Doug has tagged me with an interesting meme:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.
Like Doug, I discounted the Bible on my desk, so I picked the first book that came to hand on my bookshelf. This happened to be “Studies in the Sermon on the Mount” by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Here is what I found on p.123 – I have included the preceding sentence so that this makes sense:
Why are peacemakers blessed? The answer is that they are blessed because they are so absolutely unlike everybody else. The peacemakers are blessed because they are the people who stand out as being different from the rest of the world, and they are different because they are the children of God. In other words, I say, we are again plunged immediately into New Testament theology and doctrine.
Interesting comment in the light of my ongoing discussions with John Hobbins on pacifism, and most recently on peacemaking in Africa, issues on which John seems unwilling to be even a little bit “unlike everybody else”. So I will content myself with tagging John on this one.
Thanks, Peter. I was, however, tagged by others before you.
I agree with Martin Lloyd-Jones that those who seek to be peacemakers are unlike everyone else.
But my concept of a peacemaker is unrelated to the separate issue of what kind of violence, if any, is applied in order to achieve peace.
Here are three peacemakers in my book:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler in the hope of thereby bring about peace)
Dag Hammarskjold (Christian UN General Secretary who believed in the use of internationally sanctioned arms)
Saint Francis (who tried to negotiate peace, unsuccessfully, in the midst of what we call the Crusades)
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