What is Peace? But Perhaps More Importantly, What It Is Not
Reclaiming Jesus’ Vision and Saving the Church from a Truncated Gospel
The Reduction of Peace to Personal Tranquility
Peace is not a privatized calm, an internal tranquility divorced from the world, or merely “my peace with God.” These reductions—often born of fragmented discipleship—miss the heart of Jesus’ call to reconciliation. As Glen Stassen reminds us, peace in the New Testament is far more than individual; it’s God’s active work to reconcile us with one another and creation. It’s not about securing personal salvation as an endpoint but stepping into the expansive, risky, communal reality of God’s kingdom.¹
The Silence of the Beatitudes
Avoiding Jesus’ Radical Call
Kurt Vonnegut highlights our tendency to evade this call: “For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes.”² This silence reveals a faith that substitutes the radical ethics of Jesus with more palatable, individualized frameworks. But peace, as Jesus describes in the Beatitudes and models in his life, is not a set of rules or an abstract ideal. It’s a way of being—anchored in love, humility, and justice.
Split-Screen Discipleship: Ignoring History, Politics, and People
The Duality of Faith in Western Christianity
Split-screen discipleship further reinforces this reduction. For many Western Christians, faith operates on two separate tracks: the personal, inner peace with God on one side and the complexities of politics and history on the other. Often, the latter is ignored altogether. As Stassen critiques, such faith drives our discipleship “off the stage of history,” neglecting the reconciling work God calls us to in the here and now.³
The Exclusion of Palestinians in Holy Land Tours
This eschatological escapism doesn’t just ignore history and politics; it also leads to the erasure of people. In the Holy Land tour industry, the split-screen approach largely ignores Palestinians altogether, focusing instead on ancient relics and spiritual sites while bypassing the living stones—the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who continue to live under profound hardship.
Faith Without Praxis is Dead
Lessons from My Muslim Friends
My Muslim friends often provide a critical mirror to this tendency in Western Christianity. One cleric observed that Christians frequently focus on salvation as a "get-into-heaven" ticket, reducing faith to a personal, post-mortem transaction. This critique resonates painfully true, as many of us have lived in that truncated gospel. My Muslim friends’ lives often emphasize praxis—faith lived out in daily acts of mercy, justice, and community responsibility. Their critique of our orthodoxy without orthopraxy reminds me of James’ words: “Faith without works is dead.”⁴ Or, as I sometimes say, orthodoxy without orthopraxy is heresy. Faith must live, breathe, and act. It must reconcile, restore, and make whole, or it ceases to be faith at all.
Insights from Palestinian Christians
Our Palestinian Christian friends echo this reality in the context of their struggle. They challenge us to see the living stones—their communities of faith persisting under immense hardship—not just the dead stones of archaeological sites. Too often, Western Christians tour the Holy Land with a split-screen mindset: one screen for spiritual pilgrimage, the other for politics or history. This fragmented view blinds us to the living presence of Christ among those suffering under oppression.
The Great Feast: Peace as Community and Hospitality
Muhammed's Hospitality and Jesus' Vision
My friend, Muhammed in Hebron, embodies with his life and hospitality Jesus’ vision of the Great Feast described in Matthew 8:11-12.⁵ When he invited Cari and me to his home to celebrate our birthdays, he served us Knafeh—a dish steeped in the love and warmth of Arab hospitality. That moment wasn’t just a meal; it was an invitation into the deep, reconciling work of community. Muhammed once called me a peacemaker, but it was he who embodied peacemaking that day, welcoming us into a living expression of God’s Kingdom—a feast of love, abundance, and connection.
Peace Without Repentance is No Peace
Bonhoeffer on Cheap Grace
Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it plainly: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves... Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.”⁶ Peace without repentance, without the hard work of confronting injustice and healing broken relationships, is no peace at all. It’s a counterfeit that ignores the cries of the oppressed, the plight of the marginalized, and the call to love our enemies.
True Peace: Descriptive and Active
Living God's Upside-Down Kingdom
True peace is both descriptive and active. It describes life in God’s upside-down Kingdom, where the meek inherit the earth and peacemakers are called children of God.⁷ This peace is not limited to inner tranquility or moral righteousness. In fact, the biblical notion of peace—shalom—is far richer and more expansive. Shalom is wholeness, a state where justice, reconciliation, and flourishing prevail in all relationships: with God, with others, and with creation itself.
In this sense, the Greek word δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosyne), often translated as "righteousness" in English Bibles, reflects a limited understanding. The word carries a dual meaning: both righteousness and justice. By emphasizing personal piety over justice, many English translations obscure the communal and restorative aspects of dikaiosyne. This mistranslation reinforces the reduction of faith to individual morality, neglecting the central biblical call to pursue justice for the marginalized and oppressed.
True shalom cannot exist without justice. As Paul writes, “Christ is our peace, who has broken down the dividing wall of hostility.”⁸ In Bethlehem, those dividing walls are starkly visible, standing as barriers to connection, flourishing, and peace. Yet the vision of shalom calls us to dismantle these walls—literal and figurative—to restore what has been broken. This peace actively confronts systems of injustice, heals divisions, and embodies God’s justice in the world.
It is not a comfortable peace, but a transformative one—a peace that turns the other cheek, walks the extra mile, and builds bridges where walls once stood.
Our Call to Peacemaking
From Personal Salvation to Communal Action
Our task as Christians is not to cling to personal salvation as the endpoint of faith but to live out the Gospel as a community of peacemakers. As Paul writes, “Christ is our peace, who has broken down the dividing wall of hostility.”⁸ Peace is not just a promise for the future but a practice for the present—a way of seeing, living, and acting that brings God’s Kingdom to life here and now.
Endnotes:
Glen Stassen, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War (Pilgrim Press, 2008).
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press, 2005).
Glen Stassen, Living the Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Hope for Grace and Deliverance (Jossey-Bass, 2006), 17.
James 2:17, New Testament.
Matthew 8:11-12, New Testament.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937).
Matthew 5:5, 9, New Testament.
Ephesians 2:14, New Testament.