118 - Speak Up for Just War or Pacifism

Speak Up for Just War or Pacifism
By Paul Ramsey
University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. 212 pp. $24.95 ($12.95 pb).

Paul Ramsey died in 1988 and his last book is a worthy final testament. For despite his characteristically precise reasoning and close analysis of texts, it is imbued with all the passion of a man who has had his message unjustly neglected for three decades.

Here, he offers a devastating critique of Defense of Creation, the pastoral letter of the United Methodist Bishops in the United States. Speak Up for Just War or Pacifism is, however, most interesting and valuable for the contribution it makes to the wider question of how the church should speak on political matters. Ramsey recognizes that we now live in a post Constantinian era, but he is reluctant to let the Christian church simply become a sect with its statements addressed to its own membership. He wants church pronouncements still to be the voice of the church to the world as well as to the church itself. But how should the church address the world? Ramsey admits "I confess I do not know how any contemporary Protestant denomination should move to regain the authentic voice of a church speaking to itself and to the world of today. How shall we correct the politicization of the social-concerns decisions of every Protestant denomination today? The world is too much with us, too much within the churches."

Since Who Speaks for the Church? he has come to believe that church statements should, when it comes to

119 - Speak Up for Just War or Pacifism

particulars, set out the whole range of legitimate options and their justification. Church statements should be drawn up in the light of the great Christian doctrines of creation, the fall, and the last things land be imbued with this perspective. However, when they move on from these great doctrines and the principles that flow from them to specifics, the prime purpose of a Christian statement, where there is division of opinion among Christians, should be educative. The voice of the church can take us so far and no further. These are profoundly important matters, the very soul of the church being at stake. Ramsey, neglected so long in his lifetime by church bureaucracies, deserves to be heard after his death.

Richard Harries
Bishop of Oxford
England.