Blessed are the Peacemakers . . .

THE GREATEST ENEMY OF PEACE

Five great enemies to peace inhabit with us: viz., avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride. If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.—Petrach

The old humanist who penned these words, who lived in the 14th century, spent his life studying the lives of the great men of antiquity. It was a search for the values by which men should live. His study led him to the conclusion that the peace that men long for cannot be realized until the five great enemies of peace are overcome, which he names in this quotation. We all agree with Petrarch that this old world would be greatly blessed if these enemies of peace could be defeated, even if that would not be the peace that only our Lord can bequeath to the human heart.

We are here concerned with but one of these enemies to peace, which Petrarch names last, as if it might summarize them all. The medieval theologians came up with a similar list, which they called the seven deadly sins, and they concluded that pride was the essence of them all. And it is our conclusion as we study our mission as peacemakers. Pride may make pieces but never peace, and there is no way to be a peacemaker until peace’s greatest enemy is held at bay by the grace of God in our lives.

C. S. Lewis in his provocative little volume on Mere Christianity speaks of pride as the great sin. It was in reading what Lewis said about pride that led to the conversion of Charles Colson, Nixon’s trigger man in the Watergate era. Filled with self-conceit and arrogant over the power he had over others, Colson was staggered by what Lewis said about pride, that sexual sins and drunkenness were but fleabites in comparison to pride. Lewis implies, of course, that unchastity and drunkenness are expressions of pride.

One point that caused Colson to look at his own life was that the more pride one has the more he dislikes pride in others, and that if one wants to measure his pride he only needs to ask himself how he likes it when others snub him or push him around or take advantage of him. If you resent the other fellow’s conceit or if you are turned off by his efforts to impress you, it is a measure of your own pride, Lewis notes. Pride is essentially competitive, Lewis observes, and it is here that it raises its ugly head as the greatest enemy to peacemaking.

Pride is not satisfied with mere possession. It must have more than the other fellow. The intellectualist is not satisfied simply to be intellectual enough to do his thing, but he must be more intellectual than all his competitors. The proud woman is not content merely to be beautiful, for she must be the most beautiful. It is not enough to be rich or powerful, but to be richer and more powerful than one’s peers. It is comparison that makes us proud. One is not proud who supposes he preaches or teaches well, but that he is better than those with whom he may be compared. Lewis notes that sexual desires may put two men in competition for the same girl, but it is pride that drives a man to take a fellow’s girl away from him, not so much because he wants her, but to prove that he is the better man.

My friend Perry Gresham, recently president of Bethany College, tells in one of his sermons of one of his parishioners in Seattle who was elated over her Christmas bonus, it being far more than she expected. When he saw her a little later, she was downcast because the girl at the next desk had received more than she. Perry said that he knew better than to ask her why she cared about what someone else received so long as she was pleased with her gift. But he saw the need to go into his pulpit and preach against pride.

Lewis says pride has been the chief cause of misery in all of human history, for pride always means enmity. It is enmity, not only between man and man, but enmity to God. He insists that there is no way for one to know God as long as he is proud. Then how is it that so many religious people are proud?, he asks. It is that they are serving an imaginary God, one who allows them to look down on others while adulating themselves. When we look up to God and discover one who is immeasurably superior to ourselves, it is only then that we can pour contempt on all our pride. And if we look up to God we will no longer look down on others. In the presence of the real God we realize that we are nothing.

The worst of all vices smuggles itself into the center of our religion, Lewis asserts, not because it comes through our animal nature (it is too subtle for that), but because it comes direct from hell itself, being purely spiritual. This is why it is so deadly. One might overcome lust, cowardice, or a bad temper because of pride, such things being beneath him. Lewis says this causes the devil to laugh, for he is pleased for you to be cured of chilblains if he can give you cancer! And pride is spiritual cancer.

That the cancer of pride has eaten away at the unity and fellowship of the church is apparent enough if one but looks at the story of our divisions and sub-divisions. We have looked down on others for so long that we hardly ever look up to the one who teaches that we are to love and receive one another even as he has loved and received us. The pride of being right, while all others have to be wrong, has come right out of hell, and, as Lewis notes, it is purely spiritual. A dear brother who would not dare miss going to church will not only reject but even maltreat his sister in the Lord whom he dubs as “in error,” too proud to realize that that is precisely his condition before the God who teaches him to forgive even as he has been forgiven.

Pride has laid a heavy hand upon our party leaders. Even as I prepare this essay a journal comes to my desk in which one preacher is criticizing another one for advocating a course of action that, according to him, would compromise the position that “the loyal brethren” have always taken. He says, “We are going to have to admit that we have been wrong all these years.” But what is bad about admitting that one has been wrong even for a lifetime, except for pride?

Many preachers have allowed pride to bring them to the place where they are not to be questioned by anyone, not even by their elders. They are our infallible ones. They have been to college and have learned all that needs to be known, and they leave the impression that they have arrived and are no longer truthseekers. Some even dare to dictate what the rank and file, who of course are beneath them, can read and not read. And they certainly have no interest in their sermons being challenged. A few of them can even tell you who is going to heaven and who is not, who may be fellowshipped, and who are our “brothers in error.” These are the ones who write bulls of excommunication and presume to “withdraw” from churches and preachers even in distant states. It takes a pompous divine to assume such prerogatives. Such ones are not peacemakers.

One might think that since I have spent much of my life on the university campus that I have had my fill of intellectual pride. There is of course such pride in the academic world, but it is not as manifest as one might suppose. Among the humblest folk that I’ve known have been the best educated, for they, like old Socrates, have learned just enough to realize how ignorant they really are. To the contrary, I find much more intellectual pride and downright arrogance in our churches, pulpits, and journals than in the world of academe. If the pope is razzed, a nun made fun of, aged and dedicated scholars ridiculed, scientific research scoffed, and sincere people in general put down, it is much more likely to come from one of our pulpits or one of our schools of preaching than from anywhere else.

“Pride goeth before destruction” one of the proverbs warns us, “and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Even as I write these words comes news of a church in Dallas that has been so judgmental of other Churches of Christ in the area that have dared to veer from the party line, or the preachers of said church I should say since the rank and file is usually above party politics. Well, the two preachers that have been so hard on others have now declared war on each other and parted company.

And there is word from Tennessee concerning David Lipscomb College. The chairman of the Board has been indicted by a grand jury for conducting a tractor-theft ring, and the former president, longtime leader of Churches of Christ in that state, has left the true church and has gone to the Presbyterian Church, explaining that he finds more understanding of his personal problems among the Presbyterians. This is the college that made it so hard on its faculty that they could not even attend the wrong kind of Church of Christ, namely the Belmont congregation. If our brother finds a closer walk with our blessed Lord among the Presbyterians, I will rejoice, but this experience should cause him to have second thoughts about firing faculty for attending a different Church of Christ than those politically-accepted ones in Nashville. In a college west of the Mississippi a faculty person was fired for attending a meeting of the Full Gospel Men’s Fellowship!

But let’s call this what it is: dirty, cheap church politics perpetrated by arrogant and frightened preachers, editors, and college leaders, and it is all the ugly offspring of sinful pride. If they can spend a lifetime preserving “the truth” in the right church, and then take off with the Presbyterians when their own life gets screwed up, one is left to wonder if they really believed all that legalistic stuff in the first place. And when you conduct a policy that rejects sisters and brothers for being “charismatic” and are at the same time the ringleader of a gang that steals tractors from hard-working farmers so as to sell them on the black market, you can understand why a lot of the college kids laugh at our religion.

There is no pride like institutional pride, for it has a way of alternating with personal pride. Even Alexander Campbell, who was usually magnanimous, could not abide criticism of his Bethany projects. When Tolbert Fanning, who had his own paper and college, leveled a criticism Bethanyward, Campbell retorted, “Brother Fanning is just jealous of Bethany College and the Millennial Harbinger!” That cruel judgment, which almost certainly was not true since Fanning almost worshipped Campbell, was published to the brotherhood, breaking the Nashville editor’s heart and causing him to regret that he’d ever seen a paper or a college.

That is what pride does. But Fanning got off light, for when I questioned the prerogatives of a Tennessee Church of Christ college, they put me in jail. And while in jail that night I too was sorry that I ever saw a “Christian” college! If all the in-fighting and pettiness that goes on behind the scenes of our colleges were known to the brethren, they would wonder how Christian they really are. At one of our colleges some years ago the administration became so oppressive and unyielding that the students went on strike, bringing the educative process to a standstill. The president had several chances to avoid the downfall that finally came, but he would not budge. The incident received nationwide news coverage. The Board had to fire the very man that founded the college! “Pride goeth before destruction.”

Pride is the sin that divides Christians and the sin that preserves the divisions. We do not need Petrarch’s list of the enemies of peace, for Jesus has provided one for us. It is not the things that go into man that defile him, he assures us, but the things that come out of his heart, and he lists things like covetousness, deceit, and pride. Pride defiles! Yes, and pride divides! As Lewis aptly puts it, pride comes right out of hell itself, being the spiritual sin.

It is noteworthy that Paul did not want a novice appointed as elder, “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil,” that is, condemned by pride as the devil was condemned by pride. So pride is the beginning and end of all sin, and self-conceit can be the undoing of us all.

There is only one way out and that is through him who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” When Jesus makes his home in us through the indwelling Spirit, we will see ourselves more like God sees us and pride will lose its grip on us. Humility, the opposite of pride, is the fruit of the Spirit rather than our own virtue, and one that we are never really conscious of, for in dying to the old man of sin we are simply not all that conscious of ourselves anymore. When our lives are hid with Christ in God we look beyond ourselves to the welfare of others and to causes of heavenly dimension.

Unless one has this peace within her, she will have no way to be a peacemaker. If we make something, we have to have the necessary ingredient with which to make it. - the Editor

I for one have not lost my passion for a united church, and I am not content to sit by and do nothing. I am not satisfied with the sect from which I inherited all the troubles and heartaches. I know what it is to be among people who care nothing for each other or the world around them. You cannot get them to do any personal work. We just keep house for the Lord. I can see why youth think as they so often do about the church.—Sam Davis, Clarksburg, WV