Peace in Between: Understanding Precarious Peacemaking in a World of Enmity

Introduction

‘There is no way to peace, peace is the way,’ a saying attributed to twentieth-century peace and nonviolence activist A.J. Muste, has considerable currency in Christian peace ethics. ¹ But what does it mean theologically to say that the practice of peacemaking is itself already peace in action, rather than the deployment of utilitarian means towards peace as an end-goal? The claim that peace is a process or a way of relating, rather than a state of affairs, has been developed at length in several ‘peace studies’ contexts, but its implications for theological ethics remain underexplored. ² Within the broad question concerning the theological implications of viewing peace as a process, this article focuses in particular on the precarity and ambiguity of peacemaking in practice. Peacemaking efforts involve the peacemakers in various creative but ambivalent and high-risk compromises, and often not only fail to achieve peace as a lasting state but fail in some of their proximate goals; and this precarity raises questions for theologies of peace. Drawing, for my response, on a key image and accompanying text in the Book of Divine Works of Hildegard of Bingen, and also picking up on the systematic peace theology of John Dear, I present peace as an unstable equilibrium, an active and mobile occupation of a space ‘in between’ – including a space ‘in between’ the peace given by God and the lived situation marked by violence and enmity. I then explore how this reading of peace ‘in between,’ overcoming enmity through precarious practices of peacemaking, might relate to apocalyptic visions of peace as victory over all enmity – and how it invites a reconsideration of the significance of precarity and ambiguity in ethics more broadly.

To establish and illustrate the precarity of peacemaking, I focus attention, in the next section, on some specific peacemaking activities of Christian communities. I take as the paradigm cases practices aimed at ending enmity, or turning enemies into neighbours, through engagement in negotiation, mediation and related activities – a group of practices and experiences that have received relatively little discussion in the theological ethics of peace. A key resource is the recent history of the Society of Friends (Quakers), as a historic peace church with many distinct, long-standing and complementary traditions of nonviolent practice and of work for peace. ³ Like Glen Stassen and others who have worked on ‘just peacemaking’ from Mennonite perspectives, ⁴ I am thus attempting to do justice to a Christian tradition in which peace and nonviolence are not ethical questions on a long list of other ethical questions, but rather are central to Christian identity and formation. ⁵ It should be noted that in exploring the peacemaking activities of members of historic peace churches, I am not primarily defending the pacifist commitments of those who are involved; to focus attention on the pacifism/just war dichotomy, which continues to arise frequently in theological ethics despite numerous efforts to shift the agenda, is to miss some of the more interesting theological and ethical questions that arise in relation to making peace. ⁶

It has already emerged in the literature that the centrality of peace to the ecclesial self-understanding of peace churches and their members points to the need to frame peace otherwise than as a desired (and generally deferred) state of affairs. Thus, to give the best-known example, Stanley Hauerwas’ engagement with historic peace church traditions, and more broadly with what Myles Werntz has termed ‘ecclesiocentric’ peace theology, leads him to develop an account of the church as a community that performs peace, and hence of core ecclesial practices that shape a countercultural ethic of peace. ⁷ My main focus here, however, is on those processes of peacemaking that are not primarily about ‘performing an alternative’ but rather about engaging to change a situation – negotiating, conciliating, mediating, transforming conflict, and so forth. ⁸

Peace in Practices of Ending Enmity

The practices discussed here have been relatively neglected in theological and indeed historical studies. ⁹ To the extent that ethical debate focuses on ‘just war or pacifism’ or even on ‘violence or nonviolence’, the characteristic public activities of pacifist Christians or members of peace churches that are most likely to be emphasised are, firstly, refusal of military service, and, secondly, organised nonviolent resistance or nonviolent direct action; in other words, unequivocal public performances of the pacifist side of the debate. ¹⁰ Clearly there are important theological and ethical questions to ask both about conscientious objection and about nonviolent protest. My interest here, however, is on those activities of Christian peacemakers – characteristic of, and often developed by and made possible within, peace church traditions, although by no means confined to them - that are oriented to ending enmity.

By enmity, I mean the relation to another that authorises destructive violence or exclusion. ¹¹ The peacemaking practices in which I am particularly interested involve interventions in situations of enmity through which enemies become capable of co-existence – interventions that are aimed at converting unpeaceful relationships into peaceful ones. ¹² A wide range of specific interventions might come under this generic heading, and the terminology can be confusing. In one of very few recent extended (non-theological) discussions of this group of peacemaking practices, Anne Bennett uses the generic term ‘conciliation’, and provides an overview of historical cases, focused on activity supported by Quakers in Britain. ¹³ Her discussion covers (inter alia) programmes of facilitated informal discussions at the UN and in Brussels; ¹⁴ long-standing work in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, with ‘off-the-record meetings with politicians, paramilitary representatives, senior civil servants, community leaders and others’ as well as lower-level community-based conciliation; ¹⁵ and a wide range of East-West activities during the Cold War.

To summarise two recent examples: ¹⁶

[Cecile Nyiramana, Tutsi Rwandan Quaker leader whose husband was in prison] felt called to bring together the two groups of women: widows of the genocide and wives of imprisoned husbands, Tutsis and Hutus… She… went to the prisoners’ wives and tried to get them to meet with the widows. It was a tough sell. They were afraid… When the participants came, the women in each side sat separately from the others and didn’t speak across the divide… When the third day began, however, they began to talk to one another about trivial things. It was a real breakthrough… They had gotten past their almost ten-year-old stereotypes of the others as enemies. They also recognized that they shared many responsibilities, including care of their own families. They decided to meet once a month to talk about reconciliation and peace, as well as to help one another in practical ways (food, shelter, etc. being major concerns)…This group became the prototype [for a series of other women's groups. ¹⁷

Third, as mentioned above, the proximate aim is ending a given situation of enmity, and this requires a creative intervention that goes beyond existing parameters, not only in terms of the vision of what end-state might be possible, but more concretely in terms of what can be done immediately. Not only the projected goal (for example, the peaceful reintegration of Rwandan communities post-genocide) but also any means to achieve it (for example, the formation of a joint group for the widows of victims and the wives of prisoners) are contrary to the apparent possibilities and limitations of the situation. Peace – even the kind of peace that exists in the process of peacemaking – requires a significant exercise of the imagination. ²¹ At the same time, fourth, these activities are creative in relation to existing traditions of peacemaking. They require improvisation in relation to the given situation, and they are only viable insofar as they are developed in close attention to the specific complexities of that situation. The need for deep listening that challenges the peacemaker's presuppositions emerges as a recurrent theme in narratives of peacemaking. The responses are not, as it were, straightforwardly deduced from a pacifist ethical or theological commitment; historical examples, or even one's own earlier experience, can provide resources but not blueprints. ²²

Fifth – and concomitant with the previous two points – all of these activities are high-risk, multiply ambivalent, morally fraught, and successful only in some temporary and circumscribed sense. They are not, or not obviously, a clear and visible witness to the peaceable kingdom in the face of a violent world. It is noteworthy, indeed, that discussions of conciliation in practice, even those designed to commend it to the doubtful, often include risk, failure, ambiguity, dilemmas and frustration as major themes. ²³ The most obvious source of risk is the requirement temporarily to treat those who are now enemies as neighbours – which becomes particularly apparent in Mamai's move to create a space in which the two groups are relabelled, and hence in Nyiramana's work to bring one's own enemies into the same room.

Beyond this and entering a sphere of ethical ambiguity and frustration, there are concerns about the positioning of the mediator or peacemaker, who cannot be neutral or disengaged but must find a way to hold a temporary space beyond enmity. For example, Diana Francis describes an experience of mediating on an issue where she had strongly-held, religiously grounded commitments to one side of the argument, and took the decision to ‘play an enabling role for those coming from deeply held and opposing positions… to step aside from my own viewpoint and feelings in order to do what was asked of me’ (p.85) – to good effect in the specific context. ²⁴ Moreover, there are deep questions of justice and of the risk of ‘reconciling’ to an unjust situation; and there is the very limited possible impact of any specific strand of activity in a multi-layered and long-term situation of embedded enmity. Curle, reflecting on his extensive experience of conciliation, deals directly with the possibility of ‘unmediable’ violence in which there is no possible use for peacemaking. Strikingly, the main example he uses is one in which he himself made the context-dependent judgement call to refuse to act as a mediator, and decided on subsequent reflection that he had been wrong. ²⁵

I am assuming here that the examples of peacemaking work listed above are examples of practice that Christian ethicists would want to commend, so the intention here is not to commend them further, but rather to ask what can be learned from them. My question is whether theological ethics can recognise their precarity and ambivalence, together with the requirement to improvise creatively, not as bugs but as core features of peacemaking – and how this in turn can shape a theological understanding of peace.

Answering this question requires further consideration of the temporality and spatiality of peace in Christian thought. Is peace an end-state or goal that we move towards, or are moved towards; is it already here, ecclesially or otherwise, as a space in contrast to the present state of things; or is another option possible, signalled by Muste's claim that ‘peace is the way’? The relationship between these questions and the challenge of ‘ending enmity’ will become apparent in what follows; the question of where and when peace is, is inextricably tied up with the question of what the end of enmity looks like.

Christ's Peace and Practices of Peacemaking: Peace on the Wall

To enable further theological engagement with the precarity, ambivalence and creativity of peacemaking activities, discussed above, in this section I bring them into dialogue with Hildegard of Bingen's puzzling and suggestive theological image of peace, and with the explanation that she offers for that image. Hildegard, I argue, locates peacemaking in a theological space of the ‘in-between’, in a way that both resonates deeply with the activities of peacemakers who stand or walk ‘in between’ opposed parties, and also indicates more clearly what it might mean theologically to locate peace in specific peacemaking activities.

Hildegard in her Book of Divine Works envisions peace as part of a complex vision of God's relation to the world, with peace as the odd one out in a group of three figures:

I saw as it were three images [of human-like figures]… Two were standing in the clearest fountain, whose rim was topped all around with a perforated stone wall; and they appeared rooted in it, as when trees sometimes seem to grow in the water's midst… The third meanwhile was standing outside the fountain upon its stone rim… Her face shone with such stark radiance that it turned back my face. ²⁶

Hildegard's vision, as she explains in the accompanying text, is of the deep well, or fountain, of divine life from which creation is nourished and renewed. Her three forms are the figures of love, humility and peace. The figures representing love and humility stand in the fountain; they are securely identified with, or dwelling in, their divine source. Hildegard writes that ‘God is Love in all his works, and holds humility in all his judgements’, and the virtues of the saints flow from and reveal divine love and humility. ²⁷ The figure who stands out, who disturbs the apparently smooth flow from the life of God to the lives of ‘the saints’ who appear around the fountain, is the figure representing peace. She stands – rather precariously, in both the text and the image that accompanies it – on the wall of the fountain; and she is very difficult to perceive because she fades in and out of view, as the face of the onlooker is turned back by the radiance of the vision.

What is going on here? On the one hand, peace in Hildegard's vision is a form or figure just like the others. She is a living gift of God who reveals and reflects God's own life, and she is as true and reliable as the virtues alongside her, that is, love and humility. The vision and the text take for granted that God is the God of peace, and that God gives peace to creatures with God's own self-gift in the incarnation. Peace, as Hildegard puts it, ‘arose through God's Son’. But, to complete the quotation - ‘Peace, who arose through God's Son, cannot yet be kept on earth as she is in heaven’. Peace with a human face, embodied and enacted rather than ideal, is neither seen consistently nor established firmly; and this is because peace as a complex social and political reality is caught up in ‘earthly undertakings’, in the complexities and uncertainties of life in time, in all the things that are ‘constantly changing, cast here and there as they stagger about’. ²⁸

The positioning of peace on the wall, if we consider the wider context, conveys a wider claim about the temporality of the transformed earthly reality that ‘arose through God's Son’. The wall itself, in Hildegard's terms, appears to represent ‘the time remaining’. It is the unresolvedness of the world, whatever keeps the present age or the saeculum both separate from and close to the reign of God. The wall is the relationship and disjuncture between ‘on earth’ and ‘as it is in heaven’; and peace is precariously balanced on it, really given and enacted in time but always caught up in things that are ‘cast here and there’. Peace, in practice, is balanced between the present ‘earthly undertakings’ and the realisation of the reign of God.

We might consider this precarious balance as an image of how arguments about Christian ethics sometimes work in relation to peace. On the one hand, we can locate peace as an goal not yet achieved, and pull our arguments about conflict and peace in theological ethics onto this side of the wall, into the saeculum or the space of ‘earthly undertakings’; from this perspective we might talk about how to navigate bad options and preserve the least worst in a world beset by violence. On the other hand, we can push the argument onto the other side of the wall and talk about peace as a gift given in Christ that can and should be lived in now, perhaps in the counter-cultural or counter-political space of church-community. The latter impetus – focusing on living the peace of God now as a distinctive community, over against the changing and struggling world – is more closely associated with peace church theologies, and perhaps might also be expected from a mystical theologian. But Hildegard was a practical politician as well as a mystic; and her vision, alongside the examples I gave earlier in this discussion, directs attention to how a vision of peace motivates and sustains engagement in the struggle of things ‘cast here and there’.

I suggest that the peace ethics towards which my examples and Hildegard's vision point is an ethics of being in-between, of standing on the wall. The figure standing on the wall is – temporarily and with some difficulty – overcoming enmity by turning a separation or a division into a point of connection. ²⁹ This can be a description of the actual practice of overcoming enmity – negotiating between two sides – but it also points to how peacemaking practice operates in-between the vision of peace to which the practitioner is committed, on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations of the given situation, on the other.

For Hildegard, we can see, roughly, what the peace of God looks like – we can see, inter alia, the inseparability of peace from love and humility, and of all of them from the revelation of God in Christ. The central image of peace standing on the wall recalls the account of the work of Christ in Ephesians 2:14 – ‘in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us’. The visual reference to the wall already points back and forward to the decisive establishment of peace and the end of enmity; what we see here is what Christ has broken down. But peace in this picture – in her appearance in history, in the human forms she takes – stands on the wall; the wall is still there and the enmity is still there, even though the peacemakers in their particular cases and situations can temporarily surmount it, or relate to it differently, through their imaginative work.

For the foreseeable future, in Hildegard's vision and in Christian ethics, peace comes about piecemeal. That is not, however, the same as saying we give up on peace. Peace ‘in-between’ is peace in movement and in the moment. In Hildegard's narrative, the peace that ‘arose through God's Son’ just is the peace who stands on the wall; and as in the narrative discussed above, peace ‘on earth’ is seen in an enacted unstable equilibrium-in-motion, a balancing or a mediation between one enemy and another and between the espoused ideal and the limited range of present possibilities. Peace, in Hildegard's vision, can be seen in history, but her face shines so brightly that it turns back your face; it is a vision that is only possible in movement, in an ambiguous to-and-fro, as the seeker repeatedly turns towards the vision and is turned back towards mundane realities.

So, how do we understand the relationship between Christ being, already, peace (breaking down the wall), and ‘peace as we make it’ (standing on the wall, being caught up in ‘earthly undertakings’)? The reference to Ephesians 2, above, with its repeated references to ‘flesh’ and to the specificities of division, emphasises that the peace that ‘arose through God's Son’ is not simply the refusal or the condemnation of enmity as an attitude of mind, but rather its active overcoming, its ‘putting to death’. God's peacemaking, enacted in history, puts an end to the structural and lived enmity that creates material violence and suffering. To say with Muste that ‘peace is the way’ is, from this point of view, not particularly radical in Christian theology; it is an outworking of identifying peace with a living person (Eph 2:14 ‘For he is our peace,’ which Hildegard implicitly acknowledges by personifying peace).

Following John Dear in his adventurous mini-systematic theology of peace, we should further note that the peace that ‘arose through God's Son’ is a peace brought about by peaceful means. ³⁰ Jesus enacts the peace that he makes, in a radical practice of love and forgiveness and disavowal of power over others that is, just as such, an overturning of the ‘old warrior gods’. ³¹ Making peace in the midst of war by peaceful means is Jesus’ ‘method’ in his life; the resurrection of the crucified Jesus reveals it as God's ‘method’ in the world; and the identification of Jesus as the Son means that the ‘method’ of his life, death and resurrection is, not an arbitrary means to a divine end, but a truthful reflection of who God is, as the God of peace. In a similar way, again following Dear, we can say that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of peace – not only as the one who brings about peace at the end of all things, but as God's own active and creative ‘peacefulness’ shaping lives and communities of peace. ³² Looking at it this way, the God of peace makes peace through peace; it is peace all the way down, through all and in all ways, peace as the source and the goal and the means; and the God of peace not only reconciles enemies but also makes peacemakers.

The association between the gift of the Holy Spirit and the gift of Christ's peace (see John 14:26–27), and the claim that the God of peace sanctifies (1 Thessalonians 5:23), direct attention towards the ways in which the people of God are drawn into and caught up in the divine movement of making peace. In the activities of the peacemakers discussed above, the central importance of creativity and imagination, as well as risk, draws attention to the significance of pneumatology for reading the ‘in between’ theologically. The peacemakers’ work is empowered by a concrete re-imagining of the possibilities of a given situation, as when Joseph Mamai renames the enemy groups. The process of peacemaking is inseparable from seeing things otherwise and acting otherwise. Moreover and importantly, the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 55:22–23) are evident in the work of peacemaking – not the outcomes it seeks, but rather its enabling conditions; consider, for example, how patience, generosity, gentleness and self-control become evident in the Rwandan and Kenyan peacemaking examples discussed above.

Lest all of this sound too idealised – a way of setting up peacemakers on a pedestal as personal exemplifications of virtue – we should come back once again to the theme of precarity, risk and ambivalence in the activity of peacemakers. The narratives set out above drew attention, not only to the creative leaps that make extraordinary things possible, but also the judgement calls that go wrong, the initiatives that have no effect, and the constant negotiation with and around one's own moral commitments in order to be able to work effectively between enemies. Is it possible to say that these are somehow integral to peace? My proposal in the next section is that acknowledgement of the imperfections and ambivalence of peacemaking is important to avoid some of the risks that go along with a theological commitment to peace as the overcoming of enmity.

The End of Enmity and the Persistence of Enemies: Satan Crushed Underfoot

I have said that the activity of peacemaking, together with its risk and ambivalence, inhabits that unstable equilibrium between the reality that God has made peace and the historical experience of enmity and division. I now suggest that it is important to affirm peace as a process, and as a process in which neither the preservation of moral purity nor the achievement of good ends can be counted on, in order to be able to affirm that peace consists in the putting to death of enmity without thereby requiring the destruction of specific enemies. This latter is an abiding risk even for those theologically committed to peace, for members of peace church traditions and others who stand ‘on the side’ of peace.

Consider the striking juxtaposition of God's peace and victory in Romans 16:20: ‘The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (Romans 16:20). In a 2013 article Beverly Roberts Gaventa, an influential proponent of apocalyptic readings of Paul, takes up this juxtaposition and intensifies it by demonstrating how pervasive the rhetoric of violence is throughout Romans. ³³ She ends her discussion with the question posed by Romans 16:20: ‘how [is it] possible to call God a God of peace, given what Paul writes throughout this letter?’ ³⁴ In keeping with her overall approach, Gaventa argues that the key framework for interpreting Romans 16:20 is a cosmic conflict, in which humanity is ‘living on the battlefield’ between God and the ‘anti-God powers’; and proposes, in her own brief response to the question of what it means to call God the ‘God of peace’ in Romans, that ‘peace looks much like … unified praise of God and God's Christ’. ³⁵

Gaventa's reading avoids, on the face of it, the interpretive option of equating ‘Satan’ in Romans 16:20 with some specific enemies of the Pauline church. ³⁶ The problem – not directly with her reading of Romans 16:20, but with the emphasis on peace as an end-state, the divine victory either already accomplished or anticipated in the future– is that the risk remains of projecting the cosmic conflict onto a present struggle, and then of painting the persistent opponents of peace as the diabolical ones whose defeat alone will bring enmity to an end. The cycle of enmity turns again, even in the middle of a text about peace – we are the truly peaceful ones (the God of peace), you are the inciters of division (Satan crushed underfoot). And to make this turn can, in practice, short-circuit the complex processes described earlier in this article, including those whereby the peacemaker must on occasion be willing to renounce their own correct performance of peacefulness or moral integrity in order to mediate effectively between, and to listen to, enemies.

The complexities of mapping an innerhistorical conflict onto a cosmic-apocalyptic one – and what it means for practices of peacemaking – can be seen at the origins of the Quaker peace church tradition in the mid-seventeenth century. In the context of the English Civil War and its aftermath, the language and imagery of cosmic warfare proved particularly attractive to a group who were suffering persecution, who also tended in general to emphasise the apocalyptic in their reading of scripture. At the same time as articulating a collective commitment to nonviolence in practice, the Quakers identified their mission with the ‘Lamb's War’ and projected their confrontation with persecution onto a cosmic battlefield. ³⁷ Concurrently with these apocalyptic moves, however, we find early examples of creative, risky and ambivalent peacemaking activity. Margaret Fell's letter to Charles II at his restoration is the earliest public articulation of the Quaker commitment to nonviolence:

‘We are a people that follow after those things that make for peace, love, and unity; it is our desire that others’ feet may walk in the same, and do deny and bear our testimony against all strife, and wars, and contentions… Who said, “My kingdom is not of this world, if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, but my kingdom is not from hence.” This is he that comes to save men's lives, and not to destroy them, and this is he that is our Lord and Master…’. ³⁸

Fell takes up Romans 14:19 to emphasise the process of peace – ‘following after’ the things that make for peace, love and unity, being conformed to Christ in seeking what will ‘save men's lives, and [not] destroy them’. In a time of persecution, Fell's text nudges the interpretation and practice of her community away from projecting cosmic enmity onto an innerworldly experience of enmity; the servants of Christ must not fight with ‘carnal’ weapons (including ‘strife… and contentions’) to establish a kingdom of this world. At the same time, Fell was performing her own balancing act even in the process of setting out – what was to become – the manifesto for a peace church. In its context the text quoted above was, among other things, a risky and creative political intervention, an effort by one of the few Quakers with higher social status to build bridges with the new regime, to make a case for religious toleration, and to defuse the suspicion likely to fall on herself and her community. ³⁹ In its time and in relation to its proximate aims, it was not particularly successful.

In the light of this discussion, if we want to ask with Gaventa what peace looks like for the ‘God of peace [who] will soon crush Satan under your feet,’ we should perhaps say that it looks much like the ongoing work of mutual forbearance and upbuilding (Romans 15:1–2), or the ‘steadfastness’ (15:4) required for the long haul of love across the divides. The feet under which the God of peace will ‘soon’ crush Satan -that is, decisively put an end to enmity – are not themselves trampling enemies. They are, instead, standing ‘in between’ and waiting for new possibilities of relationship to emerge, walking back and forth between opposing parties in a conflict to mediate a solution, or otherwise following after the things that make for peace. The God of peace does not make peace without the peacemakers’ work, and their work might look much more like balancing on a wall or walking a tightrope than like a triumphant progress.

Conclusion and Future Directions: Questions of Compromise

I have suggested above that the ambiguities, risks and compromises entailed in peacemaking do not mean that they should be categorised by theological ethicists as failures of peace, or compromises between peace and something else; rather, the ambiguities, risks and compromises are integral to peace because they are integral to the concrete practice of making peace. One obvious question about the approach outlined here is whether, and why, peace is a special case. Could not all Christian ethics be characterised as ethics of the ‘in between,’ at least in the sense of existing in between the new situation established in Christ and the state of ‘earthly affairs… cast here and there’; and could not we think better about many ethical questions by noting, and then blurring, the distinctions that creep in between ends and means? And do not the challenges that confront peacemakers, at least in relation to risk, moral ambiguity and failure, confront a wide range of ethical projects? ⁴⁰

It is certainly possible to argue that peace is a special case, or at least a case more likely to yield insights, just because of the ambivalence in the term and the ongoing debates around it on which this article is based. People do talk about peace as a social or political state of affairs, an attitude of mind, a way of behaving, a condition of a relationship, and more; and how we understand the interrelations between these dimensions has practical as well as theoretical significance, as well as implications for how scriptural and traditional accounts of peace are read. However, there is also no reason why the focus on practices of peacemaking should not have wider implications for theological ethics.

One area that deserves further exploration is the theological ethics of compromise. There is a small but significant literature on compromise in political ethics, mostly in relation to the ethics of negotiation and often raising questions that come close to the issues facing those engaged in conciliation – the problem of ‘dirty hands’, the issue of the limits of negotiation, the difference (as Avishai Margalit puts it) between an acceptable compromise and a rotten compromise. ⁴¹ Theology, if it appears at all in the literature on compromise, tends to appear as a generator of ideals that may or may not then be compromised; and theologians and theological ethicists play into this to the extent that we set up ideals to aspire to and then lament the need to compromise them. ⁴²

At the same time, compromise of various kinds – deciding which principles need to be voiced or enacted at what times, what and how much ethical discomfort to accept in order to maintain what set of relationships, when to perform neutrality and when to join a side, what can or cannot be given up or suspended – is not only the stuff of peacemaking but also the stuff of ethical life. And compromise, as we learned from Hamilton, is an art, even if a grubby one; ⁴³ compromises have to be made through hard work, and the making of a good compromise is creative and hopeful where the alternative is irreducible enmity. One thinker whose work might offer ways forward is Paul Ricoeur, who presents compromise as creative and as grounded in the irreducible plurality of the world – while also, and just because of the plurality of the world with which it engages, being fragile and temporary. ⁴⁴ Like the peacemaking activities discussed earlier in this article, compromise could never be the whole story or an ethical ‘position’ of its own. ⁴⁵ Given its highly contextual, unsystematic, and inevitably disappointing character, it is an aspect of ethical life that theologians may be tempted not to see, and which may deserve more attention in a polarised world. Moreover, acknowledging the ubiquity of compromise in ethical life may open up new possibilities for ethical dialogue across opposing positions, in peace ethics or elsewhere; the experience of seeking and making compromises is common, both to proponents of just war ethics and to members of the peace church traditions discussed in this paper.