Religious perspectives
Abrahamic alternatives to war: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives on Just Peacemaking
How can religion contribute to peacemaking?
Authors:
Publisher:
United States Institute of Peace , 2008
Eight Muslim scholar-leaders, six Jewish scholar-leaders, and eight Christian scholar-leaders met in June 2007 at a conference sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace and the Churches’ Center for Theology and Public Policy. This paper shows how conference participants specified practices within each of the three faith traditions that could lay the groundwork for nonviolent alternatives to resolving conflict and addressing injustice, while also identifying roadblocks in the sacred texts of their traditions to creating such processes. The scholars ’ teachings also found that these ancient religious teachings on peace and justice are often consistent with modern conflict-resolution theory.
Key observations include:
- Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sacred texts all contain sections that support violence and justify warfare as a means to achieve certain goals. In particular historical circumstances, these texts have served as the basis to legitimate violent campaigns, oftentimes against other faith communities.
- many of the passages from sacred texts in all three religious traditions that are misused in contemporary situations to support violence and war are taken out of context, interpreted in historically inaccurate ways, or can be better translated
- there a great many teachings and ethical imperatives within Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures that promote peace and present the means to achieve it. These include mandates to strive for political, social, and economic justice; tolerant intercommunal coexistence; and nonviolent conflict resolution
- the three religious delegations that participated in the conference leading to this report presented slightly different and yet overlapping methods for peacemaking articulated by their sacred scriptures. The considerable overlap led the scholars to affirm the existence of a coherent “Abrahamic Just Peacemaking” paradigm, which began to take focus through their rigorous interfaith debate.
