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JANUARY 2008 [32:1]

Mission and the Peaceable Kingdom

Jonathan J. Bonk  

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What went wrong? Why would intelligent, well educated young men in their prime willingly obliterate themselves by crashing passenger jets into New York ’s famous Twin Towers—arch symbols of this nation’s commercial virility? How could they have been convinced that the incineration of ordinary Americans both compelled and justified their carefully executed mass murder by suicide? What religious or ideological wellsprings animated them and thousands like them? A plausible and much repeated response to these perplexing questions was soon offered by Bernard Lewis in his bestselling book, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East ( Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).

Once proudly superior Muslim civilizations, he observed, had fallen behind the West in virtually all categories of human endeavor: cultural, social, economic, political, scientific, and military. They perceived their societies inching inexorablytoward irrelevance and extinction. Devotees using revealed antiquity as the standard against which modernity should be measured believed that only the most desperate actions could salvage the integrity of their religion and its civilization from the fatal toxicity of the decadent West. That’s what had gone wrong.  

Paging through the November 2006 issue of Religion in Eastern Europe last February, I found my attention drawn to an article written by Gerald Shenk, whom I had met in Osijek , Croatia , two decades earlier. Entitled “What Went Right: Two Best Cases of Islam in Europe— Cordoba , Spain , and Sarajevo , Bosnia ,” the essay served as a gentle counterbalance to the vast discourse of despair that has engulfed us since 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq .  

We badly need such perspectives. But even with voices like Shenk’s, it is difficult to imagine how states with their competing economic interests and antithetical religious or political ideologies can ever achieve genuine shalom. Numbed by the savagery and carnage inflicted upon the world by its “most civilized” and “most Christianized” nations during the first half of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr concluded that while human beings are moral, the societies that define them can only be immoral. Perhaps this is why Jesus urged his followers to be leery of their society’s assessment of “the other.” “Love your enemies,” he said, “and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44).  

Among the most universally recognized paintings by an American artist is The Peaceable Kingdom. The artist, Quaker preacher Edward Hicks (1780–1849), is known to have produced more than 100 versions of this painting. He must have been utterly captivated by Isaiah’s vision of shalom—of a day when “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. . . . They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:6–9 NRSV).  

This issue of the IBMR is marked by a hopeful yet realistic tone. David Shenk’s lead article—the most heartening piece of its kind that I have read in recent times—tells how devoutly militant Muslims and evangelical Christians have come together in common cause. Who could have imagined that Hizbullah in Central Java —whose 10,000-strong militia proudly flaunt their destruction of church property and murder of Christians—would recently (February 2007) host an international group of some thirty Christians? And that the occasion of this meeting would be the joint launching of a Christian-Muslim book, the newly translated Islam and Christianity: A Muslim and a Christian in Dialogue? And who could have foreseen twenty-seven years ago—when two young colleagues at Kenyatta University College , one an American Mennonite and the other a Ugandan Muslim, published their co-authored book with the Uzima Press—that this humble book would help reconcile Muslim and Christian enemies an ocean away and almost three decades later?  

Also found in this issue are two articles on Christians in India, our annual statistical update on the state of world Christianity and mission, a thoughtful analysis of shifting North American Protestant missionary numbers, and a cautiously hopeful essay by Hyun-Sik Kim, formerly a professor at North Korea’s Pyongyang University and personal tutor for family members of Kim Il Sung’s wife.  

Kingdoms at peace still seem to be little more than a faintly visible mirage on the constantly receding horizon of human longing. But the articles in this issue will have served at least one worthwhile purpose by reassuring readers that the Peaceable Kingdom is indeed no mirage. It is already here. The mustard seed is planted everywhere, and the yeast is hard at work.

—Jonathan J. Bonk

 Front cover: Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 60.2 cm, about 1833, courtesy of Worcester Art Museum , Worcester , Massachusetts , museum purchase.

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