The Prince of Peace — Josh Nisly — Ep. 092

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Josh Nisley, or is it Nisley? Nisley. Nisley, all right, I got it wrong, but that's okay. We are here in Brooklyn, but you're from Queens, correct? Yes. That's right, in New York City. Um, and we're going to dive into a slightly interesting topic about how we view Jesus as the Prince of Peace. Um, and this was—this inspired me from a sermon you had actually out in Kansas when I was out there visiting family. I thought we would just jump into that. You've observed the title "The Prince of Peace" as it applies to Jesus. Can you go through how that's laid out in Scripture and what that means, and why is it significant?

So what first got me interested in this as I was studying, um, looking at the title of "The Prince of Peace" is the sort of the chronological context in which Jesus came, which I think brings an interesting twist to it, because right at the time when Jesus was born, uh, Caesar Augustus had just risen to power in Rome, and he is largely responsible for ushering in Pax Romana, or Roman peace. And so it's in the context of this peace that Jesus, who the Bible calls the Prince of Peace, comes. And to me, what that's saying is that this Roman peace was not true peace. That true peace was a different kind of peace. So if you think about Pax Romana, yeah, there wasn't a lot of war between nations, but that's because Rome was this brutal, you could say, global dictator at the time.

I would describe that as a peace of brutality, a peace of dominance. With that background, the peace that Jesus brings is completely different. Jesus has this peace of harmony and submission. And so as we look at how Jesus brought peace and the kind of peace that he brings, I see it as twofold. Um, one, there's this ultimate peace of man being reconciled with God. Ever since Genesis, we've been at war, you could say, with God, have been separated, and Jesus brings this peace of reconciling God and man. But there's another kind of peace, and that is just what I would maybe describe as community peace or communal peace. So as you go through the Gospels, we see Jesus interacting with people, and every time Jesus interacts with someone, he ends up leaving that seeker more whole, more who they are, and more at peace than they were before he met them.

Now that's really interesting because I'm thinking if someone in the time of Jesus then would have heard the title "Prince of Peace," would have been like, "I mean, everything's good right now, right? Like everything, we're not at war." Would it have been confusing to them, you think?

The term "Prince of Peace"? It's certainly not what they were expecting. Yeah. If we think about also the way that Jesus brought in the kingdom of God, it's not the kind of kingdom that they were expecting. In the same way, the peace that Jesus brought is not the peace, the kind of peace that they were expecting. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think it caught people off guard. I don't think it stopped catching people off guard. See, part of why I think it's relevant today is we're in the middle of, you could say, Pax Americana, but it's the parallels between American peace and Roman peace are eerie. It's this peace of brutality, of dominance. America as a nation is probably more at peace than it's been through most of its history, and yet I wouldn't necessarily call America peaceful.

There's rising tension, and what to me that says is just like Pax Romana was not true ultimate peace, Pax Americana isn't either. There's something festering under the surface. Yeah, and until you resolve that core underlying reconciliation with God and with each other, you can have, you know, whatever army you want, it's not going to be true peace. So when Scripture gives the title "Prince of Peace" to Jesus, that seems to imply he's reigning over something. So how does that apply to us as his disciples? I think that the term "Prince" can mean multiple things. I think one of the connotations is simply like the Prince of Peace being the foremost or the initiator. So I think of Jesus being the ultimate reconciler of God with man, and it's through that that he earns this title of Prince in that process.

So what does that mean for us as followers of Jesus?

You know, in this context, I think it just means valuing what Jesus valued, valuing this concept of peace. You know, I was talking with a friend some time ago, and he pointed out, and he's right, I think, that Europeans and their descendants, which would be us, have a cultural and historical heritage of dominance, of conquering of dominance and subjugation through violence. And so what he's saying is that this idea of dominance and of valuing conquering runs in our cultural blood. It's naturally what we will tend to revert to. And so I think one of the things that this means as followers of Jesus is that we've got to push that aside and say, this may be what the culture at large is saying, this may be what our history books say we have done, but this is not who we are.

This is not who we are to be. The common answer to that is, well, we don't participate in armed forces. We use the term "non-resistance." Like we're a poster child for this. But I'm not sure, and that's certainly a start, but I think it's still a danger that we have of identifying with this idea of dominance. Example of that, this was a Canadian who was telling this story. They were at an American Bible school, and they were talking about the military somehow. This came up, and the teacher mentioned that, you know, America's military is large. And asked the student, well, how large is Canada's army? And she was like, well, do we even have one?

And he was like, well, yeah, you're welcome. But there's this implication there, this implication that America is doing a favor by being this global dominant force. I just think we've got to step back from that and say, this is not the way of Christ. This is not the kind of peace that we're after. This is not the way that we ought to be. This is not what we should be valuing. That's really interesting though, because I obviously for this project and for other things, I travel and get to see a lot of different Anabaptist churches, and I've had the sense, or even had people just blatantly say it, that, well, I mean, for things to be stable and okay, you got to have brutal force to, you know, keep things together.

And I mean, you know, go military. You know, we're not resistant, but we're real glad that they're going over there and killing the bad guys, basically, and not in so many words, I guess. And that always kind of bothered me. I'm like, I don't really see Jesus saying that. So where did that attitude come from? And that makes a lot of sense, I guess, that sense of dominance. I think it's interesting that often this, it's just the way the world works, is used to justify behaviors that we know are wrong. Exactly. But we value anyway. In the book "Freakonomics," the authors make a case that Roe versus Wade, legalizing abortion, is more than anything else responsible for reducing crime through the mid-90s.

The drop in crime we saw is caused by a legalized abortion. By allowing mothers in tough spots to have abortions rather than have their kids grow up in areas of crime, reduces crime. And that's an extremely provocative theory, and I'm not going to defend it. But imagine just for a second that that were actually the case. Imagine that that were true. Would we then say, oh, well, this is the way the world works. We should legalize abortion in order to reduce crime. It's just the way it works. Whoa. Okay, I hope not. Whoa, yeah. I just see what you did there. Well, I think one of the things that radical Anabaptism says is you don't say this is the way the world works.

Yeah. You say human life is precious, no matter where it is, no matter how old it is, no matter what the background is. Human life is precious, and we're going to protect it no matter what the consequences are. If that means higher crime, so be it. If that means our country is crowded, so be it. We are going to protect human life. Basically a consistent ethic of life. Yeah, and I think one of the things that Anabaptists have done pretty well at is saying, as a whole, over time, is saying we are going to radically follow and value biblical values even when they don't line up with societal values. Yeah. So we're going to pull back from being involved in law enforcement, and we're going to say we believe that God is powerful enough that if everyone did what we're doing, the world would still work.

And I think the same applies here. Yeah, so, and I'm sure a lot of our audience is going to think of this, but what do we do with the contrasting images we see of Jesus? Where, yes, he's the Prince of Peace, but at the same time he's, you know, cleansing the temple with a whip, or he says, I'm not here to bring peace but a sword. How does that work with what you're discussing here? Yeah, that's a great question. The specific, I haven't come to bring peace but a sword, I think all that's required there is to sort of step back and look at the context. The context is in the cost of following Jesus.

And so what I'm saying is I'm going to metaphorically drive a sword between families, between communities. Like there is a cost to following me, and you need to take that into account. You will be pushed to the fringes of society if you follow me as I ask. As far as cleansing the temple, or I might say there's also these pictures of Jesus as sort of this, I think it's fair to say a conquering warlord in Revelation. And I think there's kind of two answers to that. One is Jesus is God, and he is able to do things that we're not. So he was fully man was here, but he was also fully God. That gives him the authority to do things that we don't have to, we don't have.

He was able to forgive sins, for example. I hope we don't try to do that. So that's one answer. The other answer is that yes, there will be a setting of right in the end, like in the next life. You know, it's interesting. There's a Harvard professor of Mirasol Wolf wrote a book, "Exclusion and Embrace." It's a fascinating book. He makes a passionate case for non-violence, and he says this case rests on the fact that all will be set right in the end. And what he says is you can't just say in this life, oh, everyone should love each other unless you believe that in the next life things will be set right. And he has this great quote, something like, it takes the quiet of a suburban home untouched by violence to come up with this idea that God should just love everyone and there should be no setting of rights.

And he says that out of experience. He grew up in Europe and saw his family killed. And what he's saying is that once you've experienced that violence against you and yours, you can't just say, you won't just say, oh, God should love everyone. You will end up believing in a God that will set things right. This idea of us as people of peace, I believe, has a bedrock of we believe in a God that will set things right. You've heard the quote, I suppose, you know, we'll leave the judging up to God, but it's up to us to arrange the meeting.

Yeah. It's this celebration of like we are in control and we are effectively trying to play God. That's a dangerous place to live your life. And ultimately, I think it comes back to not valuing what God values, not valuing this peace and viewing human life as precious. Yeah. So looking again at Jesus as the Prince of Peace, in what ways in particular would you see believers, especially in America, I would think, departing from that model and trying something else? And why are they doing that? I think there's lots of things that are happening sort of on the political and the social scene right now that head us in this direction. But we are increasingly moving toward an individualistic society.

I think the term is expressive individualism, saying I'm going to find meaning within myself and I'm going to assert that against the community. We are, I think, increasingly addicted to anger. So I think the Christian Science Monitor a while back ran an article saying that America as a nation has, I think the term they used was addiction to anger, and it's basically saying we see this in politics, we see this in the social scene, we see this in social media. There's this idea that the outrage makes us feel good and we're going to stoke that. And I think this should go without saying, but that is the opposite of this Christ-like peace that we're talking about.

We've got to be able to step back from that and say, no, we are instead going to work toward relational peace. We're going to work to build bridges instead of sort of asserting our view on the world. That whole idea of, you know, pushing our view is inherently, I think, an idea that has come from postmodernism. I do think as followers of Christ, what we've got to come back to though is the ultimate peace is only found through relationship with Jesus Christ. And so one of the things that I think is so powerful about Anabaptist thought is it says, no, we don't think that peace comes through a military. We believe that peace, true peace, the most effective way to get peace is to introduce people to the gospel and see lives transformed through that.

And from that, to see peace spread through the community. So I think that's one aspect. No matter where you go, whether you're in the US, whether you're global, keeping a focus on the gospel is central. As far as maybe how that works out in practice, one thing is just, you know, we talked about this, but stop identifying with American dominance. Like stop valuing that. And you've got to step back. It's un-Christ-like. It hinders the message of the gospel overseas. And I think it opens you up to adopt other messages contrary to the gospel that particularly political parties will push at us. There's this idea, this is a bit of a side note, but there's this idea that Christians will be, Pastor was relating this, a person came up to him and said, this wasn't in a Baptist church, but saying Christians should be good patriots.

We might say it more gently, say good citizens. But if you look at the early church, the early church were not good Roman citizens. And I think it's instructive. They didn't rebelled like the Jews did. So there was this idea of submission, but they also refused to the point of death to say Caesar is Lord. And what they're saying is, I am a part of this kingdom of Christ and that supersedes loyalty to here. And so, you know, I'm here, I'm going to participate, I'm going to submit, but this is not who I identify with. This is not who I, you know, find my meaning from. And push come to shove, what happens in the Roman Empire is not really my problem.

You know, it comes in varying levels of explicitness, but it's acknowledging that the call of Christ is not the most important thing in my life. Pretty much, yeah. Wow. Ouch. But I think there's another aspect, which is just, and much more local and perhaps more concrete, but that is work to build peace within your community. I'm reminded of a book, Destroyer of the Gods by Larry Hurtado.

And Hurtado goes in, basically the synopsis of the book is he goes and says, what made early Christianity unique? What made it spread like wildfire through the Greco-Roman world? You know, what made this interesting to people? This was the time of Plato. There were really smart people around. What made Christianity catch on? He says a lot of things, but one of the things he says is that early Christianity, he has like five things. He says early Christianity was more culturally and ethnically and racially diverse than anything that had come before it ever.

There's extreme diversity. He says they cared for the poor. It wasn't abortion back then, it was infant exposure, but it was the equivalent. So they found babies that were abandoned and they took care of them. There's this great quote from one of the Caesars that says, the trouble with these Christians is that they not only care for their poor, but for ours as well. And they were non-resistant and they had an extremely conservative sex ethic. But if you look at those, a lot of those are, how do we build peace within the community? So mid-20th century, there was this idea of the social gospel and social justice. And what it did is it emphasized sort of the outworkings of the gospel without, while kind of laying aside the core of the spiritual gospel, there was this sort of this reaction among, you might say, Christian conservatives against that.

But one of the sad things that has happened as part of that is that this idea of social justice, this idea that we care about our community and that the gospel actually has practical outworking, has sort of become a dirty word. It's become a thing we sort of react to. And what has happened is that when we're left with, we want to save your soul, but we're not going to care for your community, is we are just like the social gospel movement, we're left with half of the gospel. So the gospel is bridging that gap between God and men, but it's also making people more whole, more themselves, more at peace when the gospel has finished transforming them than they were to start with.

My concern is that as Anabaptists, we have sort of pulled back. And again, I think we've let political conservatism push us in this direction, but we've held back and we said, you know, effectively, the poor can take care of themselves. We're okay with being white America. And we're just, we're losing that intense practical outworking of the gospel.

And we're left with what isn't really the whole gospel. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Wow, that's a lot to think about. Okay, well, thank you so much, Josh, for coming. This has been a lot of material to think about. My pleasure. Yeah, I think this is something we really don't hear enough about. So I really appreciate it. Yeah.