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32 “I Have Not Come to Bring Peace but a Sword” (Matthew 10:34) Peacebuilding and the Struggles for Justice The title of my contribution “I have not come to bring peace but a sword”1 is, to say the least, somewhat provocative for a Women’s Peacebuilding in Religion conference. It cites an early saying of Jesus that is also found in Luke’s Gospel (12:51-53). Luke’s version reads: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you but rather division.” If this is a saying of Jesus found in the conjectural source Q, then, like Q, Matthew seems to contrast peace with the tensive symbol “sword” and interprets it as conflict among members of the kyriarchal household. It was Luke who replaced the tensive symbol “sword” with “division.” By interpreting the tensive symbol “sword” as “division,” the Lukan text suggests that the opposite of peace is division. However, if one understands the tensive symbol “sword” as representing conflict then the opposite of peace is conflict and struggle. Whereas division sets people against people, conflict is caused not only by war but also by struggles for justice. I am not simply concerned with a textual hermeneutical issue here, but instead want to explore the two meanings of peace evoked which are in tension with each other: the tension between the meaning of peace as the result of ending war and absence of conflict, on the one hand, and peace as the result of conflict and struggle for justice that seeks to change structures of domination, 1. This paper was presented at a conference on Peace Building in Society and Religion, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, June 23–26, 2011. It will be published in the conference volume edited by Maria Pílar Aquino. I want to thank Dr. María Pilar Aquino for inviting me to this important conference and my research assistant Michal Beth Dinkler for her corrections and careful feedback. 491 on the other hand. Understanding the tensive symbol “sword” as “struggle,” I suggest that peace in the Matthean saying is then understood as the opposite of conflict and struggle. The Jesus saying would then mean, “I have not come to bring peace but conflict and struggle.” Hence, it becomes necessary to explore “peace” and its contextual meanings in the first century. I will do so also in order to clarify a conceptual contradiction inscribed in peacebuilding discourses today. Having undergone a crash course in peace studies, it seems to me that peace studies center on two key terms: peacebuilding and conflict resolution, thereby associating conflict with the negative term “war” and dissociating peace from it. The more general term “conflict” seems to have replaced the term “war” and appears to have the often unintended function of identifying struggles for social-religious change with the negative rhetoric of war. Hence, wo/men who have not only suffered violence but also experienced more independence and leadership in times of war fare badly after the war is over, since peacebuilding and conflict resolution are often in danger of serving the function of pacification insofar as they identify social conflicts such as wo/men’s struggles for equality with war. Feminists who raise critical questions of justice are often silenced as “battle-axes” or “conflict mongers who prevent peace.” Wo/men who have been “comrades in arms” during the wars of liberation are sent back to hearth and home after peace is negotiated. Or to give another example: In my experience, Roman Catholic peace centers will speak out against war but not against the injustices caused by the Vatican’s denial of wo/men’s ordination, anti-gay strictures, or refusal of condoms to prevent HIV infection because they do not associate peacebuilding with such inner-church struggles for justice. That this conference focuses on wo/men’s and not on feminist peacebuilding, I fear, is another sign of such pacification tendencies in peace studies. Hence, before I turn to my N*T example for elaborating this tension between peacebuilding and conflict resolution or transformation historically, I need to explain first how I understand the f-word “feminist” and elaborate my feminist approach to the problem of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. A Critical Feminist Analytic: Kyriarchy Feminist theories and the*logies have emerged from wo/men’s participation in emancipatory movements such as the struggles for full democratic citizenship, religious freedom, abolition of slavery, civil rights, national and cultural independence...

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