Does wisdom matter for world peace?

Contribution on behalf of the conference organized by Brussels Forum of Wisdom and World Peace

Bert de Ruiter

Introduction

First, I want thank Mr. Khan of hosting this event and to congratulate my friend Khalid Hajji with the initiative of setting up the Brussels Forum of Wisdom and World Peace. I believe it is already a mark of wisdom to sense there is a connection between wisdom and world peace.

This Forum combines two things that are close to my heart: wisdom and peace.

Can one have one without the other? I don’t think that world peace, understood as a harmonious living together of people of different faiths and worldviews is possible without wisdom.

  1. World peace: only possible when Christians and Muslims live at peace

Christians and Muslims are beckoned by our religions to seek peace. Taking our faith seriously means that we are committed to world peace. 

It takes wisdom to understand that ultimate and lasting world peace is a divine gift, and not a human possibility. Nevertheless, human beings are not idle spectators in this. We are anxiously anticipating the all-encompassing and everlasting world peace, and while we do so we seek to live in peace with one another.

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population, making the relationship between these two religious communities the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world. If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities there can be no meaningful peace in the world. It is not an overstatement to say that the future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

Without ignoring the fact that the thirteen hundred years of co-existence of Christianity and Islam, has witnessed many quarrels and dissensions, continuing to the present day, I would like to focus on the positive, on the initiatives that have been taken towards promoting peace.

One of the more recent historic events I would like to point to is when on October 13, 2007, 138 Muslim scholars from all corners of the world, representing every branch of Islam, delivered a fifteen-page letter entitled “A Common Word Between Us and You” to the leaders of Christian churches and denominations throughout the world. 

The most public response was a letter initially signed by over 300 mostly Evangelical leaders and scholars entitled “Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to A Common Word Between Us and You”, published in the New York Times on November 17, 2007.   

The initial letter and the many responses to it have given rise to many conferences, projects, initiatives between Muslims and Christians throughout the world. “A Common Word” has led to the United Nations Resolution in 2010 to declare a worldwide interfaith harmony week for the first week of February every year.

H.R.H. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan stated the following when he presented the proposal for an interfaith harmony week to the UN General Assembly in 2010:

The misuse or abuse of religions can ….be a cause of world strife, whereas religions should be a great foundation for facilitating world peace. The remedy for this problem can only come from the world’s religions themselves. Religions must be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”[1]

Such peace initiatives need our wholehearted support and need to be embraced not only by religious leaders and theologians, but by common Muslims and Christians living side by side in our cities, towns, streets, apartment blocks, sharing public space together. The Brussels Forum of Wisdom and World Peace could be facilitating such meetings.

While we acknowledge that religions at the core promote peace, we also cannot be blind to the fact that religions have been the cause of war.  Not all religious people are peace-loving people. This brings me to the second part of our topic of today: wisdom.

What is needed to have the two largest religions Christianity and Islam, live in peace with each other?

More documents and initiatives, such as A Common Word? More interfaith harmony weeks?  More interfaith dialogue meetings? More laws against discrimination and religious racism? More education on peacemaking and conflict resolution? More peacemaking models? More alliances and agreements? More resolutions? More organisations? More Forums of Wisdom and World Peace?  

Probably all of this and more. Nevertheless, I am convinced that all these activities and initiatives will have limited value, both in time and scope, without one important ingredient, namely peacemakers: Christian and Muslim peacemakers. Without such men and women all structures, meetings, and declarations might just be mere ‘play- acting’ events. Wise people are needed to consolidate our living together.

Unfortunately, Christian and Muslim peacemakers are still a rare breed. Where do we find Christian and Muslim peace makers?  What are their characteristics?

I suggest that one of the key characteristics of such people is that they are wise. They have made wisdom part of their lives.

Since the earliest time, the notion of wisdom seems to have been used to refer to a special mastery of life. Religious and philosophical traditions have been concerned with the topic of wisdom. Although, in modern times the explicit treatment of wisdom is a peripheral concern of philosophy, in the last decades we can notice a ‘fledging wisdom revival.’[2]  The reasons for this could be ”the growing apprehension that intelligence, as defined by psychologists, is a less than totally comprehensive descriptor of human competence. The dramatic technical ‘progress’ of the past century fed the belief that the solution to all human problems and the realization of all human potential lay along a path paved with empirical facts and analytical schemes. Intelligence, understood as that which IQ tests test, was seen as the proper measure of the person’s ability to adapt and contribute to the technological environment. “[3]

This is beginning to change. Nevertheless, it is not always clear what is meant by the term ‘wisdom’.

During the last two decades, researchers in the behavioral sciences have shown renewed interest in the concept of wisdom, which has historically been considered the pinnacle of human development. However, a generally agreed-upon definition of wisdom does not yet exist.

In recent psychological history, two major research groups stand out as major contributors to the scientific study of wisdom: Paul Baltes and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Robert Sternberg and colleagues at Yale University.

According to Baltes and colleagues a wise person is someone who knows what is most important in life and how to get it.  He or she knows what constitutes meaningful life and how to plan for and manage such a life.[4]

According to Sternberg’s theory, people are wise to the extent that they use their intelligence to seek a common good.  They do so by balancing their own interests with those of other people and those of larger entities (e.g., family, community, country).  Wise people can adapt to new environments, change their environments, or select new environments to achieve an outcome that includes but goes beyond their personal self-interest.[5]

Even though the quest for wisdom is as old as mankind, there is no consensus among philosophers (who after all are lovers –philo– of wisdom –sophia) and religious people, who for centuries monopolized the domain of wisdom, about how to define wisdom. 

Trying to see a common denominator among the definitions most people consider wisdom an ability to understand, judge and discern thoroughly and correctly what is of value and essential in life and what is the best way of dealing with life’s problems and uncertainties and to act successfully on the basis of this knowledge.

Often wisdom is perceived as a multidimensional attribute involving the integration of general cognitive, affective and reflective components.

Even the contemporary experts on wisdom admit that “model exemplars of perfect wisdom are hard to find” (Ardelt) and that “individuals by themselves are only “weak” carriers of wisdom” (Baltes & Staudinger). They construct an ideal type of wise person, an utopia, and realize that “very few people, even among those who are generally considered wise, might measure up to this ideal type” (Ardelt). They admit that ‘no one is wise all the time.’ (Sternberg)

Waiting for ultimate and everlasting peace under the Lordship of the All-Wise God we pursue wisdom for peace. Like ultimate and everlasting peace can only come from the God of Peace, ultimate, perfect wisdom is only found in the All-Wise God.

Nevertheless, people who worship the God of Peace are called to pursue peaceful relations with the other. People who worship the Only-Wise-God, are called to pursue wisdom as the only means to live in peace with their neighbors.

Wise people are peacemakers as the Bible underlines:

“Mockers stir up a city, but the wise turn away anger.” (Proverbs 29:8)

A king’s wrath is a messenger of death, but the wise will appease it. (Proverbs 16:14)

We need wise people in our religious communities. Can we identify what we are looking for?  Maybe this could be part of the agenda of the Brussels Forum of Wisdom and World Peace.

By way of introduction, I want to identify several characteristics of wise peacemakers.[6]

One of the key characteristics of wisdom in the Bible and in the Qur’an is ‘the fear of God’. This fear, among other things, refers to His Sovereignty over all domains of life. The motive of religious people for using wisdom to pursue peace should always be to glorify God and to build up the other person.  Peacemakers seek to be morally pure, free from any jealousy or selfish ambition.

Research has brought to light that effective peacemakers are deeply committed to their religious beliefs. Peacemakers were simply good Muslims and Christians. [7]

Wise peacemakers are gentle, moderate, clement, patient, able to bear and forbear. They  not rigidly demand their own rights but are willing to recede from their just right for the sake of peace and love.  

A wise peacemaker knows how to forgive when strict justice gives him a perfect right to condemn. He knows how to make allowances, when not to stand upon his rights. They readily forgive injuries done to them and do not bear hard upon others for their failings, but cover them with the mantle of love.

A Muslim hadith reads:

“Whenever violence enters into something it disgraces it, and whenever ‘gentle-civility’ enters into something it graces it. Truly, God bestows on account of gentle conduct what he does not bestow on account of violent conduct.”[8]

Wise peacemakers are compliant, reasonable, and easily persuaded. They are willing to defer to others if a core doctrine or moral principle is not at stake. They know when to yield for the sake of peace. They can discern between issues worth fighting over and those that are not.  Also, a wise peacemaker is willing to listen to others’ views and to change if he is proved wrong. Wisdom is needed to balance our own convictions on truth matters with giving space to others to do the same.

Peacemakers are multilingual in their practice, demonstrating a persistent interest in understanding the perspectives of others with a genuine open-mindedness.

“We hung in there for about a year. The whole idea was to come open-minded, to represent our points of view, to listen to theirs, and to find the areas where we disagreed and could not come to agreement, and the areas where we had flexibility. We were able to come to that up to a certain point, when we got to redline issues for both sides. We haven’t really had conflict with the individuals, since we decided it wasn’t working. But we couldn’t resolve redline issues. So we felt that instead of trying to force each other to change each other’s views, we would instead just continue in the spirit of friendship and dialogue without trying to resolve these major issues beforehand.” (a Muslim peace maker) [9]

Wise peacemakers are merciful, compassionate towards others. Not only having compassion for the person who is suffering apart from anything that he did, but also showing compassion to the one who is suffering because of his own fault. 

Muslim and Christian peacemakers have experienced that addressing practical needs for physical and psychological survival (e.g. shelter, recreation, blood, and relationships) can help form a context within which peacemaking can occur.[10]

A wise peacemaker does not take sides based on a party spirit or personal cronyism, while at the same time has an unwavering loyalty to God. Godly wisdom does not play politics with the truth, shading it according to personal advantage. Rather, it holds unswervingly to the truth in love. Spiritual maturity is foundational to a peacemaking ethos:

“Being mature in your faith is not worrying about what other people thin or say about you. You’re sort of at peace with yourself. It’s that you’re at peace with your yourself and your relationship with God. And then you can move from that place of peace into bringing that to other people. And then your life is in service of God, seeking the pleasure of God.” (A Muslim peacemaker)[11]

A wise peacemaker is sincere without hypocrisy. He or she is stable, trustworthy, transparent—the kind of person consistently displaying the virtues of wisdom and on whom one can rely for advice and counsel. Their ‘peaceableness’ and mercy towards others is without dissimulation.

The question: “Does Wisdom matter in World Peace?” is one that I answer with a clear ‘yes’. In fact, I am convinced that without wisdom world peace is impossible. But wisdom not as an abstract concept, but wisdom as found in people that fear God.  

It is my hope and prayer that this Forum will provide a platform to (a) honor the wise peacemakers of the past and use them as inspirational examples; b) identify contemporary present wise peacemakers; c) to give them a voice; d) to strengthen them; e) to provide a community for them to motivate and sustain them over time and through failure; f) to stimulate others to join their ranks.

I congratulate you, Khalid, for this great initiative to create the Brussels Forum of Wisdom and World Peace and I am willing to continue to work with you to see its dreams realized.

Bert de Ruiter

[1] http://worldinterfaithharmonyweek.com/newspost/h-r-h-prince-ghazi-bin-muhammad-delivers-kings-world-interfaith-harmony-week-proposal-at-un/

[2] S.G. Holliday, M.J. Chandler, Wisdom: Explorations in Adult Competence, 6

[3] Ibid.

[4] Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55 (1), 122-136.

[5]Sternberg, Robert J. A balance theory of wisdom. Review of General Psychology, Vol 2(4), Dec 1998, 347-365.

[6]  I have taken these from the Bible, particularly from the following verse:“The wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate submissive, full  of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. (James 3:17)

[7] Alvin C. Dueck and others in “Let Peace Flourish”  in Peace-Building by, between, and beyond Muslims and Evangelical Christians, edited by Mohammed Abu-Nimer and David Augsburger (2009), page 251

[8] Ibid, 234

[9] Ibid, 237.

[10] Ibid, 239

[11] Ibid, 236

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