I often say, as a Christian committed to nonviolence, that I don’t have a foreign policy because I’m not a state. The very assumption that I have to know how to find a solution to the war in Ukraine is already a set of presumptions that misdescribe what it means to be nonviolent. What is so important for thinking through all this is that nonviolence is not an end in itself. We are nonviolent because we are worshippers of the crucified Messiah. That crucifixion is God’s salvific work in the world to make possible lives that are not possessed by violence.

We need to be a people that witnesses to the God who gives us an alternative to war, and that alternative is us.