Peace​—Is It a Fleeting Hope?

PEACE​—this has been viewed by people from the earliest times as a “magical” word. Yet how few are the years when peace has prevailed earth wide!

To date no nation of the world has succeeded in ‘beating its swords into plowshares and its spears into pruning shears.’ (Isa. 2:4) The armaments race has absorbed vast sums of money that could have been used to better the nations morally and economically. Following the peace treaty that United States President Carter helped to negotiate between Israel and Egypt, news comments and cartoons made much of the gigantic piles of armaments that were promised to both sides pledging “peace.”

The reason why peace has been a will-o’-the-wisp, say some students of the matter, is that peace is generally thought of as the mere absence of physical conflict. An article in Sunday Magazine, October 15, 1978, entitled “Who Are These Peace People?” commented:

There are those who question where the peace movement is today. For example, consider the opinion of the Rev. Dr. Homer A. Jack, chairman of the Nongovernmental Organizations Committee on Disarmament at the United Nations. . . .

“‘We haven’t had a disarmament movement and very little disarmament activity really since 1964 or 1965,’ he said. . . . ‘Everything disassociated because of the Vietnam war. The disarmament movement fragmented, kind of petered out.’”

“Others,” said the article, “maintain that a true peace movement does not exist today.”

Another authority on the matter, Mr. James H. Laue, who is director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and cochairman of the National Peace Academy Campaign, said of the need for a concerted, organized approach to world peace: “The notion of peace is nice, but vague . . . What peace has meant for so many years has been negative​—the absence of tension and conflict.”

Laue stated that, since 1935, 140 bills have been introduced in the United States Congress toward the creation of a peace establishment or academy, but that the concept of peace always has seemed too vague to fit into a working agency.

Consequently, up to the present time peace has been an unattainable goal. Is this because peace has a meaning that goes beyond the commonly accepted definition? Let us investigate.