GC29 Manifesto on Nuclear Disarmament (1982M157)

Because we are a covenant people under God, we stand uncompromisingly for life and against the forces of death.

Because our God is the God of Sarah and Abraham, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Miriam and Aaron, we know ourselves as a pilgrim people whose only security is in the promise that God is with us.

Because we are in covenant with the God of truth:

We will not believe the claims of any governments or military powers which hold sway by fear and seduce the people of the nations to expend the build of their resources on arms and not on bread, education and health care;

We will not believe in absolutizing the goal of national security, nor will we give up our freedom and responsibility to speak, to act, to dissent, or to name evil;

We will not be persuaded to accept the illusion of a limited nuclear war, or that any nuclear war can have winners, and we call for an end to the propaganda that holds out these concepts as desirable or possible.

Because we confess Jesus Christ, the crucified one, and we are a people of the cross:

THEREFORE, we name and reject the false gods of national security, national or racial superiority, economies based on the production of arms, and a false peace which depends on terror and not on justice, and we will seek instead the fullness of God’s Shalom, with justice, freedom and wholeness of life for all peoples.

Because we confess Jesus Christ, the risen one, we believe that God brings life in the face of death, and that death and despair will be overcome by life and hope.

THEREFORE we call on the church to renounce its alliances with security and power; to name with courage the forces that militate for death and against life; to repent and to call for repentance all in the church who have allowed the longing for security to replace the love of freedom; optimism to replace hope, and fear to overcome faith.

We call on the governments of the nations for an immediate end to the arms race, and to the production and deployment of nuclear weapons.  We call instead for a serious commitment to a just social order with freedom and wholeness for all.

November 1982, G.C. Executive, pp. 37-38