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Christianity and Peace: Rebuilding a Historic Connection · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally Speaking is the Central Schwenkfelder Church's podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the middle way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology at the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Today's topic is Christianity and Peace, rebuilding a historic connection.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we're very pleased to have Dr.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Rob Arner here with us today.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Rob has been most recently Associate Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, and also Assistant Professor of Theology and Culture at Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Bluebell, Pennsylvania.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: He is passionate about promoting the biblical vision of the sacredness of all human life in church and society.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: And to that end, he's written and also served in various capacities.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's the author of Consistently Pro-Life, The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity, published by Pickwick Press in 2010.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: And he's also served on the board of directors for the Consistent Life Network and has done so for over a decade.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: His 2013 dissertation was entitled Theology, Personalism and Human Dignity: The Impact of Personal Esteem on the Social Justice Activism of Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cardinal Joseph Bernardine.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it highlighted the connection between the words of esteem for the value of human life and the shape of social activism for justice and the work of these prominent theologians and leaders.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Rob is also a family man, married to Laurie and father to Grace, Luke and Joshua worships and serves at Langmore Presbyterian Church.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Rob, welcome to the show.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Drake.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: This is a joy to be here.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's a joy to have you.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: And a joy for us to talk about this topic you feel very passionate about Christianity and peace.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I want to start off by asking the question: where has this relationship between Christianity and peace been severed?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Came across a survey recently done at Denmark by UGO Denmark Analysis Institute in 2022, where this peaceful loving country, Denmark, saw 73.1% of Danes saw religion as a source of conflict, while only 8% or so believe that religion leads to peace.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: How did this happen?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not only Denmark, but it seems like Western society were seeing a severing between peace and Christianity.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Where did this come from in your perspective?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: Good question, Drake.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think for me, uh something fundamental happened back in the fourth century that altered the relationship between Christianity and power.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, with power comes the relationship between violence and peace.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Something happened in the fourth century that to me was a critical loss of part of Jesus and the Apostles' vision for the kingdom of God.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: As I document in my book and other recent studies, including those of uh Ron Sider, which is called The Early Church on Killing, and uh George Calansis, whose book was called Caesar and the Lamb, prior to the second decade of the fourth century, the church categorically rejected killing under any circumstances as incompatible with Christian discipleship.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: It was something that my modern hearers are very surprised to discover, but I believe that I have documented thoroughly in my work here.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Now, as I see it, with the ending of the persecution period and the imperial favoring of Christianity under the Emperor Constantine and his successors, the church was suddenly handed the opportunity to remake the empire in its own image, which turned out to be something of a Faustian bargain.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Within a few short years, the church went from being a powerless, persecuted minority to suddenly becoming the privileged, powerful majority that now had the power to persecute heretics and dissenters with the same power that it had once been subjected to itself to the great cost of the martyrs.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: And this, I think, is the real culprit that has been causing the increasingly common association of Christianity with social coercion and intolerance.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that the church has essentially, from the fourth century onward, all too frequently given into the temptation to try to run society, to bring about what they saw as God's will through sheer political power, rather than entrusting the good of society and the world into the providential hands of God.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So if I can paraphrase then, the original message, as you see it, of Christian faith in the early centuries and when shared, even in modern times, about peace and love and kindness and patience is a good thing.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: But when somehow power and political power gets intermixed, it confuses people.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think so, because ultimately, as Christian tradition can attest, love cannot be coerced.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: The kingdom of God cannot be brought about with the sword.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Only through God's power and the means that He has directed us to do.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Can we bring about peace, love, joy, and all those fruits of the Spirit?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: You've already referenced one important event in the history of the church and also world history.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: A number of people associate Christianity and violence from the crusades.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: How has that part of Christian history emphasized violence and coercion rather than peace, at least as modern-day Westerners see it?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great question, too, Drake, because the crusades are like that ultimate gotcha boogeyman for whenever you're discussing something on the internet with a stranger.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: What about the crusades?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: They say, and yeah, what about them?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: The crusades represent a ultimately a perversion even of the just war theory that the church began to adopt following the writings of St.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Augustine and St.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Ambrose in the fourth and fifth centuries.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: In the Council of Claremont in 1095, Pope Urban II kicked off the Crusades with a speech about the necessity of going to war to conquer the Holy Land for Christianity and get rid of the people that had been oppressing Christian pilgrims in that region.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: But he goes beyond just war reasoning in say, which would have said that this is lamentable but necessary that we have to do this, to turning it into something of a positive good and even the will of God that they go to war.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: I have a selection from that speech that Pope Urban gave in 1095 that I'd like to read, if that's okay.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: Pope Urban starts by laying out the causes for going to war, some of which were just, but look at the turn he makes at the end of this passage here.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: He says, They have occupied more and more of the lands of these Christians and have overcome them in seven battles.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: If you permit them to continue thus for a while with impurity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: On this account, I, or rather the Lord, beseech you, as Christ's heralds, to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: I say this to those who are present.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: It meant also for those who are absent.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: Moreover, Christ commands it.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: And now look what he does here.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: So Pope Urban went from admitting the tragic necessity of going to war, as the just war theory would say, to saying, no, this isn't just tragic and necessary.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: This is the will of God that we fight and kill.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: And not only that, Jesus will forgive the sins of all those who die in this quest.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: It was an absolute abandonment of much of what the Christian tradition had held to that point.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's sad.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: It is sad, and that's a very great departure from the language of peace that's uh woven throughout the scripture.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Think of Paul uh opening up his letters and saying, Grace and peace to you, Peter doing the same thing, and yet now we have Pope Urban saying, No, it's war, and we'll forgive sins for you going to war.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is very different than at least the writings of Peter, Paul, the preaching of Jesus, very different from what was happening in Roman society at the time with where there was a lot of violence, and violence uh was looked upon as a display of power.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Can you compare the original Christian message of peace, uh hope, and love from Jesus, Paul, Peter, uh John, and others with some of the things happening in the Greco-Roman world at the time?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's that's that's one of the really sharp contrasts for anyone who has uh studied the history of the emergence of Christianity against the the Greek and and Roman backdrop, because the Roman world in which early Christianity emerged was frankly a wash in bloodshed.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: Indeed, human life was cheap in antiquity.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: If you read Plato's Republic and Aristotle's politics, for example, the way they conceived of the value of the individual was only what that individual could contribute to the well-being of the state as a whole.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: The individual person had no inherent or intrinsic value to the Greek and Roman philosophers.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was only what that person could offer to the collective.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And in that way, the ancient philosophers' view of human life very much anticipated that of Marxist communism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: To give you a couple examples of the cheapness of human life in the Greek and Roman world, we tend to think of abortion as a modern thing, as something that was invented in the 20th century for whatever reason.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Abortion goes way back to ancient times.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: As long as women have been becoming pregnant, sometimes they have wanted to end those pregnancies.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: The power dynamic of that was in ancient times often more in the hands of the father.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: I want to give you an example.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: Abortion and infanticide in the ancient world were both very common.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they would attempt to destroy the embryo or the fetus in the womb through very dangerous methods that often endangered the mother's life.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: But sometimes, and actually probably more frequently, if the baby was born and it was not wanted, or there was something wrong with it, or it was just an inconvenient child, the baby would be either killed directly or abandoned on a mountainside to die of exposure.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: For example, I have a letter from an ancient Roman official named Hilarion that he wrote to his wife Alice in the uh early second century.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Listen to this.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: He's far away from his wife, and he knows his wife is pregnant and about to give birth.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: He offers his warmest greetings.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: He says, Hilarion to his sister wife Alice, many greetings also to my lady Borutius and Apollinarian.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Know that I am still in Alexandria, and do not worry if they wholly set out.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: I am staying in Alexandria.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: I ask you and entreat you to take care of the child, and if I receive my pay soon, I will send it up to you.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Above all, if you bear a child and it is male, let it be.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: If it is female, cast it out.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Male lives were in those days, as they are in some parts of the world today, such as China and India, more valued than female lives.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: And babies were discarded if they were the wrong sex, if they were something wrong with them.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the early church had a very fascinating practice of identifying the places where babies were often left to be abandoned and die of exposure on the mountainside.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: And they would send out what they called life watch patrols.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: Members of the church, deacons or women, would go and look for these discarded, abandoned infants and try to save their lives and then bring them up as their own children.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: What a stark contrast between wanting to discard a life or allowing to discard a life.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I assume that that letter that you were reading earlier on was commonplace type of expression compared to Christian women at that time, then going to pick up the abandoned child.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: What a contrast.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: That human life was sacred to the early church, that every single human being, whether the lowest person in society, a slave, a foreigner, a woman, was just as valuable as the most prestigious emperor.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: Every human life was of equal value in the sight of an estimation of God.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the biggest and most glaring conflicts came about in the way that the Romans had their entertainment.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas if we wanted to go see at an athletic event, we might go down to watch the Phillies play baseball or the Eagles play football or whatever your sport of choice is.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: The Romans would go down to the Colosseum to watch slaves battle to the death.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Bloodshed was their sport.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: The gladiator combats were amusement, and people cheered for these things.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: The lives of the slaves that were fighting in front of them were not worth anything except for their amusement.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: The church was horrified by this.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Speaking of your book, you've referred to it several times.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: In your book, you refer to the church as an army that does not shed blood.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: How does an army not shed blood?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And what early Christian texts are you looking at that would point to the church being an army?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: One thing that I was very surprised to discover in my research was that while the Christians of the first three centuries were without exception, for lack of a better word, pacifistic in rejecting human bloodshed as incompatible with Christian discipleship, nevertheless, they were not opposed to using militaristic metaphors to describe the early Christian life.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: For example, in the late first century, Clement of Rome observed the precise discipline and order of the Roman legions that were following the orders of their generals and ultimately the emperor.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: He saw in it a model for how the church ought to be.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Although, of course, the leaders, the purpose and goals and memes of the church were completely different from the bloody memes of the Roman legions that sought to extend and enforce Rome's grip on the world with an iron fist.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: The church used what a scholar of the early church, Adolph von Harnach, would call militia Christi imagery, or it's Latin for the army of Christ.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And they used these metaphors to describe themselves as a disciplined force following the commands of their general, Jesus Christ.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: But the means of this army were the precise opposite of the Roman means.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: The militia Christi would use the weapons of prayer, fasting, love, and charity, the works of mercy as the means of their combat.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: Their enemies were not human enemies, like how Paul points out in 2 Corinthians, their enemies were not flesh and blood or other human beings, but their enemies were the powers and principalities that hold this world in their thrall, the devil and the demonic forces, and a warfare it was, they thought of it.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: So the same type of command and discipline, but just not using swords and spears.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's right, that's right.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: That precise phrase, the army that sheds no blood, comes from Clement of Alexandria in his writing the uh Exhortation to the Greeks, written in the second century.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So this is an example of the militia Christi imagery I was talking about.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Clement writes, But when the shrilling trumpet blows, it assembles the soldiers and proclaims war.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Shall not Christ think you, having breathed to the ends of the earth a song of peace, assemble the soldiers of peace that are his?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and he did assemble, O man, by blood and by word, his bloodless army, and to them he entrusted the kingdom of heaven.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, interesting, how they pick up on that image, but yet put the knives and the daggers and the swords away.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: What about some of these peace-loving Christian communities and denominations that are in existence today?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking for our listeners, we're in Pennsylvania, the eastern part of the United States, and we have a number of Mennonites in our area, the Moravians, there are other peace-loving groups.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: How do these denominations conclude about Christian faith, peace, and violence?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you're right that even with the fourth century's what was basically a repudiation of the early church's pacifist consensus and the adoption of the just war theory as the predominant mode of Christian address for this question of war, there's always been a pacifist minority that has existed throughout the church's history.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, we have Quakers and those churches such as the Mennonites that derive their origins from the Radical Reformation.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: But even before that, pacifism was and indeed still is the rule for monastic orders such as the Benedictines that sought to live out a pure Christian discipleship in community.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: Another example was St.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: Francis of Assisi, and the Franciscan tradition is another one that has long been avowedly nonviolent.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: Even today, although official Roman Catholic doctrine upholds the just war theory as a tragic necessity in a fallen world, there are still a great many Catholics, such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, who adhere to the moral stance of the first generation of Christians on this issue.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: I would just point out that it's been, even since the adoption of just war theory by the church in the fourth century, it's pacifism has long been a minority trajectory that has never completely disappeared or gone away, even from those earliest days.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: It seems that those who are associating Christianity with violence are at least forgetting a large section of the Christian tradition that still is pacifist and peace-seeking.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I would argue that those churches that still hold to this stance are serving as a prophetic minority, calling the rest of the church back to its first love.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: In your book, you write about patience as a forgotten Christian virtue.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Patience isn't something that we like that much in modern society, but forgotten as a virtue.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Where do we see this in the Bible where patience is a virtue?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really important one, Drake.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for asking that one.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Patience, in popular understanding, just means not getting anxious when we have to wait too long.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: For the early church, uh patience meant a lot more than that.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: It meant not taking things into your own hands, but fully trusting in God, that God would be doing things in his own time, in his own way, and not trying to seize upon and force history or our own circumstances to turn out how we think they ought to be.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And a big part of that was in the way that the early church approached suffering for the gospel.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: If you read the book of Revelation, you know, that most bizarre but amazing and astounding and revealing book in the scriptures, Revelation was written not to predict the future, but to provide hope for suffering people who were being persecuted because of their adherence to Jesus Christ rather than to obeying the emperor.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: These Christians were suffering and dying and wondering, God, why is this happening?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: How long do we have to put up with this?
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: The word that John uses in Greek is hupomone, which in many English translations is translated as patient endurance.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: It meant holding out, standing firm, and not jumping away from the way that God has called you to, because ultimately all of this is still under God's control, and he is making it turn out for your good, just as he did through the human evil of the crucifixion of Jesus that turned out to be the redemption of the entire world.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: Patience then meant something like waiting on the Lord.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Another place we see this in scripture is one of the most remarkable verses, but I think one of the most underappreciated moral verses of the New Testament is Romans 12 19, that says in the NIV, do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: For it is written, it is mine to avenge, I will repay, says the Lord.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that this is the only place in the entire Bible that Christians are called explicitly not to imitate the character of God.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: Think about like in Sermon on the Mount, be holy, be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect, or from the Old Testament, be holy as I am holy.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: We're called to grow more and more in our holiness and our godlike character in everything except for this one thing: vengeance.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: It is the one prerogative that God reserves for himself alone.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we usurp God's prerogative and actually commit idolatry when we exercise it ourselves.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting point, letting God be God to take care of social injustices rather than taking it into our own hands.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: But patience is a difficult thing to develop in a modern society.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: You have any tips for us on increasing our patience?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: I looked to um Martin Luther King on this.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: He was one of the subjects of my dissertation.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: One of his most famous sayings that he repeated a lot in his speeches and sermons was the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't mean that history is inevitably moving in the right direction.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: He was a Christian preacher, and he had this profound faith in the justice of God at work, even through the long dark nights of injustice that he was experiencing.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: And he knew that by working for truth and justice and peace in the world, only through peaceful means and not through violent means could a peaceful world be achieved.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: Patience meant joining with God in that cause, but not trying to force it faster through what could be self-destructive means.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciated all of the insight you've given on violence and peace and patience.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Just one last question as we close out this podcast: are there some ways for us as listeners to work to increase the connection between peace and Christianity in a modern society that is so confused?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: That was one of the reasons that I that I wrote my book.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: I thought that the moral clarity on issues of violence and peace that the early church showed, if it were recovered in our modern times, could be a profound way forward through this time of polarizing culture wars that we are experiencing now, where we don't even trust our neighbors anymore, whatever political party they happen to be a part of.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: When we remember that the Lord said, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God, that's what I want to be.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: I want to be part of God's mission of breaking down barriers between enemies.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like Paul comments in Ephesians, that through Jesus Christ, the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile, those mortal ethnic enemies, had been taken away.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And they were a new humanity worshiping together side by side in Jesus Christ.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: So that recovering that original vision, I think, is absolutely, absolutely critical, as is keeping in mind the sacredness of every single human life that we that we meet.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Not only knowing it in our minds, but also applying it as appropriate.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Rob Arnor, thank you so much for this conversation today.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh wish you well on your continued work for peace and the value of human life in church and society.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Drake.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: This has been a real, real pleasure for me.