It is our faith that Christ has established in His church a universal community and brotherhood within which the fullness of Christ's reign must be practiced, into which the redeemed must be brought, and from which must go out into all human society the saving and healing ministry of the Gospel. It is our faith that the life of love and peace is God's plan for the individual and the race, and that therefore discipleship means the abandonment of hatred, strife and violence in all human relations, both individual and social. Our convictions concerning peace and war grow out of our understanding of the Bible as the infallible Word of God, believing that God has revealed himself supremely in Jesus Christ and that all Scripture must be interpreted in the light of this revelation. Nonresistance is an expression of Christian love and emphasizes that which love refrains from doing as it encounters evil. The pages of Scripture are written large with the divine judgment upon resistance, war, and hatred.
Christian love is essentially positive.
If God loved us while we were his enemies, we must love our earthly enemies. Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. Not only did Christ reveal in His life, death, and resurrection His way of nonresistant suffering and triumphant, reconciling love, but also the whole tenor of the Gospel manifests this theme. The atoning cross of Christ in the center of human history stands also for the acceptance of suffering, the sacrifice of self, the outpouring of love, and the complete surrender of life to the ministry of redemption for others. We are penitent because we today embody so imperfectly that glorious heritage of high commitment which was wrought out of the fires of sacrifice, persecution, and martyrdom.