Ten years and counting. America has been at war ten years and counting. It is almost difficult to recall a time when America was not at war.

The "Cold War" may not have seemed like "war," but there can be no doubt that it was appropriately named "war." For those of us who have lived long enough to remember it, in some ways the "Cold War" seemed more real than the wars that ensued after 11 September 2001.

The "Cold War" impinged on the daily lives of Americans. The wars after 11 September 2001 have been fought without the general American population having to make any sacrifices. It goes on, and so do we. Yet people are dying and people are killing. These wars are real.

Most Americans, however, seem not terribly bothered by the reality of these wars. It is as if the wars have become but another video game.

In truth, the wars themselves are increasingly shaped by technologies that make them seem game-like. Young men and women can kill people around the world while sitting in comfortable chairs in underground bunkers in Colorado. At the end of the work day, they can go home and watch little league baseball. I find it hard to imagine what it means to live this way.

The unreality of the wars America has been fighting for ten years and counting makes it hard for any of us to deal with the reality of war. We celebrate and praise the heroism of those who fight in these wars. We are saddened that some must make the "ultimate sacrifice" to preserve our "freedom."

It is not clear, however, that those so honoured think, given the reality of war, they should be so regarded. To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.

It is crucial that we, Christian and non-Christian alike, to confront the reality of war. I write as one committed to Christian non-violence, but I would like to extend a kind of invitation for those who do not share my commitments to join in an effort to try to think through what a world without war might look like.

In the face of ongoing wars it is hard to know what to say, but let me try to articulate some of the things I believe need to be said if we are to be faithful to the Gospel in a time of war - if we are, in other words, to find an alternative to "ten years and counting."

Let me begin rather immodestly. I want to convince Christians that war has been abolished. The grammar of that sentence is very important. The past tense is very deliberate. I do not want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war, but rather I want us to live recognizing that in the cross of Christ war has been abolished.

So I am not asking Christians to work to create a world free of war. The world has already been saved from war. The question is how Christians can and should live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished.

I am well aware that the claim that Jesus has abolished war will strike many as absurd. We live in a world of war. So what could it possibly mean to say that through his death and resurrection Jesus has brought an end to war?

To live as if war has been abolished surely is a fool's game. Philip Bobbitt must be right to argue we cannot and, more importantly, should not try to imagine a world without war. Rather we should think hard about the wars we should have if we are to avoid wars that lack political purpose.

Bobbitt's presumption that there is no alternative to war reflects a humane and profound understanding of our common lot. He is no lover of war. He is not a cynic or a nihilist. He does not believe when all is said and done that we must live as if the bottom line is to kill or be killed.

Bobbitt simply accepts the world as he found it, that is, a world in which war, like birth and death, is simply a fact of life. He sees his task, a moral task, to help us understand the possibilities as well as the limits of such a world.

The only problem with Bobbitt's defence of what he takes to be the real world of war is that there is another world that is more real than a world determined by war. The real world is the world that has been redeemed by Christ.

That world - that is, the world that has been redeemed by Christ - has an alternative politics to the constitutional orders that Bobbitt thinks are established by war. The name for that alternative politics is "church."

That there is a world without war in a war-determined world is an eschatological remark. Christians live in two ages in which, as Oliver O'Donovan puts it, "the passing age of the principalities and powers has overlapped with the coming age of God's kingdom."

O'Donovan calls this the "doctrine of the Two" because it expresses the Christian conviction that Christ has triumphed over the rulers of this age by making the rule of God triumphantly present through the mission of the church.

Accordingly the church is not at liberty to withdraw from the world but must undertake its mission in the confident hope of success.

My appeal to O'Donovan's understanding of the "doctrine of the Two" may seem quite strange given my pacifism, his defence of just war, as well as his nuanced support of some of the arrangements of the past we call Christendom.

From O'Donovan's perspective the establishment of the church in law and practice, as well as the development of just war reflection, were appropriate expressions of the rule of Christ. Yet I am convinced that my (and John Howard Yoder's) understanding of the "doctrine of the Two" share more in common with O'Donovan than many might suspect.

My claim that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we think nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but rather because as faithful followers of Christ in a world of war we cannot imagine not living nonviolently, might seem quite antithetical to O'Donovan's understanding of the "doctrine of the Two." But I do not think that to be the case.

Like O'Donovan I believe that after the Ascension all that is, including those who rule, cannot avoid being a witness to the rule of Christ. Even the rejection of Christ's lordship cannot help but testify to him.

The church simply names those whom God has called to live faithfully according to the redemption wrought through Christ. The difference between church and world is not an ontological difference, but rather a difference of agency.

The world by being the world is not thereby condemned to live violently, but rather the violence that grips our lives is the result of sin. This understanding of church and world is, therefore, a "duality without dualism" because Christians believe that we are what the world can be.

That Christians believe we are what the world can be means we can act in the hope that the world can and will positively respond to a witness of peace. That witness begins with Christians refusing to kill one another in the name of lesser loyalties and goods.

Such a refusal creates the necessity for Christians to imagine what it might mean to live in a world in which war has been abolished. That is no easy task given the way war shapes our habits of speech, the fundamental explanatory accounts of the way things are, and the way we see the world.

The challenge for those that would worship Christ, therefore, is to allow what we do in prayer to challenge the habits that seem to make war inevitable.

John Howard Yoder observes that to imagine a world in which war has been abolished requires that we live in a community that celebrates and shares a language that helps us see an alternative world.

According to Yoder, because the church is that kind of alternative community, Christians can see things that other people cannot see, we can notice what others fail to notice, and connections can be made that otherwise are overlooked. Such a community, moreover,

"enables perseverance, it motivates, it protects us from the erratic and the impulsive, because the stance we take is a shared and celebrated stance. We live with one another the maintenance of the language that gives meaning to our countercultural identity."

The church, in other words, is to be an alternative to war. To suggest that the church is an alternative to war can be interpreted by those concerned with the fragmented character of our lives to be a reactionary response.

Many long for a universal ethic that promises the means to secure agreements between diverse people as an alternative to war. To emphasize the church as an alternative to war will seem from such a perspective to introduce the kind of particularistic commitment that is the source of the problem.

Too often, however, those who presume they are representatives of a universal ethic find it difficult to place a limit on war. For example, if a war is fought "to be a war to end all wars" or "to make the world safe for democracy" or as "a war against terrorism" then war cannot come to an end.

By beginning instead with the church, I think we can better see why we find it so hard to imagine a world without war. As one committed to Christian nonviolence, I think this also helps us to give an account of war that acknowledges the real sacrifices of those who have participated in war.

One of the reasons I think it is difficult for many to think of themselves as pacifist is that such a position seems to dishonour those who have gone to war. Defenders of war may say that they respect those who are pacifist, but they continue to assume that there are times when war is a necessity.

That assumption seems justified because if, as most rightly think, good people fought in past wars, then it may be necessary to fight in future wars so that those that fought in past wars are not forgotten or dishonoured. From this perspective the pacifist disavowal of war seems to suggest that those who have fought in past wars are morally culpable.

If we are to even begin avoiding the unhappy characterizations pacifists and non-pacifists make of one another it is crucial that those of us committed to Christian nonviolence make clear that we do not understand our disavowal of war to be a position of "purity."

A commitment to nonviolence rightly requires those who are so committed to recognize that we are as implicated in war as those who have gone to war or those who have supported war.

The moral challenge of war is too important to play the game of who is and who is not guilty for past or future wars. We are all, pacifist and non-pacifist alike, guilty. Guilt, however, is not helpful. What can be helpful is that we begin to think together to make war less likely.

To begin that task many have assumed the best way to proceed is to develop increasingly sophisticated accounts of the classical moral alternatives of the crusade, pacifism, and just war.

But I am not persuaded that attempts to gain clarity about the ethics of war does justice to the moral reality of war. I am not suggesting, though I am in some sympathy with the suggestion, that just war considerations have little effect on decisions to go to war or the actual conduct of war. I am rather suggesting that this way of approaching war as a moral reality fails to do justice to the morally compelling character of war.

For in spite of the horror of war I think war, particularly in our times, is a sacrificial system that is crucial for the renewal of the moral commitments that constitute our lives.

That is why, as Jonathan Tran argues in his The Vietnam War and the Theologies of Memory , memory is a crucial constituent of the moral reality that makes war seem unavoidable.

What we have asked soldiers to do - that is, to kill as well as be killed - means that in order to make sense of what they have done we must identify them with those patriotic stories that enable us to remember those who have died as well as those that they have killed.

Tran observes that most soldiers cannot "long live with the memory of killing if the nation does not provide both narratives and narratival enactments that circumscribe those memories within the national myth, engrafting killers into the lore of patriots."

That, of course, is what did not happen for those who fought in Vietnam. And without culminating liturgies that war has never ended - particularly for those who fought in it. This means, according to Tran, "for the first time in American history, soldiers came home killers" because they were not given the means to return to "normality."

In his Why Politics Can't Be Freed from Religion , Ivan Strenski complements Tran's analysis of the liturgical character of war by suggesting that the sacrifices demanded of war cause certain effects in the society for which the war has been fought.

The sacrifice of war - that is, that a society must receive the giving up of self by those who have fought and died - "authorizes conceptions of an ideal community, it energizes a society to flourish, it inspires it to resist extermination, it weaves the networks of obligation that makes societies cohere."

Those who die in war make it necessary that those for whom they have died feel obligated to accept the gift of their death and, more importantly, "be obliged to repay this gift of their heroic deaths in some appropriate way."

John Howard Yoder wonders why it is so hard for political leaders to admit mistakes made in war, to confess they were wrong. He asks, for instance, if it was necessary to withdraw American soldiers from Vietnam in 1975, or from Beirut in 1983.

"Why can it not be admitted that it was wrong to send them there in the first place? Why can the statesman not afford to advocate peace without saying it must be 'with honor'? Why must the willingness to end the war be dulled or perhaps even denied by the demand that we must still seem to have won it?"

I think the answer to Yoder's perfectly sensible questions is quite simple: to acknowledge that a policy or a strategy was mistaken is thought to betray the sacrifices made by those who as a result of the policy died.

It is often observed that the first casualty of war is truth, but how do you tell the truth without betraying the sacrifice of those who accepted the terms of battle? War is thus a sacrificial system that creates its own justification.

But in the cross of Christ, the Father has forever ended our attempts to sacrifices to satisfy God. We (that is, we Christians) have now been incorporated into Christ's sacrifice for the world so that the world no longer needs to make sacrifices for tribe or state, or even humanity.

Constituted by the body and blood of Christ we participate in God's Kingdom so that the world may know that we, the church of Jesus Christ, are the end of sacrifice.

This is why, if Christians leave the Eucharistic table ready to kill one another, we not only eat and drink judgment on ourselves, but we rob the world of the witness necessary for the world to know there is an alternative to the sacrifices of war.

And isn't the silence that surrounds the taking of life in war an indication, a judgment, that we were created to be at peace with one another and God? We were not created to kill one another. We were created to be in communion with one another.

There is no more basic natural law than the prohibition against killing. When we kill, even when we kill in a so-called just war, our bodies rebel. Yet that rebellion is a marker of hope.

Christ has shattered the silence that surrounds those who have killed, because we believe that the sacrifice of the Son makes possible the overwhelming of our killing so that we might be restored to a life of peace.

Indeed, we believe that it remains possible that those who have killed can be reconciled with those they have killed. This is no sentimental bonding represented by the comradeship of battle, but rather this is the reconciliation made possible by the hard wood of the cross.

War is a mighty practice, a power that destroys those ennobled by the force of war. We are fated to kill and be killed because we know no other way to live. But through the forgiveness made possible by the cross of Jesus we are no longer condemned to kill.

A people have been created who refuse to resort to the sword that they and those they love might survive. They seek not to survive, but to live in the light of Christ's resurrection.

The sacrifices of war are no longer necessary. We are now free to live free of the necessity of violence and killing. War and the sacrifices of war have come to an end. War has been abolished.

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. His latest book, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity, will be published next month by Baker Academic. In 2001 he was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine.