What I have discovered in seeking the God who saves the world is that the horror of nuclear weapons is qualitative. The wickedness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not that hundreds of thousands of people died, but that innocents were killed. The number of innocents simply illustrates and magnifies the transgression against the God who made human beings in his image and who holds life and death in his hands.

So consider Hiroshima from close up, instead of our usual vantage point, which is big enough to frame miles-high mushroom clouds and six-figure casualty statistics. Consider it intimately – from the perspective of the trespass – and you will find that it becomes a story about God.

There is a little boy named Keiji Nakazawa standing in front of the gate of his elementary school in Hiroshima on a hot August morning in 1945, speaking with a friend’s mother. Then there is a blinding light and deafening roar, and he is knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, he sees his friend’s mother‘s charred body and realizes that he has been protected from the heat blast by the school wall. Dazed, he makes his way home and discovers a smoking ruin. He continues to wander the city. Later in the day, he finds his mother, who holds an hours-old infant girl – his sister.

What had happened was this: when the bomb exploded, his mother, in her third trimester of pregnancy, was at home with his father, sister and brother. Then there was a flash and a roar, and the house collapsed.

When his mother dug herself out of the rubble, she saw a carbonized human shape where her daughter had been sitting. She heard the voice of her son, crying out under a pile of roof timbers. She heard her husband from under another pile, asking, “Can’t you do something for him?” These three things barraged her stunned brain through her eyes and ears: her daughter‘s burnt corpse, her son crying out, her husband pleading.

She tried to pull the wreckage away to free her son, but her hands were burned, and she lacked the strength. Then she saw that houses nearby were on fire and that the blaze was approaching their house. A neighbour passed by, and she begged his help.

But he replied, “No, we must go! We must go, for the fire is coming!” “No!” she said. “I will stay and die with my family.” But for her sake he forced her to leave. “No, no, no!” As she was pulled away from her home, she heard, over the roar of the fire, the sounds of her husband and son being burned to death under the roof timbers.

The shock drove her into early labour, and hours later she gave birth to a baby girl. The baby died two months later from radiation sickness and malnutrition.

After her husband, two daughters and son had been killed, Mrs. Nakazawa lived another two decades. She cared for and educated her remaining son, Keiji. Keiji became a famous author of manga, Japanese comic art, and wrote the famous Barefoot Gen series based on his experiences.

I heard the story of his family from his own mouth. He told it in hallmark hibakusha (A-bomb-survivor) fashion, without a hint of self-pity or sentimentality – and perhaps understandably so: what verbal affect could add to the bare truth? But our translator, a mother of young children, wept and wept with the cruel labour of making his words her own.

Or let us go even closer, to a point so intimate it is obscene. While walking in Hiroshima’s A-bomb museum, I encounter a Plexiglas case containing a tiny pair of linen shorts, mottled tan and brown and rust-red, and a photograph of a laughing, impossibly chubby little boy. The exhibit card labels it as “Son’s underpants.”

It tells the story of Ren Taoda, a 30-year-old mother carrying her two-year- old son, Hiroo, when the bomb exploded. She was terribly burned, except for the Hiroo-shaped patch on her back where her son absorbed the blast, likely saving her life. They fled. Hiroo, scorched, was desperate for water, but Ren had heard that drinking water would kill him. (The sudden shock of cold water killed many people in Hiroshima desperately trying to soothe their burns, and a rumor rapidly spread that this bomb had made water fatal.) The exhibit card said that, for the sake of her son, “Ren hardened her heart and didn’t give him any.” He died hours later.

And here, right before me, are the underpants in which he died, stained with the blood and ichor that dripped from his terribly burned body, and which were saved by a mother left with nothing but guilt and remorse. I stand there, transfixed, thinking of my three small nephews.

“Son‘s underpants.” I stare at the bloody folds and recognize, like a dog with its nose shoved into its own sick, what we have offered up to our Master.

The moral of these stories is not about right or wrong, but about rights – to human life, and who has them. The terrible passages of Scripture teach us that human life belongs wholly and only to God, full stop. And none of it – not a cellular micrometer or temporal millisecond – is ours to take.

This does not mean that humans can never kill. The Bible is replete with instances of divinely sanctioned lifetaking. But the common thread in each of these is that no human ever possesses the authority to take life. It may be delegated on a situational and temporary basis. Because all life belongs to God, those who take it must always be acting as God‘s proxy, for God‘s purposes. You can see why this is a weighty responsibility: to get it wrong is, literally, murder.

To kill outside the boundaries of God‘s justice is to take from God the time and place of a person‘s death. For this reason, there can be no quarter and no compromise between Christians and pragmatists on the ethics of life and death. In World War II, commanders justified the bombings of civilian centers like Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that is, taking lives that they had absolutely no right to take – with the claim that doing so would save lives in the end. The theological error here is assuming that God‘s primary concern is numbers.

Only in the recognition of God‘s complete right over all the world – salvation and damnation, life and death, blessing and disaster, joy and suffering – can we understand our utter lack of authority over life. The commandment against murder, which is any act of taking human life outside the judgment and justice of God, is absolute.

The working of God is often terrible. But God may be terrible because he is holy, and holiness is fearsome to behold. So, what do we name it when we, who are so deeply profane, arrogate to ourselves the right to ape God, to plant our unholy feet in his sacred place and wreak terror and horror? It is abomination.

Excerpted and adapted from The World Is Not Ours To Save, a book by the Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, www.ivpress.com. The Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, a long-time activist for the abolition of nuclear weapons, is Scholar-in- Residence at Little Trinity, Toronto, and is in the dissertation phase of his Th.D. at Wycliffe College, writing on the premodern concept of secularity.

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This October, the Nobel committee announced that the 2017 Peace Prize had been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a Geneva-based international coalition of which the Anglican Church of Canada is a member. The prize was awarded for ICAN’s work as the driving force behind the groundbreaking Treaty On The Prohibition Of Nuclear Weapons, which was negotiated at the United Nations earlier this year, approved by 122 nations in July, and opened for signature in September.

Known informally as the Nuclear Ban Treaty, it prohibits the development, testing, production, possession, and use or threat of use of nuclear weapons. It also prohibits non-nuclear nations from relying on nuclear-based security guarantees of other countries – such as the “extended deterrence” that the United States has historically offered to allies like Japan and South Korea. When 50 nations ratify the ban, it will enter into force permanently.

The Ban Treaty was not won without controversy. The world’s nuclear powers vocally boycotted the treaty negotiations, and encouraged and coerced their allies to do the same. Canada was notably absent from the negotiations. During Question Period in Parliament, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended Canada’s boycott by saying that the absence of nuclear-armed states from the discussions made negotiations “sort of useless”. The Trudeau government even declined to congratulate Canadian Setsuko Thurlow – a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb and an anti-nuclear activist – when it was announced that she would jointly accept the Nobel Prize with Beatrice Fihn, ICAN’s executive director, at the award ceremony on Dec. 10.

Supporters of the ban, however, see the opposition of politicians like Mr. Trudeau and President Donald Trump as an indication that they are doing something right. During a key session in the treaty’s development at the UN, US ambassador Nikki Haley held a press conference outside the chamber, declaring that the Ban Treaty would accomplish nothing. According to Ms. Fihn, however, Ambassador Haley’s actions belied her words. It was, Ms. Fihn said, like a neon arrow sign saying “progress happening here”.

From the perspective of Canadian history, the Trudeau government’s dismissal of the ban appears indefensible. Canada’s historic commitment to peace and disarmament is perhaps most notably enshrined in this nation’s leadership to ban antipersonnel landmines in the 1997 Ottawa Treaty. That treaty was boycotted and opposed by landmine possessors, and entered into force despite their opposition and non-participation. But the treaty’s articulation of a global norm against landmines has proven consequential even for those countries that still refuse to ratify it, resulting in a radical decline in the use of landmines worldwide.

The Ottawa Treaty example might explain the Trudeau-Trump fear of the nuclear ban. The ban is based on the recognition that nuclear weapons result in unacceptable humanitarian consequences. These range from uncontrollable local fallout in a limited use of nuclear weapons, to global famine resulting from regional nuclear war, to the omnicidal extinction of a nuclear exchange between superpowers.

The ban also recognizes the horrific humanitarian consequences of the simple existence of nuclear weapons. The development, testing, and possession of nuclear weapons has had a well-documented but underreported effect on women and children and the reproductive cycle, and disproportionately affected Indigenous populations.

Thus, by naming nuclear weapons as an existing humanitarian crisis, which threatens to become exponentially worse in the event of their use, the ban reveals the inherent injustice behind a security policy that relies on such weapons.

This injustice also speaks to the alignment of Christian theological and ethical priorities with the ban treaty. Christians have been among the most vocal opponents of nuclear weapons since their development and use at the end of World War II. In Canada, the Anglican Church has a long history of resolutions opposing nuclear weapons and supporting disarmament, including the 2007 General Synod resolution that led to the ACC joining ICAN. At a global level, the Holy See was one of the first nations to sign and ratify the ban, and there is little daylight between the Vatican’s anti-nuclear position and that of the World Council of Churches and the World Evangelical Alliance, the other two world bodies representing Christianity.

This unity of Christian opposition to nuclear weapons is perhaps most fundamentally grounded in the Just War tradition, a theological framework for considering armed conflict that has historically guided Anglicans and Roman Catholics, among others. In brief, Just War forbids the use of weapons that do not discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, as well as violent force that causes more harm than the good it seeks to do. As a category, nuclear weapons fail both these tests, making them a de facto instance of weapons forbidden as mala in se (evil in themselves), like mass rape, torture, and genocide.

During the Cold War, the recognition of nuclear weapons’ evil was functionally outweighed, even for many Christians, by the conviction that only nuclear deterrence could prevent their use. Today, however, the spiraling crisis of world events reveals the alignment of moral virtue and prudential wisdom undergirding the ban treaty. Seventy-two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are leaving behind the era when one could imagine that we had to have nuclear weapons so that they would never be used. Now, we are entering a new, uncharted era, in which the increasing consensus of security experts is that the indefinite existence of nuclear weapons guarantees their eventual use. The crisis unfolding on the Korean Peninsula is just one instance of the danger we face.

Such crises confront us with our own powerlessness. They also invite us to what we can do, which is repentance and the refusal of complicity.

Toward this end, perhaps the Anglican Church in Canada will seek to live up to our imputed Nobel Prize: first, by forming an army of prayer that God will give us “time for amendment of life,” as the Compline blessing puts it. And, second, as an army of activism, insisting both as dioceses and faithful individuals that our government have the courage to name right from wrong by signing the ban treaty – and then doing the hard work of adjusting its security policies accordingly.

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