On March 13, I had the privilege of speaking to the Advisory Board on Ethics of the Communion of Protestant Churches in Europe, which was gathered for its Workshop on Uncertainty and Preparedness. That this body (representing Protestant churches across the continent) is asking these questions at all is itself critically significant. That they are asking them together with voices from Ukraine, from Finland, from other countries that know what proximity to threat actually feels like in the body, it is not a procedural nicety. It is a sign that the European church is willing to let its theology be shaped by those living the questions, not only by those hosting the conversation. The four miles I have described are not a metaphor for us in the fifth year of the ongoing full-scale inhuman Russian war. They are a real distance, and we are extremely grateful to real churches that chose to walk with Ukraine and other war-affected contexts for these four miles… I do not want to offer recommendations to Western churches in peace contexts (vs. war-affected contexts), but my six theses can serve as hints drawn from the lessons of the Ukrainian Church. Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war, Taras D (Ukraine)
The problem with the word itself… I want to begin with a confession about language.
When I received the invitation to reflect theologically on uncertainty, my first instinct was not to reach for a systematic theology. It was to remember a specific morning in the city, 20 km from the frontline, the other day: the air-raid sirens, the silence that follows, the sounds of explosions, not knowing whether the next strike will be closer than the last. That kind of uncertainty has a temperature and a pulse rate in our bodies.
Since February 24, 2022, the United Nations has verified more than 56,000 Ukrainian civilian casualties (killed and injured), and the killing is not winding down; it is accelerating. Over 3 million household units have been damaged or destroyed. More than 3,600 educational buildings have been shelled, over 400 schools demolished beyond repair, and one-third of Ukrainian universities damaged. 750 houses of worship (churches, prayer houses, mosques, synagogues) have been struck, along with over 1,800 medical facilities. 70% of electricity generation was demolished last Winter. Nearly 10 million people have been displaced, either abroad or within their own country. In 2025 alone, according to official Ukrainian government statistics, Russia used over 100,000 kamikaze Shahed-type drones, 60,000 guided aerial bombs, and nearly 2,400 missiles against Ukraine, averaging more than 440 aerial weapons every single day and night of the year.
These numbers represent perhaps 25% of the actual statistical impact. The rest is still being counted or will never be. This is not background noise. In biblical tradition, numbers are not abstractions; they are events and names of people being broken one by one. They are the coordinates of uncertainty as it is actually lived: in our bodies, in the rubble of churches and homes, in the funerals and cemeteries, in the specific silence after an explosion when you do not yet know what, and who, has been lost…
I tell you this not to establish my credentials through the suffering of the Ukrainian people. I tell you this because the word “uncertainty” in the title of this workshop does a great deal of work, and we need to examine what it actually carries before we do theological reflection with it.
Yes, there is epistemic and philosophical uncertainty about which framework applies. And then there is uncertainty as our existential condition: the uncertainty of the mother who has not heard from her missing son at the front, the uncertainty of widow and orphan, the uncertainty of the seminary rector who does not know if the building will still be standing next semester, the uncertainty of the pastor who must preach to a congregation where half the seats are empty because the people who sat in them are dead, displaced, or fighting.
These are not the same thing as wearing different clothes. They are structurally different forms of human experience. If we do theology on uncertainty without first acknowledging this asymmetry, we will produce a theology that is, at worst, a kind of spiritual anesthesia for those who need it least…
In that spirit, and as a framework for what I want to offer today, I propose the image of four ecclesiastical miles.
- The first mile is humanitarian aid to people affected by the war of terror and aggression. Western churches have walked it generously, and it has literally saved lives. Food, evacuation, shelter, medicine, and financial support. This is real, and it matters critically and physically.
- The second mile is the extended journey, accompanying the church and people of Ukraine, and probably of all war-affected countries, through the prolonged period now upon us: when news cycles have moved on, donor fatigue has set in, partners are quietly recalibrating their priorities, and the Russian inhuman war of terror continues. This mile requires a different kind of endurance than “crisis response,” – the mission of presence. It requires sustainable relationships based on trust that endure even after the urgency has been settled.
- The third mile is harder still: the willingness to be precise (in theological language and in political language) to call things what they are. Not “conflict.” Not “the situation.” Not “both perspectives of conflict.” Aggression. War crime. Dehumanization. Rape. Torture. Looting. Murder. Destruction. Terror. The war of genocide… This mile costs something politically, missionally, institutionally, and relationally, which is precisely why so few walk it.
- The fourth mile, we cannot yet fully see. The post-war journey (reconstruction, justice, the reintegration of the traumatized and millions of veterans, the long work of rebuilding what was broken) is unclear in shape, and we do not know when it begins… What we know is that the church will be needed there too, and that the churches that walked only the first mile will not have the relationships, the understanding, or the credibility to walk the fourth…
These four miles are the horizon of my reflections today…
Thesis one. Uncertainty is always situated. The geography of the body determines the theology of the mind… There is no view from nowhere in theology. Church history and the Reformation prove it. Liberation theology (forgive me, evangelicals) insisted on it. The Ukrainian church is learning it again, in blood. Where you stand (literally, physically) shapes what “uncertainty” means, what it costs you to name honestly, and what resources you have to survive it. “Being church together in times of uncertainty” is a beautiful phrase. But “together” is the most demanding word in that sentence. It requires that we not collapse our different situations into a single generic uncertainty that everyone can relate to equally. Because we cannot. Ukraine has become a theological laboratory. The conditions of the ongoing full-scale unprovoked war have intensified questions that the church in peacetime can afford to leave vague or decorously unresolved. In Ukraine, those questions have become acute and urgent. They demand answers not in the next “synod cycle,” but before the next sermon, the next hospital visit, the next funeral, the next call from an unknown number… What our laboratory reveals is not always comfortable: not for us in Ukraine, and, I would suggest, not for you, Western Christians either… We ask, from which geography do you theologize? And when did that geography last unsettle your theology (genuinely disturb it) rather than simply locate it?
Thesis two. War does not create theological problems. It reveals and intensifies the ones we already had… The questions that break open in wartime are not new. They are old questions (like theodicy, divine providence, the nature of evil and its naming, the calling of the church in history) that comfortable theology in peace-dominating contexts had learned to manage rather than answer. War strips away the management. It asks you to speak and name directly. Does God see what is happening? Is evil merely a perspective, a dialectical moment in the unfolding of history, or does evil have a name, a face, a decision, a bomber that just took off from Russian territory? I delivered a paper on March 9 at a Ukrainian Catholic University seminar titled: “Evil Has a Name: How Russia’s War Against Ukraine Forces Theology to Speak More Precisely.” My argument was simple: the war has made theological vagueness morally and theologically expensive. When you are standing at the edge of a mass grave in Bucha (like I did in April 2022), the language of “complexity” and “two perspectives” does not preach or comfort. Because it does not correspond to reality. Our argument is not for theological simplification. Our argument is for precision. Real theological uncertainty is not the same as deliberate imprecision, or as false balance that refuses to distinguish between aggressor and victim because it mistakes symmetry for fairness. We ask the global church in peace-dominating contexts, when did your theology of evil last cost you a relationship? When did your commitment to dialogue last require you to say something that could not be diplomatically unsaid?
Thesis three. God is not uncertain. God is not neutral between the rapist and the raped. And these are two different things… The theme of “uncertainty” in Christian theology could, if we are not careful, migrate toward a kind of epistemic humility that ultimately becomes functional agnosticism: uncertain about the future, uncertain about outcomes, uncertain even about God’s ways, and therefore neutral, considering “both perspectives,” refusing to name and judge. I have resisted this trajectory with everything I have since 2014, at that time under heavy criticism from some international partners who valued Russian theology and culture so much more than those being annihilated by Russian imperialism in its “surrounding countries,” and since 2022, now with support from a number of our international partners who have walked with us through the second to the third mile. And not only with Ukraine, but also with other war-affected nations and churches. The Psalms are perhaps the most honest theological documents in the canon precisely because they refuse to collapse divine mystery into divine absence. The Psalmist does not know when God will act, or how. But the Psalmist is not uncertain about whether God sees, or whether what God sees matters. “How long, O Lord?” A liturgical question in peace-dominating contexts, and an existential cry in war-affected contexts, is a cry of uncertainty about duration. It is not an expression of uncertainty about justice, even if it happens only eschatologically. The prophetic tradition is built on the conviction that God has a posture toward history, that God does take sides, not in the geopolitical sense that any nation or “Christian empire” can claim divine endorsement, but in the moral sense that God consistently aligns with the widow, the orphan, the one whose land is taken, whose dignity is dehumanized and crushed. It is not triumphalism. It is a theology of the God who, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, is “a practitioner of solidarity,” who enters the pain of the suffering not from the outside as a neutral arbiter, but from within, as companion and advocate. The Russian aggression against Ukraine has taught me that uncertainty about God’s timing is not the same as uncertainty about God’s character. We do not know when the war will end. The war that started not in 2022, but in 2014. We do not know the shape of what comes after. But we learn to confess that a God who does not respond to the cry of the oppressed is not the God of Exodus, and is not the Father of Jesus Christ…
Thesis four. The church’s calling in uncertainty is not to manage anxiety, fix, heal, force forgiveness and reconciliation before the evil is named and challenged. It is to practice missional and prophetic presence… What does the Ukrainian theological laboratory reveal about the church? Several things, and not all of them flattering. It reveals extraordinary resilience (the word I hate more and more with each year of the Russian war): Ukrainian churches have become distribution networks, trauma counseling centers, spaces of lament and worship simultaneously, places where theology is rewritten in the morning at the funeral and aid is packed in the afternoon. Where will your churches be if the war comes to the countries of “Western Christendom”? Just an open question…But our theological laboratory also reveals what the global church often reaches for under the pressure of war-affected churches and uncertainty. It reaches for premature resolution, the kind that names “both-sides” wounds without sitting in them, that rushes grief toward hope before hope has been earned. It reaches for a unity that is, on closer inspection, uniformity of tone: a carefully maintained register in which nothing too specific is said about who is killing whom, in which the preservation of institutional relationships with churches in aggressor countries is dressed in the language of pastoral responsibility, and the silence required to maintain those relationships is called spiritual wisdom. There is a profound difference between a church that accompanies its people through uncertainty and a church that manages their uncertainty on their behalf. The managing church offers answers before questions have been fully asked, heard, listened to, and understood. It steers lament toward resolution before the depth of loss and the width of damage have been measured. The accompanying church does something harder. It stays. It does not need the suffering to end in order to remain present to it… I often think and speak of kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ in the hymn in the Letter to Philippians. The incarnation is not God solving the problem of human suffering from a safe distance. It is God bodily entering the uncertainty of human existence (our vulnerability, our genuine not-knowing) in order to be with us inside it and co-suffer with us. If the global church is to be the Body of Christ in times of uncertainty in war-affected countries (and it is not about Ukraine only), its primary vocation is not strategic clarity. It is a readiness to enter the kenotic presence… Thus, we ask our partners in the West, which mile are you on with war-affected countries and churches? Have you asked the church in Ukraine (and other churches in the fire) which mile it most needs you on? And do you understand that the answer may not be the mile that is most comfortable for you to walk?
Thesis five. Ongoing lament is not a failure of our faith. It is the most honest form of our faith during the ongoing inhuman Russian war… Before 2022, lament was a category discussed in our Old Testament lectures and scholarship. Since 2022, it has become a liturgical practice in Ukraine… The Book of Lamentations 1:12 reads: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.” This is a challenge to the disinterested observer of the church life in war-affected contexts, and of the church that supports the war of terror and occupation. A demand that we not walk past the ruins without stopping, without acknowledging what we are seeing, without letting it cost us something… You probably know what it costs when that demand goes unheard. During the Holocaust, lament rose from many Nazi camps (uncomfortable, inconvenient, considered politically and theologically wrong, and existentially unbearable) while so many churches across the globe continued their Sunday worship undisturbed. The lament was real. It was practiced. It rose, even when no one heard and received it, until the last Jew entered the gas chamber and cried out, dying… And how did the majority of Christians answer that question, “Is it nothing to you?” They answered it with silence. Not the silence of ignorance because they knew. The silence of those who had learned to translate the suffering of others into something at a safer distance: something that could be noted, perhaps even mourned in a measured way, but that did not require them to stop their life and ministry, to look, to act, to let it cost them anything… American and European churches are among those invited this season to stop, look, and act… I do not mean guilt or self-flagellation. And it is not about us being ungrateful, I do hope you understand. But the willingness to be genuinely uncertain together, which requires first that we be genuinely present together, which means the church in peace-dominating contexts must allow the churches in the fire to speak for themselves, instead of speaking for and about them, without immediately translating its witness into more manageable articles, podcasts, news, and terms to fix and push to forgiveness and reconciliation without naming the evil… Lament of the Community of Hope has always been politically inconvenient. Because it refuses to be strategic and silenced just for the sake of a “peace deal.” And it is precisely what makes it theologically essential for us here and now, today… Therefore, we ask the global church: “Is it nothing to you?” We ask it not as a rhetorical flourish and a theological exercise. We ask it as the oldest liturgical question in the canon, addressed to those who are passing by. We are still waiting for more than a procedural and “peacebuilding” answer.
Thesis Six. “Being church together” requires the courage to name, the courage to go beyond humanitarian aid, listening, presence, and compassion (which are critically important and vital)… I want to return to the phrase that frames this consultation: “Being church together in times of uncertainty.” I do believe in this phrase. The ecumenical vision of the global church as a communion that crosses borders, racial and ethnic identities, languages, and political pressures… it is not an abstraction to me. It has fed me, kept me connected to a wider Body of Christ in my ministry during the war since 2014, when my immediate context has been almost entirely consumed by the Russian war in Ukraine and the region. But I also want to be honest about where this phrase is tested… There is a form of togetherness that functions as avoidance, that keeps all parties at the table by ensuring that nothing too sharp is said, nothing too precisely named, not to offend those who support the war of terror and occupation actively, passively, or choosing to be silent in the presence of the atrocities, prioritizing the preservation of the relationship with an aggressor over the integrity of the witness… The prophetic tradition has always known that there are moments when the naming… the naming is the ministry of the church. When to call a thing by its right name – aggression, war crime, rape, torture, abduction, looting, destruction, dehumanization, the weaponization of the church as an instrument of genocide – is itself an act of sharing the Gospel, ministry, liturgy, and pastoral care, because it tells the victim that the church sees clearly what has been done to them. That they have not imagined it… No, it is not a call to abandon dialogue with Russian Christians, a very small minority paying enormous prices for their witness against this war. Our theological laboratory does not ask us to hate. It asks us to be precise. It asks us to hold uncertainty about outcomes (which is entirely appropriate) while being clear about the character of God and the content of the Gospel. And the content of the Gospel is that God hears the cry of the oppressed. That the blood of Abel speaks. Because Abel did not die. Abel was murdered by Cain, although both shared a sinful nature after the fall of humanity… We ask the global church, what would it cost your institutions to say plainly what you already believe, probably privately? And what does your silence cost us, those who are on the third and fourth miles, still waiting for you to arrive to us, to the war-affected contexts, not only with humanitarian aid (with all gratitude for that, otherwise we would not be surviving physically), but with naming the evil and calling the aggressor and occupier to stop?
What the Ukrainian theological laboratory can offer to Western churches… Ukraine is not simply a humanitarian “crisis and conflict” (for me, these are euphemisms and dehumanizing terms in the face of the ongoing full-scale Russian war of terror) that is only viewed as a call for Western charities and churches’ financial generosity. Ukraine is for the global church, first of all, a theological event: a moment in which foundational questions about the nature of the church as the global Body of Christ, the character of God, the witnessing and naming, the forced forgiveness and reconciliation, and the cost of witness are being asked and answered in real time, in congregations, in seminaries, in field hospitals, in cemeteries, in trenches… Our theological laboratory offers Western churches something you did not ask for and may not want: the chance to discover what you actually believe, under pressure. What does your theology of providence hold when the providence is not comfortable? What does your commitment to peace actually mean when peace requires, first, the end of aggression, not simply pushing the victims into occupation and annihilation, and the cessation of resistance? What does being church together actually cost when together means receiving the testimony of those who have been bombed and allowing that testimony to reshape your ecclesiology and your prayers? Uncertainty, theologically understood, is not the opposite of faith. It is daily faith’s condition… Abraham left without knowing where he was going. The early church moved into an empire it could not control, with a message it could not predict, toward a future it could not secure, and without certainty about outcomes. What they had was clarity about the character of God and His presence… the presence of the One who said I am with you, even to the end of the age…
That is enough for us to move. That is enough to be church… together, across all our asymmetries… in these uncertain, burning, irreplaceable days and “cherry” nights… Thanks be to God, who in all things does not leave us without witness… Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Taras D, Ukraine
Leave a Reply