Introduction
Ever since Clark Pinnock taught
an interterm course in 1975 at Regent College, entitled “The Politics
of Jesus”, for close to half of my life, I have been drawn to the
nonviolent Cross of Jesus. Pinnock later taught a full-semester
course by the same title, based upon a then recent publication by Mennonite
theologian John Howard Yoder, The Politics of
Jesus (1972 & 1994), that theologian Stanley Hauerwas believes
is the most important publication on ethics of the twentieth century.
What do I mean by “violence”
in this talk? A very succinct definition is given in Marjorie
Suchocki’s The Fall To Violence (1994): “… at its base,
violence is the destruction of well-being (Suchocki, 1994, p. 85,
italics added.)” Violence is the destruction of
well-being.
Shalom
is the enormously semantically rich word that fundamentally means “well-being”
or “peace”, and the polar opposite of violence. It is used
237 times in the Hebrew Bible. Shalom that violence destroys
is the most commonly appearing word for the joining of justice and peace
in the Hebrew Bible1. Violence is the destruction
of well-being. Violence is the destruction of
shalom.
I can immediately think of
several qualifications. So I might have to change the definition
to:
Violence is the purposeful,
active destruction of the well-being of fellow humans,
and/or the indiscriminate wanton destruction of
the well-being of fellow humans and
the Good Creation.2
This too is subject to qualifications,
as are all definitions.
According to a Pew Charitable
Trusts poll in April, 2003, 87 percent of white American evangelicals
supported the president’s decision to invade Iraq (The Pew Charitable
Trusts, 2003). What does one make of such a fact? One could
find similar statistics about Christians repeated throughout the entire
sweep of Western Christendom since the fourth century.
Why have so few voices denounced
violence by the state since the era of Constantine in the fourth century?
“It is a great irony of history,” writes one commentator, “that
the Cross, symbol of the ultimate triumph of peaceful means to peaceful
ends, has been used as a standard in battle (Anderson, 1992, p. 104).”
Hence part of this paper’s title:
“An Irony of History”.
This is grand understatement.
The
Cross: Ultimate Revelation of Truth
The Apostle Paul wrote:
I am not ashamed
of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone
who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile (Romans 1:16)
In II Corinthians he also wrote:
For the message
of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who
are being saved it is the power of God…
Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach
Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power
of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than
man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength
(1 Corinthians 1:18-25)
The Cross is the ultimate demythologizer
and deconstructor of religion and philosophy. It is the “Final
Unveiler”. As such, it also unveils violence as THE grand myth
of human interaction, and liberates us towards the Two Great Commandments:
love of God, love of neighbour.
In this presentation, I propose
a very simple thesis: Violence is The Ultimate Lie, and the Ultimate
Contradiction of Truth. The Cross is
The Ultimate Truth, and The Ultimate Contradiction of Violence.
One writer explains:
In short, according
to [René] Girard3, the work of the Gospel through the ages
has ultimately enabled an anthropology of human origins as rooted in
what we are confronted by in the cross, namely, the collective murder
of a victim (Nuechterlein, 2002, p. 44).
Legitimate (state) violence
is foundational of human culture, claims Girard:
…Girard’s proposal
is that the logic of accusation and sacrifice has remained at the center
of what constitutes human culture (ibid, p. 17).
What most legitimizes this
human violence is religion, through a “mythologizing” process that
hides the horror of the violence, and renders it acceptable to human
culture:
If myth veils the
nature of human violence behind a cloud of religious mystification,
how is it that humankind has ever begun to get out from underneath the
cloud? Through lucid thinkers like [Jacques] Derrida and [René] Girard?
No, according to Girard: only an extended encounter with the true God
over time could begin to blow us free from that cloud. And he contends
that such an encounter is testified to most consistently through the
Judeo-Christian Scriptures, especially through the Gospel of Jesus Christ
(ibid, p. 17).
The Cross, in other words is
the ultimate unveiler of the lie of sanctioned, sacred, sacrificial
violence.
Nuechterlein summarizes:
One might be tempted
to say that the cross forgives the sin [of human scapegoating violence]
at the same time that it reveals it to us. But it may be even more gracious
and amazing than that: the cross forgives our sin so that it
might begin to be revealed in the first place. Human beings have no
hope of ever being able to see something so dark about ourselves unless
we are first forgiven for it. It is the so-called “original sin,”
the sin that goes back to the origins which have generated the very
cultures that form us. In Christ Jesus we have a sacrifice that God
transforms into self-sacrifice, a life of loving service, which is the
founding event of God’s Culture, known in the Gospels as the
“Kingdom of God” (ibid, p. 19).
If violence is seen from the
perspective of the accuser, from the state, from organized society,
violence is “mythologized”, claims Girard. But if violence
is seen through the eyes5 of the victim, then violence is
demythologized, and culture must be “reinvented” – a point made
again below.
Nuechterlein explains:
Unless the Risen
Victim can begin to help the apostles to see the cross from the perspective
of the victim, the cross and resurrection are simply another myth told
from the perspective of the persecutors. But the victim who rises from
the dead as forgiveness enables the turn-around of being able
to demythologize conventional myths by adopting the perspective of the
victim. Those whose encounter with the Risen Victim creates faith now
have the calling to use the gospels to help humanity read and understand
its own myths — not the opposite tactic so common among biblical literary
critics of today, that is to say, to read the gospels in the ‘light’
of mythology. For the ‘light’ of mythology is actually the darkness
that would keep us blind (ibid, p. 19)6.
I shall turn to Gil Baillie’s
book, Violence Unveiled (1995), to help develop further the centrality
of the Cross, the Universal Truth that contradicts violence,
the Universal Deception.
Baillie claims that “Human
history is the relentless chronicle of violence that it is because when
cultures fall apart they fall into violence, and when they revive themselves,
they do so violently (ibid, p. 6).”
In other words, violence
is the foundation of human culture. Baillie argues, drawing on
the work of René Girard, that scapegoating violence, whereby
all turn against the one in violent expulsion to preserve the order
of society, is the great and fundamental building block of all human
culture. Ancient societies derived support for this resort to
scapegoating violence from religion, and religious justifications for
scapegoating violence were readily available. “ ‘It is better
that one man should die,’ said Caiaphas of Jesus, ‘than that the
whole nation be destroyed’ (ibid, p. 6).”
“Caiaphas,” explains Baillie,
“was invoking a mechanism for preserving culture that is as old as
culture itself (ibid, p. 6)”. This mechanism is sacred,
scapegoating violence, at the heart of all human culture, including
Western secular culture. At the heart in turn of deconstructing
the legitimacy of this ages-old justifying mechanism for violence is
the Cross, the very inversion of Caiaphas’ words! The Cross
gives the lie to scapegoating violence, the Ultimate Lie of the history
of humanity. As Jesus said of the protectors of the religious
culture of his day:
You belong to
your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire.
He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for
there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language,
for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44).
The Cross is about Ultimate
Truth. Violence is the Ultimate Lie. And myth
obfuscates the truth that violence lies (double entendre) at
the core of all human culture. Myth means to close one’s eyes
to, to keep secret. Baillie states:
In the New Testament,
mythos is juxtaposed to Logos – the revelation of that
about which myth refuses to speak – and to aletheia – the
Greek word for truth. Aletheia
comes from the root letho,
which is the verb “to forget”. The prefix a
is the negative. The literal meaning, then, of the Greek word
for truth, aletheia, is ‘to stop forgetting’ (Baillie,
op.cit., p. 33).”
Myth refuses to see and speak
about the underlying violence of human culture. For this reason,
“Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and gospel
(ibid, p. 34).” Myth ultimately mutes the victim’s
voice, reversing the biblical message in response to Abel’s murder:
“Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. (Gen
4:10).”
Myth ultimately justifies violence
by declaring it legitimate if the state through its police and military
undertake it. The Gospel ultimately delegitimizes violence, by
declaring it violation of love of God and neighbour, especially neighbour
at its extreme test case: the enemy. This is Gospel.
All legitimations of violence are demythologized in exact reversal
of Rudolph Bultmann’s project of demythologizing the Gospels.
As it turns out, the Gospels are the only texts to tell the truth
about violence.
In I See Satan Fall Like
Lightning, René Girard says:
The Passion accounts
reveal a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures
and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions
and scapegoating. If this analysis is true, the explanatory power of
Jesus’ death is much greater than we realize, and Paul’s exalted
idea of the Cross as the source of all knowledge is anthropologically
sound (Girard, 2001, p. 3).
Bailie discusses the 1989 execution
of serial killer Theodore
Bundy, when hundreds of men, women and children camped outside the Florida
prison in a festive spirit one reporter likened to a Mardi Gras.
The same reporter described the event as “a brutal act… [done] in
the name of civilization (Bailie, op.cit., p. 79).” Bailie
reflects on that commentary thus:
It would be difficult
to think of a more succinct summation of the underlying anthropological
dynamic at work: a brutal
act done in the name of civilization, an expulsion or execution
that results in social harmony. Clearly, after the shaky justifications
based on deterrence or retribution have fallen away, this is the stubborn
fact that remains: a brutal act is done in the name of civilization.
If we humans become too morally troubled by the brutality to revel in
the glories of the civilization made possible by it, we will simply
have to reinvent culture. This is what Nietzsche saw through a
glass darkly. This is what Paul sensed when he declared the old
order to be a dying one (I Cor. 7:31). This is the central anthropological
issue of our age (ibid, p. 79).
And this is the grand enterprise
of the Gospel impetus: to reinvent culture consonant with the Peaceable
Kingdom where:
The wolf will
live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf
and the lion and the yearling together; and
a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like
the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the
young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither
harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full
of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea
(Isaiah 11:6-9).
Baillie points out that scapegoating
violence demythologized by the Gospels arises from a human proclivity
René Girard calls “mimetic desire”, which the Bible calls “covetousness”,
or James dubs “evil desire”.
In
Girard, “Desire is mimetic in the sense that it imitates desire, it
copies the other’s desire for an object and not the outward form
of the other’s actions (Hamerton-Kelly, 1994, p. 132).” When
two toddlers are in the nursery surrounded by toys, one child is perfectly
content to let a certain toy lie untouched beside him until the other
child suddenly wants it. That demonstrated desire by one child
suddenly awakens desire in the other, and all hell breaks loose.
Violence erupts, violence which is always the outcome of the contagion
of a desire whose origins are Satan.
James puts the matter succinctly:
“…each one is tempted when,
by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then,
after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it
is full-grown, gives birth to death (James 1:14-15).” This
is mimetic desire gone amok, derivative from Satan who is “the personification
of the rivalrous mimesis [imitation], the mimesis engendering accusation
and violence (Williams, 1996, p. 293).” As Jesus himself says:
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out
your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not
holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he
speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies
(John 8:44).” The same Greek work (epithumia) is used
in both texts for “desire.”
Girard understands desire ultimately
to be metaphysical: it wants to be the other, who acts both as
a model but then as an obstacle-rival. But mimetic
desire is not inherently bad or destructive, rather it can also be the
means whereby we become open to God and others. “If,” one
author explains, “it becomes effective in a fundamental change of
personality through the imitation of God or Christ, it could be termed
‘conversionary mimesis’ or ‘conversionary imitation’ (Williams,
1996, p. 291).” A classic text is Ephesians 5:1 & 2:
“Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live
a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as
a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Put slightly differently:
The desire for a self ever found in the well-being of the other,
is mimetic desire gone good. It
is a life of “embodied forgiveness” according to Gregory Jones
(1995), and the true “life craft” of every human. It is
a consciousness that Jesus can be discovered, as Mother Teresa
used to put it, even “in its most distressing disguise”,
and always in everyone. It is the ultimate and only antidote to violence.
For Girard, good mimetic desire
towards God in Christ spells an explicit end to all legitimized scapegoating
violence by the state or society, and all illegitimate violence proscribed
by law. “Just war” and “just executions” are therefore direct
contradictions of the fundamental revelation of God in Christ.
They are both brutal acts done in the name of civilization, reek of
human fallenness and death, and are contradictions to salvation and
life; or as John puts it, “grace and truth” brought through the
Cross of Jesus Christ.
According to Girard, Jesus
died because he gave the lie to legitimized,
redemptive7 violence. The “atonement” therefore
is in fact, the inversion of legitimized violence, and therefore again
the very antithesis of all Just War theory. I shall return to
the theme of atonement.
A 2007
documentary is based upon a book by journalist Norman Solomon.
The book and movie are entitled, War Made Easy: How Presidents &
Pundits Keep Spinning us to Death (Solomon (2005) – the book;
Alper & Earp (2007) – the documentary). In the documentary,
narrator Sean Penn and commentator Norman Solomon explain:
SEAN PENN: Influencing
the nature of this war coverage has been a priority of one administration
after another since Vietnam, when conventional wisdom held that it was
negative media coverage that turned the American people against the
war and forced US withdrawal. Since that time, and beginning with new
urgency during the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon has worked with increasing
sophistication to shape media coverage of war…
NORMAN SOLOMON:
So for the invasion of Grenada and invasion of Panama in ‘83 and ‘89,
then the Gulf War in early 1991, it was like a produced TV show, and
the main producers were at the Pentagon. They decided, in the case of
the Gulf War, exactly what footage would be made available to the TV
stations… (Alper & Earp, 2007).
“The first casualty when
war comes is truth,” declared U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917.
Jesus declared: “Then
you will know the truth, and the truth will
set you free (John 8:32).”
A. J. Coates in The Ethics
of War writes:
The moral prohibition
of lying, for example, makes good sense in the context of personal relations,
but no sense at all in affairs of state. Telling the truth is
a moral luxury that politicians and diplomats can rarely afford.
More than that, the fulfillment of their public duty will require them
not only to conceal the truth but to suppress it and twist it constantly
(Coates, 1997, p. 36).
Professor Coates is knowledgeable
throughout his book in his discussion of the ethics of war. But
the analogy leaps out: If I were an alcoholic, deeply committed to
that substance abuse, I would do all in my power to legitimize my lies
so that the addiction could continue! Just like the Emperor
and the lords of the bedchamber who went on with the procession (or
process addiction8) at all costs.9
So this erudite ethicist, without
evident commitment to an overarching narrative to challenge him, adds
in step with the best of scholastic casuistry:
This is not so
much the violation of a single morality as the application of another
and different morality, according to which the moral permissibility
of any act is determined in the light of its foreseeable consequences
rather than of its intrinsic quality. In this way what is morally
impermissible in one sphere may become morally obligatory in the other
(ibid, p. 36).
This truly is the logic
of all addiction, no less of all state
process addiction. Translated, it means two things:
- The end justifies
the means; - Might makes right.10
Solomon observes more generally:
All a president
has to do is start a war, and these arguments kick in that you can’t
stop it. So it’s a real incentive for a president to lie, to deceive,
to manipulate sufficiently to get the war started. And then they’ve
got a long way to go without any sort of substantive challenge that
says, hey, this war has to end (ibid).
The documentary ends with these
words of Solomon, then of Martin Luther King Jr.:
The independent
journalist I.F. Stone says that all governments lie and nothing they
say should be believed. Now Stone wasn’t conflating all governments,
and he wasn’t saying that governments lie all the time, but he was
saying that we should never trust that something said by a government
is automatically true, especially our own, because we have a responsibility
to go beneath the surface. Because the human costs of war, the consequences
of militaristic policies, what Dr. King called “the madness of militarism,”
they can’t stand the light of day if most people understand the deceptions
that lead to the slaughter, and the human consequences of the carnage.
If we get that into clear focus, we
can change the
course of events in this country. But it’s not going to be easy and
it will require dedication to searching for truth.
MARTIN LUTHER KING:
A time comes when silence is betrayal, and that time has come for us.
…
Even when pressed
by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of
opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. …
And I knew that
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed
in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today, my own government …
A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs
of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. …
Somehow this madness
must cease. We must stop now. …
I speak as one
who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative
in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours (ibid).
King’s words were from a
speech at Riverside Church, New York, entitled “Beyond Vietnam”
April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated,
April 4, 196811.
Humanity’s Most
“Consistent Signature”: Genocide
Jared Diamond wrote in The
Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992)
– and substantiated his conclusion with long lists of evidence –
that the only consistent signature of the human species is genocide.
David Livingston Smith in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature
and the Origins of War (2007) presents humans as biologically
“wired to fight”, and murderous to the core.
He writes: “The history of humanity is, to a very great extent, a
history of violence (ibid, p. 57).”
I will dwell on Smith’s book
for a while.
He begins by writing that “Almost
200 million human beings, mostly civilians, have died in wars over the
last century, and there is no end of slaughter in sight (ibid,
p. xiii).” The 20th century created far more victims
of war than any other.
He indicates in the first chapter
that humanity is the only animal who kills his fellow species
en masse. He claims that “War is not”, as we might think,
“antithetical to civilization, the brotherhood of man, or the great
spiritual and cultural traditions of East and West. It is deeply
and perhaps inextricably bound up with them (ibid, p. 6).”
In 2004 the world spent one
thousand thirty-five billion dollars on the armed forces – $2.8 billion
each day – and less than 8 percent of that amount on aid: about $78.6
billion.
Smith uses the term “democide”
to cover all forms of politically motivated government-sponsored
killing apart from warfare. He adds that “Estimates of the death
toll from twentieth-century democides range from 80,000,000 to 170,000,000
lives (ibid, p. 21).”12
Smith writes:
Later on I will
argue that self-deception is an indispensable element of war,
and that despite the fact that wars are calculated and planned, there
is a sense in which human beings do not know what they are doing
when they cut one another down on the battlefield. A smoke-screen
of self-deception is required to make most human beings capable of such
acts of slaughter (ibid, p. 8, first italics added).
The author, from a secular
viewpoint, uses an arresting turn of phrase: human beings do not
know what they are doing, that takes us directly to Jesus’ words
at the Cross: “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they
are doing… (Luke 23:34).” Gil Baillie comments thus: “The
moment these words were spoken, the delusion [lie] to which they refer
was exposed, and shortly thereafter the paramount power of the delusional
system that produced it was undermined (op.cit., p. 265).”
Baillie quotes Michael Ignatieff’s term of “ ‘divided consciousness’…
that allows one to switch from the part of the brain where direct experience
is both rationally and morally assessed to a ‘different part of the
brain’ where abstract fantasies and foreign policies [lies, pace
Coates] are formed… (ibid, p. 265).” This “different
part of the brain”, argues Smith, is a form of dissociation that in
fact is huge self-deception, when humans kill in war.
Given humanity’s enormous
capacity to kill en masse, to commit genocide and democide, there
is nonetheless a major disinclination within humans to kill. In
the movie Saving Private Ryan, Captain John Miller says: “For
every man I kill, the further I get from home.” Smith comments:
To perform well
in battle without succumbing to malaise, soldiers need a way to blunt
the pain of warfare and overcome their natural horror of killing, while
at the same time preserving or even enhancing their morale and effectiveness.
This sounds like a very tall order, but evolution has endowed us with
just this capacity. For this to happen, the soldier must immerse
himself in a special form of self-deception. Strange as it
may sound, his ability to deceive himself can make the difference between
survival and extermination, victory and defeat (op.cit., p. 160,
italics added).
He quotes retired American
Lieutenant David Grossman, who developed a new science of Killology:
Looking another
human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him,
and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form the single
most basic, important, and potentially traumatic occurrence of war.
If we understand this, then we understand the magnitude of the horror
of killing in combat (Grossman, 1995, p. 181).
In the new James Bond movie
Casino Royale, Bond completes the sentence of the first man he kills,
saying together with his victim something like “The first kill is
the hardest.” Bond in fact earns his “double 0 status”,
his license to kill, by crossing the threshold into killing in cold
blood.
With the advent of aerial bombing
in World War I, modern warfare increasingly mediates self-deception,
since real enemies are simply never seen, except as figures like in
a war video game. Combine this with a quiescent corporate media
that will not broadcast images of humans torn apart by bombings, the
virus of self-deception spreads to an entire nation such as the United
States. This was the great lesson of Vietnam: do not allow images
to be shown of killing or its aftermath. Ever since, the Pentagon
has exercised total censorship – of course, in the interests of “homeland
security”.
Smith makes a compelling case
that species homo sapiens is indeed far and away “the most
dangerous animal”, while simultaneously endowed with a deep aversion
to killing.
If we have been hard-wired
to be self-deceitful through our evolutionary past, or in, as Christians
affirm, the post-resurrection doctrine of original sin13,
neither of which Raymund Schwager (2006) argues need contradict the
other, then it is precisely the preaching of the Cross that contradicts
and deconstructs this profound human self-deception, and points
us to the truth of the Cross that sets us free.
Before continuing on that theme,
I shall cite two scriptures, then delve into the horror of war as seen
through the eyes of Christian journalist Chris Hedges. As you
hear these scriptures and descriptions, please search your hearts for
your own self-deceptions about “Christian lethal violence”, the
Ultimate Oxymoron I suggest, in light of the revelation of the Cross.
This utter contradiction of terms is sustained by self-deceit, namely,
by the rejection of Truth as revealed in the Cross.
Jesus replied:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All
the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matt
22:37-40)
The commandments,
“Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,”
“Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment
there may be, are summed up in this one rule:
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbor.
Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Rom. 13:9 &
10)
War Is A Force That Gives
Us Meaning: Humanity’s “Process Addiction” To Violence14
Process addiction is defined
as: “Addiction to certain mood-altering behaviors, such as eating
disorders, gambling, sexual activity, overwork, and shopping.”
Such addictions are benign in comparison to the Ultimate Process Addiction
of all humanity: violence, in particular lethal violence, to resolve
interpersonal and international conflict arising from intransigent desires.
Again, the Apostle James wrote:
What causes
fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that
battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and
covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You
do not have, because you do not ask God.
When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives,
that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world
is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world
becomes an enemy of God (James 4:1 & 2).
The modern Western state –
Canada, the U.S., all members of NATO – are process addicts,
consequence of which is indescribable mass murder, crime, and environmental
devastation. Yet we clutch the “process bottle” of this addiction
immediately to the chest the moment there is even a hint of taking away
the substance responsible for the addiction; the moment there is breathed
a hint of the only cure for violence: total abstinence; consistent
nonviolence.
Perhaps one of the most poignant
moments in the history of war last century was a letter sent by President
Roosevelt on the very day the Germans began their blitzkrieg
against Poland, to appeal to the nations of the world at least to protect
civilians. On September 1, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
sent an appeal to Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland that
read:
THE
ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centres of
population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in
various quarters of the earth in the past few years, which have resulted
in the maiming and death of thousands of defenseless women and children,
has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.
If
resort is had to this sort of inhuman barbarism during the period
of tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds
of thousands of innocent human beings, who have no responsibility for,
and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which
have broken out, now will lose their lives.
I am
therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every Government, which may
be engaged in hostilities, publicly to affirm its determination that
its armed forces shall in no event and under no circumstances undertake
bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities,
upon the understanding that the same rules of warfare will be scrupulously
observed by all their opponents.
I request
an immediate reply (Roosevelt, 1939, italics added).
The French and British in response
jointly announced that they would spare civilian populations and government
property. The Germans claimed to affirm Roosevelt’s call, but
contradicted that in their attack on Warsaw that same day. By
1945, both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and all other Allied leadership,
had rejected this 1939 appeal utterly. All Western Allies
returned to the bottle of violent process addiction: they recommitted
to massive and increasingly deliberate indiscriminate
deployment of the most advanced and devastating weapons of mass destruction
in their arsenals.
St. Augustine, fifth-century
guardian as it were of the gate to subsequent developments of Western
Christian theology both Catholic and Protestant, envisioned an ideal
state in which the entire army was made up only of Christians: which
in fact became the case under Emperor Theodosius, Constantine’s grandson.
Such an army, he argued, would kill compassionately, with love in the
soldiers’ hearts for the enemy. That is, as they would thrust
spears through the gut, hack off heads and other appendages, shoot arrows
through the heart, and do whatever other horrific acts of lethal violence
to their enemies that weapons of war at that time facilitated, they
would burn with the love of the Lord for their (soon-to-be) fallen enemies.
Augustine countenanced war
waged in the spirit of love. One commentator remarks on this revealingly,
in light of the thesis that war is always about self-deceit and deception:
At the same time,
if war is waged in the spirit of love, no particular course of action
is ruled out for Augustine. Ruses and ambushes, for example, may
be appropriate. The only “act” that Augustine appears to have
denied altogether to loving in war is one that is intimately connected
with one’s inward disposition: lying (Stevenson, 1987, p. 109,
italics added).
Yet lying is of the
essence in all state warfare. It is the entry ethic as it were
in all warfare, after which follows, since World War I, the cold-blooded
morality of mass murder, civilians as indiscriminately as soldiers.
Concerning one’s “inward
disposition”:
War and its consequent
physical death and injury may result from right love for Augustine,
because love is primarily a matter of inward disposition, not one’s
outward action… However, the true moral content of the specific action
always resides in the inward disposition, the motivation, of the one
who acts. Hence, objectively speaking, anything is permitted as
long as it results from an attitude of right love (ibid, p.105)
A scholar on just war theory
wrote:
St. Augustine,
a major contributor to the just war tradition, argued that, despite
the horror of war and the pain and suffering that soldiers inflict on
one another, war can be fought without violating the law of charity:
to fight without hatred and with compassion is a basic moral imperative15.
According to realism, however, the imperatives of combat are altogether
different. In the first place, military training, or the preparation
for combat, is designed to generate in the soldier feelings, dispositions,
states of mind that undermine any moral capacity or inclination to fight
“justly” or “compassionately”, let alone “lovingly”.
The military trainee is to be divested of his civilian and pacific responses
and turned into an efficient “killing machine”. Not only is
he to be taught how to kill, but the ardent desire to kill is to be
implanted in him. In this way behaviour and attitudes that in
peacetime would be regarded as beyond the pale become in war the moral
or professional norm. As Field Marshall Montgomery advised: “The
troops must be brought to a state of wild enthusiasm before the operation
begins… They must enter the fight with the light of battle in
their eyes and definitely wanting to kill the enemy” (Montgomery,
[B. L. (1958), Memoirs, Collins, London], pp. 88 – 9) (Coates,
1997, p. 29).
Retired U.S. Lt. Colonel David
Grossman, founder as mentioned of the science of Killology, indicates
that no institution pays more attention to dehumanization of its recruits
than the military:
Brutalization,
or “values inculcation,” is what happens at boot camp. Your head
is shaved, you are herded together naked, and dressed alike, losing
all vestiges of individuality. You are trained relentlessly in a total
immersion environment. In the end you embrace violence and discipline
and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal
new world (Grossman, 2000, p. 1)16.
He says again:
This brutalization
is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept
a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as
a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept
it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world
(Grossman, 1999, p. 1).
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Chris Hedges, a Harvard Divinity School graduate, gives an explanation
for war in the very title of a recent book: War is a Force
That Gives Us Meaning (2003).
He has also written What Every Person Should Know About War
(2003) and American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on
America (2006), amongst others.
He writes:
I learned early
on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and
often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years.
It is peddled by mythmakers-historians, war correspondents, filmmakers,
novelists, and the state-all of whom endow it with qualities it often
does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our
small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has
a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory,
corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which
becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental
questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the
planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest
depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the
surface within all of us. And this is why for many war is so hard to
discuss once it is over.
The enduring attraction
of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us
what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason
for living (Hedges, 2003, War…, p. 3).
World War II U. S. Marine and
War Correspondent, Edgar Jones wrote:
WE
Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking
to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider
ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently
in a better position to decide what is right and wrong in the world.
What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners
in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated
enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into
a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy
skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones
into letter openers. We topped off our saturation bombing and burning
of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless
cities, thereby setting an alltime record for instantaneous mass slaughter.
As
victors we are privileged to try our defeated opponents for their crimes
against humanity; but we should be realistic enough to appreciate that
if we were on trial for breaking international laws, we should be found
guilty on a dozen counts. We fought a dishonorable war, because morality
had a low priority in battle. The tougher the fighting, the less room
for decency; and in Pacific contests we saw mankind reach the blackest
depths of bestiality.
Not every American
soldier, or even one per cent of our troops, deliberately committed
unwarranted atrocities, and the same might be said for the Germans and
Japanese. The exigencies of war necessitated many so-called crimes,
and the bulk of the rest could be blamed on the mental distortion which
war produced. But we publicized every inhuman act of our opponents and
censored any recognition of our own moral frailty in moments of desperation.
(Jones, 1946,
p. 4)
In a New York Times
article, former presidential hopeful John Kerry, also a Vietnam War
veteran, delivered an impassioned speech to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in April 1971:
American troops
in Vietnam, he said, had “raped, cut off heads, taped wires from portable
telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs,
blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion
reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned
food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in
addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular
ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Mr. Kerry’s account
came from his own experience, as well as from a three-day conference
of the fledgling Vietnam Veterans Against the War. At the conference,
he said, “over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated
veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated
incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness
of officers at all levels of command.”
A transcript of
that meeting makes for hair-raising reading. The returned troops told
of the slaughter of civilians; “reconnaissance by fire,” or soldiers
shooting blindly; “harassment and interdiction fire,” with artillery
being used to shell villages; captives thrown from helicopters; severed
ears drying in the sun or being swapped for beers; and “Zippo inspections”
of cigarette lighters in preparation for burning villages. (Kifner,
2003, pp. 2 & 3)
The Toledo Blade won
a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of Vietnam War atrocities. The
report, published in October 2003 and titled “Rogue G.I.’s Unleashed
Wave of Terror in Central Highlands,” “said that in 1967, an elite
unit [known as Tiger Force], a reconnaissance platoon in the 101st Airborne
Division, went on a rampage that the newspaper described as ‘the longest
series of atrocities in the Vietnam War’ (ibid, p. 1).”
The New York Times
discovered that it was in fact nothing of the sort. Rather, routine
orders were issued throughout the Vietnam War by top military leaders
all down the line, that eventuated in hundreds of such atrocities throughout
the War. The newspaper continues its report:
While [former Tiger
Force members] became deeply troubled after they returned from Vietnam,
Mr. Doyle, a sergeant who was a section leader in the unit, seemed unrepentant
in a long, profanity-laced telephone conversation.
“I’ve seen
atrocities in Vietnam that make Tiger Force look like Sunday school,”
said Mr. Doyle, who joined the Army at 17 when a judge gave him, a young
street gang leader, a chance to escape punishment.
“If you’re
walking down a jungle trail, those that hesitate die,” said Mr. Doyle,
who lives in Missouri. “Everybody I killed, I killed to survive. They
make Tiger Force out to be an atrocity. Well, that’s almost a compliment.
Because nobody will understand the evil I’ve seen.”
The American public
was shocked in November 1969 when the reporter Seymour M. Hersh broke
the news of the My Lai massacre…
“My Lai was a
shock to everyone except people in Vietnam,” recalled Kevin Buckley,
who covered the war for Newsweek from 1968 to 1972 and reported
on an operation called Speedy Express, in which nearly 11,000 were killed
but only 748 weapons were recovered.
At his court-martial
in the My Lai massacre, Lt. William L.Calley Jr., the only person convicted
in the case, said: “I felt then – and I still do – that I acted as
directed, I carried out my orders, and I did not feel wrong in doing
so.” He was paroled in 1975 after serving three and a half years under
house arrest.
…
David H. Hackworth,
a retired colonel and much-decorated veteran of the conflicts in Korea
and Vietnam who later became a journalist and author, said that he created
the Tiger Force unit in 1965 to fight guerrillas using guerrilla tactics.
Mr. Hackworth was not in command of the unit during the period covered
by the Blade articles because he had rotated out of Vietnam.
“Vietnam was
an atrocity from the get-go,” Mr. Hackworth said in a recent telephone
interview. “It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great frustration.
There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers
of bodies you counted (Kifner, op.cit., 2003).”
Numerous accounts of atrocities
from the Abu Grahib prison, the downfall of Fallujah, and routine horror
committed by Allied troops are readily available in the current “War
on Terror”. One is The Deserter’s Tale (2007) by Joshua
Key, who sought asylum in Canada.17 Would one expect differently?
Covenant of Peace: The New
Testament and “Violence in Defense of Justice”
Two years ago, noted Mennonite
theologian Willard Swartley published his magnum opus – his
great work of a lifetime: Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in
New Testament Theology and Ethics (2006). It is a meticulous
work of New Testament scholarship.
Swartley asks how is it that
major volumes on NT or Pauline theology would have only one or two references
to peace, even though that word and associated motifs are throughout
– over one hundred times in NT literature, and in every NT book except
I John. Twenty-five major works of theology and ethics over the
last half-century are listed in Appendix I. In only two do peace
and peacemaking shape the material; in all others it is neglected or
even missing.
At the end of his last chapter,
Swartley quotes Richard Hays at length, commenting: “I affirm Hays’s
nonviolence manifesto and call for the complement of positive peacemaking
teaching and action as revealed to us by NT Scripture (Swartley, 2006,
p. 429).” Hays wrote in part:
One reason that
the world finds the New Testament’s message of peaceaking and love
of enemies incredible is that the church is so massively faithless…
Only when the church renounces the way of violence, will people see
what the Gospel means… The meaning of the New Testament’s
teaching on violence will become evident only in communities of Jesus’
followers who embody the costly way of peace (Hays, 1996, p. 429).
This quote is from Hays’
likewise masterful study, The Moral Vision of the New Testament,
Chapter Seven, entitled: “Violence in Defense of Justice”.
Hay’s review of Swartley’s
book states:
Swartley
describes the book as a study of a single neglected theme in scripture
and offers it as “a companion volume to texts in New Testament theology
and ethics.” But this volume is something much more. Not just an overgrown
dictionary article on eirene [peace] in the New Testament, it
is nothing less than a comprehensive theology of the New Testament presenting
peace as the heart of the gospel message and the ground of the New Testament’s
unity (Hays, 2007).
He adds:
Swartley
makes a strong case that previous studies of New Testament theology
and ethics have neglected or underestimated the pervasiveness of the
theme of peace—including this reviewer’s own work, The Moral
Vision of the New Testament, which takes nonviolence as a central
motif in the New Testament. Swartley’s point is an important one:
avoidance of violence is not the same thing as proactive peacemaking.
It is the latter imperative that Swartley finds throughout the pages
of scripture (ibid, italics added).
“How Could a Public Execution
Have Liberated the Human Race?”:
Stricken By God?18
Gil Baillie writes:
Both Christianity’s
scriptural sources and its creedal formulae pivot around a public execution,
an act of official violence regarded as legally righteous by the political
authorities and as a sacred duty by the religionists. This simple and
obvious fact is the most overlooked aspect of the colossal historical
phenomenon we call Christianity. The Christian Scriptures and creeds
make the outlandish assertion that because of this public execution
the grip of sin has been broken, the human race has been offered a new
lease on life and, at the same time, placed in grave peril if it refuses
the offer. The Christian movement has pondered these weighty claims
for two millennia with mixed results. How could a public execution have
liberated the human race? Why was a public execution the necessary form
that this liberation had to take? In answering this question, Christian
doctrine has sometimes turned itself inside out. The most familiar form
of the atonement doctrine, for instance, supposes that a wrathful God
demanded that a victim pay in blood for human sin––like the animals
that died in the atonement sacrifices at the Jewish Temple––and
that God chose to take a human form and pay for the sin “Himself.”
It is an understandable doctrine, given the religious and cultic backdrop
against which early Christian thought was first forming. But the doctrine
is not only logically incoherent; it is morally and theologically inadequate
as well (Baillie, op.cit., p. 37).”
About two years ago, Pastor
Brad Jersak of Fresh Wind Community Church in Abbotsford, British Columbia
invited me to lunch. We discussed an idea he and Professor Ron
Dart had already tossed around on a local mountain hike: to do an anthology
on the atonement from a nonviolent/peacemaking perspective. The
book’s title is: Stricken By God?: Nonviolent Identification and
the Victory of Christ (Jersak, 2007).
Within two weeks of the book’s
appearance, William Eerdmans of Wm Eerdmans Publishing phoned Brad for
permission to issue the book as well. Within six weeks, that publisher
had the book in the stores. With internationally known writers
as Archbishop Rowan Williams, CFD Moule, NT Wright, Marcus Borg, Miroslav
Volf, Richard Rohr, and writers from across the breadth of the ecumenical
spectrum, the publication of twenty essays, two of which are introductory,
besides a Foreword from Willard Swartley, has created a lot of interest.
Co-editor Brad Jersak writes
of the overall message of the twenty essays in the publication: “Sacrificial,
co-suffering love truly is a more powerful force [than violence].
The Cross was not God’s violent solution to sin––it was an act
of love in which God destroyed the power of violence by refusing to
be drawn into it (ibid, p. 53).”
Co-editor Michael Hardin writes:
The most current
defense of a sacrificial theory of atonement belongs to Hans Boersma
whose 2004 publication Violence, Hospitality and the
Cross brought to the fore many of the problems when discussing violence
in relation to God. Many authors in this volume respectfully engage
Boersma but demur from his conclusions… If this book seems overly
preoccupied with Boersma, it is because he has set the problem of a
sacrificial theory of the atonement clearly before us and it cannot
be ignored. We look forward to further conversations with Dr. Boersma
(Jersak and Hardin, op.cit., p. 15).
Dr. Boersma writes in that
publication:
This [the Reformed
tradition] comes to the fore in my re-evaluation of violence as something
that is not inherently negative; in my insistence that boundaries can
function in wholesome ways and need at times to be defended; as well
as in my argument that restorative justice can only function if we are
willing to include the notion of punishment (ibid, p. 10).
Boersma asserts: “The limitation
of Eucharistic hospitality to those who are baptised indicates again
that the Church has boundaries that the Church’s hospitality cannot
be absolute if the Church wants to remain the Church (ibid, footnote
37, p. 220).” True, as far as it goes. And one must rejoin:
Nor can its violence (in warfare or criminal justice) be absolute/terminal.
While the Church practises discerning discipline, it is ever restorative
in intent, this side of the Age to Come. This can be seen in Jesus’
parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13; his teaching about
conflict resolution in Matthew 18; Paul’s call for restoration in
Galatians 6, etc. Boersma himself writes correctly: “Confession
and penance… constitute one of the ways in which the Church safeguards
and protects its character as a hospitable community (ibid, p.
228).” Vengeance is God’s purview, which in itself is God’s
wrath in an agony of restorative covenant love (Romans 12:19 and context;
compare the book of Hosea, especially 11:8)19. The
Church is tasked to offer endless invitation to the sinner, carry out
incessant evangelism.
I conclude with three considerations.
First, the author affirms
a sophisticated realpolitik and ahistorical eschatological consummation
that says we cannot escape, this side of the eschaton, violence
endemic to the human condition. This is patently and painfully
true. But to say we must therefore embrace “boundary violence”,
whether directed and blessed by the Church as in past centuries, or
endorsed by the Church today for the state to perform in war and penal
justice, is another matter. We may attempt as far as we can to
deny the state such power. We may refuse to participate directly
in endorsing or performing its violence. We may, in other words
follow the Pauline admonition: “If it is possible, as far as it depends
on you, live at peace with everyone (Rom 12:18).” And again,
we may commit to “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with
good (Rom 12:21).”
Concrete examples of alternative
responses to crime are found in Restorative Justice literature worldwide20.
There is also the compelling story of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
headed up by Archbishop Desmond Tutu21. I write this
despite the pessimism of political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain, who
says:
The value of this
approach in dealing with not just one state’s internal efforts to
build constitutional order but with relations between states is untested;
political restorative justice seems likely, however, to fall prey to
the classic dilemmas of international politics (Elshtain, 2003, p. 130).22
As to international politics:
see any of the following books for challenge to Boersma and Elshtain:
- Duane Friesen
Christian Peacemaking and International Conflict: A Realist Pacifist
Perspective, Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1986; - Vern Neufeld Redekop
From Violence to Blessing: How an Understanding of Deep-Rooted Conflict
Can Open Paths to Reconciliation, Ottawa: Novalis, 2002; - Donald W. Shriver,
An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, Oxford/New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995; - Glen Stassen,
Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace,
Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992; - Glen Stassen, Editor,
Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War, Cleveland, Ohio:
The Pilgrim Press.1998.
Second, and related,
though Dr. Boersma is a very gifted scholar and theologian, in the end,
in particular in his treatment of violence, he seems to simply float
above the ground of historical reality. Ironically, his book is
impervious to the realpolitik
of invariably vast numbers of “innocent” victims of state violence
in executions and warfare, as already discussed. If one understands
Jesus as the Ultimate Innocent Victim who was sacrificed once for all
so that all ever after, no matter their actual sin and guilt, could
be declared just, then the circle of God’s embrace this side of the
eschaton is without boundary at all. And one has inklings
that it just might be that way in the Age to Come, unless there is obstinate
refusal, itself the defining boundary. In this case God’s rejection
is actually not a violence but an endorsement of choice.
God “gave them over” in the chilling words of Romans 1:24.
C. S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce:
There are only
two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be
done,” and those to whom God says in the end, “Thy will be done.”
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there
could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires
joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock
it is opened (Lewis, (1946), pp.66 & 67).
C.F.D. Moule, upon a close
reading of the New Testament witness, writes:
If God has willed
the dire consequences that ensue on sin, it does not necessarily follow
that he has willed them retributively, punitively. It may be that
he has willed them as the only way of doing justice to the freedom and
responsibility of the human personality, as he has created it (Moule, 2007, p.
256).
Walter Wink in his fascinating
study Engaging the Powers (1992), beginning on page 244 presents
a select list of politically impactful nonviolent interventions.
He cites Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action
(1973) and other publications as examples. James William McClendon
Jr.’s Ethics (1986) adduces three biographies of Christians
attempting to live out this ethic faithfully. Co-authors Nancey
Murphy and Geroge F.R. Ellis present a strong case for an applied ethic
of non-violence in On the Moral Nature of the Universe
(1996). They argue “from below” in the social sciences, and
“from above” theologically, for a “kenotic ethic” that centres
on self-sacrifice and non-violence. When asked why so few Christians
align with this kenotic nonviolent “grain of the universe”23,
Ellis responded simply: “It is just too hard.”
Finally, Dr. Boersma
does not mention or discuss The War on Terrorism and the Terror of
God (Griffith, 2002). The book stands in striking counterpoint
to Boersma’s thesis on violence.
Griffith opened his first book
with the memorable challenge: “The gospel is profoundly scandalous,
and until we hear at least a whisper of its scandal, we risk not hearing
any part of it (Griffith, 1993, p. 1)”. He lays out the contours
of this scandalous offence
in his second book with reference to violence and war. He too
confronts us with our profound addictions to lies and violence as presented
in this talk, lies and violence fundamentally opposed to the Truth of
the Cross, the Truth that sets us free.
Griffith further decries co-opting
God to the service of carnage, and to One “who intervenes in history
through warfare rather than… through resurrection and the renunciation
of death (Griffith, op.cit., p. xii).” In “testing
out God’s perfect will”, Griffith states: “Violence is inevitably
a renunciation rather than an affirmation of the will and freedom of
God (ibid, p. xiii).” “All
violence is an attack upon community. All
violence by Christians is also an attack upon the memory of Jesus (ibid,
p. 48).”, Griffith contends in Section II. Likewise, Griffith
asserts:
Violence is a form
of proselytism which preaches that there is no God. The preachments
of violence are more effective than televangelists, more zealous in
winning converts than those who sell religion door to door. As
we wait for God, terror surrounds us with a message offered as holy
writ: “God is not.” (ibid, p. 68).
Griffith quotes Abraham Heschel
that humanity’s greatest problem is not that of evil but of our relationship
to God. And in that relationship, the “enemy” is the gatekeeper:
Though it is maddening,
what I owe to God is intertwined with what I owe to my enemy.
And the hope too is intertwined. Hope is not possible for me unless
it is also possible for the most demonic of my adversaries (ibid,
p. 125).
Walter Wink similarly asserts
that Jesus’ teaching is clear: If we do not find God in the enemy,
we have not found God at all. The litmus test for love of God
is love of neighbour. The litmus test for love of neighbour is
love of enemy. Fail to love the enemy creates a dominoes effect
in similar response to neighbour and God.
Near the end of the book, Griffith
asks:
What would this
mean if it were true that we love God only as much as the person we
love least? Would it not mean that, when we have finally won the
victory in our war on terrorism, when we have finally managed to exterminate
all the thugs and Hitlers and terrorists, we will have expressed nothing
so much as our total confidence in the death of God? (ibid, p.
263)
This is the heart of Griffith’s
sustained thesis that “the biblical concept of ‘the terror of God’
stands as a renunciation of all violence – and of death itself (inside
front jacket cover).” He says at the end: “In effect, the
resurrection is God’s war on the terrorism of both guerrilla bands
and nation states (ibid, p. 269).
Conclusion:
How Should We Then Live?
The short answer to this question
is in the already quoted scripture: “Be imitators of God, therefore,
as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering
and sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:1 & 2).” This is the
succinct biblical ethical summation of consequence of the atonement.
Glen Stassen and David Gushee
published Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context
in 2003.
The authors challenge all forms
of ethical dualism arising from Plato. They write:
It is this incipient
Platonic dualism, combined with the desire to please the powers and
authorities of this world – whether they be political rulers, concentrations
of wealth, racist power structures, or habits, customs and self-interested
practices – that creates in subsequent church history the devilish
dualism in which whole swaths of life are moved out from under God’s
authority and placed under the authorities of the world (Stassen and
Gushee, 2003, p. 129).
Point Seven of “The Pattern
Continues Throughout the Sermon” concludes:
It shows that Jesus’
teachings engage us in transforming initiatives that par-ticipate in
the reign of God, the presence of the gracious God who acts in Jesus-who
reconciles us with enemies, who is present with us in secret, who is
faithful and trustworthy, and who brings deliverance from the vicious
cycles that cause violations of the traditional righteousness. The second
member [of a chart, p. 142, on the triadic structure of the Sermon on
the Mount] consistently names vicious cycles; the Sermon is by no means
based on an idealistic assumption that we do not get stuck in vicious
cycles of sin. And the third member points the way of deliverance in
the midst of this real world of sin. This corrects the idealism that
sought to hallow Jesus’ teachings by making them simply calls for
hard, strenuous, even impossible human effort. Instead it suggests a
hermeneutic (a way of interpretation) of grace-based, active participation
in eschatological deliverance that begins now. The split between attitudes
and actions, in which Jesus allegedly emphasized intentions and not
actual practices, falls away. Legalism falls away too; Jesus is pointing
to participation in the grace of the deliverance that characterizes
the inbreaking of the reign of God. Jesus is indeed the prophetic Messiah
who proclaims the inbreaking reign of God and points to specific ways
of participation in the kingdom (ibid, p. 143).
As I said at the outset, I
propose a very simple thesis: Violence is The Ultimate Lie, and the
Final Contradiction of Truth. The
Cross is the Ultimate Truth, and the
Final Contradiction of Violence.
In a chapter of I See Satan
Fall Like Lightning entitled “The Triumph of the Cross”, René
Girard argues that the Cross enables the truth to triumph. He
quotes Colossians 2:14-15 thus:
[Christ has]
cancelled the accusation that stands against us with its legal claims.
He set it aside, nailing it to the
cross. He thus disarmed the principalities and powers and made
a public spectacle of them, drawing them along in his triumph (quoted
in Girard, op.cit., 2001, p. 137).
The “accusation”, according
to Girard, is collective violence against a victim, no matter what the
justification: War on Terror, legal state execution, any form of nonrestorative
retributive punishment, etc. The accusation is the Grand Lie that
leads to a scapegoating victim mechanism24 that authorizes
violence against another. This is in direct contradiction to the
Truth of the Cross – a truth that sets the individual, the “interdividual”25,
and all of human culture free!
Girard writes:
The Cross enables
the truth to triumph because the Gospels disclose the falseness of the
accusation; they unmask Satan as an imposter. Or to say it another
way, they discredit once and for all the untruth of the principalities
in the wake of the Cross. The Cross of Christ restores all the
victims of the single victim mechanism, whether it goes under the label
of legal accusation26, Satan, or principalities and powers
(ibid, p. 138).
Or, to say it yet another way,
the Cross discredits all resort to violence – by legally constituted
state government as much as by the individual criminal or “organized
crime” – an apt description of many (most? all?) states in the history
of the world27.
Girard argues that to understand
the Cross as “God’s weakness” (I Corinthians 1) that subverts
all Untruth, all Lies, is to understand the Cross as supreme source
of all knowledge – about the world, humans, and God. This is
not anti-intellectualism, rather the Ultimate “Science” (Knowledge),
so that humanity can know its violent origins, and potentially be set
free from all violence.
This is why all theories of
atonement that turn on violence in God’s response to sin, especially
the original sin of violence, are, in Girard’s understanding, mythological:
they promote and authorize the perpetuation of humanity’s
violence, rather than prevent
and cure it. The most violent of these are likewise the
most dominant in Western theology: satisfaction
and penal substitution theories. Even Hans Boersma’s
embrace of the recapitulation theory of the atonement as propounded
by Church Father Irenaeus retains legitimized violence “at the boundaries”;
it still embraces a dynamic of “satisfaction” and “penal substitution”.
Girard writes:
Medieval and modern
theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes
of the Crucifixion: God’s honor, God’s justice, even God’s anger,
must be satisfied. These theories don’t succeed because they
don’t seriously look in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful
humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing
as Satan (ibid, p. 150).
Andrew Klager (2007) challenges
Boersma’s reading of Irenaeus as inadequate and claims that personal
and sociopolitical nonviolence are central to his recapitulation
theory. Otherwise,
Essentially, if
Irenaeus were to anachronistically submit to the claims of penal substitutionary
atonement, the rescuing model would include God violently killing his
own nonviolent self in an effort to demonstrate the importance of nonviolence
to the humanity he wishes to redeem – through violence (Klager, 2007,
pp. 445 & 446).
Boersma on the other hand,
as earlier mentioned, wants to retain violent punishment towards criminals
and state enemies. Klager comments in footnote 206:
… Boersma’s
endorsement of penal or juridical measures to restore peace fails to
account for the subsistence of violence, or the Cain instinct.
Instead of redeeming or transforming violence into the pursuit of
shalom, Boersma seems content to allow the Church to participate
in punitive, and therefore retributive, actions that create a winning
and a losing side, the former of which invites violent imitation based
on its success, which of course creates a proportionate number of losing
sides (ibid, p. 476).
He also says in the main text
that gave rise to the footnote:
Regrettably, Boersma’s
vindication of penal functionality obscures the restorative characteristics
inherent in Christ’s identification with
humanity, but also for the Cain instinct redeemed through the
alternative Abel nonviolent resolve… Irenaeus’ emphasis on
Christ’s nonviolence demonstrates his propensity for restorative justice
in opposition to penal impetuousness. Christ’s two primary initiatives,
that of instruction and empowerment, implies an invitation to reclaim
the divine, and an invitation to nonviolence. It also insinuates
the requirement that the Church be
the Church first and foremost, which includes uncompromising nonviolence,
while allowing the rest of humanity to be
the same (ibid, p. 476).
He concludes his essay thus:
Irenaeus, therefore,
understands the atonement for humanity’s apostasy to consist of restoration
rather than penal retribution. Atonement is humanity’s comprehensive
identification with Christ whose objective is the reinstatement of
shalom, and this through his own identification with humanity by
means of incarnational instruction, nonviolent obedience and victory
over death (ibid, p. 480).
Violence is The
Ultimate Lie, and the Ultimate Contradiction of Truth. The
Cross is The Ultimate Truth, and The Ultimate Contradiction of Violence.
The Cross and Peace stand in
complete solidarity. There is no Cross without Peace. There
is no ultimate Peace without the Cross. It is not only a great
irony of history that the Cross became symbol of legitimized, redemptive
violence. It is tragic inversion of the Gospel. “For
the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…
For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness
of God is stronger than man’s strength (1 Corinthians 1:18 &
25).” Amen.
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