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Introduction
“Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the
modern world (Wink, 1992, p. 13).”, writes one contemporary cultural
observer and New Testament theologian, Walter Wink. More than any
religious spirituality, including Christian, violence is the cultural
air we breathe. This past century has seen more people slaughtered than
all previous centuries combined – 107 millions in wars and regional
conflicts by the mid-90’s. And Christians have led, blessed, and
participated in the vast majority of this killing, and continue to do
so into the third millennium.
Yet
this massive slaughter has been carried on in a world ostensibly
dominantly under the sway of Christian spirituality. Is it therefore to
be concluded that a Christian worldview and praxis lead ineluctably to
an ultimate bloodthirsty spirituality, and therefore the sooner
eradicated from the human cultural landscape, the better? Or is there
“something rotten in the state of Denmark?” – in the worldwide
expression of Christianity that is profoundly aberrant from the way and
teachings of its Founder? That is the thesis of brilliant 19th century
Danish theologian and social theorist Søren Kierkegaard, founder of
existentialism. He wrote: “My position is that the whole prevailing
official proclamation of Christianity is a conspiracy against the Bible
– we suppress what does not suit us (quoted in Bellinger, 2001, p. 98).”
There is doubtless a mixed group here tonight in terms of faith
background and commitment. I shall nonetheless unapologetically spend a
significant part of tonight’s presentation on Western understandings of
violence and peacemaking with reference to Christianity.
The defining religious ethos of Western spirituality historically has
been Christianity. Christianity has also been the reigning ideology in
the West until into the nineteenth century. While it is salutary to
discuss other world spiritualities with reference to violence and
peacemaking, no other religion or spirituality has remotely impacted
the formation of the West like Christianity.
While one cannot wish away the past, can it be too much to hope that
the twenty-first century for Christian spirituality world-wide will be
marked by a profound renewed impulse towards peacemaking? Such a
world-transforming spirituality has never been more needed! It is the
contention of this paper that the Christian story offers a dramatically
alternative narrative to that of resort to violence, seen unfortunately
so predominantly in Christianity’s long history. I will argue that the
story the Christian faith tells is eternal wellspring for the
spirituality of nonviolence, however massively unfaithful Christian
adherents have been to the plot-line down through the ages (1). I shall
return to the issue below of the “massive faithlessness” of the church.
Pre-Christian Origin of Contemporary Ethos of Violence
Walter Wink traces Western history’s central ethos of violence to the
Babylonian creation myth in existence well over a thousand years before
Christ. Creation is seen in Babylonian religion as a fundamentally
formative an act of violence.
“The creation myth, Enuma Elish, tells the story of Apsu (the male,
primeval sweet water ocean) and Tiamat (the female, primeval salt water
ocean). From the commingling of the two waters came divine offspring,
who in turn gave birth to more generations of gods. The young gods,
however, disturbed the peace of Tiamat and Apsu, who decided to destroy
the younger generation of gods. Apsu was killed before he could carry
out his evil plans. Tiamat, enraged, planned evil against her offspring
to avenge Apsu. The young gods then asked the young upstart, Marduk, to
lead them in battle. Marduk agreed, defeated Tiamat’s forces and sliced
her carcass in two, creating from the one half the firmament of heaven
and from the other half the foundation of the earth. Thus, Marduk
created order out of the chaos of the waters. With the cosmos now in
place, the gods started to complain to Marduk that they had too much
work to do in the newly created universe. Marduk, therefore, created
humans to do the work. He created the first human beings out of the
blood of Tiamat’s second husband and captain of her army, Kingu.
“This story shows that in the Babylonian worldview there was no
absolute preference for good over evil. ‘Evil’ is already planned by
Apsu and Tiamat before the universe has come into being (I.52; II.3).
It is a normal part of the universe, not a later, alien intrusion into
a fundamentally good world. Power is the ultimate morality. It is only
‘by violence that the youngest of the gods establishes order (Ricoeur,
1969, p. 179).’ Moreover, the violence among the gods in turn justifies
human violence. The Babylonian king receives his authority from the
gods. Paul Ricoeur, in his analysis of the Babylonian creation myth,
makes the point that the king represents the god who in violence has
overcome chaos. This means that the king’s enemy represents the forces
of evil, the resurgence of chaos (Ricoeur 1969, p. 196). ‘Heavenly
events are mirrored by earthly events, and what happens above happens
below’ (Wink, 1992, p. 15). Polytheism here does not offer a solution
to violence; rather, it covers the origin and life of both gods and
humans with the blood of violence (Boersma, 1999).”
Creation is a violent victory over an enemy older than creation. Evil
is prior to good. Violence is in the godhead itself. Humanity is
created out of bloody violence, and hence humans are seen to be violent
to the very core.
“The distinctive feature of the myth,” explains Walter Wink, “is the
victory of order over chaos by means of violence. This myth is the
original religion of the status quo, the first articulation of ‘might
makes right’.” He continues: “Peace through war, security through
strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient
historical religion (Wink, 1992, pp. 16 & 17).”
With rare exceptions, this myth permeates contemporary culture the
world over. This “religion” is at the heart of Western culture, in
particular North American society, like no other rival such as Judaism
or Christianity. It is pervasive in children’s comics and cartoon
shows. “In a period when Christian Sunday schools are dwindling, the
myth of redemptive violence has won children’s voluntary acquiescence
to a regimen of religious indoctrination more exhaustive and effective
than any in the history of religions. Estimates vary widely, but the
average child is reported to log roughly thirty-six thousand hours of
television by age eighteen, including some fifteen thousand murders. In
prime-time evening shows, our children are served up about sixteen
entertaining acts of violence (two of them lethal) every night; on the
weekend the number of violent acts almost doubles (thirty). By age
sixteen, the average child spends as much time watching television as
in school (Wink, 1992, p. 23).” On my wall at work used to be a poster
which read: “If ‘prison is a school for crime’, is television its
kindergarten?”
Christian Origin and History of Contemporary Christian Ethos of Violence
There is no question that Emperor Constantine, who first legalized
Christian worship in the early fourth century, also caused the Church
to embrace for the first time an ethic of state violence which
Christians have largely endorsed ever since.
This began particularly to emerge after the “Papal Revolution” of the
11th century. In this century, Saint Anselm of Canterbury wrote a
famous treatise, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), on the atonement.
The “atonement” is about the effect of Christ’s death on the cross.
There have been four discernible views of the atonement in the history
of the church, of which the second chronologically, the “satisfaction
theory”, has been the most dominant in Western history since the 11th
century. “The second group of theories may be said to have originated
with Anselm, who saw sin as dishonor to the majesty of God. On the
cross the God-man rendered satisfaction for this dishonor. Along
similar lines the Reformers thought that Christ paid the penalty
sinners incurred when they broke God’s law (Morris, “Atonement”, p.
83).”
Without elaboration, Anselm’s theory created a cultural “structure of
affect” (2) that understood God’s justice in primarily violent terms:
God clearly demanded blood satisfaction for wrongs against him, like
feudal lords did in the society of the time. It was and is consequently
not a big step for Christians who believe the satisfaction theory of
the atonement to employ violence in the pursuit of justice. This
pursuit has dominated Western Christendom ever since.
1. A Short History of Christian Violence (3)
a. As Christianity expanded in the Roman Empire during its first three
centuries it met with significant resistance from the governmental
authorities, which often took the form of direct persecutions resulting
in Christian martyrdoms. During this period, Christians were, generally
speaking, the recipients of violence rather than perpetrators. After
Christianity became a tolerated and then an official religion, however,
it became much more common for violent acts to be carried out by
Christians.
b. A notable example is the execution of Priscillian, a Spanish
ascetic. His enemies in the Spanish church lobbied the Emperor Maximus,
and succeeded in obtaining his condemnation for heresy. Priscillian and
one of his followers, the noblewoman Eucrotia, were beheaded in 384.
This was the first case in which heretics had been formally tried,
convicted, and executed through the cooperation of church and state,
foreshadowing the extensive powers of the Medieval Inquisition (Dowley,
1995, 150-151).
c. In the year 390, the people of Thessalonica murdered the military
commander of the city. The Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered a
massacre of the city’s inhabitants, which resulted in more than 7,000
deaths. Under pressure of excommunication, exerted by Ambrose,
Theodosius publicly repented of his sin (Dowley, 1995, p. 151).
d. The Crusades were a series of military expeditions organized by
Western European Christians, during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, in an effort to recover the Holy Land from the Muslim
“infidels.” The first Crusade was very successful militarily, achieving
several victories over the “Turks” as the Western armies advanced
toward Jerusalem. On July 1, 1097, one of the main Muslim armies was
defeated and almost completely decimated by the Crusaders. Two years
later the Crusaders reached Jerusalem and captured it after a
relatively brief siege. In the course of taking the city they massacred
most of the inhabitants—men, women, and children. Jerusalem was
described by observers as being “awash in a sea of blood.” The
Crusaders saw their actions as being an expression of God’s righteous
judgment on the Muslim “infidels” who deserved to die for their
rejection of Christ and their “desecration” of the Holy City. Various
subsequent Crusades were carried out during the next two centuries,
most resulting in military failure or short-lived Latin kingdoms in the
East. The net result of the Crusades was to further separate the
Eastern and Western branches of Christianity from each other and to
ensure the alienation of the Muslim world from Christianity—an
alienation which to a large extent has continued up to the present day
(Dowley, 1995, pp. 278 – 279).
Between 1209 and 1229 a Crusade was organized against the Albigensian
heretics in southern France. Because a significant portion of the
nobility of that region had sided with the Albigensians, the fighting
was long and drawn-out, resulting in tremendous loss of life. The Roman
Catholic bishop of the city of Bézier, when asked by the besieging
soldiers how to tell the heretics from the orthodox, is reported to
have said: “Kill them all, God will sort them out.”
e. The Inquisition was the internal European institution which
corresponded to the external Crusades. Its main function was to
identify and punish the “infidels” within the Western world who were
perceived as a threat to society. The Inquisition was organized in the
first half of the thirteenth century, largely in response to the
Albigensian heresy in France, but its power was soon extended into many
areas of Europe. Typically, the Inquisitors would enter a city and
establish a court. They would summon all heretics to come forward and
confess their heresy. Those who did so were treated with relative
leniency. Those who were accused of heresy by others and found guilty
were punished more severely, sometimes with death (at the hands of the
civil authorities, not the Inquisitors themselves). In 1252 Pope
Innocent IV officially approved the use of torture by the Inquisition
to extract “the truth” from defendants. Justification for this
procedure was found in the tradition of Roman law. Methods of torture
included the rack and placing hot coals on the soles of the feet. At
the close of the court proceedings, the sentences of those found guilty
were announced publicly in a ceremony referred to as an auto-da-fé—an
“act of faith (Dowley,1995, pp. 321-324).”
In 1478 a relatively autonomous branch of the Inquisition was
established with papal approval in Spain. It carried out a campaign
against Jews and Muslims whose conversions to Christianity were thought
to be insincere, against “witches,” and in later decades against those
accused of Protestant leanings. Tomás de Torquemada, the notorious
Grand Inquisitor of Spain, burned at the stake thousands of alleged
heretics between 1487 and 1498. The Spanish Inquisition was not
formally dissolved until 1834 (O’Malley, 1996).
The Dominican order provided most of the key inquisitors during the
thirteenth century, and their leading theologian, Thomas Aquinas,
attempted to justify the practice of executing heretics in his Summa
Theologiae. To establish the legitimacy of executing heretics he quotes
Titus 3:10-11: “After a first and second admonition, have nothing more
to do with anyone who causes divisions [a heretic], since you know that
such a person is perverted and sinful, being self-condemned.” Thomas
assumes that the phrase “have nothing more to do with” legitimates the
killing of human beings. He argues that since forgers of money are put
to death by the civil authorities it is even more imperative for
heretics to be killed because “it is a much graver matter to corrupt
faith (Aquinas, 1988, p. 256).” The Church hopes for the conversion of
the heretic, thus allowing him to respond to a “first and second
admonition.” But if he remains unrepentant, then the Church ceases to
hope for his conversion and “looks to the salvation of others by
excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore
delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from
the world by death.” Aquinas quotes Jerome in support of this course of
action: “Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the
fold, lest the whole house, the whole dough, the whole body, the whole
flock burn, perish, rot, die.”
The Waldensians were one of the groups particularly targeted for
persecution by the Inquisition. Their principal crime was questioning
the claim of the Roman Church to be the true Church of Christ. They
sought to distinguish themselves from what they perceived as the
avarice and moral laxity of the Roman Church by living lives of strict
poverty and obedience to scripture. They went from town to town
preaching sermons from biblical texts. Their success in gaining
converts in many areas of Europe alarmed the papacy and led to official
attempts at repression by the Inquisition. These attempts did not
succeed in wiping out the Waldensians, however, but only in forcing
them into an underground or a rural existence, which they maintained
from the thirteenth century until the sixteenth, at which time many of
their ideas entered into the mainstream of the Protestant Reformation
(Dowley, 1995, pp. 327 – 329).
f. In the early fifteenth century, a somewhat similar reforming
movement came into existence in Bohemia: the Hussites. Jan Hus, their
leader, was greatly influenced by the writings of John Wyclif. He thus
stressed scripture as the supreme authority over popes and cardinals.
He criticized corruption in the clergy, worship of images, and
“superstitious pilgrimages.” He was called before the Council of
Constance in 1415 to defend himself against charges of heresy. Although
he had been promised “safe passage,” he was burned at the stake without
being given a full opportunity to defend his views (Dowley, 1995, p.
336). During the sixteenth century, many Protestants were killed by the
Roman Church for holding views similar to those of the Hussites.
William Tyndale, for example, was burned at the stake by imperial
authorities in 1536, his crime being unauthorized translation of the
Bible into vernacular English.
g. The magisterial reformers, Luther and Calvin, were not much
different from the Roman Catholic leaders of the day with regard to
their attitudes toward violence. Luther’s teachings had indirectly
contributed to the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany in the 1520s. Luther
called for suppression of the rebellious peasants in these well-known
words: “Let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or
openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or
devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog
(Porter, 1974, p. 86).” In 1525, about 50,000 peasants were slaughtered
by the German princes, urged on by Luther. The Consistory in Calvin’s
Geneva burned at the stake the anti-Trinitarian heretic Michael
Servetus in 1553. Calvin is reputed to have favoured beheading as a
more humane form of execution in this case. Nevertheless, he approved
of the Consistory’s decision, and said that Servetus “cried like a
Spaniard” as he was being burned.
h. The Catholics and the Protestants were united in their fear and
loathing of the Anabaptists (forerunners of the Mennonites), who had
the audacity to proclaim that Christians should not be in the business
of killing. For teaching this they were killed. The following
transcript of the trial of Anabaptist leader Michael Sattler conveys
the atmosphere of the time very effectively. After giving a speech to
the court outlining the basic points of Anabaptist doctrine, Sattler
concludes:
“Whereas, then, we have not acted contrary to God and the gospel, you
will find that neither I nor my brethren and sisters have offended in
word or deed against any authority. Therefore, ministers of God, if you
have neither heard nor read the Word of God, send for the most learned
men and for the sacred books of the Bible in whatsoever language they
may be and let them confer with us in the Word of God. If they prove to
us with the Holy Scriptures that we err and are in the wrong, we will
gladly desist and recant and also willingly suffer the sentence and
punishment for that of which we have been accused; but if no error is
proven to us, I hope to God that you will be converted and receive
instruction.”
Upon this speech the judges laughed and put their heads together, and
the town clerk of Ensisheim said: “Yes, you infamous, desperate rascal
of a monk, should we dispute with you? The hangman will dispute with
you, I assure you!”
… One of the prisoners also said: “We must not depart from the truth.”
The town clerk: “Yes, you desperate villain, you arch heretic, I say,
if there were no hangman here, I would hang you myself and be doing God
a good service thereby.”
… The judges having returned to the room, the sentence was read. It was
as follows: “In the case of the attorney of His Imperial Majesty vs.
Michael Sattler, judgment is passed that Michael Sattler shall be
delivered to the executioner, who shall lead him to the place of
execution and cut out his tongue, then forge him fast to a wagon and
thereon with red-hot tongs twice tear pieces from his body; and after
he has been brought outside the gate, he shall be plied five times more
in the same manner….”
After this had been done in the manner prescribed, he was burned
to ashes as a heretic. His fellow brethren were executed with the
sword, and the sisters drowned. His wife, also after being subjected to
many entreaties, admonitions, and threats, under which she remained
steadfast, was drowned a few days afterward (Hunston, 1957, pp. 141 –
144).
Scenes such as this were repeated many times during the sixteenth
century, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Anabaptists, who were
perceived as dangerous heretics attacking the very foundations of
Western Christian culture. Indeed, the Anabaptists were attacking these
foundations, insofar as they were generated by a scapegoat mechanism
rather than the teachings of Christ.
i. Violence between Catholics and Protestants occurred sporadically
during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, erupting finally
on a grand scale in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) (Dowley, 1995, p.
427). During this period the Catholic armies of the Holy Roman Empire
entered into battles with the Protestant armies of Bohemia, Germany,
Denmark, and Sweden. Success and defeat ebbed and flowed for both sides
for many years. Most of the fighting took place in Germany, resulting
in widespread devastation. Historians estimate that the overall
population of Germany was reduced by fifteen to twenty percent. Later
in the war the Catholic armies of France entered into war with the
Catholic armies of the Empire, for motives that were more political
than religious.
j. The American Civil War took place between 1861 and 1865. Historians
estimate that 620,000 persons died in the war (Litwack, 1996). On both
sides there were Christian soldiers ministered to and encouraged by
chaplains who claimed that God was on their side.
k. In the 20th century, about 110 millions were slaughtered in two
Great World Wars, and hundreds of lesser conflicts. Christian chaplains
were found in all countries under Christian sway fully supportive of
their nation’s war efforts. When for instance President Truman watched
the detonation in the Nevada desert of the world’s first nuclear bomb,
he declared it was the greatest event in the history of the human race!
Now Truman was a Baptist Sunday School teacher who supposedly believed
in the Resurrection… Shortly after the first test explosion, two atomic
bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, under Truman’s
authority, and with subsequent full blessing of American Protestant,
Evangelical, and Catholic churches, instantly killing about 120,000
civilian men, women, and children in those cities. A few months
earlier, with similar support by Allied Christians the world over,
100,000 civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered in one night
of a conventional incendiary bombing raid on Tokyo, Japan.
In addition, over eighty Japanese cities, and forty-two German cities,
for several years, were bombed regularly. The targets were primarily
residential and civilian, not military and industrial. Hundreds of
thousands of men, women, and children lost their lives.
Father George Zebalka was the Catholic chaplain with the US Army air
force who blessed the men who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945. He said this in a Sojourners interview 21 years ago
(August, 1980): “The mainline Christian churches still teach something
that Christ never taught or even hinted at, namely the just war theory,
a theory that to me has been completely discredited theologically,
historically, and psychologically.
“So as I see it, until the various churches within Christianity repent
and begin to proclaim by word and deed what Jesus proclaimed in
relation to violence and enemies, there is no hope for anything other
than ever-escalating violence and destruction.”
Richard Hays has written: “One reason that the world finds the New
Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is
that the church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence,
the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism,
violence, and idolatry (1996, p. 343).” If the essence of the “law” –
of how we should live -, according to Jesus is justice, mercy and
faithfulness (Matt. 23:23 – compare to Micah 6:8, high water mark of OT
spirituality), the church stands overwhelmingly guilty of faithlessness
on the issue of violence.
Spiritual Origin of Violence
Violence is not necessarily found in all human societies past or
present. It is possible that widespread violence, developing into what
one author calls a “Domination System” (Wink, 1992), emerged in human
history only after a certain degree of societal density, complexity and
conflict had been reached.
According to René Girard, however, who has been studying violence and
its cultural origins during the past 40 years, violence is basic to
human society from its earliest beginnings. In fact, Girard presents a
convincing case that the origin of all culture, past and present, no
exceptions, is violence, or what he calls “the founding murder”.
Violence is in fact what creates social cohesion, indispensable for
human culture to emerge. Violence within a given society, argues
Girard, builds up to a certain point, then erupts into uncontrolled
mayhem. The impetus towards violence arises from what Girard calls
“mimetic desire”: imitating the desire of another. So for example, a
child in the nursery picks up a toy, and suddenly another child in the
nursery wants it, and only it. And violence erupts! This is how Tom
Sawyer in Mark Twain’s classic got his fence painted, and how Madison
Avenue entices the world to part with its money!
Violence generally follows from this “mimetic desire” – this
covetousness. As the biblical writer James puts it succinctly: “What
causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires
that battle within you? You want something but you don’t get it. You
kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and
fight (4:1 & 2).”
According to Girard, the origin of violence is as simple, yet as
profound, as our desires going unchecked until they explode into
violence.
The biblical story of the first murder is a classic illustration of
this: Cain desires what his brother has – God’s favour. And he kills
for it. But of course alienation, not relationship, results. Girard
argues convincingly that all culture arises from a “founding murder”
that is preserved for us worldwide in all cultural mythologies. And the
guardian of this violence has been the “sacred” institutions in any
given society. In a secular society, the “sacred” is simply more
hidden, though no less there. The most apparent is the criminal justice
system in any Western liberal democracy – and elsewhere!
Universal Responses to Violence: Scapegoat Mechanism
Girard goes on to explain that, once violence has erupted, it threatens
the well-being of the community. So a scapegoat must be found to siphon
off the violence. In most societies, religious institutions
traditionally served to create and/or oversee a “scapegoat mechanism”
by which the scapegoat could be identified and sacrificed. All
according to a strict ritual. “Religion is therefore, according to
Girard, organized violence in the service of tranquillity. Religion
covers up the sacrificial mechanism by means of myth, ritual, and
prohibition (Wink, 1992, p. 146).” And humanity is thereby inescapably
religious, even in this present Western most “secular” of all eras.
As said, in our secularized West, with the demise of religious
institutions widely influencing society, the criminal justice system in
fact usually takes the place of religion in operating the scapegoat
mechanism (Redekop, 1993). The courthouse may be seen as the modern
cathedral, perpetuating myths about crime, following elaborate rituals,
and acting on legislative prohibitions of certain behaviour. But
“‘Everybody Does It!’”: crime is in fact opportunistically committed by
the vast majority of Canadians, according to a major study by a
Canadian criminologist (Gabor, 1994.) So the scapegoating of only
certain criminals for punishment is extremely selective. (For instance,
only one to three percent of all criminals who actually commit Criminal
Code of Canada offences go to prison.)
A further problem is, the scapegoat mechanism only siphons off the
violence for a time. It in no way is capable of removing violence
altogether, for violence in fact is foundational to it. This is the
dilemma of all human cultures built upon a scapegoat mechanism. It is
the ongoing participation in the Babylonian creation myth that violence
is legitimate: so long as it is appropriately channelled through a
religious mechanism or a secular means such as criminal justice, with
all its prohibitions, rituals, and myths. Violence never removes,
rather it breeds, violence.
Jesus’ Alternative to Violence
Jesus offered and modelled a ‘third way’ in response to violence that
takes one from a flight or fight response, to transformative “just
peacemaking” initiatives in the face of violence. Paul Anderson sums
this up well in an essay entitled, “Jesus and Peace”.
“Finally, [Walter] Wink argues that these instructions [about turning
the other cheek, etc.] must be read in light of Matt. 5:39a, which is
often mistranslated “Do not resist an evildoer.” Wink judges that a
more correct interpretation of the text does not negate resistance, but
only violent resistance; what Jesus forbids is ‘to resist violently, to
revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection [1987, p. 185]’. One
might also amplify the sentence to read, ‘But I tell you, do not
counterstrike the evildoer; but if someone strikes you on the right
cheek, turn and face him, offering also the other.’ The implication is
that evil cannot be overcome by evil means. When one responds violently
to violence, evil wins a double victory. First, its essential nature
remains unexposed and thereby it prolongs its life. Second, it succeeds
in seducing those with good intentions into its way. History is full of
examples of revolutionaries who became what they had originally hated:
oppressors. Jesus’ strategy brings true reform and avoids this tragic
end. Says Wink,
His way aims at converting the opponent; failing that, it hopes for
accommodation, where the opponent is willing to make some changes
simply to get the protesters off his back. But if that fails too,
nonviolence entails coercion: the opponent is forced to make a change
rather than suffer the loss of power, even though he remains hostile.
But Jesus’ way does not employ violent coercion [1987, p. 192].
“The strength of Wink’s interpretation of Jesus’ teachings on
nonviolence is that it clearly portrays the third way Jesus instructed
his disciples to follow. Jesus advocated neither a fight nor a flight
response to domination, but a nonviolent, redemptive engagement of the
powers that be. While he did not aspire to be a political leader in the
popular sense, his teaching was thoroughly political in its
implications. It aimed at nothing short of creating a new earth in
which God’s just and loving will would be done as perfectly as in
heaven (Anderson, 1994, pp. 118 & 119).”
But there is a profound tension, as indicated, between this way of
Jesus lived and taught, and the ensuing New Testament documents in line
with that way, and church history that unfolded since in response to
Jesus.
Richard Hays, in a major work entitled The Moral Vision of the New
Testament (1996), puts the issue pointedly: “This is the place where
New Testament ethics confronts a profound methodological challenge on
the question of violence, because the tension is so severe between the
unambiguous witness of the New Testament canon and the apparently
countervailing forces of tradition, reason, and experience (p. 341).”
In an entire chapter devoted to whether New Testament teaching in any
way warrants Christians to support violence to achieve justice, Hays
concludes: “Our exegetical illustration of Matthew 5:38—48 has led to
the conclusion that the passage teaches a norm of nonviolent love of
enemies…. The question that we must now consider is how Matthew’s
vision of the peaceful community fits into the larger witness of the
canonical New Testament. Do the other texts in the canon reinforce the
Sermon on the Mount’s teaching on nonviolence, or do they provide other
options that might allow or require Christians to take up the sword?
“When the question is posed this way, the immediate result—as Barth
observed — is to underscore how impressively univocal is the testimony
of the New Testament writers on this point (p. 329).” There is one
consistent New Testament voice on the theme of violence: its rejection!
Why then, if the New Testament is so consistent in its witness for
nonviolent peacemaking, should commitment to nonviolence be the
overwhelming minority position of the Christian church? Hays again:
“One reason… is that the church is so massively faithless. On the
question of violence, the church is deeply compromised and committed to
nationalism, violence, and idolatry. (By comparison, our problems with
sexual sin are trivial.) This indictment applies alike to liberation
theologies that justify violence against oppressors and to
establishment Christianity that continues to play chaplain to the
military-industrial complex, citing just war theory and advocating the
defense of a particular nation as though that were somehow a Christian
value (p. 343).”
What ever happened to following Jesus on the issue of violence?
What About Violence in the Bible?
Once, when I was teaching a Sunday School class on the Luke 6 passage,
which specifically enjoins love for the enemy, and indicates that God
is merciful to the wicked every bit as much as to the good, a man in
exasperation said that Jesus may say that in this passage, but there
are lots of other passages where he could get the kind of message
towards criminals he wanted: retribution pure and simple!
Another time, in an evening forum on capital punishment organized by a
criminology class in a community college, I was asked to present a
Christian perspective. Three others gave varying views. During the
response time, a man indicated he was directing his remarks towards me.
He began by quoting the King James Version of Matthew 23:23: “ye…
have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment…!” He fairly
thundered the last word, then proceeded with a diatribe against me and
my ilk so full of invective that, had capital punishment been on the
books for misinterpretation of Scripture, I think by his reckoning I
would have been on death row.
The point is, both these people are right. They are drawing on
wellsprings of violence attributed to God in the Bible. (Though Matt.
23:23 actually continues with the words “mercy, and faithfulness”,
drawing on Micah 6:8, which specifically calls God’s people to practise
“justice” – the preferred translation, not judgment – for the poor, the
widow, etc. – instead of scapegoating!)
There are, for instance, “six hundred passages of explicit violence in
the Hebrew Bible, one thousand verses where God’s own violent actions
of punishment are described, a hundred passages where Yahweh expressly
commands others to kill for no apparent reason… Violence… is easily
the most mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew Bible
(Wink, 1992, p. 146).” And there are portions of Revelation and other
texts scattered about the New Testament with a violent tinge or avowal.
The sacrificial system of the Old Testament embraces the scapegoat
mechanism. The beginning of the Hebrew religion is the scapegoating of
an animal instead of a human being, in the surrogate sacrifice of a ram
instead of Isaac. Animal sacrifice in the Old Testament is never far
from human sacrifice. There is a move away from this scapegoat
mechanism, especially during the time of the later prophets (Barbé,
1989, pp.24ff.) For instance Micah identifies animal sacrifice as child
sacrifice disguised in the very passage Jesus draws on in Matthew 23.
Hosea rejects all sacrifice except sincere conversion of the heart.
The New Testament however teaches in John 1 and Hebrews 1 that we read
the Bible through the work and words of Jesus. Jesus is our
“hermeneutical” or interpretative lens enabling us rightly to
understand God’s Word. And it is in Jesus that we meet sacrifice only
to find in his teaching and through the Cross its complete rejection.
“It is mercy I desire and not sacrifice” Jesus says straightforwardly,
quoting from Hosea 6:6 (Matt. 9:13). Jesus moves “from the logic of the
scapegoat – that of the compulsory sacrifice – to the logic of the Lamb
of God – that of the freely offered sacrifice of the innocent one, the
righteous one (Barbé, 1989, p. 6).” According to the book of Hebrews,
Jesus is the last scapegoat sent to reconcile us, once for all, to God
(Hebrews 10:5 – 10 and others). According to I John, Jesus was the
“…atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for
the sins of the whole world (2:2).” No one ever need atone for sins –
his or hers – again!
Hays says: “This is the point at which one of the methodological
guidelines proposed in Part III must come into play: the New
Testament’s witness is finally normative. If irreconcilable tensions
exist between the moral vision of the New Testament and that of
particular Old Testament texts, the New Testament vision trumps the Old
Testament. Just as the New Testament texts render judgments superseding
the Old Testament requirements of circumcision and dietary laws, just
as the New Testament’s forbidding of divorce supersedes the Old
Testament’s permission of it, so also Jesus’ explicit teaching and
example of nonviolence reshapes our understanding of God and of the
covenant community in such a way that killing enemies is no longer a
justifiable option. The sixth antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount
marks the hermeneutical watershed. As we have noted, the Old Testament
distinguishes the obligation of loving the neighbor (that is, the
fellow Israelite) from the response to enemies: [B]ut I say to you,
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may
be children of your Father in heaven.” Once that word has been spoken
to us and perfectly embodied in the story of Jesus’ life and death, we
cannot appeal back to Samuel as a counterexample to Jesus. Everything
is changed by the cross and resurrection. We now live in a situation in
which we confess that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the
message of reconciliation to us’ (2 Cor. 5:19). Those who have been
entrusted with such a message will read the Old Testament in such a way
that its portrayals of God’s mercy and eschatological restoration of
the world will take precedence over its stories of justified violence
(pp. 336 & 7).”
Jesus shatters for all time the legitimacy of the scapegoat mechanism.
From his time on, no enemy may ever be put outside the circle of God’s
or our love. Love in the New Testament in fact means the concrete
embracing of the other to make that person a friend.
The Biblical Interpretation Dilemma
An unusual picture was once circulated around our Church when I was a
kid. I remember it well. The brief notation below the picture explained
that a man had been travelling along the highway after a pristine
snowfall sparkled its brightness everywhere under a glorious sun. At
one point he stopped, and noticed an unusual play of shadow against the
backdrop of the freshly fallen snow. Being an amateur photographer with
his own dark room, he took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of
the strange phenomenon. He was astounded when, upon developing them,
one in particular displayed an amazing likeness to the traditional
artists’ depictions of the face of Jesus. We all were invited to see
what he saw.
What I saw first however, as did most, were dark blotches against a
snow-white background. There was no face of any kind to see. Except
there was! It took some doing, some adjusting, some intense looking,
but finally I got it!
Then, what was fascinating after that was, no matter how I looked at
the picture, sidewards glance, upside down, back to front even when
held against a clear window, in a mirror, etc., I never failed
immediately to recognize the face of Jesus in that photo.
We all know this phenomenon. There is a technical term for it that escapes me.
But some never did see the face. Their eyes simply never adjusted. They even doubted that we who saw really “saw”.
Theology means literally, a word, or words about God. What theology
really is concerning is creating for us, the believer, an accurate
word-picture of God’s face. Unfortunately – or fortunately! – there are
no artists’ drawings of the real face of Jesus that have come down to
us. So we have to discover the face of Jesus, and thereby the face of
God, we Christians say, somehow in the written word – the Bible. The
data of Scripture, in ongoing dialogue with Christians’ interpretations
through the ages and our faith community’s understandings today all
help us throughout our lives to form an ever sharper image of God.
Once an editor (in his 50’s) of a theological piece I had written and
was publishing said to me as the task was completed: “I have never been
able to shake a picture of God I have had since my childhood. That
picture is one of a God who is stern, harsh, totally demanding,
punitive, a ‘Hangin’ Judge’ ready to condemn me severely for anything I
do wrong, and likely to relegate me to hellfire should I ever so
slightly step out of line.” He was a Christian, to be sure, and a
faithful church-goer, he acknowledged, but he wasn’t entirely sure that
spending an eternity with such a “god” would not be more like his
understanding of hell!
The dilemma we are in can be put as an analogy. The Bible is like a
monstrous jigsaw puzzle, with a vast number of individual pieces to it.
It’s in fact the Ultimate Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle, we Christians believe!
I have seen once in my life the kind of jigsaw puzzle I am comparing
the Bible to: one with identically shaped pieces. In the puzzle I saw,
they were all squares. Now, it was a daunting enough task to put the
puzzle together that I saw with the original box and the picture on it.
Try doing an identically shaped pieces jigsaw puzzle sometime! But what
if there were rival box cover pictures, and debate about which was the
authentic one?
I am suggesting that the biblical data is precisely like that kind of
jigsaw puzzle with identically shaped pieces – and lots of date about
the authentic box cover picture! I’m suggesting further that we would
have no hope of putting it together at all were it not for the face of
Jesus we discover in the New Testament revelation, which becomes for us
the ultimate picture of the face of God. I am suggesting that all other
box covers than that of Jesus as seen in the New Testament revelation,
are inadequate or wrong. But I am suggesting further that it is
nonetheless difficult to see the face of Jesus properly. For some who
say they “see”, what is seen are “dark blotches”: the face still of
violence. And I think that one in that case does not really “see”.
Piece together the jigsaw puzzle when one only sees dark blotches
instead of the New Testament portrait of Jesus, and one’s picture of
God will turn out entirely differently from doing it with the face of
Jesus seen aright!
But that begs the very question, does it not?
ENDNOTES
(1) “Stanley Hauerwas has suggested that the only thing that makes
the Christian church different from any other group in society is that
the church is the only community that gathers around the true story. It
is not the piety, or the sincerity, or the morality of the church that
distinguishes us (Christians have no monopoly on virtue). It is the
story we treasure, the story from which we derive our identity, our
vision, and our values. And for us to do that would be a horrible
mistake, if it were not a true story, indeed the true story, which
exposes the lies, deceptions, and half-truths upon which human beings
and human societies so often stake their lot (Marshall, 2000, p. 13.)”
(2) This is Timothy Gorringe’s term (1996).
(3) I am drawing on The Genealogy of Violence (Bellinger, 2001), much of it verbatim.
(4) See Redekop (1993).
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