Q&R: How Naive Violence Fantasies Endanger Your Family – Brad Jersak
QUESTION
Recently, I had been reading David W. Bercot's insightful book, The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down.
Our backstory: My spouse and I used to be "Preppers" and besides food, water, and other emergency supplies, we and all of our friends stocked up on guns and ammo. We claimed we were not doing it out of fear but to be wise and to have enough to share with others. In the past several years, I now see it as future-tripping and religious rationalization.
Apparently, the attitude among many conservative "Christians" is our need to fight for the right to bear arms and to be ready to defend property, self, or in these times, fight in a revolution.
For several years, I have been coming to terms with loving and blessing and forgiving my enemies. But a few chapters in Bercot's book, he shows via the scriptures that Jesus and Paul were nonresistant and never retaliatory. They never took up the sword or defended themselves verbally or physically.
My heart can believe Jesus functioning like that but we are having a hard time picturing ourselves acting without aggression if we found someone breaking into our home or doing some evil act against us. Any thoughts you care to share?
RESPONSE
Great question. There are a few ways to think about this.
I'll let Brian Zahnd address it briefly via a blog post. We think about this together a lot. https://brianzahnd.com/2014/
I would also recommend two other resources that show how preparing for violence is the real naive idealism versus Jesus' instructions, which are actually the higher realism:
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers - https://www.jstor.org/
John Howard Yoder, What Would You Do? - https://searchworks.
I also respond to the question here: https://www.ptm.org/q-r-
What I mean by the naivety of violence versus the realism of non-violence is this:
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