During World War II, famed literary scholar and “mere Christian” C.S.
Lewis delivered a lecture to a pacifist society entitled, “Why I am Not
a Pacifist”. From a writer whose pen could never be dull, this piece
was Lewis’ authorial nadir.
It is akin to Bertrand Russell’s essay, “Why I am Not a Christian”,
which discusses only philosophical abstractions. In it Russell sets the
rules, such that, by “reason” outside of God’s revelation one “must”
prove God, or not, case closed!(1)
Such
negatives presuppose a counter. Upon reflection therefore, this
article’s title was changed from “Why I Am Not Pro-Violence” to “Why I
Am (Try to Be) Consistently Pro-Life”.
The other afternoon I met my seminary (Regent College) church history
prof from 30 years ago. Upon re-introductions he said (somewhat)
jokingly: “So this is the world-famous Anabaptist whose writings get me
so riled!”
I am not world-famous (have you ever heard of me?), and I am decidedly
not a card-carrying “Anabaptist”. But in the words of Robbie Burns,
“Whene’re my Muse does at me glance, I jingle at her”. I heard, ever
since that encounter, my “Muse” (whom I trust to be the Holy Spirit)
jingling. And I felt riled too – not for the first time – on this
issue, though you may judge whether with “sinless anger”, as we are
enjoined in Ephesians 4.
Let’s get two things straight at the outset:
• Pro-choice people are not! The foetus has no choice, and an
abominable violence against “the least of these” is committed in every
abortion, whatever the mitigating circumstances.
• Pro-life people are rarely! Most of those I’ve ever met, heard or
read are pro-death about war and/or capital punishment. They commit or
support an abominable violence against neighbour and enemy whom Jesus
also dubbed “the least of these”. Whatever the mitigating circumstances.
The early church watchword was: Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine – the
Church abhors shedding blood. Such an ethic was in the earliest period
applied fairly consistently to abortion, executions and war. Whatever
the complexity then, there has never been majority Christian ethical
consistency since. (2)
C.S. Lewis in his essay observes: “And when we turn to Christianity, we
find Pacifism based almost exclusively on certain of the sayings of Our
Lord Himself. If those sayings do not establish the Pacifist position,
it is vain to try to base it on the general securus judicat [verdict]
of Christendom as a whole. For when I seek guidance there, I find
Authority on the whole against me.” He writes further: “The whole
Christian case for Pacifism rests, there¬fore, on certain Dominical
utterances, such as ‘Re¬sist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee
on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’” He then proceeds in a
few short paragraphs to rebut a pacifist reading of this injunction.
And he’s done with Scripture, except for this earlier observation:
“Nor, I think, do we find a word about Pacifism in the apostolic
writings, which are older than the Gospels and represent, if anything
does, that original Christen¬dom whereof the Gospels themselves are a
product.”
Lewis thereby sadly commits a kind of Dominical and Scriptural lèse
majesté, and in the decades since has never to my awareness been
reprimanded by his worldwide Christian admirers (of whom I am one).
Considering his towering reputation as literary scholar, his biblical
Liberalism (selectively and superficially reading Holy Writ) is
regrettable. Lewis betrays Jesus and the biblical text – and gets away
with it in Christian circles, in favour of philosophical prolegomena
and arguments from tradition. One might have expected that Lewis had
done his biblical homework. He demonstrably had not. Though in all
fairness, some of the best theological helps in this have been post-War
publications (3).
Still, the essay should have been returned by the publisher, Lewis’
section on “Dominical utterances” and his comment on “the apostolic
writings” crossed out in red with the comment: PLEASE GO BACK AND READ
THE SOURCES!
For starters, if one must be restricted to a solitary dominical saying
(but why?), Lewis copped out. Why did he not choose “Love your
enemies”? In the entire sweep of Christian history, no one has ever
demonstrated how one may “love (agapao)” enemies in any faithful
biblical meaning of the term (4), while running him through with a
spear, putting a bullet to her head, or bombing them to smithereens. No
one! Why was that text (apparently) rejected out of hand? Everyone so
minded does. Everyone. And no one, except by Liberal fiat, has ever
discovered a biblical exception clause (5). (“Miracles do not happen,
therefore…” “Jesus could not have meant that, therefore…”)
Second, Lewis glosses over the injunction, “turn to him the other
[cheek] also”, in the Sermons on the Mount and Plain, relegating it to
a bit of innocuous personal advice, like Ann Landers might have
written. He comments: “Indeed, as the audience were private people in a
disarmed nation, it seems unlikely that they would have ever supposed
Our Lord to be referring to war. War was not what they would have been
thinking of. The frictions of daily life among villagers were more
likely to be in their minds.” This is exegetical fluff. Lewis’ failure
to understand Jesus and the New Testament in a political context is
blatant. John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (6) amongst many
studies is a helpful corrective.
In understanding the New Testament as only for one’s own private
spirituality and not for the cosmos (Ephesians 1, Colossians 1), Lewis
nonetheless makes the default political judgment that the state’s
violence de facto must unquestioningly be supported in war and capital
punishment. Why this default? (7)
Glen Stassen in Just Peacemaking (8) asserts: “It has become clear that
efforts to confine the authority of Jesus’ teachings about God’s will
to an inner, private, or individual realm, and to keep them from having
authority in societal or political relationships, are efforts at
evasion that contradict Jesus’ holistic faith that God is Lord of all
life.” Over against Lewis’ evasive reading of Jesus and the New
Testament, Stassen and other interpreters point to activist nonviolent
“transforming initiatives” with direct real world political
consequences in the “other cheek” passage, throughout the two Sermons
and the New Testament.
Third, the outstanding succinct study that contradicts Lewis is New
Testament scholar Richard Hay’s “Violence in Defense of Justice” in The
Moral Vision of the New Testament (9). After discussing the Sermon on
the Mount in Matthew, Hays concludes in a similar direction to Yoder,
Stassen, and a host of interpreters, that it “teaches a norm of
nonviolent love of enemies (italics added).” He then asks: “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?” He responds: “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 (italics added).” Hays allows that
“narratives about soldiers provide the one possible legitimate basis
for arguing that Christian discipleship does not necessarily pre¬clude
the exercise of violence in defense of social order or justice.”,
though doubts that is the right interpretation.
When discussing “other authorities”, which is what Lewis mainly adduces
while dismissing all but one “straw-man” New Testament text, Hays
writes: “This is the place where New Testament ethics confronts a
profound methodological challenge on the question of violence, be¬cause
the tension is so severe between the unambiguous witness of the New
Testa¬ment canon and the apparently countervailing forces of tradition,
reason, and expe¬rience.” Tragically, Christian history is littered
with the myriad victims of those “countervailing forces” – right up to
the current “War on Terror”.
The Templeton Prize winner for progress in religion in 2004 was
theoretical cosmologist and South African Quaker activist George F. R.
Ellis, who co-authored with theologian Nancey Murphy On the Moral
Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics, in which they
argue compellingly “from below” in the social sciences, and “from
above” theologically, for a “kenotic ethic” that centres on
self-sacrifice and nonviolence. When asked why so few Christians align
with this kenotic nonviolent “grain of the universe” (10), Ellis
responded simply: “It is just too hard.”
Hays’ final paragraphs are pointed:
“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 ques¬tion 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.
“Only when the church renounces the way of violence will people see
what the Gospel means, because then they will see the way of Jesus
reenacted in the church… (italics added)”
C.S. Lewis and majority Christendom are pro-violence, Hays concludes,
not because of Jesus and the New Testament, but in contradiction of
both. In the movie Saving Private Ryan, Captain John Miller comments:
“I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel.”
In Fahrenheit 9/11, an American soldier in Iraq comments: “When you
kill another person, you kill part of yourself.” The breathtaking Good
News declares there is Christ (the Quakers say “that of God”) in
Everyone. The movies got it right where Christendom largely has not: if
one destroys the neighbour/enemy, one destroys God in Christ in “the
least of these”, one wanders far from home and God.
If Walter Wink is right that “Violence is the ethos of our times.”
(11); if Christendom for centuries has endorsed it; if states like
America wield it brutally worldwide with overwhelming Western Christian
approbation; if Mahatma Gandhi was accurate in observing, “The only
people on earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as nonviolent
are Christians.”; perhaps my former church history prof can appreciate
why a Christian minority feels riled like Jesus in the Temple (and not
a little betrayed) by such massive unfaithfulness.
God’s will on earth will ultimately be done as it is in heaven, regardless! This is foundational Gospel faith and hope.
When it comes to state violence, it just would be nice for a change to see God’s will done by majority Christians…
NOTES
(1) There is a joke about the little child who lost a coin in a
dark part of the street. Upon being asked why she was searching for it
under a street light, she replied, “There is more light here”. Karl
Barth (in “Christianity or Religion”, Fragments Grave and Gay, Karl
Barth, London: Collins, 1971) said humanity’s search for God is
“religion”, to all of which Christianity is opposed, beginning “when
religion ends”. God’s “arising to go to man” is Christianity’s
“essence”. We do not set the rules about that search, demanding God be
found (or not) under the light of our own rationality. God on the
contrary finds us if we are to be found in “active attentiveness to the
acts and word of this God”– or not.
(2) Sadly, that watchword changed in time to mean church functionaries
would never shed blood, but gladly mandate and bless the secular
authorities to “let blood roll on like a river” in complete inversion
of Amos 5:24.
(3) Three publications with excellent bibliographies on this topic are:
The Church’s Peace Witness, edited by Marlin E. Miller and Barbara
Nelson Gingrich, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994; “Violence in Defense of
Justice”, in The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary
Introduction to New Testament Ethics, Richard B. Hays,
HarperSanFrancisco, 1996; and The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on
Creation, Freedom, and Evil, Charles K. Bellinger, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
(4) Agapao in New Testament usage means “to constantly invite into
one’s circle of friends”, as in Romans 5:1 – 11, where God’s agape
(verse 5) is implicitly explicated as model for human behaviour;
reprised explicitly in Romans 12, 13, and Ephesians 5.
(5) The most blanket is God-ordained Old Testament violence. As if they
never read Jesus or Paul who taught the entire sweep of Old Testament
ethics hangs on “these two commandments [love God, concomitantly
neighbor] (Jesus in Matt. 22:40)”, and “Love does no harm to its
neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (Paul in Rom.
13:10).” In Christian ethics, “If ir¬reconcilable tensions exist
between the moral vision of the New Testament and that of particular
Old Testament texts, the New Testament vision trumps the Old
Testa¬ment.” (Richard Hays. Ibid, p. 336.)
(6) This book is “a new beginning” in reading the foundational texts
faithfully, claims “America’s best theologian” (Time magazine), Stanley
Hauerwas.
(7) There is no place in this reflection to pursue that question.
Anthropologist René Girard is the premier theorist. A great place to
begin is Charles Bellinger’s study, ibid (see footnote 3). Also read
The Girard Reader, edited by James Williams, New York: Crossroad, 1996;
Violence Renounced: René Girard, Biblical Studies, and Peacemaking,
Willard Swartley, Telford: Pandora Press, 2000; and I See Satan Fall
Like Lightning, Ren, René Girard, Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001. A vast rich
world opens up!
(8) Stassen’s preferred term is “just peacemaking” as opposed to
“pacifism”, which latter at once connotes quietistic passivity (as in
much of Anabaptist/Mennonite history), and misses the active “triadic
structure” of Jesus’ ethic, which is aggressive resistance to evil, but
never retaliation in kind (Compare Eph. 6:10ff, and passim). See Just
Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace, Glen H.
Stassen, Westminster: John Knox Press, 1992.
(9) It is a huge tome in which Hays develops meticulously how one should mine the New Testament for its “moral vision”.
(10) This is John Howard Yoder’s expression; title, when prefaced by
“With the”, of Stanley Hauerwas’ outstanding 2001 Gifford Lectures and
book (With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural
Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001). Yoder
wrote: “… people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the
universe.”
(11) Opening words of Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance
in a World of Domination, Walter Wink, Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1992, p. 13.