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Nonviolence

Jeremy Bouma – Christian Participation in War and Violence

07/08/2012
Church & Culture, Empire, Nonviolence, Theology, War & Peace
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My friend Jeremy is doing a series on Christian Participation in War and Violence over at his blog Novus Lumen. You can get a good sense of the series by this quote from his introductory post.

“Rather than following the ethic of Caesar, members of the Kingdom are called to imitate the ethic of Jesus, which centers on loving God and loving others. As an eschatological community, the Church is called to bear witness to God’s movement to re-create the world anew in Christ, a world where violence and war has no place.

As citizens of the Kingdom, which was inaugurated through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, we are called to live into a new ethic, of which peacemaking is primary. The meaning of this new ethic will only be understood properly, both inside and outside the Church, when communities of Jesus followers actively and deliberately embody the costly way of peace”

I look forward to seeing where he goes over the next few posts, but so far I think he is offering an important challenge to Christian assumptions about our participation in violence.

Book Notes: The Early Church on Killing

22/06/2012
Books and Reading, History, Nonviolence, War & Peace
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I’m quite excited about this one – yesterday I came across a new release from Baker Academic, The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment, by Ronald Sider.

Often I have been in discussions with people about my somewhat unusual views on such matters, and have brought up the fact that for 300 years the early Church was essentially unanimous in their opposition to war, military service, the gladiatorial games, capital punishment, abortion, and infanticide.

Not that I want to take a position of “the early church said it, I believe it, that settles it,” but at the same time such a unified witness from the community of faith should give us pause before we go about brushing off such prohibitions against killing.

The problem in those discussions has often been demonstrating this was in fact the position of the early church, especially when I’ve come across that evidence in dozens of different books and articles.

This is where Sider’s The Early Church on Killing comes in.

Not simply an argument for Christian nonviolence, Sider’s 200-page sourcebook is almost entirely made up of primary source material, the words of the Church Fathers and Mothers themselves, with some helpful introduction to the various documents. So what we get is first hand evidence of what the early church thought about killing, and a convenient source for referencing these challenging words.

The conclusion Sider arrives at by the end is that “First, up until the time of Constantine there is not a single Christian writer known to us who says that it is legitimate for Christians to kill or join the military. Second, there are a substantial number of passages written over a period of many years that explicitly say that Christians must not and/or do not kill or join the military… the rejection of killing is comprehensive” pg. 190.

Such evidence might not be the last word in a Christian discussion about war and other forms of killing, but it is at the very least a crucial first word that we should not easily forget.

Bill Maher on Christian Nonviolence

24/10/2011
Just War, Nonviolence, Teachings of Jesus, War & Peace
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Recently Bill Maher interviewed Dr. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas and the head of Pathway to Victory.

During their discussion, Maher asked Jeffress about the killing of Bin Laden and how it jives with Jesus’ many statements about nonviolence and loving our enemies.


Honestly, I think Jeffress’ answer was  a cop-out, and it demonstrates the lengths we will go to ignore passages that don’t fit our political and theological assumptions.

The amount of hermeneutical twisting and turning necessary to limit Jesus’ words to only “personal offenses” is unconscionable, particularly for someone with an advanced degree in theology who really ought to know better.

Take the “go the second mile” teaching for example, which was about nonviolent resistance to the brutal Roman occupation. Not exactly a personal offense.

Christ’s message of loving our enemies cannot be twisted to fit nicely alongside “shooting our enemies in the face,” and I think it’s about time we stopped pretending otherwise.

[Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting there isn't a difficult conversation to be had about the role of the state in enacting justice. There is, and we can no more point to Jesus' teachings and pretend that settles it in one direction than we can point to Romans 13 and pretend that settles it in the other. My issue is rather the way we ignore Jesus' teachings altogether and act as if they pose no challenge to our assumptions about war and state violence.]

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For another way of reading Romans 13, see this appendix to Jesus for President.

on Women, War & Peace

12/10/2011
Nonviolence, War & Peace
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“In today’s wars the primary victims are women and children”

For the next fours days, PBS will be airing Women, War & Peace.

The issues raised in this documentary are incredibly important, but I warn you ahead of time that the trailer is not easy to watch.


You can also find an extended trailer here, and a powerful behind the scenes discussion with narrator Matt Damon here.

Let us no longer claim ignorance, let us no longer be silent.

in which we have no “Pro-Life” Party.

22/09/2011
Justice, Nonviolence, Uncategorized, War & Peace
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Last night I shut off my computer after the stay of execution for Troy Davis, thinking there would be days or weeks for the state to reconsider. When I woke I found that wasn’t the case.

Honestly I don’t have that much to say this morning, except this.

When the leaders of one party champion the death penalty (even loudly cheering for it at debates), are in large part pro-war, and frequently advocate cutting back on care for the poor and uninsured, while leaders of the other party mourn these injustices all while ignoring the horrors of the thousands of abortions performed each year, then our nation does not have a political party with any right whatsoever to call itself “Pro-Life.”

As Davis said before his execution, “May God have mercy on our souls.”

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For further reading: 
Eugene Cho with “Who Would Jesus Execute?”
David Henson “The State Killed Two Men Last Night” (HT: Kurt Willems)
The Atlantic “The Death of Troy Davis“
Daniel Kirk on Evangelicals and “Redeeming Grace”
N.T. Wright with “American Christians and the Death Penalty.”

Myth | History | and the Crusades

02/09/2011
Crusade, Just War, Nonviolence, Propaganda, Teachings of Jesus, War & Peace
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A post entitled Four Myths About the Crusades (inspired by this essay) has been getting a fair bit of attention recently.

That’s not surprising, particularly as the Crusades have become wrapped up with the ways we do (or don’t) talk about the our wars in the Middle East, and the upcoming anniversary of 9-11.

Those four myths?

The Crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians, Western Christians went on Crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims, Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda, and the Crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

The essay has a noticeable ideological slant, but the argument boils down to this – The Crusades were a justified response to reclaim lands lost to centuries of unprovoked Islamic aggression, which people participated in for pious and honorable reasons.

Now each of his points have some truth to them, it’s truly not as cut and dry as those “myths” suppose. There is more to that story though, both sides of it. And the essay, while helpful to a point, also stands to be critiqued.

However, I’ll leave that to someone more qualified. Today I simply want to pose a question about the third “myth.”

Myth # 3: Crusaders Were a Cynical Lot Who Did Not Really Believer Their Own Religious Propaganda

So here is my question. In what world is proving this to be a myth somehow going to improve the image of the Crusades?

Are you actually saying it’s better if they bought into their religious propaganda?

It’s better if they believed the propaganda which used the name of the Jesus, who taught us to lay down the sword, as an idol to justify murder and war?

It’s better if they bought into propaganda that used the cry of “God wills it” as peasants and knights from Europe strove to gain the remission of all their sins by taking the lives of the very enemies Christ called us to love?

If anything this essay is proving the very point it challenges, that any religious war is inherently unjust, abhorrent, and even blasphemous against the very “faith” it exploits.

I’m continually astounded by our attempts to somehow justify that dark stain on the Church’s history, but if you would like to justify it, insisting that the Crusaders thought they were faithfully following the will of God doesn’t seem to be the way to go.

That truth is far worse than the “myth.”

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