I just finished a short but powerful book by Ronald Sider,
Christ and Violence. Here are some of the better quotes from this book.
Pg. 24
[Jesus] informed Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world in one specific regard – namely that His
followers did not use violence (John 18:36).
Obviously He did not mean that the messianic kingdom He had inaugurated
had nothing to do with the earth. That would
have contradicted His central announcement of the eschatological Jubilee which
He expected His followers to begin living.
But He did mean that He would not establish His kingdom by the sword.
To a people so oppressed by foreign conquerors that repeatedly over the
previous two centuries they had resorted to violent rebellion, Jesus gave the
unprecedented command: “Love your enemies.”
Pg. 25
Jesus’ way is entirely different. For
the members of Jesus’ beginning messianic kingdom, neighbor love must extend
beyond the limited circle of the people of Israel, beyond the limited circle of
the new people of God! All people
everywhere are neighbors to Jesus’ followers and therefore are to be actively
loved. And that even extends to enemies
– even violent oppressive foreign conquerors!
It is exegetically impossible to follow [Martin] Luther’s two kingdom analysis
and restrict the application of these verses on love of enemies to some
personal sphere and deny their application to violence in the public sphere.
As Eduard Schweitzer says in his commentary on Matthew, “There is not the slightest
hint of any realm where the disciple is not bound by the words of Jesus.”
Pg. 27
The radical, costly character of Jesus’ call for love toward enemies certainly
tempts us to decisively weaken Jesus’ message by labeling it an impossible
ideal, relegating it to the millennium, or limiting its application of personal
relationships. But that is to misread
both the text and the concrete historical context in which Jesus lived and
spoke. In his original setting, Jesus
advocated love toward enemies as His specific political response to centuries
of violence and to the contemporary Zealot’s call for violent revolution. And He spoke as one who claimed to be the
Messiah of Israel. His messianic kingdom
was already breaking into the present, and therefore His disciples should and
could live out the values of the New Age.
To be sure, He did not say that one should practice loving nonviolence because
it would always instantly transform enemies into bosom friends. The cross stands as a harsh reminder that
love for enemies does not always work – at least in the short run.
Pg. 30
It was the resurrection which convinced the discouraged disciples that in spite
of the cross, Jesus’ claims and His announcement of the messianic kingdom were
still valid.
Pg. 34
Because Jesus commanded His followers to love their enemies and then died as
the incarnate Son to demonstrate that God reconciles His enemies by suffering
love, any rejection of the nonviolent way in human relations involves a
heretical doctrine of the atonement. If
God in Christ reconciled His enemies by suffering servanthood, then those who
want to follow Christ faithfully, dare not treat their enemies in any other
way.
It is a tragedy of our time that many of those who appropriate the biblical
understanding of Christ’s vicarious cross fail to see its direct implications
for the problem of war and violence. And
it is equally tragic that some of those who most emphasize pacifism and
nonviolence fail to ground it in Christ’s vicarious atonement…
Certainly the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world was a
unique element of His cross that could never be repeated. But that fact never
prevented the New Testament authors from discerning in the cross a decisive
ethical clue for the Christian’s approach to opponents and enemies, indeed even
friends, spouses, and fellow members of Christ’s body.
Pg. 38
In every strand of New Testament literature and with reference to every kind of
situation (whether family, church, state, or employment), the way of the cross
applies. Jesus’ cross, where He
practiced what He had preached about love for one’s enemies, becomes the
Christian norm for every area of life.
Only if one holds biblical authority to irrelevant that one can ignore
explicit, regularly repeated scriptural teaching; only if one so disregards
Christ’s atonement that one rejects God’s way of dealing with enemies; only
then can one forsake the cross for the sword.
To be sure, church history is a sad story of Christians doing precisely
that. After the first three centuries
when almost all Christians refused to participate in warfare, Christians
repeatedly invented ways to justify violence.
And each of us if we think honestly about the costly implications of suffering
servanthood, will understand within ourselves how temptingly plausible it is to
consider Jesus’ nonviolent way in an impossible ideal, a utopian vision
practiced only in the millennium, or some idealistic teaching intended only for
personal relationships. But if one recalls Jesus’ historical context, one
simply cannot assert that this is what Jesus Himself meant. Claiming to be their Messiah, He came to an
oppressed people ready to use violence to drive out their oppressors. But He advocated love for enemies as God’s
method for ushering in the coming Kingdom.
And He submitted to Roman crucifixion to reconcile His enemies.
Pg. 44
I think activist nonviolence rather than nonresistance is the more faithful
application of the New Testament teaching.
Pg. 45
Lethal violence is different. When one
kills another person, one treats him as a thing, not a person. Hence Jesus’ teaching excludes lethal
violence as an acceptable option for Christians.
Pg. 47
Indeed, one should love one’s enemies, even at great personal cost. The good of the other person, not one’s own
needs or rights, are decisive.
Pg. 48
Thus Jesus’ saying is compatible with the use of economic, legal, or political
power to oppose evil as long as love for the oppressor as well as the oppressed
is both the means and the end.
Pg. 55
This eschatological hope for the restoration of the whole of creation including
the principalities and powers underlines the fact that the Christian dare not
choose between a creation ethic and a kingdom ethic.
Pg. 57
To announce Christ’s lordship to the principalities and powers is to tell
governments that they are not sovereign…
Again, it is clear that merely to
witness in a biblical way to the principalities and powers is to engage in
dangerous, subversive political activity.
But is that all we are to do? Is it correct to say that we should witness to
the state and other principalities and powers but not take the offensive
against them? I think not. I doubt that the absence of offensive weapons
in Ephesians 6:10-20 means that we are merely to defend ourselves against the
powers. Everyone agrees that we are to
witness boldly to the powers. But surely
that is an offensive act, not a defensive one.
One can take the offensive with words just as much as with actions. Ephesians 6 calls us to arm ourselves with
the truth, with the gospel, and with the Word of God. The kind of words we are summoned to speak to
the powers surely involves taking the offensive unless one wrongly supposes
that bold proclamation is merely a defensive approach.
Pg. 59
In reference to Romans 13
Neither Jesus nor the early church ever supposed that to be subject to
government meant to obey its every command.
Jesus and the apostles knew that whenever government commanded what was
contrary to God’s command, it must be disobeyed. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)
was their working principle. But even in
their refusal to obey, even in their civil disobedience, they continued to be
subject to government. They did not
rebel. They did not take up the sword to
overthrow government. On the other hand,
when government commanded things contrary to God’s will they regularly refused
to obey, and then accepted the penalty for their disobedience.
Pg. 60
We should resist the evils promoted or perpetuated by governments. We dare not rebel against government and cast
off its authority. We can and should try
to make our government – no matter how good or bad it is – more just. We dare not – however unjust it may be – try
to destroy it. We can engage in
political lobbying, voter power, economic boycott, political demonstration,
civil disobedience, tax refusal, even total noncooperation and still be subject
to our government. As long as the
methods are those of loving nonviolence, as long as we refuse to consider the
oppressor an enemy, as long as we submissively reject rebellion and instead
respectfully accept the penalties that are imposed, we remain subject to
government. Scripture commands us always
to be subject to government. It does not
command us to obey without condition.
And wholehearted subjection to government is fully compatible with the
most vigorous nonviolent resistance to governmental injustice because the goal
is not rebellion but improvement of the government to which was are subject
precisely as we resist.
Pg. 63
Precisely as we plunge deeper into the centers of power of secular society, we
will need even more urgently to strengthen the church as a counterculture of
Christians whose visible commitment to the radical values of Jesus’ new kingdom
is so uncompromising that the church’s very existence represents a fundamental
challenge to surrounding society. Unless
we are based in that kind of kingdom counterculture, our movement into society
will be useless because we will merely become one more empty echo of an unjust
status quo. But that need not happen if we maintain the sharp biblical
distinction between the church and the world and if our primary identity and
allegiance remains with Jesus’ new community of believers.
Pg. 67
Probably few people reading this book will have killed another person. Many would choose going to jail rather than
going to war. But joining the army is
not the only way to participate in murder.
Established economic structures can destroy people by the millions. Slavery did that. Child labor did that. Both were as legal as they were lethal. Legal structures can be violent. Therefore we must face a very painful question:
Do we participate in economic structures that help destroy millions of people
each year?
Pg. 68
Not even the Dominicans who work on the sugar plantations have profited. The sugar plantation workers earned less in
real wages in 1978 than they did in 1968 – in part because the Dominican
government installed by U.S. marines have destroyed the cane cutters’ labor union. The U.S. has invested more money per capita
for police training in the Dominican Republic than in any other Latin American
country. And those police have made
widespread use of torture to suppress any opposition to the dictatorship which
ruled for over a decade. Fortunately
that government was replaced in 1978, thanks in part to President Carter’s
vigorous support of the results of an election which the armed forces wanted to
annul. But that former government has
made it possible for Gulf and Western to use a vast part of the country’s best
land to grow sugar for you and me at a handsome profit to the company.
Now who is responsible for the thousands of Dominican children who die each
year of malnutrition? Just the top
leaders at Gulf and Western? Just the
Dominican Republic’s elite who profit by cooperatin with Gulf and Western? Or are you and I also implicated?
Jacques Ellul has pointed out that unjust economic systems can be as violent as
rampaging armies: “I maintain that all
kinds of violence are the same... the violence of the soldier who kills, the
revolutionary who assassinates; it is true also of economic violence – the
violence of the privileged proprietor against his workers, of the ‘haves’
against the ‘have-nots;’ the violence done in international and economic
relations between our societies and those of the third world; the violence done
through powerful coporations which exploit the resources of a country that is
unable to defend itself.” One can only
agree with James Douglass:
“In the contemporary world of affluence and poverty, where man’s major crime is
murder by privilege, revolution against the established order is the criterion
of a living faith. ‘Truly I say to you,
as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me’ (Matt.
25:45). The murder of Christ
continues. Great societies build on
dying men.”
Unfortunately it is not true that our society’s wealth is simply the result of
God’s blessing and hard work. To a
significant extent, our affluence depends on unjust economic structures that
make us rich and Latin Americans hungry.
Fully one half of all the cultivable land in Central America is used to
grow export crops (sugar, coffee, bananas, flowers, and the like) to sell to
the U.S., Canada, and other rich nations.
That land ought to be used to grow food for the masses in Central
America where 60 percent of the children die of malnutrition before they are
five years old. But it is used to grow
sugar and coffee and bananas for North Americans because we can pay for it and
the starving children’s parents cannot.
Pg. 70
There is an important difference between consciously willed, individual acts
(like lying to a friend or committing an act of adultery) and participation in
evil social structures. Slavery is an
example of the later. So is the
Victorian factory system where ten-year-old children worked twelve to sixteen
hours a day. Although both slavery and
child labor were legal, they destroyed people by the millions. They represent institutionalized violence or
structural evil. Tragically, most
Christians seem to be more concerned with individual sinful acts than with
participation in violent social structures.
But the Bible condemns both. Speaking
through His prophet Amos in Amos Chapter 2, the Lord declared,
6 This is what the Lord says:
“For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not relent.
They sell the innocent for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
7 They trample on the heads of the poor
as on the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.
Father and son use the same girl
and so profane my holy name.
Biblical scholars have shown that some kind of legal fiction underlies the
phrase “selling the needy for a pair of sandals.” This mistreatment of the poor was legal!
In one breath God condemns both adultery and legalized oppression of the
poor. Sexual sins and economic injustice
are equally displeasing to God.
Some young activists have supposed that as long as they were fighting for the
rights of minorities and opposing militarism, they were morally righteous
regardless of how often they shacked up for the night with a guy or a girl in
the movement. Some of their elders, on
the other hand have supposed that because they did not lie, steal, and
fornicate, they were morally upright even though they lived in segregated
communities and owned stock in companies that exploit the poor of the earth.
God however, has shown that robbing one’s workers of a fair wage is just as
sinful as robbing a bank.
God clearly revealed that laws themselves are sometimes an abomination to him.
Psalm 94
20 Can a corrupt throne be allied with you—
a throne that brings on misery by its decrees?
21 The wicked band together against the righteous
and condemn the innocent to death.
22 But the Lord has become my fortress,
and my God the rock in whom I take refuge.
23 He will repay them for their sins
and destroy them for their wickedness;
the Lord our God will destroy them.
pg. 72
God proclaims the same word through the prophet Isaiah:
Isaiah 10:1-4
Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
2 to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.
3 What will you do on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your riches?
4 Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives
or fall among the slain.
Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.
There is one other aspect to institutionalized violence or structural evil
which makes it especially pernicious. It
is so subtle that one can be ensnared almost without realizing it.
God inspired His prophet Amos to utter some of the harshest words in Scripture
against the cultured, kind, upper-class women of his day:
Amos 4:1-2
Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria,
you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy
and say to your husbands, “Bring us some drinks!”
2 The Sovereign Lord has sworn by his
holiness:
“The time will surely come
when you will be taken away with hooks,
the last of you with fishhooks.
The women involved probably had no contact with the impoverished peasants. They
may never have realized clearly that their gorgeous clothes and spirited
parties were possible only because of
the seat and tears of toiling peasants.
In fact, they may even have been kind to individual peasants they
met. (Perhaps they gave them “Christmas
baskets” – once year). But God called these privileged women cows
because they profited from structural evil.
Hence they were personally and individually guilty before God.
We must conclude, I think, that if we are members of a privileged class that
profits from structural violence and if we do nothing to try to change things,
then we stand guilty before God.
Structural evil is just as sinful as personal evil. And it hurts more people and is more subtle.
Pg.
76
We are all implicated in structural evil.
The patterns of international trade are unjust. An affluent minority devours most of the
earth’s nonrenewable natural resources.
And the food consumption patterns in the world are grossly
lopsided. Every North American benefits
from these structural injustices. Unless
you have retreated to some isolated valley and grow or make everything you use,
you participate in unjust structures which contribute directly to the hunger of
a billion unhappy neighbors.
But that is not God’s last word to us. If there were no hope of forgiveness,
admission of our complicity in guilt of this magnitude would be an act of
despair. But there is hope – if we
repent.
Pg. 77
We need change at three levels: 1) our personal lifestyles, 2) the church, and
3) secular society. In each case, the
goal is peacemaking… First we need to pursue simpler personal lifestyles. As the Catholic saint, Elizabeth Seton, has
said, “The rich must live more simply that the poor may simply life.”
Pg. 79
It is a farce to ask Washington to legislate what the church refuses to live.
The church should consist of communities of loving defiance. Instead it consists largely of comfortable
clubs of conformity. A far-reaching
reformation of the church is a prerequisite if the church today is to commit
itself to Jesus’ mission of liberating the oppressed.
The God of the Bible is calling Christians today to live in fundamental
nonconformity to contemporary society.
Affluent North American society is obsessed with materialism, sex,
economic success and military might.
Things are more important than persons.
Job security and an annual salary increase matter more than starving
children and oppressed peasants. Paul’s warning
to the Romans is especially pertinent today: “Don’t let the world squeeze you
into its own mold” (Romans 12:2; Phillips).
Biblical revelation summons us to defy many of the basic values of our
materialistic adulterous society.
Pg. 89
It is in that kind of [small group] setting – and perhaps only in that kind of
setting – that the church today will be able to forge a faithful lifestyle for
Christians in an Age of Hunger. In small
house-church settings, brothers and sisters can challenge each other’s affluent
lifestyles. They can discuss family
finances and evaluate each others’ annual budgets. Larger purchases (like houses, cars, and long
vacations) can be evaluated honestly in terms of the needs of both the
individuals involved and God’s poor around the world. Tips for simple living can be shared. Voting patterns that liberate the poor, jobs
that are ecologically responsible, charitable donations that build self-reliance
among the oppressed and direct actions campaigns that successfully challenge
unjust multinational corporations – these and many other issues can be
discuppes openly and honestly by persons who have pledged themselves to be
brothers and sisters in Christ to each other.
My second proposal on the church begins with the assumption that it is a tragic
farce for the church to ask Washington to legislate what it cannot persuade
Christians to live.
Pg. 83
The United States has trained large numbers of police who have tortured
thousands of people working for social justice in countries like Chile and
Brazil. Multinational corporations in
the United States work very closely with the repressive governments. Events in Brazil and Chile demonstrate that
the United States will support dictatorships that use torture and do little for
the poorest one half as long as those regimes are friendly to U.S. investments.
Pg. 85
Our most fundamental Christian confession is that Jesus is Lord. But He won’t be Lord of our family life and
allow radio and TV commercials to be Lord of our family budget and
multinational corporations to be Lord of our business practices. If Jesus is our Lord, then He must be Lord of
our business practices, our economic lifestyle, Lord of our entire life.
The Historical Peace Churches are a biblical people who have opposed
theological liberalism. But still I’m
afraid that we are in danger of falling into theological liberalism today. We usually think of theological liberalism in
connection with issues like the bodily resurrection and the deity of Jesus
Christ. And that is correct. Theological liberals have fallen into
terrible heresy in recent times by rejecting those basic doctrines of historic
Christianity. But notice why that
happened. Modern people became so iof impressed
with modern science that they thought they could no longer believe in the
miraculous. So they discarded the
supernatural aspects of Christianity and abandoned the resurrection and the
divinity of Christ. They allowed the
values of surrounding society rather than biblical truth to shape their
thinking and acting. That is the essence
of theological liberalism. In our time,
we are in desperate danger of repeating exactly the same mistake in the whole
area of justice and the poor. We are
allowing surrounding society rather than Scripture to shape our values and
life. Have not our economic lifestyles
and our attitudes toward the poor been shaped more by our affluent
materialistic society than by Scripture – even though the Bible says as much
about this set of issues as it does about the atonement or Christology?
If we want to escape theological liberalism, if our confession that Jesus is
Lord is genuine, then we must cast aside the secular economic values of our
materialistic society. Now I know many
of the people in our churches don’t want to do that. They don’t want to hear the Bible’s radical
call to costly discipleship. But that
simply raises in a more painful way for every church leader the basic question:
Is Jesus really our Lord?
Many pastors, Sunday school superintendents, and other church leaders agree
that we should be concerned with the poor and work for peace via justice. They are willing to talk carefully about
these things as long as the message is not too upsetting to the congregation,
as long as it does not offend potential new members and hinder church
growth. But they don’t make it clear, as
Jesus did, that we really have to choose between Jesus and Mammon. They are afraid to teach and preach the clear
biblical word that economic systems perpetrate instutionalized violence and
murder because that would offend business people. One wonders whether it is Jesus or church
growth, whether it is Jesus or vocational security, whether it is Jesus or
social acceptance who finally is our Lord.
Pg. 87
Is Jesus or surrounding society our Lord?
If we intend to follow the risen One, then I think we will discover that
He calls us to be peacemakers through economic change – through more simple
personal economic lifestyles, through more simple church lifestyles, and
through action designed to change economic systems that produce violence by
statute.
Pg. 99
I dream of a time when it will be the norm rather than the exception for our
people to authenticate our word about peace with lives of costly, nonviolent
identification with the oppressed. For
tens of thousands that will mean leaving comfortable rural or suburban surroundings
to join the poor of the earth in their struggle for justice – by making our homes
in the black or Spanish speaking inner cities, in the Appalachian Highlands, in
unjust third word settings. When tens of
thousands of our people have done their homework so they are competent to
discuss pending legislation with Senators, when tens of thousands of our people
are going to jail, when we are being tortured and getting martyred in a
nonviolent struggle for justice in the inner cities and the third world, then
we will have the right to talk about nonviolence.
Of course, not all of us should move.
For others, identifying with the oppressed will mean talking and working
against unjust structures here and abroad so persistently and single-mindedly
that our scholarly societies, our professional colleagues, our business
associates and political friends will discover that we worship the God of the
poor not success, that we will accept social disgrace, professional failure,
unemployment, even imprisonment for civil disobedience rather than forsake our
identification with the oppressed.
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