Seeds Will Grow

In recent months, I have had many conversations with white, American, Evangelical Christians about these themes, and I’ve begun to realize something. The culture of white American Christianity tends toward individualism and tends not to talk or think critically about power relationships. It seemed to me that an inability to recognize dynamics of power and control in relationships and systems was connected to a sense of apathy or disengagement in justice work and peacebuilding. That realization led me to want to learn more about the relationship between power and peacebuilding. I turned to theologian Walter Wink’s book entitled The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium.

After extensive introduction to “the powers,” Walter Wink describes how Jesus challenges oppressive powers in a transformative, nonviolent way. I agree that this way of Jesus is central responsibility of the Church and grieve when I see the Church abandon this way for myriad reasons.

In the following excerpts, taken from chapters 7 and 8 of his book, Wink gives tangible examples of how nonviolence has worked in personal, community, institutional, and national practice, and he challenges Christians and Church leadership to make training in Jesus’ nonviolent way central to discipleship and Christian living. I dream of a world where the Church, as an institution and individual members, is known for living Jesus’ way of peace.

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Nonviolence as Christian Vocation

Just-war theory misinterpreted “Do not resist an evildoer” (Matt. 5:39) as meaning nonresistance. In an earlier chapter I tried to demonstrate the error of this interpretation [see: https://www.lutheranpeace.org/…/transcript-of-walter…/ ].

Jesus did not teach nonresistance; rather he disavowed violent resistance in favor of nonviolent resistance. Of course Christians must resist evil! No decent human being could conceivably stand by and watch innocents suffer without trying to do, or at least wishing to do something to save them. The question is one of means.

Likewise, Christians are not forbidden by Jesus to engage in self-defense. But they are to do so nonviolently. Jesus did not teach supine passivity in the face of evil. That was precisely what he was attempting to overcome!

Pacifism, in its Christian forms, has often been based on the same misinterpretation of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:38-41. These interpreters have also understood Jesus to be commanding nonresistance rather than nonviolence. Consequently, some pacifists have refused to engage in nonviolent direct action or civil disobedience on the ground that such actions are coercive. Hence the confusion between “pacifism” and “passivism” has not been completely unfounded.

Jesus’ third way is coercive insofar as it forces oppressors to make choices they would rather not make. But it is nonlethal, the great advantage of which is that if we have chosen a mistaken course, our opponents are still alive to benefit from our apologies. The same exegesis that undermines the scriptural basis for traditional just-war theory also erodes the foundation of non-resistant pacifism. Jesus’ teaching carries us beyond just war AND pacifism, to a militant nonviolence that actualizes in the present the ethos of God’s domination-free future…

Christians today can no longer regard war as an extension of policy; it is rather a dangerous anachronism, destined for oblivion in the new, nonviolent order of God…

The church’s own witness should be understandable by the smallest child: we oppose violence in all its forms. And we do so because we reject domination. That means, the child will recognize, no abuse or beatings. That means, women will hear, no rape or violation or battering. That means, men will come to understand, no more male supremacy or war. That means, everyone will realize, no more degradation of the environment.

We can affirm nonviolence without reservation because nonviolence is the way God’s domination-free order is coming…

What If-?

Sorting out our answer to the what if-questions [of our response to experiencing violence] is more complex than many realize. Gandhi, known for nonviolence if anyone is, repeated again and again that it is always better to be violent than cowardly. His own position was clear: he could never resort to violence, but if someone had not reached that level of spiritual awareness, Gandhi said, then that person should do what he or she is ready for. “If you have a sword in your bosom, take it out and use it.”

Most assailants work from a definite set of expectations about how the victim will respond, says nonviolence theorist Angie O’Gorman, and they need the victim to act as a victim. A response of violence, hostility, panic, or helplessness reinforces the assailant’s expectations It confirms his self-confidence and sense of control. And it tends to increase cruelty within an already hostile person. Assailants know how to play this game. They can handle what they are prepared for. Using violent resistance to resolve the situation is limiting oneself to the rules of the game as laid down by the assailant.

Provoking a sense of wonder, by contrast, tends to diffuse hostility. It seems to be nearly impossible for the human psyche to be in a state of wonder and a state of cruelty at the same time. Wonder can create what O’Gorman calls a ‘context of conversion.’ When the victim focuses on what causes wonder, a desire to imitate tends to occur in the assailant that creates a counter-impulse incompatible with violence.

In The Universe Bends Toward Justice, O’Gorman describes being awakened late one night by a man kicking open the door to her bedroom. The house was empty. The phone was downstairs.

“He was somewhat verbally abusive as he walked over to my bed. I could not find his eyes in the darkness but could see the outlines of his form. As I lay there, feeling a fear and vulnerability I had never before experienced, several thoughts ran through my head–all in a matter of seconds.

The first was the uselessness of screaming. The second was the fallacy of thinking safety depends on having a gun hidden under your pillow. Somehow I could not imagine this man standing patiently while I reached under my pillow for my gun. The third thought, I believe, saved my life. I realized with a certain clarity that either he and I made it through this situation safely–together–or we would both be damaged. Our safety was connected. If he raped me, I would be hurt both physically and emotionally. If he raped me he would be hurt as well. If he went to prison, the damage would be greater. That thought disarmed me. It freed me from my own desire to lash out and at the same time from my own paralysis. It did not free me from feelings of fear but from fear’s control over my ability to respond.

I found myself acting out of a concern for both our safety which caused me to react with a certain firmness but with surprisingly little hostility in my voice.

I asked him what time it was. He answered. That was a good sign. I commented that his watch and the clock on my night table had different times. His said 2:30, mine said 2:45. I had just set mine. I hoped his watch wasn’t broken. When had he last set it? He answered. I answered. The time seemed endless. When the atmosphere began to calm a little I asked him how he had gotten into the house. He’d broken through the glass in the back door. I told him that presented me with a problem as I did not have the money to buy new glass. He talked about some financial difficulties of his own. We talked until we were no longer strangers and I felt it was safe to ask him to leave. He didn’t want to; said he had no place to go. Knowing I did not have the physical power to force him out I told him firmly but respectfully, as equal to equal, I would give him a clean set of sheets but he would have to make his own bed downstairs. He went downstairs and I sat up in bed, wide awake and shaking for the rest of the night. The next morning we ate breakfast together and he left.”

By treating her intruder as a human being, O’Gorman caught him off guard. Conversation defused his violence. Through the effects of prayer, meditation, training in nonviolence, and the experience of lesser kinds of assault, she had been able to allow a context for conversion to emerge. Such a response could come to her because she had been rehearsing nonviolence beforehand.

Wonder and surprise: what if you are a woman walking home from a supermarket on a deserted street, laden with heavy packages, and you realize that you are being followed? Here is what one woman did, according to nonviolence practitioner Dorothy Samuel. As the footsteps behind her got closer, she wheeled suddenly, smiled at the stranger who was advancing on her, handed him her packages, and said, ‘Thank God you showed up! I hate to walk alone in these streets, and these packages are so heavy.’ He escorted her home safely.

What if a gang of thugs is harassing villagers in the Philippines, and the police do nothing about it? Does one kill the thugs? Killing would excise the tumor perhaps, but develop no antibodies in the system to stop its recurrence. What could the people do? They had the numbers; they were like ants, says Niall O’Brien. They could swarm over these thugs and stop their behavior nonviolently. If they failed, someone would shoot these petty criminals and simply confirm others in their worship of the gun. So people from the churches went, a thousand strong from the entire region, to the home of a known killer, and held a Mass surrounding his house. The perpetrator was refused communion and ordered to leave the area. He surrendered all his weapons, disarmed his gang, and after talking all night, repented of his action, which it turned out, were supported by President Marcos’s army to discredit the real guerillas.

What if the American revolutionaries had continued to face the British with the tactics of refusal to pay taxes, noncooperation, and nonviolent resistance? The Americans were largely succeeding, but misread the reluctance of the British to make concessions as defeat, when in fact the revolutionaries probably needed only to escalate the extent of their struggle. Had they persevered rather than resorting to military action (it also failed to win immediate results), they would surely have prevailed, for Britain was incapable of maintaining its American colony against any form of resolute resistance for any span of time.

Impacts of Historical Nonviolence

Lithuania provides a remarkable case of successful nonviolent national defense. Lithuanians had fought a guerrilla war against the Soviets until 1952, expecting Western aid that never came. They lost 50,000 lives, and 400,000 Lithuanians were sent to Siberia.

“After the deportations and the night of our genocide,” one Lithuanian remarked, “our people realized that armed struggle was not the way. We needed to rely on patience and nonviolence. At that point, the ‘invisible’ nonviolent struggle began.”

Despite the threat of Soviet military force, leaders from the top down, including the Catholic church, urged the people to remain nonviolent and to maintain a spirit of love. The movie Gandhi was widely viewed and highly influential. The Lithuanian Department of Defense went some distance in committing itself to a policy of nonviolent national defense against the Soviet Union, and the faculty of the Police Academy explored nonviolence with Captain Charles Alphin, a black policeman from St. Louis who teaches nonviolence to police forces. Peace activists Gene Sharp, Richard Deats, and Robert L. Holmes actively consulted with the Lithuanian government as it raced against time to devise a comprehensive nonviolent defense–a defense that worked when in 1991 the three Baltic states won their independence.

The brutalities of the Nazis stand for many people as the ultimate refutation of nonviolence. Surely, they reason, only violence could have stopped Hitler. The facts indicate just the opposite. Nonviolence did work whenever it was tried against the Nazis.

Bulgaria’s Orthodox Bishop Kiril told Nazi authorities that if they attempted to deport Bulgarian Jews to concentration camps, he himself would lead a campaign of civil disobedience, lying down on the railroad tracks in front of the trains. Thousands of Bulgarian Jews and non-Jews resisted all collaboration with Nazi decrees. They marched in mass street demonstrations and sent a flood of letters and telegrams to authorities protesting all anti-Jewish measures. Bulgarian clergy and laity hid Jews. Christian ministers accepted large numbers of Jewish “converts,” making it clear that this was a trick to evade arrest and that they would not consider the “vows” binding. Nonviolence strategists Ron Sider and Richard K. Taylor comment, “Because of these and other non-military measures, all of Bulgaria’s Jewish citizens were saved from the Nazi death camps.”

Finland saved all but six of its Jewish citizens from death camps through non-military means.

Of 7,000 Danish Jews, 6,500 escaped to Sweden, aided by virtually the whole population and tips from within the German occupation force itself. Almost all the rest were hidden safely for the balance of the war.

Denmark’s resistance was so effective that Adolf Eichmann had to admit that the action against the Jews of Denmark had been a failure.

The Norwegian underground helped spirit 900 Jews to safety in Sweden, but another 756 were killed, all but 20 in Nazi death camps.

German wives of Jews demonstrated in Berlin on behalf of their husbands in the midst of the war, and secured their release for its duration.

In Italy, a large percentage of Jews survived because officials and citizens sabotaged efforts to hand them over to the Germans.

During the Nazi occupation of Holland, a general strike by all rail workers practically paralyzed traffic from November 1944 until liberation in May 1945–this despite extreme privation to the people, who held out all winter without heat and with dwindling food supplies. Similar resistance in Norway prevented Vidkun Quisling, Hitler’s representative, from imposing a fascist “corporative state” on the country.

The tragedy is that even though nonviolence did work when used against the Nazis, it was used too seldom. The Jews themselves did not use it, but continued to rely in the main on the passive nonresistance that had carried them through so many pogroms in the past. And the churches as a whole were too docile or anti-Semitic, and too ignorant of the nonviolent message of the gospel, to act effectively to resist the Nazis. Because the churches had failed to train members in nonviolent resistance, no alternative to violence was available.

German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the death plot against Hitler must be seen against the backdrop of the churches’ ignorance of its own nonviolent message. He joined the plot to assassinate Hitler in the absence of any nonviolent options. But he never attempted to justify his involvement as right. He insisted that his act was a sin, and threw himself on the mercy of God.

Two generations of Christians have held back from full commitment to nonviolence, citing Bonhoeffer as justification. I wonder if he would have joined the death plot had he known that it would have the effect of condoning redemptive violence in the eyes of so many Christians.

But there are situations that are simply tragic, where nothing we can conceive of doing will help. In such cases, the violent and the nonviolent alike are forced to suffer the agony of irrelevance–and may themselves be among the victims.

The problem with war or violence as a last resort is that we may be less likely to look to God for a way through if we have already settled in advance that violence is an option. Faith requires at times marching into the waters before they part (Josh. 3:15-16). Those who have not committed themselves to nonviolence in advance and under all circumstances are less likely to discover the creative option in the desperate urgency of a crisis. They are already groping for the trigger, just when they should have been praying and improvising. It may be that only an unconditional renunciation of violence can concentrate our minds sufficiently to find a nonviolent response when the crisis comes.

Nonviolence as Discipleship and Practice

As Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Charles McCarthy observes, our capacity to discover creative nonviolent responses in moments of crisis will depend, to some degree at least, on whether we rehearse them in our everyday lives. If we live in the spirit of nonviolent Christian love in the little things, then in the great things we will be more likely to have something to call upon, something unexpected. But if we have not rehearsed responding in ways consistent with Jesus’ spirit, then the crisis triggers old and dark images of threat, fear, anger, and retaliation.

Here is a story that catches the exact moment when a homeless man was able to cross the divide between violence and nonviolence, where the old lust for revenge contends with the new vision of nonretaliation. It’s told by Janet Wolf, a United Methodist pastor in Nashville.

“We have a Bible study during the middle of the week and we try to use it as a time both to hold each other and hold each other accountable. I mean, how have we done in living this stuff out. And John came in one night. He’s homeless, as are a number of the folks in our congregation. And he said, all right, I’m gonna tell this story on myself before anyone else tells it… You all know I’ve been trying to turn my life around and it’s not been easy. What you don’t know probably is how bad I was. I mean, I was so bad I had all the cars and the women and the money and the power that any one person could want. I was so bad that when I walked down the street folks crossed to the other side just to get out of my way.

I’m trying to turn my life around and my life’s gotten worse. Last night I spent the night at the Mission–nowhere else to go. I wake up this morning and someone has stolen my shoes. You all hear what I’m talkin’ about? Somebody stole my shoes… So I get my knife out. I hadn’t given up that part of my old life yet. It’s a big knife and everybody there knows that I’ve used it before and I just might use it again. I get out my knife and I’m walking down all those tables ’cause I mean to get my shoes back.

And Jim starts hollering from the other side of the room: ‘You ‘member what we talked about in Bible study ’bout if they take your cloak and you got another give ’em that one, too. John, put down that knife. They took your shoes; give ’em your socks.’

And I tell ’em, ‘Huh-uh, I’m not given ’em my socks. I want my shoes. And I go up and down there with my knife and I mean to get my shoes.’

And Jim keeps hollering and he hollers and he hollers, ‘Put down that knife; give ’em your socks.’

So I folded up my knife, slowly, but I folded it up. I put it in my pocket. I walked barefoot to the Service Center this morning. I begged another pair of shoes. Damn, if it isn’t hard to live this stuff out.”

John at least took this new talk of nonviolence seriously, and was trying to learn to live it. But the churches seldom even consider it, much less making it a central part of their message and practice. The church’s failure to do so is not just a lapse of faithfulness to the gospel; it literally costs people their lives.

Church Inaction Costs Lives

In Nicaragua, for example, the revolution against the dictator Somoza took twenty thousand lives. But violent revolt there was not inevitable. Miguel D’Escoto, the Sandinista foreign minister and a Roman Catholic priest, tells why:

“Eight years before the insurrection, after the earthquake, I talked to the archbishop. And I said, ‘Archbishop, don’t you see how this is going to explode?’

To me it seemed inevitable that sooner or later in spite of the great patience of our people–everything human is limited–that patience would run out.

I said, ‘Bishop, it is going to be terrible, there will be so many dead people, so much destruction and death. Why don’t we go into the streets? You lead us, armed with the rosary in our hands and prayers on our lips and chants and songs in repudiation for what has been done to our people. The worst that can happen to us is the best, to share with Christ in the cross if they shoot us.

If they do not shoot us, there will be a consciousness aroused internationally. And maybe the people in the United States will be alerted and will pressure their government so that it won’t support Somoza, and then maybe we can be freed without the destruction that I see ahead.’

And the Archbishop said, ‘No Miguel, you tend to be a little bit idealistic, and this destruction is not going to happen.’

And then when it did happen, the church insisted on nonviolence.

To be very frank with you, I don’t think that violence is Christian. Some may say that this is a reactionary position. But I think that the very essence of Christianity is the cross. It is through the cross that we will change.

I have come to believe that creative nonviolence has to be a constitutive element of evangelization and of the proclamation of the gospel. But in Nicaragua nonviolence was never included in the process of evangelization.

The cancer of oppression and injustice and crime and exploitation was allowed to grow, and finally the people had to fight with the means available to them, the only means that people have found from old: armed struggle. Then the church arrogantly said violence was bad, nonviolence was the correct way.

I don’t believe that nonviolence is something you can arrive at rationally. [Scholar Erica Chenoweth disagrees with this priest–she came to nonviolence through reason.] We can develop it as a spirituality and can obtain the grace necessary to practice it, but not as a result of reason. Not that it is anti-reason, but that it is not natural. The natural thing to do when somebody hits you is to hit them back.

We are called upon to be supernatural. We reach that way of being, not as a result of nature, but of prayer. But that spirituality and prayer and work with people’s consciences has never been done. We have no right to hope to harvest what we have not sown.“

When an oppressive regime has squandered every opportunity to do justice, and the capacity of the people to continue suffering snaps, then the violence visited on the nation is a kind of apocalyptic judgment.

In such a time, Christians have no business judging those who take up violence out of desperation. The guilt lies with those who turned justice aside and did not know the hour of their visitation. But while the church must sincerely wish the revolutionaries success, it has no business legitimizing the violence of war. And the church itself must bear a large share of responsibility for having taught a gospel of docility and compliance instead of evangelizing people in the way of nonviolent transformation.

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Read more from The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium.

Or, to grow in your understanding of Jesus’ nonviolence and how it inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., pick up a biblical commentary that looks at the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke through the eyes of nonviolence: The Gospel of Peace.

Or, listen to a podcast about the Nonviolence of Jesus.