Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination by Walter Wink

Author:Walter Wink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-06-29T03:13:00+00:00

11. Beyond Just War

and Pacifism

Early Christian Nonviolence

The new reality Jesus proclaimed was nonviolent. That much is clear, not just from the Sermon on the Mount, but from his entire life and teaching and, above all, the way he faced his death. His was not merely a tactical or pragmatic nonviolence seized upon because nothing else would have "worked" against the Roman Empire's near monopoly on violence. Rather, he saw nonviolence as a direct corollary of the nature of God and of the new reality emerging in the world from God. In a verse quoted more than any other from the New Testament during the church's first four centuries, Jesus taught that God loves everyone, and values all, even those who make themselves God's enemies. We are therefore to do likewise (Matt. 5:45; cf. Luke 6:35). The reign of God, the peaceable kingdom, is (despite the monarchical terms) an order in which the inequity, violence, and domination characteristic of androcratic societies are superseded. Thus nonviolence is not just a means to the kingdom of God; it is a quality of the kingdom itself. Those who live nonviolently are already manifesting the transformed reality of the divine order now, even under the conditions of the Domination System.

The idea of nonviolent resistance was not new. The Hebrew midwives, the Greek tragedians, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Lao-tzu, and Judaism were all to various degrees conversant with nonviolence as a way of life and, in some cases, even as a tactic of social change. What was new was the early church's inference from Jesus' teaching that nonviolence is the only way, that war itself must be renounced. The idea of peace and the more general rejection of violence can be found before Christianity and in other cultures, says Peter Brock, but nowhere else do we find practical antimilitarism leading to the refusal of military service.'

Early Christian statements against war are ubiquitous.' Justin Martyr is representative when he declares, "We who once killed each other not only do not make war on each other, but in order not to lie or deceive our inquisitors we gladly die for the confession of Christ."4 "For we no longer take up 'sword against nation,' " wrote Origen, "nor do we `learn war any more,' having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus."5 Tertullian was, if anything, more adamant: Christ, "in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier." "But how will a Christian man war," he asks, "nay, how will he serve [as a soldier] even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away. The pagan Celsus attacked Christians for disloyalty to the empire, since they refused to serve in the army. If everyone behaved as Christians did, he charged, the empire would be ruined-unmistakable evidence that the teaching of the early theologians was representative of actual practice.'

No one disagrees that the early church denounced war. For three centuries, Christians were virtually unanimous in denouncing Christian participation in battle.8 Such data as we have indicate that involvement in the army even in peacetime was problematic.

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