When Pennsylvania ran on Quaker principles, how did it go? Christian pacifists such as Stanley Hauerwas are too quickly brushed aside in conversations about what a good state ought to look like. This is a missed opportunity for Christians of all stripes who are seeking to live as faithful citizens amid many political temptations and confusions. For starters, Hauerwas has not called for a retreat from politics, but is rightly concerned that the dominant mode of political engagement will swallow Christian ethical commitments whole. As he likes to  quip , much as retreat might be nice, “We’re surrounded, so there’s no place to retreat to. So Christians have to engage the world in which we find ourselves.” The question is not  whether  Christians should get involved in politics, but  how  – to which Hauerwas would invariably joke: “the same way porcupines make love: very carefully.” Hauerwas admits that Christian success in politics might look like worldly loss. If a Christian somehow ends up president, he  warns , “if they do the right thing, they won’t be re-elected.” Christians must live in the awareness that faithfulness often leads to martyrdom, not political success. After all, in Revelation the saints are identified as those who conquer by means of the apparent defeat of their Lord (“the blood of the Lamb”), as well as their own apparent defeat (“the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death”). It is one such apparent defeat, Hauerwas once told me, that he considers the “only successful Christian experiment in government”: Quaker Pennsylvania. Even Christians who, like me, lack firm pacifist convictions can learn much from the efforts of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn. Originally published by Plough, used with permission https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/politics/can-a-government-be-pacifist?utm_source=Plough%20-%20English

Here in this sermon, pastor Jon Sherwood discusses the nonviolent way of the cross as seen in the life and ministry of Jesus, and its relevance in a context of Christian nationalism and violence.

Christians today can learn from WWII-era theologian K.H. Miskotte about resisting without resorting to political violence. [Christianity Today] Editor’s note: This article appeared in print before the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump. We’re publishing it online ahead of schedule given its relevance to the present moment. The US is in another presidential election that, in many ways, triggers a déjà vu of 2020—a high-water mark for political and social unrest many might wish to forget. And while we may not be living in entirely unprecedented times (as a brief review of the not-too-distant 1960s serves to remind us), our country is experiencing a rise in politically motivated violence. A 2023  study  from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found that 40 percent of both Biden and Trump supporters “at least somewhat believed the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.” In  response  to similar findings by the Public Religion Research Institute, the National Association of Evangelicals released a  statement  by evangelical leaders condemning violence as a justifiable political tool. Responses like these are welcome and helpful. It’s crucial for evangelical leaders and clergy who minister at the level of everyday life to speak and act against this alarming trend and the desperation that justifies it. Yet I believe the Spirit of Jesus has given the church more to face our present moment. Political violence isn’t just a sociopolitical problem to be denounced—it demands a fresh vision of discipleship cultivated and encouraged from the pulpit. As French theologian Jacques Ellul  wrote , “the role of the Christian in society” is to “shatter fatalities and necessities” associated with violence. Such a broad task requires a more robust vision of pastoral theology, one that rejects passivity to imagine a faithful Christian presence in a hostile sociopolitical climate. One possible source for this renewed vision is the historic witness of Kornelis Heiko Miskotte—a Dutch Reformed pastor theologian who spent the war in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Miskotte defied Adolf Hitler’s political regime and risked his life to shelter Jews in his home. But he also participated in a uniquely theological form of resistance through his writings, including a widely distributed biblical tract its editors  say  served as a kind of “anti-Nazi catechism.” Miskotte was a contemporary of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as a fellow admirer of Karl Barth. Yet his name has been relatively forgotten in history, in part because his works were not translated into English until recently. But there may be another reason for Miskotte’s obscurity compared to Bonhoeffer: He did not die for his cause. When it comes to defying Christian passivity, Christians often call on the wisdom of Bonhoeffer, who was a leading voice in the Confessing Church—a clergy movement that resisted the Nazification of Germany’s Protestant churches. Rather than flee to America, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany before the war. He was barred from lecturing and preaching and eventually joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—which led to his imprisonment and ultimate execution. Yet many today have fractured and co-opted Bonhoeffer’s legacy by lifting his biography from his theology. This distortion creates a “Bonhoeffer option”—which amounts to tacit permission to entertain political violence as a viable solution. In a  recent article  defending evangelical support for Trump, professor Mark DeVine does just that, writing, “Bonhoeffer saw civilization itself in the crosshairs of evil. So do Trumpers.” Yet German theologian Hans Ulrich, who studied under some of Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries after the war,  writes differently  than DeVine: “Bonhoeffer’s witness is not his death but his desire to fulfill the will of God.” In the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, Bonhoeffer freely welcomed God’s judgment,  writing , If one has completely renounced making something of oneself—whether it be a saint or a converted sinner or a church leader … then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God. Bonhoeffer’s decision placed him beyond the limits of ethical systems, frustrating those who would use him as moral justification for political violence. Instead, we must attend to the theology that fueled Bonhoeffer’s faith, which was born from years of wrestling with God’s will against the backdrop of everyday life—and in helping his church do likewise. Only a robust pastoral theology rooted in everyday fidelity can imagine a faithful theological resistance to evil. Biblical pastoral theology should give clergy resources to help their church members answer vital questions like “Whom do we trust?” and “In what do we hope?”—which have a profound impact as much on our everyday lives as in the most extreme moments. And as Eugene Peterson would say, a pastor’s primary job is not galvanizing congregants for a partisan cause but rather, in the words of  his biographer , “ teaching people to pray and teaching them to die a good death. ” One way pastoral theology makes this possible is by reminding people of the power of God’s Word—which brings us back to Miskotte. When his fellow Dutch citizens were faced with the costly choice of pious inaction or violent reaction, Miskotte invited them to a theologically sustained yet politically active form of resistance. This, he  believed , began with the simple yet radical act of listening: Many cry out for  action . But could it be, that the primordial action is  hearing —the hearing that arose in former times as resistance against the worldly powers, giving rise to martyrdom and a new song; a new diaconate, a new confession, and suffering and action arose. Miskotte saw that the Nazi occupation in Amsterdam yielded a surprising, fresh hunger for the Scriptures—including an outbreak of Bible study groups across occupied cities in the winter of 1940. Miskotte personally facilitated some of these underground meetings and, with his theological training, published and distributed a study guide to meet the desperate need for biblical resources. His pamphlet, titled  Biblical ABCs , took aim at the religious roots of Nazism. The primer began with the importance of God’s name, which Miskotte saw as the “cornerstone” of all “resistance” to authoritarianism and truth decay. “The more firmly we believe in the Name,” Miskotte  writes , “the more unbelieving we become toward the primordial powers of life.” Miskotte hoped that by reencountering this living God and reimagining what it means to be biblical, Dutch Christians might cultivate a “better resistance” to the Nazi occupation. In this way, Miskotte saw Christian sanctification as a form of sabotage. The God of Israel revealed in the Bible and in Jesus Christ, Miskotte  said , “is from the outset Saboteur.” Not only does Jesus destroy our manmade ideas about God and religion, but sanctification initiates us into God’s ongoing holy sabotage of our lives and the sociopolitical worlds that define them. Biblical holiness, Miskotte argued, is not just moral virtue but sanctified sabotage. In his  essay  on Miskotte’s work, theologian Philip G. Ziegler says a key to “the sanctification of the Name is active disbelief and disobedience vis-à-vis the chthonic and religious powers driving natural life.” Yet even this form of nonviolent theological resistance is often regarded as literal subversion by the political establishment—especially people whose visions of peace, justice, and greatness conflict with those of the kingdom of God. For instance, when one of Miskotte’s fellow Dutch pastors, Jan Koopmans, published a similar pamphlet  confessing , “We are Christians first, Dutch second,” the Dutch SS flagged Koopmans’s file and labeled him as a dangerous “saboteur.” Miskotte seized on that accusation and appropriated it subversively for the Dutch church. Faithful discipleship has always posed a risk to the political establishment—beginning in the first-century Roman world. To proclaim “Jesus is Lord” then was to  question  Caesar’s claim of total authority, and thus this confession was seen as an indirect sabotage and subversion of the Roman order and the violence that built it. Kornelis Heiko Miskotte Even the word  Christian  first  emerged  as a way for Roman authorities to code early believers as dangerous political agitators and enemies of the Pax Romana, or “Roman peace”—and only later did believers appropriate the term for themselves. Just as the earliest Christians’ devotion to the Jewish Messiah subverted Caesar’s sovereignty, “saboteurs” like Miskotte and the Confessing Church threatened Hitler’s supremacy in Europe. And while this makes it sound as if the Christian heritage is associated with overt political posturing and rebellion, God’s form of sabotage is ultimately not of this world—even as it remains for this world. Holy sabotage is brought about not by the power to crucify but by the power of one who was crucified. This translates into a political presence that, according to Stanley Hauerwas,  exists  “so that the world may know there is an alternative to the violence that characterizes the relations between peoples and nations.” To be Christian is to confess that Jesus alone is Lord—a God who will have no rivals, no counter-creeds, and no rogue words against the Word. This divine Saboteur does not leave us with our rage, nations, causes, or principles—all elements that prime us toward violence. Instead, he sets us apart for himself. More than that, God sets us apart  together . Whenever and wherever we gather, we become an insurgent church—a people and place where the stories and slogans of our social and political world are emptied of their power and crucified on the cross. The common life of the church is, in its very nature, a public witness to the world—an invitation to relinquish our natural, often violent methods of empire building to embrace the supernatural provision of Jesus Christ. Yet the communal mission of the church is often extinguished by times of relative peace and piety. Miskotte noticed that the Nazi occupation in Amsterdam exposed the long-standing rot of insular Dutch churches and their infighting factions. “We have the  church , and we have  individual believers ,” he said, “but we don’t have communities.” Amid the horrors of World War II, Miskotte  proclaimed  that “the pious world of so-called church life must come to an end”—and in its ruins, a new church was being birthed. In his review of  Biblical ABCs , Koopmans  spoke  of the national church’s breakdown and the revival of study groups gathering in homes, saying, “Through this War, God teaches us to ask for the Bible. … we almost don’t have a Church anymore, apart from the form in which it can be found in the Bible.” As Miskotte  wrote , “The mystery of the church is, that something happens there.” That “something” flows from a renewed hunger for the Word of God. In the same way, resisting political violence in our day requires the church to renew its identity as the community of God’s Word. The American church today is divided by allegiances to various partisan causes—leading to what feels like the collapse of our common life as Christians. We have neglected Paul’s instruction to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). And if pastoral theology is to unite the church and revive its public ministry, it must encourage congregants to be devoted to the Spirit of Jesus, not the spirit of the party. To resist political violence is not to be rebranded by another cause but to be renewed together as the body of Christ. This is our primary theological resistance against all worldly powers that would seek to divide us, claim our loyalty, or call us to arms. As Miskotte  reminds us , “the church is the church by faith in becoming the church, again and again.” Instead of the Bonhoeffer option and its anomalous permission for violence, American Christians can rediscover the wisdom of pastoral theology in Miskotte and—closer to home—similar witnesses like Martin Luther King Jr., who during the Montgomery bus boycott  instructed  participants to pray for guidance and commit yourself to  complete  non-violence in word and action as you enter the bus. … If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times. As Miskotte reminds us, Christian sanctification involves partnering in God’s holy sabotage of our world and its mechanisms of violence. The church’s prophetic task is witnessing to the peace of Christ, which reconciles and sustains the world. A restored humanity is possible only at the Cross, not by the sword. And as dissident disciples, we smuggle this subversive message as witnesses in, to, and for a hostile world that is being reconciled to God but has yet to recognize it. As sanctified saboteurs baptized into God’s life, we say boldly, “We are Christians before we are Americans,” in accordance with our primal confession that Jesus is Lord. Jared Stacy is a theologian and Christian ethicist who served for nearly a decade as a pastor to evangelical congregations in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and the Washington, DC, area. Learn more at JaredStacey.com . Originally published at Christianity Today https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/07/dutch-resistance-theologian-kh-miskotte-biblical-abcs/

“To me, nonviolence is the all-important virtue to be nourished and studied and cultivated,” Dorothy Day wrote in 1967. She regretted that she had not done more to promote nonviolence as a way of life. I think we can all do more to nourish, study, cultivate and promote nonviolence as a way of life. As a spiritual path, as the basis for people power, as a political methodology for change, and as a hermeneutic for Christian discipleship, active nonviolence is the best hope for humanity. Gandhi taught that nonviolence was the way of God, Jesus was the greatest practitioner of nonviolence in history, the Sermon on the Mount were the greatest teachings on nonviolence in history, and that the Gospel way of nonviolence holds the key for us personally, collectively and globally as a way of out of our self-destructive violence. Most of us can cite chapter and verse of the latest crisis of systemic violence. We know well the pandemic of violence around us–racism, mass incarceration, police brutality, sexism, corporate greed, starvation, homelessness, poverty, gun violence, executions, wars, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. What we can’t recite is the antidote—the methodology of active, creative nonviolence which can be applied to any and every social ill, as well as our hardened hearts, to steer us toward a most just, more peaceful, more nonviolent world. In my book  The Nonviolent Life , I propose a simple framework to nourish and cultivate nonviolence in our lives and world. Nonviolence, I submit, requires three simultaneous attributes—you can’t do just one, you have to pursue all three simultaneously. We have to be totally nonviolent to ourselves; at the same time, we try to be meticulously nonviolent to everyone around us, every human being on the planet, all the creatures and Mother Earth; and at the same time, we actively participate in the global grassroots movements of creative nonviolence for a new culture of justice, disarmament and environmental sustainability. Most of us are good at one of these. Some of us are good are even two of these. But few reach the holistic nonviolence of Gandhi and King and manage all three attributes at the same time. Many of us are committed activists, for example, but we’re terrible at practicing nonviolence toward ourselves or those around us. Others of us cultivate inner peace and are peaceful to those around us, but don’t life a finger to serve the homeless, fight injustice, or speak out against war and environmental destruction. In this way, we are not just part of the problem; we are the problem. Our silence is complicity with systemic violence and injustice. As the world’s violence worsens, our nonviolence has to deepen. Jesus calls us to practice his holistic, total nonviolence–the height and breadth and length and width of nonviolence as universal love, universal compassion, universal peace, to non-cooperate with every trace of violence within us and in the culture and give our lives not just resisting systemic violence but working for a new culture of nonviolence, disarmament, justice for the poor and peace. Nonviolence toward ourselves Some of us are steeped in violence, raised in violence to be violent toward everyone, beginning with ourselves. The journey toward interior nonviolence begins with non-cooperating with our own inner violence. From now on, we try not beat ourselves up, put ourselves down, or be violent toward ourselves. We try to make peace with ourselves, make friends with ourselves, and create a place of peace within where the God of peace can dwell. We don’t want to be wounded wounders, as Henri Nouwen taught, but wounded healers. So we are gentle with ourselves, and practice self-care and self-compassion. As activists, we have to be especially mindful.  When we take to the streets and engage the culture, if we are not on our game, our lingering inner violence can be triggered, and we don’t want that. So we practice daily meditation, mindfulness, and self-reflection, to cultivate inner peace and deepen our nonviolence in order to be better public peacemakers. Nonviolence Toward All People, All creatures and All Creation While we deepen in interior nonviolence, we want to sharpen our interpersonal nonviolence. From now on, we try to be meticulously nonviolent toward everyone we meet. That sounds good on paper, but it’s devilishly hard. We’ll never be perfectly nonviolent; we’re all experts in violence. But as followers of the nonviolent Jesus, we try to be nonviolent to everyone–our families, our children, our parents, our neighbors, our coworkers, and everyone in our community. We try not to hurt anyone and but to live, speak and act within the boundaries of nonviolence. So we forgive all those who hurt us, drop all our resentments and anger, try to outdo one another in loving kindness, and widen our circle into the beloved community. As we deepen our interpersonal nonviolence, it can open our hearts into universal love, universal compassion and universal peace—that is, universal solidarity with the human family, which Gandhi taught was the heart of nonviolence. That’s why we attend especially to those who push our buttons, those who might provoke us. Oddly enough, they become our teachers. They expose our violence and show us our need to deepen in nonviolence. So the difficult people in our lives become a great blessing as they help us experiment with and practice nonviolence, patience and unconditional love. As our nonviolence widens, we try to be consciously nonviolent toward all creatures. That means, for starters, we have to become vegetarians. We try to be nonviolent to Mother Earth in every way possible, so that we are in greater solidarity with all creation in this time of climate crisis. Nonviolence as Participation in the Global Grassroots Movements While we practice nonviolence toward ourselves, all people, all creatures, and Mother Earth—we also join and support the global grassroots movements of nonviolence for justice, disarmament and environmental sustainability. This is essential; otherwise, our nonviolence is passive complicity with the structures of violence. Nonviolence is a political methodology of social change that always works, if it’s tried. That’s how positive social change has always worked–through bottom up, people power, grassroots movements of nonviolence. With humanity on the brink of global destruction through permanent war, extreme poverty, nuclear weapons and climate crisis, we need to build a global grassroots movement of nonviolence for global justice, disarmament and environmental sustainability the likes of which the world has never seen. That means, every one of us needs to join in and do our part. If everyone gets involved, the grassroots movement will grow and become contagious. With the power of engaged nonviolence, we can wear down even the most entrenched structures of violence and empire, because nonviolence is the methodology of God. As we experiment publicly in organized movements, we discover that Dr. King was right: we are not powerless. Nonviolence is power, a methodology for social transformation. A recent book,  Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict   by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, documents how, over the last century, nonviolent movements were far better at mobilizing supporters, resisting regime crackdowns, creating new initiatives, defeating repressive regimes and establishing lasting democracies. Their book conclusively proves through exhaustive social science that nonviolence can transform even the bleakest political reality if it is wielded wisely in organized grassroots movements. As I reflect on the challenge of living and practicing nonviolence, I find hope that all of us can become more peaceful and nonviolent to ourselves and one another, and like Dorothy Day, Gandhi and Dr. King, we too can contribute to the disarmament of the world. More, nonviolence helps us better understand Jesus. That’s why I recently founded “The Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus,” ( www.beatitudescenter.org ) to teach that Jesus was nonviolent and help Christians become more nonviolent. Through the lens of nonviolence, the scandal of the Gospel makes sense: that God is nonviolent, that to be human is to be nonviolent, and that we are headed toward a new realm of total nonviolence. With nonviolence, even the good news gets better. Originally published by John Dear at the Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus, used with permission https://beatitudescenter.org/pursuing-nonviolence/

Each fall it is my great pleasure to walk through the four Gospels with anywhere from two to four sections of first semester students at Abilene Christian University in a course we call Jesus: His Life and Teachings . I find the title notable because I am convinced that the two are intertwined and must not be separated if we are truly to understand who he was and is, as well as what it means to bear his name and title, to be a Christian. I am convinced of this because I am convinced that Jesus was neither a hypocrite (a loan word from ancient Greek meaning an actor) nor a sophist (another loan word from Greek that takes its meaning from the group of ancient teachers who would sell their lessons, and thus it was said, would allow their conclusions and lessons to be unduly influenced by those willing to pay). Jesus, in contrast to both these groups, lived what he taught and taught what he lived. Two recent experiences highlight this amazing quality of Jesus, that he lived what he taught and taught what he lived. First, my undergraduates have become more and more flabbergasted that Jesus might teach that one should allow another person to harm oneself without any move towards defense and/or retaliation. They come wielding the phrase “self-defense” as both talisman and sacred doctrine. They know that not only is self-defense allowable, but it is a moral imperative! The second experience is more broadly catalogued in my recent essay, “Reading the Sermon on the Mount with ChatGPT”. ChatGPT is one of many explosive recent technologies that have much of the Western media, political, and university classes in an uproar. It is an internet chatbot that can produce intelligible responses to a vast number of conversational prompts a human user might pose to it. Naturally, I decided to talk to it about the Bible. In doing so, I became increasingly struck by its tendency to tilt toward metaphorical interpretations that would allow it to avoid making any claims that might approach being offensive. That is, until I asked it if any of Jesus’s teachings should be taken literally. It suggested that one might follow Jesus’s instruction in Matthew 5:38-39 literally. Here, the evangelist records Jesus as teaching his disciples, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye’ and ‘Tooth for tooth’. But, I say to you, do not resist the evil person, but rather if someone should strike your right cheek, turn to the that person also your other cheek.” I was fascinated. Did ChatGPT really just provide a response that would deeply offend my undergraduates? Did it’s predictive language not account for the immediate response I hear in class each fall (“But, self-defense!”)? So I pursued the conversation. It turns out, ChatGPT would somewhat quickly renounce its own suggestion of this as a potential teaching to be followed to the letter. After a bit more conversation, it would go so far as to label someone who actually embraced a life of Christian pacifism as “pollyanna-ish,” a move more recent editions of the bot would not repeat. Yet, I find both my students’ inability to imagine a world of turning an actual other cheek and this generative AI’s quick repentance from its own claim that this teaching should/could be followed to the letter, revealing of a particular temptation. This temptation is likely a preeminent human one, as the text of Matthew’s Gospel reveals (see below). Regardless of its universal application, though, I find it to be a prominent temptation for many Christians in the US. It is the temptation to excuse ourselves from the call to discipleship under Jesus’s teachings and example because what Jesus taught and how Jesus lived is somewhere between offensive and unimaginable to us. To be sure, there is a long history of wrestling with the Sermon on the Mount broadly and the teachings in Matthew 5:38-39 particularly, but this is not a history with which many Christians in the US are familiar. We simply can’t imagine Jesus asking us to allow ourselves or others to be harmed (or even worse, killed) without resistance. Yet, if we pause and consider for a moment, perhaps this line of thought is what should be unimaginable to us. After all, how could it be so far out of the realm of possibility for us to consider when we worship and proclaim Jesus as our Lord, Jesus whom we claim was not only unjustly arrested, but also beaten, tortured, and killed without resistance, all while he had the power to not only stop it, but to stop it without doing any actual violence himself (if we believe all things possible for Jesus). Consider the trajectory of the Gospel of Matthew and the idea of being Jesu’s “disciple”, one of the evangelist’s favorite terms for those of us who would later take the name “Christian”. “Disciple” is often glossed as “a student”, but in some ways the idea of “Christian” comes closer to what a disciple of Jesus, who is called Christ, actually is. The term Christian was first used as a mockery of those who proclaimed Jesus as Lord. It was meant to identify them as “little Christs” because they were so devoted to Jesus’s teachings and imitating them that others wanted to associate them fully with a man seen as shameful and weak in the face of the might of Rome, a crucified man. Jesus in Matthew does not shy away from this either, proclaiming that his disciples will be treated like him and worse (Mt 10:16-26) and calling his disciples to “take up the cross and follow him” and “lose their life for him” (Mt 10:38-39, 16:24-26). Perhaps it is odd to us to hear these texts connected to the suffering of physical violence because we have come to know them as calls to be sacrificial with our time, our money, to “deny ourselves” in terms of resisting some symptoms of comfortable middle class minor character vices, such as refusing to raise our voices in anger at someone else. And to be sure, there are passages of Scripture that invite just such an application, but these texts come on the heels of Jesus speaking plainly about real physical violence, and chapter 16 comes directly after Jesus has rebuked Peter when Peter tells him that he must certainly not suffer physically and be killed. Thus, it is much more challenging to read them as if in this Gospel they are not actually about threats to our physical well-being, for we risk making Jesus into a Sophist in his teachings, subjugating him to our whims because without our witness, our commitment, our preaching (we imagine), his legacy would not endure. So we imagine ourselves to “pay” Jesus and thus his teachings must be domesticated to what we find palatable and comfortable. Moreover, as I stated at the beginning, Jesus is not a hypocrite. One of my favorite exercises with my first-semester students is to walk through the Sermon on the Mount with them through Matthew’s narrative of Jesus’s Passion (Mt 26-28), showing them how Jesus lives up to the high bar of his teachings at every turn. For our purposes, let us consider simply the turn the other cheek teaching and the arrest in the garden (26:47-56). Judas comes and kisses Jesus on the cheek, a symbol of friendship, but here a sign for arrest and physical violence. Jesus calls him a friend in response, a turning of his other cheek to welcome another kiss, while simultaneously refusing to resist those who laid hands on him and arrested him. One of Jesus’s companions would draw a sword in attempted defense of his Lord and Rabbi, but Jesus responds thus, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (52-53) No physical violence in defense of others, no physical violence in self-defense. Simple surrender and trust in God, the one who judges justly . (By the way, let us not forget stories in Exodus, Joshua, Judges, etc. where angels to come and the amount of violence one or a small handful can visit on humanity when we hear these words of Jesus.) So, what do we do? You may be wondering whether I wrote this to draw some line in the sand: become a Christian pacifist or renounce your claim to be a Christian. But this is not my intent nor within the realm of my authority. Rather I write in hope for a renewed engagement with the life and teachings of Jesus, one where we may stop and imagine, especially when those teachings might seem most offensive or unimaginable, that Jesus might be serious, that Jesus might actually mean it, especially since, in this case, he actually did it. I hope this engagement might also excite you to explore the wealth of our 2000 years of wrestling with this and other teachings of Jesus. Let us understand positions that justify harming others in defense of self and others so that we can make decisions about what it means for each of us to follow Jesus’s teachings in conversation with our sisters and brothers who have gone before us as well as who journey with us today. * Another version of this article by Dr. John Boyles appeared at Christianity Today as " Misreading the Scripture with Artificial Eyes "

After years of hiding bruises, a woman confides in a friend about her husband’s violent outbursts. Her friend advises her to submit to her husband, explaining that in the  Sermon on the Mount  Jesus teaches that we are to “turn the other cheek.” But is that Jesus’ meaning? Is he really teaching people to remain passive in situations of abuse? Jesus’ instruction to turn the other cheek, found in Matthew 5:39, actually means to turn the tables on those who seek to harm us and to overcome evil through creative acts of nonviolent resistance. Jesus is not claiming we should never resist those who seek to harm us. In fact, that would contradict the Hebrew Bible’s principle of  lex talionis , which Jesus quotes: “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” (1) The aim of this principle is to establish justice and to curb vengeance. So if someone knocks out our tooth, we can’t knock out five of theirs in retaliation. In the same sentence, Jesus calls people to “not resist-in-kind an evildoer,” (2) but to turn the other cheek. This fulfills the intention of the  lex talionis  to bring about true justice in a new, creative way that refuses to return harm for harm. In other words, turning the other cheek avoids both extremes of violently retaliating and passively permitting others to do whatever they want to us. The Cheek Slap in Jesus’ Day In Jesus’ day, hitting a person on the cheek was a forceful insult, but it was not considered a violent assault. Here, Jesus is specifying a strike on the right cheek, which implies a back-handed slap. Striking someone with the back of the hand (3) could demand a doubled fine because it was “the severest public affront to a person’s dignity.” (4) But Jesus is not suggesting that his followers should stand around and take abuse. First, turning the left cheek was a bold rejection of the insult itself. Second, it challenged the aggressor to repeat the offense, while requiring that they now strike with the palm of their hand, something done not to a lesser but to an equal. In other words, turning the other cheek strongly declares that the opposer holds no power for condescending shame because the victim’s honor is not dependent on human approval—it comes from somewhere else. (5) This kind of action reshapes the relationship, pushing the adversary to either back down or to treat them as an equal. Giving Your Coat to a Greedy Person As another example of what it looks like to not resist-in-kind an evildoer, Jesus says, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also.” (6) He’s teaching people to resist harmful greed with creative  generosity . In this case, a greedy person crushes a poor person with an unjust lawsuit and demands their inner garment as collateral. Hebrew Bible law does allow Israelites to also use someone’s outer garment, or coat, as collateral for a loan, but the coat must be returned by nightfall because the person likely needs it for warmth. (7) To voluntarily give up the coat would be exceedingly generous. Jesus is teaching a way of life that trusts in the power of a generous response and does not repay greed with greed. Even more, some interpreters understand Jesus’ instruction to mean that one who gives both their shirt and coat would become completely disrobed, which is “an intolerable dishonor in Palestinian Jewish society.” (8) Whether or not Jesus implies that they should appear naked, someone who gives up their coat (and shirt) is likely giving up their main defense against the cold and some level of social status. They are in an extremely vulnerable position. This obvious vulnerability forces an opponent to publicly confront his callous greed in literally taking the clothes off the other person’s back. (9) And that person’s radical generosity would present a striking contrast against their opponent’s tight-fisted grasping. Going the Extra Mile for an Oppressor In a final example of how to not resist-in-kind an evildoer, Jesus says, “Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two.” (10) In the 1st century world, Roman soldiers could force someone to carry loads for them for up to a Roman mile (1,000 paces). (11) The practice reduced a person to an object, a forced laborer caught under the thumb of imperial power. Jesus is speaking to a beleaguered group of Jews who have suffered under centuries of foreign occupation. Having experienced degradation, harassment, and oppression by their Roman overlords, they would be stunned at Jesus’ call to not just submit, but to give of oneself beyond what is asked. Carrying a soldier’s load for an additional mile shifts the terms of the interaction. Rather than passively accepting the demeaning treatment, people following Jesus’ instruction creatively resist oppression and assert their dignity by wilfully choosing to go that second mile. They are treating the Roman soldier with generosity, as one might treat friends or family members. In fact, Jesus sums up his teaching with a general encouragement for his followers to make generosity a key marker of right relating with others, (12) echoing Proverbs 25:21–22: “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; For you will heap burning coals on his head." (13) Asserting Dignity With Love and Generosity In all three of Jesus’ examples, to “resist-in-kind” would perpetuate the cycle of harm. As Martin Luther King Jr. says, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. … Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” (14) Jesus invites his followers into the ways of God’s Upside-Down Kingdom. Rather than retaliating against insult or injustice, he calls them to engage in creative acts of resistance, characterized by love and generosity. To turn the other cheek means to see and treat everyone as a person created in  God’s image , always seeking their highest good. As  Anna Case-Winters  (15) observes, this may appear to put a person in the “passive victim” role, but it actually makes that person “an agent who asserts power in a way that is positive and unconventional. What might have been a humiliation is met with a ‘dignity asserting’ act of giving … and an implicit invitation to the enemy, aggressor, or importuner to a different kind of interaction.” (16) Jesus teaches us to avoid both shrinking back in passive fear and pushing back with violent words or actions. Instead, like him, we can approach enemies with creativity, love, and generosity. By treating them as friends, we invite them to reflect on their behavior and consider a new way of relating with us. Restoring Relationships Jesus’ “turn the other cheek” teaching aims at restoring the harmony God intended for humanity since the start of creation. In taking from the tree that God instructed them to avoid, people chose to reject God’s wisdom and do what was right in their own eyes. This rejection quickly led to a cycle of harm and retaliation. We see this desire for vengeance and the escalation of brutality in the story of Lamech, who killed a man for striking him. (17) Yet the aim of the  lex talionis —“an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” (1) —was meant to limit the escalation of violent retaliation. In other words, it sought to break the ever-increasing cycle of violence by preventing people from taking personal revenge and ensuring that the punishment never became greater than the crime. Fulfilling the intention at the heart of the  lex talionis  means seeking true justice. And true justice reshapes the relationship between victim and perpetrator; it brings about restoration for everyone involved. We see a striking example in the story of Joseph. Joseph Turns the Other Cheek Jealous of their father’s favoritism toward Joseph, his half brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt, where he eventually rises to a position of power. When his half brothers come to Egypt to buy food during a famine, they don’t recognize Joseph, hidden behind the facade of an Egyptian official. But Joseph recognizes them. And he must make a choice. He can use his power as a high government official to take vengeance. He can allow the courts to mete out justice. He can passively ignore his half brothers’ offense and act like nothing happened. Or he can “turn the other cheek” by testing them. Joseph chooses the last option—to turn the other cheek. He wants to see if they will repeat their offense by allowing his only full brother, Benjamin, to be taken as a slave. (18) Joseph gives his half brothers an opportunity to confront what they did to him (19) and choose to act differently. And when they show how much they’ve changed, healing tears of love and grief stream down Joseph’s face as he generously offers forgiveness. (20) Jesus Turns the Other Cheek Jesus himself demonstrates for his followers how to turn the other cheek. At certain times when his opponents seek to destroy him, he chooses to withdraw, slipping from their grasp. He wisely discerns when waiting is better than immediately addressing a threat. At other times, he meets his opponents face-to-face with creative generosity. In the ultimate declaration of turning the other cheek, Jesus allows his enemies to falsely accuse, arrest, and convict him before putting him through intense public humiliation and brutal murder on a Roman cross. As it’s all happening, Jesus turns his other cheek to those who strike him, offers up his clothing,  and  carries his cross the extra mile. (21) He is not passive or unwilling; he’s not a powerless victim. With tremendous power, he willfully accepts his opponents’ malicious treatment because he knows they have no ability to ultimately take either his honor or his life. Jesus actively gives his life; he does not retaliate or return any kind of harm for the harm being done to him. He loves his enemies to the end, praying for their forgiveness with his dying breath. (22) Love’s Response to Injustice For a battered woman desperately looking for help, removing herself and any other victims from the situation is often the wisest course of action. Not only does she strengthen her agency, but it may also be the most loving response she could have toward her abuser. By separating him from the targets of his abuse, she may hinder him from continuing in behavior that is destructive to both himself and others. We can also extend the principle of turning the other cheek to situations where people around us experience harm. When Jesus encounters injustice in  the temple , he overturns the tables of the money changers and calls them back to God’s aim for the temple to be a “house of prayer” for all people. (23) Although Jesus’ actions are intense, they’re not harmful or vindictive. By confronting the money changers’ injustice, he invites them to reconsider their behavior. When we see people who are mistreated, it’s tempting to either fight the perpetrator or avoid the situation. But the principle of turning the other cheek leads us to stand in solidarity with victims by exposing injustice or confronting an oppressor. Whether submitting, withdrawing, or confronting, Jesus always sets the terms of the encounter. And he always acts in love for the good of others, even his enemies. “Love implies resistance to injustice by using nonviolent methods,” says  theologian Naim Ateek . “It is done not out of hate or in order to crush or destroy the enemy, but in order to force the perpetrators of injustice to undo what is wrong and commit themselves to doing what is just and right.” (24) Ultimately, the Bible looks forward to a day when “violence will not be heard again,” (25) and no one will do “evil or harm,” (26) as God renews his original intention for people to live forever in a world where everyone acts for the highest good of the other. (27) That’s the way of God’s Kingdom. And Jesus says this Kingdom is at hand—starting now. The renewal is not complete, but it is already underway, and we can enter and experience it today, every day. Although not everyone will treat us with the love and dignity God desires, we can choose to embody God’s Kingdom by turning the other cheek when people seek to harm us. With creativity and wisdom, we can discern how to carry out this vision in any situation. (28) And we don’t need to be anxious about finding the one “right” response. By paying attention to Jesus’ life, we can train our imaginations to envision creative, more effective responses to each new challenge. When we choose to resist evil through acts of love, instead of perpetuating cycles of harm, we become signposts to the new creation where justice and peace reign. Matt. 5:38; see Exod. 21:23–24; Lev. 24:19–20; Deut. 19:21. Matt. 5:39a (BibleProject translation"). Mishnah Baba Qamma 8:6-7 Craig S. Keener,  The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary  (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 197. Keener,  The Gospel of Matthew , 198. Matt. 5:40 (BibleProject translation). See Exod. 22:25–27; Deut. 24:10–13. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew, 198. See further David E. Garland,  Reading Matthew: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys), 74. Matt. 5:41 (BibleProject translation). For an example, see Matt. 27:32. Matt. 5:42. NASB translation Martin Luther King Jr.,  Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?  (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 62. Professor of Theology at McCormick Theological Seminary Anna Case-Winters,  Matthew, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible  (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 82, 84. Gen. 4:23–24. Gen. 42–44. Gen. 42:21–22. Gen. 44:14–45:15. Matt. 26:67; 27:35; John 19:17; see also Dennis T. Olson, "Loving Enemies as Being Birthed into God's Creation-Wide Family: A Homiletical Exploration of Matthew 5:38–48," Word & World: Supplement Series 5 (2006): 64. Luke 23:34. See Isa. 56:7, which Jesus quotes. Naim Ateek, “Who Is My Neighbor?” Interpretation 62 (2008): 165. See Isa. 60:18. See Isa. 65:25. See Phil. 2:1–10. See further Jonathan T. Pennington,  The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary  (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic), 197–198. Originally published by Bible Project, used with permission https://bibleproject.com/playlists/retaliation-and-creative-nonviolence/#2-passage-insight-creative-nonviolence

Of all the silly claims sometimes made by atheists these days, surely one of the silliest is that Christianity was in no way determinative of the politics of Martin Luther King, Jr. Just take Christopher Hitchens’s claim that, on account of King’s commitment to nonviolence, in “no real as opposed to nominal sense … was he a Christian.” Wherever King got his understanding of nonviolence from, argues Hitchens, it simply could not have been from Christianity because Christianity is inherently violent. The best response that I can give to such claims is turn to that wonderfully candid account of the diverse influences that shaped King’s understanding of nonviolence in his Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story , and then demonstrate how his Christianity gave these influences in peculiarly Christ-like form. King reports as a college student he was moved when he read Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience . Thoreau convinced him that anyone who passively accepts evil, even oppressed people who cooperate with an evil system, are as implicated with evil as those who perpetrate it. Accordingly, if we are to be true to our conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system. In the early stages of the boycott of the buses in Montgomery, King drew on Thoreau to help him understand why the boycott was the necessary response to a system of evil. But Thoreau was not the only resource King had to draw on. He had heard A.J. Muste speak when he was a student at Crozer, but while he was deeply moved by Muste’s account of pacifism, he continued to think that war, though never a positive good, might be necessary as an alternative to a totalitarian system. During his studies at Crozer he also travelled to Philadelphia to hear a sermon by Dr Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, who had just returned from a trip to India. Dr Johnson spoke of the life and times of Gandhi so eloquently King subsequently bought and read books on or by Gandhi. The influence of Gandhi, however, was qualified by his reading of Reinhold Niebuhr and, in particular, Moral Man and Immoral Society . Niebuhr’s argument that there is no intrinsic moral difference between violent and nonviolent resistance left King in a state of confusion. King’s doctoral work made him more critical of what he characterizes as Niebuhr’s overemphasis on the corruption of human nature. Indeed, King observes that Niebuhr had not balanced his pessimism concerning human nature with an optimism concerning divine nature. But King’s understanding as well as his commitment to nonviolence was finally not the result of these intellectual struggles. No doubt his philosophical and theological work served to prepare him for what he was to learn in the early days of the struggle in Montgomery. But King’s understanding of nonviolence was formed in the midst of struggle for justice, which required him to draw on the resources of the African-American church. King was, moreover, well aware of how he came to be committed to nonviolence not simply as a strategy but as, in Gandhi’s words, his experiment with truth. For example, in an article entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” for The Christian Century in 1960, King says by being called to be a spokesman for his people, he was: “driven back to the Sermon on the Mount and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. This principle became the guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method. The experience of Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books I had read. As the days unfolded I became more and more convinced of the power of nonviolence. Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life. Many issues I had not cleared up intellectually concerning nonviolence were now solved in the sphere of practical action.” In the same article, King observes that he was also beginning to believe that the method of nonviolence may even be relevant to international relations. Yet he was still under the influence of Niebuhr, or at least at this stage in his thinking he could not escape Niebuhr’s language. Thus, even after he argues that nonviolence is the only alternative we have when faced by the destructiveness of modern weapons, he declares: “I am no doctrinaire pacifist. I have tried to embrace a realistic pacifism. Moreover, I see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser of evil in the circumstances. Therefore I do not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts.” That would not, however, be his final position. In an article entitled “Showdown for Nonviolence,” which was published after his assassination, King says plainly: “I’m committed to nonviolence absolutely. I’m just not going to kill anybody, whether it’s in Vietnam or here … I plan to stand by nonviolence because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice but also my dealings with people with my own self. I will still be faithful to nonviolence.” Thus Martin Luther King, Jr., the advocate of nonviolence, became nonviolent. Which means it is all the more important, therefore, to understand what King understood by nonviolence. What does it mean to be nonviolent? In a 1957 article for The Christian Century entitled “Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” King developed with admirable clarity the five points that he understood to be central to Gandhi’s practice of nonviolent resistance. The next year saw the publication of Stride Toward Freedom , in which he expanded the five points to six. Those six points of emphasis are: that nonviolent resistance is not cowardly, but is a form of resistance; that advocates of nonviolence do not want to humiliate those they oppose; that the battle is against forces of evil not individuals; that nonviolence requires the willingness to suffer; that love is central to nonviolence; and, that the universe is on the side of justice. Though these points of emphasis are usefully distinguished, they are clearly interdependent. This is particularly apparent given King’s stress in Stride Toward Freedom that nonviolence requires the willingness to accept suffering rather than to retaliate against their enemies. King approvingly quotes Gandhi’s message to his countrymen (“Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood”) and then asks what could possibly justify the willingness to accept but never inflict violence. He answers that such a position is justified “in the realization that unearned suffering is redemptive.” King identified Gandhi as the primary source of his understanding of the “method” and “philosophy of nonviolence.” But he could not help but read Gandhi through the lens of the gospel, as his use of the word “redemption” makes clear. Gandhi read Tolstoy, who convinced him not only that the Sermon on the Mount required nonviolence, but equally importantly, Gandhi says he learned from Tolstoy that the willingness to suffer wrong is finally a more powerful force than violence. Gandhi’s understanding of satyagraha , the belief that truth and suffering have the power to transform one’s opponent, was Gandhi’s way to translate Tolstoy in a Hindu idiom. King read Gandhi and learned as a Christian how to read the Sermon on the Mount; or, to put it more accurately, he learned to trust the faith of the African-American church in Jesus to sustain the hard discipline of nonviolence. In King’s own words: “It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than the doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negro to protest with the creative weapon of love. As the days unfolded, however, the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in is struggle for freedom.” Gandhi’s “method,” moreover, gave King what he needed to challenge Niebuhr’s argument that a strong distinction must be drawn between non-resistance and nonviolent resistance. Niebuhr had argued that Jesus’s admonition not to resist the evildoer in Matthew 5:38-42 means any attempt to act against evil is forbidden. Niebuhr, therefore, maintained that Gandhi’s attempt to use nonviolence for political gains was really a form of coercion. Through his study of Gandhi, King says he learned that Niebuhr’s position involved a serious distortion because: “true pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.” King acknowledges that there are devout believers in nonviolence who find it difficult to believe in a personal God, but “even these persons believe in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness.” For King, however, it is the cross that is: “the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is the symbol of God’s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation.” Love, therefore, becomes the hallmark of nonviolent resistance requiring that the resister, not only refuse to shoot his opponent, but also refuse to hate him. Nonviolent resistance is meant to bring an end to hate by being the very embodiment of agape . King seemed never to tire of an appeal to Anders Nygren’s distinction between eros , philia , and agape to make the point that the love that shapes nonviolent resistance is one that is disciplined by the refusal to distinguish between worthy and unworthy people. Rather agape begins by loving others for their own sake, which requires that we “have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.” Such a love means that nonviolent resistance seeks not to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win a friend. The protests that may take the form of boycotts and other non-cooperative modes of behaviour are not ends in themselves, but rather attempts to awaken in the opponent a sense of shame and repentance. The end of nonviolent resistance is redemption and reconciliation with those who have been the oppressor. Love overwhelms hate, making possible the creation of a beloved community that would otherwise be impossible. Accordingly nonviolent resistance is not directed against people, but against forces of evil. Those who happen to be doing evil are as victimized by the evil they do as those who are the object of their oppression. From the perspective of nonviolence, King argued that the enemy is not the white people of Montgomery, but injustice itself. The object of the boycott of the buses was not to defeat white people, but to defeat the injustice that mars their lives. The means must therefore be commensurate with the end that is sought. For the end cannot justify the means, particularly if the means involve the use of violence, because the “end is preexistent in the means.” This is particularly the case if the end of nonviolence is the creation of a “beloved community.” It should now be apparent why nonviolent resistance is “not a method for cowards; it does resist.” There is nothing passive about nonviolence since it requires active engagement against evil. Courage is required for those who would act nonviolently, but it is not the courage of the hero. Rather it is the courage that draws its strength from the willingness to listen. For the willingness to listen is the necessary condition for the organization necessary for a new community to come into existence. A people must exist whose unwillingness to resort to violence creates imaginative and creative modes of resistance to injustice. King not only learned what nonviolence is, but he learned to be nonviolent because he saw how nonviolence gave a new sense of worth to those who followed him in Montgomery. Stride Toward Freedom begins, therefore, with the lovely observation that though he must make frequent use of the pronoun “I” to tell the story of Montgomery, it is not a story in which one actor is central. Rather it is the “chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.” King’s account of nonviolence reflected what he learned through the struggle in Montgomery. He never wavered from that commitment. If anything the subsequent movement in Birmingham, the rise of Black Power and the focus on the poor only served to deepen his commitment to nonviolence. But these later developments also exposed challenges to his understanding of the practice of nonviolence that should not be avoided. King’s dilemma Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in as well as practiced nonviolent resistance because he was sure that to do so was to be in harmony with the grain of the universe. The willingness to suffer without retaliation depended on that deep conviction. King certainly drew on the rhetoric of American democratic traditions to sustain the goals of nonviolence, but American ideals were not the basis of his hope. Rather, as John Howard Yoder contends, King and Gandhi shared “a fundamental religious cosmology” based on the conviction that unearned suffering can be redemptive. This is a Hindu truth Gandhi recovered, but Yoder observes that it is also “a Christian truth, although not all the meaning of the cross in the Christian message is rendered adequately by stating it in terms that sound like Gandhi.” The Christian truth that Gandhi’s understanding of satyagraha does not adequately express, according to Yoder, is “if the Lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power, then no calculation of other non-lamb roads to power can be ultimately authentic.” According to Yoder, because King understood nonviolence to be the bearing of Jesus’s cross, King was able to choose the path of vulnerable faithfulness with full awareness that such a path would be costly. King operated with the conviction that the victory had been won, but also with the realization that the mopping up might take longer than had been expected. Yet the success of Montgomery meant King could not avoid becoming the leader of a mass movement. To sustain the movement with a people who were not committed to nonviolence as King was committed meant results had to be forthcoming. For example, in an article entitled “Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom,” in which King defended nonviolence amid the riots of the 1960s as well as the stridency of the Black Power movement, he acknowledged the importance of results for sustaining the movement. Results are necessary because King understood well that he could not assume that everyone who follows him understood that nonviolence is not simply a tactic to get what you want, but it is a way of life. But results can take months or even years, which means those committed to nonviolence must engage in continuing education of the community to help them understand how the sacrifices they are making are necessary to bring about the desired changes. Accordingly, King suggests that the most powerful nonviolent weapon, but also the most demanding, is the need for organization. He observes: “to produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power. These units might be political, as in the case of voters’ leagues and political parties, they may be economic units such as groups of tenants who join forces to form a tenant union or to organize a rent strike; or they may be laboring units of persons who are seeking employment and wage increases. More and more, the civil rights movement will become engaged in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and to produce change in their behalf. This is a tedious task which may take years, but the results are more permanent and meaningful.” Yet Stewart Burns suggests King discovered that nothing fails like success. King, and those close to him in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had been captured by the need to produce results. They had no time for the “tedious” work of organization. The movement had become a trap. Every “success” required upping the ante in the hope that those who followed King would continue to do so even if they did not share his commitment to nonviolence. In Montgomery, King had been able to rely on the black churches and, in particular, the women leaders of those churches for the “organizing miracle” that made Montgomery possible. But the further he moved beyond Montgomery, the more he had to depend on results in the hope that through results community might come into existence. King was well aware of this dilemma, as is evident from his anguished reflections on the destructive riots in Watts: “Watts was not only a crisis for Los Angeles and the Northern cities of our nation: It was a crisis for the nonviolent movement. I tried desperately to maintain a nonviolent atmosphere in which our nation could undergo the tremendous period of social change which confronts us, but this was mainly dependent on the obtaining of tangible progress and victories, if those of us who counsel reason and love were to maintain our leadership. However, the cause was not lost. In spite of pockets of hostility in ghetto areas such as Watts, there was still overwhelming acceptance of the ideal of nonviolence.” But as King well knew, nonviolence is not an “ideal” but must be embedded in the habits of a people across time that make possible the long and patient work of transformation necessary for the reconciliation of enemies. King was, after all, a creature of the African-American church. In the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” even as he expresses his disappointment concerning the failure of the church he declares, “Yes, I love the church.” For understandable reasons, however, King did not see that his understanding of nonviolence required the existence of an alternative community that could sustain the hard and “tedious” work of organization. From Yoder’s perspective, therefore, some of the later tactics of the civil rights movement designed to secure results without transformation of those against whom the protest was directed may have made King vulnerable to Niebuhr’s critique that nonviolent resistance is but disguised violence. King’s attempt to combine nonviolent resistance with a social movement that aimed to make America a “beloved community” did not fundamentally challenge the Constantinian assumptions that America is a Christian nation. Christian nonviolence presupposes the resources of faith. King assumed those resources were available in Montgomery, and they were. However, the more he became a “civil rights leader” rather a black Baptist minister – two offices that were indistinguishable in his own mind – he could not presume his followers shared his faith, making the demand for results all the more important. Yet King was sustained by his faith. In the last speech he gave before he was assassinated King began observing: “I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that. And so we, like David, find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled. Life is a continual story of shattered dreams. Mahatma Gandhi labored for years and years for the independence of his people. But Gandhi had to face the fact that he was assassinated and died with a broken heart, because that nation that he wanted to unite ended up being divided between India and Pakistan as a result of the conflict between the Hindus and the Moslems.” King is obviously thinking about his own life and dreams. He seems to know that he too will die of a broken heart. Yet King tells the congregation that he can make a testimony not because he is a saint but because he is a sinner like all of God’s children. And yet, he writes: “But I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, ‘I take you in and I bless you, because you tried. It is well that it was within thine heart.'” It is, moreover, well with us who live after King as he remains a great witness to the power of nonviolence. We still have much to learn from this extraordinary man. Article first appeared in ABC Religion & Ethics , posted on Stanley Hauerwas, used with permission https://stanleyhauerwas.org/the-only-road-to-freedom-martin-luther-king-jr-and-nonviolence/

In the context of the Kingdom of God, Jon Sherwood takes a look at the passion week of Christ in the gospel of John to show how Jesus confronted the kingdoms of the world and subverted their power by overcoming death itself, not by force or war, but through peaceful, non-retaliatory self-sacrificing love and resurrection from the dead. Sermon from Jon Sherwood originally delivered to Asheville Church Network , used with permission: https://www.jonsherwood.com/post/kingdom-of-god-subversive-confrontation

Just two years later, in AD 313 , an unimaginable blessing occurred. Constantine and his co-ruler Licinius made Christianity a legal religion in Rome . Overnight, the threat of persecution was gone. Over the next few years, state money flowed to restore seized land to the churches and build them places of worship. Constantine converted to Christianity (although he would not be officially baptized until he was on his deathbed), and its influence grew. It must have seemed like an incredible blessing. But was it? Earlier, in AD 244 , the emperor of Rome, Phillip the Arab , wished to attend a Christian celebration of Easter along with his wife, who had become a Christian. The leaders of the church, however, would not allow him to partake in all aspects of the gathering. Unless he truly repented, walked away from his position of power, and submitted his allegiance to Jesus, he would have to stand with the visitors and leave the church when it was time to take communion. Unfortunately, this same level of commitment to the kingdom standard of separateness was not observed with Constantine. Once the church accepted the authority and support of the empire, it blurred the separation between state and kingdom. Before long, Constantine was inserting himself into church decisions and authority. He is often demonized today and charged with everything from deciding which books would be in the New Testament to changing the day of worship to Sunday, and many other things that are not true. But he did initiate a series of decisions that would lead the church down a path of compromise that would change the nature of the church faster than anyone might have imagined. Within a few decades, the church was intertwining itself with the state. They went from centuries of opposing military participation for Christians or violence of any kind for any reason, to allowing the Roman army to call itself Christian and persecute heretics for holding different beliefs. The distinction between the kingdom of God and the Roman empire blurred to the point that Rome became a nation under God in the mind of the church. Many Romans joined the church, but they were no longer held to strict allegiance to Jesus and his kingdom view of the world . Right doctrine, church membership, and obedience to the authority of the bishop were now the expectation. Constantine eventually exempted church leaders from paying taxes and called for formally paying church leaders a salary. They were also given the authority to decide many civil law cases, rather than people going before judges. Constantine did hold to the historic position of the church that people could not be coerced to be members. But by AD 380 , Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity to be the official religion of Rome , outlawed all other religions, and began a program of destroying pagan temples and persecuting those who did not convert to Christianity. The church grew, but the kingdom was nowhere in sight . The actions of the church of the fourth century were at odds with the historic teaching of Christians in the first, second, and third centuries. A theologian named Ambrose rose to prominence in the latter half of the fourth century . He came from the schools of natural law and human logic and argued that Rome was a Christian nation and to defend the Roman Empire was to defend Christianity. He introduced the philosophy that if someone was in danger, it was immoral not to use violence to defend them if necessary . This was in stark contrast to the teaching of the first three centuries. Shortly after Ambrose, Augustine became the most influential leader in the Christian world. He taught that individuals could not control their sin and that it was up to the state to curb violence and keep order. War, he believed, was an inevitable tool that was a moral positive in the hands of a godly state. In his theology, it was now the state that would restore order in the world rather than the kingdom of peace. Augustine justified the use of violence by pointing to the violence of the Old Testament , though he did not advocate continuing other elements of the old covenant period such as animal sacrifice, a seemingly inconsistent position. He convinced the church to turn its back on the longstanding prohibition of violence in self defense , and he eventually came to advocate for coerced conversions . To justify the turn in philosophy toward embracing empire and advocating for violence and war, Ambrose and Augustine developed guidelines for “ just war .” These principles are still largely accepted and followed to this day in much of Christendom, with only minor tweaks over the centuries. There have always been small groups that have held to the gospel of King Jesus and his kingdom of peace, operating as alternative societies. But since the revolution of Constantine, Ambrose, and Augustine, the face of Christianity to the world has been very different than it was for the three hundred years after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, and most of those small kingdom movements were harshly persecuted by the dominant strains of Christendom. As we continue to move forward, considering the role that Christians and the church can and should play in the world of politics, there is a reason that I have spent the first twelve chapters of this book talking primarily about the kingdom of God and very little about politics. For many Christians today, our vision of the kingdom is too small. If we do not grasp the vastness of the kingdom and what allegiance to Jesus truly demands, we are bound to develop grotesque caricatures of God’s kingdom rather than the radical vision of the future that it is supposed to be. We will create Christian movements that mix Christian morals with the methods of the world and sound godly but are a far cry from what the kingdom is to be . Without a biblical vision of how the kingdom should direct our lives, values, and passions, we will get off track rather quickly when we engage the world in difficult areas like politics and justice. Without the complete transformation of thinking that the kingdom is designed to bring about, we will be conformed, in one way or another, to the patterns of the world. Excerpt taken from Escaping The Beast: Politics, Allegiance, and Kingdom  by Michael Burns, used with permission.

A lot has changed in 2000 years. The earliest followers of Jesus started out with a strong emphasis on nonviolence and peacemaking for a few hundred years after the death and resurrection of Christ. However, some 1700 years later it has evolved (or devolved) to the point where some of the most ardent supporters of military power are evangelicals - those seemingly carrying the torch for Christian faith in the 21st century. Even among serious followers of Jesus, his teaching to turn the other cheek and do good to those who would harm you (Mat 5:38-48) is often anemic. When we look at the church today, when we look at all the content that saturates the internet, we tend to find very little mention of the subject. It is remarkable when you open the New Testament and begin to turn the pages, the first time you come to a command to love, it is not only to love your neighbor, but to love your enemies. Jesus’ manifesto on the kingdom of God that we call the "Sermon on the Mount" (Mat 5-7), teaches what it looks like when someone lives in this new Kingdom ... this age-to-come-breaking-in-now Kingdom. Jesus said the kingdom of God was marked by those who were willing to love, even their enemies and those that hurt them ... then he modeled it with his own life. If this teaching was only found in the Gospels that would surely be enough, but Paul echoes this message when he writes his letter to Christians in Rome as well. In the city that was the epicenter of an empire that dominated the known world — often with brutal force, he says, “ Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse ... If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good .” (Rom 12:14, 20-21). There is ample evidence that for nearly the first 300 years of the Christian movement, followers of Jesus, whose numbers continued to grow, kept their focus on these ideas. In fact, it was what they were most known for by outsiders. The theme of peace and violence come up frequently in the writings of prominent leaders in the early church . By comparison, the United States is roughly 250 years old — so for approximately 50 years longer than the United States has existed, early Christians held onto a nonviolent way of being while living in an unmistakably violent culture. They believed it was fundamental to what it meant to live in God’s kingdom. Today, it is common for many Christians to tell you that this is not a subject they have given much thought to. Often there is an implicit theology and belief system about the use of violence that has not been thoroughly examined. This is why Jesus Peace Collective exists. The Jesus Peace Collective seeks to humbly help us examine ourselves. To help us journey together with Jesus, following the Prince of Peace and learning to become peacemakers, "for they will be called children of God" (Mat 5:9). Jesus Peace Collective desires that disciples of Jesus look further into what he taught and how he lived on topics such as war, enemy love, and violence; as well as peacemaking, nonviolent resistance, forgiveness, and mercy. Jesus Peace Collective seeks to be a resource and community that helps disciples of Jesus in their calling to live as nonviolent agents of peacemaking in the world. Peace, in and through him.

A lawyer reflects on how his Christian community interacts with government. Christian Pacifism Is Not Liberal Pacifism Such a Christian pacifism does not bless government use of lethal force or support just war theory as Catholic or Magisterial Protestant Christians usually have. Neither, though, is it the same as liberal pacifism, which expects the state to be nonviolent – a contradiction in terms. Liberal pacifism is based on an idealistic concept of human goodness and progress rather than a clear reckoning with the reality of sin and evil in an unredeemed world. In opposing these, our approach – because we understand it to be Christ’s – is to reject the use of the sword of state power in favor of the weapons of spiritual warfare, in the confidence that God’s will must prevail in history. Within the church, these weapons are mutual commitment and admonition; in the public realm, they are prayer, critique of the social order, civil disobedience for the sake of conscience, exile, and even martyrdom. Thus instead of grasping for political control, the church advocates within the state for the most just, least violent action possible. There is no dualism in this outlook – there is not a different standard of justice for the church and the secular world. For example, the church calls on the state to pursue peace to the greatest possible degree, refraining from interventionist wars or capital punishment, though without expecting it to forswear all force; it urges it to care for the poor, the orphan, and the stranger, while acknowledging that the state cannot eliminate every inequity . In such ways, we seek to promote the practical good in both as far as circumstances allow, never losing focus on our most important calling: to follow Christ. Sometimes the church can promote Christ’s standards within the political sphere through ideas expressed in the terms of secular humanism. Ideas like liberty, equality, democracy, and human rights ring true to our contemporaries because they point, albeit imperfectly, to truths about the human condition; they gesture to the justice of the kingdom. They can, therefore, be useful as the church seeks to critique the world, including abuses of state power. But as we use such terms, we must not be enchanted by them. The fullness of justice and peace will not be achieved by the progress of a worldly empire, however enlightened, but by the calling together of a new people, which is the church of Christ  – and ultimately, by the renewal of all humanity when he comes again in glory . In the meantime, we must not put our trust in the vision of a utopian state, whether of the left or of the right, or in reviving an imagined golden Christendom of the past. [ 1 ] Exerpt from article originally published at Plough, used with permission https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/intentional-community/the-bruderhof-and-the-state For the history of (and an example of) utopian progressivist thought in the United States, see Richard Rorty,  Achieving Our Country  (Harvard University Press, 1999).

The following is an example of active peace building practices in communities in Zambia. Zambia has always taken great pride in being a peaceful country, not having faced either external or civil war. In recent decades, the relative peace of Zambia has drawn thousands of refugees from many African countries. Given this relative peace, I have often been asked: “Why is there a need for peace clubs in a country like Zambia?” While to some the need for peacebuilding in a context like Zambia has not always been evident, others have recognized that the absence of war does not mean that there is no violence in the country. For example, gender-based violence in Zambia is widespread and pervasive. According to a study done by USAID in 2010, almost half (47%) of Zambian women over the age of 15 have experienced physical violence. One in five women has experienced sexual violence in her lifetime (Wyble, 2004). Gender-based violence in Zambia includes everything from spousal abuse to sexual violence to psychological abuse to child neglect and more. Recognizing that violence can take many forms, MCC chose to support the pioneering of the peace club model in three schools in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, in 2006. Through participation in peace clubs, many young people have become peacebuilders in their schools and communities. They have learned how to be critical and creative thinkers. Peace clubs operate as an extracurricular activity. Like any other school club, students are free to join the after-school peace club, with the support of a teacher, to learn about how the principles of peace can help to address the problems they see in their lives and in societies. Since the first pilot project in 2006, MCC has supported the development of the peace clubs model in a variety of ways. MCC staff assisted in drafting a peace clubs curriculum that introduces participants to different aspects of conflict analysis and resolution, examining understandings of conflict and violence, exploring gender-based violence, trauma, and the rights of persons with disabilities and charting the journey to reconciliation. The goal of peace clubs is not to teach young people the exact names of the different problem-solving techniques, or to have them able to recite the curriculum word-for-word. Instead, peace clubs are about helping a young generation develop new ways of thinking about peace, conflict and violence and equipping them with skills to peacefully address and prevent conflict in their schools, homes and communities. Through participation in peace clubs, many young people have become peacebuilders in their schools and communities. They have learned how to be critical and creative thinkers. Peace clubs have equipped them to face unexpected situations. Furthermore, peace clubs have contributed to a change in attitude and behavior on the part of parents, teachers and students, allowing them to use peaceful means to resolve conflicts. Young members of peace clubs have influenced adult community members to change their culture of violence into one of peace. Peace clubs have contributed to a reduction in corporal punishment and increased the use of non-violent disciplinary methods in schools, homes and communities. The introduction of peace clubs into Zambian prisons has proved successful, leading the Zambia Correctional Service to seek to establish a Restorative Justice and Peace Building Unit and to expand peace clubs to all 65 prisons in the country. From its humble start in three schools in Lusaka, peace clubs in Zambia have expanded to 32 Lusaka schools as well as to 12 Brethren in Christ schools in Zambia’s southern province. The idea of what a peace club can be has even expanded beyond school settings, with peace clubs established in churches, prisons and refugee camps. The introduction of peace clubs into Zambian prisons has proved successful, leading the Zambia Correctional Service to seek to establish a Restorative Justice and Peace Building Unit and expand peace clubs to all 65 prisons in the country. Meanwhile, the peace clubs model has expanded beyond Zambia. Mennonite Brethren and Brethren in Christ churches in Malawi look to introduce peace clubs in their contexts to address and prevent gender-based violence. Churches, schools and prisons in fourteen African countries have adapted the peace clubs model, while groups in Latin America and Canada also look to introduce the peace clubs model in contextually appropriate ways. Over the course of only 13 years, the peace clubs model has grown from three after-school activities to a fully developed curriculum implemented in churches, schools, prisons and refugee camps on three continents. Looking ahead, peace clubs certainly face challenges, including how to diversify funding support for long-term sustainability and how to better measure the impact of peace clubs. One can envision this model being expanded all over the world and adapted to many other contexts and refined to successfully introduce alternatives to violence for a more just and peaceful tomorrow. Originally published by Issa Ebombolo at MCC Intersections, used with permission https://mccintersections.wordpress.com/2020/08/17/peace-clubs-in-zambia-and-beyond/