Exclusion and Embrace

Lohfink reminded me of Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace.

I’ve posted these quotes before, but I think they’re pertinent to the discussion, so please pardon the repetition.

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone. Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: A Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God?s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.(page 304)

Clarification: This quote comes at the end of a section in which Volf is arguing that Christians should be committed to the non-violent way because God will judge those who persist in evil in an eschatological (which is much worse than a medieval) kind of way. On page 301, he says:

The key question is who should be engaged in separating the darkness from the light? Who should exercise violence against the “beast” and the “false prophet”? Echoing the whole New Testament, the Apocalypse mentions only God. . . Preserving the fundamental difference between God and nonGod, the biblical tradition insists that there are things which only God may do. One of them is to use violence. . . The New Testament radicalized this process of the theologization of divine anger and boldly proclaimed God?s monopoly on violence, at least as far as Christians are concerned. Whatever relation may exist between God?s and the state?s monopoly on violence?Romans 13 and Revelation 13 give radically different answers to this question?Christians are not to take up their swords and gather under the banner of the Rider of the white horse, but to take up their crosses and follow the crucified Messiah.

I?m not a card-carrying pacifist in the strictest sense of the word, although I?d like to be. I tried to be for awhile, just after graduate school, but then I got my card taken away for beating up a guy who ridiculed my convictions.

In this next quote, Volf captures for me the tension found in following the Prince of Peace in a fallen, sometimes necessarily violent world.

This is what Jesus Christ asks Christians to do. Assured of God?s justice and undergirded by God?s presence, they are to break the cycle of violence by refusing to be caught in the automatism of revenge. It cannot be denied that the prospects are good that by trying to love their enemies they may end up hanging on a cross. Yet often enough, the fragile fruit of Pentecostal peace grows?a peace between people from different cultural spaces gathered in one place who understand each other?s languages and share in each others? goods.

It may be that consistent nonretaliation and nonviolence will be impossible in a world of violence. Tyrants may need to be taken down from their thrones and madmen stopped from sowing desolation. It may also be that measures which involve preparation of the use of violent means will have to be taken to prevent tyrants and madmen from ascending to power in the first place or to keep the plethora of ordinary kinds of perpetrators that walk our streets from doing their violent work. It may be that in a world suffused with violence the issue is not simply “violence versus peace” but rather “what forms of violence could be tolerated to overcome social ?peace? that coercively maintained itself through the condoned violence of injustice.” But if one decides to put on soldier?s gear instead of carrying one?s cross, one should not seek legitimation in the religion that worships the crucified Messiah. For there, the blessing is given not to the violent, but to the meek (Matthew 5:5).

There are Christians who have a hard time resisting the temptation to seek religious legitimation for their (understandable) need to take up the sword. If they give in to this temptation, they should forego all attempts to exonerate their version of Christian faith from complicity in fomenting violence. Of course, they can specify that religious symbols should be used to legitimate and inspire only “just” wars. But show me one warring party that does not think its war is just! Simple logic tells us that at least half of them must be wrong. It could be, however, that simple logic does not apply to the chaotic world of wars. Then all would be right, which is to say that all would be wrong, which is to say that terror would reign?in the name of the gods who can no longer be distinguished from the devils.

I think the teaching and example of Jesus, as well as that of the Apostles and the early Church are pretty clear about the non-violent path Christ-followers are called to walk. My problem is that I’m not sure how to transfer what they said and did into a post-Constantinian world where the church is not a struggling minority, but rather a power-drunk heavyweight whose legs are beginning to turn to jelly.

Jesus’ teachings were delivered to peasants who were being ground to dust under the heel of Herod and Ceasar. He was telling people how to not only survive, but prosper in the shadow of a pagan superpower.

Did he foresee the day when Ceasar would call him Lord and Christianity would be the socially and politically correct religion of the Roman Empire?

Would it have changed his teaching about the Kingdom of God if he had?

I don’t know.