Daily Archives: September 24, 2008

Violence and Nonviolence: Human and Divine

Posted by on September 24, 2008 23 comments

In his incredible book, Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf makes a very subversive and contentious argument. He claims that the Christian call to nonviolence in the face of persecution, violence, and terror requires a belief in divine vengeance. Volf argues that Christians are called to a posture of nonviolence in the face of suffering, patiently bearing the cross and offering forgiveness to those who would abuse them.

However, this posture of patient suffering is sustained through a belief in the coming retribution of God who will right all wrongs, judge the guilty, and bring about equity for the oppressed. For Volf, we are called to nonviolence, not because God is a God who refuses to judge, but rather because judgment ultimately belongs to God alone. God is the source of all human life, as such God alone has authority over human life (cf. Deut 32:39). The taking of the lives of others thus becomes a way of usurping the sovereignty of God over human life, that is why it is wrong, not simply because it is “violent.”

Here is Volf’s zinger of a quote:

“My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologian in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). 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. (p. 304)

Now, whatever one may think of this statement, one cannot deny that it has some measure of authority and integrity behind it. Anyone who doesn’t take a challenge like this seriously is almost certainly among those enjoying the “pleasant captivities of the liberal mind” indeed!

What I appreciate about Volf’s view is that it is difficult. It accepts no easy answers. It is easy to offer the enlightened liberal platitudes about God being perfect nonviolent love, and therefore we are called to absolute nonviolence (which, after all will really solve all the world’s problems). It is likewise easy to claim that we are victims, that our offenders are opposed to God and therefore the cause of justice in on our side and we are free to violently eliminate those who stand against us (and therefore against God). Volf takes the hard path of insisting that evil must be punished, and yet demanding that we refuse to take upon ourselves the mantle of divine perogative, suffering at the hands of evil rather than playing God ourselves.

However, that being said, the question remains, is Volf right?

A New Otherworldliness

Posted by on September 24, 2008 3 comments

Robert Kysar, a noted Johannine scholar makes an interesting observation in his essay, “The Coming Hermeneutical Earthquake in Johannine Interpretation.” He predicts that twenty-first Christians, having lost their dominance over the mainstream culture in the West, will draw heavily on the Gospel of John, particularly as a resource “to understand themselves over against the world.” He predicts the coming of a “new other-worldliness” that is grounded in a sort of Johannine sectarianism.

While Kysar worries that this will be dangerous in some key ways, I find myself sitting right in the center of the faultline of this coming earthquake and loving it. As I’ve said before, I think the church needs to become more sectarian, not less. Only by doing so will we discover the forms of communal life which make for authentic culture and human flourishing.

At least in evangelical and mainline protestant cricles, there is far too much ink spilt today on how the church must become more “authentically worldly.” The church, we are told must move beyond simple preoccupation with “eternal” life and focus on the matters of real importance in the world, social justice, poverty, war, world hunger, etc.

However, this call to discover an authentic Christian worldliness comes, more often than not, at too great a price. For the sake of being timely and relevant, the church equivocates on the radicality of its message and its calling. The church cannot seek to “get involved” in the world, or become “wordly” in any way other than being precisely otherworldly. The reason for this is because the church itself is an “other world.”

The church’s true calling is in fact to be as otherworldly as possible because the message of the gospel is precisely that there is a whole new world into which our broken lives can be translated and transfigured. This does not mean that Christians seek to cut off contact with non-Christians, rather it means that the only real thing, the only truly radical thing that Christians have to offer those outside is the offer of a new world of reconciliation, actualized in Christ and made present to us by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.

Thus, the question the church should be asking is not, “How can we best enter into the struggles of the world?” Rather the church’s question must always by “What does it mean for us to live as the true world, the world of the gospel in the midst of this passing age of darkness?”

Switch to our mobile site