Non-violence?

I’ve been thinking about non-violence lately: reading James McClendon, school shootings, recent blog discussion.  I have become convinced that to follow Jesus means to practice non-violence.  However, sometimes I feel like it is easy for me to say that.  My country has never required me to go to war, and growing up quite priviledged I did not need to join the army to pay for my education.   I live in a stable and safe environment; the chances of me needing to violently defend myself are rare.  So for me to believe in a non-violent way of life seems more like a theory than a practical reality. 

However, there must be things I could do to practice non-violence in my “safe” life.  So what do you think?  Despite the fact that myself, and probably many of my blog readers will never have to be conscientious objectors, what would it look like for us to practice non-violence?

 Disclaimer: This post is not for the purpose of facilitating a discussion on the merits or validity of a non-violent way of life.  But rather I hope to discuss what a non-violent life might look like. If you would like to discuss the merits/validity of non-violence see the post below and continue that discussion there.

McClendon on Bonhoeffer

A few of us at MHGS are reading James Wm. McClendon Jr.’s three volume Systematics this semster.  In this work McClendon attempts to put forth the “baptist vision”.  I’ll share some quotes with you as I journey through these texts.  I bet you will be surprised by his idea of what being a baptist is all about.  The following quote comes from his first volume Ethics, in a discussion on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who lived during the first half of the 20th century.  A man who is best known as a ardent believer in the possibility of obeying the sermon on the mount and a participant in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

My thesis, then, is that Bonhoeffer’s grisly death was part and parcel of the tragic dimension of his life, and that in turn but an element in the greater tragedy of the Christian community of Germany.  Put in the briefest terms, the thesis is that they had no effective communal moral structure in the church that was adequate to the crucial need of church and German people (to say nothing of the need of Jewish people; to say nothing of the world’s people).  No structures, no practices, no skills of political life existed that were capable of resisting, christianly resisting, the totalitarianism of the times.  The tragedy is the more intense because of all Christians in Germany Dietrich Bonhoeffer perhaps came nearest to displaying exactly those skills and to developing exactly those practices.  But it is a shared tragedy, for he could not in any case have met the need alone.  And finally it is an instructive tragedy, for there is considerable evidence that the Christian church in the world, not least in America, faces again in our times the same qualities of intrusive government, ideological warfare, and coopted religion that so easily deceived the Germans in the 1930’s and 1940’s…So the correct Bonhoeffer question to put to one who believes as I do that violence is not an option for the disciples of Jesus Christ is not the often-heard “Then what would you do about Hitler?”  Quite possibly there was nothing that Dietrich Bonhoeffer alone could have done about Hitler, except possibly to help a few Jews escape Germany and help a few friends of a better German future make contact with their Christian friends in other countries.  The correct – because realistic and responsible – question has been better put by Mark Thiessen Nation: “What would you do with a church which chooses to go along with a government that systematically eliminates Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, and mounts a war that would lead to the deaths of more than 35 million people?”  That question makes it clear that (from the standpoint of Christian solidarity) it was not Brother Dietrich but we who failed.  p. 211-212.