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.

The role of the church is to not be in charge…

I just finished reading the book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond. Jared was in Papua New Guinea and a native man asked him this question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” This book attempts to answer that question specifically and broadly. By that I mean the question could be asked a hundred different ways. Why is Bolovia the poorest country in South America? Why is Sub-Sarahan Africa so poor? Why didn’t China colonize the Americas? Why didn’t Native Americans colonize Europe?

Through the book Diamond attempts to prove that the answers to those questions most often lie within the geography of a country rather than the people themselves. There is much more to be said about all that, but as I finished the book last night some things came to my mind about the role of the church in society.

This book reveals that the history of humankind is a story of people attaining advantages and then using those advantages to take over other people. The history of humankind has been a fight for survival. Often times religion has played the role of justifying one group’s survival over another.

We see this in the history of Christianity: Constantine, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of Anabaptists by Lutherans, the exploration of the New World, and even today with the Moral Majority, the War on Terror, Evangelical lobbyists in Washington, our Christian President, the list goes on.

I have always struggled with the idea of the soveriegnty of God. Mainly because I find that many Christians use the idea to justify people spending an eternity in hell, or one groups “blessed” state of existence compared to the “cursed” state of others.

And then last night it hit me, to believe in the soveriegnty of God is to assume the role of not being in charge of the world. The rest of the world is fighting tooth and nail for survival. The role of the Christian is to entrust one’s survival into the hands of God.

What are the outcomes of this posture:
1. A Christian cannot use the sword to enable their survival.
2. A Christian cannot assume roles of political power to enable their survival.
3. A Christian assumes the role of stranger or alien in any land that they inhabit.
-Thus abandoning any idea of a Christian nation
4. A Christian believes that Jesus is the Messiah, and it is his role to bring about a new heaven and a new earth.
5. A Christian is a suffering servant.
6. The Church is a minority group.
7. The Church is a fellowship of people who freely assume this role.