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Looking back over the time since last summer, which has seen a lot of development in my social/ethical/political views as a Christian (read: I became a pacifist), four books strike me as having been extremely significant in that process. This list is inspired by a similar one recently posted on Seeking First the Kingdom.
1. Jesus for President: I started reading this book in a class at YTI last summer. Written by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, this book challenged many of my notions of what a Christ-like ethic is like. It made me start reconsidering Christian pacifism, leading me eventually to embrace that that position as one of the most important aspects of who I am today. It stoked the flames of my already-increasing anti-nationalism, and it was largely due to reading this book that I came to the conclusion that I cannot say the Pledge of Allegiance in good conscience as a Christian. It’s a wonderfully expansive book, delving into Jesus’ relevance for environmental issues, poverty, justice, violence, and more. Despite a few factual inaccuracies/inconsistencies, I highly recommend it as a theological starting point for evangelicals and post-evangelicals who feel like they’re missing something in the contemporary American church.(Also, the layout is visually spectacular, and makes for an enjoyable read.)
2. Jesus and Nonviolence: Subtitled “A Third Way,” this short (~100 pg) work offers a wonderful introduction to the nonviolence theology and method of the eminent Walter Wink. Wink, a veteran of the civil rights movement, offers a key outline of both the practical and the ethical reasons that Christians should adopt nonviolence, pointing to its successes in numerous national and international struggles and its basis in the teachings of Jesus. The book goes a long way towards addressing many of the basic concerns most non-pacifist Christians have about nonviolence. Its brevity renders it both accessible and hard-hitting. When I talk to people (Christians or non-Christians) who are interested in the concept of Christian nonviolence, this is the first book I recommend (and lend).
3. The Powers That Be: Also by Walter Wink, this short book, based on his much longer “Powers” trilogy, is spectacular. The focus of the book is an exploration of what the Bible means when it talks about “principalities and powers”. Wink understands these terms (in line with much modern scholarship) as referring, in the context of a first-century worldview, to the oppressive systems and unjust structures that rule society. Wink calls these structures, collectively, the “Domination System”, and he convincingly demonstrates that Christ’s message was based on a rejection of domination in favor of justice, liberation, and peace, with the goal of redeeming the Powers. Discussing patriarchy, economic inequality, violence, and more, Wink does an excellent job of illustrating and explaining how the Church is called to confront nonviolently the Domination System. This book, perhaps my favorite of these four, contains more eminently quotable passages than any other work I have come across.
4. The Politics of Jesus: I read this book just last week, despite the fact that it is widely recognized as a crucial work for Christian nonviolence and inmany ways is foundational to the books listed above. Written by John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus did a good job of filling in many of the gapos of my peace theology. Yoder systematically exegetes Scripture to show 1) that Jesus’ message and life were inherently political and 2) that Jesus’ example continues to have relevance and the ethics it embodies should be normative for the Church. The book is quite comprehensive, summarizing existing scholarship rather than seeking to reinvent or re-discover on its own. Meticulously footnoted, it gives the reader every opportunity to find more information or seek out independent verification of Yoder’s exegesis. I have a feeling that this book, of the four listed here, will be the one that I refer to the most and use as a reference for my own thoughts. Yoder excellently demonstrates that the New Testament presents a unified, nonviolent, ethical message, from Jesus to Paul to Revelation, and he also considers and discusses the Old Testament witness (though at much less length). Though I had already arrived at many of its conclusions by the time I read it, The Politics of Jesus has helped tie together all the strands of thought that I had been developing over the past months.
Invariably, whenever a pacifist Christian reveals her stance to a non-pacifist Christian, the first question she must answer is “What about the Old Testament?” Indeed, many Christians today use Israel’s wars recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures as a justification for the stance that war is consistent with Christian ethics.
A careful consideration of the relevant biblical texts reveals that this is not the case. As John Howard Yoder discusses in The Politics of Jesus, while it is certainly true that in some cases wars occur apparently with YHWH’s blessing, ancient Israel consistently denies that war is what saves them from their enemies. Rather, redemption from the threat of oppression is always seen as a result of the special intervention of God himself, not of human military exploits. As Yoder writes:
It had thus become a part of the standard devotional ritual of Israel to look over the nation’s history as one of miraculous preservation. Sometimes this preservation had included the Israelites’ military activity; at other times no weapons at all were used. In both kinds of case, however, the point was the same: confidence in YHWH is an alternative to the self-determining use of Israel’s own military resources in the defense of their existence as God’s people. [emphasis added]
The point of the war stories of the Old Testament, then, is that salvation comes from God, not from the the violent strength of men. Indeed, even where some military force is used, it is often minimized by God’s command (consider the story of Gideon in Judges 6-8, wherein God limited Gideon’s forces to show that the victory was His alone). This interpretation makes sense in light of passages such as Psalm 33.16-17:
A king is not saved by his great army,
a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.
The war horse is a vain hope for victory,
and by its great might it cannot save.
This same Psalm ends with this reminder of YHWH’s provision:
Our soul waits for the LORD;
he is our help and shield.
Our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O LORD, be upon us,
even as we hope in you. [NRSV]
Israel’s wars, when successful, were not displays of trust in the might of bow and sword. To an Israelite — whether David against Goliath or Gideon against the Midianites and Amalekites — deliverance is due to the miraculous intervention of YHWH. This understanding of war for Israel was much more fundamental than the idea of “giving credit” to God for victory; it was rather the recognition that God caused the victory entirely, which is not the same thing at all as an after-the-fact token Alleluia.
This attitude contrasts sharply with the modern practice of war, particularly in America. Today, war is uniformly an outgrowth of faith in the myth of redemptive violence, of trust in the power of tanks and bombs to deliver us from evil. Militarism — the kind so often backed by the church, sadly — is always the embodiment of the belief that if we only invest a little more money and few more lives, we’ll have just enough strength to save us.
Ancient Israel looked to its covenant with God for its preservation, trusting in YHWH as “help” and “shield”. No nation today has that covenant, and thus every nation today trusts instead in “great armies” and “war horses”. These two approaches are fundamentally different, and therefore no attempt to justify modern warmaking can be based on Israel’s example.
I’m currently reading John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, which is one of the modern classics of Christian pacifism and related theological movements. In his chapter on Romans 13, Yoder has a brilliant statement on the relavancy of the passage to issues of war. I reprint it here without further comment; it speaks for itself.
The function of bearing the sword to which Christians are called to be subject is the judicial police function; it does not refer to the death penalty or to war.
The sword (machaira) is the symbol of judicial authority. It was not the instrument of judicial punishment, since the Romans crucified their criminals. It was not the instrument of war since it was but a long dagger. Like the pistol warn by a traffic policeman or the dagger worn by a Swiss citizen-officer, it was more a symbol of authority than a weapon. This is not to say that the Roman government was mild or that this weapon was only symbolically present. But what it symbolizes is the way a given government exercises dominion over its subjects by appeal to violence, not the execution of capital offenders or the waging of hostilities against other nations. At this time Rome was not carrying on major military hostilities against other nations. There were in fact no neighbor “nations” with whom Rome could very meaningfully wage war. The brushfire hostilities along the frontiers were more like police action than like war.
The distinction made here between police and war is not simply a matter of the degree to which the appeal to force goes, the number of persons killed or killing. It is a structural and profound difference in the sociological meaning of the appeal to force. In the police function, the violence or the threat thereof is applied only the offending party. The use of violence by the agent of the police is subject to review by higher authorities. The police officer applies power within the limits of a state whose legislation even the criminal knows to be applicable to him. In any orderly police system there are serious safeguards to keep the violence of the police from being applied in any wholesale way against the innocent. The police power is generally great enough to overwhelm that of the individual offender so that any resistance on the offender’s part is pointless. In all of the respects, war is structurally different. The doctrine of the “just war” is an effort to extend into the realm of war the logic of the limited violence of police authority — but not a very successful one. There is some logic to the “just war” pattern of thought but very little realism. At the very most the only relevance of Romans 13 to war would be to a very precise operation carried on within the very clear limitations of all the classic criteria that define the “justifiable war.” The more we would attempt honestly to define and to respect such criteria, the more clearly we would see that as far as any real or conceivable war is concerned, in the name of any real or thinkable government, it is not honestly possible to include that function under the authorization given government by Romans 13.
