Jesus and Nonviolence

A Third Way

Walter Wink

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780800636098
• eBook ISBN: 9781451419962
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

More than ever, Walter Wink believes, the Christian tradition of nonviolence is needed as an alternative to the dominant and death-dealing "powers" of our consumerist culture and fractured world. In this small book Wink offers a precis of his whole thinking about this issue, including the relation of Jesus and his message to politics and nonviolence, the history of nonviolent efforts, and how nonviolence can win the day when others don't hesitate to resort to violence or terror to achieve their aims.

Chapter 1

There have been some remarkable success stories of nonviolent struggle around the world recently. In the Philippines, a nonviolent revolution led by Corazon Aquino with crucial support from the churches swept the dictator Ferdinand Marcos from office with a loss of only 121 lives. Central to the effectiveness of that struggle was a background of training in nonviolent direct action provided by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.

In Poland, Solidarity irreversibly mobilized popular sentiment against the puppet Communist regime. An entire clandestine culture, literature, and spirituality came to birth there outside the authority of official society. This undercuts the oft-repeated claim that what Mohandas Gandhi did in India or Martin Luther King Jr. did in the American South would never work under a brutal, Sovietsponsored government.

Nonviolent general strikes have overthrown at least seven Latin American dictators: Carlos Ibáñez del Campo of Chile (1931), Gerardo Machado y Morales of Cuba (1933), Jorge Ubico of Guatemala (1944), Elie Lescot of Haiti (1946), Arnulfo Arias of Panama (1951), Paul Magliore of Haiti (1956), and Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of Colombia (1957).¹ In 1989–90 alone, fourteen nations underwent nonviolent revolutions, all of them successful except China, and all of them nonviolent except Romania. These revolutions involved 1.7 billion people. If we total all the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, the figure comes to 3.4 billion people, and again, most were successful. And yet there are people who still insist that nonviolence doesn’t work! Gene Sharp has itemized 198 different types of nonviolent actions that are a part of the historical record, yet our history books seldom mention any of them, so preoccupied are they with power politics and wars.²

There are good reasons for reluctance to champion nonviolence. The term itself is negative. It sounds like a not-doing, the putting of all one’s energy into avoiding something bad rather than throwing one’s total being into doing something good. But the term itself is hardly the cause of objection. “Nonviolence” is identified by many as the injunction to be submissive before the authorities.³ Romans 13:1–7 has been interpreted as an absolute command to obey the government whatever it does. “Turn the other cheek” became a divine ultimatum to slaves and servants to accept flogging and blows obsequiously. “Love of enemies” was twisted to render the oppressed compliant from the very heart, forgiving every injustice with no thought of changing the system. Nonviolence meant, in the context of this perverse inversion of the gospel, passivity. And the fact that “pacifism” and “passivism” sound so alike only made confusion worse.⁴

Most Christians desire nonviolence, yes; but they are not talking about a nonviolent struggle for justice. They mean simply the absence of conflict. They would like the system to change without having to be involved in changing it. What they mean by nonviolence is as far from Jesus’ third way as a lazy nap in the sun is from a confrontation in which protesters are being clubbed to the ground.

When a church that has not lived out a costly identification with the oppressed offers to mediate between hostile parties, it merely adds to the total impression that it wants to stay above the conflict and not take sides. The church says to the lion and the lamb, “Here, let me negotiate a truce,” to which the lion replies, “Fine, after I finish my lunch.”

“Reconciliation” also has been misused. Reconciliation is necessary, and it must be engaged in at all stages of the struggle. The human quality of the opponent must be continually affirmed. Some kind of trust that can serve as the basis of the new society to come must be established even in the midst of conflict. But when church leaders preach reconciliation without having unequivocally committed themselves to struggle on the side of the oppressed for justice, they are caught straddling a pseudo-neutrality made of nothing but thin air. Neutrality in a situation of oppression always supports the status quo. Reduction of conflict by means of a phony “peace” is not a Christian goal. Justice is the goal, and that may require an acceleration of conflict as a necessary stage in forcing those in power to bring about genuine change.

Likewise, blanket denunciations of violence by the churches place the counterviolence of the oppressed on the same level as the violence of the system that has driven the oppressed to such desperation. Are stones thrown by youth really commensurate with buckshot and real bullets fired by police?

Finally, some pacifists have been rightly criticized for being more concerned with their own righteousness than with the sufferings of the afflicted. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued:

To maintain one’s innocence in a setting such as that of the Third Reich, even to the point of not plotting Hitler’s death, would be irresponsible action. To refuse to engage oneself in the demands of necessita, would be the selfish act of one who cared for his own innocence, who cared for his own guiltlessness, more than he cared for his guilty brothers.⁵

The issue is not, “What must I do in order to secure my salvation?” but rather, “What does God require of me in response to the needs of others?” It is not, “How can I be virtuous?” But “How can I participate in the struggle of the oppressed for a more just world?” Otherwise our nonviolence is premised on self-justifying attempts to establish our own purity in the eyes of God, others, and ourselves, and that is nothing less than a satanic temptation to die with clean hands and a dirty heart.⁶

For Discussion

1. What objections do you have to nonviolence?

2. Do you think you could be nonviolent, if not consistently, then during a specific demonstration or vigil?

3. What reasons can you find for choosing to be nonviolent?

Chapter 2

Many of those who have committed their lives to ending injustice simply dismiss Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence out of hand as impractical idealism. And with good reason. “Turn the other cheek” suggests the passive, Christian doormat quality that has made so many Christians cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice. “Resist not evil” seems to break the back of all opposition to evil and to counsel submission. “Going the second mile” has become a platitude meaning nothing more than “extend yourself,” and rather than fostering structural change, encourages collaboration with the oppressor.

Jesus obviously never behaved in any of these ways. Whatever the source of the misunderstanding, it is clearly in neither Jesus nor his teaching, which, when given a fair hearing in its original social context, is arguably one of the most revolutionary political statements ever uttered:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile (Matt. 5:38–41 NRSV).

When the court translators working in the hire of King James chose to translate antistēnai as “Resist not evil,” they were doing something more than rendering Greek into English. They were translating nonviolent resistance into docility. Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. That would have been absurd. His entire ministry is utterly at odds with such a preposterous idea. The Greek word is made up of two parts: anti, a word still used in English for “against,” and histēmi, a verb that in its noun form (stasis) means violent rebellion, armed revolt, sharp dissention. In the Greek Old Testament, antistēnai is used primarily for military encounters—44 out of 71 times. It refers specifically to the moment two armies collide, steel on steel, until one side breaks and flees. In the New Testament it describes Barabbas, a rebel “who had committed murder in the insurrection” (Mark 15:7; Luke 23:19, 25), and the townspeople in Ephesus, who “are in danger of being charged with rioting” (Acts 19:40). The term generally refers to a potentially lethal disturbance or armed revolution.⁷

A proper translation of Jesus’ teaching would then be, “Don’t strike back at evil (or, one who has done you evil) in kind.” “Do not retaliate against violence with violence.” The Scholars Version is brilliant: “Don’t react violently against the one who is evil.” Jesus was no less committed to opposing evil than the anti-Roman resistance fighters. The only difference was over the means to be used: how one should fight evil.

There are three general responses to evil: (1) passivity, (2) violent opposition, and 3) the third way of militant nonviolence articulated by Jesus. Human evolution has conditioned us for only the first two of these responses: flight or fight. “Fight” had been the cry of Galileans who had abortively rebelled against Rome only two decades before Jesus spoke. Jesus and many of his hearers would have seen some of the two thousand of their countrymen crucified by the Romans along the roadsides. They would have known some of the inhabitants of Sepphoris (a mere three miles north of Nazareth) who had been sold into slavery for aiding the insurrectionists’ assault on the arsenal there. Some also would live to experience the horrors of the war against Rome in 66–70 C.E., one of the ghastliest in human history.

If the option “fight” had no appeal to them, their only alternative was “flight”: passivity, submission, or, at best, a passive-aggressive recalcitrance in obeying commands. For them no third way existed. Submission or revolt spelled out the entire vocabulary of their alternatives to oppression.

Now we are in a better position to see why King James’ faithful scholars translated antistēnai as “resist not.” The king would not want people concluding that they had any recourse against his or any other sovereign’s unjust policies. Therefore the populace must be made to believe that there are two alternatives and only two: flight or fight. Either we resist not or we resist. And Jesus commands us, according to these king’s men, to resist not. Jesus appears to authorize monarchical absolutism. Submission is the will of God. And most modern translations have meekly followed in that path.

Neither of these alternatives has anything to do with what Jesus is proposing. It is important that we be utterly clear about this point before going on: Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil. His is a third alternative not even touched by these options. Antistēnai cannot be construed to mean submission.

Jesus clarifies his meaning by three brief examples. “If any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Why the right cheek? How does one strike another on the right cheek anyway? Try it. A blow by the right fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent. To strike the right cheek with the fist would require using the left hand, but in that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. Even to gesture with the left hand at Qumran carried the penalty of exclusion and ten days’ penance (The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1QS 7). The only way one could strike the right cheek with the right hand would be with the back of the right hand. What we are dealing with here is unmistakably an insult, not a fistfight. The intention is not to injure but to humiliate, to put someone in his or her “place.” One normally did not strike a peer thus, and if one did, the fine was exorbitant (4 zuz was the fine for a blow to a peer with a fist, 400 zuz for backhanding him...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• The Fellowship of Reconciliation