If Jesus Is Lord

Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

Ronald J. Sider

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780801036286
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493418268
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What does Jesus have to say about violence, just war, and killing? Does Jesus ever want his disciples to kill in order to resist evil and promote peace and justice?

This book by noted theologian and bestselling author Ronald J. Sider provides a career capstone statement on biblical peacemaking. Sider makes a strong case for the view that Jesus calls his disciples to love, and never kill, their enemies. He explains that there are never only two options: to kill or to do nothing in the face of tyranny and brutality. There is always a third possibility: vigorous, nonviolent resistance. If we believe that Jesus is Lord, then we disobey him when we set aside what he taught about killing and ignore his command to love our enemies.

This thorough, comprehensive treatment of a topic of perennial concern vigorously engages with the just war tradition and issues a challenge to all Christians, especially evangelicals, to engage in biblical peacemaking. The book includes a foreword by Stanley Hauerwas.

1
Jesus’s Gospel

Virtually every New Testament scholar, whether liberal or conservative, Catholic or Protestant, agrees that the gospel Jesus announced and proclaimed was “the kingdom of God.” This phrase (or Matthew’s equivalent, “the kingdom of heaven,” which means exactly the same thing) appears 122 times in the first three Gospels—most of the time (92) on the lips of Jesus. Jesus points to the kingdom as the purpose of his coming (Luke 4:43). Both his preaching and his miraculous healings are signs of the kingdom (7:18–28). And Jesus sends out his disciples to announce the coming of the kingdom (Matt. 10:7–8; Luke 10:9).

At the core of Jesus’s teaching was the claim that the long-expected messianic time of peace, justice, forgiveness of sins, and restoration of Israel was actually breaking into history in his person and work. But Jesus puzzled and astonished his contemporaries. By his teaching and action, he offered an understanding of the nature and work of the Messiah that was strikingly different from that of popular expectation. He rejected the widespread messianic idea of a conquering military hero. When he publicly made messianic claims in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he rode not on a military general’s proud warhorse but rather on a lowly donkey. And he taught his followers to love their enemies.

To understand the implications of Jesus’s messianic understanding for our topic, we must first explore the messianic expectations of his day, then examine the extent of messianic violence in Jesus’s time, and finally develop more fully Jesus’s teaching on the dawning kingdom of God. Only then will we be ready to understand Jesus’s more specific words and actions with regard to violence.

Messianic Expectations

In 587 BC Babylon conquered the kingdom of Judah, destroyed the capital city Jerusalem and its temple, and took Judah and its leaders into exile in Babylon. Those events fundamentally challenged the basic belief that God had given the land of Israel to Abraham’s descendants forever and that the one God of the universe was uniquely present in the temple in Jerusalem. The people’s sinful failure to obey God’s revealed law, their prophets explained, was the reason for national destruction and exile. But their prophets also held out the hope of a future return from exile and a restoration of their God’s presence in a rebuilt temple.

There were modest movements of return from exile under Ezra and Nehemiah in the latter half of the fifth century BC. But no strong independent Jewish kingdom emerged. Many descendants of the ancient Israelites remained scattered throughout the Near East. And those who still lived in the ancient homeland suffered under the rule of oppressive empires. For a century after the Hasmonean revolt, which started in 167 BC, a small Jewish kingdom existed, but the Romans swept through Palestine in 63 BC. Living under the Romans’ ruthless rule, the Jews had little sense that the long-expected return from exile had truly happened.

The hope for a Davidic figure who would bring the nation freedom was largely absent for several hundred years after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. But in the Hasmonean period a messianic hope for national restoration grounded in some earlier biblical texts emerged. Yale biblical scholar John J. Collins shows that by the end of the first century BC the idea of the Davidic Messiah as a warrior king who destroys Israel’s enemies and brings unending peace “constitutes the common core of Jewish messianism around the turn of the era.”1 “This expectation of a Davidic messiah had a clear basis in the Scriptures and became very widespread in various sectors of Judaism in the last century before the Common Era.”2

That is not to suggest that there was one uniform messianic understanding in this period. A variety of messianic views existed.3 The Jewish historian Josephus (who is our best source outside of the New Testament for the events in Palestine in the first century AD) talks about various violent rebellious movements (some of which were messianic) in the period leading up to the Jewish War (AD 66–70). These violent movements, Josephus suggests, helped lead to that war. Josephus speaks of an “ambiguous oracle” in the Jewish sacred writings about someone from their country becoming a ruler of the world.4

In the Jewish texts from the two hundred years before and after the birth of Jesus that speak of the Messiah, his central task is the liberation of Israel (often using military means) and the cleansing or restoration of the Jerusalem temple. There is no expectation that the Messiah will suffer.5 But the expectation of a military conqueror is certainly present: “How beautiful is the king, the messiah, who will arise from those who are of the house of Judah! He girds up his loins and goes forth and orders the battle array against his enemies and slays the kings along with their overlords, and no king or overlord can stand before him; he reddens the mountains with the blood of their slain, his clothing is dipped in blood like a winepress.”6 Craig Keener says that “most Jews expected a final war against the Gentiles to culminate this age and inaugurate their redemption.”7

The texts describing the end of the old age and the arrival of the new messianic age often use powerful apocalyptic language and vivid cosmic imagery. Unfortunately, since the time of Albert Schweitzer at the beginning of the twentieth century, many scholars have thought these texts were talking about the end of the physical world. But more recent scholarship has shown that view to be fundamentally mistaken. In N. T. Wright’s words:

There is virtually no evidence that Jews were expecting the end of the space-time universe. There is abundant evidence that they, like Jeremiah and others before them, knew a good metaphor when they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological significance of cataclysmic socio-political events. There is almost nothing to suggest that they followed the Stoics into the belief that the world itself would come to an end. . . . They believed that the present world order would come to an end—the world order in which pagans hold power and Jews, the covenant people of the creator God, did not. . . . Jews simply did not believe that the space-time order was shortly to disappear.8

The apocalyptic language “had nothing to do with a supposed end of the space-time order and everything to do with the great climax to Israel’s history, the final liberation of Israel from her pagan enemies.”9

Very often these texts predicted a violent war that would overthrow the pagans and usher in the age of peace. There are also many passages in the Old Testament that speak of a future leader and time that will bring universal peace. Especially striking are three from Isaiah.

Isaiah 9:5–7 speaks of a coming king who would bring peace and justice:

Every warrior’s boot used in battle

and every garment rolled in blood

will be destined for burning,

will be fuel for the fire.

For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given,

and the government will be on his shoulders.

And he will be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the greatness ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Other Books by Ronald J. Sider
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Jesus’s Gospel
• 2. Jesus’s Actions
• 3. Jesus’s Teaching in the Sermon on the Mount
• 4. Other Teachings of Jesus
• 5. Peace in the Rest of the New Testament
• 6. But What About . . . ?
• 7. Foundational Theological Issues
• 8. Problems with Pacifism
• 9. Problems with Just War Thinking
• 10. Jesus and Killing in the Old Testament
• 11. What If Most (or All) Christians Became Pacifists?
• 12. Nonviolence and the Atonement
• 13. Christians and Killing in Church History
• 14. If Jesus Is Lord
• Bibliography
• Subject and Name Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover