A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence

Key Thinkers, Activists, and Movements for the Gospel of Peace

Cramer, David C., Werntz, Myles

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781493434732
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A Word & Way 2022 Book of the Year
Sojourners' 2022 Book Roundup to Inspire Faith and Justice Christian nonviolence is not a settled position but a vibrant and living tradition. This book offers a concise introduction to diverse approaches to, proponents of, and resources for this tradition. It explores the myriad biblical, theological, and practical dimensions of Christian nonviolence as represented by a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers and movements, including previously underrepresented voices. The authors invite readers to explore this tradition and discover how they might live out the gospel in our modern world.

1
Nonviolence of Christian Discipleship

Following Jesus in a World at War

During the Second World War, the small mountainous village of Le Chambon, France, became a refuge for nearly five thousand Jews and other persons fleeing the Holocaust.1 In a biography of André Trocmé, pastor and leader of the movement in Le Chambon, the biographer asks, “How is it that the population in Le Chambon and the surrounding area almost unanimously embraced the rescue effort?”2 It is one thing to celebrate a radical individual, but how does this kind of group action emerge? In answering this question, we encounter a particular kind of Christian nonviolence: nonviolence of Christian discipleship.

Today, nonviolence of Christian discipleship—sometimes called ecclesiocentric nonviolence—is one of the most well-known forms of Christian nonviolence. This form emphasizes the role of the gathered Christian community—or, more properly, Christian disciples—in Christian nonviolence. According to this stream, nonviolence is a way of living in the world, shaped by reading of the Scriptures, corporate worship, and the practices of life together. Christian nonviolence is a habit of regular discipleship, which then becomes the mode of engagement in times of conflict.

As we describe below, nonviolence of Christian discipleship was popularized in the second half of the twentieth century by the works of John Howard Yoder, particularly his 1972 book, The Politics of Jesus. However, subsequent to the publication of this book, survivors and advocates exposed details of Yoder’s own sexual violence toward women, including his colleagues and students.3 This undermines any straightforward appropriation of this stream of nonviolence for today. In this chapter, then, we complicate the narrative by not only discussing Yoder’s contributions to this stream but also exploring sources of this stream that predate Yoder (in figures like André Trocmé and Dietrich Bonhoeffer) and divergences within this stream among contemporary theologians and biblical scholars. According to this approach, the Christian community is called to be a nonviolent community that reads the Scriptures canonically in light of the nonviolent Jesus’s call to Christian discipleship. The question that arises is whether a church can be called a church without this commitment to—and practice of—nonviolence. Thus, any failure to practice nonviolence threatens to undermine this approach on its own terms.

The Nonviolent Revolution of Jesus

When André Trocmé’s Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution first appeared in English in 1972, it created a stir. Written by the pastor of the French Reformed Church of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the book offers a reading of the Gospels that draws on biblical scholarship to make the case for nonviolence as the way of the communities that Jesus founded. In taking up this topic, Trocmé largely sets aside the question of canonical progression: for Trocmé, it matters little whether the Hebrew Bible commends nonviolence, for he unapologetically embraces the view that “Jesus is the central event of history, because de facto his coming changed humankind.”4 Trocmé then connects the churches of Jesus to the ethic of Jesus on precisely this point: to be a disciple of Jesus is not simply to confess faith in Jesus but also to follow Jesus in the way of the cross.

For Trocmé, it is not enough to say that Jesus’s example is one of nonviolence. Instead, Jesus’s very substance as the goel (the mediator between the community and God) is of this nature: Jesus’s mediation between God and humanity occurs in a way that abolishes whatever violence was present in Israel. “For the Christian, the figure of the ‘Servant of Yahweh,’ who gives his life in ransom for the guilty ones fallen into slavery, now thrusts itself upon Jesus (Mark 10:45). In this way, the law of retaliation was transmuted. Its demand for justice, for holiness, could never be abolished. But God’s vengeance would now be borne by God himself, by the God who is the goel of his people in the person of his Son.”5

For Trocmé, the way in which Jesus mediates for humanity and the way in which the church is connected to Christ morally and to the world in witness are integrally related. They are a sacramental matrix of divine imitation, in which the church follows in the way of Jesus, for it is in this way that Jesus joins us to God the Father.

Over the course of the book, Trocmé unpacks the Hebrew Bible’s vision of liberation from sin that is enacted socially, creating a new sociopolitical order and uniting class divisions across Israel. As Trocmé notes, in addition to ministering to various classes of people (Jews and gentiles, rich and poor, and so on), Christ’s ministry ranges across the fortified cities of Galilee, uniting these polities into one body of disciples. The sociopolitical expansion of this peace mirrors the sacramental vision of peace that undergirds Trocmé’s vision of who Jesus is and what the church is to be. Accordingly, Christ’s commandments are not to be enacted solely by individual followers of Jesus in a series of situations but are to be the enacted life of the church together. Refusing interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount in which the Sermon depicts eschatological reality or purely individualist options, Trocmé argues that the norm of the Old Testament was that of the community. As such, the people of the church are to enact these teachings now, together.6

The goel of the people, who redeems them through nonviolent love, enacts the kingdom of God in a way that “commits to the redemption of the individual person.” The nonviolent church, in turn, is “a matter of showing compassion, of saving and redeeming, of being a healing community.” This way, which is participation in the very person of Jesus, is only available as a work of God and not, in distinction from Gandhi’s view, as a tactical move toward a political end. The distinction Trocmé makes between the way of Gandhi, as commendable as it is, and the way of Jesus turns on this: participation in the power of God available through Jesus Christ, who is the mediator of humanity to God.7

Trocmé thus connects the mediation of Christ, the creation of the people of God, and the practice of the Christian community. In doing so, Trocmé takes a different path than nineteenth-century liberal theology—and a different path than the way that the nonviolent community will be appropriated by many in the twentieth century. For in much nineteenth-century liberal theology, dogmatic claims about the nature of God are available to us through moral behaviors: to know God is to love people. While in Scripture, the knowledge of God and the love that the Christian has for others are connected, for liberals in the nineteenth century, one knows who God is as one enacts moral behaviors. The substance of God is transposed into a moral axiom.

This is not to say that the twentieth century—in emphasizing the practical nature of the Christian faith or the imitation of Christ—is simply repeating the nineteenth century’s mantras. But across the modern era, as Christians continued to sort out the relationship between the church and the peace that is God, two roads began to emerge: (1) that the peace of God manifests itself as the church’s liturgical gathering and (2) that the peace of God manifests itself through the actions and witness of the church. This is in some ways an artificial separation, as most theologians will affirm both to some degree. But the question appears in terms of whether what is happening is an embodiment of God’s peace or an imitation of God’s peace. In his work, Trocmé holds together what will sometimes come apart.

Nonviolence in the Christian Canon

Biblical scholars have expanded Trocmé’s thesis beyond the Gospels to the remaining canon of the New Testament and to the precedents of the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament. The concern is not simply whether nonviolence is articulated by Jesus for his disciples but also whether Christian nonviolence is thoroughly canonical: Does Jesus offer his disciples (and thus the church) something that is continued from the Old Testament to the New Testament? Is this teaching new, or is it already a presumption for Israel as well? What is at stake in these questions is whether Christian nonviolence is consistent with Hebrew Scriptures or whether it entails Christian supersessionism.

In her 1984 text, My Enemy Is My Guest: Jesus and Violence in Luke, trailblazing Catholic New Testament scholar J. Massyngbaerde Ford argues that Jesus’s nonviolence is indeed a new development from what came before, with John the Baptist as a transitional figure between the old and new.8 Thus, for Ford, Elizabeth’s blessing of Mary in Luke 1 harks back to blessings bestowed on Jael in Judges 5 and on Judith in the Book of Judith 13. Ford writes, “It is interesting that these two women are blessed for a heroic, nationalistic, but violent course of action. In other words they were women zealots, somewhat analogous to Phinehas and Elijah. Mary is praised by Elizabeth in words that would clearly remind Jewish readers of these two women zealots.” Likewise, Ford describes Mary’s song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), as bearing “all the marks of a holy-war song.”9

In John the Baptist’s teaching in Luke’s Gospel, Ford sees a transition beginning to take place from the violent messianism of Mary and Elizabeth to the nonviolence of Jesus. She observes of John the Baptist’s teaching to the crowds, tax collectors, and soldiers that he “checks any violent reaction to their circumstances, but he does not ask either the tax collectors or the soldiers to relinquish their occupations.” For Ford, then, the nonviolence of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke is truly something new within the canon. Through his parables and teachings, the Lukan Jesus teaches that “disciples must be ready to carry their cross for the sake of the kingdom.”...