The Audacity of Peace

Scot McKnight

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506484570
• eBook ISBN: 9781506484587
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In The Audacity of Peace, Scot McKnight sketches a peace ethic, or a peace witness, that embraces the embodied self-denial of Jesus to the point of the cross, which through the resurrection is vindicated by God. As such, a peace ethic volitionally and communally participates in the cruciform pattern of the life of Jesus. Through the power of God's grace and the indwelling Spirit of God, the participant in the way of Jesus is transformed into a Christoform life. A peace ethic is a lived theology whose discerning witness transcends the specific principles and ideas of that theology.

In the My Theology series, the world's leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs in concise, pocket-sized books.

1

Sider

ONE CAN DRAW a straight line from Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi, and then from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.. Walk that line and you will also meet Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Michael Gorman and forms of pacifism, radical and resistant and political and prophetic. Though I have learned from each of these, pacifism first entered my conscience through an American Mennonite, Ronald Sider.

In the late 1970s I read Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and began to read into the ways of the Anabaptists. Kris and I, along with our small children, participated for a couple of years in a Catholic Worker home called ‘Anawim House’, where I began to develop a social conscience both about possessions and war. The leaders, Pat and Mary Murray, owned a small bookshop and Pat regularly informed me of new books that could help me in my journey. One of these was Ronald Sider’s lectures called Christ and Violence, a short book that converted me to a peace ethic in a single reading.^[4]

In what follows I reflect on Sider’s study. There is no attempt here to reconstruct what I believed in those days, other than the transformative encounter I had reading Christ and Violence. My mind changed. Rather, I reflect on what I think now about a theme I first learned in Sider’s book, sticking to some kind of reflection on what he wrote. In one brief formula:

Christ chose the cross, not the sword.

Jesus’ approach to victory was not a war, not to be armed, not to fight but to die, to give himself for others. In Sider’s words, ‘Christians who reject violence follow the way of the cross rather than the way of the sword’.

The World of Jesus

At the time of Jesus a sect was alive and well at Qumran that had a scroll we now call The War Scroll, and that sect had an apocalyptic hope, a fantasy really, of a final military battle in which the sons of light would annihilate the sons of darkness. Alongside that sect at the time of Jesus the zealot option was surging. The zealots believed in the story of Phinehas, the priest, who was commended for the use of violence to restore faithful observance of the Torah (Numbers 25:1-13; Psalm 106:28-31). They also knew the stories of the Maccabees, who resisted the Seleucid takeover and defilement of the temple by taking up arms and recapturing Jerusalem for the observance of the Torah (1-2 Maccabees). They also knew the Psalms of Solomon vision for the Messiah.

Behold, O Lord, and raise up to them their king, the son of David, at the time, in the which you choose, O God, that he may reign over Israel your servant. And gird him with strength, that he may shatter unrighteous rulers. And that he may purge Jerusalem from nations that trample (her) down to destruction. In the wisdom of righteousness he will thrust out sinners from (the) inheritance, He will destroy the pride of the sinner as a potter’s vessel. With a rod of iron he will break in pieces all their substance. He will destroy the godless nations with the word of his mouth. At his rebuke nations will flee before him. And he will reprove sinners for the thoughts of their heart. And he will gather together a holy people, whom he will lead in righteousness. And he will judge the tribes of the people that has been sanctified by the Lord his God. And he will not suffer unrighteousness to lodge any more in their midst, nor will there dwell with them any man that knows wickedness. For he will know them, that they are all sons of their God. And he will divide them according to their tribes upon the land. And neither sojourner nor alien will sojourn with them any more. He will judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness. Selah. (PsSol 17:21-29; Craig Evans et al.; Accordance Bible Software).

No matter how you shake that text, what spills out of the bag is a violent Messiah, and this too was a major expectation for the world in which Jesus was nurtured. Resistance occurred, but mostly it was futile. Rome had conquered the land in 63BC, had grown into an empire by the time of Jesus and had strategically placed in the area power brokers of Rome – think Herod the Great, Pilate, and Herod Antipas. Taxation was a constant irritation, famines exacerbated the irritations, and at times it all bubbled up into a foment of resistance. People like the sign prophets of Josephus or the zealots like Judas – and many more whose names are not recorded in documents – produced a world in which heroes could be made by simple acts of rebellion and resistance.

Jesus taught God’s empire (or kingdom) in this context.

The Way of Jesus

Two disciples, James and John, wanted to sit at the left and right of Jesus in that kingdom. Testing them, he asks if they actually think they can endure what he will endure. They think they can. He knows otherwise. Actually, he knows they too will be martyred, but what he can’t do is assign them such seats of power. Such places are designated by God. So Mark 10:35-40. The other ten apostles were indignant about the hubris of the brothers.

Jesus informs them that desiring seats of power is the way of Rome and its pawns (10:42). Second, he clears out a completely different path for the disciples:

But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. (All translations of the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version.)

If they are going to follow him, as they had chosen from the very beginning (cf. John 1:35-51; Mark 1:16-20; Luke 5:1-11), they will follow one whose path is the Way of the Cross.

The Way of the Cross begins with one’s posture: one must choose the discipline of serving others instead of power over others, instead of leading, one is to be a follower of Jesus. The desire is not to be ‘great’ or ‘first’ but instead to be ‘servant’ (diakonos) and ‘slave’ (doulos). Jesus himself did not come to ‘be served but to serve’ and his service required that he ‘give his life as a ransom for many’ (10:43-45). We can dispute whether ‘ransom’ means substitution or liberation, and whether ‘for’ means ‘instead of’ or ‘for the benefit of’, but the impact is that Jesus’ death saves humans from their condition and then transforms them into a life of serving others. One can’t dominate people and serve them at the same time.

What I learned from Sider is that Jesus here consciously and intentionally rejected the way of violence and power over others and chose the way of suffering and service as the path to ‘victory’, now redefined. One doesn’t get to the Easter victory of Jesus apart from the defeat on Friday.

These words confirm what Jesus had taught and would teach in other settings. At the Temptation he rejects the ‘glory’ and ‘authority’ to rule ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ that Satan can grant him if he will be bow to the devil (Luke 4:5-8). His first sermon in Nazareth, expounding as it did Isaiah 61, articulates a mission of ‘good news to the poor’ and to ‘captives’ and to the ‘blind’ and to the ‘oppressed’ (4:18). When Jesus provoked the disciples to name who he was in Israel’s story, Peter declares him to be ‘Messiah of God’ (9:20). But Jesus immediately ‘sternly ordered’ them into silence and revealed to them the Way of Jesus: ‘The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised’ (9:22). Messiah he is, but not the Messiah of their fathers’ world. He would be a crucified Messiah who would revolutionize the very meaning of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Sider
• 2. Bonhoeffer
• 3. Gorman and Bonhoeffer
• 4. Craigie
• 5. Collins