A Response
to Questions About Nonviolence
Recently a very bright,
caring man I know well (he’s my son) read some of what I have put on this blog
about Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. He raised with me some questions about
that teaching. He asked about the situation where someone breaks into your home
and threatens harm to you or your family. This is actually a common question
from people learn about Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. The question I think
comes down to this: Is violent self-defense morally justifiable? Most of us
would answer that question yes. Many Americans keep guns in their homes against
precisely this possibility, statistically remote as that possibility may be.
Here for what they’re worth are my responses to the question. If you aren’t
familiar with Walter Wink’s exegesis of Jesus’ major teaching on the subject
(turn the other cheek, etc.) you might want to study it before reading further
here. You can find a discussion of it my post “The Inner Revolution” elsewhere
on this blog.
There is no doubt that
Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. The nonviolence he taught wasn’t meekly
passive, but it most certainly rejected all use of violence. One possible way
to avoid Jesus’ teaching is to say that his examples of turn the other cheek,
give the cloak also, go the second mile address issues of oppression or
injustice and aren’t intended to apply to other situations. If true that
interpretation would at the very least leave open the possibility that violent
self-defense could be moral.
There is however a
problem with that interpretation of what Jesus said. He not only taught
nonviolence, he lived it to the end. He would not use violence himself, nor did
he allow his disciples to use violence to save his own life. See for example
Matthew 26:51-52 and John 18:36. It seems unlikely that any violence Jesus or
his disciples could have used would have saved him. The Romans were a whole lot
stronger in the use of force than Jesus and his friends could ever be. Be that
as it may, Jesus would not let anyone try to free him through violence. He died
not letting anyone even attempt to use violence to save him, so committed was
he to God’s way of nonviolence.[1]
The assertion that
violence is moral when used in self-defense reflects, I think, a belief that
nonviolence doesn’t “work” and that it isn’t “safe.” Indeed nonviolence often
isn’t safe, but then neither is violence. As for nonviolence not working in the
case of a home break-in there are lots of stories of people disarming intruders
not by shooting them but by talking to them as the frightened, probably
desperate human beings they almost certainly are. Having a gun in your home is
no guarantee of safety. If you’re being a responsible gunowner your gun is not
loaded and is locked safely away out of the reach of children. In the case of a
house break-in rarely will you have time to get it, load it, and use it. So
yes, nonviolence often isn’t safe and doesn’t always work, but then neither is
violence always safe nor does it always work either.
There is another way of
handling the matter. The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, living in
Nazi Germany, knew Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence perfectly well. He even tried
to live in accordance with it. Eventually however he joined a conspiracy to
assassinate Hitler. He did it because he saw getting rid of Hitler as the only
way to end the horrors of Nazism and World War II. The conspiracy failed. Bonhoeffer
was arrested and spent much of World War II in jail. The Nazis executed him
shortly before the American army got to the prison he was held in. Bonhoeffer
joined a conspiracy to commit an act of violence because he thought it was
necessary. He never thought however that it was moral. He knew that it wasn’t.
He knew that it was something for which he would have to beg God’s forgiveness.
A person surely can conclude that an act of violence is necessary. According to
Jesus no one can ever claim that it is moral.
Here's the bottom line
about a life lived completely nonviolently. All of the great advocates of
nonviolence say that to be truly committed to nonviolence you have to be
willing to die for it. Granted, that becomes more problematic when the one
faced with being killed isn’t you but is someone you love. It is very easy for
us to drop our commitment to nonviolence in those cases and do everything we
can to protect our loved ones. God doesn’t condemn us for that. God
understands. I just hope that if any of us has to do it that we remember with
Bonhoeffer that it is something for which we have to beg God’s forgiveness.
[1]
Some Christians might contend that Jesus’ example here doesn’t apply to us
because suffering and dying were what he came to earth to do. Mel Gibson’s
movie The Passion of the Christ was marketed with the slogan “Dying was
his reason for living.” I simply do not and can not believe that that is how
Jesus understood himself. Though we confess him to have been the Son of God Incarnate,
he was also fully human. Surely he thought of himself in much the same way that
we think about ourselves. I therefore believe that he rejected violence as a
means of saving his life for the most part because he was so committed to what
he understood to be God’s nonviolent nature. Making Jesus too divine and
insufficiently human does indeed make him irrelevant as a model of moral behavior.
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