Introduction to a
Book I May Never Write
June 27, 2021
I just reread something I wrote last month but had forgotten
about. It is an introduction to a book with the working title Liberating
Peace. It is basically an essay that deplores human violence of all kinds.
I think it is worth reading so I’ll post it here even though I may never write
that book. I think I stopped working on it after I wrote this Introduction
because the task I outline in it is so daunting and I feel inadequate to complete
it. So for what it’s worth is that Introduction I wrote:
Liberating Peace
Introduction
There simply is no denying it. Both human history and
present human reality are drenched in blood. The history we’re taught in school
is largely the history of wars. Every or at least nearly every human culture we
know of has fought wars. From the ancient wars of the Egyptians with the
Assyrians (and wars even older than that in the Middle East, China, and
elsewhere)to the twenty years of the American war against the Taliban in
Afghanistan that President Biden is only now ending, human cultures have used
their best minds and their most effective technology to create ever more
efficient ways for some people to kill other people. Though we haven’t used
them since 1945, today we have enough nuclear weapons to end all life on earth.
So do the Russians and perhaps others. We developed those nuclear weapons as
part of an armaments race with the bygone USSR. In that country the military
had first call on resources both material and human. Why? So the USSR could be
as proficient at killing people as the US was, and we couldn’t let them get
more proficient at it than we were.
The history of the Christian church is to a considerable
extent the history of the church’s relationship to war. Once Christianity became
the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE the official
church abandoned Jesus’ teaching and practice of nonviolence and replaced it
with what it called “just war theory.” As we will see in the course of this
work, just war theory claimed to place limits on the sort and extent of
permissible Christian violence, but as a practical matter it opened the door to
Christian participation in whatever violence a Christian’s national government
wanted to commit. Christians fought wars against Muslim believers in the Middle
East who were no threat to them whatsoever. After Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and
others introduced reformed versions of Christianity in Europe, different sorts
of Christians willingly engaged in killing each other supposedly in the name of
Christ. In the Age of Discovery Christian missionaries followed the imperialist
armies of their nations and participated quite happily in destroying native
cultures and forcing people to convert to Christianity at the point of a gun. In
more recent times German and Allied Christian soldiers may have stopped killing
each other long enough to sing Silent Night together one Christmas Eve, but
then they went right back to killing each other.
There have always been other Christian voices of course.
There have always been Christians who have sought to revive and live by Jesus’ teaching
of creative, assertive, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. Tragically, at
least since the middle of the fourth century CE, they have always been a small
minority of all the world’s Christians. Since it became the official state
religion of the Roman Empire in the mid-fourth century CE Christianity has
never really succeeded or had any meaningful success at all in stopping the
killing.[1]
This work is an attempt at a study of the causes and
possible solutions to human violence. It is a daunting task. Human violence
comes in so many different forms. There are so many questions that we must ask
about it. These include but surely are not limited to:
·
Are we humans biologically programmed to be
violent?
·
Does human on human violence arise only with the
advent of civilization as some have claimed?
·
If so, why does civilization lead to human on
human violence?
·
Why do so many of us abhor human on human
violence?
·
Why do so many of us not abhor human on human
violence?
·
What are the causes of individual human on human
violence?
·
What are the causes of institutional human on
human violence, i.e., governmental violence against the government’s own
people?
·
What are the causes of nation on nation violence,
i.e., war?
·
What are the causes of violence by
nongovernmental actors against nations?
·
What are the causes of violence by
nongovernmental actors against other nongovernmental actors?
·
Can any of these types of violence be ended?
·
If so, how?
In this work I will attempt to answer at least some of these
questions. I will address the fundamental nature and causes of human violence
in the myriad ways it presents itself among us. Whether or not I add anything
to the literature on the subject remains to be seen.
I certainly do not have all the answers. I am only a rather
elderly, retired Christian minister with a background in theology, history, and
law. I have committed myself to following and teaching Jesus’ radical rejection
of violence and his advocacy of creative, assertive, rejection of violence and
his advocacy of assertive, creative resistance to evil for many years now. I
have lived for nearly three quarters of a century in a world filled with
violence. I have been and am sickened by the gun violence that so plagues our
nation. At least since the student movement against the Vietnam war in the late
1960s I have opposed every war my nation has engaged in. I was upset that my
nation murdered the murderous Osama ben Laden rather than arrest him and bring
him to trial. Capital punishment makes me sick to my stomach. I will turn off
any television program that includes or discusses it.
Many of my clergy colleagues are called to work primarily on
other issues. A good friend of mine, for example, is passionate about the
climate crisis we face and has done much work to educate people about it. God
bless her for that commitment and that work. I however have discerned, rightly
or wrongly, that God calls me to speak out against human violence as immoral
and not God’s way in every guise in which it appears. This work is an attempt
to do that in a more systematic way than I have done before. It consists primarily
of my personal ruminations on the subject. I only hope that it may spark in you
ruminations on the subject of your own.
Thomas C. Sorenson
Sultan, Washington, USA
May, 2021
[1] I
have heard an interpretation of some history that says that Christianity has at
least reduced human violence to a significant extent. The late Donald W.
Treadgold, a prominent Russian historian and my PhD advisor, said that one reason
why the Soviet Communists were so much more brutal than their tsarist
predecessors, killing orders of magnitude more people than the tsars ever did, was
that the tsars were Christians while the
Communists were militant atheists. That may be true to some extent, but the
tsars were hardly paragons of Christian nonviolence. They had few is any qualms
about executing political opponents and sending millions of their people to
kill and be killed in the numerous wars they fought up to and including World
War I.
No comments:
Post a Comment