A Christian Approach To Peace: II
Terrence Kardong
CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE
When we finish summarizing Jesus’ nonviolence, it leaves us with a sort of helpless feeling. Who can live up to it? Certainly the church has not found it easy! Indeed, some critics like Garry Wills say flat out that the church has not found it possible: “The church’s later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from his extremism.” But it is not quite true that the church has ignored Jesus’ way of nonviolence. In fact, there is evidence that the earliest Christians were quite pacifistic, so much so that they were expelled from the Roman army because they would not kill. This was just one aspect of Christianity that was unacceptable to the Roman state. Of course, the church was just a tiny minority in a sea of pagans who were more than willing to kill.
By the year 315 AD, however, Christians were so numerous that the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion. By 390 AD, Theodosius made it the only legal religion in the Empire. And about the same time, only Christians were allowed in the army! Apparently, they were now quite willing to cooperate in the violence thought necessary to protect the public order. As time went on, the church was such an integral part of the government of, say, the Byzantine Empire, that there were no Christians questioning whatever violence the Emperors chose to perpetrate. Indeed, the Church was simply the religious department of the Byzantine state. Apparently, there was no more worry about Jesus and his counter cultural pacifism.
It seems to me that one of the most problematic results of the success and spread of Christianity after Constantine was simply this: from then on there was a tendency of the leaders to consider the church an institution and no longer a prophetic movement. Then the church is tempted to consider its own survival above its allegiance to the gospel of Jesus. And so the church hesitates to speak out against official violence out of fear of what it will jeopardize the institution. This has been the excuse of countless churchmen when faced with blatant evil.
This same political situation continued through the Middle Ages, but at least in the Latin West the church had enough influence over the feudal kings and their nobles that there was some possibility of moderating their violence. So the theologians developed what was called the Just War Theory, according to which a king could only wage war if certain conditions were met. For example, it was never permitted to invade another territory, but if you were invaded, you could fight back. The bishops went so far as organizing the nobility into an army against the Moslems in the Holy Land. This had the advantage of diverting them from killing each other; but it had almost no other advantages. And certainly Just War principles were rarely followed.
With the coming of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, there was some
improvement in that a few Christian sects were (and are) completely pacifist. The
Mennonites, Quakers and Hutterites take Jesus’ words literally; they do not fight.
But the division of Christianity also brought with it terrible wars of religion in
Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. These wars were mostly fought along confessional
lines, that is, between Catholic and Protestant kings. Sometimes that was just a
cover for the usual greedy reasons for war-
The upshot of this kind of holy warfare was that central Europe was crippled for a century afterwards. People began to notice that both sides invoked exactly the same Christian God in their behalf—against each other. It did not take too much mental acumen to wonder about all this. It drove a lot of people right out of the Christian church and it provided plenty of fuel for the religious skepticism of the Enlightenment. Even where people could agree on a crusade like the one that drove the Moors out of Spain in the 15th century, they could still see that holy war leaves scars as terrible as any other kind of war.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, technology took the romance right out of warfare. The American Civil War was one of the first truly mechanized wars, and it was unspeakably terrible. Here again, both sides thought they had a high and noble cause for fighting, and the churches were right in there blessing both armies. In fact, most denominations split into southern and northern branchs, so the chaplains were pitted against each other. But when it was all over and a million men had been killed or wounded, Abe Lincoln dolefully commented that he did not think that God was on either side.
Another mechanized atrocity was the First World War, a war which was started for no reason and fought in such an absurd way as to make many people totally disgusted with war. It was billed as a “war to end all wars,” but it did not end anything. It certainly did not end the chain of retaliation in Europe. Indeed the terms imposed on Germany were so harsh as to almost insure that there would be another war soon. Fortunately, the Allies did not make the same mistake after the Second World War, but that was another war that made mincemeat out of the Just War Theory.
The thing that really knocked the theory for a loop, however, was the invention
and use of nuclear weapons. As soon as these bombs were dropped, it became clear
that their use meets none of the Just War criteria. They could not be aimed away
from non-
Since the Second Vatican Council took place not too long after the Second World War, it was natural that the ethics of warfare should be on the agenda. Most of the bishops were willing to re endorse the Just War Theory and let it go at that. But there was an effective peace lobby, including people like Dorothy Day, who got to enough of the bishops that they ended up recognizing the right of Catholics to claim conscientious objection if they are sincerely opposed to killing another human being. This teaching had not sunk in much by the time of the Vietnam War. The Catholic clergy were usually not too helpful to pacifists in their ranks. When a group of seminarians asked the Bishop of Bismarck to condemn the war, he replied, “Your ignorance is only surpassed by your arrogance.”
But the Vietnam War was enough of a fiasco that the American bishops must have felt they had to rethink their position. Consequently, a special committee was set up to study the matter. This committee did a really serious job, interviewing all kinds of experts in these matters and coming up with a position paper in 1983. This document honors both the Just War Theory and pacifism. But what it does not do is to seriously question nuclear deterrence. And even though the Cold War is now basically over, some countries like the USA are still building nuclear warheads, for God knows what reason. Is not the mere intention to retaliate with weapons that could well end the human race intrinsically evil? To judge from the American bishops’ document, it would seem not. The popes, however, have unequivocally condemned even the possession of these weapons.
In recent years it would seem that the American bishops have lost interest in the question of peace and nonviolence. Even when the rest of the world pleaded with the Bush administration not to invade Iraq, the bishops said very little. It could be that they judged the national mentality to be so bellicose that their protests would do no good. After the events of 9/11/01, it takes a lot of gumption to speak for nonviolence in this country.
Finally, I think it is necessary to say a few words about some great modern heroes
of nonviolence. Not all of these have been Christians, but most of them have been
influenced by Jesus. Certainly the father of modern pacifism was Mohandas Gandhi.
He was a sort of free-
In Gandhi’s view the real issue is the truth, and the question is: Do we believe that the truth itself has power? If we do not, then we will always be tempted to help it along, and we will help it violently if necessary. But when we do that, we simply prove that we do not believe in the power of the truth itself. Now it should be added that Gandhi was quite willing to equate truth with God. So he is saying that when we act violently in the name of God, we are showing that we do not believe God is nonviolent and we do not believe either that God can accomplish his will.
This philosophy caused Gandhi and his followers to confront British colonial power with symbolic acts of nonviolent resistance. He would not let people participate in these actions unless they were specially schooled and trained in nonviolence. If they had succumbed to the temptation to return violence for violence, then Gandhi believed it would make the whole exercise useless. Eventually, the British left India on their own volition, but Gandhi’s resistance certainly was an influence on them.
In this country, Martin Luther King led a similar movement against racial injustice, and he admitted freely that he got his ideas from Gandhi. Granted, there was another, violent, wing of black resistance called Black Power. But the famous marches in Selma and Washington and Birmingham were orchestrated by King on the principles of Gandhi, and of course Jesus. It was sickening to watch King and his marchers get clubbed down by the police, but that was all part of their witness. And eventually the country, gazing at the spectacle of nonviolent resistance, had to reform its unjust laws on segregation.
A final example of heroic nonviolent resistant can be seen in the Catholic Worker
Movement. Dorothy Day and her followers in New York were convinced pacifists, as
well as anarchists. Consequently, when the population was ordered to take part in
seeking shelter in the subways during atomic air-
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Volume 38, Number 1 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
January 2010 |
