Violence and the New Testament

This morning we had our discussion about the Bible and violence. Through this process I have learned more than I thought I would.

For the last few years I have been drifting into the theological mainstream of the tradition. The mainstream is the Just War tradition, which took shape in the Middle Ages. This tradition says that in this fallen world sometimes violence for the sake of peace is acceptable, as long as certain criteria are met. These criteria include legitimate authority, a just cause and use of proportionate means.

Even so, in the best of this tradition, war is to be understood as a horrible tragedy and ought to cause deep anguish in the person or nation that pursues it. There is no such thing as gloating or nationalistic triumphalism in the properly traditional Christian view of war.

I had been led to this classic view through my deep reading of Augustine, where I had caught glimpses and hints. I had assumed that somewhere, in some text I hadn't yet read, Augustine fleshes out his views. I discovered this week that there is no one place where he presents his thoughts on war. He only makes little stabs, here and there, at justifying war, and he almost always does it with great inner turmoil.

He also, I discovered, does not read the New Testament correctly. I rarely feel that way about Augustine. I often joyfully follow him as he uses his great intelligence and trustworthy spiritual imagination to play with the text. He always, I thought, pursued interpretations that lead only to a deeper sense of love, and so can be trusted. But when it comes to violence in the New Testament, he pulls up short.

The other place I turned to in the last week to wrestle with the issue of God and Violence was Richard Hays' classic work, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. One of his chapters is called Violence in Defense of Justice. In it, he explores whether it is possible, based on the New Testament, to build something like a Just War theory. He proves decisively that it is not. In fact, Christian Just War theory has always been based on experience and natural reason, and never on scripture. If you turn the light of the New Testament on the practice of war, all God centered rationales for violence begin to whither.

The most important text is Matthew 5:38-48. This key text from the Sermon on the Mount is where we get Jesus' teaching to turn the other cheek and love your enemies. Hays thinks that Jesus meant this literally and his best data is the way Jesus himself behaved on the way to the cross.

This is where Augustine got it wrong. Augustine turns it into a metaphor, where we can love the enemy on the inside, while our outward behavior includes domination and even killing, for the sake of stability and justice. He separates intention and act. For Augustine, violence is a heart-rending tragedy and a last resort, but it is easy to see how, in less mature hands, Augustine's hesitant permission could be received as authority to be violent in God's name.

Hays will have none of it. From Matthew to Revelation he can find no solid scriptural support for violence of any kind. The cleansing of the temple is street theater, a prophetic act, not the beginning of an armed revolution. When Jesus says 'I have not come to bring peace but a sword' he is clearly speaking metaphorically. In the context of the whole Christian message, these are completely insufficient grounds for building a case for Jesus centered war. The early church knew this. Christians were, by definition, pacifists until the conversion of Constantine. Then all of a sudden the church needed to adjust to the demands of supporting empire.

And what of the Old Testament? For Hays, this is one of those issues, like circumcision, where the new revelation of the cross and resurrection of Jesus trumps the old revelation of the law. In the new dispensation, violence is simply no longer expressive of the way of God. The only possible distinctly Christian response to violence is 'non-violent, long suffering generosity.'

I feel convicted. For myself I can come up with no scriptural argument to counter Hays, nor do I really want to, other than to defend my prior convictions. When you are proven wrong, wisdom and humility dictate that you do your best to adjust to the truth revealed to you.

I am beginning to repent of my satisfaction and even, God forbid, celebration at the death of Bin Laden. He was evil and horrible, but his death, too, was, from a strictly New Testament perspective, an immoral tragedy. Jesus says love your enemy. I don't believe I did that.

This is foolishness. At the end of his chapter, Hays writes:

'Let it be said clearly, however, that the reason for choosing Jesus' way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms the way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of non-violent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our own skins pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing non-violence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God's love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.'

We have much to learn about the way of God's Kingdom. By God's grace, we have all we need to learn it here at St. Paul's.