The Politics of Non-Violence

Camassia continues to blog her way through John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus.

One of the great virtues of Yoder’s work, in my view, is to situate the debate between pacifism and just-war as an attempt to answer to the question: How do we most faithfully follow Jesus?

Yoder’s project can be viewed as simply an attempt to draw out the full implications of orthodox Christology. If Jesus is both true God and true man, then doesn’t it follow that Jesus’ humanity is normative for us, at least in certain important respects?

Jesus’ command to love our neighbors, and the kind of love he himself exhibits become the standards for those of us who would follow him. However, the debate is over how to put this love into concrete action.

For just-war proponents, a just war is a way of defending the innocent from aggression, and thus loving our neighbor. It’s an act of charity. This distinguishes just-war theory from “realism” and other assorted “lesser-evilisms.” A Christian cannot do evil that good may come, but for just-war proponents, going to war under the right circumstances is not a case of choosing the “lesser evil” but a positively virtuous action.

Just-war proponents like Paul Ramsey argue that neighbor-love can require the use of force to protect the innocent and punish aggression. They don’t see this as qualifying or watering down the ethic of Jesus, but of translating it to the sphere of politics, which intrinsically involves the use of force.

On the other hand, the pacifist will argue that Jesus didn’t use violence to defend himself and specifically ordered his disciples not to use violence to defend him either. For the Christian pacifist nonviolence is about faithfulness first and effectiveness only secondly.

The pacifist is wary of any attempt to qualify the ethic of Jesus in order to be more “realistic,” where “realism” is defined as meeting the standards of the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer discusses this at great length in The Cost of Discipleship. Specifically with respect to non-violence, Bonhoeffer critiques the Reformation notion that a Christian can participate in the use of force as long as he’s doing so in the course of carrying out the duties of his office or station in life.

In other words, according to the Reformers, as a private individual, the Christian must turn the other cheek, resist not evil, etc. But if he also happens to be a government official, a hangman, a soldier, etc. he can deploy violence as part of his official duties:

[The Reformers] distinguished between personal sufferings and those incurred by Christians in the performance of duty as bearers of an office ordained by God, maintaining that the precept of non-violence applies to the first but not to the second. In the second case we are not only freed from the obligation to eschew violence, but if we want to act in a genuine spirit of love we must do the very opposite, and meet force with force in order to check the assault of evil. It was along these lines that the Reformers justified war and other legal sanctions against evil.

The Reformers took this even further by arguing that one might be required to resist attacks on one’s person because of one’s duties as, e.g. a spouse or parent, not just as a government official. If I am responsible for providing for my family, I am obliged to resist aggression against my person, even if, considering only my personal safety I would ideally not resist.

The problem with this, according to Bonhoeffer, is that we are never acting merely as a private individual. We all have multiple roles as family members, citizens, workers, etc., so there would always be a plausible reason to use violence if the situation seemed to call for it. The Reformers’ teaching ends up seriously qualifying the radical ethic of Jesus. Bonhoeffer points out that the disciples didn’t divide their lives into their “official” capacities and their capacities as followers of Jesus:

But this distinction between person and office is wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. He says nothing about that. He addresses his disciples as men who have left all to follow him, and the precept of non-violence applies equally to private life and official duty. He is the Lord of all life, and demands undivided allegiance.

It’s difficult to judge who has the better argument. The just-war theorist will always accuse the pacifist of leaving the innocent and defenseless to the mercy of aggressors and allowing evil to triumph. Is this a proper way to display neighbor-love? The pacifist’s reply will be that faithfulness to Jesus requires following his precept and example and trusting in God to ensure the ultimate victory of his justice. The pacifist might also point out that few, if any, wars have actually been fought within the bounds of just-war theory, and that in practice it has served as rhetorical cover for governments at war more often than it has provided a check on their behavior.

This debate is directly implicated in the realist vs. sectarian debate I’ve been going on about ad nauseum. Pacifists are more likely to reject the nation-state as an object of Christian loyalty (even penultimate loyalty) and are less likely to see it as an instrument for justice. Some, like Jacques Ellul, reject the state altogether. They think the efforts of Christians are better directed to communities of discipleship that exist on the margins of society rather than in the corridors of power.

It’s often asked of the sectarians: Must we take the first century position of the church as normative for all other generations? Just because the church existed at the margins of society in the first century, does that mean it shouldn’t seek to infiltrate the institutions of society such as the government? Might there not be a providential aspect to what sectarians deride as “Constantiniansm”? The answers to all these questions, I think, will depend greatly on how we answer the question of violence vs. non-violence.