Introduction
Studying Gandhi’s and reflection on his life’s work have changed the way I understand Jesus. When I read the New Testament I am thrilled and emblodened by the filled-with-compassion, brave, nonviolent Jesus I find there. Gandhi not only had a similiar appreciation of Jesus but in his world actively working for the poor, taking on power structures and enduring violence without succumbing to violence oneself, his way of “satyagraha,” which means “firmly holding to the truth” in the midst of conflict while reaching out with nonviolent, suffering love. When I read the Sermon on the Mount I hear Jesus proclaiming the same truth, the same “way” : neither fight nor flight, but a thrid way of assertive, creative, nonviolent love even for our “enemies.” When I see a crucifix I can only do what Gandhi did in the famous scene caught on film when he happened upon a simple crucifix while visiting the Vatican—bow and be grateful to Jesus for showing us the way and the power of suffering love.
I know I am not alone in finding inspiration from Gandhi to find in Jesus what the world, caught as it is in an iron spiral of violence, desperately needs. Andre Trocme, for example, the leader of the church in Chambon, France, that nonviolently resisted the Nazis and proctected the lives of thousands oh hunted Jewish people, wrote:
The coming of Mahatma Gandhi, whose life and teaching surprisingly resemble those of Jesus, revived the whole issue of nonviolence just when majority theology thought it had already answered the question negatively.... Gandhi showed that the Sermon on the Mount can be politically effective.
Reading contemporary scripture scholarship has only confirmed for me this understanding of Jesus’ life and teaching. There is great convergence of testimony from scripture scholars, as we shall see later in this book, that Jesus embodied and taught a way of nonviolent love of enemies and, in a time of violent Roman occupation of his country, gathered followers to live out the way. As one eminent scripture scholar, Norbert Lohfink, put it: “Jesus was nonviolent to the core.”
It is a mystery to me that more Christian have not embraced the nonviolent Jesus. It is a mistery to me that the Christian churches, in particular the Catholic Church, are not, at this point in history, clearly proclaiming, with a strong and united voice, the way of nonviolent discipleship. Given the clear witness of Gandhi and the astonishing achievements of organized nonviolent action in the sixty years since his death, the liberation of countrry after country, from Poland, East Germany, ang the Ukraine to South Africa, the Phillippines, and Czechoslovakia, and given the powerful witness of Gandhian adherents such as Martin Luther King, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela—why is it not more obvious to Christians that the Sermon on the Mount is the way forward? Given the united testimony of contemporary scripture scholarship, why do we still hang back from following the way of the nonviolent Jesus?
I believe there are three major reasons: first, we are enmeshed in a culture that believes in the myth of redemptive violence; second, we are deeply imbued with a spirit of retributive justice and as a result find it hard to hear the biblical message of restorative justice; third, some of our fundamental Christian tenets, of our “systematic theology,” were conceptualized with a mindset that accepted violence as a given for humans.
The myth of redemptive violence in which our culture is enmeshed is the belief that, when one is really up against it, only might can bring deliverance. When push comes to shove, most people belive, the only logical thing is to push back. One has every right to defend one’s self, one’s property, one’s family, one’s nation. End of story. The way to maintain power is to carry a big stick and not be afraid to use it when you have to. Otherwise you just invite attack. This is undoubtedly the conventional wisdom and the way of the world. The only problem is—it is not the gospel.
The political and ethical stance of many of us Christian is more often shaped by yhe concept of retributive justice than by than the biblical teaching of restorative jaustice. “To do justice” in the retributive justice scheme means to appropriately punish those who have done wrong to society. The symbol of this kind of justice is the ancient symbol of the female figure holding the scales. Justice not done until the scales are once again in balance. Because of this ingrained value we in our culture are fascinated with the issues of determining guilt, tracking down criminals, and administering justice—understood as appropiate punishment. This carries into popular entertaiment. Witness the high ratings for television shows such as CSI and Law and Order. We just can’t get enough stories about finding and punishing the guilty. CSI and Law and Order multiply themselves into CSI Miami and CSI New York and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
In cultures that emphasize a retributive understanding of justice, determining who is guilty and exacting appropriate punishment are important functions of society. Those who find and punish the guilty—the police, the private investigators, the evidence technicians, the prosecutors, the judges—are legitimately held up as important proctectors of society’s wll-being. This retributive mindset spreads into everyday life. As Joel B. Green and Mark D. Baker note:
The assignation of blame has reached the status of a vocation for some in the media, and the two-fold process of determining fault and meting out punishment occupies families, schools, businesses and more... Who started this fight? Who called the first name? Whose idea was this?
This is a far cry from the biblical teaching on restorative justice. Throughout the Bible, especially in Paul, justice is what God is doing for his people, justice is God delivering them from their sin. God pursues, woos, threatens, raises up prophets, works mighty deeds, reaches into people’s hearts to save them from themselves. Justice is active. The point of the pursuit of justice is not punishment but change of heart and reconciliation between people and between people and their God. The Biblical symbol of justice is the river, not the woman with the scales. The deep belief in retribution, the assumption that justice means retribution, keeps people from hearing the clear teaching of Jesus on loving one’s enemies. Forgiveness, for a retributive mindset, is not the act a magna anima, a magnanimous person, but oermissiveness or being “soft on crime.“ In the words of Christopher D. Marshall:
If... justice is understood in essentially retributive terms, then acts of mercy or forgiveness will be seen as, at best, a forgoing of the legitimate claims of justice, or at worst, a distinct injustice. But if justice is understood in more relational and restorative terms—making things right and repairing relationship—then justice is actually consummated in forgiveness and reconciliation.
The church in the West, influenced through the centuries by the Latin fathers such as Tertullian, a lawyer, and Cyprian, adopted the narrower legal view of justice. In so doing the church watered down its faith to what can be adjudicated as “reasonable” by the world at large. The saying attributed to Jhon Paul II, “If you want peace, work for justice, “can be totally misunderstood if interpreted to mean retributive justice and not restorative justice. The largesse and mercy that Jesus demonstrated may be less spontaneously understood by the world, but it is in fact the wisdom that the world needs. Nonviolence is in the end more reasonable than the world’s belief in violence. No longer is the church the “contrast society” it was in the first three centuries—embracing the gospel of nonviolence. The church instead attemps to influence society by engaging it in debates relying on reason and “natural law” concept alone, leaving aside the revolutionary belief in nonviolence.
Finally, some of the basics of our Christian theology have been artculated out of a violent worldview. For example, our ecclesiology, or concept of the church, reflects an understanding of how to exert power that more closely resembles the hierarchical, top-down structure of the Roman Empire than it does the nonviolence , servant-of- the-servants teaching of the gospels. No item in Christian theology is more rooted in a violent world-view than the most commonly held articulation of “what it means to be saved”—the satisfaction theory of salvation. The theory that God the Father demanded the sacrifice of his Son to make satisfaction for humankind’s sin. If our very own tenets of Christian theology, the way we communicate our faith to one anither, are rooted in violence, it is that much harder to hear the teaching on nonviolence.
The purposes of thuis bool are therefore threefold: first, to share my understanding and appreciation for Gandhi’s way of satyagraha; second, in the light of Gandhi’s satyagraha, present the thinking of four Christian theologians whohave embraced and make credible a nonviolence Jesus; third, refomulate “what it means to be saved” by making, not violent sacrifice, but nonviolent power, the root metaphor. If our systematic theology, the way we explain the truths of our faith to one another, is soaked in violence, then our ethics or moral theology will surely be soaked in and unreflectively supportive of violence—as has been the case for centuries. Our ethics or moral theology may shift to the degree that our fundamental systematic theology shifts. This is, therefore, a work of systematic theology, an attempt to express one of basic truths of our faith, salvation, in a way that opens us to hearing the call to nonviolence discipleship.
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