Given
our worldwide violence, most people, especially in North America,
have concluded that it is impossible to become nonviolent, that
we might as well not even bother. Cultural violence naturally
leads to such rock-bottom despair. The spirit of violence tells
us that we have no other alternative; it insists that violence
is our very nature.
The God of nonviolence tells us otherwise.
In the life of Jesus, God invites us to become the people we can
be. Anyone can practice nonviolence; everyone is called to practice
nonviolence. God would not have invited us to this life of peacemaking
if it were impossible. The church, unfortunately, has often taught
the ideal but at the same time insisted that the ideal is impossible
to live and gone on to present an "interim ethic" of justified
violence. But as Jesus revealed, God never calls us to violence.
Over the centuries the church has done a great disservice to God
and humanity by blessing violence and warfare. The gospel is much
stronger. It insists that nonviolence is not just an option, it
is a commandment. We are commanded by Jesus to practice nonviolence.
Humanity is charged with the grace of God; our sin is the conscious
choice not to act in the grace of nonviolence. Given our violence,
we need to ask the God of nonviolence for the grace to become
like God, to renounce our violence and join faith communities
of nonviolence to help us live lives of active love. God has promised
that the grace is ours for the asking.
Nonviolence is possible for every human being,
for every violent person, if we but turn to God and ask for grace.
To be fully human means to open up our hearts to the grace of
God, to allow God to disarm our hearts, to transform our hearts
and souls into instruments and channels of God's nonviolent love.
History is filled with people who learned God's
way of nonviolence. From Gandhi and Dorothy Day, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Jean Donovan, to Wang Weilin (the Chinese student
who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in June
1989) and the thousands of Filipinos, Russians, and Lithuanians
who nonviolently resisted tyranny, our age is brimming with noble
practitioners of nonviolence. They model what it means to be human
in today's world.
These peacemaking people point us back to the
peacemaking Christ. Jesus presents the fullest image of what it
means to be human because he lived and taught nonviolence to the
fullest. He models the God of nonviolence. He shows us what it
means to be human in his nonviolence, that is his love, compassion,
mercy, truthtelling, and nonviolent resistance to evil. He leads
us in hope and fidelity to the God of peace.
Jesus is the model human being because he is
nonviolent. He is just, faithful, and unconditionally loving.
He loves enemies; serves people; tells truth; builds community;
prays to the God of peace; and risks his life in active nonviolence,
even to arrest, torture, and execution. Because of this steadfast
nonviolence, God raises Jesus from the dead to uphold his life
for all humanity to emulate.
Violence so dominates our world that it has
corrupted our image of God. We have created God in our own image
- a god of violence who waits to destroy us all in an explosion
of anger and violence. The reverse side of this perversion is
our own desire for (violent) power-the desire to be God. In this
mad attempt to be superhuman, to be divine, we assert our egos
over one another and our national ego over other nations. We seek
to become God, when we are invited merely to be human.
The great irony of this error is that while
we seek to be God, God desires to become human. In Jesus, God
fulfills this desire and demonstrates to us how to be human. God
becomes one of us and lives humanly. As Walter Wink explains:
The essence of sin is the desire to be God,
which is in effect to enter into mimetic rivalry with God....
We are meant to imitate God ... but sin enters when imitation
turns to envy and God becomes the ultimate rival. Desire thus
transforms God into an idol on whom human beings not only project
their own violence and hatred, but whom they also depict to themselves
as the sanctifier of the violence at the heart of all religious
systems. To desire to usurp the place of God inevitably leads
a person to create God after the image of a jealous rival, and
fosters an unconscious death wish against God. The human desire
to be God is countered by the divine desire to become human. God
reveals the divine weakness on the cross, leaving the soul no
omnipotent rival to envy, and thus cutting the nerve of mimetic
desire.... Jesus absorbed all the violence directed at him by
people and by the Powers and still loved them. But if humanity
killed the one who fully embodied God's intention for our lives,
and God still loves us, then there is no need to try to earn God's
love. And if God loves us unconditionally, there is no need to
seek conditional love from the Powers who promise us rewards in
return for devotion. When the early Christians proclaimed that
"there is salvation in no one else" (Acts 4:12), this should be
taken as literally true: only through Jesus is the scapegoat mechanism
exposed and the spiral of violence broken. "Salvation" here is
an anthropological, not a theological term. It simply states a
fact about human survival in the face of human violence…
The problem is that, once the gospel has deprived a society of
the scapegoating mechanism, that society is defenseless against
the very violence in which it trusts. For us today, the only alternative
to love and nonviolence is apocalypse. And it is not a vengeful
God who ushers in apocalypse, but ourselves. The "wrath" or judgment
of God is precisely God's "giving us up" to the consequences of
our own violence (Romans 1: 18- 32). It is now a race between
the gospel and the effects of the gospel: either we learn to stop
mimetic violence and scapegoating, or having been stripped of
the scapegoating mechanism as an outlet for our violence, we will
consume ourselves in an apocalypse of fire. In a world of nuclear
weapons, even more urgently than in that of the Roman empire,
scapegoating must be exposed and eradicated, or we will destroy
ourselves. (Engaging the Powers, pp. 151-152. Reprinted
by permission, copyright 1992, Augsburg Fortress).
In Jesus, we see "God in trouble for being
human," as Daniel Berrigan writes. It is precisely God's humanity
- God's nonviolence - that gets God into trouble. Jesus is executed
by the empire for his nonviolent resistance to evil, for his love
for his fellow humans.
"The only vocation to which a Christian is called,"
William Stringfellow observed, "is to be a mature human being."
(A Second Birthday, pp. 67-68). An anthropology of nonviolence
asks, in light of today's global violence, What does it mean to
be a human being? It concludes that a human being is a person
of nonviolence, a peace maker in a world of war, a seeker of justice
in a world of injustice, a channel of compassion in a world of
apathy. A mature human being worships the God of nonviolence by
living at peace with every other human being. It asks: What does
it mean to be alive in the nuclear age? In light of the peacemaking
Jesus, an anthropology of nonviolence answers that a full human
life worships the God of life and gives over its own life so that
all humanity may live in peace with justice, without the threat
of violence. To be human is to be nonviolent.
This article is excerpted from The
God of Peace: Toward a Theology of Nonviolence by John Dear,
SJ. Used with the permission of Orbis Books, Box 308, Maryknoll,
NY 10545. (Available from FOR, $17.50 plus postage.)
