Tags
christendom, discipleship, gospel, jesus, new testament, nonviolence, pacifism, politics, quakers
The following are my favorite books on Christian pacifism. As always, I don’t (and couldn’t) agree with everything in them but I have found them supremely helpful. Labels are a bit overrated, but I do consider myself a Christian pacifist, which means that I believe discipleship to Jesus means renouncing killing and violence and seeking to overcome conflict (even in the form of attack) using peaceful means. Two clarifications are needed: (1) Pacifism is not the same as being passive. That the two words are so similar is an accident of the English language. Pacifism is about “pacifying” situations of conflict without resorting to violence. (2) There is a huge difference between Christian pacifism and what we might call “liberal” pacifism. The latter argues on the basis of effectiveness: We refuse to kill because that will work better to resolve conflicts than killing. Many also claim that liberal pacifism is based on a naive optimism regarding human nature. Whether this or the opposite is true, I can’t say (because I don’t know and I’m sure it depends on the person). But Christian pacifism is rooted in the good news of salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the call to follow him as Lord in life or in death in anticipation of the resurrection to come. Obviously most Christians — many of whom are more faithful than me! — don’t hold to this position, but all of us would agree that we cannot ignore Jesus’ commands to love our enemies and “turn the other cheek,” even if those directives need to be interpreted for specific situations. Anyhow, in this post I’m not trying to convince anyone to agree with me, but merely pointing to some resources that will help one think through the many complex related issues and questions. Continue reading »
More from Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion . . . about what Kelly calls the “revolutionary explosiveness” of full obedience to Jesus. After quoting Meister Eckhart’s comment about how many will follow Jesus halfway but few will continue with the other half (btw, Eckhart places giving up all our possessions in the first half!), Kelly summons us, “It is just this astonishing life which is willing to follow Him the other half, sincerely to disown itself, this life which intends complete obedience, without any reservations, that I would propose to you in all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness. I mean this literally, utterly, completely, and I mean it for you and for me – commit your lives in unreserved obedience to Him.” And then he says, in case we’ve missed that he’s not playing around, “If you don’t realize the revolutionary explosiveness of this proposal, you don’t understand what I mean.” 
In A Testament of Devotion, Thomas Kelly describes the practice of “ordering our mental life on more than one level at once.” He gives two – the external demands of our world and what we often call internal / mental / spiritual reality. He’s putting words to the fact that we are able to go about our lives doing one thing, while at the same time thinking primarily about another. I can be thinking about what to eat for lunch while writing an email, or considering the Lakers’ chances of winning a title this year while sitting in a meeting. There are no doubt problems in dividing the world into the categories “mental” and “physical,” or internal and external, but you get the point. Kelly sees this second level as a place where we commune with God, the place where the Light resides, the place where we worship and pray and adore God while going about our business; this he calls the real real world, not because the rest does not matter but because only here can the other be truly discerned and faithfully engaged. Or as he puts it,
