Thanks for this article Rowland. I’d like to engage with a couple of things Mark said in this article.

(See http://jmm.org.au/articles/18156.htm )

Mark Durie wrote: “Throughout the New Testament there is a systematic rejection of religious violence. The key to this is Jesus’ message that his kingdom was spiritual and not political.”

For Jesus’ culture there is no sense in which the spiritual and the physical (let alone the political) could be separated. Greek dualism came later. When Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world, he’s saying that this world is about force and violence and coercive power; my kingdom is not like that. What Jesus advocates is absolutely political; it’s just a different kind of political, one that hadn’t been seen before and hasn’t been seen since. It’s a politics of nonviolence that eschews domination in favour of self-giving love. They killed him precisely because he absolutely threatened the social and political order. As John Howard Yoder said in The Politics of Jesus:

“Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry was unfortunately seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-Man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e. promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships…No such slicing can avoid his call to an ethic marked by the cross, a cross identified as the punishment of a man who threatens society by creating a new kind of community leading a radically new kind of life.” JHY The Politics of Jesus, p. 62-3.

Thus the key to the New Testament repudiation of violence is not that Jesus’ message is spiritual rather than political, it’s simply that it is about self-giving love, rather than destruction.

Mark Durie wrote: “The New Testament supports the just use of force as a proper function of the state, whatever its religious identity. Thus it is not a specifically religious or sacred act to go to war, or to use force to implement justice. It is just a matter of public duty, one aspect of the ordering of society that God has established for the common good.”

I don’t think that the New Testament anywhere “supports the just use of force as a proper function of the state”. Use of force by the state may well be acknowledged to be a reality, but it is absolutely clear that followers of Jesus should not participate in the carrying out of that force. It is a clear ethic of Jesus’ that his followers were not to harm anyone. How is it that for the first few hundred years, Christians refused to go to war for anyone, to the point of being killed themselves, if the New Testament was so supportive? The only thing God is establishing for the common good is the Kingdom of God – and we’ve got a ways to go before that is finished.

Christ’s way is the way of active, creative nonviolence. Whether it’s an Iraqi dictator or Muslim extremists, it’s the only weapon we as Christians have against the use of such force. And that’s the whole point – it’s not only the only weapon we have, as it turns out, it’s the BEST, most POTENT weapon possible – one that heals instead of hurting, the only weapon that can turn enemies into friends. What better way to start loving our enemies than by not killing them?

And finally, it seems to me that an article like this is more likely to alienate Muslims than win them over. In no way do I condone violence from anyone, but the only thing likely to win Muslims over, moderate or extremist (or anyone else for that matter), is living a life that demonstrates a love towards them that they cannot fathom or find anywhere else, even when it costs us as dearly as it cost Jesus. Because the good news of Jesus is that killing us isn’t the worst you can do to us!

Pace e bene, Simon