From a thoughtful friend:

Gandhi used to say that he loved Christ but couldn’t stand Christians because they were so unlike Christ…this from a man who meditated on the gospels for two hours a day for the last 40 years of his life…so I reckon he knew Jesus pretty well…how many _Christians_ do that?! Not me, that’s for sure! He did it partly because he believed Jesus to be the greatest practitioner of nonviolence in history and wanted to learn from him.

So I think the gospels are the best place to start, both practically and theologically…after all, if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God that we have, everything else has to be read through that lens. When I look at the gospels now I can’t help seeing it everywhere, so its a little hard to know where to begin. I’d suggest reading this article by a good friend of mine, John Dear: http://www.johndear.org/pdfs/jesus_and_civil_disobedience.pdf. It’s specifically on Jesus’ civil disobedience actions but gives a good general overview of Jesus as nonviolence exemplar.

Jesus’ teachings are nonviolence personified – love your enemies, be blessed peacemakers, do good to those who persecute you, Matthew 18:15-20’s nonviolent conflict transformation, and ultimately the cross. Paul also talks about not repaying evil for evil but overcoming evil with good. I’ve never heard it satisfactorily explained how you can love your enemies and kill or hurt them at the same time.

Beginning with the gospels is not to say it’s not right through the Bible when you start to look for it – witness the prophets as one obvious example, but there are plenty more.

I think most of the reason we see little hope of nonviolent action protecting the innocent is because we’re rarely told stories of nonviolent resistance. All of our movies, our culture, tells certain stories, stories of what Walter Wink calls ‘the myth of redemptive violence’, so much so that we’re trained in it and lack the imagination to think otherwise. All the more reason to hear alternative narratives, to tell each other stories of faithful nonviolent action (I could give you hundreds if you’d like them) – and more than that, to live them ourselves so there are more stories to tell. One person said “If someone breaks into my home and attacks my family, without question there will be some violence enacted by me, and I expect it to be bloody”. Most people would say the same thing, and to be honest I’m so trained in violence by my culture that it may well turn out similarly if that happened to me. But there are numerous stories of it turning out differently because people chose to see the humanity in the person who threatened them. Real stories where the perpetrator was confronted by a loving person rather than a counterthreat, which transformed that perpetrator. Why don’t we have the imagination for those kind of outcomes? Because we don’t believe it’s possible. Why not? Because we’re not told the stories, or it’s left untried.

Part of the problem here of course is that violent action assumes one party is “guilty” and the other “innocent”, and acts out of that oversimplification, so when we talk about ‘defending the innocent it’s often important to nuance it at least a bit, or know more of the story…nonviolence though is able to recognise that conflicts are infinitely more complex than that, and act accordingly because it seeks to understand the opponent rather than kill or silence them. Surely this is more consistent with the Christian worldview that everyone is sinful and redeemable (even the murderous Saul of Tarsus).

We need to think hard I reckon about what we mean when we say that violence or even nonviolence “works”. Do we mean that we got our own way? Is that always a victory? Gandhi talked about nonviolence as satyagraha – a grasping of or holding to truth – and that in nonviolent struggle the goal is always to discover truth, not always prove yourself right. The vow of nonviolence or ‘satyagraha’ is a vow to die rather than say or do something untrue to one’s own understanding of the world. The only thing violence proves is that one side had bigger guns or more force, not that they were morally right. Nonviolence seeks the truth through moral struggle with your opponent. Sometimes that will mean that your opponent kills you (witness Jesus, Gandhi, King, Romero, Dirk Willem, so many of the saints), and much of the time their killing you proves they were wrong. But ultimately the biblical support/promise is resurrection – which is proof that even death cannot halt the love of God. As Gandhi once said, “When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.” That’s the gospel – that in the end, love wins.

Remember we’re not talking about refusing to act. That is NOT nonviolence, that’s passivity. Nonviolence may well mean the risky business of standing between an oppressor and the oppressed and saying if you want to get to him you’ll have to go through me. Something like taking up a cross and dying to oneself.

So much more could be said but I find these forums of limited ability to get some ideas across…I hope that ramble answers some of some people’s questions.

Grace and peace,

[Name withheld]