Another Quote from Volf

Here’s another quote from Exclusion and Embrace that stopped me in my tracks.

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone. Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: A Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.(page 304)

Clarification: This quote comes at the end of a section in which Volf is arguing that Christians should be committed to the non-violent way because God will judge those who persist in evil in an eschatological (which is much worse than a medieval) kind of way. On page 301, he says:

The key question is who should be engaged in separating the darkness from the light? Who should exercise violence against the “beast” and the “false prophet”? Echoing the whole New Testament, the Apocalypse mentions only God. . . Preserving the fundamental difference between God and nonGod, the biblical tradition insists that there are things which only God may do. One of them is to use violence. . . The New Testament radicalized this process of the theologization of divine anger and boldly proclaimed God’s monopoly on violence, at least as far as Christians are concerned. Whatever relation may exist between God’s and the state’s monopoly on violence–Romans 13 and Revelation 13 give radically different answers to this question–Christians are not to take up their swords and gather under the banner of the Rider of the white horse, but to take up their crosses and follow the crucified Messiah.