Quote from Exclusion and Embrace

I’m not a card-carrying pacifist in the strictest sense of the word, although I’d like to be. I tried to be for awhile, just after graduate school, but then I got my card taken away for beating up a guy who ridiculed my convictions.

Here is a breathtaking quote from the final page of Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. He captures for me the tension found in following the Prince of Peace in a fallen, sometimes necessarily violent world.

This is what Jesus Christ asks Christians to do. Assured of God’s justice and undergirded by God’s presence, they are to break the cycle of violence by refusing to be caught in the automatism of revenge. It cannot be denied that the prospects are good that by trying to love their enemies they may end up hanging on a cross. Yet often enough, the fragile fruit of Pentecostal peace grows–a peace between people from different cultural spaces gathered in one place who understand each other’s languages and share in each others’ goods.

It may be that consistent nonretaliation and nonviolence will be impossible in a world of violence. Tyrants may need to be taken down from their thrones and madmen stopped from sowing desolation. It may also be that measures which involve preparation of the use of violent means will have to be taken to prevent tyrants and madmen from ascending to power in the first place or to keep the plethora of ordinary kinds of perpetrators that walk our streets from doing their violent work. It may be that in a world suffused with violence the issue is not simply “violence versus peace” but rather “what forms of violence could be tolerated to overcome social ‘peace’ that coercively maintained itself through the condoned violence of injustice.” But if one decides to put on soldier’s gear instead of carrying one’s cross, one should not seek legitimation in the religion that worships the crucified Messiah. For there, the blessing is given not to the violent, but to the meek (Matthew 5:5).

There are Christians who have a hard time resisting the temptation to seek religious legitimation for their (understandable) need to take up the sword. If they give in to this temptation, they should forego all attempts to exonerate their version of Christian faith from complicity in fomenting violence. Of course, they can specify that religious symbols should be used to legitimate and inspire only “just” wars. But show me one warring party that does not think its war is just! Simple logic tells us that at least half of them must be wrong. It could be, however, that simple logic does not apply to the chaotic world of wars. Than all would be right, which is to say that all would be wrong, which is to say that terror would reign–in the name of the gods who can no longer be distinguished from the devils.