Sorry to any readers who were not following the conversation or are not interested in hearing about nonviolence. Some discussion came up and I put together some thoughts that you’ll find in the following posts. They are listed in the order I posted them and in the order they should be read:

Nonviolence: Intro and response re:Jesus on War
Nonviolence: Response re: ‘Murder’ and OT disregard
Nonviolence: Response re: Israel as favored nation
Nonviolence: Response re: Sinful world
Nonviolence: OT and NT; Reducing the troops
Nonviolence: OT and NT; Constraining the King
Nonviolence: OT and NT; Alternative Vision

These are all quite lengthy, and I apologize. But then again, you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to.

The Alternative Vision
The prophetic imagination. Have you read it? It’s a book by Walter Brueggemann and is definitely worth the time. So, instead of being faithful to god, we see that Israel went ahead and tried to fend for herself anyway. The king, who was appointed to promote peace and justice did exactly the opposite. Along came the prophetic denunciations, and following, the hope of the people of Israel that God would release them from the monarchy in which they were now entrenched. Who will lead them since other kings have so badly failed?

The prophetic vision to follow shows a righteous kingdom with a righteous king. The attributes of this kingdom are found mostly in prophetic literature (Is. 9:6-7; Micah 4:6-13; Jer. 23:5-8). See especially Is. 11:6-9:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the kid,
The calf and the lion and the fatling together,
And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
Their young shall lie down together,
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand in the adders den.
They will not hurt or destroy on my holy mountain;
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.

Does this look at all like the OT we have read about thus far? Is the old Israel even recognizable in this new plan? Where do we get off saying that the older version is more beautiful, more Christ like than this new alternative? Where in these passages can we finally confirm that the Jesus of the NT is exactly what the God of the OT is looking forward to?

We see the king in Zech. 9:9-10, a king most unlike david or Solomon. No military might, disarmed, riding on a colt. And the kingdom he establishes is similarly disarmed. This path that started with reduction and constrainment eventually leads to disarmament (Is. 2:4).

The Old Testament always indicates that there is something else in the works. Do you think that Christ envisioned a kingdom that looked like the Old Israel? There is a New Israel! If you want the old one back, I’m sorry but you wouldn’t be allowed in! You’re not a jew and you certainly haven’t been following the Torah.

At the same time that we don’t want to, and can’t theologically, break the NT from the OT because of the latter’s violence, we also cannot see the OT as an embarrassment to those who would claim nonviolence as integral to the Gospel. Why have we accepted that Christ can change how we are saved, and the need for obedience to the Law, but not that he’s asked us to live simply, nonviolently, and submissively? I guess because the first two are benefits to us and the last two cost something.

As I have said before, this is all Kingdom stuff and I would never expect a Nation to adhere by them. As much as some members of the current administration, and members of the Christian Right, want it to be true, the Kingdom IS NOT and WILL NEVER BE a nation, or sponsored by any nation. What do we think being “Not of this world” means? What do we do when the nation is in conflict with the Kingdom? As a kingdom member, we are called to serve as an alternative vision for the world. The world, and its nations, should look at this Kingdom as a viable alternative to the warring ways it has so long pursued. We need to promote peace, by providing the said alternative and involving ourselves in nonviolent ministries. We need to model peace within our churches and our families. We need peace.

The idea of the wolf and the lamb lying together is so foreign to us. When that Kingdom is finally lived out by its people, these things that are so abnormal will be normal. But maybe even more importantly, we have to understand that what this scripture describes is WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE NORMAL! We have for so long lived with the realities of the world that we see them as normal! It is not normal that men wage war and hate! It is not normal that we kill for the sake of money and pride! It is not normal that we live according to our civil duties and not our allegiance to the Kingdom! And when we do try to claim that nonviolence is an aspect of the Kingdom, we then say that the Kingdom is some far off future reality. Jesus makes it plainly clear that the Kingdom is among us! Start living it!

Rather than decrying war, we justify it. Rather than creatively seeking peace, we settle for common realism and cope with “the world we live in”. Rather than show an alternative vision, we model more of what the world already sees.

What are we doing?

Constraining the King:
We then see, as we move through the OT, that Israel begins to call for a King. Keep in mind, it didn’t have Kings, and it wasn’t in God’s plan for Israel to set up a King. Now, kings aren’t always the best thing, and often they can become self serving. Most of the practices that kings carry out (1 Sam 8:11-17) are not necessary in Israel. So, there are some deuteronomic principles that any King of Israel is supposed to follow. They should not amass horses, a sign of military security. They should not acquire lots of wives, referring to marrying foreign women for political security. They should not accumulate wealth, financial security. We see then that these kings are not to be invested in what other kings are invested in, but the Torah.

Two of those three are based directly at military affairs. Horses would show a buildup of military might and the wives might create alliances that would allow Israel more power during military actions.

Of course, kings being kings, they didn’t always follow that. We see then that the OT is always ripping on these guys. David is rebuked for counting his fighting men (2 Sam. 24), Solomon throws all three mandates out the window (1 Kings 10:26-29; 11:1-13). Also take a look into Isaiah and you’ll see prophetic pronouncements against the kings all over the place. These “crimes” against the Torah are even listed in sections dealing with idolatry. The Kings, never designed to be a part of Israel, were doing exactly what God feared they would do: they began to look for political and military might. In other words, they began to look for power in the forms of the world. It’s no accident that the most vocal prophets were around during this time and that most of their denunciations were based on Israel relegating itself to worldly desires. We see in these prophecies the call for a new order, a messiah that would come and lay claim upon Israel’s heart. This is where we see the alternative vision for Israel become clear.

I just want to take a little bit of time to show how I think the Old Testament, while certainly not a pacifist document, shows a movement towards nonparticipation in violence and war. I don’t think anyone has really argued that Jesus isn’t promoting peace, or that the NT doesn’t offer nonviolence as a reality. It’s pretty clear what Jesus has to say about all of this. The main argument against nonviolence that I’ve seen has been the prevalence of OT war.

The main issue is whether or not the Old Testament sees war and violence as a necessary act, or whether it is moving us towards nonparticipation. I think the Old Testament seeks to transform and even abolish it, much as it as done with slavery, polygamy, and the subjugated roles of women. I think there are 3 areas we need to look at: reducing the troops, constraining the king, and seeing an alternative vision (as Brueggemann calls it, using the Prophetic Imagination).

Reducing the Troops:
Obviously, we see war all over the place in the OT. The task then is to discover how Israel and her neighbors portrayed wars. I’ll agree with you that most of the wars in the OT were divinely inspired affairs. There is no getting around that. They were, in many instances, the way in which God displayed his displeasure and often his justice (Lev. 18:25-28; 20:22; Deut. 18:9-14; 2 Kings 21:9). These seem a lot more like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah than they do like any war we see today. God was instructing Israel where and when to fight, and for what reasons (Deut 7:2: 20:17; Josh 10:40; Judg. 1:1-2). Anything that was initiated by Israel alone was ready to fail.

You’ll see god acting directly on the behalf of the Israelites all over the place. The plagues on Egypt, the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still in the Israelites’ battle against the Amorites, rain to screw over the Canaanite coalition, god confuses the Midianites, blinds the arimeans, strikes the blood thirsty Assyrians, etc. etc. The OT writers want us to see it that way. They want to get the point across that this was God working through the people. Other cultures during this time felt similarly with their gods (and I wouldn’t mind saying that we sometimes still feel that way, claiming that our God is defeating the evildoers, and thus their god as well…dangerous stuff if you ask me).

The idea of reduction comes in because we constantly see that god is working on behalf of the weakened. In the few instances where Israel felt like it might be able to use its own resources to win the battle, an act of reduction occurs. Gideon confronts the midianites with a fraction of his forces (Judg. 7) and amaziah (Im gonna name my kid that) faces the edomites without the aid of a group he thought he could count on (2 Chron. 25:5-7). Even the troops with Gideon who are left are the worst of the bunch. In modern day terms, it might be like gathering the Michigan militia to fight against the swiss army (though those militia guys scare the crap outta me).
In short, God directs the battle and also intervenes within it. The only difference between Israel and her neighbors is that Israel goes through a process of weakening and reduction. And take this into account: it is all well and good that they are reduced, but keep in mind also that they are constantly weakened and reduced militarily in the most war torn area in the world at that time (and still today). All of this tends to make them reliant on god rather than themselves. Morons. We do not see this today. We can claim that we try and use minimal force and the least troops possible, but then we hear about “Shock and Awe”. And we applaud.

Now to the issue of the sinful world. “In a world filled with sinful people (Rom 3:10-18), war is inevitable. Sometimes the only way to keep sinful people from doing great harm is by going to war with them.” Hmm…the perfect world argument. Does the fact the we live in a fallen world give us the right to use that fallen world’s methods to advance ourselves? Can we discredit everything Jesus asked us to do since we live among sin? Violence is everyday, everywhere. War is inevitable. These have become so normal that we can’t hear the voices that cry out for something different. When will we show it to them? When will we stand up and live the Kingdom in such a manner that it actually looks different than American ideals???!! We cannot use the excuse of sinful man as a reason to engage in warfare, hate, or elitism, not simply because it’s bad theology, but because it undermines everything Jesus came to do. It does not matter that the world is sinful. We are to be of the Kingdom, not of the world, and that includes how we deal with sinful man. We don’t kill sinful man to exemplify the love and sacrifice of Christ. We love and sacrifice to do that. Sacrifice money, sacrifice security, sacrifice comfort, sacrifice our desires…

I wonder what else we can stop doing since we don’t live in a perfect world. Can we stop giving to the poor? Can we stop caring for the widows and orphans? Can we stop loving our spouses? Can we stop praying for forgiveness? If there is anything in Jesus’ gospel that we can stop doing because of the state of the world, couldn’t it apply to every single command he gave us? To reverse the question, might our sinful world benefit from a Kingdom that doesn’t abandon its tenets when confronted with that sinful world? I suspect that the world is in the state it’s in simply because the Kingdom has not been itself.

In the case of Israel, you wrote:
“You may ask how we know that God is on our side of this war. Both sides claim to have God (or in the case of Iraq, Allah) on their side. There is only one thing we can be sure of in relation to whose side God is on – He is always on Israel’s side (Zech 2:8-13). Iraq has repeatedly declared itself to be Israel’s enemy. Iraq continually calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews. In Desert Storm, Iraq launched dozens of missile attacks against Israel. Saddam Hussein has made it no secret that he finances the suicide attacks against Israel. So, we can be sure that God is not on Iraq’s side. There is no greater friend and ally of Israel than the United States. No country gives Israel more economic, humanitarian, and military aid than the United States. God promised to bless those who bless Israel (Gen 12:3; Num 24:3-9). So, although God has not proclaimed who He wants to win this war – I think the Bible makes it obvious whose side He is on.”

I single this out, because I think it’s one of the most dangerous things I have ever heard, theologically or in praxis. Let me explain why theologically first. Again, you use the OT understanding of Israel to determine that God is always on Israel’s side. This neglects two things. #1, that the Israel of the OT is not the same as the political country that we see today. If you were to try and retain the OT understanding of Israel in order to determine that God is always on their side, you would have to say the same for the people of Israel (Jews) regardless of where they are living. Which includes Jews in Iraq in small numbers. So is God on the side of Israel in Israel, or in Iraq, or in America, or in Germany? Fortunately for us, the question isn’t valid, leading me to #2. It is not valid because the OT understanding of Israel, a people set apart by God to be His Kingdom, was redefined and fulfilled in Jesus. There is a New Israel! We are the new Israel, all of us who have committed our lives to the Kingdom of God. If we try to retain the status of the people of Israel in the OT, we are saying in effect, that we are not part of it! If you try and maintain that God holds a special place for the nation of Israel still today, then you are in fact denying that Jesus offered the Kingdom to you! A bigger wrench is that because Israel has been redefined, it is not contained within any worldly nation. When we attack other countries, we are attacking countries who most likely have members of the Kingdom within. And what if they don’t want you to attack? There are Christians in Iraq who are against the war. Some of them have died. Whose side was God on?

Now the practical part. First, let me ask where you get the data to support that “Iraq has repeatedly declared itself to be Israel’s enemy. Iraq continually calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews. In Desert Storm, Iraq launched dozens of missile attacks against Israel. Saddam Hussein has made it no secret that he finances the suicide attacks against Israel”. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with every part of that, I’m only questioning its validity on the basis of verifiable sources. Is this something you’ve just assumed or did you get this from a respected source? Regardless, that matters little to what I’m going to say. It is always incredibly dangerous to say that God is on our side and not someone else’s, particularly in regards to war. God does not pick sides. He does not favor us over anyone. It is only the grace of God and the example and work of Jesus which sets us apart, and then only in the sense of relationship with him, not in the sense of His love and desire for us. What does it say about us and our God when we begin to exclude others from his grace by saying he is on our side and not theirs? Further, if we were to confirm the fact that He really is on our side and not on Iraq’s, does that mean all of Iraq? How do we qualify who is in and who is out? Was he on the side of the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died? Certainly not in your understanding. Was he on the side of my new Hero, Marla Ruzicka? Again, apparently not. And he absolutely wasn’t on the side of the Iraqi military and insurgents, even though they too were created in his image. A more difficult question. Was he on the side of the early Americans who drove the native Americans off their land and massacred many of them? Was he on our side….well, let me just let Bob Dylan say it. These are excerpts from the song “With God on our Side”:

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.

I know that took some room, but I wanted to put it in because I think it’s a poignant look at how messed up our theology has become; how bad theology has made bad practice. You’re probably right, there is no greater friend of Israel than the United States, but if you assume that puts us in special favor with God, well, you’d be wrong. Having “God on our Side” has justified the Holocaust, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the imperialism of almost every country that murdered indigenous people and kicked them off their land, slavery, genocide, and on and on. We need to stop asking if God is on our side and start asking “whose side do we need to be on in order to please God?” The answer, inevitably, is on the side of the poor, the oppressed, those beaten down by war, and those consistently told “God is not on your side.”

“I already responded re: the difference between murder and killing. God allows war and demands it at times. It seems that you want to disregard the entire Old Testament. Surely Jesus is the fulfillment of God on earth, but that means we should ignore all the lessons he taught us in the Old Testament? The OT covers a significantly larger time span of history and shows much about God’s personality. I definitely will look into Jesus’ words, but I don’t however think that we should assume that the OT is worthless in this discussion.”

Correct, you did respond about the difference between murder and killing. But your definition of “Murder” makes the point quite clearly. Do you think the deaths in war are accidental? Surely nobody can make the claim that lifting a rifle, setting the crosshairs and firing a bullet is accidental. It is as you say the “intentional, premeditated killing of another person”. This would also include bombings, rockets, landmines, car bombs, poisoning, etc. Some would argue that it would not be murder in the case of civilians since they are not targeted (at least not often). However, when you go into a situation absolutely knowing that there will be some civilian casualties, it is premeditated. That actually is the definition of premeditated: knowing beforehand. And the fact that civilian casualty rates are now often higher than military deaths shows that everyone understands this is a part of war. In other words, it would be acceptable to kill you and your family as long as it was during an act of war. Then it would be considered “killing”, and righteous at that. This doesn’t make sense to me.

You say God allows war and demands it at times. You are still stuck looking only at God in the OT. You say I want to disregard the OT, but it seems to me you’d rather disregard the NT. Do we follow Moses or Jesus? Does Jesus demand war? Where? If so, did he contradict himself by saying, “You have heard that it was said ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy’. But I tell you love your enemies”? Incidentally, that phrase they had heard said was not actually in the Torah, but a misrepresentation of the justice commands. God never actually said “hate your enemies”. And when Jesus said “love your enemies”, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.

I do not want to disregard the OT, I want to explain to people that it doesn’t work counter to the NT. We are not serving two different gods, and if we don’t find out how the OT informs the NT and vice versa, we will forever be confused by the God in the OT and the one Jesus embodies. Can anyone deny that Jesus offers a God that looks different from the one who caused the flood? Of course not. So how do we work that out? This is absolutely critical, not only to our understanding of nonviolence, but to our understanding of scripture, God and Jesus. If we can’t see the OT as a document moving toward a climax, we miss the point of Jesus. Jesus not only is the climax of the OT, but we see in him the fulfillment of the history of Israel as the revealed messiah. Unfortunately, the Jews didn’t recognize him. Or they didn’t want him. And they didn’t want him because he came offering a Kingdom unlike the ones in the OT, the ones they were hoping for. He came offering a simple Kingdom that wouldn’t give them political or military strength. And yet somehow, we still want our Kingdom, our Christianity, to be a violent one. One where we applaud the deaths of the evildoers and are thankful that the death penalty gets rid of those horrible people. You know, the ones hanging by Jesus on the cross. It makes us safer, or at least we think it does. And we think Jesus offered us that safety, and it’s our right to take it by force. But I don’t remember him giving us that permission.

The following posts will be incredibly long, and for that I apologize. For those of you not following the discussion, some dialogue regarding nonviolence and the validity of war has popped up under this post. Both people engaged in the dialogue, JD and Casey Tygrett, are friends of mine, so if the dialogue appears harsh, it is most likely meant to be humorous. Casey is a very brilliant friend from college, as is JD, someone I’ve known since high school. She unfortunately, is wrong about everything. This is where you would read “humor” not “vitriol”.

I think what I will do is respond to JD’s comments in reverse order that they were posted, leaving her longest response to last. Casey’s comments have in the past informed my own views, so you’ll see a lot of his thoughts present here. I’m going to divide it into several posts since it is so long. In the first two, I will answer the shorter of JD’s responses, just to get them out of the way. In the third and fourth posts I will respond to a couple select arguments from her initial detailed response. They deserve their own mention because I want to make my point very clear on them aside from the rest. Following that will be several posts that lay out the theology of nonviolence moving from the Old Testament (OT) to the New Testament (NT).

“Also….the word “war” is used 225 times in the Bible. Of those, it is only mentioned 15 times in the NT, of which 8 are mentioned in Revelation re: the final “war”. I am having a difficult time finding where Jesus speaks of war. So far this is the only verse I have found. “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not sit down first and consider whether he is able with 10,000 men to oppose the one coming against him with 20,000? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.” I didn’t pick this verse to defend my view, but as I said, I am having a very difficult time finding more. Please let me know which verse in the NT that you are referring to when you discuss war.”

The reason I asked you to specifically look for words about war from Jesus is because his entire gospel is based around love, the outcast and the downtrodden. It’s difficult to find many places that Jesus even mentions war, and when He does, it is either referring to the OT accounts of war or the deplorable state the world will be in because of the absence of the Kingdom, the people of God. This is most often used to describe what the world will be like not because we physically are not here, but because we are not living out that Kingdom. You were correct to assume that the passage you listed actually has little to do with war. It is included in a list of sayings where Jesus is talking about the people of God understanding the cost of being a disciple. Unfortunately, the cost of being a disciple has gone lower and lower as we continue to erase commands from Jesus’ gospel. Simple living, nonviolence, loving your enemy, forgiveness, and on and on. These have all disappeared from the practice of Christian living and our faith is the worse for it.