The Catholic Nonviolence Initiative Roundtable #2 produced the embedded paper titled: “Jesus’ nonviolence according to the Gospels”.
Excerpt from the paper:
In summary, the Gospels show us Jesus as a full spectrum nonviolent peacemaker. Jesus teaches us how to prevent violence before it gets started, by refusing to treat anyone as an outsider or enemy. He teaches how to intervene with creative, disarming nonviolent action when things are getting hot, breaking the cycle of violence. He demonstrates civil resistance peacemaking, attacking structural violence, bringing it into the open, using nonviolent power to change the equation. He demonstrates after-the-harm-has-been-done peacemaking–how to nonviolently reconcile parties who have been estranged. He shows how to neutralize personal violence and protect the innocent with the power of creative nonviolent action. He calls us to form a community of nonviolent service that will be an antithesis to regimes of domination through violence. Finally, he shows us how to live a life of nonviolence to the full and to the end.
The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University produced a short study guide on violent parables and nonviolent Jesus.
Excerpt:
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount instructs us to not return violence for violence; instead, we should be like God, who offers boundless, gratuitous love to all. But in the same Gospel Jesus tells eight parables in which God deals violently with evildoers. Which of the divine ways are we to imitate?
“Admittedly Christianity has always had a wimp problem. The kind of guy who can only jaw-jaw because he can’t war-war has always been with us, and one of the few acceptable employments he could find was in the Church. But this is an entirely different order of weak. If you actually go back and read the Bible — and I question how many of these “pastors” with “ministry” degrees actually have — the Jesus you see is a rough-and-ready character. He talks a lot about peace, love, and understanding… but He also orders His followers to arm themselves. He absolutely puts beatdowns on people. You get the full spectrum of human behavior with the Biblical Jesus.”
Those who built on the wall, and those who carried burdens, loaded themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction, and with the other held a weapon. NEH 4:17
The Wall is part blog, part journal, part bulletin board, and part archive I set up in order to further the discussion about the use of force in defense of church and community. Learn MORE ABOUT THE WALL.
