Jesus the Pacifist: A Concise Guide to His Radical Nonviolence

Introduction

If you are like most modern Christians, you have your doubts about Jesus’s pacifism. You’re aware he wasn’t a violent revolutionary, generally preached against violence, and said some rather flowery things about turning the other cheek and loving your enemies. But you also know he cleared the temple with a whip, told his disciples to buy swords, praised a Roman centurion, frequently spoke of violent judgment, and will—according to Revelation—return one day to kill God’s enemies with a sword. You’ve likely engaged with bits and pieces of the issue here and there, but you’ve never given it the focused, sustained attention necessary to reconcile the apparent contradictions.

This book attempts to remedy that. It provides a systematic, biblically based, and comprehensive overview of Jesus’s life and teachings on the subject of violence.

But why should you care? Why expend energy exploring Jesus’s relationship with violence? Two reasons.

First, Jesus is our moral standard. As discussed at length in my previous book The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence, the Bible indicates on every level that we are to obey Jesus—not Moses or the God of the Old Testament.[1] Likewise, it declares that we are to mimic Jesus, not the ancient Israelites, Yahweh, or the God of the end times. Jesus, and Jesus alone, is our ethical ideal, our moral compass, the perfect example of how to do God’s will on earth. Everything and everyone in the Bible declares it. Consequently, all justification for violence must come from his life and teachings, and nothing else.

Second, as this book demonstrates, nonviolence is central to Jesus’s ethical teachings. It is not merely one of many minor peripheral moral issues he treats. Nor is it only for the particularly devout or merely a matter of personal conscience. It is a fundamental aspect of Christian discipleship, a necessary component of fulfilling God’s will for our lives. As Walter Wink puts it, “nonviolence is not a fringe concern” but “the essence of the gospel,” so essential that “Jesus’s nonviolent followers should not be called pacifists, but simply Christians.”[2]

Unfortunately, Jesus wasn’t as explicit about violence as he could have been. He didn’t unequivocally denounce all violence as always and everywhere immoral, nor did he provide us with a comprehensive list of acceptable and unacceptable uses. But that doesn’t mean his stance on violence was vague. It wasn’t. He gave us plenty of violence-related material to work with—material that, when carefully analyzed, yields a few clear, largely indisputable conclusions regarding the ethics of violence. Performing such an analysis is the task of this book.

Before we dive in, two definitions are in order. When I refer to violence, I mean the use of (unwelcome) physical force against a person or their property. In other words, I mean it in the relatively narrow, traditional sense, not in the broader, more modern sense of any action that causes any type of physical or nonphysical (verbal, psychological, spiritual, structural, cultural, etc.) harm. Actions that cause the latter types of harm are often as destructive as those that cause physical harm, but they are not our concern here. We are talking about direct physical actions like vandalism, theft, assault, kidnapping, rape, killing, war, and similar tangible acts of coercion, rather than things like insults, income disparities, greed, or racism, which alone are relatively indirect and nonphysical.

By pacifism, I mean the practice of nonviolence in all situations. I don’t mean doing nothing. As you will see, Christian pacifism isn’t passive. Like Jesus, it actively combats evil. It just does so nonviolently. It engages in nonviolent resistance, not nonresistance.

A word of warning: If you are not already a pacifist, this book will challenge you. You will likely think it goes too far in some spots. A few parts may even anger you. Most assuredly, you will not agree with all of it. I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to give it a hearing, to allow its Jesus-centered case for radical nonviolence to enter your consciousness.

Of course, I hope you are persuaded by the evidence this book presents and the logic it employs. But if nothing else, I pray it is sufficiently sincere, rational, and biblically based to at least make Christian pacifism a more understandable position—even if you still don’t adopt it.

[1] See Chapter 9, which makes this point from both a historical and theological perspective, backed up by a plethora of Scripture references.

[2] Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers 25th Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 232.