Volf on divine violence

Here is Miroslav Volf, a pacifist himself, on why Christian nonviolence actually needs the vengeance of God to be coherent (not to mention Biblical):

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 who is 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 hom 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...

Exclusion and Embrace, p. 204

Stout savages Hauerwas

Hauerwas is so dominant in the thinking of a generation of American theologians that is a relief to hear him challenged. But Stout does so as a non-theologian: it is a shame that it took a non-theologian to do it:

A cynic might say that the secret of Hauerwas's vast influence in the church in the 1980s and 1990s lay in the imprecision of the sacrifice he appeared to be demanding of his followers. Surely he was not proposing that the strength of one's sentimental identification with the church could by itself secure noncomplicity with the evils of the world. His favourite patristic text appears to be Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom. [Actually, here Stout is taking a piece of O'Donovan's rhetoric in Desire of the Nations rather literalistically! - a bit of a schoolboy error. MJ] But in the absence of a clear statement of the price Christians must be willing to pay, his audience was able to indulge itself in fantasies of martyrdom without experiencing
actualy poverty or persecution at all. (p. 158)

Ouch - harsh but fair. Tenure at Duke hardly seems like persecution, now, does it? He charges Hauerwas with inconsistency over his reading of Scripture. Hauerwas wants to make non-violence thee central feature of the Christian message. But is the pacificist case really convincing on the basis of Scripture? And how come he is such a rigorist on this issue, but not on others - say, on remarriage after divorce? As Stout says:

It is hard...to escape the conclusion that his ethics rests on an extremely selective reading of the Bible. (p. 160)

And further, Stout articulates a point I had thought of but not really expressed before: Hauerwas's church, his 'peaceable kingdom', doesn't seem to exist. When he says 'the church', which church is he talking about? What does he mean? As Stout says,

The actual church does not look very much like a community of virtue, when judged by pacificist standards. (p. 161)

Just War and Atonement?

Over at Faith and Theology there has been a vigorous discussion after Ben invited nominations for the 'Worst Theological Invention Ever'. Everyone loves a gripe, me included!

Several of the contributors nominated Just War theory, with one of them actually noting a link between those who hold JW and those who hold to Penal Substitution.

This is just tendentious, and a bad reading of even the pacificist tradition. As Miroslav Volf points out in Exclusion and Embrace, many of the strongest pacificists in Christianity - in the early church and in the radical reformation - have also held to a vigorous account of the divine wrath against sin and sinners, and the need for a substitionary sin-bearer. It is precisely this account that enables there to be a meaningful pacificism.

Which leads me to a further observation: there are two types of pacificism. There is the one I have just described, which, though I think it has weaknesses, is orthodox and ancient (though it is a minority report). The other rests on a doctrine of God that is frankly novel, reading out of an ontology of God's peace that is exegetically and theologically unconvincing (in my opinion), owing more to Foucault than anything. Or at least, to put it less combatitively, if pacificism rests on such a doctrine of God then there are really two very different conceptions of the nature of God at play.

Christendom has also come under attack (again!), as if one could make meaningfully sweeping generalisations about a millenia of thought about this era in the history of the church! Christendom had its bad fruit, certainly, as it had its wonderful benefits for humankind and for the gospel; and I am not yet urging a return to it (as if I could) out of some Christian nostalgia: but the flaw was not in the idea of Christendom itself - at least not as it properly and accurately described.