What do we do instead of preparing to respond to violence with violence?
First: as individuals, our hearts need to be changed. Therefore we seek and allow God’s continuing creation to build up love in our hearts and shalom in the world through the way we live.
Second: in communities we work to engage everyone to form a collective vision of a Good Place and work together to make it happen. In this process, everybody needs everybody else.
Part of this includes making sure that everyone in the community sees the church living out the gospel by being fully engaged in the community process, as well as making sure that everyone hears an understandable presentation of the gospel and, if they accept it, that they can be discipled to full Christian maturity.
Third: change our economic activities from being exclusively or primarily focused on achieving the greatest return on investment, to a focus on building economically viable organizations that value people over money (expressed in large part by offering members of the organization the opportunity and encouragement to live out their full potential) and that work to build up good places.
Effort in these areas will build peace and diminish violence.
We can choose to dedicate our lives to this.
A Life of Shalom
“But what about if somebody broke into my house and was going to harm my family. You can’t say that I can’t harm – even kill – them to protect my family.”
From that simple statement people feel they have unhinged the entire argument against violence and that they have justified every act of violence – whether a single act against a malevolent intruder or a sustained, multi-generational strategy of using violence to control others.
Romans 13: 1-5 is often quoted during these discussions:
Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience.
Both of these arguments – protecting our homes from intruders and blindly supporting government use of force – depict responses to isolated acts of violence by others towards us, against a larger background of peace and order.
For the sake of the argument, let’s concede the occasional use of force in response to isolated acts of aggression.
For the sake of the argument, though, let’s also admit that this does not account for the vast majority of violence occurring in our world.
We live in a sustained, multiple generation reliance on violence as a normal instrument of policy to accomplish our regular, day-to-day business. We live way beyond “what if a man comes into my house with a gun” or the authorities responding to law breakers and wrongdoers. And, unsurprisingly, the level of violence continues to increase in the world.
In this kind of world, the life of God’s shalom lived purposefully, intentionally, sincerely, vigorously, and intelligently in the world will shine like a light on a stand, like a city on a hill.
Let us not allow Romans 13 or fears of intruders put us off from vigorously pursuing the life of shalom.
It is a choice. We choose either to rely on violence or on lives of shalom to bring into the world the life that God wants for us.
God’s people are characterized by energetic lives of shalom, where God’s grace flows through all our natural gifts and abilities, in the most loving way possible.
There will always be someone somewhere responding to aggression with aggression. We don’t have to worry that our homeland or our neighborhood will not be defended if we choose to live lives of shalom.
The use of force against law-breakers, though, should be “legal and rare”.
That is not what we experience today.
Violence is common, not surprising, and increasing.
Forceful responses to violence do not address the causes of violence. Ultimately they increase violence; first, by the very fact that they are themselves violent and so, by their nature and presence, introduce more violence into the world; second, because people don’t like being forced into changing their behavior.
Forcing someone to change their (violent) behavior minimizes violent behavior – as long as you have the greater force and as long as you feel like and can afford to apply your force overwhelmingly to the choices that they want to make. As soon as they slip your grasp or elude your attention, their violent behavior will return.
Even the US military has learned – at some level – that lasting peace comes only when people change their hearts and minds from violence towards shalom.
God’s people are about shalom in a big way. They are not about violence – not about perpetuating, continuing, sustaining, violence as a tool of policy. They do not sit by idly while violence is used as a regular strategy to accomplish our goals.
Suppose you live in a neighborhood where violent home invasion is becoming more and more common.
What do you do?
Better locks, more caution, etc.?
The majority of our effort should be to work together with others to address the causes of increasing violence.
This might be hard work.
It might take a lot of our time.
It might be expensive.
It might even be dangerous.
But that is the response of God’s people.
Perhaps one reason that we so easily and quickly justify force to defend our homes without looking beyond immediate circumstances to larger issues is that in order to address the larger, background issues we need to function as members of a body, not as individual free agents.
It seems we often prefer to act as individual free agents. The individual, free agent installs more locks, buys a gun, moves to a better neighborhood.
The blessing comes, however, as we take our places as members of the body of Christ. God’s grace flows through God’s people living and acting in unity.
This brings shalom into our world. Force and violence do not.
So, if you want to, go ahead and keep a gun by your bed at night. It will not make you safe, but it will give you the option to respond to violence with violence, if that makes you feel better.
Only lives of shalom can bring peace and safety to our places. Until shalom exists in our places, no amount of force can make us safe.
This is a work of grace.
Come, O house of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of the Lord.
So far I’ve used cleaned up scans (from the Bartoli surveying book) that I used in the printed text of Violence or Peace. Based on the length of the whole V or P text, the number of cleaned up images from Bartoli, and the practical length of blog posts, I’m running out of cleaned up scans.
So this week you get what is technically called an Inhabited Initial – “An enlarged letter . . . that contains human or animal figures but not an identifiable scene.” (M. Brown, Understanding Medieval Manuscripts) An initial with an identifiable scene would be an historiated initial. Now you know!
One benefit of this straight, non-“cleaned up” scan is that you get a sense of the texture of the Bartoli book’s handmade paper. I think that is pretty cool!