Reviewed by John A. Wood,
Professor of Religion, Baylor University

Must Christianity Be Violent? Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology
Kenneth R. Chase & Alan Jacobs, Eds.
Grand Rapids, Brazos Press, 2003.

            The issue of violence and religion has taken center stage since 9/11. Both Muslims and Christians have probed deeply into the relationship between violence and Islam, and books regularly appear in both scholarly and popular venues. However, the issue of Christianity and violence has been a topic of concern for Christian thinkers for centuries. They have sought to respond to incessant charges by non-Christians that although Christian ethics claims to be an ethic of love and service to others, it has in fact been used to subjugate and to kill.

The Crusades of the middle ages and the Nazi Holocaust in particular have called for Christian thinkers to explain how their faith could have been so closely related to these horrific events. One such recent effort to deal with this subject from a Protestant, evangelical perspective occurred at a conference sponsored by The Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College on March 15-17, 2000. This book is a collection of papers delivered at that conference, although some of the chapters have been updated by the presenters to include references to 9/11.

            The Introduction by Kenneth Chase notes that the arguments mounted against a Christianity that is supposedly characterized by peace fall into two broad categories: the pragmatic argument and the inherency argument. The pragmatic argument says that although not all Christians are violent, the right circumstances will cause Christians to expose their claws and reveal their true nature. History, it is claimed, reveals that Christians all too often act violently. The inherency argument claims that the core elements of the Christian faith inherently lead to violence because its exclusivist claims to truth link evangelism with a struggle between good and evil, and because the sacrifice theme inevitably leads to an undesirable dependence on bloodletting, substitution, and suffering. The following chapters address these two arguments in various ways. The tone of the chapters is generally non-defensive and the writers seek with humility to come to grips with these serious charges.

            Joseph Lynch examines the Crusades and concludes that they emerged out of long-term theological developments that changed the way Christians viewed war and warriors. Some Christians adopted the concept of holy war in the Old Testament through allegorical interpretative methods whereby the crusaders saw themselves as the new Israel fighting for territory under God’s leadership. Furthermore, the crusades were also unimaginable without the transformation of medieval knighthood into a religious calling.

            Luis Rivera-Pagan views Latin American Christianity, as well as Latin American cultural identity and national consciousness in general, as a result of a clash between two paradoxical sources: the “messianic providentialism” guiding the violence of the conquistadors and the prophetic indignation reacting against them in the name of the biblical God of mercy and justice, seen most vividly in the writings of the remarkable Bartolome de lasCasas.

            Dan McKanan provides an insightful analysis of the theology of the antislavery movement, and is especially helpful in his treatment of Lincoln whom McKanan says opted for a “providential theology of divine violence.”  That is, the war was so big that it had to be, in some way, a manifestation of God’s will. Furthermore, Lincoln’s assassination functioned as a sacrificial death for the nation.

            In examining the Holocaust David Gushee refuses to accept the view that Christianity was the cause of the Holocaust, but also owns up to Christian complicity in the Holocaust. In his treatment of Christian rescuers of Jews he asks how a faith could motivate some Christians to risk their lives to save Jews while seemingly motivating other Christians to murder the same people their brothers and sisters were trying to save? He concludes that then, as now, there was no Christian faith, only Christian faiths. In various social contexts and historical circumstances, the Christian faith is taken in different degrees of seriousness and modeled differently by Christian leaders, leading both to healthy and to aberrant versions of Christianity. In a later chapter Victoria Barnett calls the complicity of German Christians during the Nazi era as a “damning failure,” but arrives at a conclusion similar to Gushee’s.

            In an excellent chapter historian Mark Noll tries to answer the question: “Have Christians done more harm than good?” He confesses that the indictments of Christianity as a malignant force in history have not arisen out of thin air; the historical record speaks for itself and should lead to shame and repentance. Having admitted this however, Noll offers not exonerations but mitigations of these charges. For one, Christians, like Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and other religions have engaged in periodic bloodletting, indicating that these evils are part of the human condition rather than distinctive features of Christianity. Second, however nasty some of the fruits of Christianity have been, often explicitly anti-Christian religions or substitute religions have been worse (e.g. Bolshevik murders, Stalin’s Great Terror, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, etc.). Third, without the legacy of Christianity the West would never have possessed the trajectory of moral critique that could lead to an indictment of Christianity for its moral failings. After offering historical examples of the good that Christians have done, he concludes the Christian faith has been a plastic force in history. It has obviously inspired to great goodness, but it has also obviously been used for great evil.

            James Juhnke’s chapter on “How Should We Then Teach American History” is alone worth the price of the book. Rejecting the extremes of the super-patriotic “triumphant nationalism” and of negative cultural criticism, he proposes an alternative of “constructive nonviolence.” He proposes that we honor nonviolent aspects of the American experience such as: (1) the survival and strength of native American cultures (e.g., the nonviolent chief Massasoir and the prophet Handsome Lake), (2) nonviolent alternatives that were proposed but rejected (e.g., Philadelphia’s nonviolent “Tea Party,” Joseph Galloway’s bold proposal of how to change the British constitution, William Jennings Bryan’s arguments against WWI, and alternatives for the use of the Atomic Bomb on Japan), (3) the human conscience against killing (published interviews with soldiers), (4) the role of voluntary communities (the struggles against Indian removals in the 1830s), and (5) the opponents of total war (the challengers of the prevailing military mythology throughout American history). Juhnke makes a compelling case against the dominant master narrative of American history that sacralizes both the state and the fruits of its violence.

            Glen Stassen summarizes the good work he has done in recent years in just peacemaking theory. Drawing on the Bible and on contemporary thought he demonstrates that nonviolent conflict resolution is both Christian and possible in the real world of international conflict.

            Richard Mouw tries to defend the Reformed tradition of the substitutionary atonement of Christ by insisting that the nastiness that has often characterized Calvinism flows more from their general picture of a distant and angry God than from their understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death. A reader can commend Mouw’s effort while also concluding that the time has come to explore alternate ways to explain what Christ’s death means to the violent world we live in.

            The book concludes with the irrepressible Stanley Hauerwas’ provocative defense of his and John Howard Yoder’s understanding of pacifism combined with an attack on John Milbank’s view that violence is not necessarily always wrong for Christians. Milbank follows with an essay scolding pacifists for simply “gazing” at violence and doing little to counter it; he thinks that the impulse to protect the innocent is rooted in human nature and not a “fallen” impulse.

            This is a timely book for a world engulfed in violence and for a world which cries out for genuine peacemaking. Christians, whether pacifists or just war defenders, will be helped in their efforts to obtain guidance on how to live as Jesus’ disciples in a hostile world. All of the chapters are useful, although readers pressed for time might concentrate on the chapters by Noll, Juhnke, Stassen, and Hauerwas.

Updated Sunday, March 07, 2004