In his \u201cI\u2019ve Been to the Mountaintop\u201d speech the night before he was murdered, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, \u201cThe choice we face is no longer violence or nonviolence; the choice we face is nonviolence or nonexistence.\u201d The truth of this statement becomes more obvious every day. If we are to prosper and perhaps even survive on this planet, we must embrace nonviolence when we fight to defend and promote the things that are precious to us and in which we believe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faith communities are called to lead the way toward the embrace of nonviolence in this struggle, because nonviolence is a form of love and love is central in the teaching of most major faith communities. God\u2019s Hesed, translated as tender mercy or love, is a major theme throughout Jewish scriptures. The Buddha insisted that no one can attain the \u201cwisdom\u201d of enlightenment unless he or she feels \u201ccompassion\u201d for all sentient beings. Every chapter of the Qur\u2019an but one begins, \u201cIn the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful, the Compassionate.\u201d No religious leader emphasized love more absolutely than Jesus. The whole New Testament bears witness to this. \u201cFaith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love,\u201d Paul writes in I Corinthians. The author of the First Letter of John actually equates God and love. \u201cGod is Love,\u201d he writes not once, but twice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The authorities soon realized that they had to destroy Jesus if they wanted to preserve the social order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
For Jesus, love is not confined to the realm of personal relationships. It is an energy that binds us together in what Martin Luther King called the Beloved Community and what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. At the heart of Jesus\u2019 whole life and ministry is his announcement that the Reign of God is breaking into the world; that it is, in fact, already among us. Jesus\u2019 teachings and actions portray and proleptically realize the Kingdom here and now. His welcoming the marginalized, his meal fellowship with prostitutes and tax collectors, his egalitarian interactions with women incarnate the universality of God\u2019s love and the solidarity of life in God\u2019s kingdom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jesus\u2019 proclamation and embodiment of the Reign of God was a lethal threat to the religious and political leaders and the social order over which they presided. They accused him of drunkenness and gluttony and called him a friend of prostitutes and sinners, which indeed he was. In fact, he told the priests and lawyer, \u201cProstitutes will enter the Kingdom of God ahead of you.\u201d The authorities soon realized that they had to destroy Jesus if they wanted to preserve the social order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is most relevant for any consideration of nonviolence from the point of view of Christian faith is not the authorities\u2019 hostility toward Jesus but Jesus\u2019 response to it. Jesus never backed down or even moderated his message or behavior. Sometimes he even escalated it. But he unequivocally rejected violence as a means of defending himself or advancing his cause and required his followers to do the same. \u201cThose who live by the sword will perish by the sword,\u201d he told Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jesus\u2019 nonviolence is evident everywhere in the Gospels, but he expresses it very directly and clearly in the Sermon on the Mount in these words: <\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cYou have heard it said, \u2018you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,\u2019 but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you … If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return … and you will be children of the Most High, who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Be merciful as God is merciful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
Jesus bases his teaching about loving the enemy on God. God, Jesus believes, governs the world through love. His followers are to imitate God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jesus\u2019 embrace of and teaching about nonviolence was well known and emphasized in the church during the first 300 years. Biblical scholar William Klassen writes that these words about loving the enemy were the most frequently quoted of all Jesus\u2019 sayings in the early church. In the first three centuries of our era, all the most respected and influential leaders of the Church taught that nonviolence and love of enemy was expected of followers of Jesus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Athenagoras, a philosopher and Christian teacher in Athens, in his defense of Christianity to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius around 177 A.D., wrote that Christians cannot bear to see a person being killed even if killed justly. He went on to write, \u201cWe, thinking that to watch a person being killed is practically equivalent to taking life, refuse to attend the gladiatorial displays.\u201d Origen of Alexandria, the most brilliant and influential church teacher of the third century, wrote around 220 A.D. that God \u201cdid not deem it becoming to his own divine legislation to allow the killing of any person whatever.\u201d Commenting on the commandment \u201cThou shalt not kill,\u201d Lactantius, a Christian leader and advisor to the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, wrote, \u201cIn this commandment of God, no exception at all ought to be made to the rule that it is always wrong to kill a human being, whom God has wished to be a sacrosanct creature.\u201d These teachers and leaders of the early church referred to the Sermon on the Mount as the basis of their teaching. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the fourth century, the churches awareness of Jesus\u2019 nonviolent teaching and life gradually faded, but never completely disappeared, and from time to time came to the fore again. The life and ministry of St. Francis of Assisi is a particularly dramatic example of this. One incident especially demonstrates St. Francis\u2019 devotion to nonviolence. In 1299, while the fourth Crusade was raging in Egypt, St. Francis journeyed there with several Franciscan brothers. He and Br. Illuminatus left the Crusaders camp and walked unarmed into to the camp of Sultan Malik al Kamil. Thinking him an emissary from the Crusaders\u2019 camp, Turkish soldier took him to the Sultan, who received him graciously. Francis remained in the Sultan\u2019s camp for several days and conversed with the Sultan about Jesus and peace. The Sultan is reported to have said, \u201cIf all Christians were like you, I would become one.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a talk to ambassadors to the Holy See shortly before his trip to Abu Dhabi and Morocco in 2019, Pope Francis referred to this peacemaking mission of St. Francis. He said, \u201cThese (upcoming) visits represent two important opportunities to advance … mutual understanding between the followers of (Christianity and Islam) in this year of the 800th anniversary of the historic meeting between St. Francis and the Sultan Malik al Kamil.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jesus\u2019 teaching and practice of nonviolence has been coming to fore again in Catholic and mainline protestant churches in recent times. In the Catholic Church this renewed awareness of Gospel nonviolence began in the 1960s with the papacy of John XXIII and has reached a new level under Pope Francis. But Jesus\u2019 radical nonviolence was rediscovered even earlier by people less directly or not at all connected to the church. In 1894 Leo Tolstoy, inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, wrote the book “The Kingdom of God is Within.” Tolstoy argued that Jesus\u2019 injunction against the use of violence even in the face of evil must be taken literally. Gandhi, a devote Hindu, was inspired by Tolstoy\u2019s book, and began corresponding with him in the last years of the author\u2019s life. But the Sermon on the Mount itself, which he read daily, was Gandhi\u2019s chief inspiration for what he called \u201cMy experiments with Truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The greatest misconception about conflict is that violence is always the ultimate form of power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In his autobiography, subtitled \u201cThe Story of My Experiments with Truth,\u201d Gandhi explains that the purpose of these \u201cexperiments\u201d was to develop an effective way of fighting for Truth based on Jesus\u2019 teaching of love for the enemy and to develop nonlethal but powerful weapons with which to fight. Gandhi\u2019s disciples all over the world like Martin Luther King, Jr. continued these experiments through the 20th century and into the 21st with remarkable success. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,100,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone\u2019s wildest expectations, ” wrote New Testament scholar Walter Wink, commenting on this success in his book “The Powers that Be.” “If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa, India…) the figure reaches 3,337,400,00, a staggering 64 percent of humanity. All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn\u2019t work in the \u2018real\u2019 world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Writers Peter Akerman and Jack Duvall, in their book “A Force More Powerful” \u2014 which was the basis of the PBS television documentary of the same name \u2014 write:<\/p>\n\n\n
At the end of the last century, the world\u2019s airwaves and bookstores were full of material that looked back at what was called the most destructive hundred years in history. In reel after reel, and on page after page, we were shown the carnage, the awful cost, it was said, of defeating evil. But told only that way, the history of the century\u2019s conflicts would reinforce a terrible fallacy: that only violence can overcome violence, that the struggles with the highest stakes have to be settled by force of arms. Yet if that were true, how was it possible that in the same century, rulers and oppressors having every conceivable advantage in violent force were pushed aside on every continent by people who did not resort to violence?<\/p>\n
The greatest misconception about conflict is that violence is always the ultimate form of power, that no other method of advancing a just cause or defeating injustice can surpass it. But Russians, Indians, Poles, Danes … African Americans, Chileans, South Africans, and many others have proven that one side\u2019s choices in a conflict are not foreclosed by the other side\u2019s use of violence, that other, nonviolent measures can be a force more powerful. If the great sacrifices of lives and honor exacted by the last century is requited in the next one hundred years, it will be because that truth becomes more fully understood.<\/p>\n\n\n
These quotes provide historical evidence for the effectiveness of nonviolence as a way of fighting for justice and human rights. More recently this evidence has been supported by academic research. Dr. Erica Chenoweth (Professor at Harvard Kennedy School) and Dr. Maria Stephan (Director of Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute for Peace) examined 323 social change campaigns from 1900 to 2006. The goal of their research was to create the first study to try to answer in a systematic, empirical way whether nonviolent or violent resistance methods are better at producing short- and long-term political change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n