Jesus' teaching on nonviolence remains his most controversial teaching because we live in a world organized by violence. Which is why so many Christians want to pretend that Jesus didn't teach and model nonviolence. But to imagine a violence-endorsing Jesus is to...
THE PROBLEM WITH THE WORD 'NONVIOLENCE' is that people think they know what nonviolence is apart from Christ. Then nonviolence becomes a marker more determinative than Jesus – it conceives peace apart from the crucifixion. But in reality, discipleship is the defining...
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.-------------------------------------------------------Gender-inclusive paraphrase: Nonviolence means...
If a house is burning, and a bucket of water is thrown on the blaze and doesn't extinguish the fire, this doesn't mean that water won't put out fire. It means we need more water. And so with nonviolence.
If it [our framing story] tells us that the purpose of life is for individuals or nations to accumulate an abundance of possessions and to experience the maximum amount of pleasure during the maximum number of minutes of our short lives, then we will have little...
I think that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and human dignity. It has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and at the same time it works on...
For Jesus, there can be no sacred violence. There can only be sacred nonviolence. “Nonviolence” is not an adequate term, because it does not quite capture the creative, dynamic, surprising, transforming initiatives that Jesus commands.
No doubt the objection may be raised that affirmation of nonviolence by the churches would be simplistic, that ethical judgments in the real world of the Powers are far too complex to adopt a fixed ethical stance. This objection, I must confess, was one of the main...
In his nonviolent teaching, life, and death, Jesus revealed a God of nonviolence. The God who delivered an enslaved people in the Exodus was now seen as the deliverer of all humanity from oppression. The violence associated with God in the biblical tradition was...