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...
Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another.
When Jesus uses the Aramaic term mammon to refer to wealth, he is giving it a personal and spiritual character. When he declares, "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24), he is personifying mammon as a rival god. In saying this, Jesus is making it unmistakably...
Public good doesn't automatically follow from private virtue. A person's moral character, sterling though it may be, is insufficient to serve the cause of justice, which is to challenge the status quo, to try to make what's legal more moral, to speak truth to power,...
Because God is the subject of worship, we must back up a step to recall that, before liturgy can involve the work of the people who offer their praise, it begins with the presence of God graciously inviting that response. It seems to me that some of the worship wars...
I now read Christ's being "lifted up" as image language echoing a passage in the letter to the Ephesians that speaks of God putting all things "under his feet" (Ephesians 1:22). As a beautiful paraphrase puts it: God has put everything without exception into Christ's...
Samuel understands well that people of faith cannot withdraw from public questions. He understands well that every decision about God brings along with it an implicit decision about sociopolitical-economic power. This narrative concerns the attractiveness and danger...
Many people are seduced from time to time by the temptations to be relevant, powerful, or spectacular, and a few people have to wrestle with them regularly. But perhaps the more common temptation for most of us is to feel that we have little or no chance to be any of...
Money has power out of all proportion to its purchasing power. Because the children of this world understand this, they can use money for non-economic purposes. And use it they do! Money is used as a weapon to bully people and to keep them in line. Money is used to...