In the spring of 2009, I was loafing around the Lipscomb bookstore and purchased a book by Walter Wink. Many months later, I have finally read the book that has been taunting me. Jesus and Nonviolence is a book about exactly what you would expect it to be about: Christian nonviolence, the same brand of nonviolence that motivated Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless unknown and underappreciated people.
The book is small, and can easily be read in an afternoon. However, I found it to be more beneficial to read a chapter a day over the course of a week. That allowed the material to more thoroughly sink in.
For the first 4 chapters, Wink attempts to reason with the reader with the aim of helping the reader understand nonviolence apart from faith. Indeed, he does make a compelling argument that even for someone that is not a Christian, nonviolence resistance is superior to violent revolution, as violent revolutions can only hold their positions of power through more violence, and have not, in effect, actually changed the system that warranted the violent revolution.
From the very beginning, Wink attempts to dispel the false idea that nonviolence is a position of weakness and cowardice. Pacifism does not equate passivism. There is more to pacifism than seeking to avoid an evil, but it is, primarily, an attempt to overcome that evil with creative strategies that pursue some sort of “good.”
Wink makes the point that the goal of nonviolence is not to defeat your enemy, as is the goal of violence, but it is to convert your enemy and to lead him/her to repentance and true change. This is difficult for many of us to fathom as we’ve grown up in a culture that teaches us that we are to “be the best.” In order to be the best, you have to defeat other people.
One of Wink’s primary points is that we have traditionally been offered two possibilities: flight or fight. We either run away or respond with violence, but Wink argues for a 3rd way: nonviolence resistance. He details this 3rd way with a list of goals: (I have edited down this list)
- Seize the initiative
- Develop a creative alternative
- Maintain your human dignity, as well as theirs
- Break the cycle
- Do not accept an inferior position
- Expose the injustice of the current system
- Be willing to suffer ridicule
- Be willing to suffer the punishment
These first 4 chapters left me thinking that Wink was simply a secular pacifist using the name of Jesus to push his own agenda. In chapter 5, however, he begins the conversation of nonviolence and Jesus, a difficult conversation that we should all struggle through, even if we arrive at different outcomes.
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