Yoder on Non-Violence and the Problem of Just War

Jesus Radicals has a review of a posthumous work by John Howard Yoder on non-violence. Their review is worth quoting at length:

John Howard Yoder’s newest posthumously published book, Nonviolence: A Brief History, is comprised of lectures that he gave in Warsaw Poland in 1983. At that time the Solidarity Movement had became a powerful nonviolent force trying to affect change in Communist Poland. Pope John Paul the II was to visit Poland just a month after Yoder delivered his lectures. So the time for Yoder to urge nonviolent resistance was ripe, though Yoder did not reference contemporary events in Poland during the lectures. First Yoder urged his hearers to consider the lessons that heave been learned by nonviolent movements in the twentieth century. He then refutes objections that just war theorists might raise to the effectiveness and legitimacy of a nonviolent movement, moving from there to ground nonviolence resistance in the Judeo-Christian heritage. Finally he addresses the Roman Catholic Church in the final three lectures, agreeing with liberation theologian Adolfo Pérez Esquivel that “It is love, not violence or hatred, that will have the last word in history.”

. . . Yoder narrates the “cosmological conversions” that Tolstoy, Gandhi and King underwent that pushed them to see reality anew. Speaking of Tolstoy’s insight that influenced Gandhi and King Yoder states:

The key to the good news is that we are freed from prolonging the chain of evil cause engendering evil effects by action and reaction in kind. By refusing to extend the chain of vengeance, we break into the world with good news. This one key opened the door to a restructuring of the entire universe of Christian life and thought. There developed from it a critique of economic exploitation, of military and imperial domination, and of westernization.

Yoder invites the reader to have their own “cosmological conversion” has he explains the New Testament’s cosmology (thus overcoming some weaknesses in Tolstoy’s viewpoint). The “powers and principalities,” which help create order but also dominate and oppress people in forms such as the state, have been disarmed and defeated in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. They were put on public display and shown for what they truly are: emperors with no clothes. Jesus now wages a cosmological war against these defeated powers, and invites us to be part of the march toward history’s christological. Christians are a sign of Jesus victory and the eschatological kingdom. As such we take part in an alternate politics that sees that the “grain of the universe” is not with the powerful, but the oppressed and downtrodden, not with violence but with suffering as Christ suffered. As such, Jesus’ church will inevitably run headlong into the empire’s of this world as they resist Jesus, and the church will have to witness publicly, and sometimes at great cost.

This cosmological conversion to which we are invited is to a new way of living in and viewing the world, not merely to feelings and beliefs. It is to see that Jesus is more determinative of history than anybody in the White House, the Kremlin or some country’s Parliament. He goes on to show how in the past few decades the Holy Spirit has moved within the Catholic Church to help many people to this conversion, most importantly people in the Catholic Worker movement, but there have also been stirrings in the bishops themselves. Jesus is lord and has altered the course of humanity’s sinful, violent rebellion. The question for us is whether we care to take the medicine that will make us well enough to see again, to see not merely shadows, but the reality that casts them.

The Church has become far too comfortable with violence and with war. We glorify past wars and rationalize present ones. We trot out the logical pretzel of just war theory when we know very well it bears no relation to the gospel. The Church is not just another political actor. It is the presence of Christ in the world.