Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, I want to discuss an article I came across a few years back and I've been saving for a rainy day. The article is entitled, We Should Teach Our Children to Be Capable of Violence. And it has a guest quote from Matt Walsh which, I'm sure you're probably familiar with. So, sure you can probably already tell it's going to be an an interesting article and discussion here.

So buckle up and let's jump right in. So I don't caricature what the author says and since the article is pretty short, I'm going to quote the article a few times at length. And I'll start off with an introductory quote to lead us into the first discussion point. Quote, The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh recently opined in a piece entitled, We teach our kids to be doormats and then wonder why there is a bullying epidemic. From the article, Walsh says, We have built we have built off this mythology of the bigger person and told our children that the bigger person is the one who walks away from bullies, disengages, tells an adult, the bigger person is somehow the submissive one who slinks away and runs for cover.

We tell our children that remaining silent in the face of a bully is strong and courageous. But somehow, the strong, courageous, bigger child who spends his childhood avoiding confrontation and retreating in the face of aggressors never actually feels very strong, courageous or big. He feels rather like a punchline because that is what we have told him to be. I'm going to up the stakes on Walsh's article and bluntly state what he alluded to, make your children capable of violence. Now, I'm not going to criticize Walsh or the author of this piece for their intuition.

I have to admit that when I see movies where a bully gets their comeuppance, it makes me feel good still today. I definitely do empathize more with aggressors than I used to or I guess retaliatory aggressors. But I even actually empathize with the first agro, the primary aggressors too. You know, I often wonder because of all the stories that I've heard and starting to not think of things so much in a well, he started it type of mindset that a lot of conservatives tend to have where it's like, well, he deserved it, he started it. I was just so juvenile, that's what I deal with my kids, right?

My kids do that all the time. But we conservatives kind of do the same thing, well, they deserved it, he brought it on himself. Yet, how many stories have we heard and movies have we seen where we understand that aggressors are the way that they are for reasons and but by the grace of God, right? We say that all the time, but by the grace of God, but we never mean it. So I I do empathize more with aggressors today than I used to and I I wonder why they are the way that they are and I can logically understand that there is more to to any aggressor's story.

Nevertheless, I like it when bullies get payback. I mean, remember in college watching the very violent movie, The Punisher and that just made me feel so good to know that when the police just they they their hands are tied whether it's due to corruption or just lack of resources or inefficiency, whatever it is, for somebody to go out and get the really big bad guys and just kill them, even torture them, like, oh, that just, that felt so good because injustice is so so hard to take. I get it. So I'll agree here that intuition brings most of us to the same conclusion that that Walsh and the author of this piece have. That aggressors getting justice from somebody that they're bullying feels like the right thing.

However, Jesus entered a culture that was very much about feeding their intuition and emotions on the issue and an eye for an eye sounded good to them too. The same principle Walsh and the author have a view here. Yet Jesus did a lot to show us that God's ways are a bit different than our ways and I'd argue that His thoughts are also probably higher than our thoughts. We have heard it said that an eye for an eye is good and Walsh is saying that right here as is the author of this piece. But Jesus shows us a different way, doesn't He?

And Walsh, who identifies as a Christian, surely he's heard these words of Christ before, right? And it makes me wonder what he does with those words. Does the divine inspiration of his intuition trump the inspired words of the Bible as it depicts Christ's teachings? I mean, let the bullies win in the way that Walsh would define winning or this author would define winning, right? As getting the physical upper hand.

So in that sense, yeah, Jesus let the bullies win. And He certainly was a punchline to them, wasn't He? They said that Jesus saved others yet He couldn't save Himself, you know, why don't you come down from that cross? And they laughed about it, they divvied up His garments, He was a laughing stock. Yet the intuition that we all have of justice here and the frustration that we have that Jesus was made a punchline, that has nothing to say in regard to the justification of violence.

Recognizing injustice and concluding violence are two different steps, two different action steps that we have to evaluate. And Peter, when he tried violence to do the right thing on Walsh's this author's terms. Peter was told to put away his sword and as Tertullian said in disarming Peter, Jesus has disarmed us all. The Anti Nicene Church was in agreement and stood for no violence. Many early Christians became the punchline for ancient Rome.

We call those punchlines martyrs and the early church called those punchlines the seeds of the church. As I think again it was Tertullian who said the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Punchlines lead to longer punchlines. Martyrs lead to converts who would become partakers of the vine, the blood of Christ. So yeah, do I ever have a problem with how this article starts off?

Especially considering that this isn't just someone wrestling with their desire to do harm to others, which I get, but it's someone advocating that we teach this to our children. This thing that Jesus tried to get out of the world two thousand years ago with humanity's endless lust for vengeance and this cyclical violence, the author and Walsh and a lot of Christians try to perpetuate and even advocate teaching this to our children. The author next continues by attacking what it means to be peaceful. He says the following, quote, Let's approach this from a philosophical standpoint. There's nothing virtuous about saying you're peaceful if you're not capable of violence.

You're not actually peaceful, you're helpless. There's a difference. You don't actually have a choice. Being peaceful is a lie you tell yourself to excuse your weakness. It's like patting yourself on the back because you didn't get punched this time while having your lunch money stolen and giving it up to avoid a conflict.

End quote. I'm not sure what the author means here by being capable of violence. Does he mean that to be legitimately peaceful you have to be physically capable of doing harm to your aggressor? Or does he mean one has to be volitionally capable of choosing violence? If he means the former, then Jesus was capable of violence because he could have called legions of angels, like he could have messed them all up, right?

So he was physically capable of doing some harm there. However, was Jesus capable of disobeying his father's will and choosing to hate his enemies and do violence to them? Was he volitionally capable to do violence? Answers might differ on that but I think most people would probably argue that such a choice was not a real option as we would define real options, you know, because I don't think there's any world that Jesus would have disobeyed, right? Would done the wrong thing.

So volitionally, that wasn't on the table for Jesus because to love, and we had an episode on this, I forget what it's called, I'll link it in the show notes, but we had an episode on this where we, you know, we talked about is enemy love an intrinsic part of what it means to love? And if it is and God is love, then he could not have done anything but that, but love his enemies. So yeah, I would say that volitionally, Jesus couldn't have hated his enemies and done them harm in this instance. He would never ever have chosen that option. Calvinist and Arminians might nuance this differently, but the point is violence wasn't really an option for Jesus, at least on his way to the cross.

So depending on what the author means, Jesus may not have been peaceable, He may rather have just been helpless by the author's standards. But even if the author can get away with explaining how Jesus was peaceable by His definitions, the author still discounts a large segment of the population who Jesus sought to empower. Jesus empowered slaves, women and the poor through His teachings, yet He didn't do this by making them capable of violence. In fact, Jesus subdued His zealot contingency, the group that sought to do harm to others and not be helpless. Jesus and the apostles taught slaves and women of unbelievers to remain in their positions.

They taught submission to not just any government but to the wicked and unjust government of the Roman Empire. The power of the people came not in idolizing their lives and their comfort or sticking it to their enemies. It came by counting their lives as lost yet hidden in the hand of an all loving father who would bring all justice about in due time. These poor and oppressed were not only called to wait upon ultimate justice rather than take it into their own hands. They were told that because of their standing and value which were true irrespective of their circumstances, they could live free in Christ always, no matter what.

What Walsh and this author are actually doing is reversing that empowerment. They are binding a Christian's value to their capacity to do harm, their circumstantial capabilities to exert power. To the masses of oppressed who received hope from Jesus, these two want to take it away. Most people through most of history may have the volitional capacity to do harm to some people, but they don't have the positional capacity to do harm to their oppressors most of the time. Walsh and the author are thinking on on a small scale here, one individual to another individual but that's not how the world works.

It's nice that they live lives where the bullies that come to mind are milk money stealing bullies at public school, but that's not the reality for most oppressed through most of the time, most of history. Slaves to masters, women to men in patriarchal societies, citizens in occupied countries, peasants under feudal lords, the oppressed under dictators, you name it, most people through most of time do not have the positional capacity to do harm. And that's part of the reason why non violence is important and why we did a whole season on it. You can go back and listen to that. So without the capacity to actually do harm, whether that's positionally, volitionally, actually, however you want to define that, the choice to try to do harm them then seems pretty moot.

Knowing you can't really do harm and choosing to try it anyway is not choosing to do harm, it's choosing to fail to do harm. So one of the reasons I find this piece so upsetting isn't because these guys advocate violence. I think that's a misstep, that's problematic, it's difficult to do biblically, historically, all that we've made the case for. I'm with them there in my fleshly desires and that base intuition, I get it. But when you see the teachings of Jesus and the liberation that they bring and specifically to whom that liberation is brought, the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed, then what bothers me so much about this piece is that it reverses that liberation.

The people that these guys think that they're helping, the bullied, are by and large the people who they are shackling back up to the chains that Jesus loosed. And that just really bothers me. So that brings me to the final quote from the piece that I want to talk about. The author says the following, The biggest takeaway is this, peace through strength is as applicable to grade school as it was on the world stage. Make your children disciplined and capable of violence.

Stand up for them in front of them for it is, for its principled use. Very few examples will need to be made before the target is off your kid's backs. Or we could be complacent with the rising suicide rate of bullied children while continuing to enable the bullies. I say punching a bully in the face is favorable in comparison to your child hanging themselves but that's your choice. End quote.

So I'm not gonna talk about all the things that bothered me in there. There were very infuriating aspects particularly implying that if you don't go this guy's route that you're encouraging your kids to commit suicide, and that's infuriating. But we're not gonna touch on all that. Let me get what I think is maybe the heart of this rather than going down some other rabbit trails. So we've explored a lot about non violence in our podcast.

We looked at the Bible, church history, logic, empirical data, all that stuff. We also did a whole season on non violent action how seeking peace and reconciliation are actually better than fostering violence which tends to produce a cyclical set of violent actions. This concept the author has of making examples of bullies shows, in my opinion, a shallow understanding of history. Not only are many bullies not going to learn their lesson, but there will always be more bullies. And in this whole process, since the capacity to do harm is what validates here in their eyes, there will come a bully who has a greater capacity to do harm.

Then what? I mean, as Americans, it might be really easy to think that nationally, well yeah, the capacity to do harm legitimates, right? What a warped moral ethic that yeah. So once again, this doesn't apply to most people, most nations, most individuals through most of time in most places, it's just not possible. There's always going to be a bigger bully.

But as an American male, these guys can say those kinds of things and feel that it's true because for them, it might be true. It might be true that they don't feel like there are people out there who could or groups out there who could bully them stronger than they can bully or I'm sorry, stronger than they can retaliate. I don't know, maybe I was right the first time. But peace however, it doesn't focus on the externals. It's not dependent on my ability to do anything.

At least that's what I'd argue. I think peace already exists. Justice is assured and I'm told to wait on it. My status and value in Christ are set and so is the status and value of my oppressor, which is an important thing not to forget that I think these guys are forgetting. Peace then is simply achieved in greater measure as one is able to recognize it.

Sort of like a scratch off ticket maybe. We've already got the peace, we just work to uncover that to the best of our ability. We've got a winning ticket, we've just got to scratch it off. As we uncover that for ourselves and realize that it's true, that will in turn allow us to live at peace with others. It's how slaves could live under masters and be more free than their masters.

It's how women could live free under oppressive husbands and be more free than their husbands. It's how martyrs could live free as they willingly walked to their deaths under oppressive government and they were more free than the people oppressing them. God forbid that their hope lay in their capacity to do violence, but then they were more than most a hopeless and pitiable people. And thank God, violence wasn't their hope because how then would Rome have been transformed in the way that it was by the peaceable lambs who were led to the slaughter to plant the seeds of the church? Walsh and the author of this article get things wrong and that they reverse what the process really ought to be.

They see individuals as being in need of mustering up some volition to do violence with hope then arising in their accomplishing of violent action. But Jesus works quite a bit differently. Rather than internal to external, Jesus works external to internal. We are to recognize that God is the victor and His promises are true. That accomplished fact, that truth then moves inside of us and liberates us to act freely from that knowledge.

We see something very similar in the way that God commands things. When He gives the 10 Commandments, He says, First, I am the God who brought you out of slavery in Egypt. And He says this all over the Old Testament before He has expectations for Israel. Remember who I am and what I have done from you and what I am assuring you. And from there, your your actions should flow.

So one concept is a motivation from the inside out and the other from the outside in. One is choice from a liberated soul and the other from a soul that seeks to find its liberation by being effective in the world, which once again brings in our our issue of consequentialism. I hope Walsh and the author of this article eventually find the liberation that that they're looking for. But my advice to them is to stop looking for it in their own personal accomplishments and ability to retaliate their capacity for violence or anything in themselves. My advice would be to look for that peace and that hope in the accomplishments of Jesus Christ and God the Father and to allow the Spirit to reveal those truths within them and to become more at peace.

That's all for now. So peace, and I mean real peace, not contingent peace on anything that you can do. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.