Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today, we are beginning a new series. Since this is a podcast on non violence, I figured it was probably time for us to be able to jump into some of the more practical aspects of what non violence looks like in the world. Season one largely covered the theological basis for non violence, but we didn't really get into as much of the real world applications as some people might have been interested in. In this season, I want to look at the practical nonviolence theory, as well as examples in history, And I also want to be questioning what that means for us.

Just because something is nonviolent, does that mean it is something that we should utilize? Or is nonviolence just a way that we can be grasping at power? So what I'm going do is I'm going to set up our series, and then I will spend a number of episodes talking about specific examples of nonviolence. And then towards the end of the series, the last few episodes, we'll evaluate what a Christian response should be, whether there are some non violent movements which we shouldn't get involved in as Christians or some non violent tactics. And I don't know how many answers I'll have, but we'll be asking a lot of questions and thinking a lot through this.

And honestly, that's a lot of what this podcast is. There are definitely some issues like abortion and certain aspects of non violence, the theological aspects which I feel a lot more certain about. But then when you get into other aspects and how that all plays out, I mean, I'm I'm kind of learning as we go. Even though I'm doing this this first episode here, I I'm still in the process of reading a bunch of different resources and I I don't know the outline of this season yet and I yeah, I'm gonna be asking questions. So this is not me dictating all of the right conclusions, it's really a process of me thinking and I'm letting you guys in on that.

So hopefully you find it beneficial, and let's go ahead and get started. Before we get into episodes which deal with specific non violent action in the world, I want to explore what I think is a core aspect of violence, and therefore, the antithesis of nonviolence. In Orthodox theology, maybe it's not just Orthodox, but I know in Orthodox theology, I think this is called apophaticism or something like that, negative theology. It's kind of saying, look, God is so mysterious, I what can I really say positively about Him? I can tell you what God isn't, but I don't know that I can really tell you what God is in any meaningful way.

And even though the issue of nonviolence might not be unknowable like God is, I think apophaticism can help us to understand things. It can be a good strategy to understand things. We can see things more clearly not only by learning about those things, but by learning about their antitheses, by learning about what they're not. So in this episode, let's go ahead and start talking about one of the antitheses of of nonviolence or something that just doesn't go with it. I want to talk about the role of fear, the role of fear in violence.

And it's ironic that the nonviolent position is often accused of being a position of inaction or fear, when in reality, it tends to work in the opposite way. We call ourselves the fourth way here because we dismiss the way of violence, of aggression, of fighting. We don't fight, we don't flee, we don't freeze by the grace of God, all in order to embrace a path of sacrifice, and sacrifice entails pain and discomfort. It would be something that we should fear. But nonviolence really meets fear head on, and we'll talk talk about that as we go.

So the other paths, fighting, fleeing, freezing, are really byproducts of a fear of losing one's life or goods. The path of sacrifice is the only one which, as Jesus says, counts our lives already as lost. And I think that's reminiscent of a quote which we talked about at the beginning of season one from Martin Luther King Junior. And what you'll find is that a lot of times, a lot people try to go to MLK or Bonhoeffer, and they use those as examples of people who claimed nonviolence who supposedly threw off that idealistic notion for violence. And MLK is somebody who we know used nonviolent methods and adhered to nonviolence, but he did purchase a gun at one point.

Of course, he purchased it before he fully committed to nonviolence, but when you hear histories of it, that, you know, it's implied that he got it and he was a hypocrite. But King says something about this incident when he had a gun and got rid of it and adhered to nonviolence. So I want you to to listen to King's words because this, I think, summarizes so much of the non violent movement and Christ's words of counting your life lost, and and the power that's in that, really. It's not it's not really giving up something, it's it's gaining the world, gaining your soul, and and through gaining the soul, gaining eternity. So King says, quote, How could I serve as one of the leaders of a non violent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection?

Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution. We decided then to get rid of the one weapon we owned. We tried to satisfy our friends by having floodlights mounted around the house and hiring unarmed watchmen around the clock. I also promised that I would not travel around the city alone. I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house.

When I decided that I couldn't keep a gun, I came face to face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety, we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors. Man, there's so many things to to chew on there, but let me highlight a couple of those things. First of all, counting his life as lost is what gave King courage.

It's what allowed him to focus. He counted his life as lost and he said, Let it be done. Let it be done to me as you wish, God. It doesn't mean he didn't take steps, like he mounted floodlights and things, I mean, deterrents of sorts, but he wasn't hyper focused on his life, that wasn't the point. His consistent philosophy prevented I mean, who knows where the movement would have gone had King been hypocritical?

Maybe others would have taken up violence too. Maybe it would have discredited him and stopped, halted the movement. Who knows what it would have done? Or had he been assassinated and he had a gun in his hand or tried to defend himself or I don't know, whatever, who knows what could have happened. There's another story of King where he was giving a lecture and somebody came up and punched him in the face.

And then he reconciled with him. The guy didn't really apologize or anything, but he he talked to him and he didn't I don't think he pressed charges or anything. King was was a model example and part of it is because he counted his life as lost. That gave him the courage to to face attackers, literal attackers. Now, that's not to say that King never had any fear or that people who enact non violence don't experience fear, of course there would be fear in the face of violence.

But the point isn't that there isn't an absence that there's an absence of fear, right? The point is that fears are faced. So the first thing to understand about non violence is that rather than being driven by fear like the other routes, they seek to face fear and control it. To be driven by fear is to act contrary to the well-being and love of others, and it's very different than suppressing one's fear and acting in a manner which refuses to throw love aside as a useless means in a particular situation. Nonviolence keeps the love of all at the forefront.

Even the love of enemy, it doesn't allow fear to sacrifice anybody, and it casts out the fear which would cause love to be compromised for one's own well-being. Fear centers around self preservation. You fight to preserve. You flee to preserve. You freeze, I don't know if that's to preserve.

Possums maybe freeze to preserve, But there is there is this aspect of of frozenness which kind of locks you in. I'm sure it's some sort of defense mechanism. It sure certainly doesn't seem super effective, but sacrifice is the only one that faces fear and works through it. As the Apostle Paul says, perfect love casts out fear. Perhaps that's why Jesus could pray for those who crucified Him, and Paul, those who imprisoned and beat Him.

The second thing you should realize is that those who we call brave are often not in control of fear, but are rather controlled by it. Since soldiers are the most common example of of those we think of as being brave and suppressing fear, I wanna take a look at them. While it's true that soldiers have to deal with a great deal of fear to move forward in combat and on their missions, there are two important things that I think you should take note of. First, fear is likely one of the components that drove them to their job in the first place. And this might not be as true in The United States as it is elsewhere, but I I know I saw this right after nine eleven when I had friends or or knew of people who volunteered to go into the army.

A fear of our nation's susceptibility to other nations or to terrorists is at least one of the motivating factors for some people to join the military. We want to preserve what we have. The US values its army because it is touted as the great defender of our way of life. We don't want to lose our families, our comforts, our freedoms, so we arm ourselves very heavily. While we don't live in knee knocking fear because of our military being one of the most powerful in the world, it's a deep seated fear which populates our military with recruits.

This fear of self preservation, of the need to preserve our comforts and our goods. Second, if you remember back to season one in our episode on respecting soldiers, you'll recall my use of a George Patton quote. Patton basically says that something like, no bastards ever won a war dying for his country. He won a war by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his. Soldiers might have bravery in that they face the potential of death, some of them, depending on the time period and all that, but we have relatively few soldiers get injured and killed.

But their goal isn't sacrifice, right? It's to deal death, not to succumb to it. Their goal is to kill others, not to be killed. In fact, because so few are killed and injured, it's not something that you really go into the military expecting. It's not, as an American at least.

So in this way, soldiers do make a potential sacrifice, but their goal is ultimately not to make a sacrifice. That's not even in their view. They don't that's not there at all. It's to make as little of a sacrifice as possible and to make other people sacrifice. That's distinctly different than the Christian call to lay down our lives, count our lives as lost, take up our crosses, and maybe not seek persecution but expect it, right?

Because we live the types of lives where it's not like me going into the Air Force and I can have a desk job for thirty years and retire with awesome benefits and salary, it's no, anybody who joins Christ's Army should expect persecution if they're living how they should. So we can contrast a soldier with the example of a faithful nonviolent actor, a nonviolent Christian. The nonviolent individual enters a situation knowing that the enemy's end is to harm or kill the nonviolent. Depending on the situation, could be verbal, be physical, whatever. The nonviolent actor remains in harm's way, recognizing that this is the desired end of the enemy.

While the goal of the nonviolent isn't to die or to be harmed, it is the express goal of the enemy. Therefore, nonviolent action is assumed self sacrifice. It is not merely potential like patent sacrifice. When Gandhi marched with the Indians to the salt mines, he knew that they were gonna get pummeled by metal bars and clubs and all kinds of things shot maybe. When the civil rights marchers marched, they knew they were going have dogs sicced on them.

They were going to have water hoses spray them. They walked into unarmed combat, non violent combat, at least on their end. And in fact, their suffering and their persecution, which we'll get to in the series, is a major vehicle to help others see the injustice present in the systems of violence. It was in the civil rights movement when we saw children being carted off to jail, bitten by dogs, fire hosed, that the nation finally snapped and said, What is going on? What evil is this?

The suffering, the sacrifice of people was a major vehicle for the good of others, for the good of the nation. So while sacrifice is not the desired end, the ultimate end of the nonviolent, the nonviolent does view it as an inevitability and a catalyst for change should the enemy choose to spill their blood. However, on Patton's view, sacrifice is worthless, it's meaningless. We don't want any soldiers to be sacrificed, we want to be the sacrificers. In that way, the nonviolent have counted their lives as lost whereas the soldiers are clinging to it, clinging to their own personal lives and clinging to the fear of that their duty brings which is to protect their families, perception that they're protecting their families and their freedoms and all of those things.

I don't want to spend a ton of time here, as we'll likely address this repeatedly throughout the series, but this is an important concept to understand, what we've just been mentioning. We see sacrifice as a catalyst for change in in two different spheres. We see it in the Biblical, and we see it in the actual. So Biblically, Revelation talks a lot about the blood of martyrs and the filling up of the cup of wrath. That's a weird concept to those who aren't non violent, but Revelation seems to indicate that the unjust slaughter of innocence actually accumulates judgment.

Those who slaughter the innocent, their judgment ends up being that they drink from the cup that that they've filled up. And that sounds like a really bad way to bring about judgment because it seems like the powers are in control as they kill their enemies. And so what? They they fill up the the cup with our blood, with the blood of martyrs, and then they drink it? Doesn't sound like that much of a punishment to me.

And a lot of times what we think is is we all just want for God to rain down fire. We want Him to just to destroy Himself, the wicked. But that's that's not how Revelation depicts it. And maybe you can understand how judgment comes as we reflect back on something we just mentioned, something from the real world. In the book, Why Civil Resistance Works, the authors hit home that nonviolent action works more often and produces deeper results.

Now they hypothesize that this is because more individuals are involved in the process of of nonviolence, whereas in violence, you basically have fighting age men who can participate. Whereas in nonviolence, you have anybody young, old, male, female, doesn't matter. At the same time, nonviolence addresses the root issues rather than glossing over them. Killing a dictator doesn't fix your societal problems. There's no concession, there's no there's no legislation, there's no restoration, it's just the regime change.

So as I mentioned, I think the greatest example of this is that we'd be familiar with is the civil rights movement when the young children began marching. When the nation saw kids being attacked by dogs, fire hosed, and carted off to jail, it shifted the sentiments of much of the nation, which in turn began to impact legislation and legal action. As the nation saw violence pitted against the non violent and the harmless, it became clearer and clearer where the evil was and where the injustice was. The blood of the martyrs changed the whole nation. Now while while some of the violent groups had an impact on society as well, like the Black Panthers, violent actions were often counterproductive because they gave naysayers fodder to point at and argue the wrongness of the group.

The same thing happened in Gandhi's India. When he was marching with his group to the salt mines, he told everyone, Look, we're going to face the British. We're going to walk right up to the to the sea, or to the salt mines or whatever. And he said, do not even lift your hand. Don't lift your hand above your waist because if you do, they'll portray it as as an act of aggression or something that they they thought something was gonna happen and they will kill you.

And if they do, they will be justified because they'll convey it as their fear for their lives. So do not even give the appearance of attack. You don't even defend yourself. You don't lift your arm to block a blow. And they didn't.

They walked straight into the British and several, many, I don't remember how many, were killed. They were beat over the head and they didn't even lift an arm to block the blows. Now when something like that happens, everybody can see clearly who the evil one is and they can see clearly where true power lies. Power is not in violence and you can see that. Now it's counterintuitive because what do you mean it's not power is not in violence, they they killed a bunch of the marchers.

Yeah, but people recognize that. It's kind of like they say, if you're teaching or if you're a parent and you yell, that's the last that's the last thing that you really have in your repertoire. And once you yell and nothing happens, kids realize you've got nothing left to back that up. If you've got a society that doesn't even fear death, who's got the power? And that's, I think, in part what what we see in Revelation.

We see that in ancient Rome. It it took a couple hundred years, but when you have martyrs like Polycarp and Perpetua and I can't think of the other guy's name. But some of these martyrs were and especially women, when women were going bravely to be martyred, and people are seeing this stuff with I don't know if it was with Perpetua or a different martyr, but there's a catechumen who was a martyr, basically like this kid who was or maybe not a kid, but somebody who was being trained to be a Christian and they had these they were a disciple of like an elder. And the elder found out that their disciple was going to be martyred, and the elder turned himself in so he could be martyred with his pupil. I mean, nuts, just crazy things like that.

And the Roman world was turned upside down, they couldn't stop the conversions to Christianity because it was so clear to the society where true power lay. And Rome basically killed themselves out of out of jobs, out of out of positions of power. And they did the same thing in the Jim Crow South, they violenced themselves out of power. So counting one's life as lost is an integral part of nonviolence. Enemies view the death of the nonviolent resistors as an end, whereas the nonviolent view it as a means to change.

This is very different than soldiers who view the death of their enemy as the means to the end of safety and comfort or the assuaging of fear. The final thing you should understand about fear's relationship to nonviolence is that it is often fear which escalates violence. Being nonviolent can definitely escalate fear, particularly if we are talking about a government's fear of losing power. However, fear is often greatest when one is viewed as a threat, and one is viewed more as a threat if one has weapons or power. Now with all the nonviolence used in the last sixty years, that's beginning to change as as we'll probably talk a little bit about.

Nonviolence in some ways, in some circumstances, is becoming less effective because governments have are figuring out how to try to counteract that with their with their own things, their own strategies. However, having weapons often does escalate fear more than nonviolence does. So a lot of great examples of this, but you know, the Japanese, when we when we cut them off economically, and because we had aircraft carriers and other sorts of things, you know, the Japanese were worried about us. And they thought, we've got we've got some power, so we need to take them out before they can get to us. So had we not had a super powerful aggressive navy, if we only had a defensive navy, would Japan have cared to attack us?

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the weapons that we had and the aggressive position that we were in, maybe that influenced Pearl Harbor and the deaths that we suffered in the war that we then entered. So their fear of our intent and power is likely what caused them to attack us. Now as we go through this season, we'll have some more stories in which we'll see pretty clearly that someone's lack of arms was actually their preservation. As we get into our series on non violent action, I want you to keep your ears open for fear.

Where is fear? Where is fear fostered? Where is fear assuaged? I want you constantly to ask yourself, who's acting in fear? And what is causing them, what is fear causing them to do?

Who's in control of their fear? And who's suppressing it? What you're going to find is that it is usually those who wield power who exhibit fear, and they're fearful of losing power, and is their exercise of violent power which exemplifies the level of their fear. And of course, remember that in all of this, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Because fear, not under submission, makes you compromise love.

That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.