Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Since we have covered so much material in the case for Christian Nonviolent, I thought it would be fruitful for us to have an episode which summarizes the case. If you're new to the issue, I would definitely recommend that you go back and, listen to the whole thing, especially episodes 1 through 5, which makes the positive case, and then any of the other episodes which kind of stand out to you and whatever personal, issues you have with with Christian nonviolence, and kinda deal with those on a case by case basis. Or if you've gone through everything and you feel like, you know, you you've heard out everything and you've thought through everything, but sometimes you just need a refresher and wanna come back and kinda get the overview, hopefully, this episode will be able to help you with that. I think it's it's also helpful after you've gone through so much material to be able to get a bird's eye view and reflect on some of the strengths and weaknesses of the case as you continue to consider further.

So, as usual, let's just go ahead and jump right in. We started our first episode by taking a look at presupposition. I shared the story of my own life, which highlighted how human nature and our culture really fosters this idol of control and pragmatism. And pragmatism on its own isn't a problem, but when we use it as a moral ethic, which I call which I think is called consequentialism, or this idea that the ends justify the means, that becomes problematic because morality cannot be determined by ends. The ends do not justify the means, at least in Christianity, and, when we're dealing with objective morality.

Nevertheless, it's human nature, and especially our culture's nature, because our culture focuses on efficiency and comfort and results. It's in our nature to be consequentialist. So we are often willing to compromise moral means and faithfulness in order to accomplish the ends that we we say are the ends that are are good, and it's those ends which makes our actions, our immoral means, right. Our consequentialism is fed by these intuitions, which make us think that violence, especially violence in order to serve justice and to protect innocence, these intuitions that make us think that violence is good. Violence, as a means, brings about the ends that we desire.

And good ends. Right? That justice is served or that the innocent are protected. Beyond those, strong intuitions, there is on top of this this idea, that that nonviolence just is not feasible in the real world. It doesn't work.

I'd say that that's more than an idea. That's something that we can probably point to a lot of cases of and say, I'll see if they if they wouldn't have fought back or if they just stand there, they're gonna be massacred. And, we we see oppression and we see violence towards towards people, and we know that nonviolence just doesn't work. However, I I addressed that a lot of these these ideas and presuppositions are wrong. We talked about how morality kind of falls apart if you are a consequentialist, if you start to say that the ends justify the means.

Even if as a Christian you'd say, no. I don't believe that the ends justify the means. You have to take a look at at what you're saying with some of the the positions that you hold. And and then as far as our intuitions go, we took a a look at a really good book called On Killing by Grossman who referenced, individuals, researchers prior to him. And just this, this literature that we have that shows centuries of data, which indicate that our armchair intuitions really dissipate and reveal deeper ingrained intuitions when they're put to the test.

And Marshall and Grossman show this by taking a look at soldiers and how throughout history, soldiers have often refused to fight not by, running away from the army, but rather by firing above the heads of their enemies or refusing to shoot, whether that was by choice or just this this intuition that kind of compelled them away from trying to use deadly force on a fellow human being. And we have centuries of of, of data to to show that. We also touched just a little bit on, Sharp's research and some more modern research, in works like Why Civil Resistant civil resistance works, which empirically shows us that nonviolence is actually more successful than violent movements, empirically so. And and Sharpe does a really good job of of showing us why that's the case, whereas why civil resistance works shows us that it is the case. And Sharp tells us that the reason it is the case that nonviolent resistance works more is because while violent resistance seems to do good immediately or or more quickly, the good that it does is really very temporary and, in fact, often creates more harm than it does good.

And we can see this in in the progression of, you know, from World War one to ISIS today. You know, how did we get to ISIS? Well, you can look back at how the, how the the British and and other powers, used the Middle East in particular ways. You can take a look at colonialism in Africa, Northern Africa, and and just other places, And you can see how, how oppression and how slavery all of these things, and and the way that we we used the area, we manipulated them, kind of created this problematic area. And in World War two, we we added to this with, with, pitting certain parts of the Middle East against each other and creating the state of Israel, continuing into Afghanistan when we we were fighting a proxy war by supporting the Afghanis against Russia, and which created Al Qaeda.

And then, we create a power vacuum by by killing Al Qaeda. So you could just see this this huge string of events where, if you remember the the episode where, I talked about Yoder's book about self defense in the home, and there's this guy who said, well, you know, we can play hypotheticals all day. What would have happened if The United States wouldn't have joined World War one? Potentially, Germany and Russia would have fought each other, or maybe it was World War two. I don't know.

Germany and Russia could have fought each other, could have, yeah. It was World War one. So Germany and Russia could have fought each other and maybe even, like, just absolutely destroyed each other. They could have lost their stranglehold. There wouldn't have been a Hitler created because we wouldn't have created an unjust peace treaty.

Just all of these things. You can play hypotheticals all day long. But, to say that we know that violence was better is kind of ludicrous. And Sharp shows us that the reason civil resistance tends to work is because even though it takes a lot longer and it might be frustrating and there might be a lot of pain and suffering at first, it ultimately brings about restoration and reconciliation because it doesn't force something. It it focuses on relationships and infrastructure and building up.

And when you do get change, it's it's lasting change. And beyond all of all of the moral problems with, with violence and beyond all of the data that we have that shows nonviolence works and that our presuppositions are really, really flawed, we when we start to probe the coherence of ethical systems of violence, like Christian just war, we find that they're really idealistic systems. They're they're unable to produce examples of their own ethic being followed out in the real world. There's no such thing as a just war. We looked at, World War two as probably people's favorite example of a just war, and it fails at a number of the just war checkpoints to to say that the war is just, and it it just fails.

And beyond failing its own test, it's often prone to incoherence, a logical incoherence. 1 of the examples that we used was, you know, 2 nuclear powers: The United States and Russia. If you're trying to lead The United States, and you're trying to be a Christian, you're trying to implement a just war, and we were to ever fight Russia, we'd lose. You have to lose. Because, if the probability of success is a big point, in just war, but so also is the refusal to sacrifice civilians to indiscriminately kill, then 2 nuclear powers, if one's trying to be a Christian, they can't do it.

Because Russia would just say, hey. We'll nuke you, and we don't care. We'll nuke everybody, your citizens and everything. And The United States would have to say, sorry. We can't nuke you because that would be immoral.

And then Russia says, okay. Well, then your probability of success is 0, so forfeit. And, the a just war and that and that's just 1 example. Just war theory just does not make sense in the real world, and it creates many moral problems and and incoherences. And, none of this should really surprise us, because the Bible seems fairly clear as to how Christians in the New Testament era are supposed to act.

And, oftentimes, the way that Jesus teaches and the way that the apostles teach we should live is really counterintuitive to our initial presuppositions and emotions and feelings. They call us to self sacrificial living, which is not at all how the world or our natures tell us we are to work. Beyond the teachings, we see this exemplified in the life of Jesus himself who was not willing to do violence to others. We see it in the apostles and and their refusal to do violence even though all but John were were martyred. The apostles call us to leave vengeance to God even when the tools God uses, like evil governments, seem out of control because we know that God is sovereign and we can trust him.

And even when we when we explore what most consider to be the bloodiest or 1 of the bloodiest books of the Bible, which seems to to show, it does show us how Christ and his followers wage war against evil regimes. But what we see is that all of the blood mentioned in Revelation that is coming from people comes from Christ and the martyrs, not the enemies. The way that Revelation chose Christ, Christ's battle and our battle is through the word of truth and through the proclamation of Christ's victory and in the laying down of our own lives, not in the shedding of the blood of others. Dearly church bore this teaching out for the first three hundred years, and you don't find anything said for, violence, really, in the first three hundred years of church history. And they railed against all forms of violence, which included capital punishment, soldiering, abortion, murder, and self defense.

And we don't just see, you know, these these, like, the best of the best theologians saying this kind of stuff in the early church. This was univocal, which is really hard to find in the early church, to find an issue where you don't find dissent from anybody. And we see it represented by all sorts of people and and, and documents. We see the nonviolent position rec represented in ecumenical documents, including the Council of Nicaea three twenty five. We see and in that document specifically, it talks about soldiers, not rejoining the army once they're they're, they're given leave from their original position.

We also see the nonviolent position from mainstream theologians, like Origen. We see it from soldiers who end up leaving the Roman army under great penalty to themselves. And we also see it through enemy attestation from people who are observing what Christians are doing. As we turn away from the the saints of old to the the saints of new, we are able to see modern examples of those who who live out lives that are more comparable to Jesus and the apostles in the early church. And and as we look at those lives, we find that their examples are far more compelling, heroic, and consistent, and transformative than the path of violence.

We took a look at, some various lives of people who were willing to lay down their lives or did lay down their lives, like Martin Luther King Junior, Desmond Dawes, Sophie Scholl. I don't know if she was a Christian, actually, but it's a heroic example nonetheless. And Jim Elliot, who again was not necessarily a pacifist, but, we see the power of the willingness to lay down one's life versus returning violence for violence. So after laying out the positive case, we ended up taking a look at rebuttals to nonviolence. When we look at rebuttals, most end up failing to carry the weight that's necessary to overthrow nonviolence.

Because like I said, nonviolence really is a cumulative case. And when you look at church history, the Bible logic, moral logic, philosophical logic, empirical data, all of that stuff, hands down, other than intuition, hands down, nonviolence wins. So as we look at rebuttals to nonviolence, some rebuttals are stronger than others, and some some answers, are hard to come by for nonviolence because the the answers are not appealing and and more difficult. Nevertheless, the point in a cumulative case is that it's not torn down by by 1 jab, by 1 poke, by 1 good blow, because the cumulative aspect has made a a very strong foundation, and you'd need to chip away at quite a lot of things. Nevertheless, I think that the nonviolent case can be very strong, in terms of handling all rebuttals thrown at it, even the strongest ones.

We began by looking at some of the more shallow arguments or the ones that are that are easier to kind of overthrow, like Jesus and the money changers or, and overthrowing the tables there, or John the Baptist's, not condemning soldiers. I moved on through many stronger rebuttals. And you'll just have to look at the rebuttal section to see what stands out for you. But the 2 rebuttals which I do feel carry the most weight out of all of them, I'll I'll lay out really quickly just below. But I I think even these are very answerable and overall make more sense in a nonviolent position.

So in my opinion, the the strongest arguments for for Christians coming out of the bible is going to be the presence of violence in the Old Testament. You know, 1 or 1 or 2 verses, you can start to explain things away. But when you have many, many, many, many hundreds of verses discussing violence and God's incorporation of violence, God's command for violence, you're you really have to have, a good explanation. And and sometimes if you don't have the framework for that explanation you're gonna receive, you're talking about a a paradigm shift. So we talked about the easy way, the easy route to go for conservative Christians at least, and then the harder way.

So let me give you the the harder way. I'll give you the easier way first. So the easy way is to say that god is the author of life, and he can take life as as he sees fit. He can take life in judgment, or he can take life be just because he wants life to be taken at that point. Because we are we are all worthy of death, and we are all sinners.

And God is going to, at some point, take all of our lives, so it's his prerogative when he does it and how he does it or how he allows it to come about. So in the Old Testament, we saw that God gave, Israelites and and, oftentimes, he gave them the command or the the, free free choice to use violence as a means to judge other groups of people or to wage war in conquering the promised land. You do often see God's violence restricted. With the with the Canaanites, it took four hundred years to build up to the judgment that he allowed Israel, to have on them. And they were doing absolutely atrocious things, like, burning their infants alive to hear their screams and and other sorts of things.

And God really only justified, killing for the Israelites when they were taking the promised land. So to so to create his, you know, his territory. And even in that, there are a number of passages where god says, hey. Look. I'll do the fighting for you.

I'm gonna send the the hornet out before you, and it will drive them out. So there are even, a number of verses that show that God was limiting the amount of of violence for the Israelites to do. And you see that in a lot of other places too, like with Sennacherib and his, besiegement. You you see a besieging of Jerusalem, I think. And you see the king pray, and an angel comes and takes care of the army.

And Israel doesn't do any fighting. There are lots of passages. Psalms talks a lot about allowing the Lord to fight for us, and, you you do get a lot of that in the Old Testament too. So God can take life, and he can authorize the taking of life because that's his prerogative. That's a lot like as a parent.

My 5 year old daughter, she is able to make eggs with the stove, but she is not allowed to use the stove. But when I say, you can use the stove right now, she's able to use it in that moment to make eggs for our breakfast so long as I'm watching. And then when that time is done, the command is rescinded. The the ability for her to use that is rescinded because the stove is is not in and of itself a moral or immoral thing. It is something that I have the prerogative to to issue commands for.

Same thing with with life and death. Life and death is not something that is, it's not like lying, which would be antithetical to God and something that God cannot do. Life and death is something that God can give and God can take. And so if God chooses to give that prerogative to me to take or to to Joshua to take Canaanite life, that's up to God. That's fine.

He can he can rescind that command. Whereas a command for lying, God cannot rescind. And and so that means in the New Testament, when God says, hey. Vengeance is mine. You don't do it.

You don't do any evil. God rescinded that command. I'm not using the stove anymore. I'm done making those eggs. And and that's that's the easy answer.

Right? God said it in the old testament. He allowed it to be used in specific circumstances, though it was pretty limited. And in the New Testament, God completely limits it because of the work that he did in Christ and now calls us to live in like manner. Easy answer.

You might disagree with it, but it's pretty simple. You don't have to change your view of the Bible very much as a conservative or really at all. You just have to change whether or not you believe God commanded something new in the New Testament or God rescinded his prerogative. The the harder answer, for conservatives in particular to buy would be that God used progressive revelation in the Old Testament. And when we see people talking about God telling them to kill people, they're really, they're imposing their cultural worldview on things.

Because in in the old testament times, in the ancient Near East, a lot of people thought that the gods loved bloodshed and slaughter. And so they would they would dedicate the people that they were killing to their gods. And so ancient Israelites came out of the ancient Near East, and they thought, like everybody else, that God wanted the death of their enemies, and they were mistaken. And even though they attributed that to God, that was not God's desire. And when we get to Jesus, we see God's true desire because we see the true revelation.

God is is, the author of life. He is not the author of death. And so death and and killing are antithetical to God. And the the ancient Israelites were mistaken, but God was gracious with them and patient with them. And so he he allowed their, understanding to progress until we get to Jesus when it's ultimately made clear and his expectation for us is clear.

That would change that makes reading this view makes reading the Old Testament a little bit harder than the conservative view because you are trying to differentiate between what God is really saying and what the ancient authors are thinking he's saying. And while that's harder in some respects, if you use Jesus as the lens because he is the ultimate true revelation, of god, if you use Jesus as the lens, it becomes a lot clearer when god is telling, Joshua to kill babies in Canaan, that's not something Jesus that that looks like Jesus, so God wasn't telling that to Joshua. Joshua was saying, hey. Look. We follow this God, and he must want the slaughter of these babies.

So let's go do it. And that that, horrified god and made god weep, but god stuck with Israel and, until we get to Jesus. So that's more of the, I don't know what view you wanna call it, more of the liberal view or progressive revelation view. But, those are 2 ways that you you can deal with this idea that there is violence in the Old Testament. And neither of them give you, 2 different gods like Marcionism.

They're just going to show you how God, in 1 case, how God implements progressive revelation by being willing to, engage in a manner that he will later rescind. And in the other view, it is God, being misrepresented by people as he is progressively revealing who he truly is to them, which culminates in the revelation of Jesus. So there's an answer to that Old Testament violence. In fact, 2 answers. You can pick which 1 sounds best to you.

And and closing down on that point, I'd say that a lot of people don't really like dealing with the violence in the Old Testament. They think that that's too hard to overcome in order to embrace nonviolence, which, again, if you take the conservative approach, it's really not difficult to reconcile. You might disagree with it, but it it doesn't change your your theology or or hermeneutics much at all, if at all. But some people are still just uneasy about it because they're so used to the the old view. But I have to say that if you if you're uncomfortable with how to deal with the Old Testament and and, with all the violence that it does there, and you wanna maintain violence because you just think you can't excuse away the Old Testament violence, you've got a different problem.

You've gotta figure out how you excuse away Jesus and his call to live like him and and all how the apostles lived in the early church and, you know, the New Testament. You have to explain that away, the way that that God calls Christians to live. And, like, Hebrews says, it seems to me that Jesus is a lot more clear than any other part of the bible. Jesus is the clear revelation of God, and his teaching is is true and right. And it's a lot harder for me to explain away Jesus and his teachings than it is for me to explain away the violence in the Old Testament.

Because I'm not an Old Testament follower, though I believe that the Old Testament is is pertinent for us today and it is God's word. I'm a Christ follower primarily. So it's much, much harder for me to try to excuse away the, what I feel are pretty clear teachings of Christ in the New Testament that we like to turn into metaphors and things to make them make them easier and more comfortable. Moving on to the the second thing that I think really, was is the hardest for me, is the the seeming refusal to do good by preventing evil. That whole, now what if somebody breaks into your house?

Or what if, what if you see, some innocent person being harmed, and you have a gun, and that's the only way you can stop the innocent from being harmed? What do you do? And that's that's the hardest for me too, the non biblical 1. And, I know that there are many lines of of reasoning that you can give and examples. We talked about this in in a variety of episodes when we discussed Saint Cyril or we discussed the Holocaust and and all of those things.

And, ultimately, for me, it it comes down to this resting in in God's goodness, because I have this desire to control things and to receive immediate positive results. But that's just not how God works. He allowed Joseph to go into slavery for decades, that this this immoral thing. And his that his brothers did, but God allowed it for for good. And if we're gonna say that, the immediate stopping of evil is the ultimate moral ethic, the thing that guides us, which is what the violence violence says.

It says, if I allow that, that innocent person to be harmed when I could stop it, then I'm evil. Well, you got a big problem there, and that's you by your own ethic, god is evil because he could immediately stop every single evil act before it ever happened. But that's not what God does. And we can spend a lot of time trying to wrap our minds around why that might be the case and what that looks like. But it's pretty clear.

Any evil that occurs, God knew about and could have stopped, or else he's not omniscient and or not omnipotent. So the the ethic isn't the immediate prevention of evil, but it's the adherence to God's moral ethic. And if God's moral ethic is to immediately stop all evil, then, yeah, I'm bound by that, but but so is God. And if that's not his ethic, then I need really need to figure out what his ethic is. And to me, his ethic looks like, at least in the New Testament era, nonviolence, allowing vengeance to be God's, trusting in his control, and being willing to lay down our lives for his ethic.

There's lot of lots of other things we could say about that, but you'll have to go back and check the the related episodes. I'll just throw in a a third difficulty for me that used to be a difficulty, but after actually doing the episode on it, I was like, oh, this this is actually isn't difficult at all, really. And that was Romans 13. And before, it was it was something that was just, man, how do you deal with Romans 13 as a pacifist? But once you take a look at it in context, in the context of the whole Bible and how the Bible talks about governments, and in context of the passage the the chapter that comes before it and the the few verses after it, and the language shift and all of that, I was I was just, man, I couldn't believe that I'd never, understood Romans 13 in that way, that that people just, perpetuate this this 1 reading of it that I feel does a disservice to how Christians are supposed to act and and what the emphasis really is in Romans 13 on God's sovereignty, our relinquishing of control, our trust in God, and our our servitude and love to the world.

So I'll give that a runner-up because I know that that's gonna be a problem for most people, but, something that you should really, really dig into a lot. So in the end, the case for nonviolence, I think, pretty clearly carries the most weight as far as a cumulative case goes. It has the the greatest logical coherence, provides the most consistency with the life and teaching of of Jesus, who is the clearest revelation of God, And it comports the most with those who directly walked with him and those who came right after them, the disciples of the disciples. I'm certainly not saying that nonviolence is an easy path, but it is the right 1. And it's a path that we should be preparing for by by thinking about it and, really pondering what we would do and what we need to do to our lives to make it easier to do the right thing.

Hopefully, this summary was a summary and not just, me jabbering on, and hopefully it can help you. So that's all for now. Peace. And because I'm a pacifist, a fist, when I say it, I mean