Nonviolence is an idea that’s been profoundly, and dishearteningly, misunderstood, writes Walter Wink.
His new book, Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa: Jesus’ Third Way, is a thoughtful and eloquent reinterpretation of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as well as a hardheaded look at the political realities in South Africa today.
Jesus’ real message, Dr. Wink argues, was not one of passivism but of active, nonviolent resistance. Biblical scholars in the hire of King James, he writes, deliberately mistranslated Jesus’ words, because they wanted to discourage rebellion. Dr. Wink persuasively suggests that those struggling to end apartheid, or to redress social injustice anywhere in the world, consider Jesus’ truly revolutionary appeal.
A professor of Biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, Dr. Wink has been active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, as well as the campaign for nuclear disarmament. He and his wife, June, visited South Africa last year.
We’re thankful to Dr. Wink for permission to reprint these excerpts from his book, which was originally excerpted in Sojourners and is available for $8.45 postpaid from New Society Publishers, 4722 Baltimore Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19143.
— Ed.
There have been some remarkable success stories of nonviolent struggle around the world recently. In the Philippines, a nonviolent revolution led by Corazon Aquino, with crucial support from the churches, swept the dictator Ferdinand Marcos from office with a loss of only 121 lives. In Poland, Solidarity has irreversibly mobilized popular sentiment against the puppet Communist regime. There, an entire clandestine culture, literature, and spirituality have come to birth outside the authority of official society. (This undercuts the oft-repeated claim that what Mohandas Gandhi did in India or Martin Luther King, Jr. did in the American South would never work under a brutal, Soviet-sponsored government.) Nonviolent general strikes have overthrown at least seven Latin American dictators.
For some reason, however, many people tend to dismiss these instances of nonviolent action as exceptional and of no pertinence to their situation, which is, of course, always unique. The question for South Africans seems to be, Will it work here? — or more pertinently perhaps, Why did it not work here? South Africa makes an excellent case study of the question because its struggle is still unfolding, nonviolence is widely considered to have failed, and violence is more and more becoming the first resort of parties on all sides of the conflict. It is, moreover, a nation whose government has exhibited utter disregard for the lives of its opponents and has repeatedly defied both world opinion and the appeals of its few allies to restrain its violence. If nonviolent direct action still can make a direct contribution in South Africa, it should be, in principle at least, a “first resort” in any other conceivable situation of oppression.
We spent forty days in South Africa in March and April 1986. It is important to date our experience because events are unfolding so fast there that the relevance of this argument needs to be understood within the time frame of our involvement there.
What we found most surprising is that a great many people simply do not know how to name their actual experiences of nonviolence. I put the question to the participants in workshops and to those we interviewed: What do you think of Jesus’ teaching about turning the other cheek? Scarcely a single person was prepared to take it at all seriously. The refrain so frequently repeated was, “We tried that for fifty years and it didn’t work. Sharpeville in 1960 proved to us that violence is the only way left.”
Yet when I pressed these same people to identify the tactics that had proved most effective in the past two years, they produced a remarkably long list of nonviolent actions: labor strikes, slow-downs, sit-downs, stoppages, and stay-aways; bus boycotts, consumer boycotts, and school boycotts; funeral demonstrations; non-cooperation with government-appointed functionaries; non-payment of rent; violation of government bans on peaceful meetings; defiance of segregation orders on beaches and in restaurants, theaters, and hotels; and the shunning of black police and soldiers. This amounts to what is probably the largest grassroots eruption of diverse nonviolent strategies in a single struggle in human history! Yet these students, and many others we interviewed, both black and white, failed to identify these tactics as nonviolent and even bridled at the word.
There are, we learned, good reasons for their reluctance to champion nonviolence. The term itself is negative. It sounds like a not-doing, the putting of all one’s energy into avoiding something bad rather than throwing one’s total being into doing something good. A new, more positive term is needed. The South African Council of Churches has suggested “responsible resistance,” as opposed to irresponsible resistance, but that is so ambiguous that it could be stretched to cover even all-out war. I have long sought a better term — an English equivalent for Gandhi’s satyagraha (“truth-force”) — but without success. Therefore I have settled on Jesus’ Third Way, or simply the Third Way, as a way of denoting the unique quality of creative response Jesus taught and lived.
But the term itself is hardly the cause of objection. “Nonviolence” is identified, especially by South African blacks, with the “white” gospel that taught them that they must always be submissive before the authorities (read “white” authorities). “Turn the other cheek” became a divine command to slaves and servants to accept flogging and blows obsequiously. “Love of enemies” was twisted to render blacks compliant from the very heart, forgiving every injustice with no thought of changing the system. Nonviolence meant, in the context of this perverse inversion of the gospel, passivity. And the interchanging of “pacifism” with “passivism” in common usage only made the confusion worse.
Now that these same blacks have said no to apartheid and a resounding no also to the lying gospel that legitimated it, they cannot easily reappropriate the Biblical texts which had been perverted to hold them submissive under violence. And the churches, both white and black, have done very little to help. The English-speaking churches (eighty percent black, yet until recently led by whites) have for decades been issuing stronger and stronger denunciations of apartheid. But they have been reluctant to translate these lofty sentiments into risky, committed actions.
Many whites have developed a sudden new interest in having blacks become nonviolent, and that too must be read as a cynical attempt to avoid the consequences of an unjust system rather than an attempt to address its root causes. Most Christians desire nonviolence, yes; but they are not talking about a nonviolent struggle for justice. They mean simply the absence of conflict. They would like the system to change without having to be involved in changing it. What they mean by nonviolence is as far from nonviolent direct action as a lazy nap in the sun is from a confrontation in which protesters are being clubbed to the ground.
When a church which has not lived out a costly identification with the oppressed offers to mediate between hostile parties, it merely adds to the total impression that it wants to stay above the conflict and not take sides. The church says to the lion and the lamb, “Here, let me negotiate a truce,” to which the lion replies, “Fine, after I finish my lunch.”
“Reconciliation” also has been misused. One person we spoke with commented, “The two dirtiest words in black South Africa today are ‘nonviolence’ and ‘reconciliation.’ ” Reconciliation is necessary, and it must be engaged in at all stages of the struggle. The human quality of the opponent must be continually affirmed. Some kind of trust which can serve as the basis of the new society to come must be established even in the midst of conflict. But when church leaders preach reconciliation without having unequivocally committed themselves to struggle on the side of the oppressed for justice, they are caught straddling a pseudo-neutrality made of nothing but thin air. Neutrality in a situation of oppression always supports the status quo. Reduction of conflict by means of a phony “peace” is not a Christian goal. Justice is the goal, and that may require an acceleration of conflict as a necessary stage in forcing those in power to bring about genuine change.
Many of those who have committed their lives to ending apartheid simply dismiss Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence out of hand as impractical idealism. And with good reason. “Turn the other cheek” suggests the passive, Christian doormat quality that has made so many Christians cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice. “Resist not evil” seems to break the back of all opposition to evil and to counsel submission. “Going the second mile” has become a platitude meaning nothing more than “extend yourself,” and rather than fostering structural change, encourages collaboration with the oppressor.
Jesus obviously never behaved in any of these ways. Whatever the source of the misunderstanding, it is clearly neither in Jesus nor in his teaching, which, when given a fair hearing in its original social context, is arguably one of the most revolutionary political statements ever uttered:
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
When the court translators working in the hire of King James chose to translate antistenai as “Resist not evil,” they were doing something more than rendering Greek into English. They were translating nonviolent resistance into docility. Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. That would have been absurd. His entire ministry is utterly at odds with such a preposterous idea. The Greek word is made up of two parts: anti, a word still used in English for “against,” and histemi, a verb which in its noun form (stasis) means violent rebellion, armed revolt, sharp dissension.
A proper translation of Jesus’ teaching would then be, “Do not strike back at evil [or, one who has done you evil] in kind. Do not give blow for blow. Do not retaliate against violence with violence.” Jesus was no less committed to opposing evil than were the anti-Roman resistance fighters. The only difference was over the means to be used: how one should fight evil.
They would like the system to change without having to be involved in changing it. What they mean by nonviolence is as far from nonviolent direct action as a lazy nap in the sun is from a confrontation in which protesters are being clubbed to the ground.
There are three general responses to evil: 1) passivity, 2) violent opposition, and 3) the third way of militant nonviolence articulated by Jesus. Human evolution has conditioned us for only the first two of these responses: flight or fight. “Fight” had been the cry of Galileans who had abortively rebelled against Rome only two decades before Jesus spoke. Jesus and many of his hearers would have seen some of the two thousand of their countrymen crucified by the Romans along the roadsides. They would have known some of the inhabitants of Sepphoris (a mere three miles north of Nazareth) who had been sold into slavery for aiding the insurrectionists’ assault on the arsenal there. Some also would live to experience the horrors of the war against Rome, one of the ghastliest in human history. If the option “fight” had no appeal to them, their only alternative was “flight”: passivity, submission, or, at best, a passive-aggressive recalcitrance in obeying commands. For them no third way existed. Submission or revolt spelled out the entire vocabulary of their alternatives to oppression.
Now we are in a better position to see why King James’s faithful servants translated antistenai as “resist not.” The king would not want people concluding that they had any recourse against his or any other sovereign’s unjust policies. Therefore the populace must be made to believe that there are two alternatives and only two: flight or fight. Either we resist not or we resist. And Jesus commands us, according to these king’s men, to resist not. Jesus appears to authorize monarchical absolutism. Submission is the will of God. Most modern translations have meekly followed in that path.
Neither of these invidious alternatives has anything to do with what Jesus is proposing. It is important that we be utterly clear about this point before going on: Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil. His is a third alternative not even touched by those options. Antistenai may be translated variously as “Do not take up arms against evil,” “Do not react reflexively to evil,” “Do not let evil dictate the terms of your opposition.” The Good News Bible translates it helpfully: “Do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you,” The word cannot be construed to mean submission.
Jesus clarifies his meaning by three brief examples. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Why the right cheek? How does one strike another on the right cheek anyway? Try it. A blow by the right fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent. To strike the right cheek with the fist would require using the left hand, but in that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. The only way one could strike the right cheek with the right hand would be with the back of the hand. What we are dealing with here is unmistakably an insult, not a fistfight. The intention clearly is not to injure but to humiliate, to put someone in his or her “place.” One normally did not strike a peer thus, and, if one did, the fine was exorbitant. A backhand slap was the normal way of admonishing inferiors. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; men, women; Romans, Jews. One black African told me that during his youth white farmers still gave the backhand to disobedient workers.
Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. That would have been absurd. His entire ministry is utterly at odds with such a preposterous idea.
We have here a set of unequal relations, in each of which retaliation would be suicidal. The only normal response would be cowering submission.
It is important to ask who Jesus’ audience is. In every case, his listeners are not those who strike, initiate lawsuits, or impose forced labor, but their victims. (“If anyone strikes you . . . would sue you . . . forces you to go one mile. . . .”) There are among his hearers people who were subjected to these very indignities, forced to stifle their inner outrage at the dehumanizing treatment meted out to them by the hierarchical system of caste and class, race and gender, age and status, and as a result of imperial occupation.
Why then does he counsel these already humiliated people to turn the other cheek? Because this action robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate. The person who turns the other cheek is saying, in effect, “Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your status (gender, race, age, wealth) does not alter that fact. You cannot demean me.”
Such a response would create enormous difficulties for the striker. Purely logistically, how do you now hit the other cheek? You cannot backhand it with your right hand. If you hit with a fist, you make yourself an equal, acknowledging the other as a peer. But the whole point of the back of the hand is to reinforce the caste system and its institutionalized inequality. Even if you order the person flogged, the point has been irrevocably made. You have been forced, against your will, to regard that person as an equal human being. You have been stripped of your power to dehumanize the other.
The second example Jesus gives is set in a court of law. Someone is being sued for his outer garment. Who would do that and under what circumstances? Only the poorest of the poor would have nothing but an outer garment to give as collateral for a loan. Jewish law strictly required its return every evening at sunset, for that was all the poor had in which to sleep. The situation to which Jesus alludes is one with which all his hearers would have been all too familiar: the poor debtor has sunk ever deeper into poverty, the debt cannot be repaid, and his creditor has hauled him into court to try to wring out repayment by legal means.
Indebtedness was the most serious social problem in first-century Palestine. Jesus’ parables are full of debtors struggling to salvage their lives. The situation was not, however, a natural calamity that had overtaken the incompetent. It was the direct consequence of Roman imperial policy. Emperors had taxed the wealthy so vigorously to fund their wars that the rich began seeking non-liquid investments to secure their wealth. Land was best, but there was a problem: it was not bought and sold on the open market as today but was ancestrally owned and passed down over generations. Little land was ever for sale, in Palestine at least. Exorbitant interest, however, could be used to drive landowners into ever deeper debt until they were forced to sell their land. By the time of Jesus we see this process already far advanced: large estates owned by absentee landlords, managed by stewards, and worked by servants, sharecroppers, and day laborers.
It is in this context that Jesus speaks. His hearers are the poor (“if anyone would sue you”). They share a rankling hatred for a system that subjects them to humiliation by stripping them of their lands, their goods, finally even their outer garments.
Why then does Jesus counsel them to give over their inner garment as well? This would mean stripping off all their clothing and marching out of court stark naked! Put yourself in the debtor’s place, and imagine the chuckles this saying must have evoked. There stands the creditor, beet-red with embarrassment, your outer garment in the one hand, your underwear in the other. You have suddenly turned the tables on him. You had no hope of winning the trial; the law was entirely in his favor. But you have refused to be humiliated, and at the same time you have registered a stunning protest against a system that spawns such debt. You have said in effect, “You want my robe? Here, take everything! Now you’ve got all I have except my body. Is that what you’ll take next?”
There is, admittedly, the danger of using nonviolence a tactic of revenge and humiliation. There is also, at the opposite extreme, an equal danger of sentimentality and softness that confuses the uncompromising love of Jesus with being nice.
Nakedness was taboo in Judaism, and shame fell not on the naked party, but on the person viewing or causing one’s nakedness. As you parade into the street, your friends and neighbors, startled, aghast, inquire what happened. You explain. They join your growing procession, which now resembles a victory parade. The entire system by which debtors are oppressed has been publicly unmasked. The creditor is revealed to be not a “respectable” moneylender but a party in the reduction of an entire social class to landlessness and destitution. This unmasking is not simply punitive, however; it offers the creditor a chance to see, perhaps for the first time in his life, what his practices cause, and to repent.
Jesus, in effect, is sponsoring clowning. In so doing he shows himself to be thoroughly Jewish. A later saying of the Talmud runs, “If your neighbor calls you an ass, put a saddle on your back.”
The Powers That Be literally stand on their dignity. Nothing depotentiates them faster than deft lampooning. By refusing to be awed by their power, the powerless are emboldened to seize the initiative, even where structural change is not possible. This message, far from being a counsel of perfection unattainable in this life, is a practical, strategic measure for empowering the oppressed. It provides a hint of how to take on the entire system in a way that unmasks its essential cruelty and to burlesque its pretensions to justice, law, and order. Here is a poor man who will no longer be treated as a sponge to be squeezed dry by the rich. He accepts the laws as they stand, pushes them to the point of absurdity, and reveals them for what they really are. He strips nude, walks out before his compatriots, and leaves the creditor, and the whole economic edifice which he represents, stark naked.
Jesus’ third example, the one about going the second mile, is drawn from the very enlightened practice of limiting the amount of forced labor that Roman soldiers could levy on subject peoples. Mile markers were placed regularly beside the highways. A soldier could impress a civilian to carry his pack one mile only; to force the civilian to go farther carried with it severe penalties under military law. In this way Rome attempted to limit the anger of the occupied people and still keep its armies on the move. Nevertheless, this levy was a bitter reminder to the Jews that they were a subject people even in the Promised Land.
To this proud but subjugated people Jesus does not counsel revolt. One does not “befriend” the soldier, draw him aside, and drive a knife into his ribs. Jesus was keenly aware of the futility of armed revolt against Roman imperial might and minced no words about it, though it must have cost him support from the revolutionary factions.
But why walk the second mile? Is this not to rebound to the opposite extreme: aiding and abetting the enemy? Not at all. The question here, as in the two previous instances, is how the oppressed can recover the initiative, how they can assert their human dignity in a situation that cannot for the time being be changed. The rules are Caesar’s, but not how one responds to the rules — that is God’s, and Caesar has no power over that.
Imagine then the soldier’s surprise when, at the next mile marker, he reluctantly reaches to assume his pack (sixty-five to eighty-five pounds in full gear), and you say, “Oh no, let me carry it another mile.” Why would you do that? What are you up to? Normally he has to coerce your kinsmen to carry his pack, and now you do it cheerfully, and will not stop! Is this a provocation? Are you insulting his strength? Being kind? Trying to get him disciplined for seeming to make you go farther than you should? Are you planning to file a complaint? Create trouble?
From a situation of servile impressment, you have once more seized the initiative. You have taken back the power of choice. The soldier is thrown off-balance by being deprived of the predictability of your response. He has never dealt with such a problem before. Now you have forced him into making a decision for which nothing in his previous experience has prepared him. If he has enjoyed feeling superior to the vanquished, he will not enjoy it today. Imagine the hilarious situation of a Roman infantryman pleading with a Jew, “Aw, come on, please give me back my pack!” The humor of this scene may escape those who picture it through sanctimonious eyes, but it could scarcely have been lost on Jesus’ hearers, who must have been regaled at the prospect of thus discomfiting their oppressors.
How many a battered wife has been counseled, on the strength of a legalistic reading of this passage, to “turn the other cheek,” when what she needs, according to the spirit of Jesus’ words, is to find a way to restore her own dignity and end the vicious circle of humiliation, guilt, and bruising.
Some readers may object to the idea of discomfiting the soldier or embarrassing the creditor. But can people who are engaged in oppressive acts repent unless they are made uncomfortable with their actions? There is, admittedly, the danger of using nonviolence as a tactic of revenge and humiliation. There is also, at the opposite extreme, an equal danger of sentimentality and softness that confuses the uncompromising love of Jesus with being nice. Loving confrontation can free both the oppressed from docility and the oppressor from sin.
Even if nonviolent action does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor, it does affect those committed to it. As Martin Luther King, Jr. attested, it gives them new self-respect, and calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had. To those who have power, Jesus’ advice to the powerless may seem paltry. But to those whose lifelong pattern has been to cringe, bow, and scrape before their masters, and who have internalized their role as inferiors, this small step is momentous. It is comparable to the attempt by black charwomen in South Africa to join together in what will be for some of them an almost insuperable step: to begin calling their employers by their first names.
These three examples amplify what Jesus means in his thesis statement: “Do not violently resist evil [or, one who is evil].” Instead of the two options ingrained in us by millions of years of unreflective, brute response to biological threats from the environment, flight or fight, Jesus offers a third way. This new way marks a historic mutation in human development: the revolt against the principle of natural selection. With Jesus a way emerges by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored.
It is too bad that Jesus did not provide fifteen or twenty further examples, since we do not tend toward this new response naturally. Some examples from political history might help engrave it more deeply in our minds.
In Alagamar, Brazil, a group of peasants organized a long-term struggle to preserve their lands against attempts at illegal expropriation by national and international firms (with the connivance of local politicians and the military). Some of the peasants were arrested and jailed in town. Their companions decided they were all equally responsible, and hundreds marched to town and filled the house of the judge, demanding to be jailed with those who had been arrested. The judge was finally obliged to send them all home, including the prisoners.
During the Vietnam War one woman claimed seventy-nine dependents on her income tax, all Vietnamese orphans, so she owed no tax. They were not legal dependents, of course, and were disallowed. No, she insisted, these children have been orphaned by indiscriminate United States bombing, and we are responsible for their lives. She forced the Internal Revenue Service to take her to court. That gave her a larger forum for making her case. She used the system against itself in order to unmask the moral indefensibility of what the system was doing. Of course she “lost” the case, but she made her point.
Another, which Jesus himself must have known and which may have served as a model for his examples: when Pontius Pilate brought the imperial standards into Jerusalem and displayed them at the Fortress Antonio overlooking the Temple, all Jerusalem was thrown into a tumult. These “effigies of Caesar which are called standards” not only infringed on the commandment against images but were the particular gods of the legions. Jewish leaders requested their removal. When Pilate refused, a large crowd of Jews “fell prostrate around his house and for five whole days and nights remained motionless in that position.” On the sixth day, Pilate assembled the multitude in the stadium with the apparent intention of answering them. Instead, his soldiers surrounded the Jews in a ring three-deep. As Josephus tells it,
Pilate, after threatening to cut them down, if they refused to admit Caesar’s images, signalled to the soldiers to draw their swords. Thereupon the Jews, as by concerted action, flung themselves in a body on the ground, extended their necks, and exclaimed that they were ready rather to die than to transgress the law. Overcome with astonishment at such intense religious zeal, Pilate gave orders for the immediate removal of the standards from Jerusalem.
During World War II, when Nazi authorities in occupied Denmark promulgated an order that all Jews had to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David, the king made it a point to attend a celebration in the Copenhagen synagogue. His stand was affirmed by the Bishop of Sjaelland and other Lutheran clergy. The Nazis eventually had to rescind the order.
It is important to repeat such stories in order to extend our imaginations for creative nonviolence. South Africa is teeming with examples. Since nonviolence is not a natural response, we need to be schooled in it. We need models, and we need to rehearse it in our daily lives if we ever hope to resort to it in crises.
Sadly, Jesus’ three examples have been turned into laws, with no reference to the utterly changed contexts in which they were being applied. His attempt to nerve the powerless to assert their humanity under inhuman conditions has been turned into a legalistic prohibition on schoolyard fistfights between peers. Pacifists and those who reject pacifism alike have tended to regard Jesus’ infinitely malleable insights as iron rules, the one group urging that they be observed inflexibly, the other treating them as impossible demands intended to break us and catapult us into the arms of grace. The creative, ironic, playful quality of Jesus’ teaching has thus been buried under an avalanche of humorless commentary. And as always, the law kills.
Creative nonviolence can never be a genuinely moral response unless we are capable of first entertaining the possibility of violence and consciously saying no. Otherwise our nonviolence may actually be a mask for cowardice.
How many a battered wife has been counseled, on the strength of a legalistic reading of this passage, to “turn the other cheek,” when what she needs, according to the spirit of Jesus’ words, is to find a way to restore her own dignity and end the vicious circle of humiliation, guilt, and bruising. She needs to assert some sort of control in the situation and force her husband to regard her as an equal, or get out of the relationship altogether. The victim needs to recover her self-worth and seize the initiative from her oppressor. And he needs to be helped to overcome his violence. The most creative and loving thing she could do, at least in the American setting, might be to have him arrested. “Turn the other cheek” is not intended as a legal requirement to be applied woodenly in every situation, but as the impetus for discovering creative alternatives that transcend the only two that we are conditioned to perceive: submission or violence, flight or fight.
Shortly after I was promoted from the “B” team to the varsity basketball squad in high school, I noticed that Ernie, the captain, was missing shot after shot from the corner because he was firing it like a bullet. So, helpfully, I thought, I shouted, “Arch it, Ernie, arch it.” His best friend, Ham, thought advice from a greenhorn impertinent and, from that day on, verbally sniped at me without letup. I had been raised a Christian, so I “turned the other cheek.” To each sarcastic jibe I answered with a smile or soft words. This confused Ham somewhat; by the end of the season he lost his taste for taunts.
It was not until four years later that I suddenly woke to the realization that I had not loved Ham into changing. The fact was, I hated his guts. It might have been far more creative for me to have challenged him to a fistfight. Then he would have had to deal with me as an equal. But I was afraid to fight him, though the fight would probably have been a draw. I was scared I might get hurt. I was hiding behind the Christian “injunction” to “turn the other cheek,” rather than asking, what is the most creative, transformative response to the situation? Perhaps I had done the right thing for the wrong reason, but I suspect that creative nonviolence can never be a genuinely moral response unless we are capable of first entertaining the possibility of violence and consciously saying no. Otherwise our nonviolence may actually be a mask for cowardice.
The oppressed of the third world are justifiably suspicious that we of the first world are more concerned with avoiding violence than with realizing justice. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel comments, “What has always caught my attention is the attitude of peace movements in Europe and the United States, where nonviolence is envisioned as the final objective. Nonviolence is not the final objective. Nonviolence is a lifestyle. The final objective is humanity. It is life.”
Beyers Naude, when asked about the role of nonviolent direct action in South Africa today, responded that the churches long ago defaulted by failing to develop concrete strategies of militant nonviolence. The churches now must act decisively to develop such strategies and pay the full price in suffering and imprisonment. And, he concluded, we in the churches must not raise a single finger in judgement of those who have despaired of nonviolent change and have turned to violence as a last resort.
Ironically, in South Africa at this very moment, the apartheid regime is, by the stupidity of its brutal overreactions to funeral processions and minor harassments, helping to re-create a nonviolent movement among an oppressed people that had largely dismissed nonviolence as ineffectual. The issue is still undecided; an undisciplined and sporadic appeal to nonviolent direct action can quickly collapse when it is caught in the middle of violence from both sides. Any long-term nonviolent struggle must be disciplined, persistent, and broadly supported.
Jesus’ teaching is a kind of moral jujitsu, a martial art for using the momentum of evil to throw it, but it requires penetrating beneath the conventions of legality to issues of fundamental justice and hanging on to them with dogged persistence.
Perhaps it would help to juxtapose Jesus’ teachings with Saul Alinsky’s principles for nonviolent community action (in his Rules for Radicals), so that we have a clearer sense of their practicality and pertinence to the struggles of our time. Among the rules Alinsky developed in his attempts to organize American workers and minority communities are these:
1. Power is not only what you have but what your enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.
Jesus recommended using one’s experience of being belittled, insulted, or dispossessed (Alinsky’s rule 2) in such a way as to seize the initiative from the oppressor, who finds the reaction of the oppressed totally outside his experience (second mile, stripping naked, turning the other cheek — rule 3) and forces him or her to believe in your power (rule 1) and perhaps even to recognize your humanity.
4. Make your enemies live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is your most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
The debtor in Jesus’ example turned the law against his creditor by obeying it (4) — and throwing in his underwear as well. The ruthlessness of the creditor is thus used as the momentum by which to expose his rapacity (5), and it is done quickly (7) and in a way that could only regale the debtor’s sympathizers (6). All other such creditors are now put on notice, all other debtors armed with a new sense of possibilities.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
Jesus, in the three brief examples he cites, does not lay out the basis of a sustained movement, but his ministry as a whole is a model of long-term social struggle (8, 10). Mark depicts Jesus’ movements as a blitzkrieg. “Immediately” appears eleven times in chapter one alone. Jesus’ teaching poses an immediate threat to the authorities. The good he brings is misperceived as evil, his following is overestimated, his militancy is misread as sedition, and his proclamation of the coming Reign of God is mistaken as a manifesto for military revolution (9). Disavowing violence, he wades into the hostility of Jerusalem openhanded, setting simple truth against force. Terrified by the threat of this man and his following, the authorities resort to their ultimate deterrent, death, only to discover it impotent and themselves unmasked. The cross, hideous and macabre, becomes the symbol of liberation. The movement that should have died becomes a world religion.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through to its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
Alinsky delighted in using the most vicious behavior of his opponents — burglaries of movement headquarters, attempted blackmail, and failed assassinations — to destroy their public credibility. Here were elected officials, respected corporations, and trusted police, engaging in patent illegalities in order to maintain privilege. In the same way, Jesus suggests amplifying an injustice (the other cheek, undergarment, second mile) in order to expose the fundamental wrongness of legalized oppression (11). The law is “compassionate” in requiring that the debtor’s cloak be returned at sunset, yes; but Judaism in its most lucid moments knew that the whole system of usury and indebtedness was itself the root of injustice and should never have been condoned. The restriction of enforced labor to carrying the soldier’s pack a single mile was a great advance over unlimited impressment, but occupation troops had no right to be on Jewish soil in the first place. Jesus’ teaching is a kind of moral jujitsu, a martial art for using the momentum of evil to throw it, but it requires penetrating beneath the conventions of legality to issues of fundamental justice and hanging on to them with dogged persistence. As Gandhi put it, “We are sunk so low that we fancy that it is our duty and religion to do what the law lays down.” If people will only realize that it is cowardly to obey laws that are unjust, he continued, no one’s tyranny will enslave them.
Picking the target, freezing it, personalizing it, and polarizing it are the means, then, by which intensity is focused and brought to bear (13). For example, infant formula merchants were discouraging breast feeding and promoting their product in countries where women could not afford the powder. Often the parents overdiluted the formula, causing malnutrition, or mixed it with unsanitary water, resulting in diarrhea and death. But you cannot fight all the merchants of infant formula in the third world at once; so you pick the biggest and most visible, Nestle, even though doing so is technically unfair, since their competition gets off scot-free. The focus pays off, however. Nestle’s recalcitrance leads to world-wide outrage and an international boycott. To avoid similar treatment, most of the infant formula manufacturers make some changes. Eventually the boycott leader, the Infant Formula Action Coalition, in conjunction with the World Health Organization and the United Nations International Children’s Fund, draws up a code regulating the marketing of infant formula. In 1984, after eight years of struggle, Nestle finally signs an agreement promising to comply with the new standards. And the whole campaign has been instigated out of an office the size of a closet.
Jesus’ constructive alternative (12) was, of course, the Reign of God. Turning the tables on one’s oppressor may be fun now and then, but long-term structural and spiritual change requires an alternative vision. As the means of purveying that vision and living it in the midst of the old order, Jesus established a new counter-community that developed universalistic tendencies, erupting out of his own Jewish context and finally beyond the Roman Empire.
Jesus was not content merely to empower the powerless, however, and here his teachings fundamentally transcend Alinsky’s. Jesus’ sayings about non-retaliation are of one piece with his challenge to love our enemies. Jesus did not advocate nonviolence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy, but as a just means of opposing the enemy in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the enemy’s becoming just as well. Both sides must win. We are summoned to pray for our enemies’ transformation, and to respond to ill-treatment with a love which is not only godly but also, I am convinced, can be found only in God.
To Alinsky’s list I would like to add another “rule” of my own: never adopt a strategy that you would not want your opponents to use against you. I would not object to my opponents using nonviolent direct actions against me, since such a move would require them to be committed to suffer and even die rather than resort to violence against me. It would mean that they would have to honor my humanity, believe that God can transform me, and treat me with dignity and respect. One of the ironies of nonviolence, in fact, is that those who depend on violent repression to defend their privileges cannot resort to nonviolence. There is something essentially contradictory between crushing the dissent of a society’s victims and being willing to give one’s life for justice and truth.
There are also particular tactics which, while technically nonviolent, would break the Golden Rule. I would not, for example, condone invading a party held for the children of top executives of a corporation which we oppose, and throwing balloons filled with skunk-scented water, or paint-bombing the home of a non-supportive bishop and slashing his tires, as one militant group of Christian activists did in the Pittsburgh area.
Today we can draw on the cumulative historical experience of nonviolent social struggle over the centuries and employ newer tools for political and social analysis. But the spirit, the thrust, the surge for creative transformation which is the ultimate principle of the universe, is the same we see incarnated in Jesus. Freed from literalistic legalism, his teaching reads like a practical manual for empowering the powerless to seize the initiative even in situations impervious to change. It seems almost as if his teaching has only now, in this generation, become an inescapable task and a practical necessity.
To people dispirited by the enormity of the injustices which crush us and the intractability of those in positions of power, Jesus’ words beam hope across the centuries. We need not be afraid. We can reassert our human dignity. We can lay claim to the creative possibilities that are still ours, burlesque the injustice of unfair laws, and force evil out of hiding from behind the facade of legitimacy.
Copyright © 1987 by Walter Wink
