theophiliacs

V: Children of Light, Children of Day

She was the only thing that could convince my seventeen-year-old self to actually wake up early on a Saturday just to watch the dawn. It was sweater-weather when I met my young crush at 4am on a grassy hill a short walk from my house. Cuddling under a wool blanket and sharing coffee from a thermos, we watched the horizon change from black to blue to purple to everything and finally to a heart-pumping, Monet-inspired sunrise.

The richness of that dawn wasn’t just in its beauty but in our readiness to embrace all that it promised. Young love primed us for a hope of a future life that was not here yet but would soon indeed come. From the moment I held her hand in the dark, I lived for the sunrise—as if the sunrise had already occurred, a lover in the light.

That picture (a true story that perhaps my nostalgia has enhanced) is an image for Christian existence that I often reflect on. I first encountered the image when reading N. T. Wright exegeting I Thessalonians 5:1-11. He wrote:

[...]Paul states boldly that Christians are already ‘children of light, of the day’. When he speaks of not falling asleep, but of staying awake, he is not envisaging someone staying up later and later into the night, but of someone getting up very early, while it is still dark before dawn. This, he insists, is the present condition of Christian believers. When the day dawns [...] those who are already up and awake will not be startled by it. [...] This has strong ethical implication: it is important to be conducting oneself as though it were already daytime.

N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pg. 216-7

It is from this poetic image, that I believe the Christian derives his ethics. We have already slept, woke up early, and are eagerly anticipating the coming dawn. In other words, just as the Messiah died and defeated death by coming out the other side, so have we taken up our cross, died to ourselves, and been reborn in Christ. In yet still more other words, the Kingdom of God is coming, and since we’re already hoping for it anyway, let’s live as if it’s already here.

Bad Reasons To Follow A Nonviolent Ethic
By picturing who we will be in the Kingdom of God and living accordingly, we forever change our rationale for obedience. Put in terms of the Nonviolent Ethic, we should realize that:

1. The Church should not follow a nonviolent Ethic because God says so and we’d better obey if we want to get into heaven.
As Paul Stewart observed in an eloquent comment he wrote on this post on our blog: “So the goal of the church is not to produce moral people. Following Christ is about relationship not about rules and regulations. It is not about adhering to lists or following certain formulas or simply trying to convince people to stop drinking, smoking or gambling. However, we are called [to] proclaim and live out a radically counter-cultural ethic that involves living and dying like Christ, modeling our lives so closely after his that we have the mind of Christ and live life together in such a way that we are literally divine representatives to our world.” I might clarify that we are divine representatives to our world, of the coming world.

2. The Church should not follow a nonviolent Ethic merely because we believe it will inevitably result in peace.
I touched on this in my comments in Part IV of this series. According to Matt. 5, nonviolent disciples of Jesus SHOULD EXPECT persecution precisely because they are following the way of Christ. While nonviolent resistance can sometimes result in change, we are not nonviolent because it is the best method to create peace but because we live in anticipation of the future peace of the Kingdom.

3. The Church should not follow a nonviolent Ethic because we want to be like the secular liberals and bash all those barbarian, onward Christian soldier-types.
Throughout these posts, I’ve done my best to avoid using the word “pacifism,” (though I think I’ve slipped up once or twice). This is not because I think the word is misleading but because I feel it carries too much baggage. Perhaps for some it evokes the image of a kind of hippie, anti-establishment, druggie, “peace, dude” spirituality. I believe I’ve shown in these posts that Christian nonviolence is undeniably rooted in both Scripture and Tradition. While it’s true that at times the Christian’s aim for nonviolence might occasionally match up with those of the political “pacifists”; I believe they arrive at their conclusions through natural reason, whereas the Christian arrives at his or her reasons through the Spirit. While this is certainly not a good excuse to avoid cooperation with pro-peace political entities, it is a good reason to use discernment.

Practical Observations for the Typical, Western Christian
As the world globalizes, it gets harder and harder to preach firm, unmoving ethics when we constantly encounter so many outlandish and unheard of circumstances. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to explore what this Christian Ethic of nonviolence might mean to a potential victim of genocide or a twelve-year-old who must decide to fight or be executed. (I’m afraid at this time in my life, I wouldn’t know how to begin). Still, I suspect most of the readers of this blog are fortunate enough to fit into a context where war is a far more distant and puzzling thing. For you, I offer a few brief observations:

1. The Christian Has No Place In The Military
For those of us in the USA where military service is voluntary, I see no reason why a Christian would ever put his or herself into a position where they would be required to use violence. This is not to say that soldiers cannot be Christians or that a soldier who also happens to be a Christian should be isolated from Christian community. To me this is the same tension we live with every day in the Church—we are broken people who live in a broken world.

2. The Majority Christian Opinion on this Issue from the time of Constantine Onward is Wrong
I realize that I stand in opposition to the bulk of Christian tradition on this issue. Empirical Christianity left an ugly stain on Christian Tradition which has been a devil to get out. However, do not think that Church History is without its champions for nonviolence. Beginning with the New Testament writers themselves and extending to the author of the Epistle of Diognetus, Tertullian, St. Francis of Assisi, the Anabaptists, the Quakers, Dorothy Day, and today’s man, Martin Luther King Jr. we find a strain of historic figures deploring violence. I would even argue that these meager numbers of the nonviolent have had influence beyond their small representation because their message resonated so deeply with the message of Jesus.

3. The Church Must Liberate Itself From the Agenda of the State
I wrote a bit about this in my two post series on the separation of Church and State last month. It is perhaps too large for a little note at the end of this post. However, I’ll just briefly add that the Empirical Church did its damage from making the state’s issues, its issues. One need only review previous elections in the United States from recent years to see that this problem is far from resolved. While it may serve a Government’s interest to go to war, it will never serve the Church’s. We must especially beware of Christian language and ideals that might be used to convince us otherwise.

I fear that the world will never fully hear the Gospel until the Church can commit itself to an ethic of nonviolence. If we hope to share our hope for the coming sunrise, we must learn how to live in anticipation of it.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’ll end this series on Nonviolence with his words:

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Martin Luther King Jr. from his Noble Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964