Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. By Walter Wink. Minneapolis: Fortress/Facets, 2003. 119 pages. Paper. $6.00.

The Fortress Press Facets volumes have become a sort-of Lutheran "mini-series," with some episodes stronger than others. In Jesus and Nonviolence, noted Auburn Theological Seminary Professor of Biblical Interpretation Walter Wink admirably compresses a life's work as a scholaractivist into a volume that is the best brief introduction to Christian nonviolence on the market. This is one of those potentially life-changing books. It deserves to be widely read by theologically interested citizens, both clergy and laity.

Wink tackles directly the concern of many who are devoted to the classical Lutheran formulation of the two kingdoms, namely, that nonviolence does not contend adequately with evil. Wink argues, in contrast, that we have now had several thousand years of evidence to show that evil cannot be effectively countered by violence. He suggests that nonviolence is a reasonable political or civil alternative to dependence upon force. Of course, he also contends that this political approach has roots in the teaching of Jesus and at times betrays a tendency to equate adherence to nonviolence with orthodoxy: "love of enemies has, for our time, become the litmus test of authentic Christian faith." He reaches this conclusion by contending that if the problem of Luther's time was to rediscover a God who offered people freedom from guilt through grace, the problem of our time is to answer the question "How can I find God in my enemy?" At times this problem pushes Wink toward despair: "Either we find the God who causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, or we may have no more sunrises" (pp. 59-60).

More often, though, Wink avoids apocalyptic doom and succinctly traces the biblical, theological, and practical contours of militant Christian nonviolence. Nonviolence, according to Wink, is an alternative to either of the "natural" responses to evil--fight or flight. Jesus' "third way," as Wink sketches it, neither mirrors the violence of power as domination nor flees the scene in passive submission. The third way seeks rather to engage the "powers and principalities" with imaginative forms of civil disobedience, community organizing, and public ritual. These nonviolent means seek not simply to replace power with power but to move closer to the democratic ideal of the rule of law in which justice is built into the fabric of human arrangements, and where human flourishing is structurally insured for the greatest number possible.

Drawing examples from India, Poland, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, his own experience in the U.S. civil rights movement, and his expertise as a biblical scholar, Wink shows how eminently biblical and eminently practical militant nonviolence has proven itself over the past half century or so, especially in contrast to the record of carnage associated with state-sponsored and/or "revolutionary" violence in the twentieth century.

My only suggestions to improve this extraordinarily helpful little volume is that Wink could have included titles for each chapter to help orient readers and a longer list of agencies that can provide practical training in nonviolence for Christian congregations and individuals, beyond the address of the Fellowship of Reconciliation included on the book's last page. Each chapter has "Questions for Discussion," which makes this book an excellent choice for a congregational or small-group study.

Jon Pahl

Lutheran Theol. Seminary at Philadelphia

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