Seeking Redemptive Nonviolence

Engaging the Powers, the best and most important book I have read in a long time, is third in Walter Wink's trilogy on the "principalities and powers." Wink begins this work with a critique of violence: "Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world." He argues persuasively that violence "and not Christianity, is the real religion of America."

According to Wink "the myth of redemptive violence undergirds American popular culture, civil religion, nationalism, and foreign policy." Children's cartoons bombard us with this myth: Bluto, evil incarnate, seems triumphant before being defeated by Popeye's superior force. There is no premium "put on reasoning, persuasion, negotiation, or diplomacy....Repentance and confession are as alien to them as the love of enemies and nonviolence."

The myth of redemptive violence does more than pollute our children's minds. It finds expression in policies of "nuclear deterrence" and in theories of just war and just revolutions, and is the one notion on which the political Left and Right can agree. It pervades our spirits and our institutions. In fact, it distorts the spirituality of our institutions.

Biblical writers see institutions with both an outer form and an inner spirituality, according to Wink. This might explain why President Clinton, seemingly a decent and non-militaristic man, ordered terrorist-like bombing attacks that killed innocent Iraqi civilians, ostensibly in an effort to punish Saddam Hussein.

Wink believes that such actions are consistent with a biblical understanding of the spirituality of institutions and the fallenness of the powers. A president may actually be more controlled by the presidency than the other way around. To engage the powers, as Wink calls us to do, we must realize that our struggle is not merely to elect good presidents but to challenge the fallen nature and distorted spirituality of the presidency itself.

The problem is not "the powers" per se. We need the powers. Life in community requires institutions and social structures. Mechanisms for governing, business, and commerce are indispensable. These social structures of reality, Wink explains, are biblically speaking "creations of God."

The problem is that the powers are no longer serving their intended purposes. Wink offers a concise summary: "The Powers are good, the Powers are fallen, the Powers will be redeemed." Our task is to engage the powers, to force them to serve their intended purposes.

TO ENGAGE THE POWERS and the numerous injustices that flow from their fallenness, we must take Jesus seriously and set aside our commitment to the myth of redemptive violence. Our allegiance to this myth, reinforced by scriptural depictions of Yahweh, leads us to minimize, relativize, or dismiss the radical and practical alternative of Jesus' way of nonviolent engagement.

Jesus opposed all aspects of the domination system that dehumanized his contemporaries. He was not other-worldly but anti-establishment. Instead of saying, "My kingdom is not of this world," as most translations do, Wink says we should read, "My kingdom is not of this domination system." John 8:23 should not read, "You are of this world, I am not of this world," but instead, "You are of this system, I am not of this system."

The implications are striking. We are now free to make sense of Jesus' ministry and his radical nonviolence. "Jesus denounced the Domination System of his day and proclaimed the advent of the reign of God, which would transform every aspect of reality, even the social framework of existence," Wink writes. "[Jesus] set in motion a permanent revolution against the Power System whose consequences we are still only beginning to grasp to this day."

Jesus calls us to permanent revolution through nonviolent means. He engaged the powers through active, creative, nonviolent resistance. Injustice is brought into the light, conflict surfaces, resignation is broken. Wink presents a compelling analysis of the texts dealing with turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and handing over one's undergarment.

In each of these cases Jesus is helping poor, humiliated people take the initiative against their oppressors. Their means of doing so allows them to restore a sense of dignity while putting their oppressors off balance. They also offer their oppressors opportunities for conversion.

Jesus' nonviolence is both pragmatic and principled. It is an effective means of confrontation and transformation and it reveals the very essence and character of God.

Only by being driven out by violence could God signal to humanity that the divine is nonviolent and is antithetical to the Kingdom of Violence....To be this God's offspring requires the unconditional and unilateral renunciation of violence. The reign of God means the complete and definitive elimination of every form of violence between individuals and nations. This is a realm and a possibility of which those imprisoned by their own espousal of violence cannot even conceive.

Walter Wink's book can help us break out of this prison.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer was the author of Brave New World Order (Orbis Books, 1992) and a member of the Community of St. Martin's in Minneapolis, Minnesota when this review appeared.

Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. By Walter Wink. Fortress Press, 1993. $18.95, paper.