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December 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
His is not an alternative power of the same kind as the powers of Caiaphas, Pilate, and Caesar. If it were, his followers would “be fighting” to keep him from “being handed over” to his accusers who in turn handed him to Pilate (18:36).
In a profound sense the kind of rule Jesus advocates cannot be fought for and taken hold of by violence.
for Jesus, “both the continued expectation of a revolutionary Messiah and the accommodation of the emerging Pharisaic leadership to the kingship of Caesar” were unacceptable.
“Caesar is king” and “Jesus is king” are therefore two competing and ultimately incompatible claims.
truth is a power from a different world. The instrument of this power is not “violence” but “witness.”
To be a witness means to strive to do the self-effacing and noncreative work of telling the truth. That does not mean that a witness will have to situate himself or herself “nowhere” and in sublime disinterestedness make perspectiveless pronouncements about what everyone and anyone must have seen or heard. No, standing at one place or another a witness will tell in his or her own words what the witness has seen or heard.
A man dressed in a purple robe with a crown of thorns on his head, a man stripped naked hanging on the cross, represents the victory of truth and life, not their defeat. Should we be surprised that John considers crucifixion an act of glorification (13:31-32)!?
In marked contrast to himself who is the truth and the life, the devil is “a murderer from the beginning” and therefore “a liar and the father of lies”; when he speaks lies “he speaks according to his own nature” (8:44). Those who are from the devil want to do the desires of the devil.
Our commitment to Jesus Christ who is the truth does not therefore translate into the claim that we possess the absolute truth.
If we know the truth, we know it in our own human and corrupted way; as the Apostle Paul puts it, we “know in part,” we see “in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor 13:12f.).
If the truth ceases to matter more than our individual or communal interests, violence will reign
But what about those who in the name of truth oppress the weak?
the self of the other matters more than my truth.
Though I must be ready to deny myself for the sake of the truth, I may not sacrifice the other at the altar of my truth.
Commitment to nonviolence must accompany commitment to truth;
In Pilate’s world, truth and justice were fruits of Caesar’s sword. In Jesus’s kingdom, truth and justice were alternatives to Caesar’s sword.
How can truth and justice be anything but deception and oppression to those who have been brought to insight by violence?
we continue to live in a world that would rather stockpile swords than make enough plowshares, in which every minute the nations of the world spend 3.46 million dollars on military armaments as every hour 353 children die of hunger, according to 2018 data.
In such a world, our question cannot be whether the reign of truth and justice—the reign of God—should replace the rule of Caesar. It should—the sooner the better. Our question must be how to live under the rule of Caesar in the absence of the reign of truth and justice.
Against the brutal reality of the Holocaust, belief in the progressive elimination of violence appears more as a modern superstition than as truth about progress in history.
civilization means not only “medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music,” but also “slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps.
The one thing worse than terror resulting from the system of judgment is terror without any judgment: heads roll, but you can tell neither when, nor where, nor why.
The attempt to transcend judgment—whether it be judgment of reason or of religion—does not eliminate but enthrones violence. The escape from the castle of (judging) conscience lands one in the castle of murders.
The serious challenge that Deleuze poses is whether one can have ultimate judgment against terror without the terror of judgment. Can Christian faith affirm judgment about truth and justice and deny violence?
First, the cross breaks the cycle of violence. Hanging on the cross, Jesus provided the ultimate example of his command to replace the principle of retaliation (“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”) with the principle of nonresistance (“if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matt 5:39).
Second, the cross lays bare the mechanism of scapegoating. All the accounts of Jesus’s death agree that he suffered unjust violence.
though Jesus was innocent, not all who suffer violence are innocent. The tendency of persecutors to blame victims is reinforced by the actual guilt of victims, even if the guilt is minimal and they incur it in reaction to the original violence committed against them.
Active opposition to the kingdom of Satan, the kingdom of deception and oppression, is therefore inseparable from the proclamation of the kingdom of God.
Fourth, the cross is a divine embrace of the deceitful and the unjust.
To treat sin as if it were not there, when in fact it is there, amounts to living as if the world were redeemed when in fact it is not.
There is a profound wisdom about the nature of our world in the simple credo of the early church “that Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3).
I believe, instead, that the biblical texts narrate how God has necessarily used the sacrificial mechanism to remake the world into a place in which the need to sacrifice others could be eschewed—a new world of self-giving grace, a world of embrace.
The Enlightenment has left us with an alternative: either reason or violence. Nietzsche and his postmodern followers have demonstrated aptly that reason itself is violent,
The cross of Christ should teach us that the only alternative to violence is self-giving love, willingness to absorb violence in order to embrace the other in the knowledge that truth and justice have been, and will be, upheld by God.
But the cross does suggest that the “responsibility of reason” can replace neither the “consciousness of sin”74 nor the willingness to embrace the sinful other.
the imperial power of Rome is, in the eyes of John the Seer, a system of “political tyranny and economic exploitation,” founded “on conquest and maintained by violence and oppression.”
The violence of the Rider is the judgment against this system of the one called “Faithful and True” (Rev 19:11).
terror (the “beast” that devours) and propaganda (the “false prophet” that deceives) must be overcome, evil must be separated fro...
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We should not, however, shy away from the unpleasant and deeply tragic possibility that there might be human beings, created in the image of God, who, through the practice of evil, have immunized themselves from all attempts at their redemption.
A nonindignant God would be an accomplice in injustice, deception, and violence.
The Anabaptist tradition, consistently the most pacifist tradition in the history of the Christian church, has traditionally had no hesitation about speaking of God’s wrath and judgment,80 and with good reasons. There is no trace of this nonindignant God in the biblical texts, be it Old Testament or New Testament, be it Jesus of Nazareth or John of Patmos.
if evildoers experience God’s terror, it will not be because they have done evil, but because they have resisted to the end the powerful lure of the open arms of the crucified Messiah.
After all, the cross is not forgiveness pure and simple, but God’s setting aright the world of injustice and deception.
Those who take divine suffering (the cross) as a display of divine weakness that condones violence—instead of divine grace that restores the violator—draw upon themselves divine anger (the sword) that makes an end to their violence.
Hence in the Apocalypse, the creative word at the dawn of creation becomes the double-edged sword at the sunset before creation’s new and unending day (Rev 19:15).
The most surprising thing about this book is that at the center of the throne, holding together both the throne and the whole cosmos that is ruled by the throne, we find the sacrificed Lamb (cf. 5:6;
At the very heart of “the One who sits on the throne” is the cross. The world to come is ruled by the one who on the cross took violence upon himself in order to conquer the enmity and embrace the enemy.
This is what Jesus Christ asks Christians to do. Assured of God’s justice and undergirded by God’s presence, they are to break the cycle of violence by refusing to be caught in the automatism of revenge.
But if one decides to put on soldier’s gear instead of carrying one’s cross, one should not seek legitimation in the religion that worships the crucified Messiah. For there, the blessing is given not to the violent but to the meek (Matt 5:5).
I believe that alluring and useful but untrue ideas about God are idolatrous. I am committed to the position that only true ideas about God can be put to good use. The non-manipulability of God is fundamental to God’s divinity.
