Post by addisona on Feb 11, 2022 15:33:10 GMT
For most folks, Christian nonviolence evokes unified images of civil rights marches, Vietnam War resisters, and bumper stickers calling us to “turn the other cheek” or “beat swords into plowshares.”
But as David Cramer wrote in his 2016 Sojourners article, “A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence,” Christian nonviolence isn’t a single school of thought, “but rather a rich conversation wrestling with what it means to live out the biblical call to justice amid the complexities of ever-changing political, social, and moral situations.”
Now, six years later, Cramer, an Anabaptist pastor and theologian, and Myles Werntz, an ethicist and theologian at Abilene Christian University, are releasing a new book by the same name — A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence — in February 2022.
In their book, they identify eight different “streams” of Christian nonviolence, including those who see nonviolence as a political strategy, those who see it as a way for oppressed people to break cycles of violence, and those who see nonviolence as a resistance of death — with each viewpoint representing a uniquely Christian perspective. They include thinkers like Howard Thurman and Thomas Merton, who represent what the authors call the “Nonviolence of Christian Mysticism,” and the fifteen Anabaptist and Mennonite women who helped develop “Christian Antiviolence” — a response to the failures of nonviolent theologians to connect the violence of war and genocide to gendered and sexualized violence.
These different streams of Christian nonviolence are not rigid boundaries nor strict descriptions, the authors say, but rather a guide to exploring the distinctions and disagreements among Christians’ nonviolent practice and ideology. Figures in one stream might influence the leaders of another — and some might arguably belong in more than one stream.
The book offers an entry point for anyone who wants to consider the rich and varied tradition of Christians who refuse violence. And it provides readers with a chance to weigh each stream’s motivations and histories in contrast with others.
Werntz and Cramer sat with Sojourners assistant news editor, Mitchell Atencio, in December 2021 to discuss the book, its subjects, and whether blowing up an oil pipeline counts as nonviolent resistance.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: How do you hope people will apply what they learn in the book in their own lives?
Myles Werntz: We hope that people come away with a greater sense of the breadth of nonviolence within Christianity and that nonviolence touches on what it is to be a disciple of Jesus at various points. It’s not only politics, not only the way that we think about gender and sexuality, not only inner mystical experiences — it's all of those things together. It's our relationships with our neighbors, the way in which we think about art, the internal life of church — it’s the way that we think about our relationship to God.
David Cramer: In the first part of the 21st century a lot of discussions on nonviolence focused on North American, white, male theologians. There can be an impression of nonviolence that it's a perspective of a majority community foisted onto other communities.
And we are both white male, North American theologians, but what we tried to do was show that nonviolence arises from all kinds of different contexts. We look at Latin American liberation theology, we look at the civil rights movement — which would be more well known to people — and we look at even writings in the ’70s and ’80s around sexualized violence from feminist scholars that are looking at forms of resistance to violence that we might not often think about as a form of nonviolence.
sojo.net/articles/what-does-christian-nonviolence-actually-mean
But as David Cramer wrote in his 2016 Sojourners article, “A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence,” Christian nonviolence isn’t a single school of thought, “but rather a rich conversation wrestling with what it means to live out the biblical call to justice amid the complexities of ever-changing political, social, and moral situations.”
Now, six years later, Cramer, an Anabaptist pastor and theologian, and Myles Werntz, an ethicist and theologian at Abilene Christian University, are releasing a new book by the same name — A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence — in February 2022.
In their book, they identify eight different “streams” of Christian nonviolence, including those who see nonviolence as a political strategy, those who see it as a way for oppressed people to break cycles of violence, and those who see nonviolence as a resistance of death — with each viewpoint representing a uniquely Christian perspective. They include thinkers like Howard Thurman and Thomas Merton, who represent what the authors call the “Nonviolence of Christian Mysticism,” and the fifteen Anabaptist and Mennonite women who helped develop “Christian Antiviolence” — a response to the failures of nonviolent theologians to connect the violence of war and genocide to gendered and sexualized violence.
These different streams of Christian nonviolence are not rigid boundaries nor strict descriptions, the authors say, but rather a guide to exploring the distinctions and disagreements among Christians’ nonviolent practice and ideology. Figures in one stream might influence the leaders of another — and some might arguably belong in more than one stream.
The book offers an entry point for anyone who wants to consider the rich and varied tradition of Christians who refuse violence. And it provides readers with a chance to weigh each stream’s motivations and histories in contrast with others.
Werntz and Cramer sat with Sojourners assistant news editor, Mitchell Atencio, in December 2021 to discuss the book, its subjects, and whether blowing up an oil pipeline counts as nonviolent resistance.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: How do you hope people will apply what they learn in the book in their own lives?
Myles Werntz: We hope that people come away with a greater sense of the breadth of nonviolence within Christianity and that nonviolence touches on what it is to be a disciple of Jesus at various points. It’s not only politics, not only the way that we think about gender and sexuality, not only inner mystical experiences — it's all of those things together. It's our relationships with our neighbors, the way in which we think about art, the internal life of church — it’s the way that we think about our relationship to God.
David Cramer: In the first part of the 21st century a lot of discussions on nonviolence focused on North American, white, male theologians. There can be an impression of nonviolence that it's a perspective of a majority community foisted onto other communities.
And we are both white male, North American theologians, but what we tried to do was show that nonviolence arises from all kinds of different contexts. We look at Latin American liberation theology, we look at the civil rights movement — which would be more well known to people — and we look at even writings in the ’70s and ’80s around sexualized violence from feminist scholars that are looking at forms of resistance to violence that we might not often think about as a form of nonviolence.
sojo.net/articles/what-does-christian-nonviolence-actually-mean