Abstract
The challenges presented by the current global culture of violence are baffling. Humanity faces these unprecedented challenges that have origins in sacred texts containing violent events. “Spiritualizing” these events is not the solution to dealing with the problems they present. Christians should be prepared to doubt the texts that promote violence as a part of faithfulness to God. This article suggests the opposite of faith is not only doubt, but also fear. Christians demonstrate a cheap relationship with sacred texts when they fail to challenge traditional interpretations. A more mature approach is to embrace alternative, if unfamiliar, interpretations of sacred texts rather than hold on to orthodoxy that is beloved but unloving. Christians should see the texts that seem to justify violence or encourage war as a message requiring humanity to struggle against such violence to transform the world around them nonviolently. The Church of the twenty-first century has optimal opportunity for building harmonious relationships with people of other faiths, which will require a multifaceted approach to understanding God in a pluralistic age.
Introduction
In his celebrated work, The Meaning and End of Religion (1991), Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the respected professor emeritus of Comparative History of Religion at Harvard University and the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, maintains that religions do not exist, but rather religious people do.
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Paul F. Knitter echoes this view in One Earth Many Religions, written at the turn of this century, in which he states, As humanity steps into a new millennium, the religious traditions of the world find themselves at a turning point. Up until now . . . religious communities have understood themselves from within the circle of their own experiences and traditions; as this century slips into the next, they are being challenged to expand their ways of knowing who they are by allowing their circles to touch and overlap with others.
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He went on to say, “The nature of our intercommunicative world and of the crises this world faces offer and require such a dialogical, correlational manner of religious self-understanding.” 3
The culture of violence in the world today confirms the views of both Knitter and Smith. Religious people, rather than their religions, create and nurture environments that promote violence. “No one in the whole history of [humanity] has ever worshiped an idol.” 4 The view that humanity is often not aware of creating a new tradition is underscored by the fact that the early Christians were not conscious of being involved in a new religion that today is called Christianity. 5
During the past half-century, several scholars from the western world have written about the violent legacy of religions. 6 Most have been consistent about one fundamental point: religion is not a natural category of existence but an invented social construct from the modern western world, just as racist ideology has been invented. God has not invented religion, they argue, but it is a by-product or consequence of conflict and wars.
No scholar makes this view more forcefully than Regina M. Schwartz, focusing on monotheism as a fundamental problem of identity formation, which leads to conflicts. At the beginning of The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, she states, “Imagining identity as an act of distinguishing and separating from others, of boundary making and line drawing, is the most frequent and fundamental act of violence we commit.” 7 She goes on to write, “Violence is not only what we do to the Other. It is prior to that. Violence is the very construction of the Other.” 8 Thus, one of the main causes of violence is identity formation, which is magnified in monotheism. The promotion of monotheism as an achievement of the Judeo-Christian thought, Schwartz maintains, causes a conundrum in human history.
Monotheism is entangled with particularism with the assertion that this God and not any other gods must be worshiped, a particularism so virulent that it reduces all other gods to idols and so violent that it reduces all other worshipers to abominations.
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The assumption of only one God predicates scarcity because there is not enough God to go around. The claim that only one God, or land or place, is sacred and is mine but not yours violates the ethical principle of plurality. Schwartz maintains that the proclamation of one God is not beneficial and can be tainted by the dream of exclusively possessing the identity of God. It can also lead to humiliating those excluded from the circle devotees have arbitrarily drawn around themselves to protect their selectiveness. Thus, Schwartz concludes, “as long as people believe in the Yahweh of deliverance, the world will not be safe from Yahweh the conqueror.” 10 One can say, however, that not only identity formation in religions causes violence but also the humiliation implied in the judgmental views of the practice of faith traditions other than “ours.”
Ultimately, what religions have in common cannot be the source of conflicts because its intrinsic value is transcendent. What religions have in common, therefore, lies not in the various traditions that introduce religions to the transcendent, but in that to which they respond, the transcendent itself. Traditions evolve and faith varies, but only God endures. 11 One must then ask, “What is the cause of hatred and violence in the modern world?”
Answering this question would lead one to a nontraditional embrace of the multiplicity of the Divine as an alternative to the time-honored monotheism of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. But would this embrace lead to a non-violent society? In other words, can one find a lasting solution to violence by embracing multiplicity? The challenge to what Schwartz proposes is that multiplicity goes against logic and the modern interpretation of Abrahamic traditions. Furthermore, human beings would conceivably remain violent if many gods existed; there were enough of them to go around in the ancient world.
Some causes of violence in the world
One of the major causes of violence globally is religious people and particularly their interpretations of sacred texts. 12 Other causes of violence, however, must not be flippantly dismissed as invalid. In the history of human conflicts, many other factors have been responsible. Plato (427–347 BCE) listed selfishness, while Lucretius (ca. 96–55 BCE) argued that the primary cause of violence in the world is desire to acquire essential human needs such as food or shelter. 13 The biblical book of James states that the source of violence can be attributed to the foolishness of humanity (see 4:1-3), which is related to what Philo (13 BCE–50 CE) contended. In the history of the Church, however, most theologians have attributed violence to the devil or to sinfulness inherited from Adam and Eve. 14
In the modern era, one finds more anthropological justifications for violence. Marvin Harris argues that violence is caused by a protein deficiency in the human diet, while Roy A. Rappaport argues that a mechanism for population control is the root cause of violence in the world. In 1973, Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Biology for his 1963 book, On Aggression, in which he argues that non-human species are equipped with instinctive aggressive impulses but also with inhibitory feedback mechanisms. Thus, lions playfully fight and wrestle with cubs, but seldom do they cause fatal injuries. Aggression has served an evolutionary purpose in helping animals survive. While human beings inherited aggressive impulses, the inhibitory mechanism was lost in evolutionary development and trends. 15 The roads to identifying the origins of violence are twisted and multi-layered. This complexity does not mean, however, that one cannot clearly see the results of violence in modern societies.
Violence in the Middle East: Righteous victims living together without peace
In May 2000, I went to Israel for the first time in my teaching career. The trip was not a study tour of the Holy Land, but a 2-week fact-finding mission organized by the American Committee on Jerusalem, a think tank organization in Washington, DC. The trip included a dozen other members selected from various institutions in the United States. Shortly before our plane landed in Tel Aviv, I reached out to the seat pocket in front of me for a magazine that contained an article about understanding the other. The article perfectly represented the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a riveting way. While the author remained anonymous, the lesson of the story was unforgettable, showing that our hatred of others is not due to lack of knowledge about others, but rather due to a lack of understanding of the knowledge we possess about others. I was reminded of the words of the Italian philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza, that “to understand all is to forgive all.”
The detail of the magazine story shows two people engaged in a wisdom contest to be conducted purely in sign language. The first contestant looks around for a long time without saying a word as if contemplating what was about to happen. He raises one finger to the skies as he stands on tiptoe. As he does so, he gazes at the other contestant as if asking him to respond to this challenge or accept his superiority in wisdom.
The second contestant in defiance points two fingers downward, one right finger and one left. Following the second man’s defiance, the first competitor raises his hands as if to prevent the skies from falling. When he does so, he also looks at the second competitor, challenging him to respond. But in defiance, the second man scratches the ground with his fingers, as if to cajole or persuade the grass to sprout and grow.
The first man becomes furious as he is losing the wisdom contest. So, from the small chest he brought for the competition, he displays chicks, approximately 10 chicks in all. He looks the opponent in the eyes. But his competitor simply smiles and takes two eggs from his pocket. The first man then reluctantly surrenders, admitting that his competitor is superior in wisdom.
They were then asked to interpret the signs they had used. The first man stated that his pointing his fingers toward the skies was to show there is only one God and only one heaven. But the other contestant, pointing two fingers downward, indicated that the Earth is also one and that God created it. The first contestant put his hands up to show that God keeps the skies from falling. His opponent, however, by putting both hands downward, was maintaining that God is also the one sustaining the Earth by preventing it from sinking into the oceans.
The first contestant wanted to show there can be no death without life, and that death comes from life. “Death comes from life!” he exclaimed. He showed the chicks as the symbol of life, but they would soon die, showing that life is ephemeral and that there can be no death apart from life. By showing eggs from his pocket, the second contestant indicated that there can be no life without death, and that indeed life comes from death. While the two eggs showed no signs of life, no live chicks could exist without the apparently lifeless eggs.
This story is illustrative of the fact that conflicts occur in the world because of human lack of understanding. The second man interpreted the fact of his opponent’s pointing to the skies as his showing he was capable of poking one of the eyes of the contestant out of its socket. But in response, by pointing two fingers downward, he indicated that he could remove both of his enemy’s eyeballs from their sockets if threatened in that way.
When the first man pushed his hands against the skies, the second contestant interpreted this movement as saying he could prevent rains from falling, therefore, causing hunger, thirst, famine, and diseases. By pointing two hands downward, the second contestant wanted to let the first know that God had endowed him with the ability to cause rains to fall and plants to begin to grow and vegetation to spring up. When the first man showed ten chicks, he wanted to show that he could make all the chicks disappear and die. The second man indicated that, if he threatened such a thing, he could make chicks appear again by having his hens hatch the eggs in his pockets.
This story illustrates as well the significance of understanding the other as the other. People must know the hearts and minds of strangers and neighbors for humanity’s collective salvation and redemption in the world. Understanding the other is critical in avoiding conflicts and in loving strangers as God loves. Understanding devotees of other faith traditions in the way they want to be understood and interpreting their faith traditions in the way they need to be interpreted are challenges that Christians and non-Christians in this pluralistic age must face together. As Christians seek to understand others as with the mind of Christ, who loved his enemies and prayed for those who persecuted him on the cross, they will have more cogent and robust (if not affectionate) relationships with non-Christian others and their cultures. In so doing, Christians are also saying that all belong to God. This understanding requires a spirit of humility, and perhaps understanding others is a divine gift that can be an antidote against the threat of violence and war in the modern world.
Scholars of the Middle East, as well as post-Holocaust theologians, have been forthcoming about their understanding of the atavistic hatred in one of the most violent and vulnerable regions of the world. 16
To assume that Jews should turn the other cheek when they have been wounded by violent events in the modern world is almost reckless. Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 is a robust account of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, with a comprehensive understanding of the origins of the conflict.
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One cannot read that book without asking whether the Palestinians and Israelis have been condemned to live together in the Middle East. The account of what the Jews have suffered during the Holocaust and after is incalculable; for Western political powers now to unscramble the eggs cracked in the Middle East seems hopeless. The Jews have suffered throughout history, with their attempts to assimilate or enculturate either socially or politically met with rejection. Contemporary Jewish scholars have expressed moderation and hope that the Jews do not mistreat others in the way they have been mistreated in human civilization. John Esposito, Darrell Fasching, and Todd Lewis cite Marc Ellis and Ellis’s 2009 work, Judaism Does not Equal Israel, stating that Ellis insists that Israeli Jews must never use the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust as an excuse for the oppression of their Palestinian neighbors. They must remember that the covenant relation of the Jews to the land includes the demands to ensure justice for all and to show compassion to the stranger.
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According to Ellis, they continue, “not only must Jews accept other Jews in their diversity,” but they must also enlarge the tent of their compassion, embracing their Christians and Muslim neighbors who have mistreated them. Accepting “Christians and Muslim Palestinian neighbors in Israel in an environment of justice and peace for all” is consistent with the covenant of the Jewish people with God. 19 The Holocaust, therefore, was a test and Jews must be faithful to the covenant by promoting peace and justice in the world.
Violence in the modern world is not limited only to the regions notorious for conflicts and wars. Modern society has become immune to reports from the Middle East of the brutality and killing of the innocent. Killing of the innocent exists elsewhere in the world and has not been reported with the accuracy and sense of urgency as much as it should have.
Violence: The murder of Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a college student in Nigeria
On May 12, 2022, a Christian student in Nigeria was brutally murdered by her Muslim classmates for alleged blasphemy. Deborah Samuel Yakubu was a brilliant student at the Shehu Shagari College of Education at Sokoto, Sokoto State, Northwest Nigeria. A devoted follower of Christ, Deborah aspired to become a productive citizen as a home economics teacher after graduation at the prestigious college that trains future teachers. When she passed her final exams, she posted a voice message in a WhatsApp group that had been created to discuss personal academic matters with her fellow home economics classmates. In her message, she said, “Jesus Christ is the greatest; he helped me pass my exams.” One can sense the elation of her postings as her family rejoiced with her. Her joyful message about Jesus was in response to some Muslim students in the group who had shared their own posts related to Islam. Many Muslim students at the school, including her classmates, however, took offense and threatened her. The college staff, who quickly saw what was coming, tried to hide Deborah in a room, but the students became a violent mob that waylaid Deborah, dragging her out of hiding. They then stoned her to death and burned her body. The brutal scenes were recorded live and posted online.
Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria and a Muslim himself, condemned the killing of Deborah Samuel Yakubu, stating, Muslims all over the world demand respect for the Holy Prophets, including Isah (Alaihissalam, Jesus Christ) and Muhammad, but where transgressions occur, as alleged to the case in this instance, the law does not allow anyone to take matters into their hands.
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Atiku Abubakar, a 2022 presidential candidate, initially condemned the lynching, but after receiving backlash from Muslim supporters, predominantly from northern Nigeria, took down the social media posts condemning the lynching, for which he was criticized on May 12, 2022. This brutal killing was an embarrassing and disastrous event that should never be repeated in Nigeria or elsewhere in the world. It was a radical departure from 2008 events in Northern Nigeria when two religious leaders decided to make peace.
Since Nigeria gained her independence from Great Britain in 1960, the country has not enjoyed consistent peace between Muslims and Christians. Religious violence has now become rampant. The emergence of Boko Haram in Northwest Nigeria has brought misery and grief to those who have experienced kidnappings and demands for ransom money for the release of their loved ones. Since 2009, Boko Haram has killed more than 40,000 innocent Nigerians with AK-47 rifles and machetes, and the group has not yet been declared a terrorist organization.
The March 2008 issue of The Atlantic included an article about two Nigerians, one a Muslim, Imam Muhammad Nurayn Ashafa, and the other a Christian, Pastor James Movel Wuye. The story of the two men is a reminder of constraints and opportunities for Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. Author Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation and an expert on the relationship between Christianity and Islam, states, “In 2006, riots triggered by Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad left more people dead in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.” 21
Both Imam Ashafa and Pastor Wuye were from Kaduna, a city in northern Nigeria. In a microcosm of Nigeria itself, Muslims populated the northern part of the town, while Christians were on the southern side. Pastor Wuye became the head of a Christian militia in 1987 and took an oath of secrecy that required carrying the photos of Christians who had been killed by Muslim militia. He himself lost his right hand and 25 of his fellow Christians at the hands of a Muslim militia.
Imam Muhammad Ashafa was also a militia leader. He grew up watching his people struggling helplessly against missionaries and preventing Christian missions from reaching northern Nigeria. His uncle persuaded him, however, to go to a Christian school, where he developed good learning skills, including memorizing portions of the Holy Bible. In 1992, Christian militia killed many Muslims in Kaduna, and Muslims retaliated, killing many Christians.
For Ashafa, the turning point came when he listened to a Friday Islamic sermon during Muslim prayer. The preacher was talking about the life of Prophet Muhammad. When asked by an angel if he wanted his enemies to be destroyed, Prophet Muhammad said, “No.” Pastor Wuye also listened to a sermon at a Christian conference in Nigeria in which Pat Robertson, one of the most conservative, if not one of the most anti-Muslim, preachers in the world at that time, stated, “You cannot preach Jesus with hate in your heart.” Both Ashafa and Wuye were transformed and later established together the first Interfaith Meditation Center in Nigeria. 22
Does the New Testament inform Christians how to combat violence?
Interpretation in the New Testament about combating violence is not uniform. One can deduce, however, from the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, what Christians must do to minimize conflicts. In Mark 9:38-40, for instance: John said to [Jesus], “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.” (NRSV)
In John 10:16, Jesus said, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So, there will be one flock, one shepherd” (NRSV). Thus, anyone who genuinely cares for the wellbeing of their fellow-human beings can also be valuable in the Kingdom of God.
In their book, Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, Heinrich Weinel and Alban G. Widgery wrote, To some God and Jesus may appeal in a way other than to us; some may come to faith in God and to love, without a conscious attachment to Jesus. Both Nature and good [people] besides Jesus may lead us to God. They who seek God with all their hearts must, however, some day on their way meet Jesus.
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The contemporary world is interconnected, and every evil planted by humanity in one region contains the seed for its own destruction in unsuspected regions.
The challenges of bridging the ideological gap to mitigate violence
Humankind faces new challenges in the modern world because it exists in a culture of violence. Christianity in its essence is not only a borderless faith but also a faith that bridges the gap between God and humanity. One of the challenges is that humanity is not only alienated from God but also estranged from one another. One of the obligations of humans in search of a spiritual destiny is therefore to make peace in religions, partly because those who know only their own religion understand none, because every religion has value, with the Divine having local names in every tradition. Knitter states it this way: “Other religions are not only genuinely different, [but] they can also be genuinely valuable.” 24 A careful relationship between one religion and another necessarily involves a careful inhaling and exhaling, but it is perhaps perilous for Christians to cut off devotees of other religions in a culture of violence and in a universal health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Humanity is living in an era of interconnectedness and interdependency, and devotees of other religions will continue to need Christians as Christians need them. What, therefore, can Christians make out of the teachings of the Bible and other sacred texts regarding violence? In other words, how can humanity be made if not safe? At least three suggestions for resolutions to violence in the modern world demand our attention.
The principle of epistemological reciprocity: A consideration
In a pluralistic age, religious violence could likely be mitigated when the devotee takes cognizance of the principle of “epistemological reciprocity.” 25 This principle is simultaneously a philosophical and a political solution. The principle of epistemological reciprocity suggests that internal argument is involved in religious certitude and asserts that the kind of internal arguments advanced by a follower of a particular faith tradition in defense of religious claims should be granted freely to the devotees of other traditions and their followers, principally because devotees of religious traditions advance the same kind of internal empirical reasoning to defend religious claims. For example, if a Muslim says, “God is Great,” based on experience in the Islamic faith tradition, and a Christian says, “Jesus Christ is great,” based on experience in the Christian faith tradition, neither has epistemological advantage over the other for making their identical claims. The principle of epistemological reciprocity suggests that since devotees of Islamic faith tradition advance the same kind of internal reasoning that Christians advance for their beliefs, neither the Muslim nor the Christian has epistemological advantage.
As a path to mitigating religious violence, this principle engenders hope during hopelessness in the modern world. It points to a mature differentiation of others as others and presents one of the most hopeful results of accepting others as others in religious differentiation. This principle could also bring mutual enrichment and transformation that adherence to one’s faith tradition in a clannish manner would not encourage. Conversations with peoples of other faith traditions could bring new appreciation to one’s own faith tradition as well. Human beings are not created to be self-sufficient, but to be interdependent beings. We move in and out of each other’s lives as dependent beings and will always need one another. In like manner, each religion provides certain truths about the essence of faith in God and human spiritual destiny, but the whole truth could be provided by working together when considering the principle of epistemological reciprocity in one’s faith assessment. Conversation with others, therefore, is a necessary steppingstone to rediscovering the truth not only about non-Christian religions, but also about Christianity itself. The windows through which the Church has always seen the world are dusty and need cleaning now more than ever before. Through the windows Christians have erected, they have seen their views only and not the views of others. Thus, Christians can see the patterns of inherited religious concepts, but they have been prevented from seeing the world outside their circles of theological knowledge and have diminished their orientation, making Christians more dangerous to themselves and others. 26
Mature differentiation: A consideration
Mature differentiation is not completely unrelated to the principle of epistemological reciprocity. The strength of mature differentiation, however, is that it accords dignity to the people of other religions, seeing them as human beings who are just as wounded and finite. Religious identity is stronger today than it has ever been in the past, leading to fundamentalism and secularism. These two ideologies are dangerous in a culture of violence. Mature differentiation would celebrate the existence of those who participate and practice religions other than one’s own. For example, a Christian would desire to live next to a Muslim or Jew or Hindu or Buddhist, while not trying to evangelize or convert them to their own faith. Christians would not desire to live in a world without Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists. 27 Likewise, few Muslims would want to live in a world without Jews or Christians or Hindus or Buddhists.
With this understanding, Christian mission becomes an opportunity to lead others to the God who has already chosen them, helping them find a divine initiative at the roots of their own faith. Christian mission, therefore, would not be an instrument of self-righteousness or be seen as opportunity for the expansion of the Church, but as a way of becoming instruments of Christ for the transformation of the world. Practicing religion as Jesus did would become more important than practicing the religion of Jesus. The strengths of the approach that takes other religious traditions and those who are devoted to practicing them seriously are more practical than philosophical, more spiritual than ideological. This principle exudes and affirms the contributions that the non-followers of our religions could make to enrich our own. John T. Pawlikowski makes this point more profoundly. He states, “There is no way for Christianity, or any other religious tradition, to survive meaningfully if it allows the death or suffering of other people to become a byproduct of its efforts at self-preservation.” 28
Humility: The path of Jesus Christ to combating violence permanently
Christians and non-Christians who read the New Testament carefully immediately discover that Jesus was not only a Jewish rabbi but also a revolutionary leader. The true religion of Jesus was not institutionalized Christianity because Jesus was a Jew throughout his life and ministry. The true religion he came to proclaim, if there was one, was to showcase or become the extension of the unlimited and unconditional love of God for all humanity through humility. In Is Religion Killing Us? Violence in the Bible and the Qur’an, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer leaves no stone unturned, particularly in the last chapter, “Saved by Doubt.” Throughout the book, Nelson–Pallmeyer maintains that the opposite of faith is not doubt but is rather fear and that Jesus doubted creatively because he was not afraid. He states, for example, that Gen 6–7 receives a new understanding and a more authoritative reinterpretation. The sacred text states that if one obeys God, life would be good. If, on the other hand, one disobeys God, life would be hellish. God will manipulate rain, and the disobedient will experience drought or flood as God’s punishment. 29 God loves humankind, but God is also vindictive and punishing for those who fail to fulfill their own side of the bargain.
The lesson that Nelson-Pallmeyer teaches in this interpretation is that relationship with God is not transactional, but restorative and dynamic. Jesus highlights this non-transactional relationship with God, with authority, saying in essence, “That is true, but I say unto you that my relationship with God based on my experience is not like that.” God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rains on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45b).
Nelson-Pallmeyer offers several examples of a dialogue between “the sacred text” and “doubting Jesus.” The sacred text claims in Lev 20:9 that God asks God’s people to murder all who curse father or mother, and according to Deut 20:18–21, to stone rebellious sons. In these words, one hears that God’s violence shores up abusive patriarchal power.
But I say to you, based on my experience, that God is not like that. God wants us to challenge oppressive power wherever we see it, including within families, because abusive power prevents us from building justice and becoming the family of God.
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The sacred text and many of our friends urge us to hate enemies because they are also understood to be the enemies of God. “But I tell you, based on my experience, that we should love our enemies and pray for our persecutors because only then can we break the spiral of violence. Loving enemies best reflects what God is like.” 31
Therefore, humanity, with humility, can be saved by doubting the sacred text as Jesus did. Jesus was concerned with the shape and direction of the world he came to transform in the power of God. He was critical of the world for its disintegration and warned its leaders, as well as his disciples, of intolerance. There are no better examples than how Jesus retreated from his Jewish tradition when relating to the Roman authorities of his day. The Sadducees and the Pharisees had a totally different idea. The crucial question about treating others who could be violent due to their powers is the same in every age. The alternative of the Sadducees for minimizing conflict with the Roman political authority was to dismiss them as inconsequential. The second alternative, presented by the Pharisees and to some extent the disciples, was not to resist but embrace the non-Jewish Roman authority with suspicion.
Jesus resented deeply the loss of Jewish identity as well as the aggression of Rome because of the burning humiliation. For Jesus, the balm for the burning humiliation was humility. Humility cannot be humiliated, and Jesus asked his disciples to learn from him: “For I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your soul. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” 32
Conclusion
To be emphasized in our time is that opportunities exist for Christians in a culture of violence to see beyond institutional religion and to become the champions of a new way of understanding particularity and pluralism. Faith in God transcends religious affiliation, and human understanding of the Divine is always in the process of formation. Thus, opportunities will always exist to challenge courageously past doctrinal certainties so Christians can be champions of peace in the world. But constraints that work to protect time-honored religious conviction will always exist for Christians in being innovative and in defending a new path of doubting, partly because, as Don Cupitt puts it, Christians often “prefer to cling to an orthodoxy that they no longer believe in, rather than embrace a rational revision of it that is unfamiliar and unloved.” 33
In January 2018, I led a group of divinity school students to South Africa, the most developed African nation state. The 2 weeks we spent in Cape Town were some of the happiest of my teaching career, and of all the places we visited, the Table Mountain was my favorite. The forest on Table Mountain appears to be a botanical paradise. It is peaceful. Beneath the surface is a teeming world of small creatures working together peacefully. Many of them have unique symbiotic partnerships with other creatures on the mountain. I was fascinated by how the propagation of some plants is dependent on small ants burying their seeds, protecting them from fire or inclement weather. In an invisible exchange, the ants are rewarded with sweet and delectable snacks beneath the surface. The beautiful birds on Table Mountain might not survive save for the company of the butterfly. The beautiful flowers would not be pollinated without the long, juice-seeking beaks of the birds. Many plants on Table Mountain offer specialized protection to their fellow mountain dwellers, and flies enjoy a constant haven on a blistering bush that is toxic and irritating to larger predators. Many less-visible inhabitants on this mountain are rodents and also a staggering diversity of insect species, each one a small but vital part of the complex tapestry of the peace that sustains their lives.
I was reflectively aware of the beauty and the demand for peaceful co-existence of the living organisms on the mountain, especially once all the visitors there had gone home. The experience on Table Mountain was for me an important lesson for the pursuit of peace in the world. Peacemaking is a way of life. It is not something modern politicians can achieve with a stroke of a pen at a peace accord. Peacemaking is not a dramatic event. It is not achieved by the flight of a bullet, but by the flight of a butterfly; peacemaking efforts are rewarded in the rhythm of our existence. Peace is attained by how we live. Lasting peace is achieved by our becoming intentional peacemakers in the world.
Footnotes
1.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).
2.
Paul F. Knitter, One Earth Many Religions: Multifaith Dialogue & Global Responsibility (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995), 22.
3.
Knitter, One Earth Many Religions, 22.
4.
Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, 141.
5.
Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, 60.
6.
See these excellent books on religions and violence in the modern word: Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997); Hector Avalos, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005); Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); Edward LeRoy Long, Jr., Facing Terrorism: Responding as Christians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004); Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Not In God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (New York: Schocken Books, 2015); William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
7.
Schwartz, Curse of Cain, 5.
8.
Schwartz, Curse of Cain, 5.
9.
Schwartz, Curse of Cain, 33.
10.
Schwartz, Curse of Cain, 58. See also Robert Allen Warrior, “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation Theology Today,” Christianity and Crisis 49 (1989): 264.
11.
See Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, 192.
12.
See Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us? Violence in the Bible and the Qur’an (New York: Trinity Press International, 2003). The book gives a comprehensive account of misinterpretation of violent events in the Bible and the Qur’an and challenges readers to exercise a position of creative doubt of the sacred texts as Jesus did in the New Testament.
13.
In Fighting Words, Avalos devotes the first chapter to Premodern Theories of Violence (39–52).
14.
Both St. Augustine (354–430 CE) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1227–1274 CE) have received theological immortality for their doctrinal positions that humanity is sinful by the constitution of its nature and needs God’s grace for salvation.
15.
See Avalos, Fighting Words, 55.
16.
Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner wrote Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), trans. of La Nuit (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit), 1958; Richard L. Rubenstein (1924–2021) is the author of After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966); Irving Yitzchak Greenberg (b. 1933) wrote Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, Modernity After the Holocaust (New York: CLAL, 1976); Marc H. Ellis (b. 1952), Judaism Does Not Equal Israel: The Rebirth of the Jewish Prophetic (New York: The New Press, 2009). These post-Holocaust theologians were passionate about dealing with the Jews’ covenantal relationship with God. After the Holocaust in World War II (1939–1945), the interpretation of this relationship has become more complicated. They embrace, however, the position that the covenant of the Jews with God has many forms. After Auschwitz, these theologians have insisted that Jews cannot be required to embrace the covenant but must do so freely. Being a Jew in the modern world has become more dangerous because of nationalist ideology that portrays the Jews as the indigestible other in the world.
17.
Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Random House, 2001); see also Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; org. 1987).
18.
John L. Esposito, Darrell J. Fasching, and Todd T. Lewis, World Religions Today, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 133.
19.
Esposito, Fasching, and Lewis, World Religions Today, 133. See Ellis, Judaism Does Not Equal Israel.
20.
21.
Eliza Griswold, “God’s Country,” “The Contest for Africa,” The Atlantic (March 2008): 44. The cover of this issue of The Atlantic headlines this article aptly as “The Contest for Africa.”
22.
Imam Ashafa and Pastor Wuye have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice, and they now preach peace in Nigeria. They are still committed to their respective religious tradition. Ashafa remains a Muslim and Wuye remains a Christian minister, but they now practice their faith with mature differentiation, more aware that practicing religions like Jesus or Prophet Muhammad is better than to practice their religions without them.
23.
Heinrich Weinel and Alban G. Widgery, Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1914), 405. See Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon, 1976).
24.
Knitter, One Earth Many Religions, 32.
25.
The principle of “epistemological reciprocity” was developed by N. Ross Reat and Edmund F. Perry in their work, A World Theology: The Central Spiritual Reality of Humankind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
26.
See Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, 193.
27.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others (New York: HarperOne, 2020) reflects my idea about the beauty of finding God through the faiths of others.
28.
John T. Pawlikowski, “Historical Memory and Christian-Jewish Relations,” in Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Exploration of Theological Interpretation, ed. Philip A. Cunningham et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 25.
29.
Nelson-Pallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us? 142–43.
30.
Nelson-Pallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us? 143.
31.
Nelson-Pallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us? 145.
32.
Matt 11:29–30 (KJV). See Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 17. Also Vladimir G. Simkhovitch, Toward the Understanding of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 60–61.
33.
Don Cupitt, Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking (Salem, OR: Polebridge, 2015), 128.