The Subtlety of Peace: A New Testament Challenge to Modern State Violence

Shame

It is wrong to impose on pacifists the burden of containing violent threats that the violent measures of modern states have proven unable to contain and have arguably multiplied in both number and scale. But this imposition is typical in current political culture, in which ‘defeat’ without a violent fight is shameful. Any state political administration open to such ‘capitulation’ is electorally doomed, as the viability of a modern state government seems to depend on its ability to threaten and deliver adequate measures of violence. ³ This is due in part to a public that has been trained to contemplate significant loss or destruction only as the failure of sanctioned measures of violence to preserve it. There is at least honor in that, it is thought. Any alternative is perceived as pathetic, and violent resistance, populations have been formed to feel, is the only salvation from shame, even if it is not salvation from death.

The abhorrence of shame, it seems, fuels prevalent responses to what are perceived as the most direct threats to the life of a state’s population, not least our loved ones. But it also governs the way we negotiate the whole range of vulnerabilities that characterize the political economic orders of the ostensibly stable states of North America and Europe. We simply cannot settle for weakness in the political establishment; it is cause for alarm and political mobilization to ‘fix’ it. The claim that certain kinds of vulnerability are actually crucial to political health and sustainability is practically laughable. Thus, a pacifist commitment finds itself burdened in the public imagination and discourse with its assumed inability to avoid the unavoidable shame that bedevils any acceptance of vulnerability. And this burden is only aggravated by the horrific spectacles staged for us by the likes of ISIS and by the surgical cleanness of the public presentation of remote, highly technological warfare waged by today’s powerful states. But can Christians assume the political burden of avoiding shame? Can political honor be the measure of Christian living? If indeed there are Christian justifications of violence, is avoiding shame one of them?

The Actual Interest of State Violence

The imperative of state warfare in modernity might be less problematic if it were actually about protecting the subsistence living of its population and if military-grade violence were not sanitized and romanticized as it is. But much of the violence that is touted in modern political discourse as defensive and necessary for survival is in fact about perpetuating the addictions of industrially overextended economies. It cannot be adequately understood apart from the geopolitical interests of the corporate enterprises that preside over those economies, whether General Electric or Halliburton or the financial institutions that facilitate and ramify their operations, effectively investing whole populations in them. ⁴ Meanwhile, far more soldiers fielded by state administrations like that of the US today are dying of suicide than they are in combat, due in part to the incompatibility of modern warfare with the romantic imaginary produced by popular narratives, film, video games, and other channels of cultural stupidity. ⁵ And this is to say nothing of the unimaginable cost of state warfare to the places and civilian communities on the fronts of today’s wars.

But the massive and epochal costs of such state-powered violence can be hidden enough from the invested populations to sustain the myth that they are necessary sacrifices, or at least sacrifices not so outrageous as to provoke mass domestic dissent or compel less violent alternatives. The same myth of necessary sacrifices informs domestic state violence in the form of policing. But, as we have been witnessing all too clearly of late in the US, the operative necessity of such violence is not reliably the well-being of the population but sustaining the privilege of certain white classes, the subordination of the many racialized others, and the viability of the existing form of corporate enterprise. ⁶

A serious theological debate about modern state violence, then, must take into account considerations like these, which are mostly lost on the traditional criteria for just war. When hypothesizing theologically about the legitimacy of resorting to violence, let us not kid ourselves by ignoring the actual impetus and cost of the state violence we are in fact discussing in most cases. Hypothetical justifications of defensive acts of violence easily function as the actual justifications of existing systems of violence, which may be methodically hiding and underestimating the human and non-human costs of their operations. We are therefore unable to examine with any rigor a claim that state violence is necessary without asking, ‘Necessary for what and for whom?’ Nor can we, without justification, impose on a Christian commitment to non-violence a burden that modern state violence has wrongly assumed or been unable to bear itself.

The Total Claims of the Modern State

A further and crucial consideration in the current political context is that the totalizing tendencies of the modern, industrialized state make an adequate framing of the theological question of violence acutely difficult. This form of the state claims to be the basis of not only the freedom but the very life of its citizens, or in the case of the messianic exceptionalism of the US, the life of the whole world. What constitutes the established justification of mass organized killing and accelerated death is thus a threat to the modern state particularly as the guarantor of freedom and life. So totalized is the modern, industrialized state that we supposedly cannot expect any of the benefits associated with it—say, the collective alleviation of poverty or the provision of medical care or relief from natural disaster or economic regulation—without accepting the massive costs it exacts by violence. ⁷ So consolidated and indistinguishable from its corresponding population is it that a threat to what might be conceived as only part of the state, such as a piece of its territory or one of its industries, allegedly constitutes an attack on the viability and whole of its people. ⁸

It has to be recognized, however, that the centralization of the modern, industrialized state, combined with its addictions to certain unrenewable or otherwise scarce resources in a globalized economy, renders a threat to such resources an actual threat to the subsistence of many of its people, even if such resources are at once the stuff of extravagance and abuse. Human societies may indeed have survived and flourished without refined petroleum for millennia, and we do not need to fly in airplanes as often as we do or produce and use all the automobiles that we do. But a threat to the oil supply of modern industrialized states could actually mean an economic and political collapse, driving much of the population to hunger, exposing them to disease, and otherwise imperiling their survival. In other words, while many of the resources that states kill for are not in fact necessary for healthy human community, certainly not in the quantity currently consumed, the life of state populations has been so ordered that they have been rendered incapable of living without them, undermining any ability to resist the violence condoned to secure them. Ironically, then, the pervasive reach and centralization of the modern, industrialized state, especially in its tense marriage with the global ‘free’ flow of capital, is precisely its vulnerability, which in turn fuels its obsession with violent means of self-preservation. ⁹

Nevertheless, even this totalizing tendency of the modern state, which elides the distinction between subsistence and exploitive excess, cannot simply be accepted. Instead of legitimizing the industrialized state’s resort to violence to sustain our current addictions, Christians must identify and oppose those addictions, calling for the dramatic transformation of the political economic order of modern states, one for which much of their populations and churches currently lack the political education and will.

Peace by Cultivation Rather than Engineering

That Christian pacifism must not assume the burden that state violence itself cannot bear, nor the burden of sustaining industrialized states in their current form, does not relieve it of the hard work of making peace. Just as a Christian theological description of the modern state must be subtle enough to expose what is obscured in abstract justifications of state violence, so it must convey the subtlety of peace. The axiom of our political culture that peace is the result of activism, often state activism, can eclipse the subtlety of peace as it is presented to us in the New Testament. It can also co-opt the New Testament in the service of oversimplified problem-solution models. Much as this activist vision can tempt us to imagine that violence can fix something (e.g., ‘disorder’ or ‘chaos’), it tempts us to imagine that peace can be engineered, that it is a matter of technological adjustments to structures and people rather than the slow and difficult cultivation of healthier political economic patterns of life. Such cultivation includes the slow transformation of communities’ and persons’ habits, appetites and imaginations.

The distinction between cultivation and engineering is not meant to insinuate that Christians must pretend to avoid employing all structures of the modern state in the pursuit of peace. But if peace is indeed what we are pursuing, our use of the modern state will have to be selective and judicious, in some ways subversive, as opposed to assuming that whatever a state or analogous structure offers is a mere resource or neutral instrument for Christian discipleship.

Owning the Modern State

While it should not be overdrawn, a significant distinction should be observed between the condition of many of the historical people of synagogues and churches attested in the New Testament and that of Christians variously enfranchised by modern states. Such enfranchised Christians find themselves today in political orders that involve substantially more collective participation in governance by the population, through institutions correspondingly more invested in the welfare of the population, at least formally. Most of these state populations have been historically and substantially influenced by the Christian tradition, even if many citizens no longer identify themselves as Christian, and those of us who do identify as Christian often exercise a great deal of power in these political orders, not least as public intellectuals. We can therefore not pretend to describe the modern state as a foreign institution, even if we must refuse its total claim on us and on others. Our theological description of the modern state must own our implication in it and refuse any facile scapegoating of it.

Refusing the Sacrificial Political Economy

The sacrificial political economy of modern state politics derives from the total claim of the state to provide for the life of its citizens and its embrace of the essentially tragic nature of this sort of political life. The condition from which the state claims to have rescued its people is not simply a diminished life, but slavery or worse, and the fate from which it pretends to protect its citizens is not merely an inferior form of political order but chaos and dissolution. Given such grim alternatives, the modern state has difficulty naming the limits to which it will go in pursuing the life of its citizens, and much more difficulty actually observing any limits it names, fostering a calculus in which ends justify extremely costly and morally incommensurable means. Meanwhile, it has embraced a Hobbesian framework of political order that issues tragically but inexorably from primordial and constitutional violence, a fundamental political hostility by which the life of its citizens was, and must continually be, purchased with the intimidation and death of enemies, including some of its own citizens. ¹⁰ There is of course plenty of fodder available for sustaining this mythic narrative of elemental violence and pervasive threat.

Moreover, the self-righteous humanism of the modern liberal state, so key to its political sway, cannot settle for celebrating the mere destruction of threats by violence, whether domestically or beyond its borders. Because its authority never ceases to be moral in nature, it must represent this destruction as tragic sacrifice. Its normal order is conceived as life-promoting such that its death-dealing occurs only according to what Carl Schmitt theorized as a state of exception. ¹¹ It is to the great intellectual credit of Schmitt that, following Kierkegaard’s metaphysical conceptuality, he recognized that the so-called exception is not the anomaly modern states purport it to be but in fact the rule underlying the norm of their operations. ¹²

Modern states have indeed confronted truly serious threats to their existence and the life of their populations, and we have no basis for claiming that a more sound form of political order would be free of such threats. Christian theologians have therefore sought, in the New Testament, criteria that might justify the exceptional recourse to violence, most notoriously perhaps in Romans 13. The fundamental problem with such political theology is that it simply legitimizes the sacrificial political economy of the established order, whereby the mythological life of a whole must be purchased with violence against some. And the tendency of this political economy is to promote violence in these terms by framing and describing emerging ‘threats’ in precisely these terms. It is also to exact the human cost of that authorized violence in inverse proportion to the human investment in the established state. In other words, the more organizations and people are invested in the state and the state in them, the less they pay. Those people and structures in which the state is less invested pay a higher price. Specifically, the cost is exacted primarily on certain foreign people and places, on less enfranchised parts of the citizenry, and of course on the natural resources that are the fuel of modern industry and warfare, regarded foolishly by industrialized state society primarily as ‘raw materials’. Thus, not only do the racial and national boundaries we have developed define and produce the sacrifices that are politically feasible for the modern state; alienation between human community and the ecology of its places also isolates non-human goods supposedly ordained for sacrifice, thus furnishing them for squander. ¹³

The New Testament does not deny the presence of sacrifice in the political economy that is the work of God in the world, although its logic of sacrifice is quite different, as I will suggest in a moment. What it does deny is that the threat of violent political hostility is a justifying basis of that sacrifice, that sacrifice is a matter of calculated necessity, and that the cost of sacrifice should gravitate to those in whom the establishment is the least invested. Furthermore, it denies that sacrifice can be finally measured by some life other than that of the revelation of God in Christ, which it presents not as necessity within a total and tragic political economy, but as gift in a political economy of God’s mercy upon all. Gift names the christological logic of sacrifice in the New Testament, so that sacrifice is celebrated only as it is at once the basis of repentance and transformation. ¹⁴ Thus, in answer to Carl Schmitt’s violent and exceptionalist political theology, which he predicated on a primordial friend-enemy distinction, ¹⁵ Jacob Taubes, describing himself to Schmitt as an ‘arch-Jew’, wrote the following to Schmitt in 1979:

Perhaps there will still come a moment at which we can speak about what is to me the most significant Jewish as well as Christian political theology, Rom. 9-11. The word ‘enemy’ also appears there, in the absolute sense, but—and this seems to me to be the most decisive of decisive points—connected with ‘love’. ¹⁶

Here Taubes refers to the climactic conclusion of Paul’s argument to his non-Jewish readers in favor of their patience and peaceableness toward some of his own relatives who had grown hostile to them.

While according to the gospel they are enemies because of you, according to election they are loved because of the ancestors, for irrevocable are the gifts and calling of God (Rom. 11:28-29). ¹⁷

What constitutes and preserves the life of the people, according to the Apostle Paul, is not its ability to define and destroy its enemies as necessary sacrifices but God’s electing power to hold friend and enemy together, which in turn calls Christians to hopeful practices of love in the face of hostility. To be sure, Paul is describing the diverse, Israelite people of God made up of both Jews and non-Jews, not the national people constituted in and by the modern state. But it is precisely Christians’ modern attachment to rival national peoples, in defiance of Jesus’ solidarity with his people and of Paul’s corresponding ecumenism, that has served to justify the sacrificial political economy of the modern state.

In Romans, Paul is working out the radical hospitality that is the fruit of God’s kingdom come in Jesus, Israel’s liberating Messiah who refuses to leave any sheep behind but unites himself bodily to the most shameful and disposable among them. Approaching Jerusalem to take the throne of Israel and of the world as Son of David, Jesus had taught his disciples that they were to refuse the gentile logic of power that is predicated on the subordination of others. Instead, the ruling power of the God of Israel comes to those who serve, just as Jesus, God’s final human ruler, the Son of Man, came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many (Mk 10:42-45). This is not a sacrifice forced upon Jesus by circumstance or his enemies, or the result of a total calculus of what is necessary for the well-being of the whole or the majority. It is a life that Jesus gives. There is of course nothing calculable about what such a gift would achieve, and the Apostle Paul is everywhere at pains to show that any attempt to calculate political success must face the utter foolishness of the cross, and know resurrection as the fruition of that incalculable messianic death and no other.

The political culture of the modern state has corroborated Paul’s teaching in its rejection of the cross as folly, ironically under vast Christian influence. And yet an abundance of people, some 2000 years after the shameful death of Jesus, nevertheless find themselves answering the call of his name, while the names of so many other rulers and other kingdoms have since risen and fallen. What Jesus did, it seems, was to plant a moral political authority with imperishable staying power, which in time exposes the bankruptcy and ephemeral hold of political orders that sacrifice those who are despised or dispensable for the sake of those who are established. However much Christians have authored them or been seduced by them, such orders cannot live up to their claims to provide life for any whole. Their representations are eventually unmasked as false gods, whose appetite for death is never satisfied.

The Christian calling according to the New Testament, then, is to refuse the sacrificial political economy of the modern state, laboring instead against political structures of totalization and closure that render those disinherited by such structures the necessary sacrifices. In the face of violent threats, we ask not how to destroy those who pose them but how those who are established have contributed to them, focusing energies on minimizing that contribution and developing more life-giving modes of relationship in repentance. This involves refusing to legitimize and exact costs with a totalized calculus, which in turn tends to push those costs onto the least established, those in whom the mythological whole of the state is the least invested.

The quality of life that is the kingdom of God is made not by sacrificing the most disposable but by God’s freely giving of God’s own future life and honor. God acts in his empowered human heir’s giving of himself in service so as to heal and to forgive the hostility that divides, shaming its shame. Thus, the sacrifice is made not by those least invested with God’s life but by the one most invested with that life, the heir to God’s own life. This Son is revealed in free and absolute solidarity with the disinherited, the cursed, becoming sin itself (2 Cor. 5:21). Partly by leading the way itself, the witnessing church is therefore to call for those in whom the state is most invested to absorb the burden of facing violent threats, rather than imposing it on the disinherited in favor of the status quo. The church must help to show how the state’s resorting to violence is a failure that results from other failures, one that is worthy of lament as opposed to the glorification, reassurance or superficially honored sacrifice that typify the ‘winning’ side of a tragic total calculus.

The losses incurred by the self-giving promoted by the church, rather than the imposed sacrifices of the disempowered, may then be understood not as new sacrifices in a tragic political economy but as participation in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s own gifted afflictions (Col. 1:24). Communities who face threats in this way may suffer a measure of political instability, but they will contribute to the reservoir of moral political authority that undermines the false claims of violence to serve justice, freedom and life, thereby encouraging deeper social bonds. As it operates currently, the state’s insistence on protecting its status quo or expanding its dominance with unspeakable acts of violence and human rights abuse is only making martyrs of those who resort to violent countermeasures in desperation, further eroding the moral authority of state establishments both domestically and beyond their borders.

Two observations about my appeal to the New Testament refusal of the sacrificial political economy of the modern state may serve as the conclusion of this section. First, by introducing a relative distinction between the weak and the strong in absorbing the burdens of our outstanding political debts, I have insinuated that the church will not name every manifestation of violence in the same way. It should speak prophetically against the violence of the establishment in a way it may not against violence committed by the disinherited. A generic Christian opposition to violence, one that observes no differentiation in power among those who resort to violence, will effectively reinforce the cleaner, more romantic, and somewhat less visible violence of the establishment. In the name of advocating non-violence, it will tend to impose on the disinherited an oppressive burden of non-resistant sacrifice. The subtle arts of Christian peacemaking, by contrast, trust direct denunciation of violence by the disinherited primarily to judicious voices among them, inviting others to discourage it more humbly by solidarity with the disinherited in their dignity and resistance to injustice.

Second, this same wisdom that discerns where and how to focus prophetic opposition will speak against the violence that emerges closest to home rather than hypocritically scapegoating more distant powers. We see this throughout the New Testament: for example, in the way Jesus’ critique of Rome was oblique, if also clear, while his confrontation of the establishment of his own community in Jerusalem was direct and diligently offensive. The selective nature of this messianic prophecy—and all sound Christian prophecy is thus selective—need not have the effect of legitimizing the violence of the distant or disinherited by focusing on the near and the established. Instead, it accumulates lasting moral authority by addressing the violence in which it is most directly implicated and that is therefore easiest to legitimize.

The Limits of State Representation

The second line along which I wish to offer a New Testament challenge to modern state violence is its witness to the limits of state representation. By state representation I mean primarily the power of state structures to express and address the needs of those represented. The bureaucratic nature of the modern state leads us to believe that people can be adequately represented and sustained by juridical status, legal processes or state-sponsored services. If certain people are being treated unjustly, we are moved to see that they are better represented in the governing structures of the state. But a systemic violence results not only from the utter lack of representation of certain classes and persons in the state but from the disparity between that representation and the actual treatment of those represented, a disparity often camouflaged by official state representation itself. ¹⁸

An example of this phenomenon is the post-emancipation treatment of those who had been legally enslaved in the US. The improvement in legal status was no doubt efficacious to a certain extent, but former slaves were not incorporated into a just sharing of the inheritance of the rest of US society; they thus remained systemically disinherited, as have their still variously segregated descendants. ¹⁹ Furthermore, the relative improvements in the official representation of African Americans in the structures of the state have helped power the myth that reparations are complete, making the ongoing violence against them the more insidious, not least that committed by state police. ²⁰ For another current example of the disparity between representation and actual treatment, we might look to legal amnesty for immigrants of color in the US or the plight of foreign non-combatants in warfare who are represented in virtually powerless international treaties.

Against an illusory and repressive state representation and the corresponding romance of addressing grievances primarily by adjustments to state categories and bureaucracy, we may consider the witness of Paul’s letter to Philemon, the owner of the slave Onesimus. Paul is known to have held that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. Yet, when writing to Philemon for the sake of Onesimus, Paul does not appeal to that formula, nor to any Christian code enshrining the emancipation of slaves. Instead, in pursuit of the emancipation of Onesimus, Paul adroitly and subtly leverages his relationships with both Philemon and Onesimus, addressing the letter not only to Philemon but to the whole church in his house, and interposing himself between Philemon and Onesimus. ²¹

He tells Philemon that he is not commanding him as he could but appealing to him on the basis of love: love between Paul and Philemon and love between Paul and Onesimus, love that has driven Paul to speak as an old and feeble prisoner, on behalf of a slave. ²² Paul says that it is because of himself, Paul, that Onesimus has become useful to Philemon again, after Onesimus had left Philemon’s household. And in sending Onesimus back to Philemon at such risk to Onesimus, Paul tells Philemon he is sending Philemon his very own heart, Paul’s very self. ²³ Moreover, he is sending Onesimus not as one he can do without in prison, but as one Paul needs, one who has been doing for Paul what his brother Philemon might otherwise do for him during his imprisonment for the gospel. ²⁴ Paul has become Onesimus’s father and thus returns him to Philemon not as absconded property but as a brother. ‘Brother’ names not primarily Onesimus’ status, then, but his formed-over-time, bodily relationship with Paul as father, which is now affecting Onesimus’s relationship with Philemon, who through Paul has become Onesimus’s brother. Onesimus is Philemon’s brother because he is Paul’s son and Paul’s heart. Paul therefore tells Philemon to receive Onesimus into his household to be as free there as Paul is free there. The final basis of his appeal in Philemon 17 is not, ‘If you believe the gospel’, or ‘if you accept our code’, or ‘this is Christ’s command’, or ‘this is Onesimus’s new status’, or ‘such was Christ’s example’. It is this: ‘If you have me as a sharer in your life, welcome Onesimus as you welcome me’.

Thus, in everything that Paul writes to Philemon he attests, and further performs, the interweaving of himself with the self of Onesimus. He begins the letter by thanking God for the love that he shares with Philemon. But then he introduces Onesimus as his own child, who is useful both to Philemon and to himself, Onesimus who is his own heart, Onesimus whom he wanted to keep for himself, Onesimus who is now beloved brother to Philemon, but especially to Paul! Paul has been united to Onesimus in the love of the Messiah, and so he makes his appeal to Philemon not on the basis of Philemon’s charity for Onesimus but of his love for Paul! Not as something owed Onesimus but as something owed Paul: If you have me as a sharer (v. 17). And in all this Paul does not preempt or manipulate Philemon by keeping Onesimus with him but sends Onesimus along with the letter (v. 14). ‘If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge it to me’ (v. 18). ‘I will repay it. And oh by the way, you, Philemon, owe me your life, too, and prepare the guest room for me because I myself will come to you soon’ (vv. 19-22).

What we see in Paul’s short epistle is not a reliance on remote structures of justice, which is not to say that such structures are insignificant, but on intimate, bodily implication in broken relationships. It is this subtle thickness, this formation of community and neighborliness, that is key to Christian peacemaking. And not incidentally, this underlying force of mutual care can better scale and use state measures of representation, making them more effective for justice as opposed to their functioning as illusory instruments whose effect is repressive and violent. Regardless of legal generalizations, people are not in fact all equally abusable and killable, just as all places are not equally destroyable. Some have been intricately integrated into webs of life and power in ways that their health is nourished and their flourishing promoted; meanwhile, others have found themselves exposed and neglected. The way forward is not simply the expansion of a bureaucratic state but its transformation. The New Testament thus challenges the violence of the modern state by teaching Christians to implicate ourselves bodily with one another and with those people and places who have, under its influence, remained or been rendered exploitable and killable. We are not to rely primarily on state structures of reform from a safe distance but to share the same table, the same neighborhood, the same home, the same bed, the same children, with those who are desperate for peace. We are to learn that desperation as our own, if it is not already, and thus to go about making peace. This is not a neat alternative to ‘the state’ but in part a way of encouraging the healthier scaling and use of structures currently associated with the state. Perhaps this subtler approach can make state violence less feasible and deliver more sustainable protection than state violence can.