Tag: Peace Theology

The pattern of Jesus (Revelation, chapters 1–5)

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Ted Grimsrud—August 8, 2023

[This is the second of a series of four posts on the book Revelation. The first is “Reading Revelation with an Anabaptist Sensibility.” The third is “Healing amidst the chaos (Revelation, chapters 6–16).]

If we take up the book of Revelation expecting it to present a case for the truthfulness of the peaceable way of Jesus, we will find plenty of evidence to confirm that expectation. The first five chapters introduce us to Jesus and his presence among Christian congregations of the late first century. These chapters make it clear that Jesus’s way stands in opposition to the domination system of the Roman Empire of the time—and all empires since.

The pattern of Jesus (1:1-6)

The first six verses of the book set the stage for what the book as a whole will be about. This is the “revelation of Jesus Christ.” That is, this is the Jesus of the gospels. We may accurately say this revelation comes from Jesus. More so, though, I think the meaning is that this book is about Jesus. And about interpreting life in light of Jesus. Once we look for it, we will see throughout the book allusions to the way of Jesus—or, as I want to say, “the pattern of Jesus.”

The word translated “revelation” is apocalypsis, may also be translated “apocalypse.” I think that latter translation may be misleading for us, though. It often has the connotation of future oriented, catastrophe oriented, kind of magical. Revelation is all too often seen as a different kind of writing than the rest of the Bible (“apocalyptic” literature). We should note that the word is not used again in Revelation. The book does not seem to want to make a point of being different. I think the best meaning is that this is a book of insight about Jesus and applying his message to life. This book is about our world, both the 1st century and the 21st century.

The statement, the “time is near” is not about predicting the future but rather urgency about the importance of the message of the book. To say “near” is a rhetorical flourish that has to do with the importance of choosing between Jesus and the Empire as the bases for one’s approach to life. We see an increased sense of urgency as we move through the three sets of plagues that come later in the book—going from 1/4 destruction to 1/3 to full, not to signify chronology but to say with increased intensity that this stuff really matters.

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Reading Revelation with an Anabaptist sensibility

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Ted Grimsrud—August 7, 2023

[This is the first in a series of four blog posts on the book of Revelation. This one will introduce a peaceable-Revelation reading strategy for the book. The following three will offer an interpretation of Revelation based on that reading strategy./

Is there a way to read the book of Revelation as a peace book? To read it as a Jesus-centered book? To read it as source of encouragement and hope? What happens when we read Revelation with an Anabaptist sensibility? In a series of posts, I will show that indeed Revelation can be read as a peace book. In this first one, I will sketch what I mean by reading with an Anabaptist sensibility or, one could say, with an Anabaptist reading strategy. In the three posts to follow I will run through the main themes of Revelation and its peace theology to show the fruit of such a way of reading Revelation—a fruitful approach for non-Anabaptists too!

In a nutshell, I read Revelation like I read the rest of the New Testament, maybe most similarly to, say, the book of Romans. I read it as an Anabaptist. Actually, what happened when I started to make a list of the important assumptions I make about Revelation, I realized I was making an Anabaptist list—and that I probably would say that these are the assumptions I have about the entire Bible. I won’t argue that this is a list that is drawn directly from the 16th century Anabaptists so much as that this reflects an Anabaptist sensibility, an Anabaptistic way of reading the Bible. I’m not trying to reproduce the way certain Anabaptists read Revelation in the 16th century so much as present a reading based on a theological perspective in the 21st century that is informed by what I understand to be Anabaptist convictions.

So often, people treat Revelation as if it is something different, something unique to the Bible with different assumptions—maybe most obviously that Revelation is predicting the future rather than speaking to the people of the first century. But I think we should read it in its own context—I would call it a “historic-symbolic” rather than, say, “future-prophetic” approach. Let me share my list—first, I will name the assumptions and then I will briefly explain what I mean by each one: I read Revelation as (1) Jesus-focused, (2) present-oriented, (3) blood-drenched, (4) Empire-resisting, and (5) discipleship-directed. I’ll explain:

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Why don’t we know how things will end? [Questioning faith #27]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 31, 2023

I have published two books that offer interpretations of the book of Revelation—in 1987 and 2022. I learned a lot during those 35 years, and I think that is reflected in the more recent book, To Follow the Lamb, being the better one. At the same time, I am happy that I still agree with most of what I wrote in Triumph of the Lamb, the first book. There is one issue, though, about which my views very definitely changed.

Triumph of the Lamb, the 1987 book, self-consciously provided an alternative reading of Revelation to the End Times-focused view I had been taught as a new Christian. That future-prophetic view has for a long time been very popular and remains so. I set out to refute that view and present what I believed was a better approach. I think I did a pretty good job of that and still affirm most of what I wrote. However, while rejecting the details of looking into the future, I still expressed hope for a happy outcome to human history. My views now are more explicitly uncertain about the End.

I concluded Triumph of the Lamb with these words: “From start to finish, the Bible records the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creation. There has always been a longing for a time to come when true peace shall reign over all the earth. Fear, hatred, and bitter tears will be no more. The affirmation of Revelation 21 and 22 is that this fulfillment, the conclusion of history, will be worth all the pain and struggle which humankind has experienced throughout the ages. The completion of God’s work is the New Jerusalem—the establishment of the holy city—within which God’s people will reign for ever and ever. If the city of Babylon is characterized by terror, deception, and injustice, the New Jerusalem is the exact opposite. There the nations walk in harmony and justice and peace, where the light of the glory of God guides everyone’s path” (Triumph of the Lamb, p. 164).

While I did not think that Revelation, or anywhere else in the Bible, taught a timeline for the End Times with specific predictions of the final events of history, I did believe that the Bible gives trustworthy promises that we will experience a genuine New Jerusalem at the end of time. I believed that Revelation was predicting that much about the future—and that we should believe that that prediction will happen.

So, I had quite a bit of confidence that we could know from the Bible that the human project will have happy ending. I no longer have such confidence. These are the final words of my 2022 book: “The peaceable message that Revelation proclaims, I suggest, is not a message the everything will turn out okay in the end. It is not a message of an interventionist God who is in control of history. It is a message of the sovereignty of love. It is a message of the call to let love shape our lives and ideals and convictions and loyalties in all areas of life” (To Follow the Lamb, p. 269).

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What does it mean to be human? [Questioning faith #26]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 25, 2023

One of my favorite theologians, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish thinker who died in 1972, wrote a profound little book called Who is Man? back in the 1960s. In that book, Heschel laments the negative view of humanness in our modern world. The human being, he writes, “is being excessively denounced and condemned by philosophers, theologians, and artists.” Heschel asks, what does the modern worldview say about us? “Humans are beasts. The only difference between humans and other beasts is that humans are beasts that know they will die. …You must cling to life as you can and use it for the pursuit of pleasure and of power.” Heschel concludes that human beings have “very few friends in the world, certainly very few in the contemporary literature about them. The Lord in heaven may prove to be humanity’s last friend on earth.”

While some Christian thinkers do agree with Heschel’s own positive humanism, a great deal of Christian theology—academic and popular—more likely reinforces the problems Heschel laments. In its actual view of humankind, Christian thought often has differed little from secular philosophy in its hostility toward humanity.

Hostility toward humanness

The roots of this hostility toward humanness go back a long way, perhaps at least to the fourth century, to the theology of Augustine and his powerful doctrine of original sin. This doctrine evolved into John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity. Human life, in the immortal words of a later Augustinian, Thomas Hobbes, is inevitably “nasty, brutish, and short.” We are born sinful, rebellious, and basically despicable.

It is highly ironic though, that these views commonly led to strong support for violent governmental control over the general population. I have never understood the logic. Why does belief in human depravity lead to trust in people with power? Why do we think rulers will transcend their own depravity and use their monopoly on violence in undepraved ways? Tying together negative views of humanness with support for domination systems has a long and still vital history. We’re all pretty bad, we’re told. That’s why we need so much military and police violence, to keep our human proclivity toward evil in check. But what about the human proclivity toward evil of those building, buying, and wielding the guns?

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What (if anything) is special about the sacraments? [Questioning faith #25]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 19, 2023

Probably the places in Christianity where the “sacred” and the “mundane” intersect the most directly are the churches’ sacramental rituals, particularly the observance of communion. Views range from the Catholic notion of transubstantiation, where the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Jesus—and where the actual attainment of salvation depends on one’s participation in (and belief in) the miracle of the Eucharist, to some “low church” views wherein the communion ritual is strictly mundane and symbolic. Even more extreme is the Quaker understanding where there is no communion ritual at all.

As one whose views are decidedly low church, I have not experienced the communion ritual as being very important or meaningful. However, I have thought about it quite a bit and have found my general idealism about the importance of the way of Jesus to be something that informs my views of the sacraments (in this post I will only reflect on communion and will not address the practice of baptism).

I do feel reluctant to take up the issue of communion. It’s not so much that I have personally had negative experiences with communion—actually my experiences have mostly been positive. But I do know people who have had hard experiences: the denial of participation in the Lord’s Supper for my friend’s father back in the 1930s for owning life insurance, a trauma that still haunt her; the gay man who was refused communion when he returned to his home congregation hoping to rebuild a sense of connection; the teen-ager who was told she was too young to take communion, making her feel like a second-class Christian even though she deeply desired to follow Jesus….These exclusions have bothered me.

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Should we bother with church? [Questioning faith #24]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 16, 2023

I did not grow up with churchgoing as part of my identity. My family did go to church regularly until I was eight years old, but I don’t think it was that important for us. When their Methodist congregation folded, I don’t believe my parents grieved much. Then, for nine years I rarely went to church. At the age of 17, by my own choice, I began attending a Baptist congregation. In the 50+ years since, I have always felt that going to church was my choice, and when I have had extended periods of not going, I did not feel guilty or unhappy—unlike many of my friends over the years for whom churchgoing has been part of their identity. These days, as I think about church, I have a lot of mixed feelings.

In the Bible, human beings are given salvation so that they might embody God’s will in this life. From the calling of Abraham and Sarah to the final revelation of the New Jerusalem, the Bible portrays lived salvation as community centered. Faith communities provide the context for human flourishing. However, in our fallen world faith communities also in practice have often not actually been that healthy for people. Their legacy is ambiguous. So, when I think about the Christian church, the questions come pretty quickly—especially one set of questions: The church, comforter or afflicter? The church, a place that heals or a place that hurts? The church, oppressor or liberator? The church, a blessing or a curse?

I have an answer to these questions: “Yes!” What I mean is, in my experience, the church has been both a blessing and a curse. We invest ourselves in this community, we make ourselves vulnerable to each other, we care deeply. The rewards can be great—but so too can be the disappointment and hurt.

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Is Christianity the only way to God? [Questioning faith #23]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 11, 2023

A number of years ago, my wife Kathleen and I visited a Sunday School class in a large Mennonite congregation. The speaker was a member of the congregation who had just returned from a year in the Far East, and he was reporting on the experience. He talked about how he found the religious beliefs and practices that he had seen so interesting. He then told how he tried to encourage his new friends to be the best Buddhists (or it could have been Hindus) they could be.

I learned later that this comment caused a bit of a furor. People who believed that faith in Jesus as Savior is the only way to find salvation were distressed. The speaker’s embrace of religious pluralism, his implied belief that any number of religions can lead a person to God, raised concerns.

Religious pluralism as a fact of life

This issue of Christian faith in relation to other religions grows ever more challenging for Christians in our globalized world. Here in the United States, we can no longer avoid asking about different religions. Many of us travel around the world, doing business with people from many cultures and religious traditions, and, if nothing else, rub shoulders in grocery stores, ethnic restaurants, and even in our own neighborhoods with other-than-Christian religious folks.

I taught for many years at a tiny Christian college in small, fairly remote town in Virginia’s Shenandoah valley. I had students who were Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist. Our favorite places to eat in town have included restaurants operated by recent immigrants from Nepal, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Germany, Thailand, India, El Salvador, Mexico, and Ethiopia. A few years ago, I heard that our local public high school had students from sixty-four different countries who spoke forty-four different languages—and represented many different faiths. Religious pluralism has become part of our everyday life, like it or not.

So, what do we think of the various religions of the world? How do we relate our own Christian faith to Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and so on? How does our understanding of the religions fit with our broader theological convictions?

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Is there such a thing as a Christian political philosophy? [Questioning faith #22]

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Ted Grimsrud—April 22, 2023

As long as I have cared about Christianity and politics, which is about as long as I have been a pacifist, I have thought that we need a political philosophy that captures key elements of the biblical vision of human social life. None of the main options one encounters in a political theory class (such as liberal democracy, communism, or monarchy) seem to come close to doing that. That leaves pacifist Christians with a kind of disembodied political philosophy—which is surely part the reason that pacifism seems too unrealistic. To try to fit pacifism into a philosophy of liberal democracy where a core principle is that the meaning of the state rests on its monopoly on legitimate violence is like trying to fit the proverbial round peg into a square hole.

Not long after I embraced pacifism, I learned to know a couple of anarchists. They helped open my eyes to a possible option. Then, when I took a class on the history of political theory in graduate school, I was pleased that the professor treated anarchism as a legitimate theory within the cacophony of theories that have been articulated in the western tradition. He didn’t spend much time on anarchism in the class, but that recognition of anarchism as a serious political philosophy planted a seed for me. I am still trying to make sense of Christian pacifism as a realistic and important set of convictions for people of good will. In this post, I want to reflect on the possibility that something like anarchism (or, more precisely what I will call an “anarchistic sensibility”) actually may help us imagine better the political relevance of pacifism.

What is anarchism?

The term “anarchism,” similarly to “nonviolence,” is a negative term that in its most profound sense speaks of a positive approach to human social life. Though the term “anarchism” literally means against “authority” (arché), it is at its heart—as I understand it—not mainly against something. It is for freedom and for decentralized ways of organizing social life that enhance human well-being. Anarchism has an unfair, though not totally unfounded, reputation for being violent, even terrorist. There indeed have been numerous acts of violence in the name of anarchism, perhaps most notably in the US the 1901 assassination of President McKinley at the hand of a self-proclaimed anarchist (though one who had few links with other anarchists).

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Are we inherently violent? [Questioning faith #21]

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Ted Grimsrud—April 16, 2023

One of the difficult issues that often comes up in discussions about pacifism is the widely held view that human beings are inherently violent. A common version of this view holds that we are born with a disposition toward violence that is part of our genetic makeup, in part because violence is necessary to successfully compete in the dynamics of survival of the fittest that is characteristic of the human project. Hence, violence is natural, and pacifism is unnatural and unrealistic—and untenable.

Not all pacifists agree with what I will argue for about human nature here. In fact, I first developed the ideas about human nature that I believe fit best with pacifist convictions for a public debate with a pacifist who argued for what I describe below as the “hard-wired view.” My debate partner believed that the call to pacifism that Jesus made was actually a call to defy our basic human nature and make a conscious choice to embrace love. I admire people who take this approach, but I also think that most people who take the hard-wired view draw from it bases for anti-pacifist conclusions. More importantly, I think the more pacifism-friendly view of human nature I will sketch actually fits the evidence we have about human existence better than the other options.

Views of human nature

I will summarize three general viewpoints concerning human nature that I think represent the main options: the “hard-wired view,” the “blank-slate view,” and the “flexible view.”

(1) The hard-wired view posits that human behavior is largely determined by a quite thick reality of human nature. One main focus of many with this view is on our genetic make-up, asserting that our behavior is profoundly shaped by our genes. As concerns violence, the “hard-wired view” tends to see human beings as naturally violent. We are born violent, we tend toward violence, our work of minimizing violence should focus on finding relatively non-harmful outlets for these naturally violent tendencies. At best, we may redirect violent tendencies, but we cannot hope to live without violence.

(2) At the opposite end of the spectrum from the hard-wired view, we may speak of the blank slate view. This view asserts that it is meaningless to posit a “human nature;” we are all born with blank slates, and human behavior is totally shaped by our environments and is variable and non-determined.

(3) A second alternative to the hard-wired view we may call the flexible view. This view, which I hold, agrees with the hard-wired view that human nature is a meaningful concept, but would differ from that view by denying that human behavior is in any meaningful sense determined by genetics or, really, by any other unchanging element of human nature.

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Why do so many Christians support warism? [Questioning Faith #20]

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Ted Grimsrud—April 13, 2023

One of the aspects of Christianity that has long troubled me and has played an increasingly significant role in my sense of my own faith has been how Christianity has for so long and so decisively been comfortable with “warism” (by which I mean to believe in war, to have a generally uncritical and positive disposition toward preparing for, threatening, promoting, and ultimately fighting in war). I grew up in my family with a mild warism and a vague Christian sensibility and had no sense that there could be a tension between the two. After my conversion at age 17, my religious convictions became much stronger as did my warism (in church, I was presented a very favorable view of America’s wars).

However, a few years later, I embraced Christian pacifism and became convicted that warism and Christian faith should be mutually exclusive. The contradiction became apparent once I began to see Jesus’s message as politically normative for Christians. Very quickly, I also came to see warism as deeply problematic on its own terms even when not judged in light of Jesus’s message. Mainly, though, my convictions about Jesus showed me the inherent problems with warism. As John Prine sang back in those days, “Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason for.” I faced a crucial historical question. What changed? If Jesus was about peace, how did his followers become so warist?

Christianity’s turn from Jesus’s way

From the time of my embrace of Christian pacifism, I have wanted to understand better why the large majority of Christians have tended not to do likewise. I learned that the history of Christianity from New Testament times to the fourth century is ambiguous on questions of war and peace. Hence, analyses tend to be contested. I feel comfortable saying, though, that earliest Christianity did (with few exceptions) apply Jesus’s teachings in a way that led to pacifism. We have no record of a Christian leader supporting participation in warfare until the 4th century.

The evolution of Christianity during its first few centuries did move in the direction of the acceptance of war even though not in overt and direct ways. The big picture political situation changed early in the 4th century when Emperor Constantine formally established a rapprochement with Christianity following generations of intense and at times deadly persecution. Christians, it seems, accepted that connection immediately and without debate and in short order became soldiers and supporters of the Empire’s wars—to the point that less than a century after the initial rapprochement, only Christians were allowed in the Roman military.

Shockingly (at least from the point of view of Christian pacifism), the history of Christianity since the 4th century is, essentially, a history of the largely uncritical acceptance of war in almost all Christian communities. This is shocking because this warism seems so drastically contrary to what Jesus advocated. It is also shocking because we have virtually no record of debate or disagreement with the turn toward war among Christian leaders. And it is shocking as well that Jesus’s life and teaching essentially disappeared from the main accounts of Christian theology and ethics (this is apparent early on in the authoritative creeds and confessions of the churches that, typically, if they mention Jesus’s life at all, jump from his virgin birth to his crucifixion).

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