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The late theologian Walter Wink called it the Myth of Redemptive Violence.
It is the belief “that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. It is one of the oldest continually repeated stories in the world,” he wrote in his book The Powers That Be.
Using force to make our enemies pay just seems so natural.
Scroll through your Netflix menu this weekend and you’ll find hundreds of movies about cops, martial arts experts, secret agents, crime families, and cartoon superheroes. Part of the formula is the big fight scene at the end. That’s because it seems the only way to stand up for what’s right in the world is to go in shooting, karate-kicking, or bombing.
Film critics suggest that as many as 50% of Hollywood feature films utilize revenge or payback as a central theme.
In the real world, people of faith sometimes come to the same conclusion. If our call is to fight God’s enemies, we may have to resort to violence. Right?
We can always find a handful of Scripture verses to support that view.
Consider Psalm 58:10: “The righteous will rejoice when they are avenged, when they bathetheir feet in the blood of the wicked.” Or Psalm 149:5-7, where the call of God’s people is to “inflict vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples.”
Do the Old Testament psalms – the so-called Songbook of the Human Race – really give us permission to use “redemptive violence” to do God’s work in the world?
Let’s be clear from the start: You can prove virtually anything from a few verses of Scripture.
Do you remember the one about the guy who was desperately seeking God’s guidance? He decided to open the Bible at random. His finger came down on this verse in Matthew: “And Judas went out and hanged himself.” Hoping for a somewhat more encouraging message, he tried again. This time his finger came down in Luke: “Go and do likewise.”
A text without a context is a pretext. That’s one of the bedrock principles of biblical interpretation. What it means is that we must never stake our lives on our understanding of a single sentence. We must always look carefully at the wider context.
Let’s revisit Psalm 58:10, quoted above. We wouldn’t want to cling to that verse in isolation and say, “God’s approved way to solve problems is strike out at others; see, the Bible says so right here.”
Instead, we would want to ask a number of questions: What does the rest of that psalm say? What do all the other psalms say? What does the entire Old Testament say? And what does Jesus say, along with all the New Testament authors?
Followers of Jesus believe there’s no such thing as a stand-alone verse of Scripture.
If Jesus (who is identified as “the Word” in the opening verses of the Gospel of John) really represents God’s final Word concerning the meaning of life, we must look at every verse of Scripture through the lens of Jesus’ teaching and example.
What we discover is that Jesus had a lot to say about battling evil. We must always resist. But we must never resort to physical violence.
Isn’t it true, though, that Christians have sometimes gone to war for Jesus with crosses on their shields? Yes, that is true – but they never did so because Jesus told them to do such a thing. He made it absolutely clear that violence never serves his cause.
When Peter flailed with his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane and cut off the ear of one of those who had come to arrest his Master, Jesus’ response was immediate. “Enough. No moreof this!” he shouted. “Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword.”
Whereupon he reached out to heal the man’s ear.
As we noted earlier this year, Bible scholar Dale Bruner suggests that whenever followers of Jesus resort to physical force, all they end up doing is cutting off the ears of other people, making it harder than ever for them to hear the Good News.
It’s difficult to overstate the irony of transforming Jesus’ cross – the very place where God was making peace with the world – into a call to arms.
You may be among the myriad people who were inspired and motivated by Charlie Kirk. Or you may be among those who found themselves radically opposed to Charlie ideologically or politically.
What we all can agree is that the murder of the 31-year-old conservative activist earlier this week does not make the world a happier place, a safer place, or a better place. It is deeply tragic that his voice has been silenced in the public conversation, at the very moment that all of us need to listen more attentively, think more clearly, and embrace “those other people” more compassionately.
You may be thinking, “Yes, that’s all very nice, but it’s crucial that we actually win this particular war – this culture war – for the sake of future generations!”
But Jesus makes it abundantly clear that we must never pursue such ends by resorting to force, deception, or hatred.
And we must never give up on love.
The loss of Charlie Kirk and the 24th anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks have made this a truly somber week. Please, Lord, no more of this.
Let’s let Jesus have the last word:
“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).