We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

5757504378_6208d5a775

Little Pacifism

Richard Beck spoke about something he names Little Pacifism on his Experimental Theology website. It’s so easy, in the name of peacemaking, to become angry and aggressive. I suppose this is just part of what it means to be human. However, if we hope to bring the Kingdom of God closer the earth (and to our neighborhoods) it just makes sense to start small, to start where we are. Let’s not behave violently, in the name of non-violence. And, by all means, let’s try to avoid being jerks whenever possible.

From the article:

I think one of the biggest failures of the pacifistic witness is when we don’t practice nonviolence in our personal relations. Pacifism is too often projected onto the global scale. The conversation becomes almost exclusively about war between political powers. And no doubt that’s an important conversation. But it can get a little abstract and philosophical. And some pacifists can be less than charitable toward others. Let’s call this big conversation heroic pacifism.

Me? I don’t think a lot about heroic pacifism. I probably should, but I spend most of my time thinking about violence in my personal relations, how I treat people–my family, people at work, people at church, people in the line at the store, commenters on this blog. My practice of nonviolence isn’t heroic in scale. I practice a little pacifism, a small pacifism. I try not to be a jerk.

Image by David Goehring. Sourced via Flickr.

Related Reading

homosexuality, truth telling, and love

A Guy Taking Pictures via Compfight A couple weeks ago, we posted a portion of Greg’s sermon (and his comments) on the marriage amendment in Minnesota, homosexuality and finding a “Third Way”. Today we’re continuing the conversation by linking to a blog post by Sarah Bessey called In which I tell you the truth about…

Put on the Armor of God

The whole of the Christian life is an act of war against the enemy as we follow Jesus in storming the gates of hell (See post.) No passage better illustrates this than Paul’s metaphor of spiritual armor from Ephesians 6. He writes that Christians are to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength…

What About Jesus’ Violent Parables? A Response to Paul Copan (#7)

Copan’s Argument. In Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG) and Cross Vision (CV) I argue that the violent depictions of God in the OT are incompatible with the non-violent, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing God who is fully revealed in the crucified Christ. It’s my contention that we therefore need to interpret these violent divine portraits, as well…

Thank You Obama for Denouncing “Christian” Violence: It is Actually Far Worse Than ISIS

Picture Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza It seems some conservative Christians are up in arms because of something Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday. After condemning ISIS and religiously-motivated violence in general, the president added: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other…

Does the Old Testament Justify “Just War”?

Since the time of Augustine, Christians have consistently appealed to the violent strand of the Old Testament to justify waging wars when they believed their cause was “just.” (This is Augustine’s famous “just war” theory.) Two things may be said about this. First, the appeal to the OT to justify Christians fighting in “just” wars…

The Politics of Jesus, Part 2

Even in the midst of politically-troubled times, we are called to preserve the radical uniqueness of the kingdom. This, after all, is what Jesus did as he engaged the first century world with a different kind of politics (see post). To appreciate the importance of preserving this distinction, we need to understand that the Jewish…