So, John, one of the connections you've made with this Kingdom focused gospel or
the gospel of the Kingdom would be from Matthew 5:39 -- that's that you resist not evil.
Sometimes, we've called this term as Mennonites "non-resistance", but you've
made some objections to that term. Explain maybe why you dislike that term
and what do you propose as an alternative?
Well, Jesus did say, "Don't resist evil", but I noticed in most of the translations -- the newer translations at least --
it says "resist not an evil man"
because it tells us in the next verses how we're to relate to evil men.
We're supposed to bless them. We're supposed to do good to them. We're supposed to love them.
But what I see in the passage right after that -- do not resist evil men.
I see resistance of evil. I think the term "non resistance" has tended to make
us think in passive terms. We just don't fight back. We don't push back
on anybody. We just hunker down and just are nice people and don't fight, but
we're in a real battle. The Bible says that we are in a battle, but the
weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they are mighty to the pulling down
of strongholds and every high thing that exalteth itself against God.
So I think the term "non resistance" tends to minimize the conflict,
not defensive warfare -- sorry, the offensive warfare that we are to be in against sin.
So I see those verses right after Jesus is saying "don't resist evil men", I see an
interesting picture of a genuine resistance against evil that is
very different from what most people think. We're under a
different commander, different rules of engagement, different goals, different
means of attaining those goals. So, a man slaps you on the face. It says if he
slaps you on the right cheek -- now I'm gonna demonstrate this. I'm not gonna
really hit you, but if I'm gonna hit you on the right cheek,
it's gonna have to be this. It's a back slap. It's an insult.
You're not supposed to tell him -- you're not supposed to say, "Now
you hit me on the cheek."
Okay.
You're just supposed to turn it. Now, he
has to make a decision. He has to make a decision whether he's gonna slap you again.
That's gonna be different from what he was expecting, and that's gonna
start to do something inside of him that's really going to challenge the
evil that's in him. Or the person that says, "now go this second mile." He wasn't
expecting that. That's going to also be something that God can work with
in his heart. This is gonna catch him totally off-guard. He's not gonna have
any kind of concept how you relate to that. Or if he takes away your coat and
you say, "here, you can have my cloak." Well in the Old Testament, you weren't
permitted to have a man's cloak overnight at least. You didn't give your cloak.
It was taken as a pledge and had to be given back by evening. So, when
you say, "Here you could have my cloak. Just go. That's fine, you can have
that too." That's gonna be something different from
what he was expecting. The person that tries to take advantage of you by
asking you for something you say, "Well, yeah, here I have something to give you."
So these are different rules of engagement. It's actually
fighting against evil on a different level.
But still fighting is what you're saying?
Yes!
Still provoking. Still advocating.
It's the ideal resistance.
The ideal resistance. Well, that's the term I think we're hunting for.
That's the term, yes.
Okay, so, it's resistance, but it's ideal resistance and different from non resistance
in that it's not just passiveness.
Right. It's active.
It's Pastor Peter in the Emmental who they're taking the thatch off his roof
and he comes out and says, "You guys worked hard all night. You're hungry.
My wife has a good breakfast for you. Come on in for breakfast."
Don't we just call that passive - aggressiveness?
I call that the ideal resistance.
How about nonviolent resistance? Martin Luther King JR?
Yeah, now I think you're resisting evil men. Yeah.
Okay.
I'm gonna make that distinction -- resisting evil men means you actually engage
people in putting them down. Yeah, I don't know how to describe it.
I'm putting you on the spot there. That's unfair.
You are putting me on the spot. Well, let me first of all
read something here. The early church was really, really an active church.
It wasn't passive by any means. Julian the Apostate who tried to revive paganism in
the fourth century was really frustrated because these Christians were doing
something that his pagan people were not doing. I'm gonna read what he says:
These impious Galilaeans [the Christians] not only feed their own, but ours also,
welcoming them with their agape. They attract them as children are attracted
with cakes. Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor, the hated Galileans
devote themselves to works of charity and by display of false compassion have
established and given effect to their pernicious errors. Such practice is common
among them and causes contempt for our gods.
Because Christian charity was beneficial [this is a commentary on that]
because Christian charity was beneficial
to all including pagans, Imperial authority was weakened.
So see this was not just passive. They were out there. We often wonder why the early church had
such tremendous influence on their society. They won the heart of the Roman
Empire within 300 years. This hated sect that the Roman Empire tried by several
desperate waves of persecution to completely obliterate before it ever got
started in 300 years found itself overtaken by it. Without lifting a sword,
they won the heart of the Roman Empire by observing and by dying and by passive - not passive -
by ideal resistance against evil and the wrongs in their society.
You could just go down through history. The Anabaptists did something very similar.
They were the first people in modern history to propose a free society--
separation of church and state that had been together for a thousand years.
They dared to challenge that and declare freedom of conscience and voluntary
church membership and adult baptism . They actually were the pioneers of
religious freedom. Nobody, but nobody was talking about such freedom during the Reformation.
How did they win that battle? They won it at the stakes.
They won it by persecution and suffering. Peter has something to say about
that too. He says, "If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye for the
spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you." (1 Peter 4:14) It's in the suffering that
this kind of resistance brings on where the glory of God is shed abroad in a way
that it isn't any other way. It's a little bit like Gideon's pitchers. You know
when they smashed those earthen pitchers --which they're sort of representative of our bodies--
that's when the light shone forth. So this is a real battle
and people say, "Well suppose you do all of this and you still get killed?"
What's a battle? There are casualties in battle and people die.
You have Dirk Willems. But my, oh my. I don't think Dirk Willems ever imagined the
tremendous influence and the imagination he would fire in the hearts
of people for the Gospel by that act that he did. So this is a battle
and there is an ideal resistance and it has results. I contend that the freedoms
of Western civilization basically found their roots in Anabaptism.
We weren't political people so you can't just trace it, but that's where it was
introduced into the consciousness of society.
You said elsewhere that the Pax Romana or at least that claim of this Roman 200-year peace in
time of prosperity wasn't won so much by the power of Rome as by the willingness
of Christians and ideal resistance. Could you unpack that?
Well, the Pax Romana which when I was in public school, they said it's
because of the strength of the Roman army. Nobody dared resist the Roman army.
That's not really what was happening. That Pax Romana was coterminous with
the 200 years, 300 years of peace that the church had. For 200 years the church
refused to permit any fighting soldier to be a member of the church.
Then in about AD 174, we have the first record of a fighting soldier joining the church
and that opened a horrible Pandora's box. Now we have Christians killing Muslims
in Jerusalem. We have the Inquisition where Christians are torturing and
burning other Christians at the stake. We have the conquest of the American-Indian
preached as the will of God. We have blacks enslaved by Christians defended
from the pulpit. We have the Latin America conquered under the sign of the cross.
We have all the wars of Western civilization. There was a horrible
Pandora's Box that opened, but before that, the church had maintained its
witness of peace. I did not bring the quotes along, but you can read the quotes.
They say that the reason for this Roman peace -- the Christians -- is because the King of peace has come.
He's established the kingdom of peace. It's the prayers
of that Kingdom that keeps the devil's activity in the world at bay.
You think it would be a pretty displeasing thing to say to some provincial governor in
Rome saying, "Well, this peace that you guys think you're upholding. It's ours,
and it's for our King, thank you very much."
That's what they said.
Oh that would probably make, bring some reason for persecution down, I would assume.
I'm not sure. You know, at the end of Isaiah 53, there's an interesting verse. It says
"Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the
spoil with the strong." (Isaiah 53:12) Now when you divide spoil, it's because you won a battle.
But how did Jesus win it? He won it by dying. That's the pattern
He set for us -- that there's a great victory to be won, but it will be
won by suffering and by dying.
So there's the teaching of Jesus in say the Beatitude,
and then there's an actual embodiment of it in the Gospel.
You're suggesting there that the gospel is actually the form.
That's the shape. That's the movement of the ideal and of our own resistance, but
it's a pattern of winning it.
It is. Some people call it reverse-fighting where you die to win.
Not the expected way to win.
But I mean it's history. That is seen in the early church. Its seen in Anabaptists and this isn't just theory.
This actually has happened. You see, some of the same thing with the
Wesley's who basically saved England from a bloody revolution.
That's acknowledged by historians by their preaching and of course if you read the
story of the Wesley's preaching, they suffered a lot. They were mobbed and
they had a lot of persecution, but they managed to get the gospel into the
hearts of people and what just about happened in England which would have
been similar to what happened in France, never happened.
Well, let's talk history just a little bit. You talk of the Anabaptists, and talked about the
time period of the Reformation. How did the Reformers grapple with this issue?
Well, they believed that the old covenant and the old laws of the Old
Testament were still in effect and they saw warfare something legitimate to the Christian.
They somehow overlooked that Jesus said "This is what used to be said,
but I say unto you ..." They just ignore the fact that Jesus was making a
change. He said to Peter whenever Peter lopped off the high priest's ear,
He said, "Put your sword in its sheath. All they that take
the sword shall perish by the sword." (Matthew 26:52) Tertullian said when Jesus sheathed the
sword of Peter, He sheathed the sword of every Christian. Jesus also said,
"My Kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight." (John 18:36)
His Kingdom isn't of this world, and His servants don't fight. They use different weapons.
They use different rules of engagement and they get different results.
In some of the history that can be overlooked, you've got that time period
of the Reformation -- a lot of freshness, a lot of newness. For that time period
what's frequently neglected is what actually follows after that when there's
alliances formed. There are struggles of power and there's all of this kind of
posturing that goes on and then there's just war -- thirty years of it. The 30 years of
war and following that, some people would point to the Peace of Westphalia of
saying, Enough. This is too much. You're ripping Europe apart. There's huge
swaths of say Germany, that are just devastated and because of that there has
to be something of a wedge put between the church and the state. That wedge
has only grown since then partly in the name of peace is that the church has
been put to the sidelines of what politics is.
I'll just ask this question yet on the heels of what I just said. How do you
work with the current contemporary context that we have in
which if there was some kind of integration between church, state and
violence (which frequently happened), that integration is no longer there in a lot
of Western societies where there's a separation that's been forcibly placed
there between church and state. What is this Gospel of the Kingdom and
especially as you're talking about it, the ideal resistance?
Are there opportunities here?
Well, I answered the number on the CAM billboards.
The biggest question is "If God is all-powerful and He's all
loving, why He doesn't do something about all the suffering in the world?"
My answer to that is "He did." He sent Jesus to initiate a Kingdom and it was
to preach the gospel through the whole world. If it had done that and the
gospel of peace that we're talking about had been part of that gospel, I can
visualize a world that's altogether different from the world we're living in.
What happens is the gospel gets taken to other countries without
the ideal resistance concept, and so a whole bunch of people in those countries
become Christians, and then a war breaks out and these Christians all take up swords and kill people.
That's what happens when the gospel is preached
without the gospel of peace. Rwanda was touted as the most Christian country in
the world four years before the genocides occurred. It was touted as the
most Christian country in the world. Four years later the Hutus and the Tutsis
basically tried to annihilate each other and they were all professing Christians.
That's what happens in our world whenever the gospel is preached without
this ideal resistance and the teachings of Jesus and how to really resist evil is not taught.
They're still relevant?
It is still relevant.
Absolutely.
Back at the end of the 1700's, beginning of the 1800's, you had the
Methodist circuit riding preachers. There was one of them by the name of
Jesse Lee. Jesse Lee one night was preaching to a full house of people and
they couldn't all get in, and so there were some boys sitting on the outside,
outside the door, and they created a major disturbance, almost disrupted the meeting.
Jesse Lee singled out one of them and very gently -- the man later
admitted he was very kindly rebuked for the way he behaved, but it made him so
angry. He determined that before Jesse Lee left that night, he was going
to whip him, but Jesse Lee somehow got away and that didn't happen. Years later
when this man was a grown man when the incident was practically forgotten and
all the hatred in his heart had basically subsided, this man is in town
one day, and he saw a cart leaving in front of him on the way home on the
trail. He looked at it, and he thought, "That looks like Jesse Lee." So he pulled up
beside him, and he said, "Are you Jesse Lee?" And he said, 'Yes." He said, "Do you remember
an incident..." [I think it was like 15 years before] "...you remember this incident?"
And Jesse Lee said, "Yes, I remember." He said, "Well, I determined that night, I was
going to whip you." He said, "I'm gonna do that now." And Jesse Lee said, "Well, I'm
an old man and if I decided to fight you, you would win.
Besides the Bible says the man of God is not supposed to strive, so that
would not be the thing to do anyway, so if you just give me time to get down off
this cart into the middle of the road, you can whip me as long as you want to."
And the young man said a terror gripped him. A horrible feeling gripped him.
And he said, "I got on my horse and I rode away from that scene as fast as I could go."
That's the power of this ideal resistance. Something genuine happened
there in that man's heart. That won't always work that way because like I said,
we're in a battle. Although you know, you ask our people who
believe in ideal resistance what they would do if somebody attacked their
family. I don't know what most people would say, but I'll tell you what one
couple did when they were attacked. They were in a motel. They were in the
city of Atlanta. There were a couple thugs loose in the city. There have been
a couple murders, and the city authorities said keep your doors shut,
keep them locked, be suspicious of strangers because of these two murderers
loose in the city. Well, this couple was a missionary couple, and they were just
visitors there in a motel. They were expecting friends to come in and so they
just left their door open so the friends could walk in. They never heard the warning.
In walked these two murderers. What would you have done? They told them
to get to the floor. The pattern was then they would shoot their victims
once they were on the floor. The man did that, but his wife was sitting on the edge of
the bed, and she got up, and she walked straight toward them singing a gospel song
and they fled. Now that won't always happen, but that's one of our weapons.
The Bible says God inhabits the praises of Israel. (Psalm 22:3) I would like for every family
that is practicing ideal resistance to think, not just pray when they're
attacked, but start singing. That's the best way to bring God's presence into
the situation. So, there, I'm just giving that as an
example. There are weapons. There are means by which we can appropriate God's
special power and grace in those situations. Besides when we're
talking about being attacked personally, you know there have been police studies
done as to what kind of methods will give you the best chances of survival if
you're ever attacked or your family's attacked because they're always
interested in knowing what is the best way for police to handle these
situations. The research shows that if you're armed, you stand
less chance of surviving than if you're not armed. So this is realism.
This isn't just idealism. See everybody assumes that if you have a weapon and
you defend your family, that you will succeed. That's not to
be concluded because many people take that approach and die and the police
studies actually show that your chances if anything are a bit better if you
don't meet violence with violence. So Jesus' teaching here is very realistic.
Even realistic in the sense too that if a person would die in
that situation, they're practicing ideal resistance, if that is actually something
at the heart of the gospel, you're just working with the pattern of the universe.
That's the structuring principle and to die in the structure of the universe in
that way, it sounds like resurrection to me.
Amen. Amen.
Okay, well, one final question here:
you could probably talk about this for a while, but it seems to me that
these ideas of non-resistance, of ideal resistance, they're very
much part of the Anabaptist heritage. You've already identified that too.
What would you say to those people who are currently maybe in the Anabaptist
tradition in some way or another and are considering leaving as it connects to
this heritage of non-resistance, ideal resistance?
Well, that's a great perplexity to me. I often say to them "What did you do with non resistance?"
I had an uncle who married an evangelical and left the Anabaptist churches.
Actually helped establish an evangelical church in a city. A very religious man.
I said to him, I said, "Uncle, what did you do with non-resistance?"
"Oh, I'm still non resistant." But his children aren't and
I don't understand that. I mean to me, we're not talking about whether you wear
hooks and eyes or where you part your hair. We're talking about whether you
condone the killing of people. So this is a great perplexity to me.
I do want to back up. There's something I did forget to say. I wanted to read. I didn't
think I had this here, but I do. The testimony of the early Christians to the government.
This is Origen: Our prayers defeat all demons who stir up war.
[He's writing to the Emperor. Okay.] Those demons also lead
persons to violate their oaths and to disturb the peace accordingly in this
way. We are much more helpful to the kings than those who go into the
field to fight for them and we do take our part in public affairs when we join
self-denying exercises to our righteous prayers
[And that's those deeds of mercy that we were talking about.]
and meditations which teach us to despise
pleasures and not to be led away by them. So none fight better for the king than
we do. Indeed we do not fight under him even if he demands it, yet we fight on
his behalf forming a special army, an army of godliness by offering our prayers to God.
It's amazing. And it goes on to say,
and if he would have us lead armies in defense of our country, let him know that we do this too and we do
not do it for the purpose of being seen of men or for vain glory for in secret
[In other words, he's saying, it's secret. We do have an army that we're leading.]
in secret and in our hearts our prayers ascend on behalf of our fellow citizens
as from priests. So Christians are benefactors of their country more than others.
This is amazing. Now, if you ask most people who
don't follow this path about this historical fact that the Christians did
not fight for the first two centuries they say, "Well, in the Roman army
they were especially pressured to worship Caesar like they wouldn't have
been if they wouldn't have been in the army. They had to regularly do this, so that's
why they weren't in the army." But that's not what the early Christians said.
They said the reason they weren't there is because
they were in a different Kingdom and they were fighting a different battle --
fighting the battle in a different way.
Still a battle, but different means, different weapons.
That's why I say ideal resistance. I want all of us to realize
that we're not supposed to just passively sit by and see evil take place.
I mean if I had lived in Hitler's Germany, I certainly wouldn't have joined
any resistance against him with carnal weapons, but I think I'd have been trying
to think creatively how I could resist that evil and of course many people did.
They risked their lives to save these people who were threatened and put their
lives at great risk and some of them lost their lives. So I think that's
the kind of thing we think about. How can we resist this evil and still not be
resisting men, but still blessing them, doing good to them, praying for them, and
showing love to them and yet resisting the evil.
Would you like to say anything
more yet about people who are considering leaving or jettisoning the
heritage of non -- ideal resistance.
Now, every culture is rooted in its values. If you go to India, you'll see a culture there
and if you start to talk to them, you'll find that there were values that
those cultural practices were the expression of. And that was true for us too.
So now I'm looking and churches are wringing their hands. Why do we have so much individualism?
Why do we have so much self-expression? Why do we have so much disunity?
Why do we have so much self-will? Yeah. We discarded the
practices and then the values disappear. We cannot delude ourselves into
thinking that we can have values that really have no distinct expression.
So, you're suggesting there's a two-way relationship with values, practices?
Yes. I'm not saying that we could not
have improved on some of those practices. In fact some of them we
certainly could, but to just simply say, "We don't need those anymore. We really
don't need any cultural expressions." That's denying the fact that God made us cultural people.
Go all over the world and every culture develops
really, every culture are practices that grow out of the values of those societies.
Christianity will produce a culture. It's like Finny said this morning --
it's something you can see. It's something tangible. It's the way the
people talk. It's the way they look. It's the decisions they make, the places they
go, the clothes they wear, the way they do their hair. There's gonna be a culture.
So if we're gonna deny culture, we can just basically scrap the values that we
as Anabaptists have stood for.
So there's this one connection here I've got to
call out, and that's that you've talked about culture, and you've also
talked about ideal resistance. I think what I hear you saying is that the ideal
for the values of ideal resistance actually begin to form some kinds of
cultural expressions. Could you talk about those a little bit?
Now, I am unprepared for this one. I'm trying to think what the
culture expression of the ideal resistance is.
Well, you've made one already.
This idea of Gelassenheit or yieldedness would have quickly become something of an expression of that.
Yes. Well, I would say our whole culture of not
having lawsuits against people, not pressing charges against people when
we're wronged. Returning good for evil. I mean, we do teach that and and there is
practice of that, but as far as any cultural expressions, I can't just
now think of any of that particular aspect of our belief.
If nothing else though, the cultural practices and norms that are there of say non retaliation through
lawsuit -- incredibly valuable.
Yes, it is. Of course we've always been known we will not go into combat.
I mean those are cultural practices.
The call I hear you giving is don't too quickly despise or reject those.
They're important. They're actually influential in shaping a person maybe especially children.
Well, on this one I will say this: if we are going to allow
ourselves to become acculturated in our society, it's going to be much, much
harder for us to maintain an ideal resistance because we've
shied away from the whole idea of having a distinctive culture. So, if the rest
of our culture has become merged with the culture around us, then this one's
going to disappear too. I will say that.
That makes sense.
Okay, well, John, thank you for joining us. It's a talk about ideal resistance.
Those that try to hang on to their lives, they're going to lose them. Those that
surrender and give their lives, these are the ones that you expect to bear much
fruit and to gain eternal life. Thanks again, John.
I would just like to say it's all about the Kingdom.
Amen.
It's not about getting to heaven.
It's about getting heaven to earth.
Very good.
It's here and now.
Thank you, John.
God bless you.
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