A Revolutionary Jesus

You can either put them at the end of the shelf or give them away, but you can now dispense with John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (for more than one reason) and even Stanley Hauerwas’s The Peaceable Kingdom. Even André Trocmé’s Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution. The book now to put at the most-accessible end of the shelf is by Jesse P. Nickel, and it is called A Revolutionary Jesus: Violence and Peacemaking in the Kingdom of God. There are plenty of important studies about peace in the Bible (I’m thinking Swartley, Seibert) and peacemaking (I’m thinking of Friesen, Werntz, Cremer, Strait), but Nickel’s book is now the best accessible study of Jesus the peacemaker. Plus, there’s a wonderful little new book by Hauerwas called Jesus Changes Everything. But Nickel updates all of this scholarship and takes us in a fresh direction. Nickel did his PhD on Jesus and eschatological violence, and it’s published as The Things That Make for Peace: The Synoptic Jesus and Eschatological Violence (BZNW 244; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021). He teaches undergrads, he has been working on the theme for years, and this book distills his insights–both about Jesus and about the wider issue of violence.

On the flyleaf my endorsement reads: “The way of violence and the way of peace–they are incompatible. Peace doesn't come through strength, and violence doesn't give rise to peace or the kingdom. Both Rome and the Rome-infested political powers of Judea in the first century were too bent on violence, and neither led to a lasting peace. Jesus was a consistent and thorough advocate of peace. Jesse Nickel’s A Revolutionary Jesus both updates a minority strand of Jesus and Christian scholarship and also extends Jesus studies by a more careful discussion of the problem of violence. I really like this book, and hope many will.”

The tension in the Christian tradition, he points out, looks like this: “Yes, affirm Christians, violence is bad, and Jesus taught against it. However, some of those same Christians continue, in certain circumstances, violence may unfortunately be necessary. The specifics of such circumstances are diverse, as the boundary lines fall in different places for different people. But at a certain point, some other factor–whether it is the need to resist evil, or to protect the innocent from harm, or for self-preservation–outweighs the vague ‘badness’ of violence, making it the preferable option. Although it may have lamentable side effects, although it can do great harm, when used in the right way, for the right purposes, by the right people, violence can be an effective (sometimes, it is believed, the only effective) tool against the forces of evil and injustice.”

The tension then is that Jesus practiced and taught peace; subsequent Christians opted out of his consistent vision for the purposes of realism. Why?, Nickels is asking, do so many Christians not walk in line with Jesus. His introductory sketch mentions those who think Jesus was not consistently nonviolent, the God-endorsed violence of the Bible (not just the Old Testament), the “ongoing, powerful presence of evil and injustice in the world,” the conviction and experience that violence at times has been useful to thwart evil, “and the conviction that to refuse violence wholesale is morally and ethically problematic.” All of these “contribute to the willingness to endorse certain forms of violence” by Christians, knowingly (in many cases) veering away from the idealistic vision of Jesus.

Like Ron Sider, Nickel lays down this fundamental direction: “If Jesus is truly Lord, and therefore is owed my allegiance; if Jesus says word is truth, and therefore is owed my obedience; if Jesus is the author and perfector of faith, and therefore is owed my invitation, and quite literally everything else must be secondary. Jesus gets the final say.” Not realism, no safety, not nationalism.

He continues,

“I believe that violence and death are among the ‘powers and authorities’ that God ‘triumphed over’ on the cross of Jesus. The damage they continue to do in our world, and the impact that this continues to have on people, must not be allowed to set the terms of engagement. Jesus does. So, no matter how unrealistic or utopian my perspective might seem to be, I feel compelled to point to Jesus and to declare with Luther: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other’.” And this: “My contention is that if Christian identity has, at its heart, Jesus's teaching and example, then violence is not an option, and in fact, peacemaking is the necessity.”

His Introduction maps out the widespread violence of Rome, and how that violence shaped the identity and the leadership for Rome for centuries. Thus, “Violence was, therefore, integral to Roman identity and power. Everywhere the Roman presence was known, and its imperium was in effect, Roman violence, and the threat thereof, became part of the reality that everyone had to negotiate.” He lays down, as the parallel to Rome’s violence, the reality of violence in Israel, not least from the time of the Maccabees onward. But “zeal for the Lord,” from Phinehas onwards, was bedrock for many who believed it was better to die than to be compromised in Torah observance. In Israel, and at the time of Jesus, “a legacy of violence that is explicitly interwoven with religious piety” had formed. He pushes harder: “The long legacy of violent zeal for Yahweh includes a proliferation of acts of resistance and rebellion against the Romans between the mid-first century BCE and the Jewish-Roman war of 66-73 CE.” The acts of rebellion were of course crushed by Rome, but resistance didn’t die.

“Into this world and its violence came a man from Galilee known as Jesus of Nazareth.” His vision and practice were unlike the ways of Rome and Jerusalem. We can dispute how consistent Jesus’s nonviolence was but what is not disputable is that Jesus was far from the ways of the future Zealots and the ways of the Maccabean Revolt.

For at least two hundred years, if not more, after Jesus the church maintained a consistent vision and practice of nonviolence. Just like Jesus. Nonviolence “became a nonnegotiable part of their lived-out identity.” What happened after that leads to the deep tension in the Christian story.

Join us in reading Jesse Nickels together.