Walter Wink > Quotes

“...Jesus did not advocate nonviolence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy, but as a just means of opposing the enemy in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just as well. Both sides must win. We are summoned to pray for our enemies' transformation, and to respond to ill-treatment with a love that not only is godly but also, I am convinced, can only be found in God.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“Evil can be opposed without being mirrored. Oppressors can be resisted without being emulated. Enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.”
― Walter Wink

“for God's sake, let's be done with the hypocrisy of claiming "I am a biblical literalist" when everyone is a selective literalist, especially those who swear by the antihomosexual laws in the Book of Leviticus and then feast on barbecued ribs and delight in Monday-night football, for it is toevali, an abomination, not only to eat pork but merely to touch the skin of a dead pig.”
― Walter Wink, Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions Of Conscience For The Churches

“Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the ends but not the means. Most of the old androcratic values and delusional assumptions remain intact.”
― Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination

“The issue is not, "What must I do in order to secure my salvation?" but rather, "What does God require of me in response to the needs of others?" It is not, "How can I be virtuous?" but "How can I participate in the struggle of the oppressed for a more just world?"Otherwise our nonviolence is premised on self-justifying attempts to establish our own purity in the eyes of God, others, and ourselves, and that is nothing less than a satanic temptation to die with clean hands and a dirty heart.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“I think people get excited about their perspective on sexuality because it gives them the feeling that, their failures notwithstanding, if they take a hard stand on what they consider to be godly, maybe God will be more merciful to them.”
― Walter Wink, Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions Of Conscience For The Churches

“Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“There is no one, and surely no entire people, in whom the image of God has been utterly extinguished. Faith in God means believing that anyone can be transformed, regardless of the past. To write off whole groups of people as intrinsically racist and violent is to accept the very same premise that upholds racist and oppressive regimes.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“Faith requires at times marching into the waters before they part.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“The polarization is such that the conservatives on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting. And the liberals on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting, and the two sides never get together and talk about it. The result is the tearing apart of the fabric of the body of Christ.”
― Walter Wink, Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions Of Conscience For The Churches

“Neutrality in a situation of oppression always supports the status quo.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“So many people, if the truth were known, live their lives on two levels. The principles they fight about are often at odds with the complicated and often frustrated lives they live. This is why there is so much intensity.”
― Walter Wink, Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions Of Conscience For The Churches

“In the final analysis, then, love of enemies is trusting God for the miracle of divine forgiveness. If God can forgive, redeem, and transform me, I must also believe that God can work such wonders with anyone. Love of enemies is seeing one's oppressors through the prism of the Reign of God--not only as they now are but also as they can become: transformed by the power of God.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“History belongs to the intercessors - those who believe and pray the future into being.”
― Walter Wink

“The practical consequence of both of the teachings noted is to encourage homosexual promiscuity. Church members can engage in many short-term liaisons without raising questions about their standing in the church. We tend not to pry into one another's private lives. But if a man brings another man to church with him regularly, if they give the same address and show signs of mutual affection, then there is likely to be a scandal. The dominant effect of church teaching is to encourage secret, temporary liaisons without commitment and to discourage long-term fidelity.”
― Walter Wink, Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions Of Conscience For The Churches

“The 'peace' the gospel brings is never the absence of conflict, but an ineffable divine reassurance within the heart of conflict; a peace that surpasses understanding.”
― Walter Wink

“Unjust systems perpetuate themselves by means of institutionalized violence.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the ends but not the means.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“The command to love our enemies reminds us that our first task towards oppressors is pastoral: to help them recover their humanity. Quite possibly the struggle, and the oppression that gave it rise, have dehumanised the oppressed as well, causing them to demonise their enemies. It is not enough to become politically free; we must also become human. Nonviolence presents a change for all parties to rise above their present condition and become more of what God created them to be.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“Neutrality in a situation of oppression always supports the status quo. Reduction of conflict by means of a phony “peace” is not a Christian goal. Justice is the goal, and that may require an acceleration of conflict as a necessary stage in forcing those in power to bring about genuine change.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known…Its presence everywhere is not the result of a conspiracy of Babylonian priests secretly buying up the mass media with Iraqi oil money, but a function of values endlessly reinforced by the Domination System. By making violence pleasurable, fascinating and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“The myth of redemptive violence is, in short, nationalism become absolute. This myth speaks for God; it does not listen for God to speak. It invokes the sovereignty of God as its own; it does not entertain the prophetic possibility of radical judgment by God. It misappropriates the language, symbols, and scriptures of Christianity. It does not seek God in order to change; it embraces God in order to prevent change. Its God is not the impartial ruler of all nations but a tribal god worshiped as an idol. Its metaphor is not the journey but the fortress. Its symbol is not the cross but the crosshairs of a gun. Its offer is not forgiveness but victory. Its good news is not the unconditional love of enemies but their final elimination. Its salvation is not a new heart but a successful foreign policy. Its usurps the revelation of God's purposes for humanity in Jesus. It is blasphemous. It is idolatrous.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“The ultimate weakness of violence,” observed Martin Luther King, Jr., “is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“The gospel, then, is not a message about the salvation of individuals from the world, but news about a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“I began to realize that if violence was my last resort, then I was still enmeshed in the belief that violence saves. And that meant that no matter how much I might object to any particular form of domination, I was still trusting domination and violence to bring about justice and peace.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“I cannot really be open to the call of God in a situation of oppression if the one thing I have excluded as an option is my own suffering and death.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“No war today could be called just, given the inevitable level of casualties and atrocities.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“Divine judgment is intended not to destroy but to awaken people to the devastating truth about their lives.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“Jesus does not encourage Jews to walk a second mile in order to build up merit in heaven, or to be pious, or to kill the soldier with kindness. He is helping an oppressed people find a way to protest and neutralize an onerous practice despised throughout the empire. He is not giving a nonpolitical message of spiritual world transcendence. He is formulating a worldly spirituality in which the people at the bottom of society or under the thumb of imperial power learn to recover their humanity.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

“Personal redemption cannot take place apart from the redemption of our social structures.”
― Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium