The Nonviolent God

by J. Denny Weaver

This bold new statement on the nonviolence of God challenges long-standing assumptions of divine violence in theology, the violent God pictured in the Old Testament, and the supposed violence of God in Revelation. In "The Nonviolent God" J. Denny Weaver argues that since God is revealed in Jesus, the nonviolence of Jesus most truly reflects the character of God.According to Weaver, the way Christians live -- Christian ethics -- is an ongoing expression of theology. Consequently, he suggests positive images of the reign of God made visible in the narrative of Jesus -- nonviolent practice, forgiveness and restorative justice, issues of racism and sexism, and more -- in order that Christians might live more peacefully.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Church, Race

304 pages, Paperback

Published November 26, 2013

About the author

J. Denny Weaver is Professor Emeritus at Bluffton University where he taught for 31 years. He continues as editor of The C. Henry Smith Series. His most recent books include The Nonviolent Atonement, 2nd edition, and the co-authored Defenseless Christianity: Anabaptism for a Nonviolent Church. His many articles and chapters in edited books as well as speaking engagements address a variety of topics related to nonviolence, violence in traditional theology, atonement theology, the character of God, violence in society, and Anabaptist history and theology. He has lectured in the United Kingdom, the Congo, and in Germany.

Reviews

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book restates the author’s nonviolent atonement motif that was proposed in his previous book, The Nonviolent Atonement, and then proceeds to (1) confirm that this understanding of the character of God is broadly supported by all parts of the Bible, and (2) suggest examples in daily life how this can be lived in typical daily life. In sum the book provides an approach to and an understanding of Christian theology with which people from nonviolent Anabaptist traditions can be comfortable. (A copy of the table of contents from the book is included at the end of this review for reference.)

Part I of the book is an analysis of what can be learned about the character and activity of God from the narrative description of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus as contained in the Bible. The Gospels, Acts, Paul and Revelation are first examined, and based upon this material the author provides a summary of "narrative Christus Victor" as presented in the author's previous book, The Nonviolent Atonement. Narrative Christus Victor is the author's theory of atonement that reflects the nonviolent message of Jesus more consistently than other traditional theories.

A fuller description of "narrative Christus Victor" can be found in my review of The Nonviolent Atonement. It is an understanding of atonement that corrects shifts in Christian theology that occurred after Constantine made changes that led to Christianity becoming a state religion.

The last chapter of Part I goes through both the Old and New Testaments highlighting the apparent instances where violence appears. The book then revisits these and other passages with a second look using a nonviolent lens. The character of God is thus revealed as being a nonviolent God through the message of Jesus, and the overall nonviolent "grain of the universe" becomes apparent in the Old and New Testaments.

Part II of the book explores ways that the nonviolent character of God is made visible on earth. This part of the book offers some sketches of what a church might look like whose mission is to continue the presence of Jesus Christ as a witness to the reign of God in the world.

To fill out the picture of Jesus as the witness to the reign of God in the world, the first chapter in Part II (Chapter 6) begins with some additional theologizing about Jesus in the New Testament. Five different Christological images are found in the New Testament (based on paper by JHY). Since the visible witness to the social order of believers church ecclesiology presumes a theology for living, sketching these five images facilitates the purpose of this part of the book.

_1. John's logos Christology against the backdrop of a Gnostic hierarchy.
_2. Hebrews' Jesus against a sacrificial cosmology.
_3. Colossians' Jesus in terms of a cosmology held together by a system of principalities and powers both "visible and invisible."
_4. Revelation's Jesus as key to history, the slain Lamb who can "unroll the world's judgment and salvation."
_5. Hymn fragment of Philippians' Jesus pictured in the image of a new Adam.

These are independent Christologies but there is a deep structure common to all five. This deep structure has six components (based on paper by JHY):

_1. The Christology resulted when the New Testament writer had taken the narrative of Jesus into another culture or linguistic world, and used the language of that world to talk about Jesus.
_2. Rather than place Jesus into the slots the cosmic vision has ready for it, the writer places Jesus above the cosmos.
_3. The New Testament writers each had a powerful concentration upon being rejected and suffering in human form beneath the cosmic hierarchy.
_4. Salvation consists not of being integrated into a cosmic salvation system but of being called to enter into the death and resurrection of the Son.
_5. There is affirmed co-essentiality with the Father.
_6. Claim that the writer and the readers of these messages share by faith in all that victory means.

The author draws four implications from the above:

_1. The classic creedal formulas are not necessary as the guarantee of what came to be called the deity of Jesus (but remain important historical references).
_2. Theologizing is never finished due to changed contexts. Thus the need for this book for our current context.
_3. A contemporary theolgy that is "biblical" is a theology that struggles with the same issues as did the New Testament writers.
_4. Christological statements that fit the characteristics found in the New Testament are Christology for living.

The book then reviews the significance of the historical creeds and then asserts that they are a philosophical system no longer compatible with our current world view and not adequate for a lived theology today. These observations lead to a new understanding of a lived theological understanding of the narrative of Jesus and the idea that we relate to Jesus by being his disciples and living in his story.

"Applied specifically in our contemporary context of relativism and pluralism, it means discovering how to witness to the ultimate truth of Jesus when there is no external source of appeal to guarantee the truth of Jesus." ... " It is the commitment to live out of and within the specific story of Jesus found in the Bible ... that gives the Christian expression of lived theology its particular identity as an ecclesiology, its particular non-controlling way of being a church in the world."

The author then discusses how the church can be the lived narrative of Jesus through baptism and being a church community, voluntary church, and a peace church.

Chapter 7 then adds some specificity to the practice of peace and nonviolence with a discussion of the practice of peace and nonviolence including hands-on day-to-day examples of how others have dealt with confrontations with potential and real violence.

Chapter 8 displays the nonviolence of God in the particular context of salvation and God's forgiveness of sin. The discussion makes the case that the narrative Christus Victor motif models God's forgiveness and becomes the basis for understanding the practice of reconciliation in the context of conflict and injustice.

Chapter 9 discusses what we can learn from the narrative of Jesus and his teachings that are guidelines for how to approach issues of Race, Gender, and Money.

Chapter 10 makes the case that respect for the natural world by humans is valued, and the author shows alternative views to the assumption that nature is always violent. The second part of this chapter tackles theodicy (the book doesn't use that term, however). In other words, why do people suffer? Weaver shows that God is with those who suffer under the narrative Christus Victor motif in contrast to the image of God one may get from the satisfaction theory. It is our lives as Christians in the midst of suffering that give witness to our faith in God.

Chapter 11 concludes that this books has given visibility to the nonviolent character of God made especially visible in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The author provides a poignant personal experience while serving with Christian Peacemaker teams (CPT) in Haiti as an example of the reign of God today. The traditional image of the trinity is recognized as another way to describe the presence of God and the reign of God in the world. In final conclusion the author provides two images of "The New Jerusalem" referenced in Revelation 21. One image is an intrinsically nonviolent view of the reign of God and the church today that lives in and give witness to the reign of God. The second image (from N.T. Wright) is to believe that God's salvation will be a restoration of earth and all its systems, human and otherwise.


The following is the Table of Contents for this book which I've placed here for reference.

PART I: THE GOD OF JESUS

Chapter 1. Jesus in Acts and the Gospels
_a. The Earliest Statements: Acts
_b. Expanded Statements: The Gospels
_c. The Significance of the Resurrection
_d. Narrative Christus Victor: Round One
__(1) The Story as Atonement Motif
__(2) Characteristics of Narrative Christus Victor

Chapter 2. Jesus in Revelation and Paul
_a. Revelation
__(1) Reading Revelation
__(2) The Message of Revelation
__(3) The Seven Seals
__(4) Beautiful Woman versus Dragon
__(5) Preliminary Conclusion
__(6) Wrath, Judgment, and Divine Violence
__(7) The Rider on the white Horse and Armageddon
__(8) Millennium and Great White Throne
_b. Narrative Christus Victor: Round Two
_c. Narrative Christus Victor: Round Three
__(1) The Writing of Paul
__(2) Jesus’ Death as a Sacrifice

Chapter 3. Engaging Atonement Tradition
_a. Traditional Atonement Images
_b. From Narrative Christus Victor to Satisfaction Atonement
_c. Responding to Challenges
__(1) The Challenge of Paul
__(2) The Challenge of Newness
__(3) The Challenges of Threefold Synthesis and of Keeping One Version but Not Another
__(4) The Challenge of Guilt

Chapter 4. Divine Violence: Bible versus Bible
_a. Biblical Violence and Divine Violence
__(1) Divine Violence: Old Testament
__(2) Divine Violence: The Gospels
__(3) Divine Violence: Today’s Version
_b. The Bible: Another Look
__(1) The Old Testament
__(2) Counters to Gospel Violence

Chapter 5. The Conversation about God
_a. God versus God
_b. An Arbiter: The Narrative of Jesus
_c. The Authority of the bible
_d. Anger, Wrath, and Judgment
_e. Why It Matters

PART II: THE REIGN OF GOD MADE VISIBLE

Chapter 6. Christology and the Body of Christ
_a. Five New Testament Christologies
_b. Nicea-Constantinople, Cappadocian Trinity, Chalcedon
_c. Conversation of Christology
_d. Lived Christology Today
_e. The Church as the Lived Narrative of Jesus
__(1) Baptism: Creation of a New World
__(2) The Church: A Community
__(3) A Voluntary Church
__(4) A Peace Church

Chapter 7. Violence and Nonviolence
_a. The Nonviolence of Lived Theology
__(1) God in the Image of Humankind
__(2) Jesus’ Nonviolence
__(3) Nonviolence Applied

Chapter 8. Atonement, Violence, and Forgiveness
_a. Forgiveness in Narrative Christus Victor
_b. Forgiveness in Satisfaction Atonement
_c. The Practice of Forgiveness: Retributive Justice
_d. The Practice of Forgiveness: Psychology
_e. The Practice of Forgiveness: Restorative Justice

Chapter 9. Race, Gender, Money
_a. Jesus and Racial and Ethnic Reconciliation
_b. Jesus and Women
_c. Jesus and Economics
__(1) A Warning: The Unholy Troika
__(2) The Lord’s Supper: An Economic Model
__(3) Baptism and Lord’s Supper as “Sacraments”

Chapter 10. Nature and Suffering
_a. Jesus and Nature
_b. Two Kinds of Suffering

Chapter 11. Conclusion
_a. The Reign of God Today
_b. Trinity
_c. The New Jerusalem
__(1) Version One
__(2) Version Two
_d. Works Cited
_e. Index

Link to good review:
https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/publicati...

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going in, I was preconditioned to agree with Weaver’s arguments in this book. I lean on the Anabaptist and Christian nonviolence side of things, after all.

Yet, the first half of this book seemed weak. I think part of it was that I expected a theological argument, so I was surprised to see folks like Rob Bell and Brian McLaren being quoted. Now, I appreciate Bell and McLaren so it wasn’t that I think they’re heretics or something. I think it was more I see them as popular level writers, so I wasn’t expecting them to be quoted in, what I thought was, a heavier theological work.

I truly wonder if my perception of Weaver’s book was down because I was reading Sergius Bulgakov’s The Lamb of God at the same time. Bulgakov is incredibly deep and profound which, to no fault of Weaver’s, made this other read seem less profound.

That said, there were some points of contact between Bulgakov and Weaver. Weaver is offering here a “lived theology” and it seemed like a logical practical and ethical next step from Bulgakov’s work. I doubt Bulgakov, as a Russian Orthodox scholar, would have thought so. But me, as someone who is drawn to both Orthodox and Anabaptist theology, I think so.

But herein lies perhaps another disappointment: Weaver comes close to playing the “when Christianity developed creeds everything went wrong” card. The story goes, once upon a time Christians just lived like Jesus and didn’t get all worried about theology, Trinity, hypostatic unions and ontology. Then Constantine made Christianity legal and they all stopped living like Jesus and just read books all day.

I know my description is an over simplification of the argument. But the argument is an oversimplification of what happened. If I recall correctly, both Sarah Coakley (God, Sexuality and Self) and S.T. Kimbrough (Partakers in the Divine Life) demonstrate how the early Christians after Constantine were still very much drawn to spiritual living and being like Jesus. In other words, folks like Weaver (and me!) can have the nonviolent Anabaptist ethical living without jettisoning the depths and profundity of Nicene and Chalcedonian Christology!

I mean, not to beat a dead horse, because I like Greg Boyd too, but Weaver flirts with Open Theism. Open Theism is fine, I suppose. I think all sorts of views of God can be debated and no one’s eternal salvation is dependent on getting everything about God correct (we’re talking about the infinite here!). But its the idea that to be nonviolent or have this nonviolent God you need to get rid of classical theism that kind of bothers me.

Give me the classical theism AND the nonviolence.

Anyway, I gave the book FOUR STARS despite all this negativity because in spite of all these flaws (oh yeah, I hate the word ‘theologizing’...stop using it Dr. Weaver) I still liked the book. Part two is really where he hits his stride as he describes what this nonviolent life looks like. He covers a lot of ground from war and mass incarceration to poverty and gender to even science and nature. I don’t know much else about Weaver, but part two of this book makes me think he is a brilliant practical theologian.

Overall, this is a good book. The biblical and historical theology side is good not great. The practical theology side is brilliant.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This builds on Weaver's views of the atonement to put them in the larger context of God's character. He argues that we can only see the character of God through Jesus as Christians and must be very careful about saying anything about God that we can't say about Jesus. He doesn't manipulate or ignore the OT texts that show God enacting or promoting violence, but says the passages that show both perspectives should be read as a conversation about God. The point of view I haven't heard articulated before was about how it is actually the resurrection, not the cross, that accomplished Christ victorious in the great cosmic conflict. The resurrection is the answer to the violence of the world. The chapters are organized around themes in Scripture and theology. I have a strong preference for theologies of the Body of Christ and this book includes that in its assessment.

[Vincent Waldron · Rating 3 out of 5]

J. Denny Weaver was professor at Bluffton College (now Bluffton University) for many years. I remember taking a religion course with him in the early 90s. He has written several books and seems particularly interested in the role of nonviolence in Christian interactions with the world around them.

In this book, he attempts to wrestle with the question of whether God is nonviolent, whether there is violence revealed in the crucifixion, and what all of this means to those who claim to follow Jesus' teachings. I am an Anabaptist and believe strongly in nonviolence (I would actually say that I believe in agape love of the world) and so perhaps, I should have connected well with the book. Unfortunately, I didn't really.

Weaver begins the book by focusing on Jesus' life and ministry and claiming that we can understand God best by looking through the lens of Jesus. That is to say, stories from either the Old Testament or New Testament that don't fit with Jesus' ministry must be tossed or reinterpreted to deal with this inconsistency. I suppose I begin to push back fairly quickly because I have a much higher view of Scripture than Weaver does.

When dealing with Old Testament passages where God told the Israelites to destroy another people group -- or for that matter when God judged the Jews with defeat at the hands of foreign powers -- Weaver resorts to claiming that the Old Testament authors either were in error, or didn't fully understand God's intentions. He finds verses here and there in the Old Testament that do speak to God's love and peaceful desires and parades them out. These are what God is all about. Never mind those other verses that seem to speak to judgment and justice meted out in a violent manner.

When it comes to atonement, Weaver has written about this elsewhere, but he restates his idea that we should focus, not on Jesus' death, but rather on His resurrection. Jesus revealed the love of God and gave His followers power over Satan and death with His resurrection. While I agree with focusing more on the resurrection, there is a sense in which the early Christians really did focus on the death of Jesus and His sufferings prior to death.

Moving on to Revelation, Weaver claims that the book is descriptive of past events, not prophetic at all. It covers Roman emperors through Domitian and has no interest in future events. There is no judgment here and most of the images of seals being opened are simply overblown descriptions of things that happened during the reigns of different emperors.

I struggled with this analysis of the Bible, not because it doesn't contain some germs of truth, but because it feels incomplete. I do believe that God is a God of love, but I also believe that He is a God of judgment. Peter healed a lame man and the other hand, spoke God's wrath down upon Ananias and Saphira. The whole book of Revelation reads to me like a persecuted church crying out for relief from suffering and eventually seeing God judge their persecutors.

The fact that God does use what appears to us to be violence in dealing with sin doesn't mean that He wants us to use the same tools. Here I am on the same page with Weaver. Christians in society should be known for their love -- not only of their friends, but also of their enemies.

As I said earlier, I struggle with this, because I don't think you can pick and choose what passages of the Bible you keep and which ones you discard. Thomas Jefferson notoriously created his own version of the Bible where all of the miracles were discarded, and Jesus sounds like a wise philosopher. Weaver seems to want to do the same thing with any passages that don't speak of grace, mercy, and love.

The last third of the book deals with what nonviolence looks like in practice. I will say that here I thought Weaver spent too much time thinking about politics and not enough time contemplating what every day Christians could do to demonstrate their desire for peace.

Does it mean buying ethically sourced coffee and clothes? Does it mean supporting undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ individuals? Weaver would say that it does, but even here, he seems to think mostly about political ways of helping these people.

Here, I feel that Weaver is not specific enough or hard hitting enough. Love of neighbor has to mean more than voting for the right politicians. Jesus did speak against accumulation of wealth, about giving generously to the poor, and ministering to the needy. I'm not sure what this looks like for every Christian, but it feels as though it should be life changing.

Weaver uses the writings of Rob Bell and Brian McLaren in this book. He quotes extensively from John Howard Yoder (never mind the problematic nature of Yoder). He borrows a bit of N.T. Wright as well, as he talks about Christ's atonement and even ultimate justice (Wright believes that somehow humans who were evil in their lifetime will morph into something nonhuman that can then be judged).

I thought the book was a bit difficult to read. It isn't that the concepts are that hard to understand, but that they are written in a fairly didactic way. The book reads more like a textbook than anything else. It was an interesting read, but not one that I will read again.

[Christopher Good · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seven out of ten.

I'm a firm believer in nonviolence. That's why I bought this book, and I agree wholeheartedly with most of Weaver's conclusions about the lived theology of the gospel revealed in Jesus. Pacifism, economic levelling, a spirit of welcome--these are Biblically substantiated doctrines, and Weaver does a fair job, in most cases, of defending them.

One thing I couldn't stand about this book, and should have been able to guess at before reading, is that its arguments are based on a non sequitur. Weaver argues that all of God is definitively revealed in the incarnation of Jesus, and therefore that any idea of God that goes beyond Jesus' dogged nonviolence is patent fiction. This argument seems a little weak considering that Jesus did other things, such as dying, which are not part of the Almighty's character. I think it's much more logical, and requires less textual gymnastics, to see nonviolence as part of a greater fabric of morality which God created for the human race. And if God created morality in the first place (which he must have, because it is not simply an extension of his character), He is not subject to its demands. Those demands will, of course, be consistent with His will, but they cannot claim to constitute it entirely, much less to limit it. Jesus' nonviolence, then, rather than defining God, defines part of the example we as God's servants must follow.

Furthermore, it seems from Weaver's exegetical diarrhea that he can't digest the Old Testament. Limiting God to nonviolence means that he has to deal with all the (apparently God-sanctioned) violence it contains. According to Weaver, there are two options: either those who heard God's call to violence heard wrong, or they didn't hear Him at all and made up the stories later to justify their slaughter. Both theories fail to explain, as one example, why God continued to bless the Israelite conquest of Canaan. I'm not prepared at the present to throw out large chunks of the Bible for a pet doctrine. This idea, and Weaver's larger distrust of literal interpretation, are also misaligned jarringly with his utter reliance on the Gospels as fact supporting Jesus' nonviolence.

I'd have trusted this book and its premise more if Weaver hadn't held the attitude throughout (and used it to support his point) that this quote from the conclusion typifies:
"[The Bible] does not stand as a transcendent source of rules that dictate theology and behavior for the twenty-first century. . . . What I have written in this book about the character and activity of God continues a conversation begun in the pages of the Bible. The result is a statement for our time of theology that is specific to Jesus, who made and makes the reign of God visible in the world."

Why did I still give this book a four-star review? In many ways, it's a valiant effort. After supporting his spin on the Christus Victor atonement theory with similarly liberal readings, Weaver revisited it in simple language with which I could conscientiously agree. His reading of Revelation, with which I don't agree at all, nevertheless exposed a flaw in my own. And despite repeated attempts to politicize his nonviolent gospel, Weaver's lived theology is sound and attractive.

I recommend this book to students of God, of nonviolence, and of Anabaptist thought.