Author: Stef Miles
Over recent years, I've noticed an increasing emphasis within parts of the church on the importance of social justice. And rightly so. Jesus himself had an extraordinary concern for those pushed to the margins and the oppressed. Take Luke 4 for example: right at the beginning of his public ministry, he announces good news for the poor, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord's favour. Any gospel that says nothing meaningful about injustice and others' suffering is missing something important.
And this concern goes deeper than simply advocating for those on the margins. In Matthew 25, Jesus makes the claim that whatever we do for the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned, we do for him. He so closely identifies himself with those who suffer that to encounter them is, in some sense, to encounter him.
But there's also something worth noticing when we return to Luke 4. Reading from Isaiah 61, Jesus stops short of the prophet's words about "the day of vengeance of our God". This detail is often overlooked, perhaps not recognised or sometimes easily dismissed, but I don't think it's insignificant. Jesus announces liberation and God's favour, but leaves vengeance out of the picture. Could this tell us something about the kind of justice Jesus has come to announce? A justice that takes suffering seriously, but refuses to perpetuate the cycles of violence that have contributed to it?
(By social justice, I mean the church’s contemporary work for the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised, which I see as a faithful expression of the justice Jesus announced in Luke 4.)
Since starting The Nonviolent Gospel Network, I've had a few people ask why social justice doesn't feature more prominently in what we're trying to do, or why it isn't more front and centre. I think that's a legitimate question, and one I want to take seriously.
My response is that I see things the other way around. Rather than making social justice the starting point for the church's life and discipleship, I believe we need to begin with the nonviolent way of Jesus. What concerns me is that churches that centre social justice can quietly stop forming people in nonviolence, enemy-love and forgiveness. This isn’t because justice matters any less, but because nonviolence goes deeper. It speaks to the very nature of God and the kind of people we are being invited to become. And when we take that seriously, a deep concern for justice, liberation and the suffering of others should naturally follow. In other words, nonviolence doesn't take us away from justice; it gives our understanding and pursuit of justice its direction.
So, what if nonviolence needs to become the central concern for the church's life and discipleship?
Where do we begin?
If we begin with social justice, we can easily find ourselves understanding the gospel primarily as a call to make the world a fairer, more equal and just place. These are important aspirations, but is that really where the gospel begins?
For me, the starting point has to be Jesus, and more specifically, the crucified and forgiving Jesus. As I keep saying within this Network, everything starts at the cross. The cross isn't simply one important event within the Christian story. It is where our understanding of God, power, justice and what it means to be human is radically challenged and reshaped.
As I've explored in more detail elsewhere in the Network, at the cross, human violence, religious authority and political power all converge against an innocent victim. And there is something deeply significant about the fact that Jesus doesn't simply stand alongside victims of violence and oppression. He becomes one of them. The one who identifies himself with the hungry, the imprisoned, the excluded and the suffering ultimately enters into the very experience of victimhood himself. At the cross, we encounter God not among those exercising violence and power, but in the innocent victim who suffers at their hands.
And what do we see in Jesus? We don't see God retaliating, overpowering his enemies or meeting violence with greater violence. Instead, we see Jesus refusing to participate in the violence being directed towards him, responding with forgiveness rather than vengeance. And when the risen Jesus returns to the very disciples who rejected and abandoned him, he comes bearing the wounds of violence, but without any desire for retribution. His first words are, "Peace be with you."
This matters enormously. The cross and resurrection reveal something about the very character of God. They show us a God who does not overcome violence by reproducing it, or establish justice through retaliation and domination. This is the God we are invited to trust and whose character we are called to embody.
Nonviolence gives justice its orientation
If we begin with the crucified Jesus, we have a different starting point. We begin with a God whose power is expressed through self-giving love, whose response to enemies is forgiveness, and whose desire is not to destroy but to restore.
This doesn't mean justice becomes less important. Rather, it means our understanding and pursuit of justice must be shaped by the character of this God.
Nonviolence is a much deeper theological category because it speaks not simply to what we are trying to achieve in the world, but to the very nature of God, the way God relates to humanity, and the kind of people we are being formed to become.
Social justice tends to direct our attention towards the conditions of human society: inequality, oppression, discrimination, exploitation, poverty and the distribution of power and resources. These are all profoundly important concerns. But the gospel is doing something more fundamental than seeking to improve the conditions of human society. It is transforming us: our desires, our relationships, our understanding of power, our relationship with enemies, and ultimately our participation in the life of God.
Nonviolence gives justice its theological orientation. It asks not only whether we are pursuing something just, but how we are pursuing it. Are we confronting wrongdoing without seeking revenge? Are we challenging oppression without dehumanising those responsible? Are we protecting the vulnerable and holding people accountable without simply reversing the power relations that caused the harm in the first place?
We can pursue social justice while leaving largely untouched the underlying human instincts that generate violence, rivalry, domination, oppression and exclusion. This is why I struggle to see nonviolence as simply one ethical concern alongside a range of others, including justice, equality, etc. It reaches much deeper.
More than a social project
I wonder whether we sometimes underestimate just how much the gospel is about the transformation of humanity.
There are many charities, organisations and movements doing wonderful work in addressing social injustice, and rightly so. The church can and should stand alongside much of this work. But what makes the church distinctive is the gospel it carries and the God to whom it bears witness. The church is called to reveal something of the character of the God we encounter in Jesus, and to invite people into participation in God's own life. That means becoming a community shaped by the self-giving, forgiving and nonviolent love we see in Jesus.
This is more than a social project. It is the formation of a new kind of humanity.
It is possible to become deeply committed to particular causes, to campaign against injustice and to advocate for a fairer society, without necessarily being formed in the character of Jesus. We can be right about the things we oppose and still find ourselves shaped by resentment, hostility and the desire to defeat our enemies.
This is how I understand the Sermon on the Mount: as an invitation to be formed away from the patterns of rivalry, competition and retaliation that so often contribute to the making of victims. The gospel is not simply about how we respond to injustice, but about being transformed away from the very patterns that produce and perpetuate it.
Of course, nonviolence doesn't ask us to be passive, ignore wrongdoing or protect those who abuse their power. Nor should forgiveness ever be used to silence victims or avoid accountability. But surely the question is whether we can resist evil without becoming shaped by it.
The church's calling is to become a living expression of the new humanity revealed in Jesus. A people learning to love their enemies, practise forgiveness, pursue reconciliation and refuse to return violence for violence. And when a community is genuinely being formed in this way, a deep concern for justice must follow. It would be very difficult to take the way of Jesus seriously and remain indifferent to the suffering, exclusion and oppression of others.
A bigger gospel
I don't want to suggest that the church has become too concerned with justice. If anything, we need to take injustice far more seriously. Fr. Joash Thomas, a friend of the Network, has written a fantastic book called The Justice of Jesus, which I'd thoroughly recommend. It has been instrumental in helping me recognise how deeply the Western Church has been shaped by colonialism, and how easily it continues to reproduce these same patterns, without even realising it.
At the same time, I wonder whether we also need to recover a deeper starting point.
What if we stopped treating nonviolence, enemy-love, forgiveness and peacemaking as optional extras, or particular interests for a certain kind of Christian? What if we recognised them as central to the gospel itself, because they reveal the very character of the God we encounter in Jesus?
Perhaps the church needs to take much more seriously the task of forming people in the nonviolent way of Jesus. Because when we begin with the crucified and risen Jesus, justice doesn't disappear. It finds its proper place, inseparable from love, forgiveness, restoration and the refusal to reproduce the violence we seek to overcome.
The invitation of the gospel is not simply to make the world a more just place. It is to become a new humanity, learning to embody the very character of the God revealed in Jesus.