Why the Nonviolent Gospel? (Part 1/2)
Author: Stef Miles
Occasionally I’m asked, why call it The Nonviolent Gospel Network? Well let me try and answer that.
Over the last decade there has been a remarkable awakening among Christians who have found themselves re-examining the faith they inherited. This movement has often been called “deconstruction”, though that word now covers all sorts of different journeys.
For many, including myself, this has meant questioning long-held assumptions about God, Scripture, salvation, judgement and the cross. And somewhere along the way, many of us have discovered something unexpected: God is far more beautiful, loving and merciful than we were taught to believe.
I know that has certainly been part of my own journey.
I’ve found freedom from forms of Christianity shaped by fear, control, transaction and contract, and begun discovering a faith that, at least to me, more closely reflects the message of Jesus. Not a God who is demanding, coercive or retributive, but one who is loving, self-giving and reconciling.
Sadly, for some, this journey has meant losing faith altogether and finding themselves somewhere in the wilderness beyond Christianity. I hope they may yet encounter Jesus afresh, because I remain convinced that the gospel itself is good news beyond anything religion has often offered in its place.
Yet for many Christians, particularly those still shaped by sacrificial, transactional or fear-based understandings of faith, the phrase Nonviolent Gospel can sound strange.
What does nonviolence have to do with the gospel? Why make it central?
My answer is simple: because nonviolence is not an addition to the gospel. It is at the very heart of it.
Jesus Reveals the Character of God as Nonviolent
The gospel is first and foremost an announcement about God.
The scandalous claim at the centre of Christianity is that the God revealed by Jesus is not like the gods humanity has always imagined. The gods of pagan religion demand sacrifice, require appeasement, and sustain themselves through fear, violence, exclusion and death. Human beings offer blood in order to secure peace with such gods. Yet Jesus reveals something entirely different.
Jesus reveals a God whose very nature is nonviolent self-giving love.
This is why the gospel feels so revolutionary, and perhaps why it can sometimes feel unfamiliar even within Christianity itself. Over the centuries, Christianity has frequently clothed the gospel in the language and assumptions of sacrificial religion. The result is that the God revealed by Jesus can become difficult to distinguish from the gods of human imagination.
The God who forgives enemies begins to resemble a God who requires punishment. The God who loves unconditionally begins to resemble a God whose love must be purchased. The God who absorbs violence begins to resemble a God who needs violence.
When this happens, the uniqueness of the Gospel is lost. The Nonviolent Gospel Network exists because we believe the Church is called to recover that uniqueness.
And underneath that conviction sits what, for me, has become one of the most important theological questions we can ask:
Does Jesus reveal God, or must God ultimately be understood apart from Jesus?
If the Gospel accounts faithfully witness to the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, then we encounter someone who is entirely without violence, radically forgiving and wholly defined by self-giving love. We see him loving enemies, refusing retaliation, confronting religious scapegoating, welcoming outcasts and praying for those who crucify him. Then the apostolic witness makes an astonishing claim: this Jesus is “the image of the invisible God”.
If that is true, then surely the conclusion is unavoidable. The God revealed in Jesus is likewise without violence, radically forgiving and wholly defined by self-giving love.
Even the Church’s earliest doctrinal language points us in this direction. The Nicene tradition confesses that Jesus is homoousios with the Father, “of one substance”. It isn't exactly everyday language, but the point matters enormously. Christianity has historically insisted that we cannot drive a wedge between the character of Jesus and the character of God.
Jesus isn't the nice part of God. What we see in Christ is what God is actually like.
Does Jesus Get to Interpret God?
The decisive issue for me is not whether we can find violent images of God elsewhere in Scripture. Of course we can. The real question is whether Jesus is allowed to interpret them.
Too often Christianity has reversed the process. Rather than allowing Jesus to reveal and define the character of God, we have allowed pre-existing ideas about God to redefine Jesus. Instead of letting Christ become the lens through which we read Scripture, we have frequently used other parts of Scripture to explain away the revelation of Christ. I think this is a crucial mistake.
At some point, I began wondering whether we had the whole process backwards.
If Jesus truly reveals the Father, then his life, teaching, death and resurrection must become the interpretive centre of Christian faith. This doesn't make difficult biblical texts disappear or mean pretending there aren't tensions within Scripture. But it does mean wrestling with those tensions through Jesus rather than using them to construct a God who ultimately looks unlike him.
The Gospel announces that God is not like the gods. So why do we continue to smuggle into Christian faith assumptions about divine violence, retribution, fear and sacred coercion that seem incompatible with the revelation of Jesus?
End of Part 1