Spring 2020 · Vol. 49 No. 1 · pp. 90–92
Book Review
Disarming the Church: Why Christians Must Forsake Violence to Follow Jesus and Change the World
Eric A. Seibert. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. 322 pages.
Old Testament professor Eric Seibert pursues a straightforward aim in Disarming the Church. He wishes to make the case for nonviolence as an essential ingredient of Christian discipleship. It is not an optional extra for super disciples, but at the very core of Jesus’s teaching and witness. Seibert is “troubled by how much violence Christians condone—and sometimes participate in—and by how much violence the church sanctions and sometimes supports” (5). This book is his attempt both to persuade the unconvinced that nonviolence is the way of Jesus and to encourage the already convinced to persevere on this path, to deepen their conviction, and to more fully embody the nonviolent way of Jesus. Simply put, he wants the church to look more like Jesus.
Seibert proceeds methodically and meticulously, beginning with defining his terms. Violence is defined as “physical, emotional, or psychological harm done to a person by an individual(s), institution, or structure that results in serious injury, oppression, or death” (10). In contrast, nonviolence is “a way of life modeled after Jesus, one that completely rejects violence, actively confronts evil, and unconditionally loves others by practicing gracious hospitality, radical forgiveness, and deep compassion” (11). Seibert clearly wants to avoid the oft-rehearsed charges both that violence is too frequently reduced to a physical act and that Christian nonviolence is equivalent to a meek passivity in the {91} face of evil. His book proceeds upon robustly defined conceptions of the violence he urges the church to reject as well as the task of love that he believes we are compelled to pursue.
From this foundation, Seibert takes us on a tour of Christians behaving badly. From Christians participating in and championing warfare, to nurturing attitudes of hostility toward atheists and members of the LGBTQ community, to pastors counseling battered spouses to remain in toxic relationships, to supporting capital punishment, examples are piled up to demonstrate how poorly the church has often behaved in light of the teaching of Jesus. Whether because of misguided beliefs about the necessity of violence or because we’ve simply grown desensitized to the actual horrors of violence, or because we’re unaware of nonviolent alternatives, Seibert suggests that Christian history supplies far too much evidence of Christians lazily and self-servingly ignoring the teachings of Jesus and resorting to violence to either oppose evil or advance our own aims.
Seibert is, of course, aware that the Bible contains passages—indeed, entire narratives—that seem to sanction human violence or even present it as a direct response to the command of God. Consequently, he devotes a good part of the middle portion of the book to the biblical case for nonviolence. He positively appeals, of course, to the direct teaching of Jesus in the Gospels (i.e., the Sermon on the Mount) and Jesus’s example of laying down his life on the cross rather than resorting to violence to accomplish God’s aims. Troublesome passages from the Old Testament are neutralized via a Christocentric hermeneutic and a conviction that divine truth unfolds progressively in Scripture. Earlier parts of the story portray God’s character partially, at best, and are refracted through the lens of national self-interest. We do not look to Joshua to see the character and purposes of God—we look to Jesus.
After making the theological, practical, and biblical case for nonviolence, Seibert spends the second part of the book providing examples of what this looks like in the real world. He wants to furnish readers with stories of actual people responding to actual situations in nonviolent ways. From pretending to be an old friend of a man being assaulted on a train and thus confusing his assailants, to a group of nurses encircling a verbally abusive doctor who was browbeating a colleague and thus forcing him to acknowledge the pain he was causing, Seibert provides a comprehensive and moving set of examples of how real-life situations can unfold differently when people refuse to instinctively respond to violence in kind and instead point toward a hopeful alternative. In the realm of global politics, Seibert cites the Velvet Revolution and the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. as examples of how nonviolence can topple dictators and instigate massive social change. {92}
Seibert ends his book with the eminently practical and the close-to-home. Christian nonviolence is about far more than whether or not to march off to war or dealing with physical threats against ourselves and those we love. It also has profound implications in the ordinary domains of the home, the workplace, and our most intimate relationships with spouses, children, neighbors, and churches. Seibert argues that as Christians we must cultivate the disciplined imagination to see everyone we encounter through the eyes of God, to see them as dearly loved children, worthy of respect and care. Violence—whether physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual—becomes unthinkable when we view people this way.
I commend Disarming the Church to Christians seeking to be faithful to the way of Jesus, to non-Christians curious about how the church has tried (and failed) in this quest, and to anyone interested in the resources Christianity has to offer a world that in many ways remains addicted to violence. Seibert’s arguments are not new—this is well-tilled soil in Christian historical theology, and in Anabaptist reflection more particularly—and his presentation can be plodding and repetitive. But one cannot fault Seibert for his passion to see the church embody an alternative to the cyclical violence that our world seems unable or unwilling to leave behind.
In his postscript, Seibert quotes an anonymous Iraqi hospital manager: “Violence is for people who have lost their imagination.” This book is an honest, faithful, and comprehensive exercise in recovering our imagination for a peaceful church providing a necessary and compelling witness in a violent world.
