Michael Westmoreland-White over at Levellers is starting a series on the Biblical basis of Christian pacifism. With all of the arguments over homosexual ordination and marriage, this is gearing up to be a series about something that I actually think is an essential praxis of Christianity - nonviolence. I always like MW-W's combination of rigor and passion, and am looking forward to seeing where he goes with this series on Christian pacifism.
7 comments:
Yeah, Michael does good stuff over there.
Thanks very much, guys. Aric, can you send me a password to your blog now that it is restricted. My email is on my blog.
The 2nd post is up.
Michael,
My old blog is not active. It is restricted purely because I haven't reconciled myself with obliterating all that writing yet, but no blogging is going on there. This is where I write now when I have time. I'm cheering your series every step of the way!
Cool. Aric, I hope some of that writing is translated into pdf form and become book chapters, articles, etc.
3rd installment is up.
BTW, not to be picky, but Levellers has 3 "ls," because I use the 17th C. spelling of the Leveller movement.
Absolute pacifism is not viable in this world because situations do arise when self-defense is entirely justified.
That having been said please check out this reference on Rightness and Justice.
www.dabase.org/p9rightness.htm
It is an essay taken from this remarkable book.
www.dabase.org/not2.htm
@ Anonymous
With all due respect, I think you put forth a potentially poisonous piece of thinking there, that just because there are some situations we can imagine where we might need to resort to violence to protect ourselves, pacifism is not viable. What you mean is that pacifism is viable for 99.999% of situations, except for the very unusual situation of self defense, and even then, there are thousands of examples of nonviolent self-defense to draw inspiration from.
So what I tend to say is that pacifism is totally viable and absolutely morally necessary, and that in the unusual case where one must violently defend their own lives (soldiers don't count because when you go to war you buy into radical violence necessarily) then in those extremely rare cases, it is understandable to perhaps fail to be peaceful. Though situations where there is no peaceful defense possible exist primarily in ethics classrooms in my experience, and there are plenty of cases where violent defense escalated a situation out of control - meaning that violence is not a viable option either most of the time.
Post a Comment