spiritual revolution in response to human need. Jesus intended nothing less that an actual revolution, with debts forgiven, slaves set free, and land returned to the poor.
It was this threat to vested interests that awakened the hostility toward Jesus that led to the cross. Jesus understood the kingdom of God in terms of God’s work in human history; every sphere of life was a domain for God’s rulership. But he saw, too, that such rulership would always cost a struggle. The first Christians, who were charged with seditiously “turning the world upside down,” understood their master well. They had caught this vision and begun to live it out.
Trocmé is careful to locate Jesus within the socio-cultural context of his day. He therefore expends a great deal of effort surveying various movements, social groups, and patterns of authority and influence that situate Jesus and help to delineate his unique mission. Jesus’ way transcended the alternatives of his day, while at the same time it grew out of intense interaction with his contemporaries. Jesus was no spiritual mystic. He had to overcome the temptations of employing violence, of escaping into the desert, and of compromise.
Yet, as Trocmé shows, Jesus refused both the way of violence and of spiritual quietism. He called for practical changes but rejected violence as a means of achieving social change. Instead he articulated and exemplified a way of life that obviates the kind of social order that produces injustice and poverty, and the violence inherent in them. Jesus’ nonviolence was not a philosophy or a tactic, but a matter of obedience to God.
Trocmé makes it clear that Jesus should be the center of the church’s life and practice, not nonviolence or revolution or justice. Jesus’ nonviolent revolution, and ours, is rooted in the cross. Jesus was ready to sacrifice his “cause,” the liberation of his people, for the sake of a single human being in need of healing. Human need – be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or social – was Jesus’ reason for being, and should be ours. Jesus’ sacrifice makes possible a new social order where human lives are dignified with justice, uplifted in compassion, and nurtured by peace.
Trocmé takes the liberty of interpreting certain passages of Scripture in fresh ways. Though somewhat imaginative at times, he puts forth insights that in the broader narrative of Jesus’ life make perfect sense. Historical and exegetical work have subsequently proven Trocmé, if not right, then at least on the right track. His work is constructive as well. By showing us how Christ continues to do his work here and now through his people, he broadens our understanding of Jesus’ mission, and makes plain what Jesus expected of his followers.
By any standard, Trocmé’s work deserves ongoing attention. This edition is new in several respects. First, the text has been edited to read more smoothly. Some material has been rearranged with new subtitles, certain sections deleted to eliminate repetition, and transitional phrases added that were not in the original English edition. New material has also been incorporated, particularly in chapters 14 and 15, which are from Trocmé’s book, The Politics of Repentance. Finally, references have been added to show how trends in current thought affirm Trocmé’s thesis.
Not much has changed since World War II, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Ours is still an age of bloodshed. We live by the hellish logic of revenge, just war, might makes right, and deterrent force, while inequality, oppression, and exploitation flourish. Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution refutes such logic. Trocmé answers our continued propensity toward violence with, as he terms it, “the algebra of God’s kingdom.” If only more Christians were courageous enough to follow Trocmé’s lead in obedience to Jesus’ call, the story of Le Chambon sur Lignon would not be so exceptional.
Charles E. Moore
Preface
T here is no easy peace. The earth’s exploding population renders more difficult each day a peaceful solution to the problems of hunger, national security, and social justice. Simultaneously, the threat of nuclear destruction continues to hover over the future of humanity.
Meanwhile, the gap widens between the mentality of our contemporaries, shaped by a technological civilization whereby we control nature, and traditional religion, conceived during a rural epoch when human beings bowed under the weight of nature. Though technology threatens human existence more than it ever did in times past, Christian thought – frightened by the responsibilities it should assume – refuses to see in the gospel anything but a message of individual salvation. It might even be said that today’s Christianity finds suspect any actions performed for the physical salvation of the human race. It spurns any practical efforts of authentic Christian obedience as presumptuous and pharisaical – and that in an age much in need of them. Such a reversal of the teachings of Jesus Christ must be rectified, lest the church disqualify itself as an instrument capable of pointing the way for a humanity bordering on collective suicide.
I am neither a professor of history nor of theology, and the following little more than scratches the surface of areas normally reserved for specialists. Let me say, however, that having flirted with the theologies and philosophies of despair, I have now rejected their poison. Existential thought may sate one with its lucid analyses, which define the problems, but it fails to offer a courageous obedience capable of resolving them. Such an approach is nothing but a subtle excuse to evade one’s responsibilities in the world and is thus characteristic of a period of moral and religious decadence. In fact, the tendency of Christians to intellectualize ethical issues is in direct proportion to the extent that they have become a part of the power establishment.
All of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, are responsible for the hunger, injustice, egoism, exploitation, and wars that devastate our time. Christians bear special responsibility: knowing that God can change both people and their situations, the disciple of Jesus can help bring into being God’s future for humanity.
Christians profess that at a given place and time, God intervened in history, rendering all subsequent happenings on this planet as of divine importance. Because of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we know that every birth, every life, and every death matters to God.
If each person has thus been invested with such value, how great is the worth of the sum of human history! Whether one believes he is the Son of God or not, Jesus is the central event of history, because de facto his coming changed humankind. We must therefore understand who this Jesus was in order to fully grasp the value of humanity and of our task toward it.
Recent works have reopened the debate about who Jesus was.1 Everyone agrees that when the authors of the New Testament attempted to present Jesus to the people of their generation, they made use of certain beliefs then current in the Mediterranean basin. Obviously, Jesus and his disciples spoke the language of their contemporaries. This should not alarm us. We need not, for example, dispute the value of what people of the first century said about the universe simply because our knowledge of the universe has since expanded. Behind the vocabulary of Jesus’ day, we can still discover the enduring Christ.
The gospel merits being read not only with faith, but with intelligence. This does not mean we have to give way to the demythologizing zeal of some interpreters, whose efforts to weed out the gospel have only transformed it into a desert.
If the New Testament has to be demythologized at all, it should be done with the assistance of the Old Testament, not our modern myths.2 The more one adheres to the strict monotheism of the God of Israel, the more visible the thought of Jesus Christ becomes. The God of Jesus Christ is the God of Israel. The Christian faith dissolves into pure mythology as soon as it no longer leans upon Judaism. True, the authors of the New Testament borrowed from sources other than the Old Testament in order to explain Jesus to their Jewish and Greek contemporaries. But let us not forget that their main frame of reference was always the Old Testament.
Conversely,
