Yoder Neufeld, Thomas R. Killing Enmity: Violence and the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011
If the civil war in Syria is violent, and belittling a spouse
in public is violent, then the very word must accommodate an enormously broad
definition. Yoder Neufeld begins his study of violence in the New Testament
with the Oxford English Dictionary definition, which emphasizes deliberate
harm or injury to persons or property. Citing other references, he broadens
the definition. Robert McAfee Brown, for instance, sees violence as any
“violation of personhood (2),” and Jacques Ellul includes any act by which a
superior “ . . . inculcates submission and a servile attitude in another (3).”
Words are
slippery entities and I generally object to beginning a discussion with a definition
for that reason, particularly in the case of a catch-all nominative like violence.
Although I can barely imagine a conversation between Jacques Ellul and Don
Cherry, I think the attempt would prove the point that words are clouds, not
points.
Having been
raised in a non-violent culture that expressed its belief in Jesus'
example by eschewing physical violence while practising all sorts of passive
aggression, I've come to appreciate the broadening of thinking—as well as the
definition—when we talk about violence. I grew up thinking that passive
aggression was acceptable and became an expert in its application: “just don't
hit people!” It was primarily through a university education and experiences as
a teacher that I began to see that the violence cloud is mighty large
compared to my childhood, childish conceptions.
But enough
about me.
Killing
Enmity takes its title from a verse in Ephesians 2:16. It's a delightful
piece of irony, the killing of enmity, as if the road to Kingdom
relationships among people can only be won through pitched battle, as in Onward
Christian Soldiers, Marching as to war. It leads to a conundrum among all who have
taken the non-violent or the pacifist stance: if one refuses to
be aggressive on the side of combat, can one learn to be aggressive in the
pursuit of peace? For me, this lies at the crux of the discussion of violence and
peace-making today, as well as forming the backbone of any contemplation of the
Bible as authoritative on the subject.
I don't know
how often I've heard pitched confusion in people's voices about Old Testament
violence, the genocides in Joshua for instance. It leads logically to questions
concerning the identity of the God of Jesus versus the God of Joshua, and that
not unexpectedly. The conquest of Canaan by the Children of Israel was
exceedingly violent, no matter how you define the word and for many, the whole
witness of the Bible is cast into doubt by that and other events that defy a
non-violent interpretation.
Many have
also ascribed such a record to its belonging to an “Old” Testament, and declare
that Jesus' witness in the “New” Testament supersedes it with a message of
peace, hope and redemption. I think that N.T. Wright would rather say, “The
advice you gave the grandfather is foolishly given to the grandson,” or words
to that effect. (See my review of Scripture and the Authority of God
previous to this.) Yoder Neufeld makes it clear that this “Old” vs. “New”
distinction doesn't absolve us of work on the subject; the New Testament is
rife with acts and implications of violence, including the entire range from
the torture and crucifixion of Christ to the implied violence in its
apocalyptic imagery, the lake of fire and all that.
And so he
sets to work.
Yoder
Neufeld begins with a look at passages most often cited as supporting a
pacifist position: if a soldier commandeers you to carry his coat one mile,
carry it two, and, if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other as well.
The interpretation of these and similar passages is most often something like,
“even if violence is practised against you, you are not to respond in kind.” An
eleventh commandment, if you will. Yoder Neufeld sees it in a little different
light, not as a “cow-towing” but as a courageous and determined stand in
opposition to the violent option. “. . . Jesus can be seen as once again
'intensifying' Torah in the direction it was already pointing, namely, to break
an otherwise endless cycle of retaliatory violence (22).” This conclusion
must be mitigated—he cautions—by OT passages that advocate revenge as a
cleansing, although limited to the talion, the equivalency restriction.
Yoder
Neufeld emphasizes how context makes a difference in interpretation (24): if a
right-handed person strikes you on the right cheek, the blow has to be
backhanded, symbolic of contempt for an inferior. To turn the left cheek is a
challenge to the offender to see you as an equal, but with an enormously
different intent than would be modelled by a retaliatory blow. The
“mini-parable” of the turning of the other cheek might be understood either as
advocating a suffering in silence—almost a self-flagellation by proxy—or as a
courageous act of anti-violence. The difference has enormous
implications for the way peace-making is practised. Killing Enmity is
aptly titled; if God's will is understood to be the redemption of creation, the
“salvation” of the cheek-striker is implicit in the mini-parable, the person
struck the active, courageous instrument for the opening of the offender's
eyes.
Among many
enigmatic encounters of Jesus with his culture and religion, the cleansing of
the temple—as we've come to know it—sticks out like a sore thumb. For the
Prince of Peace to wield a whip against people and animals as it's described in
the gospels comes as a shock when it's the same Jesus who chastises Peter later
for taking out his sword against the officers come to arrest him. I've never
been able to visualize the act of cleansing clearly; the temple was a huge
place and the tables of the money changers and dealers in sacrificial animals
would have to have been numerous. The vision of a Galilean driving them and all
their goods out seems ludicrous, something like a farmer from Consort, Alberta
driving all the horses, booth operators, barkers, etc., out of Calgary at
Stampede time. I'm guessing the indignant farmer would be jumped and hustled
out of there before you could say, “git along, little dogie!”
Yoder Neufeld
quotes theologian John Howard Yoder: Ever since the early Christian
centuries, the whip in the temple has been considered the one act in the life
of Jesus which could be appealed to as precedent for the Christian's violence (60).
Yoder Neufeld suggests that since John's description of the cleansing is quite
different from that in the synoptic gospels, consideration of its symbolic,
as opposed to its historical, intent is justified. And isn't this true
of much of what we see recorded in the Bible; the story of Jonah and the Whale,
of Noah's Ark, of the creation accounts in Genesis seem to take on much deeper
meaning allegorically-read than debated as historical—yes or no?
What has
this to do with killing enmity? Yoder Neufeld writes about the cleansing
of the temple as an act of prophesy, a one-time drama to underline the gravity
of a concept, in this case that underlying all of a God-fearing ethic is a
profound respect for God the creator and God the redeemer, the desecration of
the temple by commerce representing symbolically the most fundamental of errors
plaguing the culture of the time, namely the displacement of a love for the one
true God with systems of economic injustice characterized by the accumulation
of wealth in the temple establishment (63). In any case, we've no way of
knowing—as Yoder Neufeld points out—how violent the historical event
was, whether or not Jesus actually whipped money changers and hurt them (did he
apologize after he cooled down? one wonders); what we do know is what is undoubtedly
symbolized by the temple cleansing; the thinness of the line between stone
idols and the idolatry of economic exploitation is not to be missed.
I've used
the temple cleansing and the “turn the other cheek” chapters as examples. Yoder
Neufeld also deals, for instance, with the “household code,” a phrase with
which I was unfamiliar although I knew well Paul's description of the preferred
relationship between husband and wife in Ephesians 5: 22 – 6: 4.
Dominance/submission is considered by many to be an environment for the
breeding of violence, if not violence itself, and I can't count the number of
times I've been involved in discussions around the relative weight of the code
in modern times. Just recently, a man lamented to me how that we were allowing
women to usurp the pulpit; he ended his diatribe with reference to Sodom and
Gomorrah!
And, of
course, a look at violence in the New Testament can't gloss over the
gut-wrenching imagery of John's apocalyptic vision in Revelation. There is far
too much in the chapter, “Divine warfare in the New Testament” to allow me to
do it any kind of justice here, but to whet the appetite I quote (133) Yoder
Neufeld's challenge to today's reader of John's Apocalypse:
[Reading the Apocalypse] to
signal that the ultimate war has been waged and won in and through the
suffering of the slain Lamb clearly renders it anti-violent. But
such a reading requires of readers a nimble facility to read against the grain
of inherited interpretation and against the surface meaning of the text.
There are still plenty of
examples around us of evangelism that uses clumsy, surface reading of
Revelation (as opposed to Yoder Neufeld's “nimble facility”) to “scare the hell
out of people.” Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins series, Left Behind, comes
to mind although this may have been a case of capitalizing-on-a-human-fetish as
opposed to evangelism—commerce in the temple, as it were.
Tom
Yoder Neufeld was my pastor for three years and has been a true friend for
going on thirty-five plus years now. That's why this is a reflection and not a
review; I am not qualified to judge his scholarship, nor would I want to if I
could. I think I would recommend careful study of Killing Enmity in any case; my copy is dog-eared, replete with underlining
and marginal comments by now, and I thank Tom for two things: having “donated”
the mountain of time and energy required to write down the material for me to
ponder, and having written it in a style and with the necessary care that makes
a great essay even better.
Tom
Yoder Neufeld is not only a master of his subject, he is also an adept in the
English language. This combination is rare enough to make Killing Enmity an experience to be savoured.
