Theology: In Defense of Violence

At the heart of the Christian message is peace on earth, good will to men. In spite of this injunction to concord and reconciliation, a growing number of theologians and churchmen are willing to endorse violence and even revolution as a means of achieving social justice. In Detroit last October, at a conference on Church and Society sponsored by the National Council of Churches, one group of delegates argued that Christians should accept violence as a valid means of attacking the problems of racism and poverty. A proposal that will be debated at the World Council of Churches' Fourth Assembly in Sweden this July declares that "there are situations in which revolutionary action to achieve a radical change of the political regime seems the only way to arrive at a social order based on justice."

Christian enthusiasm for revolution is probably strongest in Latin America where Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest who was killed in a skirmish after he turned guerrilla, has become something of an uncanonized saint to many young Roman Catholics.* Last summer, 17 Latin American bishops issued a commentary on Pope Paul's encyclical Populorum Progressio, warning that revolution might well prove to be the only way of removing the continent's economic and social inequities. "Misery caused by man unto man," says Father Paul Charbonneau, a Belgian-born priest who serves in São Paulo, "is the form of violence in itself, varying only in degree and extension from armed violence."

"Justice for the Voiceless." In the U.S., especially among renewal-minded Catholics, there is a certain amount of sympathy with these views. Father Peter Riga, a professor of theology at St. Mary's College in California, notes that in Guatemala, 2% of the population owns 80% of the national wealth. "The only recourse of the people of Guatemala today," he argues, "is violent revolution to overturn that society which oppresses them so severely." Some churchmen contend that a theology of violence applies with equal validity to the U.S., because of the manifest despair and poverty of the Negro ghetto.

Ralph Potter of the Harvard Divinity School says that the new debate over violence is based on "the perception that justice may reside with those who have been voiceless before." The Rev. William Cook, a Methodist minister with the interfaith Council on Religion and International Affairs, thinks that last year's Newark and Detroit riots "were not only understandable but justifiable."

Theologians who condone violence can quote Scripture to back their cause. Ignoring St. Paul's injunction in Romans to "let every person be subject to the governing authorities," they cite the example of the Old Testament prophets who urged Israel to rebel against tyrants, Christ's violent action in chasing the money-changers from the Temple. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians of violence argue that their thinking is nothing more than an extension of the just-war doctrine, which, in brief, says that a war is moral when a good cause is at stake, or when a nation is unfairly attacked. Father Riga argues that the existence of social injustice within a country can be as much of an evil as an enemy at the gate, and thus a violent revolution may be the only way to eradicate it.