The Old Testament Roots of Nonviolence-Why I wrote the book

Here is the preface to my soon-to-be- published book, THE OLD TESTAMENT ROOTS OF NONVIOLENCE, also described as  The Seed, Root, and Flower of Peace in the Soil of Injustice.

This is my testimony:

My paternal grandparents came to Minnesota as children of German-speaking Mennonite immigrants
from the Ukraine. They left land, wealth, and comfort in Russia for the sake of conscience, and the issue was military conscription. What they did not fully understand was the reality that they were buying stolen property when they came to Minnesota. They bought land taken violently from the Dakota Sioux. History was repeating itself, because one hundred years earlier my grandparents’ ancestors had accepted land from the Russian Czar taken by conquest from Muslims. Were my ancestors naïve and lucky, or were they people of great faith? Did the resurrection of Christ defeat the violence of the system once for all and make it unnecessary, as my Mennonite ancestors believed, or were they simply clever enough to reap the spoils of war without having to fight?

When I first discovered the library in third grade, I wasn’t thinking about these questions. My childhood heroes soon became the frontiersmen, Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, and James Butler (“Wild Bill”) Hickok. I greatly admired James Hickok for his work as an honest lawman in a lawless world, a man who sought to bring about, as he described, “a government of laws and not of men.”

At the same time I listened to my maternal grandfather’s stories of growing up across the creek from the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota, and the kindnesses his family received from them, despite the ethnic cleansing that had placed the Indians on a reservation. The government of laws my hero helped establish had been a lawless intrusion into the lives of the native peoples, but this was a disconnect my education
taught me to accept as normal.

As time went on this disconnect widened. On one hand I learned pacifism from my Mennonite parents with an ethic of peace, promising freedom from sin and bringing fellowship with each other. On the other hand in public school I learned the glory of battle and patriotic heroism that brought political freedom from tyrants and kings.

In the mid-1960’s I attended a Christian College where military training was a required class for all freshman males. During this period this disconnect became for me unavoidable. How could the same indwelling Holy Spirit of Christ so clearly lead my spiritual ancestors to prison and death rather than participate in war, and at the same time lead my spiritual mentors at school in the opposite direction? Could both be following the same Spirit?

After graduation the most difficult moment of my youth was facing my own father to declare I no longer shared his convictions about war. His response exceeded my wildest hopes. In essence he said, “I gave you to God and you belong to him. You follow him wherever the Holy Spirit leads and I will support you.” With these words he set me free from mere religious tradition.

In 1967 the Vietnam War was raging, and all young men my age were being drafted. Had I actually been drafted I would have gone, but just at that time I was invited to serve as a missionary teacher in East Africa, and when I accepted the invitation an exemption from military service was quite miraculously granted. There was no clever calculation on my part to avoid military service. It was clear God had something else for me to do. Like my forbearers who left Germany in the 18th Century and again left Russia in the 19th Century, God had a different place for me.

It took another forty years of study and experience before the disconnect in my mind over the war issue had been bridged. Yes, the Spirit of God does lead his servants in opposite directions at times, but there are reasons of culture
and situation that govern. The Biblical story I tell deals with God and human social institutions—institutions built upon violence with God’s permission for a time, but which are “passing away,” as John’s first letter tells us. I invite my readers to cross the bridge by faith from what is temporary to what is permanent, because the current social order is “passing away.” The government of laws will be obsolete when love for Jesus rules the hearts of all.