When violence rules.

Reinhold Niebuhr, serving as pastor in Detroit during the 1920s, found himself pinned between an abhorrence of violence following World War I and a growing awareness of the painful disparity between the very wealthy and the working poor. Assembly line workers in the new system of industrial mass production of automobiles bore the burden of labor while Henry Ford and other company owners grew fabulously wealthy. In 1932, Niebuhr published his classic study on social ethics, MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY, in which he abandoned his earlier insistence on non-violence and affirmed the legitimacy of qualified violence in the pursuit of justice. Excessive disparity between the haves and the needy remains one of the key concerns in global economics today as it was in the 1920s. Articles in the present issue of BTB demonstrate that variations of these concerns are present as well in the teachings of Jesus, echoed in the biblical text.

Niebuhr's reasoning is compelling for a time when callousness to the needs of the working poor allows disproportionate claims to available resources. For Niebuhr, this disproportion is based upon an ego that is both self-deceptive and self-serving:

   Whatever increase in social intelligence and moral goodwill
   may be achieved in human history, may serve to mitigate
   the brutalities of social conflict, but they cannot abolish
   the conflict itself. That could be accomplished only if
   human groups, whether racial, national or economic, could
   achieve a degree of reason and sympathy which would
   permit them to see and to understand the interests of others
   as vividly as they understand their own, and a moral
   goodwill which would prompt them to affirm the rights of
   others as vigorously as they affirm their own
   [Introduction].

When violence in the pursuit of social justice becomes the issue, Niebuhr affords qualified approval:

   The middle classes and the rational moralists, who have a
   natural abhorrence of violence, may be right in their general
   thesis; but they are wrong in their assumption that violence
   is intrinsically immoral. Nothing is intrinsically
   immoral except ill-will and nothing intrinsically good
   except goodwill [Chapter 7: Justice Through Revolution].

Applied to distributive justice, the foundational issue is a self-deceptive hypocrisy in the ruling class:

   The illusory element must be admitted to be very large.
   The middle classes believe in freedom, but deny freedom
   when its exercise imperils their position in society; they
   profess a morality of love and unselfishness but do not
   achieve an unselfish group attitude toward a less privileged
   group; they claim to abhor violence and yet use it both in
   international conflict and in the social crises in which their
   interests are imperiled; they want mutuality of interest
   between classes rather than a class struggle but the mutuality
   must not be so complete as to destroy all their special
   privileges [Chapter 7].

In a reciprocal vein, Niebuhr does not neglect to ascribe illusions to those who propose violence against the entrepreneurial classes:

   The proletarian on the other hand is not enough of an individual,
   in the attainments of his own cultural life and in the
   conditions of his social life, to be strongly moved by the
   canons of individual morality. He is most conscious of the
   reality of group behavior. He is not only more completely
   immersed in his own group than the more privileged classes,
   but he feels the effect of the behavior of other groups
   upon his life more definitely than do the members of privileged
   classes. His moral attitudes are determined by the
   moral behavior of groups rather than by the moral behavior
   of individuals. He discounts the latter not only because
   he is himself not an individual, as more privileged persons
   are, but because he has not found individual morality qualifying
   the dominant greed and lust to power of privileged
   groups to any appreciable degree. He has come to the conclusion
   that the hope of achieving a moral group life results
   in illusion.

This mode of analysis may be helpful in understanding the sense of self-righteousness that seems to inform the use of violence on both sides. Briefly, Niebuhr concludes:

   The conflict between proletarian and middle-class morality
   is thus a contest between hypocrisy and brutality, and
   between sentimentality and cynicism. The limitations of
   the one tend to accentuate the limitations of the other.

Having reviewed Niebuhr's paradigm, we may perhaps find some added light for evaluating violence in today's warfare and, by analogy, the use of violence reflected in the biblical accounts under review in the series of articles in the current issue of BTB.

Joanna Dewey examines assumptions in the social world of the Bible that helped enforce a subordination of women, "Let Them Renounce Themselves and Take Up Their Crosses:" A Feminist Reading of Mark 8:34 in Mark's Social and Narrative World. Dewey clarifies the issue of the relations between the dominant and non-dominant members of society as feminist criticism has evolved in recent years.

In Hate Never Dispelled Hate: No Place for the Pharmakos (Revelation 22:15), Mark Bredin exposes the pattern of blame and revenge in the scape-goat practice that helped explain the violent death of Jesus.

Santiago Guijarro's study, The Family in the Jesus Movement, addresses the issue of whether or how discipleship displaced family relationships for Jesus and subsequently within the Jesus Movement.

The Radical Jesus: You Cannot Serve God and Mammon represents Douglas Oakman's efforts to examine the political agenda of Jesus within the economic context depicted in Luke's Gospel.

It may be asking too much of these biblical studies to expose underlying causes within today's global conflicts, but by addressing gender issues, the use of hate and blame, the role of family and economics within the biblical canon, some perspective may be rendered useful. Moreover, Niebuhr's sage analysis can advance the cause of grasping the issues from both sides of the question. Hypocrisy, self-deception, brutality, and cynicism make poor components for advancing the cause of justice within the world order at any time and in any context. Yet, somehow these remain the constant companions of the self-righteous.