Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.

I'm John, Father John Deere, and today I'm speaking with my friend, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, one of the world's great living theologians.

This is a project of...

beatitudecenter .org, where you can find many other podcasts and regular Zoom programs on the nonviolence of Jesus and practicing nonviolence and working for a more just, more nonviolent world.

So let's begin, as we always do, with a little prayer.

And I invite you, wherever you are, just to take a deep breath and to relax and recenter yourself.

And together, let's enter into the presence of the God of peace who loves you infinitely and personally and everyone.

And let's welcome the nonviolent Jesus here with us.

Just take a moment to ask for whatever grace we need to follow the nonviolent Jesus more faithfully and to do God's will.

God of peace, thank you for all the blessings of life, love, and peace that you give us.

Be with us now as we reflect together on your call to follow the nonviolent Jesus and to work for a more just, more nonviolent world.

Bless us, inspire us, disarm us, strengthen us, and send us out to do your will, to do our part to help end poverty, racism, greed, and war.

and every injustice and nuclear weapons, environmental destruction, that we might be your holy peacemakers and welcome your reign of universal love, nonviolence, and peace on earth.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

It's a great pleasure to welcome my friend, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, one of the world's greatest theologians and ethicists.

Stanley taught for years at the University of Notre Dame before moving to Duke University, where he was the Gilbert Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School.

He also served at Duke Law School and the University of Aberdeen.

In 2001, Time magazine named Stanley Hauerwas America's Best Theologian.

He's spoken everywhere in the world, even on Oprah.

Stanley Hauerwas has written way too many books to list, but the one which influenced me the most is The Peaceable Kingdom, A Primer in Christian Ethics.

I hope you'll look him up and get some of his books.

Some of his biggest bestsellers are Jesus Changes Everything, A New World Made Possible, Resident Aliens, Life in the Christian Colony, and Cross -Shattered Christ, Meditations on the Seven Last Words.

You can find out more about Stanley by Googling him and check out his website, stanleyharawas .org.

Stanley, welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.

Thanks for being here.

It's so good to be with you, John.

Thank you.

It's been a long time.

Way too long.

Stanley, you won't even remember it, but when you were back at Duke in the early 90s, I was in prison there in North Carolina for the Plowshares action with Philip Berrigan and one day out of the blue while I was in jail.

I got a package from you.

You sent me an original early edition of The Social Gospel by Rauschenbusch.

Do you remember that, Stanley?

You probably don't.

I don't remember it.

That was very generous of you and wonderful to get in my jail cell.

Well, let's just dive right into the deep end and get right to the point.

As you know, I call this the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.

Because in my opinion, I read Gandhi and Dr.

King, and I see them saying that Jesus was totally nonviolent.

So I agree with that.

And therefore, God is totally nonviolent and universally loving.

And therefore, to be not just Christian, to be human is to be nonviolent and universally loving.

And you're one of the great theologians in the world who has explored and reflected on that.

So just...

Dive in and tell us some of your thoughts about the nonviolence of Jesus and nonviolence and an ethic of nonviolence, if you will.

Well, let me begin by saying that I didn't begin as someone committed to nonviolence.

I'm a Texan.

And that means that I didn't know there was something called nonviolence until...

I was late in my education studying to do a PhD in Christian ethics.

And when I went to Notre Dame from that original education, I ran into something called the Mennonites.

I went to Notre Dame to teach Catholics and ended up being shaped by Mennonites.

And the Mennonites...

are that form of reformed Protestantism that, through the Schlechheim Confession, discovered that Jesus and the Church were mutually interrelated in a way that they worshiped Jesus.

to the world a witness of nonviolence that otherwise could not be seen.

So the Mennonites helped me see that it's not like we have Jesus, and then we might think about what implications there might be about nonviolence, but Jesus.

is nonviolence.

And to be a worshiper of Christ is to be shaped by a cross that is a manifestation of God's love for the enemy in a way that makes it possible for us to live with an enemy.

the meaning of our deaths, because the meaning of our deaths has been substantiated by Christ's cross and resurrection.

formation that we all must receive for the worship of God.

It goes back to the most fundamental convictions we have about All that is summed up by the title of John Yoder's book, The Politics of Jesus.

Jesus.

You don't have Jesus.

No, it's brilliant.

And I'm so moved that you, I said, we're going to dive right in.

And you went right to the cross to start with and said, well, that's the heart of the whole way of God and the image of God and nonviolence.

So, and we're not talking about it.

The churches seem to talk about everything but the cross.

So the way I...

was taught, and I want you to say a little bit more about it then, is that Daniel Berrigan, my teacher, put it this way.

We go with Christ's preference to accept suffering rather than inflict suffering.

Our willingness to be killed without retaliating rather than to kill.

That there's no cause for which we will ever support killing ever again, but we will.

gladly give our lives in love for suffering humanity.

So Jesus resists nonviolently injustice in Rome and doesn't want to be killed, but he goes to his death forgiving and loving and embodies total nonviolence.

That's why I'm very moved that you said Jesus is nonviolent.

So what does that mean for us, Stanley?

Well, let me respond first about Dan.

I had several times meeting him when I was at Notre Dame, and Dan Berrigan was a tough guy.

He didn't take any prisoners.

And I take that to be a sign that...

Nonviolence isn't passive.

It's quite vulnerable in that it raises questions that demand responses.

And Dan didn't let you go until you told him what you thought.

And oftentimes what you thought was implicated in violence in a way that he challenged.

So the very activity that the nonviolent people embody is one that doesn't obscure, doesn't avoid conflict, because conflict so oftentimes...

exposes what is violent but not seen because it's hidden in false order that people confuse with nonviolence.

What that does is you see how the cross is that kind of challenge.

This is my Lord and Savior, but you have to kill someone every once in a while in order to have safety.

That makes me think about the resurrection, and that's the reason we can follow Jesus in this total nonviolence, even unto the cross or the willingness, because used about survival.

That's a very helpful way you put it.

But with the resurrection, our survival is already guaranteed, and if we're supposed to be people of faith, we know that, so we can try to be as nonviolent.

as Jesus and as daring in your face as Dan Berrigan was all his life.

And as he always said, let the chips fall where they may, because we know we're headed toward resurrection.

Would you agree?

Oh, I agree entirely.

Did you find my characterization of Dan accurate?

Oh, I agree.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, he did mellow over time.

I was always amazed with him for 40 years, you know, the things he would say to audiences.

And you would just say, that's just rude.

And then you go and read the gospel, and Jesus is way more insulting.

I mean, if you look at it that way.

But as a holy person, Dan was...

actually giving us all these great gifts by saying we're going to deal with reality.

And because he was willing to do that and had so many people walked away from him, thousands of people changed their lives in his presence.

You know, they really changed.

And I want to ask you, too, about John Howard Yoder.

I think you studied with him since you brought up his book, The Politics of Jesus, which I consider.

maybe the most important, one of the most important books in Christian history.

There never really was a book about the nonviolence of Jesus, except for Andre Trachmes, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution.

He was a great figure, the head of the Fellowship Reconciliation, and such a legendary guy in the 50s.

But Yoder, who was friends with Merton and Dan and all, wrote this book.

And I read it the week I entered the Jesuits, and it kind of...

set me on this path to talking with you.

Can you talk about his book and how important it was?

And I think everyone should read it because it still holds up today.

Oh, I agree entirely.

I think it's one of the great books that has been produced in the last years.

And what it challenged was fundamentally what I might characterize as Nurembergian justification of violence, namely that Christian ethics was founded and determined by the presumption that we're on the whole for peace, but when it's an issue of injustice, hard in the need for...

security, we have to use a little violence here and there.

And John fundamentally challenged that presumption that violence is like vows that daring people take, namely to be monogamously faithful.

with their fingers crossed, where John challenged the presumption that we were going to be peaceful with our fingers crossed.

And that brilliant exegesis of the Gospel of Luke.

recreation of a community that created people that were willing to bind themselves to one another in a way that made God's kingdom real.

And that binding was a way to show the world that there was an alternative to the world.

peace.

Because one of the things that a commitment to nonviolence does is expose the...

I hope everyone will get it and read it if you haven't.

The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder.

The other book that he wrote that is very important is The Original Revolution.

Yes, yeah, about nonviolence.

I remember reading that book when I was 21.

And there's a sentence, I always remember it this way.

I don't know if it's exactly right, but he wrote...

carrying the cross is not having a hangnail or a flat tire or I have a difficult boss at work or my mother -in -law is a really difficult person and I'm carrying my cross.

And he says, that's baloney.

The cross is nonviolent resistance to the Roman Empire and therefore the American Empire.

And you're going to stand up and say no to it and you're going to get in trouble.

Yeah, you still have a hangnail and a flat tire and you're a difficult boss, but that has nothing to do with discipleship to Jesus.

And that's powerful.

You don't hear anybody saying that anymore.

I love that passage in the politics of Jesus.

The passage that I find also extremely powerful in the politics of Jesus is the meaning.

of history is not determined by cause and effect, but by cross and resurrection.

Wow.

What does that mean to you, Stanley?

It means that, as I tried to say, what theological commitments we must have as Christians.

play those commitments means you've got a account of the world that is not determined by what the textbooks about America say in public education, but is determined by the narratives that are produced within the Christian community to display.

Hmm.

That's very powerful.

And I wanted to also ask you to say a little bit more about the will of God, since you brought that up too.

And that has really been the heart of everything for me in about the last five years, as my friends know.

And I've written a whole new book about that coming out next year called Universal Love, Surrendering to the God of Peace.

And I didn't understand this, that it's still a mystery to me.

It's why I want to ask you while I have this moment, that nonviolence only makes sense in light of God's gift of free will.

That if God is totally nonviolent, God has to give every human being The complete freedom to reject God, reject love, and hurt and kill one another and destroy the planet.

And so we've all done that.

And God is suffering through that.

And the invitation of Jesus is, not my will, your will be done.

Your kingdom come.

And so he lives out that prayer even in Gethsemane and goes to his death in total nonviolence and trusting God.

and faithful to this.

He doesn't do His will.

And the more we can renounce our selfish will, personally and nationally and globally, and therefore our violence, and surrender to the God of peace, then we're free not to kill, and free to be nonviolent, and free to follow Jesus, and things like that.

Can you reflect for me?

on the connection between the free will of God and this way of Jesus' nonviolence?

I don't use the language of will that much, because in America, it usually means I'm free to do what I damn well want, and how to see will.

rather than something that's just the need to exert my power against the limits of my life is what I want to challenge.

For God to have a will is obviously very different from that understanding of will.

say God.

That's lovely.

Claims about God's will.

I just want to be very careful to avoid.

In your great book, The Peaceable Kingdom, which you subtitle A Primer of Christian Ethics, and it's all written in light of nonviolence, you talk about the kingdom of God from that perspective of Gandhi's nonviolence.

And, you know, I'm so moved that you said Jesus is nonviolence.

Gandhi said the kingdom of God is nonviolence.

which I think is a very powerful theological statement.

Well, that means...

It's not like Gandhi hadn't read the New Testament.

Yeah, he knew it better than all of us.

He did, and that Setagaria is a powerful account of what I would think is very close to Christian nonviolence.

Mm -hmm.

And, I mean, in the great...

the British, where some of Gandhi's followers acted violently against the British, and Gandhi called off the strike, you began to see what a disciplined activity nonviolence is, because Gandhi wouldn't let even...

He wouldn't let his followers act violently toward the British.

They could demonstrate, but they couldn't hit.

Well, we have so far to go compared to where he did.

I mean, so few people understand that level of nonviolence, much less any kind of vision of nonviolence.

When we talk about the kingdom of God, from the perspective of nonviolence, it's just so powerful.

And I guess I want to ask you to unpack it a little bit for us.

The way I always look at it means, well, I mean, I hear the Isaiah quote in the title of your book, The Peaceable Kingdom, where the lion and the lamb and the child lay down and no more death or tears or killing on all my holy mountain, that in God's reign, there's no war, no killing.

No discrimination or prejudice or offense or violence of any kind.

No more death.

And we're to live like that now, as if it's at hand and we're living in a realm of universal love.

Is that how you see the peaceable kingdom?

The easy answer is yes.

The hard answer is...

If you give a yes, why is it more of reality in the world than we now experience it?

And the answer is we are disobedient and refuse to live lives that are constituted by that kind of kingdom.

with disdain.

One of the aspects, John, that is oftentimes not discussed as part of nonviolence is the extremely important patients are living nonviolently in the world.

We want to have our goods and have them soon, but God is patient with us in terms of our unfaithfulness in a way that gives us.

Bye -bye.

Well, unfortunately, we're running out of time.

I want to ask you one big last question, and that's about this world today and your suggestions to everyone listening as people who are trying to follow the nonviolent Jesus and create that space and fidelity of the peaceable kingdom.

So here we are suffering through the Trump administration.

rising authoritarianism, fascism, tyranny, white supremacy, the dismantling of democracy.

And we could go on and on about the threat of nuclear war, the coming environmental destruction that we're wreaking havoc on the planet, and to the Ukraine war and our funding of the killing of children in Gaza and so forth and so on.

And now the rising of Christian nationalism.

like never before here in the U .S.

So as we wrap this up, any closing words of encouragement for folks about following the nonviolent Jesus in this bad time?

People put down nonviolence because they can ask questions about what would you do about the Russian invasion.

Ukraine, what would you do about Gaza?

And it seems like as people committed to nonviolence, we have nothing to say.

But what that means is, as people committed to nonviolence, we need to think ahead about what kind of people we need to be in order to not be.

Well, I...

Thank you so much, Stanley Hauerwas, for speaking with me today.

And it's really a blessing to be connected with you again.

And I want to thank everyone for listening to this episode of the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.

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So may the God of peace bless you all and keep on following the nonviolent Jesus and see you next time.