This has been a really busy week for me. In addition to blogging and putting the finishing touches on my thesis, there have also been several lectures held in Kansas City that I have looked forward to for some time. N. T. Wright’s lectures in KC were on Thursday, and soon Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver will be speaking at a number of engagements on Sunday and Monday.
Weaver is the author of a number of books on Anabaptist faith and practice, including The Nonviolent Atonement (Eerdmans, 2011), and, very recently, The Nonviolent God (Eerdmans, 2013). He is one of the most well-known proponents of the “Narrative Christus Victor” atonement theory, which argues against any notion that God somehow forced Jesus into a violent death to atone for humanity’s sins (a la Anselmian Satisfaction Theory).
He will be giving four lectures in Kansas City over the weekend:
- “The God of Jesus”
Sunday, March 30, 9:30 a.m., Rainbow Mennonite Church
- “John Howard Yoder: His Contribution and His Troubled Legacy
Sunday, March 30, 6:30 – 8 p.m., Rainbow Mennonite Church
- “Preaching Through Holy Week Without Doing Violence”
Monday, March 31, 9 – 10:30 a.m., Rainbow Mennonite Church
- “The Working of God: Atonement to Nonviolence”
Monday, March 31, 7 – 8:30 p.m., Central Baptist Theological Seminary
I look forward to attending them all and providing a summary of his arguments on this blog sometime next week.
the archives near Emmaus 
These look like interesting talks. Admittedly, this was one area of Mennonite Theology that confused me a bit when my wife and I were part of a Mennonite Church here in town. I wasn’t quite sure what was meant by a nonviolent god. I had presumed that Christian nonviolence was rooted in not taking our own revenge because we could rely on God to justly and righteously judge whereas our own thirst for revenge may be tainted by our fallibility. I presume that the Mennonite take on this would be that even the Christian God doesn’t act violently, at all. While I find it an interesting idea I admit I don’t quite understand how the One who controls life and death fits into the paradigm without relegating God to a Deistic framework. Similarly, I never quite understood what was going on with Mennonite views of the crucifixion, especially “wrath” language in Paul’s letters or “the cup” Jesus had to drink that only the Father seems able to have delivered him from drinking. That said, it’s been long time since I’ve sat down and read deeply about atonement theories. I look forward to reading your reflections on these talks. Maybe they will make better sense of things for me.
Those are all good questions, Brian. Our church is currently doing a book study on “The Nonviolent God,” so I hope to be able to summarize Weaver’s answers to those questions sometime in the next few months. My initial understanding is that Weaver affirms the notion that Jesus was the ultimate revelation of God’s character, and since Jesus was nonviolent, God must be, as well. This is obviously an over-simplified version, but I think that’s the gist of it. I’ll post more when I know more.
For what it’s worth, Greg Boyd endorsed the book, and has provided some feedback for it here:
http://reknew.org/2013/08/the-third-way-seeing-gods-beauty-in-the-depth-of-scriptures-violent-portraits-of-god/
I find that idea attractive, but hard to synthesize with many areas of Scripture (not trying to be a biblicist here, but the idea of “Christ died for our sins” seems to either imply it was necessary as relates to God somehow or it was necessary as relates to another power, e.g., the Satan, not just that he was a proto-Gandhi, Dr. King, or César Chávez). Another aspect I’ve been pondering is that while I wholly agree that Christ is God’s highest revelation, he is Christ’s highest revelation as a human and I find that point to be lost in many of these discussions. In the Gospels and Paul, whether we suggest ontological or functional subordination of the Son, it does seem that the being incarnate aspect of Christ’s existence makes him maybe not “inferior” to the Father, but “under” the Father in some way. I tend to think that this is best explained in God as transcendent is categorically superior to God incarnate, lest Kenosis Christology loses its meaning. Anyways, I think this is a subject worthy of discussion because one thing that is undeniable is we must wrestle with Jesus and his earliest follower’s commitment to refusal to engage their enemies violently.