Jesus the Pacifist

A Concise Guide to His Radical Nonviolence

By: Matthew Curtis Fleischer

Narrated by: Derek Botten

Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

Have you ever struggled to reconcile Jesus’s commands to not resist evil, turn the other cheek, and love your enemies with his use of a whip to clear the temple, his praise for the Roman centurion, his command to the disciples to buy swords, and his frequent warnings of violent judgment, not to mention Revelation’s prophecy that he will eventually return to kill God’s enemies with a sword?

In Jesus the Pacifist, Fleischer provides a systematic, biblically based, and comprehensive overview of Jesus’s relationship with violence, one that may forever change how you view his ministry and your calling.

©2019 Matthew Curtis Fleischer (P)2020 Matthew Curtis Fleischer

Jesus Christ, Pacifism, and the Denial of Consciousness

I started this book with the understanding that I likely would find the author’s arguments convincing but would, in the end, shrug my shoulders at the idea of Pacifism. Pacifism, sadly, has always revolted me and the author does not shy from speaking directly to readers like me. In fact, he announces a forthcoming book discussing some of the most common reasons why many of us rebel against pure Pacifism as a way to live.

Listening to the book, I began to question why I dislike Pacifism so viscerally, why it feels wrong, foolish even. I switched frames, or lenses through which I tried to question myself or discount any burden I felt to truly entertain Pacifism as a serious ethic, a multitude of times. Christianity is just one religion among thousands, maybe more, that have existed throughout human (and our precursors) history. Christianity is a relatively new religion in human history. Academic, textual analysis that modern Christian’s use to approach the Bible is misused, treating the pre-modern mind as if they wrote with similar intentions as modern writers. The Bible is not the infallible word of God but rather a collection of writings decided upon by some dudes at a conference. These considerations, I’ve only articulated a few, regarding the validity and authority of the Bible made it easy to listen to the book without much conviction that there was something serious to consider in the author’s arguments. However, with my misplaced confidence secure, I let my mind wonder to another set of considerations.

Pacifism feels immoral to me. It’s simple to pull from history any number of horrible events that could have been prevented with some well-placed violence. Angrily, I thought that Jesus’ Pacifist paradise will be built upon an infinitely large pile of innocent children’s bones from wars, sacrifices, and more (I’m being dramatic, I’ll admit). I know a Pacifist, or someone that espouses Pacifist views, and I recalled an instance where this gentleman expressed admiration for Rip Wheeler, a violent character in the television series Yellowstone. Rip represents an idealized version of manhood and follows a fairly typical Archetypal construction (Archetypes as described in Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious), albeit with some twists: tragic childhood (orphan), mythical god-like father (the patriarch of the Dutton family), a heroic initiation rite (sadly having to kill his own father who had just murdered his mom and brother), loyalty to the point of self-sacrifice, loving only one woman, and the capacity to inflict decisive, well-timed violence to accomplish some positive end.

Why does Rip appeal even to a pacifist? Why do men and women across the country, representing various ages, races, social strata, and religions all look at this character and come to the conclusion that this character represents the pinnacle of masculinity? Why do the archetypes embedded in the collective unconscious of humanity cause us demand that men be capable of violence? These questions led me to ask one more question: where do the archetypes embedded in our consciousness come from?

Original sin, in my opinion—an opinion formed from reading so many others that I hesitate to write this sentence for fear that someone may think I would ever claim to come to this conclusion on my own—is consciousness. Paraphrasing Jordan Peterson, when humans became self-aware, they learned what could hurt them and, in turn, learned how to hurt others. Following human consciousness, humans had the capacity to work towards self-preservation purposefully. This purposeful protection of yourself and your closest kin could only lead to purposeful construction of ways to prevent others from hurting you, could only lead to purposeful construction of ways to prevent and inflict violence.

Enter Jesus Christ. The author, over and over, points to scriptures where Jesus told us to deny our innate desires, deny our instincts, deny the inevitable result of original sin, of consciousness and self-awareness. Pick up your cross, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, refrain from revenge. Jesus’ instructions and the lessons taken from looking at his life, made clear by the author, is to rationally and purposefully choose to ignore the instincts built inside of you over the course of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and instead to make peace wherever and whenever possible even as you are led to your death by those who oppose it.

Jesus told his disciples, and anyone else who would listen, that the Kingdom of Heaven is difficult to enter. It is a narrow path, one that few choose to take. The author convinced me that to be a Christian, to be Christ-like, is to be a Pacifist. And, my conclusion is that this is nearly impossible for me, that I am no where near the man I would need to be to truly follow Christ. The image of Christ is not stamped deep on my heart, like an old hymn I used to sing, begs it to be.

Excellent reflection of the words and actions of Jesus in consideration of Christian non-violence

Fleischer makes and thoughtful and thorough argument for Christian non-violence by examining the actions and words of Christianity’s most important figure. He carefully considers some of the common arguments that Christian’s use to justify violence and holds those arguments up to scripture. I appreciated his use of different hermeneutical understandings of scripture. He did not simply limit his argument to his own preferred interpretation of scripture (in fact he doesn’t disclose a preferred interpretation), but instead makes his argument including multiple ways people understand the text. It would be difficult to read this book with an open mind and not at least be convicted if not convinced that non-violence is the way of Jesus.