Walter Wink Beyond Just War And Pacifism Summary

In Walter Wink's “Beyond Just War and Pacifism,” Wink interprets . He believes that instead of us taking nonviolence as not fighting back and letting ourselves be attacked. We should instead try to find nonviolent, but is not a cowardly submission, way to fight back against the evil.

Wink believes that although Jesus does not propose armed revolution. He does lay the ground work for social revolutions. He believes Jesus wanted us to have an active nonviolent resistance to evil. One that was not passive but instead aggressive and courageous.

He describes how all this was the view of the Christian church until they came under the “‘conversion’ of Constantine” (Wink 288). Here, Christianity became directly tied to that of the empires, and making the enemies of the empire the Churches enemies and bringing into the world the just war way of thinking.

The problem is that these few criteria for a just war aren’t easy to apply. According to Wink the criteria themselves is not the problem “but the fact that they have been subordinated to the myth of redemptive violence” (Wink 290). Making the just war theory a way to try and justify wars that are unjustifiable. Leading him to believe we should instead change the just war criteria to violence-reduction criteria, since that is what we are all after in the long run. He believes this will be a good medium for both advocates of nonviolence and the just