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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in Gods work to save the world.

The Conference: Nonviolent Atonement, Nonviolent God

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We have been telling you about the conference on Nonviolent Atonement theology. Today and tomorrow the conference convenes, at the Mennonite Central Committee Welcoming Place, in Akron, Pa. About 80 people have registered to attend. The conference papers will likely be available afterwary, and it is being video recorded.

To allow you to enter into the spirit and content of the event, we share a few paragraphs from the paper which Michael Hardin, key organizer of the event, founder of www.preachngpeace.org (see the conference agenda there), and ECAPC's Education Coordinator, is presenting this morning.

excerpt from Out of the Fog: New Horizons for Atonement Theory, by Michael Hardin

"We are given perspective with this better word. We are not just shown two perspectives, that of persecutor and persecuted, we are given a third option. There are three kinds of victims. There is the victim of myth, who is guilty as charged. There is the retributive victim, revealed as innocent, yet still participating in the cycle of violence (as in the Older Testament). And there is the non-retaliatory, forgiving victim, such as we see on Calvary, and again under a pile of stones, with Saul consenting. You can be on top, persecuting victims, or you can be on bottom, being persecuted and demanding vengeance or justice. Either way you perpetuate the cycle of violence. The only way to stop violence, to put an end to violence, to rob it of it’s power, whether on top or bottom, is to forgive; it is to seek peace and pursue it, to announce the message that God forgives us and calls out from the world those who would do the same . Forgiveness begins with the revelation of our own scapegoating and ends with our repentance.

"This perspective is what Bonhoeffer referred to as “seeing from below.” It is to read Scripture no longer through the eyes of the persecutor, the victor or the successful, but to hear the voice of one crying in the wilderness “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” It is the voice of the prophet crying out on behalf of the marginalized, the poor, and the defenseless that are victimized by society. It is the voice of Wisdom defending the righteous one who is victimized by enemies. It is the truly ‘pathetic’ voice of Jesus Christ dying.

"Atonement is all about violence and how we perceive God’s relation to violence. Mark Heim warns us that it is Pilate and Herod who have a sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’ death and that, “the gospels make it clear that it is Jesus’ antagonists who view his death as a redemptive sacrifice, one life given for many…Here is a caution for Christian theology. We must beware that in our reception and interpretation of the Gospel we do not end up entering the passion story on the side of Jesus’ murderers.” "