Perfect in Weakness

Do today's resistance movements pose a real challenge to power? The present volume argues that only the Bible offers a coherent basis and strategy for achieving an authentic resistance, one grounded paradoxically in a radical embrace of nonresistance and a total rejection of violence. This thesis is pursued in conversation with the ideas of Michel Foucault, Ren Girard, and John Howard Yoder, among others. Beginning with the Hebrew scriptures, the author identifies a dialectical movement tracing a divine progression away from uses of violence to advance the kingdom of God. This dialectic is followed to its ultimate resolution in the New Testament, where Christ's Gospel of peace supplies the unlikely foundation for a highly effective resistance to the coercive regime. How this ethic of resistance was successfully deployed by the early church is examined, as is the containment of that challenge beginning in the fourth century and continuing into our own day. Obstacles to recovering the power-resistant and pacifist potential of Christianity are also addressed. In the end, the reader should come away with an enhanced appreciation of the Bible's underlying political story: that of a God whose own exteriority to temporal power ultimately guides his servants to a position of weakness, one that in its very rejection of violence embodies a power-critical locus of resistance. This was a story comprehended fully by the first Christians, and the aim of this volume is to reclaim that divine narrative for believers today.