My thesis is that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance…My thesis will be unpopular with man in the West…But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…Your point to them–we should not retaliate?
Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God…Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword…It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind…if God were NOT angry at injustice and deception and did NOT make a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship.
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Miroslav Volf (Born in Osijek, Croatia - 1956), is an influential Christian theologian and currently the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale University Divinity School and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He has been a member in both the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Evangelical Church in Croatia. He is widely known for his works on systematic theology, ethics, conflict resolution, and peace-making. Recently he contributed the essay, "Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Justice" to a new text on the atonement, Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ.
He studied at Evangelical-Theological Faculty, Zagreb (B.A), Fuller Theological Seminary (M.A) in Pasadena, California, and University of Tübingen (Dr. Theol., Dr. Theol. habil.), where he studied under Jürgen Moltmann.
His book Exclusion and Embrace, was selected as among the 100 best religious books of the 20th Century by Christianity Today.
