Description: From its very beginning, Christian faith has been
engaged with religious violence. The first Christians were
persecuted by their co-religionists and then by imperial Rome.
Jesus taught them, in such circumstances, not to retaliate, but to
be peacemakers, to love their enemies, and to pray for their
persecutors. Jesus's response to religious violence of the first
century was often ignored, but it was never forgotten. Even during
those centuries when the church herself persecuted Christian
heretics, Jews, and Muslims, some Christians still struggled to
bear witness to the peace mandate of their Lord. In the thirteenth
century, Thomas Aquinas wrote a theology to help his Dominican
brothers persuade Cathar Christians to return to their Catholic
faith peacefully. Ramon Lull, a Christian student of Arabic and the
Qur'an, sought to help his fellow Christians recognize the elements
of belief they shared in common with the Muslims in their midst. In
the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa, a Church Cardinal and
theologian, expanded Lull's project to include the newly discovered
religions of Asia. In the seventeenth century, Lord Herbert, an
English diplomat and lay Christian, began to identify the political
union of church and government as a causal factor in the religious
warfare of post-Reformation Christendom. One and a half centuries
later, Thomas Jefferson, a lay theologian of considerable political
stature, won a political struggle in the American colonies to
disestablish religion first in his home colony of Virginia and then
in the new nation he helped to found. All five of these theologians
reclaimed the peace mandate of Jesus in their response to the
religious violence of their own eras. All of which points us to
some intriguing Christian responses to religious violence in our
own century as recounted in the epilogue. Endorsements:
""Peacemaking and Religious Violence brings careful scholarship and
a refreshing clarity of expression to a burning contemporary
concern: the way that religions either foster violence or defuse
it. In a series of marvelously lucid historical vignettes, Johnson
illuminates crucial moments in Christianity's response to religious
difference. He demonstrates that there is more to this story than
is commonly assumed. Alongside the all-too-real exclusivist claims
and crusading zeal, he lifts up a series of thinkers in different
periods who sketched an alternative history, a path not taken by
the majority church, but one urgently in need of appropriation
today. Peacemaking and Religious Violence is an extraordinary work:
mature, balanced, original. Its unpretentious clarity will commend
it to general readers. Its ability to throw striking new light on
major gures and topics in Christian theology and history will
impress academics. Anyone interested in questions of religious
pluralism and social con ict will be enriched and instructed by
this study."" --S. Mark Heim Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian
Theology, Andover Newton Theological School ""Roger Johnson
utilizes in this volume his formidable historical and theological
knowledge to appraise two contemporary tides in our culture: a
growing Christian peace witness and a growing public concern about
religious violence . . . This welcome study enriches our awareness
of historical figures some of whom are less well-known and it
connects them all in instructive ways. It brings the Constantinian
and the contemporary eras into comparative focus, something too
rarely done. This is a deeply illuminating and carefully researched
text that deserves to be widely read and taken to heart."" --Gene
Outka Dwight Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Yale
University ""Sad to say, the peace ethic of Jesus long ago became a
minor (some said heretical) part of Christian witness. Yet it has
persisted. Today, when we are faced with growing inter-religious
violence, Roger Johnson does us a huge service by shining the light
of his research on fi
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