13
maintained or blurred. For the church to embrace or bless violent coercion is for it to become
worldly and obscure the church-world distinction, which is crucial for evangelism and missions.
Also, this is the key point of testing in whether or not the church will follow her Lord in the path
of suffering service, that is, discipleship. The rejection of violent coercion is what it means to
heed the call of Jesus to "take up your cross and follow me." The cross is the alternative to the
sword, which is why it was such a perversion for Christendom to put the cross on its shields and
banners as a symbol of war. Jesus rejected the Zealot option, the pressure on him to be a military
Messiah who would drive out the Romans and mount the throne of Israel in Jerusalem. Jesus
knew that this way had been tried before and would not work; evil must be challenged at a more
fundamental level. So he allowed the principalities and powers to put him to death and then rose
in triumph putting their defeat on display for all to see. He chose the path of suffering violence,
rather than inflicting it, and calls his disciples to do the same. And He offers us the hope of
resurrection after the suffering of the cross.
The followers of Jesus make up the Church, the body of Christ and are thereby a distinct
society in tension with the world. The existence of the Church as Church makes it possible for
the world to know itself as the world, that is, as unredeemed and in need of grace. The existence
of the Church and the world makes conversion possible, that is, passing from one to the other by
an act of faith in Jesus Christ and commitment to following him (baptism). The Gospel cannot
be experienced as "Good News" unless response is voluntary and it cannot be experienced as a
concrete claim on our lives without the possibility of church membership, which is differentiated
from citizenship.
In viewing the acceptance or rejection of violent coercion as a major dividing line
between types, I actually am in agreement with H. R. Niebuhr. He puts Tertullian into the