A friend told me recently of a robbery in her apartment - at gunpoint. The memory of it reawakened pain, resentment, and outrage. I noticed her disturbance and asked about it. She answered, "I don't resent the things taken. I know how desperate some folks are today. What angers me still is that he held a gun at my head. He threatened to kill me."
Another story is told by a Cambodian doctor who disguised his identity and survived the genocidal rampage of Pol Pot and his regime in the late '70s. He explained how the Khmer Rouge had evacuated the cities, sealed the borders, terminated contact with the outside world, and expelled any foreign presence. They then began to liquidate the "remnants" of colonialism (professionals like the doctor), and to eliminate systematically the weak: children, old people, the sick, injured, and wounded.
"They murdered millions who didn't fit their vision," he said. "They held a gun at the head of a whole people."
I'm sure the reader gets the drift - nuclear guns at the head of everyone on the planet; nuclear guns at the heads of the unborn (untold billions of unborn); nuclear guns at the heads of the dead (to extinguish their history); nuclear guns at the head of Christ.
What is the superpower arsenal - 60,000 warheads? Enough to overkill the planet 20 times; enough for nearly two million Hiroshimas. What policy governs the arsenals? In a word, the splendor of the planet, the miracle of life itself, the design of re-creation and redemption, the very intervention of God in us are all subject to nuclear hair trigger, to the possibility of nuclear accident or technical miscalculation or official tantrum.
The metaphor of a nuclear gun at one's head is not extravagant. Moreover, the gun is legal.
The legality of the gun provides the secular context for discussing civil disobedience. Human law sanctions and buttresses atoms for war at every point: mining and processing, research and development, finance and procurement, policy, testing, production, and deployment; police, judicial and penal attritions for the naysayers. As Judge Seymour Hendel told the Trident Nein anti-nuclear protesters in in New London, Connecticut, in 1982: "You might very well be right - that we are preparing the legal destruction of the planet."
God vs. the Violence of Human Law
Another context remains available, however, one immeasurably more hopeful. If Judeo-Christian theology has remained notoriously silent about the law as obstacle to justice, the Bible has not. God's revealed word regards human law as the spirit, ethical substructure, and cohesion of an "establishment of disobedience," beginning with the rejection of God as king (1 Samuel 8:4-22); building a temple and subjecting it to the palace (civil religion) (2 Samuel 7:1-17); occupying the Canaanite cities and periodically surpassing their commercial rapacity and expansion. Instead of God as king, the Israelites had Saul, David, and Solomon: instead of the trust and vulnerability of the wilderness, they had intrigue, exploitation, and war in the city and nation-state; instead of God's law "love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18), they had human law, a code justifying the deceit and cruelty of the "club," the privileged.
In brief, the Bible exposes the legal systematizing of rebellion against God, attended by the inevitable exploitation of sister and brother. By degree human law became the ethical, economic, and political soul of the derangement called society or civilization. It became the rationale for a status quo of injustice and the official authority for it. It superceded divine law (the palace-temple arrangement in Jerusalem was symbolic of that). The law was, the Bible maintained, the code of idolatry, the gospel of the demonic counter-kingdom.
In their turn Christians repeated the example of the Israelites, under weight of ostracism, disenfranchisement, and murder. They accepted Constantine as king while he accepted them as citizens with a right to imperial protection of their property. This arrangement made the temple subservient to the palace, divine law subservient to human law.
It also altered subtly hermeneutics, particularly the character of him who had fulfilled the ancient law of Leviticus in his new commandment; had realized Isaiah's Suffering Servant in his blood; had said to the Samaritan woman, "the hour is here when authentic worshipers will worship God in Spirit and truth" (John 4:23); had scorned the delusions of bread, authority, and miracle in the desert (Luke 4); had confirmed love of enemies: "God's sun rises on the bad and the good; his rain falls on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45); had overcome principalities and powers, empires and nation-states, civilizations, cultures, multinationals, laws: "I was dead, but look, I am alive forever and ever. I have authority over death and the world of the dead" (Revelation 1:18).
Perhaps it took a Pharisee, a teacher of the law, to comprehend the profound and subtle malice of the law. The murder of Christ exposed that malice. The rulers spoke of it to Pilate: "We have a law and according to that law, he must die" (John 19:7). Paul could therefore rightly conclude that this is the "justice" of the law: "it crucified the only person who knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). "If justice comes by means of the law, Christ died in vain "(Galatians 2:21). "You have broken with Christ if you look for justice in the law; you have fallen from grace" (Galatians 5:4). "Those who rely on the works of the law are under a curse" (Galatians 3:10). And his most crushing indictment of all: "It is through the law that sin became sinful to the fullest extent" (Romans 7:13).
Paul's language appears harsh and uncompromising, but it stemmed from his immersion in the passion and death of Christ. If Christ became sin to free us from sin; if he became a curse to save us from the curse of death; then we make vain his death, we become sin, we fall under a curse if we reinvest in the law's injustice, once having been freed.
Paul states that much, but he implies more. Sin, injustice, crime, oppression flourish under the law. Furthermore, social and political crime proliferates and grows in horror insofar as it enjoys the sanction of law. That is because reliance on human law is an act of unfaith, of indifference that destroys love. The 20th century, at once the bloodiest and most "legal" of centuries, should support such a claim: two world wars, Stalin's purges, Hitler's death camps, Korea, Indochina, the blood bath in Indonesia, five Middle Eastern wars, ... the world on the brink of nuclear cataclysm. All absurdly, tragically, criminally legal.
I view the controversy over civil disobedience as a struggle to regain faith. I honor it and am profoundly grateful for it. But faith in God and God's Christ is idolatrous without compassion for nuclear victims and justice for them. Justice, synonymous with biblical love, requires the yes of right and good to the victims, as well as the no of resistance to those empires, nation-states, bureaucracies, and persons that afflict them. This yes to life and no to death is our crisis, our turning toward the victims, our movement into justice. At the point of conscience, therefore, obedient to the now of the gospel, one must abandon controversy over civil disobedience in the abstract and do it in the concrete; do it faithfully, lovingly, responsibly.
[A] nuclear gun ... is an unimaginable, unthinkable threat, no question about that. But the gun should inspire not fear, but an anguished, mature, nonviolent outrage. Moreover, it should suggest unimaginable opportunity and vision - another Pentecost, for example. Pentecost would have to mean nuclear disarmament, outlawing war, and the dissolution of any human arrangement whose health is war.
The bomb needs the law more than the law needs the bomb; so does the national security state. The bottom line is exposure of the law in its duplicity and suicidal tendencies, suffering under it in the streets, courts, and jails, holding it to accountability by our love for the innocent and helpless. Christians should prod one another, encourage one another, with Paul's words, "Wake up sleeper. Rise from the dead! And Christ will shine on you" (Ephesians 5:14).
Philip Berrigan was a longtime peace activist and member of Jonah House in Baltimore, Maryland. He died on Dec. 6, 2002.
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