37 Quotes by Walter Wink

The command to love our enemies reminds us that our first task towards oppressors is pastoral: to help them recover their humanity. Quite possibly the struggle, and the oppression that gave it rise, have dehumanised the oppressed as well, causing them to demonise their enemies. It is not enough to become politically free; we must also become human. Nonviolence presents a change for all parties to rise above their present condition and become more of what God created them to be.

In the final analysis, then, love of enemies is trusting God for the miracle of divine forgiveness. If God can forgive, redeem, and transform me, I must also believe that God can work such wonders with anyone. Love of enemies is seeing one’s oppressors through the prism of the Reign of God – not only as they now are but also as they can become: transformed by the power of God.

To worship is to remember Who owns the house.

Prayer infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present.

The ultimate weakness of violence,” observed Martin Luther King, Jr., “is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.

Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil.

Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the ends but not the means.

The issue is not, “What must I do in order to secure my salvation?” but rather, “What does God require of me in response to the needs of others?” It is not, “How can I be virtuous?” but “How can I participate in the struggle of the oppressed for a more just world?“Otherwise our nonviolence is premised on self-justifying attempts to establish our own purity in the eyes of God, others, and ourselves, and that is nothing less than a satanic temptation to die with clean hands and a dirty heart.

Unjust systems perpetuate themselves by means of institutionalized violence.