{"id":18317,"date":"2013-10-04T16:25:26","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T20:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=18317"},"modified":"2013-11-05T15:09:06","modified_gmt":"2013-11-05T20:09:06","slug":"mennonite-professor-and-israeli-philosopher-debate-pacifism-violence-and-resistance-to-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2013\/mennonite-professor-and-israeli-philosopher-debate-pacifism-violence-and-resistance-to-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"Mennonite professor and Israeli philosopher debate pacifism, violence and resistance to evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

In front of a packed audience at the Common Grounds coffeehouse<\/a>, an Israeli philosopher and a Mennonite theologian sat down to debate the ethics of pacifism and violence, approaching the issue from an unconventional angle: Is it unethical not to use violence as a last resort to resist evil?<\/p>\n

Moshe Shner, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Oranim Academic College<\/a> in Israel, spoke about his mother\u2019s participation as a paramedic in a Jewish partisan group that violently resisted Nazi Germany during World War II. Shner grew up on an Israeli kibbutz surrounded by the children of other veterans of the partisan movement, feeling pride that they had \u201cdone something\u201d to stand up for themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean that we love war or that we love bloodshed,\u201d said Shner. But it does mean, he continued, that sometimes, when all other options have been exhausted and when facing a truly implacable enemy causing harm to innocent people, using violence to try to prevent further harm is the ethical choice.<\/p>\n

\u201cViolence is bad. Violence is ugly \u2026 but in the end, we have responsibility to ourselves and our society and we have to do something that will stop [other] violence,\u201d said Shner.<\/p>\n

Unethical to acquiesce to harm<\/h3>\n

Ted Grimsrud<\/a>, an Eastern Mennonite University theology<\/a> professor who has written extensively on the subject of pacifism, agreed with Shner that standing aside while innocent people are being harmed is unethical. As a conviction that each human life is precious, pacifism, Grimsrud said, requires nonviolent resistance to protect others from harm. But he argued that eventually resorting to violence \u2013 and later \u201cvalorizing\u201d that violence, as he implied Shner does in the case of the Jewish partisans \u2013 makes violence \u201cmuch more acceptable\u201d the next time a conflict arises.<\/p>\n

Grimsrud also said that the lesson of World War II should be that violence doesn\u2019t work, as indicated by the Allies\u2019 failure to stop the Holocaust from happening.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe war was essentially a failure when it came to preventing harm-doing to Europe\u2019s Jews,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He pointed out that the most successful instances of saving Jewish lives during the war \u2013 the \u201crescue\u201d of Danish Jews to Sweden and the safe haven created in the French village of Le Chambon \u2013 were forms of nonviolent resistance.<\/p>\n

Shner simply disagreed with Grimsrud\u2019s stance on the efficacy of violence during World War II. It wasn\u2019t philosophers or theologians or intellectuals who stopped Nazi Germany, he said, it was General Patton and General Zhukov who stopped Nazi Germany and saved the Jews who were still alive when the Allied armies were finally successful.<\/p>\n

Force necessary at times?<\/h3>\n

\u201cThere are moments in life \u2013 you don\u2019t like them and you hope they don\u2019t come \u2013 when you have to use force,\u201d Shner said.<\/p>\n

By the end of their debate, Shner and Grimsrud had agreed in general that we are ethically obligated to nonviolently resist people or things causing harm to other people. They then began to split finer and finer hairs over the appropriate response to a harm-doer who doesn\u2019t stop when confronted nonviolently, moving through an increasingly aggressive set of nonlethal violent tactics up to, finally, lethal violence (which Shner said is justified when all other options are exhausted).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe line that I wouldn\u2019t want to cross is killing somebody,\u201d said Grimsrud, acknowledging the difficulty of the issue. \u201cIn a fundamental sense, I think violence is always wrong \u2026 but it was good that the Nazis were defeated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shner\u2019s visit to EMU was arranged by Linford Stutzman<\/a>, a professor of culture and mission<\/a> who regularly leads semester-long cross-cultural<\/a> study groups to the Middle East. Stutzman first met Shner more than a decade ago when Shner made a similar presentation to a group of EMU undergraduates in Israel, as he has regularly been doing ever since.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis position on the ethics of \u2018non-pacifism\u2019 is intriguing. We need that to test our own convictions,\u201d said Stutzman, who said that Shner\u2019s position, if nothing else, compels pacifists to empathize with individual traditions and experiences that lead people to non-pacifist stances.<\/p>\n

Stutzman also said that the question of pacifism\u2019s efficacy, which consumed much of the debate, isn\u2019t central to his thinking on the subject. Violence clearly is effective, and claiming pacifist convictions is easy in the comfortable Shenandoah Valley, Stutzman continued. But Jesus, he said, wasn\u2019t in a position of personal security or comfort when he taught his followers to love their enemies.<\/p>\n

Called to pacifism as a follower of Jesus<\/h3>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a pacifist because I think it will protect me [or others]. I\u2019m a pacifist because I believe that\u2019s what Jesus calls us to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elise Sauder, a junior who attended the debate, came because she\u2019s sometimes wondered whether her own pacifist convictions are always ethical.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough I believe that Moshe had really good points, my thinking is that things always come back to my faith in God, that He will protect me. If somebody was attacking me, I believe in my heart that I know where I\u2019m going,\u201d said Sauder, who was also a student on Stutzman\u2019s cross-cultural to the Middle East in the spring of 2013.<\/p>\n

And when it comes to the ethics of using violence \u2013 or not \u2013 to prevent harm being inflicted on someone else?<\/p>\n

Much harder question, Sauder acknowledged, as other members of the audience clustered around Grimsrud and Shner to continue the discussion past its allotted hour and a half \u2013 not enough time to change peoples\u2019 minds, it seemed, but plenty to get them thinking hard about difficult questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In front of a packed audience at the Common Grounds coffeehouse, an Israeli philosopher and a Mennonite theologian sat down to debate the ethics of pacifism and violence, approaching the ... read more about Mennonite professor and Israeli philosopher debate pacifism, violence and resistance to evil<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":18328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4515,5589,5583,14184,5623],"tags":[15124,7210,8739],"feature":[],"class_list":["post-18317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-bible-and-religion","category-campus-community","category-campus-guests","category-special-programs","tag-elise-sauder","tag-linford-stutzman","tag-ted-grimsrud"],"yoast_head":"\nMennonite professor and Israeli philosopher debate pacifism, violence and resistance to evil - EMU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2013\/mennonite-professor-and-israeli-philosopher-debate-pacifism-violence-and-resistance-to-evil\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mennonite professor and Israeli philosopher debate pacifism, violence and resistance to evil - 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