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We have privy information about God's intent for the world; and since then, we are marked men and women bearing a secret vision the world cannot tolerate. But isn't it great to know it and to be invited to live it?!

The issue, then, is not social struggle versus inner change, but their orchestration together so that both occur simultaneously. The transformation of society and persons can begin at either end. The early church began from the pole of steadfastness in prayer and the refusal of idolatry, manifesting that hypomone which the Book of Revelation regards as the highest Christian virtue. It is usually somewhat limply rendered "patient endurance," but it is in fact closer to "absolute intransigence," "Unbending determination," "an iron will," "the capacity to endure persectution, torture, and death without yielding one's faith." It is one of the fundamental attributes of nonviolent resistance.

How would it change the shape of social struggle if we understood that we wrestle not just against flesh and blood but also against principalities, against powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies? What are the practical implications of putting on the whole armor of God and praying at all times in the Spirit (Eph. 6:10-20)? How would it change the nature of our wrestling if we did so in the context of continuous Bible study and singing and worship? For those still working their way out from under the weight of an oppressively pious upbringing, that probably does not resound as good news, but it is. It is the way increasing numbers of others have learned they must live, in order to keep on struggling against the Beast without being made beastial.

The call of Jesus to abandon homes, families and land is not the imposition of a new “holiness” code, as if material reality is impure and must be spurned in the quest for the “purity” of spiritual life. Rather, his charge is to recognize the way normal security arrangements—homes, which provide private sanctuary from physical threat; families, which were the basic means of economic production in ancient societies; and land, the pivotal measure of wealth—distract us from the true spirituality of shared resources. The only lasting security is mutual security. Whereas the roots of terrorism lie in the hoarding of sanctuary, economic production and land ownership. But to get there requires a radical reorienting of our minds and hearts. This is what it means to get saved.

For it is in the act of worship that the church steadily renews itself in the discipline of wisdom. Worship is a vigorous act of reordering our desires in the light of God’s burning desire for the wellness of creation.

The doxologies of ancient Israel, the lyrical soaring of Paul’s Epistles, and the regular amazement evoked by the deeds and teaching of Jesus all converge in the stunning affirmation that the world is other than we had taken it to be, because the world is the venue for God’s reign.

Violence is a form of evangelism for the Devil. It’s claim is that there is no Sovereign other than the the one who, currently, aims the business end of the barrel and sets the terms of the market’s beneficiaries.

One can hope . . . that the new concern for “spirituality” that has gripped many of our contemporaries is more than just a bourgeois extension of fashionable value-prioritizing rhetoric—that is contains within itself some intuitive awareness of the need for genuine transcendence if we are to survive the self-destructive propensities of our so-called freedom.

. . . if we as Christians are to reclaim the political theology required by the truthfulness of Christian convictions, we will need to begin by doing theology unapologetically. . . . [I]f my analysis is . . . close to being right, it should make clear that a commitment to Christian nonviolence is the presumption necessary for the church reassert its political significance.

You want to know what YHWH looks like? Here, like this executive criminal [Jesus] who occupied the place of pain and shame and death so that you longer need fear it and, no longer fearing it, need no longer put anyone else there ever again, but might yourself start to live as if death were not.