Christ breaks the rifle by Otto Pankok. Pankok was a well-established artist when Hitler came to power in 1933, but he was thereafter declared a “degenerate artist” because his central theme was the suffering of the oppressed. His pictures were seized from museums and art shops and he became destitute, barely surviving the war. By the 1950s, however, he was a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, where he created the woodcut, Christ Breaks the Rifle, which was created as part of the German movement against re-miliarization after the horrors of World War II.
This post is an adapted entry originally written in 2015
There is this old phrase in Christian tradition that describes taking our swords and beating them into plowshares. If you’re like me, a city dweller, you’re probably not familiar with what a plowshare is. A plowshare is a tool used by farmers to cut into the ground in order to soften it and cultivate it for crops. It would be carried behind an animal and dragged through the dirt. Plowshares are metal blades used for non-violent purposes to help provide for the needs of the community.
The Biblical phrase comes out of Micah 4:3 and Isaiah 2:4 where the prophetic literature paints a picture of God’s purposes and hopes for our world. Essentially, God’s desire is for his children to have peace, that our swords (whatever they may be) would be transformed into devices that serve the common good.
For Christians, the individual at the center of our reality not only agrees with the notion of beating our swords into plowshares, but personifies it. Christ’s power was known in sacrifice and surrender and he responded to violence with forgiveness and grace. When Peter pulled out a sword to defend Jesus, he was corrected by the words “all who live by the sword, die by the sword.”
The portrait of God in the scriptures and in God’s incarnation is one where our tools of violence are exchanged for the warfare of love.
Fast forward a couple thousand years to the past few weeks. More mass shootings. Racist attacks. Innocence lost. There are no words to describe the tragedy and horror.
In response the events like this many Christians echo the sentiment of former president of Liberty University, the largest “evangelical” Christian college in the nation who said openly that students should acquire guns and form groups to learn how to use them so that we can “end those muslims”. Some call for teachers to be armed.
Across the nation gun sales often rocket in moments like these as conservative and often Christian voices encourage the proliferation of killing devices, or as we like to describe them, self defense tools.
After one shooting a few years ago a pastor I used to work with posted on Facebook that, he’s getting a gun. As I read the comments there were dozens of people telling the pastor that they were in agreement.
Does something here seem incongruent to anyone else?
It feels like these faith leaders haven’t even read the text that they claim has divine inspiration and authority. As one author says, Jesus carried a cross, not a gun.
I understand the fear of extremists and active shooters – I really do. But most of the folks who are propagating these ideas are so far removed from any immediate danger. It seems so obvious that we’re being driven by fear.
Here is the my observation, one that I’ve thought through a lot over the last few weeks. In the words of Dr. King, “Violence always begets more violence”. That is our history. After every war that will “end all wars”, there always comes another one.
Did you know that the United States has been at war at least 227 out of 246 years of our existence? That means if you pick any year of our history, there is a 93% chance we will have been engaged in some violent conflict. And every time we go down the path of violence, our leaders promise us it will bring peace in the end. Recently our elected officials increased defense spending by tens of billions - all while social services and economic metrics are decreasing for millions of Americans. Did you know that the Alameda County Sherifs office owns a tank called the Grizzly?
The more we flood our nation with guns, the more likely we are to see them used for evil. It’s that simple. Violence always begets more violence. If we sow a culture of killing, death, and an incredibly profitable gun industry, make no mistake- we will reap what we sow.
The most confusing part of all this to me is how Christians can be so in support of this all. How can you possibly reconcile the teachings and example of Christ with a culture that celebrates and encourages more of us to exchange our plowshares for guns, saturating our society with more killing devices all for the profit of corporations? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Chris Scott