Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution. André Trocmé

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      PLOUGH PUBLISHING HOUSE

      Published by Plough Publishing House

      Walden, New York

      Robertsbridge, England

      Elsmore, Australia

       www.plough.com

      Copyright © 2014, 2003 by Plough Publishing House

      All Rights Reserved

      André Trocmé’s book Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution was first published in English in 1973 by Herald Press, Scottdale, PA 15683, translated from the French by Michael H. Shank and Marlin E. Miller. This revised and expanded edition incorporates material from The Politics of Repentance by André Trocmé, used by permission of Fellowship Publications, Nyack, NY 10960.

      Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

      Cover art © Daniel Bonnel, www.ImagesOnChrist.com.

      Print ISBN: 978-0-87486-927-9

      Pdf ISBN: 978-0-87486-594-3

      Epub ISBN: 978-0-87486-592-9

      Mobi ISBN: 978-0-87486-593-6

       Introduction

      Few books stand the test of time as this one has. Perhaps the fact that it is still so relevant rests in the circumstances of its genesis – in the courageous life of its author. Since it first appeared in English in 1972, André Trocmé’s Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution has influenced a whole stream of New Testament thinkers and peace activists. Dozens of books about Christian ethics make reference to it, and proponents of nonviolence turn to it repeatedly for guidance. For example, significant portions of John Howard Yoder’s classic Politics of Jesus are based on Trocmé’s thesis. However, one cannot fully appreciate Trocmé’s ideas without some understanding of the man and of the amazing life story that forms the context for his message.

       The Story of Le Chambon

      André Trocmé was born into a French-German family in 1901, at the dawn of a turbulent period that would eventually catapult all Europe into armed conflict. As a young man, André’s youthful enthusiasm and impulsive deeds made him stand out. When the German army was rapidly marching into Northern France, he excitedly hung a French flag from the topmost branches of a towering tree near his house.

      During the First World War, André saw first-hand the horrors and senselessness of that war. At the age of thirteen he simply could not accept that his German cousins, his mother being German, might fight against his own half brothers. The shock of this, along with the senseless death of his mother from a car accident just prior to the war, and his encounter with numerous pacifist theologians after the war, cemented his orientation as a pacifist. Moreover, as a young student, he realized that military armistices could not establish peace between nations or reconstruct the moral fabric of a society.

      Years later he would be described by one writer as “a man of mystical fervor, aggressively loving, almost explosive in his rush to save lives.” But his path was not always so clear. As the specter of National Socialism began to haunt Europe, Trocmé, despite his aversion to violence, conceded that it might be necessary to plot against and assassinate Hitler. In the end he joined an altogether different kind of conspiracy, one that chronicler Philip Hallie called “a conspiracy of goodness.”

      By the time Hitler’s war machine came to full force, Trocmé, now married and a father of four, was co-pastor of the French Reformed Church in Le Chambon sur Lignon. A farming village on a pine-studded plateau in the mountains of south-central France, Le Chambon seemed an unlikely breeding place for the radical resistance for which it would soon be famous. Yet it became a magnet to a stream of refugees that included both French and foreign Jews, providing shelter and safety from their persecutors.¹

      Already before the first Jews arrived, others fleeing from Franco’s regime in Spain, and later from the Nazis, found this Protestant sanctuary, consisting of twelve villages, willing to bid them welcome. In the parish of Le Chambon, Trocmé and his fellow pastor, Edouard Theis, united the people in the effort to protect these fugitives, exhorting their parishioners to live not in fear of the state, but according to moral conviction. What eventually became a massive, organized network to protect and even educate Jewish children who had been taken out of internment camps, started at the grassroots with these first refugees. Villagers and farmers opened their homes to the refugees, sometimes to stay, sometimes to wait until accommodations could be arranged elsewhere or until they could be smuggled across the Swiss border. Besides the hospitality of individuals, by the middle of the occupation financial aid from outside the village was supporting seven larger houses of refuge. Several humanitarian СКАЧАТЬ