You Should Know who Raymund Schwager Is (and a quote to prove it)

I have quoted Raymund Schwager S.J. in this forum before.  If you aren’t aware of him, I suggest remedying that situation.  His Jesus in the Drama of Salvation (see this review at Amazon, but buy it at Crossroad) is one of the most satisfying soteriologies I have encountered.

I just finished reading his Banished From Eden:  Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation.  (Sorry I can’t find the publisher’s website, so you’ll have to order it at your local Christian bookstore.)  It has a bit of a Teilhardian feel in that it is brilliant, but also likely to be superseded simply because it is so cutting-edge.  Schwager takes on the hard questions and does brand new things with evolution and original sin.

I want to share a quote from that book with you to whet your appetite for more Schwager.  It concerns how Jesus’ refusal of violence is essential to our redemption.  On page 110 he writes:

Whoever offers his life when under attack of enemies makes an implicit statement about the tendencies of those who slay him.  They feel they are threatened and seize upon preventative violence.  But the non-violent one shows clearly by his conduct that he is certainly no enemy; indeed, his loving surrender of his life reveals that though being perceived as attacking those who persecute and kill him, he wills only the good for them.  The non-violent one is thus nearer to that desire of his enemies that want something good for themselves than they are to themselves.  For in attacking, the persecutors always risk their own lives as well, whereas the non-violent one, by not retaliating, protects the life of his enemies.  So by the free act of the non-violent one is more in accord with the actual will to life of the violent than the latter in their ostensible freedom.  This self-giving aims at separating in the perpetrators of violence their deeper intention from their aggressive impulses and at strengthening and redirecting the former.  So it is that the freedom of the (non-violent) other penetrates the basic will to live of the perpetrators of violence more deeply than their own agitated, aggressive desire.  In this way we can somewhat clarify how Jesus’ surrender of his life redeems sinners.  Through his loving non-violence he came nearer to his enemies and to all sinners than they are to themselves.

Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one.