Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

The practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine judgment. My thesis will be unpopular with many people in the West. But imagine for a moment speaking to people as I have whose cities and villages have been plundered, leveled to the ground, whose daughters have been raped, whose fathers have had their throats slit. Your point to them as you speak is this: ‘We should not retaliate.’ Why not? What will keep them from retaliating? I say this: that the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate wen it comes from god. Violence thrives today secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword. It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence is the result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land soaked in the blood of the innocent that idea will invariably die… If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship.

- Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace