The Myth of Redemptive Violence
Thursday, September 24, 2026
Father Richard Rohr explains that so-called “redemptive violence” usually only perpetuates the cycles of violence Jesus came to stop:
Jesus has no part in any “myth of redemptive violence,” as some have called it, even though redemptive violence is the primary storyline of history, and even of much of the Bible (conquering the promised land, the wars of the kings of Israel, and the acts of Saul, David, Herod, and the like). Jesus’s story, instead, becomes a pattern of redemptive forgiveness.
Jesus’s life and teaching are starkly opposed to that perennial, universal mistake that is probably happening every three minutes in most human minds and hearts: the instinct to destroy what we perceive as the source of the problem. In that sense, he really is the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42), because that violence is the world’s primary agenda, which he unmasks and then resolves with a quite different agenda. If we do not learn this, it is hard to believe there is much future for our world.
To oppose violence, he has to diminish the very things that people tend to absolutize, because our absolutes are normally what we use to justify our violence. This is especially true when it comes to group identity. Jesus speaks critically against his own group whenever they try to use his message for oppositional thinking or group arrogance, or to justify violence. How different Christian history would have been had we listened to him!
This is Jesus’s simple message: Holiness is no longer to be found through separation or exclusion, but through the radical inclusion and forgiveness of the supposedly contaminating element. Any exclusionary system only lays the solid foundation for violence in thought, word, and deed. So, he has to lead us on a new path of forgiveness, inclusion, and sacrifice of our self-identity.
What Leviticus 16–27 describes as the “law of holiness”—separation from sinful people, the rejection of certain actions and things—is turned around in Jesus so that the very acts of separation, superiority, and rejection are in fact the sins!
I believe Jesus is teaching us that if we put our energy into choosing the good—instead of the negative and largely illusionary energy of rejecting the bad—we will overcome evil in a much better way and will not become evil ourselves. This is exactly what he does on the cross, and I believe it is at the heart of his message. At our center in New Mexico, we have taken it as one of our central axioms that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”
More than anything else, this is how Jesus reformed the laws of religion and undercut the basis for all violent, exclusionary, and punitive behavior. He became the forgiving victim so we would stop creating victims ourselves. He became the falsely accused one so we would be careful whom we accuse.
Reference:
Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media, 2022), 161, 162, 163–164.
Image credit and inspiration: Richard Bell, untitled (detail), 2022, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a wall bearing color instead of division, we practice a love that reaches toward the other, refusing to choose a single side.
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By MAXELCAT | Published: FEBRUARY 5, 2015
Gregory on divine grace and the human response
According to Burns, Gregory believed that salvation was universal because the entire human race was required to make up the divine image of God. If all people received the divine image, then if any are missing he thought that the whole image could not be ‘re-presented.’[49] In one of his commentaries Gregory underlines this by saying ‘God will be all in all, and all persons will be untied together in fellowship of the Good, Christ Jesus our Lord.’[50]
Gregory, in his Great Catechism speaks of Christ identifying with fallen humans saying that he had ‘in mind to share our human condition’ which here refers to the boundaries of birth and death that all of us pass through.[51]
Gregory saw the two processes of purification and growth within salvation. Purification of the body was only fully achieved at the resurrection and worked by the grace of God through Christ.[52] In baptism a person ‘symbolically anticipates death and resurrection in Christ, and commits himself to free his soul from vice and passion.’[53] This implies that a person can indeed cleanse his soul from the effects of sin, and enable the ‘soul’s beauty [to] again appear.’[54]
For Reflection:
From Google AI
The Interconnected Divine Image: Gregory argues that the “divine image” is only complete when every human being is included. If salvation requires the entire human race to “re-present” God’s image, how does this change how you view your personal connection to people outside your immediate community or faith tradition?
