Editor’s note: This article appeared in print before the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump. We’re publishing it online ahead of schedule given its relevance to the present moment.
The US is in another presidential election that, in many ways, triggers a déjà vu of 2020—a high-water mark for political and social unrest many might wish to forget. And while we may not be living in entirely unprecedented times (as a brief review of the not-too-distant 1960s serves to remind us), our country is experiencing a rise in politically motivated violence.
A 2023 study from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found that 40 percent of both Biden and Trump supporters “at least somewhat believed the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.” In response to similar findings by the Public Religion Research Institute, the National Association of Evangelicals released a statement by evangelical leaders condemning violence as a justifiable political tool.
Responses like these are welcome and helpful. It’s crucial for evangelical leaders and clergy who minister at the level of everyday life to speak and act against this alarming trend and the desperation that justifies it.
Yet I believe the Spirit of Jesus has given the church more to face our present moment. Political violence isn’t just a sociopolitical problem to be denounced—it demands a fresh vision of discipleship cultivated and encouraged from the pulpit.
As French theologian Jacques Ellul wrote, “the role of the Christian in society” is to “shatter fatalities and necessities” associated with violence. Such a broad task requires a more robust vision of pastoral theology, one that rejects passivity to imagine a faithful Christian presence in a hostile sociopolitical climate.
One possible source for this renewed vision is the historic witness of Kornelis Heiko Miskotte—a Dutch Reformed pastor theologian who spent the war in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Miskotte defied Adolf Hitler’s political regime and risked his life to shelter Jews in his home. But he also participated in a uniquely theological form of resistance through his writings, including a widely distributed biblical tract its editors say served as a kind of “anti-Nazi catechism.”
Miskotte was a contemporary of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as a fellow admirer of Karl Barth. Yet his name has been relatively forgotten in history, in part because his works were not translated into English until recently. But there may be another reason for Miskotte’s obscurity compared to Bonhoeffer: He did not die for his cause.
When it comes to defying Christian passivity, Christians often call on the wisdom of Bonhoeffer, who was a leading voice in the Confessing Church—a clergy movement that resisted the Nazification of Germany’s Protestant churches. Rather than flee to America, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany before the war. He was barred from lecturing and preaching and eventually joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—which led to his imprisonment and ultimate execution.
Yet many today have fractured and co-opted Bonhoeffer’s legacy by lifting his biography from his theology. This distortion creates a “Bonhoeffer option”—which amounts to tacit permission to entertain political violence as a viable solution. In a recent article defending evangelical support for Trump, professor Mark DeVine does just that, writing, “Bonhoeffer saw civilization itself in the crosshairs of evil. So do Trumpers.”
Yet German theologian Hans Ulrich, who studied under some of Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries after the war, writes differently than DeVine: “Bonhoeffer’s witness is not his death but his desire to fulfill the will of God.”
In the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, Bonhoeffer freely welcomed God’s judgment, writing,
If one has completely renounced making something of oneself—whether it be a saint or a converted sinner or a church leader … then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God.
Bonhoeffer’s decision placed him beyond the limits of ethical systems, frustrating those who would use him as moral justification for political violence. Instead, we must attend to the theology that fueled Bonhoeffer’s faith, which was born from years of wrestling with God’s will against the backdrop of everyday life—and in helping his church do likewise. Only a robust pastoral theology rooted in everyday fidelity can imagine a faithful theological resistance to evil.
Biblical pastoral theology should give clergy resources to help their church members answer vital questions like “Whom do we trust?” and “In what do we hope?”—which have a profound impact as much on our everyday lives as in the most extreme moments. And as Eugene Peterson would say, a pastor’s primary job is not galvanizing congregants for a partisan cause but rather, in the words of his biographer, “teaching people to pray and teaching them to die a good death.”
One way pastoral theology makes this possible is by reminding people of the power of God’s Word—which brings us back to Miskotte. When his fellow Dutch citizens were faced with the costly choice of pious inaction or violent reaction, Miskotte invited them to a theologically sustained yet politically active form of resistance. This, he believed, began with the simple yet radical act of listening:
Many cry out for action. But could it be, that the primordial action is hearing—the hearing that arose in former times as resistance against the worldly powers, giving rise to martyrdom and a new song; a new diaconate, a new confession, and suffering and action arose.
Miskotte saw that the Nazi occupation in Amsterdam yielded a surprising, fresh hunger for the Scriptures—including an outbreak of Bible study groups across occupied cities in the winter of 1940. Miskotte personally facilitated some of these underground meetings and, with his theological training, published and distributed a study guide to meet the desperate need for biblical resources.
His pamphlet, titled Biblical ABCs, took aim at the religious roots of Nazism. The primer began with the importance of God’s name, which Miskotte saw as the “cornerstone” of all “resistance” to authoritarianism and truth decay. “The more firmly we believe in the Name,” Miskotte writes, “the more unbelieving we become toward the primordial powers of life.”
Miskotte hoped that by reencountering this living God and reimagining what it means to be biblical, Dutch Christians might cultivate a “better resistance” to the Nazi occupation.
In this way, Miskotte saw Christian sanctification as a form of sabotage. The God of Israel revealed in the Bible and in Jesus Christ, Miskotte said, “is from the outset Saboteur.” Not only does Jesus destroy our manmade ideas about God and religion, but sanctification initiates us into God’s ongoing holy sabotage of our lives and the sociopolitical worlds that define them. Biblical holiness, Miskotte argued, is not just moral virtue but sanctified sabotage.
In his essay on Miskotte’s work, theologian Philip G. Ziegler says a key to “the sanctification of the Name is active disbelief and disobedience vis-à-vis the chthonic and religious powers driving natural life.”
Yet even this form of nonviolent theological resistance is often regarded as literal subversion by the political establishment—especially people whose visions of peace, justice, and greatness conflict with those of the kingdom of God.
For instance, when one of Miskotte’s fellow Dutch pastors, Jan Koopmans, published a similar pamphlet confessing, “We are Christians first, Dutch second,” the Dutch SS flagged Koopmans’s file and labeled him as a dangerous “saboteur.” Miskotte seized on that accusation and appropriated it subversively for the Dutch church.
Faithful discipleship has always posed a risk to the political establishment—beginning in the first-century Roman world. To proclaim “Jesus is Lord” then was to question Caesar’s claim of total authority, and thus this confession was seen as an indirect sabotage and subversion of the Roman order and the violence that built it.
AlamyEven the word Christian first emerged as a way for Roman authorities to code early believers as dangerous political agitators and enemies of the Pax Romana, or “Roman peace”—and only later did believers appropriate the term for themselves.
Just as the earliest Christians’ devotion to the Jewish Messiah subverted Caesar’s sovereignty, “saboteurs” like Miskotte and the Confessing Church threatened Hitler’s supremacy in Europe. And while this makes it sound as if the Christian heritage is associated with overt political posturing and rebellion, God’s form of sabotage is ultimately not of this world—even as it remains for this world.
Holy sabotage is brought about not by the power to crucify but by the power of one who was crucified. This translates into a political presence that, according to Stanley Hauerwas, exists “so that the world may know there is an alternative to the violence that characterizes the relations between peoples and nations.”
To be Christian is to confess that Jesus alone is Lord—a God who will have no rivals, no counter-creeds, and no rogue words against the Word. This divine Saboteur does not leave us with our rage, nations, causes, or principles—all elements that prime us toward violence. Instead, he sets us apart for himself.
More than that, God sets us apart together. Whenever and wherever we gather, we become an insurgent church—a people and place where the stories and slogans of our social and political world are emptied of their power and crucified on the cross. The common life of the church is, in its very nature, a public witness to the world—an invitation to relinquish our natural, often violent methods of empire building to embrace the supernatural provision of Jesus Christ.
Yet the communal mission of the church is often extinguished by times of relative peace and piety. Miskotte noticed that the Nazi occupation in Amsterdam exposed the long-standing rot of insular Dutch churches and their infighting factions. “We have the church, and we have individual believers,” he said, “but we don’t have communities.”
Amid the horrors of World War II, Miskotte proclaimed that “the pious world of so-called church life must come to an end”—and in its ruins, a new church was being birthed. In his review of Biblical ABCs, Koopmans spoke of the national church’s breakdown and the revival of study groups gathering in homes, saying, “Through this War, God teaches us to ask for the Bible. … we almost don’t have a Church anymore, apart from the form in which it can be found in the Bible.”
As Miskotte wrote, “The mystery of the church is, that something happens there.” That “something” flows from a renewed hunger for the Word of God.
In the same way, resisting political violence in our day requires the church to renew its identity as the community of God’s Word. The American church today is divided by allegiances to various partisan causes—leading to what feels like the collapse of our common life as Christians. We have neglected Paul’s instruction to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). And if pastoral theology is to unite the church and revive its public ministry, it must encourage congregants to be devoted to the Spirit of Jesus, not the spirit of the party.
To resist political violence is not to be rebranded by another cause but to be renewed together as the body of Christ. This is our primary theological resistance against all worldly powers that would seek to divide us, claim our loyalty, or call us to arms. As Miskotte reminds us, “the church is the church by faith in becoming the church, again and again.”
Instead of the Bonhoeffer option and its anomalous permission for violence, American Christians can rediscover the wisdom of pastoral theology in Miskotte and—closer to home—similar witnesses like Martin Luther King Jr., who during the Montgomery bus boycott instructed participants to
pray for guidance and commit yourself to complete non-violence in word and action as you enter the bus. … If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times.
As Miskotte reminds us, Christian sanctification involves partnering in God’s holy sabotage of our world and its mechanisms of violence. The church’s prophetic task is witnessing to the peace of Christ, which reconciles and sustains the world. A restored humanity is possible only at the Cross, not by the sword. And as dissident disciples, we smuggle this subversive message as witnesses in, to, and for a hostile world that is being reconciled to God but has yet to recognize it.
As sanctified saboteurs baptized into God’s life, we say boldly, “We are Christians before we are Americans,” in accordance with our primal confession that Jesus is Lord.
Jared Stacy is a theologian and Christian ethicist who served for nearly a decade as a pastor to evangelical congregations in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and the Washington, DC, area.
