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7. This position, however, is not properly described as pessimism. It is more fairly characterized simply as realism, in the strict sense of seeing things as they really are, in distinctiction distinction from how they appear to be or how we would like them to be -- and this in both of the relevant respects: with respect both to the universal reality of human sinfulness and with respect to the all-encompassing reality, notwithstanding sin, of God's saving grace.

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Corrigendum ad 1, which should be reformulated as follows;:

1. There can be no fruitful discussion of "social violence" unless we take care to clarify what we mean by the phrase. To this end, I propose that we understand "violence" in general to mean the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on persons or damage to property, and so any action or conduct involving such exercise. By "social violence" in particular, then, I suggest that we understand such violence in this sense as is inevitably involved in what Reinhold Niebuhr speaks of as the "social struggle" to achieve "social cohesion," as the mean between anarchy, on the one hand, and tyranny, on the other.

Concerning social violence:

Jose José Miguez-Bonino

"[W]hether Christians or not, we are always actively involved in violence – repressive, subversive, systemic, insurrectional, open, or hidden. I say actively involved because our militancy or lack of it, our daily use of the machinery of the society in which we live, our ethical decisions or our refusal to make decisions make us actors in this drama."

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"[T]he political strategies by which the world achieves a precarious justice . . . invariably involve the balancing of power with power; and they never completely escape the peril of tyranny, on the one hand, and and the peril of anarchy, on the other."

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