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6. Christian faith gives us a place from which we can operate in history, working at our historic tasks without illusions and without despair.

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To what extent is the distinction between "oppressed" and "oppressors" open to the corruption that follows upon assuming that social conflicts are between "saints" and "sinners," instead of between contending groups of sinners?

1. Certainly the oppressed are sinners as surely as the oppressors. And the church's ministry of reconciliation to the oppressed is to bring the deepest insights of Christian faith to bear on their situation – -- not counseling them against violence, but dissuading them from hatred, or setting their problem in a perspective such that their hatred is mitigated by the recognition that the sin of the capitalist is not peculiar to the capitalist and that therefore the destruction of capitalism will not remove sin from the world. To the objection that such mitigation of self-righteousness weakens the fury and wrath necessary to the success of the oppressed's cause, the response is that, on the most pragmatic level, this may very well not be true, because fury and wrath may only increase the size of the enemy's ranks and strengthen the righteousness of his cause.

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5. It can be eliminated in principle both because we are not created sinners and because the saving grace of God is ever-present, notwithstanding the fact of our universal sinfulness, overcoming the deepest root of social violence in our anxious distrust of God and our consequent disloyalty to God – -- as well as to all to whom God is loyal. Since it is this underlying distrust and disloyalty that leads to all our strategies of trying to secure our existence, and thus to self-aggrandizement and injustice toward others, social violence can in principle be eliminated because, notwithstanding our tendency to sin, we have a capacity to act justly to the extent that God's grace is effective in freeing us from ourselves.

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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 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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2. The distinction between violent and nonviolent resistance is not absolute. (If it were absolute, one would have to give moral preference to the nonviolent power wielded by a propagandist over the kind of violent power wielded by a generaLgeneral)

3. The differences between violence and nonviolence are pragmatic, not instrinsic intrinsic or absolute, the differences between their social consequences being differences in degree, not in kind. (Both place restraint upon the freedom of others, and both may injure or kill persons and damage or destroy property.)

4. Once pure pacifism has been abandoned, and the principle of resistance and coercion has been accepted as necessary to the social struggle for social cohesion, the dfferences differences between violence and nonviolence lose their absolute significance, although they remain important.

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"The distinction between Niebuhr's theology and the civil rights movement is somewhat artificial. The difference between burning an unoccupied warehouse and refusing to surrender a seat at a segregated lunch counter is significant, but both actions are designed to exert economic pressure. Nonviolent direct action at its most effective was surely Niebuhrian in that it operated as political coercion, not moral appeal. King called nonviolence 'merely a Niebuhrian strategem stratagem of power.'

"The armies of nonviolence descended on Birmingham in 1963 determined to create intolerable tension in the community, to inflict an unbearable economic price, to shame the U. S. in the eyes of the world and undermine its claim to be a beacon of democracy, and to force the national government to intervene. Popular memory casts nonviolence as an appeal to the better angels of our nature, but this is sugar-coated nonsense.

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