Eminent German theologian Karl Rahner wrote, “A certain self-assertion and resistance proper to a given being and hence as its innate possibility of acting spontaneously, without the previous consent of another, to interfere with or change the actual constitution of that other… All beings simply because they exist… inevitably have power in a certain sense and to a certain degree.” Power is essential to man’s existence, its exercise is unavoidable; it can only be renounced by death. Power must not simply be understood somewhat negatively as necessary and, therefore, reluctantly permissible. It is “the condition of the possibility of freedom.” Paul Tillich, in his study of Love Power and Justice, refers in his preface to the fact that these concepts have a “common root in the nature of being itself.” He speaks of a “false opposition between love and power which “stems from a narrow understanding of both.” He regards the principle of the absolute renunciation of force as “a heresy which misunderstood the nature of man.” Since the exercise of power is fundamental to the exercise of human freedom, man in spite of his “incorrigible fallibility” must wield power, and this includes the exercise of physical power.
In this sense force is in many contexts a synonym for coercion. To coerce is to constrain or restrain by force, or by authority resting on force. Authority resorting to coercion happens also in church matters and decisions. In recent years, we have learned that violence has many faces. It is not merely a matter of physical harm intentionally inflicted upon an individual in an obvious dramatic way. There is no easy way of defining precisely this enlarged concept of violence. There is need for continued work at this level of conceptual and semantic clarification. John Rawls regards unjust social arrangements as “themselves a kind of extortion, even violence.” All people are already caught up in and are part of structures which do violence to others: Our militancy or lack of it, our daily use of the machinery of society in which we live, our ethical decisions or our refusal to make decisions make us actors in this drama. We are trying to get out of the vicious circle This is what Moltmann is concerned with when he speaks of the goal of a legitimate revolution: “As master and slave neither is a true man… If the denial of the master were total, the slave’s revolt would bring nothing new into the world but would only exchange the roles of inhumanity.”
Reinhold Niebuhr’s comment is, therefore, appropriate: “Once we admit the factor of coercion as ethically justified, though we concede that it is always morally dangerous, we cannot draw any absolute line of demarcation between violent and non-violent
coercion.” Yves Congar, one of the founders of this way of doing theology, insisted
that: “If the Church wishes to deal with the real questions of the modern world and to attempt to respond to them… instead of using only revelation and tradition as starting points, as classical theology has generally done, it must start with facts and questions derived from the world and from history.” In the words of Gaudium et Spes, “Political authority must always be exercised within the limits of morality and on behalf of the dynamically conceived common good.” Aquinas says the following about a situation of prolonged oppression: “But whatever opinion be formed of the acts of men, yet the Lord equally executed his work by them, when he broke the sanguinary tyrannical governments. Let princes hear and fear.” After “much debate” (Acts 15: 7), James gives his considered judgment, and this was subsequently agreed to by all present as what ‘seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28).