Variety: Romans 12:21

21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Nonviolence teacher Ken Butigan understands God’s love to be at the center of nonviolence. 

Our true calling is to love one another as God has loved us. When we take this seriously, we are transformed into lovers who care for all beings. In practical terms this means resisting the tendency of the violence system to divide the world into various enemy camps. A fundamental script of this system is to separate “us” from “them”: … those who are worthy of our love and those who are not…. Often, we project our own unacknowledged violence onto [them].  

Nonviolence takes another approach. Practitioners of nonviolence seek to become their truest selves by slowly learning to love all beings, confident that all are kin and that we are called to embody this kinship concretely, especially in the midst of our most difficult and challenging conflicts…. Nonviolence is committed to challenging and resisting every form of violence. Nevertheless, it does not conclude that the opponent is absolutely and irrevocably incapable of loving or of being loved. To love the perpetrator … is a creative and daring act that seeks to provoke all parties to make contact with their true self, the undefiled reality of God which dwells at the center of their being. In short, their sacredness.… The greatest work of nonviolence is to create situations which free the sacredness of ourselves and our opponent. [