For Kenyans who marvel at the fact that professed Christians killed their neighbours and destroyed their livelihoods, Easter is an appropriate time to meditate on the place of violence in Christianity and the tendency of many believers to project an understanding of salvation separated from ethics.
Christianity has failed to make a definite stand on violence mainly because classic formulations of central doctrines accommodate and support it by claiming that God saved the world through the violence of the cross. Hence, since it can do good, it is not to be tabooed as intrinsically evil.
Christians believe many things over why Jesus died and who was ultimately responsible for his murder, that God handed Jesus over to Satan as a ransom to secure the release of the souls of humankind the devil held captive, that the conflict between Satan and God was a cosmic battle in which God's son was killed, but in raising him from the dead God won a decisive victory, that the God-man's death was necessary to restore the honour of God which human sin had offended, that Jesus' death satisfied a divine law's requirement that sin must be punished, so Jesus was punished in our place to satisfy the demands of justice and allow God to justly forgive us or that his death was a loving act of God aimed at us sinners and designed to reveal his love for sinners.
Such doctrines that justify violence, under a variety of divinely anchored claims and images that portray an image of God as the chief exacter of retribution, as a divine avenger or punisher, and/or as a child abuser who arranges the death of one child (Jesus) for the benefit of the others (us sinners), as a God who saves by violence and of an innocent son who passively submits to that God-orchestrated and directed violence, are responsible for the centuries of violence on the part of Christians.
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