ABSTRACT
In a day when an increasing number of people, especially students and blacks, are speaking of the present "transition from dissent to resistance" as the advent of the second American Revolution, there could scarcely be a more timely subject for discussion than civil disobedience. To a theologian, civil disobedience suggests the names of figures from an earlier period, for example, John Knox, John Lilburne, or George Fox. Even these names, however, come from a late period in the history of Christianity. From its very beginning Christianity was an outlaw religion committed to disobedience to the "world". In the civil-rights movement in the United States disobedience was often undertaken in protest against a municipal ordinance or a state statute. In the light of the hazards of civil disobedience for the commonweal and with a very restricted conception of it, Judge Wyzanski counsels what he calls "delayed civil disobedience".
