Violence, Force, and Coercion
Jesus calls His disciples to follow Him on the way of the cross. He calls them to love as He loves, to love their enemies even if it means they must suffer and die as He did. This means that violence is always incompatible with the demands of Christian discipleship. Many people assume that a position of pacifism necessarily means a rejection of all use of force and coercion. However, this is not necessarily the case. Violence is a type of force. It is a use of force with the intention of killing or at least permanently harming another human being. However, not all force is violence. It is possible for someone to use nonviolent force for the purposes of preventing rather than causing harm. Even if one rejects all use of violence, there may still be a place for the use of force in some circumstances. It is important for Christians to consider when and how the use of nonviolent force might have a legitimate place within Christian ethics.
Almost everyone recognizes that it is legitimate to use force and coercion when dealing with children. Because children have neither the mental capacity nor the experience to understand what is good for them and what is harmful to them, it is frequently necessary to use force rather than reason and persuasion to get children to do what is right and to prevent them from being harmed. In fact, almost everyone recognizes that the failure to use force in order to prevent children from bringing harm on themselves is immoral. Parents or other adults who give children unrestricted freedom, rather than using force to prevent them coming to harm, are guilty of child endangerment. In a dangerous, Fallen world, the use of force and coercion when dealing with children may, in some circumstances, be a moral obligation.
When we consider the use of force when dealing with adults, however, the matter becomes much more questionable. Adults are capable of and responsible for caring for themselves, and we have a moral responsibility to respect the freedom of other adults, even if we do not agree with their choices. And our attempts to force other adults to do what we think is best can often have unintended consequences or even backfire. Furthermore, there is much in Christian theology that makes forcing others to do what is right highly dubious.
Force, Coercion, and the Christian Gospel
Jesus is Lord of all of creation. This is the Good News of the Christian Gospel. Central to the proclamation of the Christian Gospel is the demand that all people everywhere repent of their sins, submit to Jesus’s Lordship, and live lives of obedience to Him. Yet, Jesus is a crucified Lord. He did not, as people were expecting, establish His Kingdom through force, coercion, and violence; instead, He established His Kingdom through the Cross. After His crucifixion, Jesus rose from the dead, demonstrating His victory over all the powers of evil: sin, death, the devil, and all the kingdoms of this world. Yet Jesus did not, after His resurrection, change tactics and begin to force His Kingdom on the world using His glorious Divine power. Instead, He called the community of His disciples, the body of Christ, to follow Him on the way of the cross, to proclaim the Good News about Him, and to teach those who believe this Good News how to be formed into faithful Christian disciples. This is how Jesus’s Kingdom is to advance in the midst of a world that is in rebellion against His Lordship.
Jesus’s Kingdom was established through the Cross, and it can only be advanced through the methods of the Cross. The church cannot force anyone to become a Christian. The church cannot force anyone to repent, believe the Good News, and submit to Jesus’s Lordship. In its evangelistic efforts, the church must use persuasion rather than coercion one hundred percent of the time. Anyone who has not made a commitment to following Jesus as His disciple is by definition not living a moral life. Yet Christians are not permitted to deal with this immorality by forcing others to do the right thing and to follow Jesus. The Christian community does not operate based on force and coercion, but on love, truth, and persuasion. It cannot coerce its members into living just and righteous lives; the most it can do to those stubbornly practicing evil within its midst is to excommunicate them.
The upshot of all this is that the use of force and coercion is, at least in most cases, incompatible with Christian ethics. If Christians are going to use force or coercion, there would have to be some extreme circumstance that warrants it. In a Fallen world, in which danger is a constant reality, it may sometimes be acceptable and necessary for Christians to use nonviolent force in order to prevent harm. For example, it may be a morally upright action for a Christian to yank someone back who is about to jump off a cliff or to push two people apart who are fighting. In extreme circumstances, Christians may legitimately use nonviolent force in order to prevent (never to cause) harm to others. But these are exceptions rather than the rule.
Force, Coercion, and Governmental Power
Many Christians would agree with what has been said so far about the church being unable to force people to do what is right, but they would argue that Christians can still legitimately use the state to force people to do what is right and just. The problem with this is that the Christian Gospel and the New Testament do not support the idea that the state is a morally legitimate entity. In between Jesus’s First and Second Comings, worldly governments have a part to play in God’s plan as entities that hold back chaos and anarchy, preserving a space of relative “peace” and “justice” in which the church can carry out its mission. Yet, at the fundamental level, they have been dethroned by the establishment of Jesus’s Kingdom. Their methods of rule contradict the nature of God’s Kingdom, and so are illegitimate.
To illustrate this, let us consider the long history of Christendom, stretching from the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century to the separation of church and state in the modern period. During this period, “Christian” governments outlawed non-Christian religions; forced people to “convert,” be baptized and become part of the church; and enforced theological orthodoxy, sometimes punishing heretics with death. Almost all Christians today look back on this with embarrassment, if not horror. Yet these same Christians believe they are justified in using secular governments today to force people to act rightly, for example, having the government forcibly take other people’s money through taxes and then give it to the poor.
The assumption underlying these contrasting attitudes is that it is wrong to force the true “religion” on other people, but it is acceptable to force people to act morally. However, this distinction between “religious” beliefs and practices on the one hand, and moral behavior on the other hand, is radically incompatible with genuine Christian ethics. A genuine Christian morality cannot accept the idea that confession of faith in Jesus as Lord and participation in the life of the church are nonmoral, merely “religious” issues. Rather, from a genuinely biblical perspective on ethics, they are an integral and central part of any genuine moral life. From a Christian perspective, the fact that Jesus is Lord and Savior of the world is the basic and foundational moral fact of the universe. Without faith in Jesus and submission to His Lordship, genuine morality is impossible. Biblically, idolatry is not at all a morally neutral, “religious” issue; it is a very serious moral evil.
All this to say, if we believe it is wrong to use governments to outlaw idolatry and to force people to “convert” to Chrsitianity, then we must logically also believe that it is wrong to use governments to outlaw other kinds of immorality and to force people to act in a “just” manner. Some Christians might argue that governments at least have a legitimate role of enforcing justice, even if they cannot enforce other aspects of morality. Yet Christians cannot accept the idea that we can set aside the Gospel and still speak of justice in a way that is genuine and meaningful. There is no neutral, abstract, self-evident idea of justice. Genuine justice, Christian justice, is determined by the cross of Jesus Christ, where the only truly just human being who ever lived took upon Himself the just consequences of our sin, so that we could be justified and reconciled to God. We cannot separate justice from all the other aspects of Christian theology and ethics with which it is inextricably linked. From a Christian perspective, a “justice” that is forced on people, rather than undertaken willingly out of love, is not a true justice at all.
The Old Testament does have much to say about the kings of Israel having a responsibility to establish justice (as well as “religious” orthodoxy and other aspects of morality) through force, even violence. But Christians live during a different period of salvation history, and so the moral demands God places on us are different. God calls Christians to establish justice, peace, and all other aspects of morality through persuasion, evangelism, truth, and love, and not through force and coercion.
Conclusion
Ever since the fourth century, Christians have believed it to be their responsibility to seize worldly political power and to use it to force aspects of God’s Kingdom onto an unwilling world. Whether this has taken the form of medieval efforts to enforce church membership and theological orthodoxy, or modern attempts to enforce “social justice,” they are merely two sides of the same coin. As Christians have focused on these endeavors, they have to a large extent abandoned their true calling of building the church into a radically countercultural community that visibly embodies God’s Kingdom in the midst of a Fallen world. If Christians want to be truly faithful, it is this true calling to which they must return.