The Case for Christian Pacifism

Most modern Christians read the New Testament with a filter that says, “New Testament ethics is only about personal morality, so of course the New Testament ethic of love says nothing against state-sponsored violence; of course the New Testament ethic of love does not forbid us to hate and kill the enemies of our nation.”  This filter has nothing to do with what the New Testament is actually saying, and everything to do with assumptions that are uncritically absorbed from human culture and human tradition.  Once we have correctly understood the message of the New Testament within its first century Jewish context and laid the foundation of a genuine New Testament understanding of the politics of God’s Kingdom, though, we are in a position to correctly interpret and understand the ethical teachings of the New Testament as they relate to worldly politics and violence.  

The Christian Ethic of Love

The Lord Jesus Christ commands His followers to love their enemies and to do good to them (Matt 5:44; Luke 6:27, 35), and not to take revenge or resist an evil person (Matt 5: 38-9).  The purpose of Jesus’s ethical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is not to give us an impossible moral standard so that we will despair of meeting it and will instead turn to faith alone in Jesus’s sacrifice for us on the cross.  Nor is it to give us ethical directives for our personal lives that have nothing to say about the political structures of this world and leave their selfish, hateful, violent ways untouched. The purpose of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is for Jesus to tell us, “This is the new way of life that is possible now that God’s Kingdom is being established in and through what I am doing.”  Since Jesus claims Lordship over all of creation (Matt 28:18), his ethical commands to love our enemies and not to retaliate against evildoers apply to every aspect of our lives and every sphere of human existence: personal, “religious,” social, political, or otherwise. This means that Christians are forbidden from using violence against evildoers, even if, according to the laws of worldly kingdoms, that violence is “legal” and carried out by the state.

Jesus’s apostles reiterate His command to love our enemies.  The apostle Peter teaches, “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult” (1 Pet 3:9), and that Christians should do good even if they have to suffer for it; Peter grounds this teaching in the example of Christ (3:14-18). The apostle Paul commands Christians, “Bless those who persecute you. . . Do not repay anyone evil for evil. . . Do not take revenge. . . Overcome evil with good” (Rom 12:14-21).  Those who argue that it is legitimate for Christians to participate in the violence of nation-states try to use Romans 13:1-7, where Paul tells Christians to be subject to the governing authorities, to support their position. This is ironic because in this passage, not only has Paul just finished telling Christians that they must always do good to those who harm them and that they should never take revenge, but he immediately goes on to say, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves has fulfilled the law. . . Love does no harm to a neighbor” (13: 8, 10).  Romans 13:1-7 is bracketed by Paul’s commands to Christians to be people of peace and love, and Paul mentions refraining from rebelling against the governing authorities as a way in which Christians are to be people of peace and love. To use it to justify Christians hating and killing their enemies is to take it wildly out of context.

When Paul says that worldly governments “are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” (v. 4), he means that God, in His providence, uses the violence of worldly governments to hold back the greater evil of chaos and anarchy; he does not mean that the violence of worldly governments is legitimate from the standpoint of Christian ethics.  Since Paul has just said, “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath” (12:18), it is very clear that he intends to say that Christians are not allowed to participate in what worldly governments do as agents of God’s wrath.  Instead, as the body of Christ, Christians are called to always be agents of God’s love, grace, and peace.  They are called to carry out the “ministry of reconciliation” (II Cor 5:18), as God acts through Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord of all, “to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on a cross” (Col 1:20)

The Theology of Nonviolence

Murderers deserve to be killed; this is certainly true (Gen 3:6).  But everyone who is a Christian knows that they deserve the penalty of death for their sin, and that God has not given them this penalty they deserve, but instead, on the cross, took the penalty of death that they deserve upon Himself, so that they could be forgiven and reconciled to God (Rom 6:23).  Given this, how can a Christian inflict the penalty of death on another human being, knowing that Christ died and rose again for this person’s forgiveness and salvation, just as much as He did for their own? As the body of Christ, Christians are called to follow Jesus on the way of the cross and to show Christ’s love and grace to the world, so how can we justify killing people we think deserve to die instead of showing them God’s grace and love?

The world believes that everyone has a “right” to kill in self-defense.  The assumption behind such a “right” is that it is morally acceptable to believe that one’s own life is more valuable than another person’s life.  But Christians, who are commanded to love their neighbor (including their enemy) as themselves, know that every human life should be equally valued, and that self-centered behavior that harms others, no matter who those others are, is morally unacceptable.  And since Christians know that even the worst sinners, even killers like the apostle Paul (I Tim 1:12-16), can be saved from their sin and transformed by God’s grace to become valuable participants in God’s Kingdom, no Christian has the right to assume that their own continued existence is more valuable than the continued existence of the person who is attempting to kill them.  Through the hope of the resurrection of the dead and of eternal life in God’s new creation, Christians have been freed from the fear of death; this allows us to choose to love our enemies, even when it means we have to suffer and die.

The world believes that using violence against evildoers in order to prevent them from killing other people is not only morally acceptable, but is also morally praiseworthy.  The assumption behind this is that we can divide the world into the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” the innocent and the guilty, and that the only way to defeat evil is to use violence against those we have deemed the “bad guys.”  Christians, in contrast, must always have their understanding of how to defeat evil be grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. At any moment, Jesus could have used His divine authority to summon legions of angels to slaughter the evil, pagan Romans who were oppressing and killing God’s people (Matt 26:53); that is exactly what the Romans deserved, and that is exactly the kind of salvation from Roman oppression the Israelites were hoping the Messiah would bring.  But Jesus resisted this temptation, instead choosing to submit to the will of His Heavenly Father and to walk the way of the cross. Christians believe that Jesus’s suffering and death on the cross was not a defeat, but in fact the means by which God accomplished a victory over the forces of evil, the “powers and authorities” of this fallen world (Col 2:13-15). Rather than killing the evil pagan Romans, God struck directly at the forces of sin, death, and the devil–the root cause of all pagan empire–and defeated them through Jesus’s death and resurrection.  God’s Kingdom was established through the Cross of Christ, and, as participants in God’s Kingdom, Christians must always use the methods of the cross, and not the sword (Matt 26:51-52); they must always be people of love, not hate, and of peace, not violence.  

As part of a community of forgiven, repentant sinners, Christians can never rightly label themselves as the “good guys” and others as the “bad guys,” whom they should kill; instead, they are called to bring the good news of God’s love, forgiveness, and grace to even the worst evildoers.  Even when they see evildoers threatening the lives of other “innocent” people, Christians must, as Jesus did, resist the temptation to use the violent methods of the world to combat evil; to compromise in this way would be to admit that they do not really believe the good news that Jesus the crucified one is truly Lord of all and that God is making all things new through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  

The Christian Tradition and Nonviolence

From the time of the apostles until the fourth century, when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, virtually all Christian thinkers were pacifists.^[1]See Ceaser and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service by George Kalantzis (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012). To cite just a few examples, Tertullian taught, “The Lord thereafter, by disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier”^[2]“On Idolatry,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, Volume 3, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), page 73., St. Cyprian taught, “It is not lawful for the innocent even to kill the guilty”^[3]“Epistle LVI,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 5, Page 351., and Lactantius taught, “When God forbids us to kill, He not only prohibits us from open violence, which is not even allowed by the public laws, but He warns us against the commission of those things which are esteemed lawful among men.  Thus it will be neither lawful for a just man to engage in warfare. . .”^[4]“The Divine Institutes,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 7, page 187.  Even after the Roman Empire became a “Christian” Empire, with “Christian” emperors and “Christian” soldiers, the shift towards approving of military violence by members of the church was a complex and gradual one.  

The fact that the church’s consensus suddenly began to change towards a Christian acceptance of “just war” only after Christianity, in a (to say the least) highly dubious manner, became associated with Roman Imperial power should make us very suspicious of the theological legitimacy of the widespread acceptance of war by Christians today as consistent with the demands of Christian discipleship.  Whether a Christian accepts the Protestant principle of “sola scriptura” or not, they must acknowledge the tradition of the early church as being in some sense authoritative, since they have received the canon of writings they believe to be Scripture from the consensus of the early church. In contrast to later periods of church history, the early Christians had access to early and reliable oral traditions handed down from the apostles alongside the Scriptures, and so were better positioned in many ways to say what the teachings of the apostles were than we are today.  The pacifist consensus of the authoritative tradition of the early church thus lends further support to the thesis that there is no good biblical or theological reason for thinking that war provides an exception to the Lord Jesus Christ’s command to His church that we love our enemies.