Should Christians be pacifists?

Question 12047.

Christian pacifism is one of those positions I find myself respecting far more than I agree with. The people I have known who held it were not soft-headed idealists. They were serious believers who had read the Sermon on the Mount and decided to take Jesus at His word, whatever it cost them, and some of them paid a real price for it.

So this is not going to be a demolition job. I want to set out the case honestly, explain where I think it goes wrong, and then say what I would actually tell a believer wrestling with it.

What Christian pacifism actually claims

At its core, Christian pacifism is the conviction that a follower of Jesus may never take human life, and in its stricter forms may never use violent force at all, whether personally, as a soldier or as an agent of the state. It is not the same as opposing a particular war. Plenty of Christians who are not pacifists opposed Iraq or Suez or Vietnam.

The position comes in shades. Absolute pacifism refuses all force, including the police officer restraining a violent man. More common is a nuclear or vocational pacifism which accepts civil policing but refuses military service. The Anabaptists, the Quakers and the Mennonites have carried this conviction for centuries, often at severe cost, and the modern evangelical versions usually trace back to them.

It matters that we distinguish Christian pacifism from cowardice or from indifference to evil. Most pacifists I have met were more willing than I am to put themselves in harm’s way. They simply refused to answer harm with harm.

The strongest case for Christian pacifism

Start where they start, with Jesus. Do not resist the one who is evil, but if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also, Matthew 5:39. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. These are not obscure texts pulled from the margins. They are the plain teaching of the King.

Then there is the shape of the cross itself. Jesus had legions available and refused them. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter and did not open His mouth. Peter presents that as a pattern for believers under unjust suffering, saying that when He was reviled He did not revile in return, 1 Peter 2:23. If the Lord’s own response to violent injustice was absorption rather than retaliation, the pacifist asks why ours should be different.

Christian pacifism also has a historical argument. For roughly the first three centuries, Christian writers were markedly uneasy about military service. Tertullian argued that when the Lord disarmed Peter He disarmed every soldier. Origen wrote that Christians fight for the emperor by prayer rather than by arms. The shift, they say, came with Constantine, when the church acquired state power and quietly acquired the sword along with it.

Finally they make an eschatological point which, as a premillennialist, I feel the force of. The nations will beat their swords into ploughshares when the King reigns, Isaiah 2:4. If that is the destination, should the church not live now as a signpost to it? That is a serious argument and I do not think it is answered by mockery.

The Sermon on the Mount and personal retaliation

Here is where I begin to part company. Read Matthew 5 in its setting and Jesus is addressing personal retaliation, not civil justice. He is correcting a misuse of the lex talionis, the eye for an eye principle, which had been given to Israel’s judges as a limit on punishment and was being used by individuals as a licence for revenge.

The examples He gives confirm this, and they are not the examples Christian pacifism most needs. A slap on the right cheek, delivered with the back of the hand, was an insult rather than an assault. The cloak, the second mile, the request for a loan are all matters of personal honour, property and inconvenience. Not one of them involves a third party being murdered while you watch.

So I take Jesus to be forbidding the settling of personal scores absolutely, and I take that seriously. What I do not find Him doing is legislating for the magistrate, or telling a father what to do when a violent man breaks into his house. Reading a passage about my wounded pride as though it governed the defence of my children is not faithfulness to the text, it is a category confusion. I have written more on that in my answer on self-defence.

What Romans 13 does to the argument

Paul writes that the civil authority does not bear the sword in vain, that he is God’s servant, an avenger who carries out wrath on the wrongdoer, Romans 13:4. That sentence sits immediately after Paul has told believers never to avenge themselves. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Personal vengeance is forbidden; civil justice is instituted.

The Greek word for sword there, machaira, is not a ceremonial ornament. It is the weapon of execution. Paul is describing a real and lethal authority and he calls the one who wields it God’s servant, which is a startling thing to write about the Roman state under Nero.

This is the pressure point for Christian pacifism, and I do not think it can be sidestepped. If bearing the sword is a legitimate function ordained by God, can it be a function no Christian may ever perform? The consistent pacifist answer is yes, that the office is permitted to the world but forbidden to the believer. I respect the consistency, but I struggle to find it taught anywhere, and it leaves us insisting that a necessary and God-ordained work must always be done by someone whose conscience troubles him less than ours.

Soldiers in the New Testament

The soldiers who come to John the Baptist ask what they should do. He tells them not to extort, not to accuse falsely, and to be content with their wages, Luke 3:14. He does not tell them to leave the army. That silence is loud, coming from a man who had no difficulty telling Herod his marriage was unlawful.

Then there is Cornelius, a centurion described as devout, God-fearing, generous and prayerful, the first Gentile household to receive the Spirit. Luke gives us his profession without embarrassment and Peter never raises it. Add the centurion whose faith astonished Jesus, a man whose whole illustration depended on military command, and the New Testament’s attitude looks settled rather than reluctant.

Pacifist writers reply that these are pre-Pentecost or transitional cases, or that conversion’s implications simply had not yet been worked out. That may be so. But it is an argument from what the text does not say, and I would want something firmer before telling a believing soldier that his calling is sin.

The just war tradition and its limits

If force is sometimes permitted, it obviously cannot be permitted always, and that is where the just war tradition comes in. It grew out of Christian reflection on how to limit violence, not how to licence it, and its conditions are demanding: legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, reasonable prospect of success, proportionality, and the protection of non-combatants.

Applied honestly, those conditions rule out a great deal of what nations actually do. I have never been persuaded by the assumption, common in some churches, that a Christian’s duty is to support whatever military action his government undertakes. Sometimes the most faithful thing a believer can say about a war is that it should not be fought, and I have said as much about particular conflicts. My answer on what the Bible says about war develops this.

The tradition also has a real weakness, which the pacifist is right to press. It has been used, again and again, to bless whatever the state had already decided to do. A framework that never says no is not a framework, it is a rubber stamp. That criticism should keep us humble rather than comfortable.

Did the early church refuse military service?

The historical claim deserves scrutiny because it is often overstated. Tertullian and Origen did write against Christians serving, and their words are plain enough. But the same period gives us inscriptions and accounts of Christian soldiers, and the objections raised were frequently about the idolatry bound up with military life, the sacrifices, the oaths and the imperial cult, rather than about bloodshed as such.

The picture behind Christian pacifism’s historical claim is therefore mixed rather than uniform, and the church was not yet in a position to hold councils about it. Both sides in this debate quote the fathers selectively, and I would rather settle the question from Scripture and treat the historical material as illustration. Church history is worth knowing, as I argue in my answer on church history, but it does not carry the authority of the text.

What is clear is that the church did change once it acquired power, and not always for the better. The pacifist warning about Constantine is worth hearing even if the historical case is thinner than it is usually presented.

Where I land, and how firmly

I am not a pacifist. I believe Scripture permits the use of force to restrain evil, that the magistrate’s sword is God-given, that a believer may serve in the armed forces or the police with a clear conscience, and that a man who lets his family be harmed when he could have prevented it has not obeyed Jesus, he has failed them.

At the same time I hold this as a secondary matter, not a test of fellowship. Christian pacifism is a position held by brothers and sisters who are reading the same Bible and honouring the same Lord, and Romans 14 has something to say about how we treat believers whose conscience binds them more tightly than ours. If a man cannot take up arms without violating his conscience, then for him it would be sin, and I would defend his freedom to refuse.

I also want to say that Christian pacifism functions as a useful conscience for the rest of us. Christians are far too quick to reach for military solutions and far too slow to grieve over what war does. Every argument I have made about permitted force should be made with reluctance, because every use of it is a mark of a fallen world rather than a triumph in it.

Caring for those who have served

Let me add something the theological debate usually omits. In my ministry I have sat with men who carry what they did in uniform, and abstract arguments are no use to them at three in the morning. Some of them were told by well-meaning Christians that they had blood on their hands and no forgiveness available. That is a lie and it does terrible damage.

If you have served and you are troubled, take it to the cross rather than to a debate. The blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin, and the word all is doing real work in that sentence. If you concluded that something you did was wrong, confess it and receive what God has promised, 1 John 1:9. If you conclude that it was lawful and necessary, you may still grieve it, and grief is not guilt.

Congregations should be places where a veteran can say the hard thing out loud without being lectured. Whatever your position on Christian pacifism, that pastoral obligation does not change.

Three questions I put to the pacifist argument

The first is about the neighbour. If love of neighbour is the governing command, what does love require of me when my neighbour is being attacked in front of me? Christian pacifism answers that I may interpose my own body but never harm the attacker. That is a coherent answer and a brave one. It is also, in many real situations, an answer that guarantees my neighbour’s death alongside my own, and I cannot see how that is the more loving outcome.

The second is about consistency. Almost every pacifist I have spoken to accepts policing in some form, wants the abuser arrested and the trafficker imprisoned. But arrest is force, and imprisonment rests ultimately on the willingness to use force against those who resist. Once that is granted, the argument has become a question of degree and circumstance rather than an absolute prohibition, which is a different position from the one Christian pacifism began with.

The third is about God’s own character. The Lord is described as a warrior in Exodus 15, He commanded Israel’s armies, and the Jesus of Revelation 19 returns to strike down the nations. I am not transferring that to the church, and I am certainly not licensing anyone to act on God’s behalf with a weapon. But a theology which treats all lethal force as intrinsically incompatible with holiness has to reckon with a God who has used it, and who will use it again when He comes to reign.

So, now what?

If you are drawn to Christian pacifism, do not let anyone shame you out of taking Jesus seriously. Read the Sermon on the Mount again and ask what it is actually addressing. Notice how much of it you can and should obey immediately, whatever you conclude about soldiers, because most of us are far more likely to face an insult than an invasion.

If you are not a pacifist, watch the appetite in your own heart. It is remarkably easy to argue for just war from a comfortable armchair and to enjoy the argument rather more than the subject warrants. Pray for peace, support those who suffer in conflicts, and refuse to become the sort of Christian for whom war is an abstraction. Christian pacifism at least keeps the horror in view, and that is worth something.

The King who told Peter to sheathe his sword is coming back to end every war Himself. Until He does, are we the sort of people who long for that day, or the sort who have quietly made peace with the noise?

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

Romans 12:19, ESV

For Further Study

Millard Erickson gives a fair survey of the pacifist, just war and preventive war positions with the biblical arguments set out in full. Charles Ryrie and Lewis Sperry Chafer are worth reading on the believer’s relation to the Mosaic Law and to the state, since a good deal of the confusion in this debate comes from importing Israel’s national warfare into the church age. J. Dwight Pentecost and Arnold Fruchtenbaum help with the eschatological dimension, particularly the millennial peace that Isaiah describes and what it does and does not imply for the present. On the other side of the argument, John Howard Yoder is the most substantial modern defender of the pacifist reading, and reading him directly is more honest than reading summaries of him, though his conclusions are not mine.