Introduction
Pacifism:
The belief that peaceful methods should be used to settle differences among nations. Oppositionto war or violence as a means of resolving disputes nationally or personally.
The general principle or policy of universal peace; opposition to war.
Pacifist:
One who opposes war or other violence.
The Pacifist, Pacifism, Violence And War:
But
first, three quotes and two poems:
"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys
the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
American president, John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
What is called the utopian dream of pacifism is in fact a practical policy
– indeed the only practical, the only realistic policy that there is.
Aldous Huxley
The question is not what pacifism has achieved throughout history, but what has war achieved?
William Blum
Pacifisim — A Noble Stance
Pacifism and pacifists are often maligned, misunderstood, and even the butt of satire,
When the truth is, the pacifist stance is the only one that holds out hope, a stance to which all should aspire.
Those who're more anti-pacifism, are oft those who're caught up in patriotic fever (hysteria),
Which can fuel errant leader’s cries for war, some so-called righteous revenge, over which, there should be no “Hurrah!”
Yes, there’s no alternative to the pacifist stance, 'cause all that we're left with is those weapons and war,
And as long as we return to such, we’ll see no end to the carnage and misery that's gone on before.
Thus preaching peace and harmony whilst taking up arms, is not only an irony, but hypocrisy,
'Cause the intent of those who take up arms isn’t to preserve but destroy; killers granted legality.
It's back to front, 'cause people are justifying war when they should be justifying the pacifist stance,
'Cause until weapons, soldiers and warmongering are no longer glorified, chosen, we don’t stand a chance,
And in time will discover — far too late — that pacifism was what we should’ve glorified instead,
And pursued just as vigorously midst surveying the unrepairable, and soon joining the dead.
Warring solves nothing, 'cause its method can’t, thus at best, it’s like a band-aid given surgery's needed,
Hence why the surgical skills of pacifism coupled with peace activism should be applied, heeded.
All why John Kennedy said conscientious objectors should be honoured as highly as any soldier,
'Cause those who actively oppose war, and want no part in such, seek the noblest of the noblest, hardly err.
By Lance Landall
This poem was upgraded on 28 May 2023.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), American politician and Army general
"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) — The Olive Tree
Pacifists
If we were all pacifists, there would be peace and harmony,
As violence would be abhorred, and war unnecessary.
Given no one would raise a hand, nor rely on weaponry,
Disagreements and disputes would be settled more thoughtfully.
Yes, pacifists do not initiate or perpetuate
Any violence or wars, and nor such even contemplate.
'Cause they consider life sacred, treat all the same, live in peace,
And if we all lived that way, war and violence would soon cease.
Violence is a sickness, one that has plagued society,
And until we all refrain, this earth won’t be violence free.
Thus all should be pacifists, and preaching peace and harmony,
Thus working side by side until violence ceases to be.
If we all became pacifists, war would simply cease to be,
And violence would disappear, 'cause we’d all live peacefully.
Yes, we’d destroy all the weapons that line pockets, kill and maim,
Be the generation that war and violence overcame.
By Lance Landall
You may also wish to read my Christian poem
"Pacifism, My Take"
where there are other poems as well.
The pacifist:
A pacifist is someone who believes that violence is:
The way of weakness, not strength.
The result of failure, not success.
The path to estrangement, not reconciliation.
The partner of crime, not law and order.
The creator of misery, not happiness.
The perpetuator of evil, not good.
The consideration of fools, not the wise.
The outpouring and outcome of hate or anger, not love and peace.
The violator of rights, not the protector of.
The debaser of offenders, not the uplifter of.
The lover and promoter of weaponry, not the reducer or destroyer of.
The raider of marriages, families, and communities.
The tool of bullies, dictators, warmongers, and despots.
And is something to shun, never embrace.
One's approach:
Bear in mind that there are pacifists and pacifists.
For example:
1) As a pacifist by stance, one might defend themself or their family if attacked by an assailant, and run to the aid of someone being attacked by an assailant, but not bear arms with the deliberate premeditated intention of taking another’s life, as in war.
2) Does one's country need a defence force of some sort, lest it be attacked?
Currently, and given this world we live in, reality would have to say, “Regrettably, yes.” Unfortunately though, defence forces have a way of crossing the line.
In general:
Pacifism does not equal passivity.
Given that it is claimed by many that wars (and more so modern wars perhaps), are the product of misguided men, propaganda, and agendas, it could be argued that the conscientious objector who won’t bear arms but will assist medically say, is simply aiding an evil war machine, and patching up soldiers so that they can go back and continue killing, which inevitably includes the raping, torturing and murder of innocent citizens. That being so, the conscientious objector would surely also have blood on his/her hands.
Were it a so-called just war, it could be argued that the conscientious objector would still have blood on his/her hands, and given that they won't bare arms (in other words, kill), are thus acting hypocritically.
One could ask: Is taking the conscientious objector position (assisting but not bearing arms), a compromise in order to not upset the governing authority and to prevent ridicule and outrage from fellow citizens?
At the end of the day, any participation in war makes one an accomplice — a dilemma for the conscientious objector who won’t bear arms but will assist the war machine in some other way.
Yet another reason why pacifism is the only solution that offers humanity hope. Otherwise, it's war and more war.
Reasons why war is wrong:
1) Life is sacred. No one has the right to take someone else's life — that is, to murder.
2) War kills innocent people. Ninety percent of those who’re killed in a war are civilians who pose no threat.
3) War creates refugees. Millions of refugees exist worldwide as a result.
4) War creates poverty and starvation.
5) War disables healthy people, physically, mentally, and emotionally. War leaves terrible scars.
6) The results of war can continue for years.
7) The likes of landmines and cluster bombs cause death and destruction long after a war has ended. Large areas of land become uninhabitable, poisoned by dangerous chemicals.
8) When war is officially over, huge sums of money are needed to deal with the damage done.
9) War creates fear and uncertainty.
10) War separates families, and orphans children.
11) In wars great evils take place, like rape, pillage, wanton destruction, general brutality, and torture.
12) War makes it difficult or impossible for people to grow food to feed themselves and others.
13) War contributes to the spread of diseases.
14) War causes tremendous - even permanent - harm to the natural environment.
15) In certain countries children are forced by the government or self-appointed leaders to join in the fighting and commit brutal acts.
16) War brings out the worst in us.
18) War is a terrible wastage of talent, ability, and skill, let alone
human life.
19)
War corrupts, dehumanises, desensitises, and traumatises
soldiers,
who suffer from the likes of flashbacks, nightmares and
depression, and all of which leaves their family having to
deal
with the unfortunate results -- domestic violence, substance abuse and
suicide.
The following comment is from the book "The Christian
Pacifist" by David Ramanauskas:
An
article in the Spring 2010 issue of Abolish War, the
newsletter
for the Movement for The Abolition of War, stated that in the US over
6,500 veterans commit suicide each year, and in the UK there are an
estimated 20,000 veterans in the criminal justice system, with 8,500
behind bars – almost 1 in 10 of the prison population.
20) In war zones law and order disappear and no one is safe.
21)
Huge sums of money are spent on weapons which not only affects the
warring country’s economy but also its social services that many of its
citizens are badly in need of. An unnecessary war is not only a
criminal act in itself, but an even greater crime when it deprives many
citizens of their needs.
22) As a consequence of war, war is glorified in books and movies, seen
as entertainment, when it should be abhorred.
23) War is the worst possible solution to whatever problem we’re trying
to solve.
24)
Using physical brutality as a method to reach a conclusion is not only
uncivilised but folly. No court in this world would accept a fight as a
proper method of reaching a verdict.
25) War simply opens the door to further hatred, violence and murder.
26)
It's hypocritical to condemn violence and talk of love and compassion
on the one hand, and on the other hand to go warring. Violence is
violence.
27) War is by its very nature evil.
28) Truth is the first casualty of war.
Bear in mind that those with war in mind will always malign
the pacifist stance via their propaganda.
Many
who knock pacifists are nothing more than obedient patriotic slaves who
fall for, and bow to, the propaganda of their warring or misguided
leaders.
(The reasons
above were drawn from various sources)
Quotes regarding war (violence):
The worse the man, the better the soldier.
Napoleon Bonaparte
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
General Smedley Darlington Butler of the USMC (Highest Decorated Marine).
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory . . . and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.
Alfred Adler
No war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
Eugene Debs
People do not make wars; governments do.
Ronald Reagan
Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.
Ludwig von Mises
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Aldous Huxley
The only antidote to the poison of war is the public's courage to disagree with their leader.
Ramman Kenoun
We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of
force rather than the use of force.
Norman Cousins
War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.
Alexander Berkman
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
Gandhi
Every war is an atrocity, but every war that could have been avoided is a crime in which soldiers became criminals.
The poet, author
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
Omar Bradley
Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.
Albert Einstein
Evil means corrupt good ends.
Quaker pacifists, 1955 document
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
Force always attracts men of low morality.
Albert Einstein
There is no way to peace: peace is the way.
A.J.Muste
See the article AN INSPIRING ADDRESS which is found near the bottom of this page.
A) Christ, plus
B) The flawed Just War theory
C) Texts
D) A worthwhile article
A) Christ, plus
1) Christ never advocated war.
2) Christ never praised freedom-fighters.
3) Christ taught people never to retaliate or avenge.
4) The gospel of Christ condemns violence.
5) Christ preached a gospel of peace, and taught a new way of doing things.
6) Christ commanded us to love our enemies. Christ's cross serves as a model for His followers.
7) Christ commanded us not to murder.
8) Christ taught co-operation and reconciliation.
9) Christ said "Blessed are the peace makers".
10) Christ embodies a broad and deep vision of life that is thoroughly pacifist.
11) Christ himself practised pacifism, never striking anyone nor participating in or instigating revolutions. The Bible never says that when He drove the money-changers from the temple that He actually used the whip on the people themselves. Thus, He no doubt merely flailed it about. And don't forget that there were animals there too. Given that He is God, such is His divine prerogative, and not necessarily an example for us to follow.
12) It's hypocritical for Christians to preach Christ's gospel of love on the one hand, and on the other hand to go warring.
13) Christ rebuked Peter for severing the ear of the servant of the high priest. Peter was told to put his sword away.
14) Christ warned that those who take up the sword will perish by the sword (Matt 26:52).
15) Even when need necessitates the destruction of those who're evil, it's still considered as His strange act (Isa 28:21).
16) When Christians go to war they abandon the fruits of the Spirit.
17) Christian pacifism is grounded in theological affirmations.
18) Pacifism is in fact the original (or default) position of Christianity.
19) Constantine's arrival on the scene was responsible for the end of pacifism as the characteristic position of Christianity. Constantine, (who indulged in brutality, and who was baptised shortly before his death when he knew his life was coming to an end), made taking up arms and going to war an acceptable part of Christianity. Much rot within Christianity can be laid at Constantine's door and his Church and State fusion — such was the beginning of the worldly Church and secular Christianity. Constantine's measures, furthered by the persecuting Holy Roman Empire, saw pacifism ignored, discarded, and ruthlessly and brutally persecuted from the Christian faith. Some refer to Constantinianism as caesaropapism.
It was Augustine who first began to define when it was right for Christians to fight in wars. Augustine was responsible for many false teachings. Hardly a man to put one's faith in.
Is it any wonder now that “The only people who do not think Jesus was pacifist are Christians” — quote by Hindu Mahatma Gandhi.
20) Over time, the pacifist convictions of many Christians have unfortunately been dwarfed by the militaristic and nationalistic “Christianity” of the “Christian right”, so prone to misinterpreting Scripture in favour of its war stance.
21) A soldier is required to act without questioning, something that the sound Christian (who's to be obedient to his Lord first) should never do.
22) How can a Christian in all conscience shoot another Christian who's on the other country's side?
23) It needs to be remembered that Christians aren't living under a theocracy like ancient Israel once was, but rather, amidst a mixed multitude, which here, they join at their peril. What the world (or the State) does, and what the Christian should do, are often two different and contrary things.
(The above facts were drawn from various sources)
Professor Jonathan R. Wilson makes some very good points in the following comments regarding American Christians:
"We Christians may not do as Americans something that we must not do as Christians. As we listen to and debate arguments about going to war, note how often our Christian identity is subordinated to our American identity. We have been so formed by the collusion of the church with America that we find it difficult to even distinguish between Christian and national identity, and harder to subordinate our national identity to our identity in Christ."
"Gospel pacifism believes that God primarily works in the world through the church, not the nation. The church, as the community of disciples, is called to bear witness to the one hope that we have: Jesus Christ. Most of the debates about war, even in the church, are about what the United States should do. This is natural for those who primarily find their identity as Americans. But for Christians, our debate should be about what the church should be doing."
"Gospel pacifism argues that the church compromises its mission, corrupts its life, and abandons its witness when it follows the way of death by acting out of national, racial, and cultural identity. If this is the case, God's judgment looms over the church in the West and elsewhere."
B) The flawed Just War theory
1) The Just War theory has no basis in Scripture despite some claiming otherwise.
2) The Just War theory is grounded on the assumption that those political leaders who take such a step are wise and just men. We have no good reason for such faith in authority, even be that authority made up of Christians, and given history, even less so perhaps.
3) From the time of Constantine, the Just War criteria has been bent, broken, or completely discarded, and has led to crusade after hellish crusade — yes, far from just.
4) The Just War theory is rooted in a Constantine-ised attempt to make a war seem okay when it's still in fact evil.
5) The Just War theory does not teach people the will of Christ on when to kill but instead teaches what leaders in the fallen Church taught.
The following is an extract from the book "The Christian Pacifist" by David Ramanauskas.
Philip Dransfield a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship in his article The Just War, writes:
For many Christians the concept of the Just War was exploded with the atomic bomb in 1945. Any war which could destroy thousands of defenceless people so callously must be condemned as cruel and barbaric in the extreme.
Thousands of people were killed outright but thousands also were terribly burnt by fire or radioactivity and were left to die slowly without aid after the inferno.
Has the Christian Church ever repented of its tacit assent to this fiendish new development of warfare? Has it yet wakened up to the terrible fallacy of supposing that evil has sometimes to be done that good may prevail? Can it honestly claim that the cause of Christ was advanced in any possible way by such brutality?
It comes as something of a shock to find that there are a few people who still argue for the Just War. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki many found confirmation of the view that justice and war can never go together. But let us take the advocates of the Just War to be judged by their own principles and moral values.
The conditions which have to be fulfilled for a war to be called "Just” have been defined. Regrettably the Christian Church has tended to accept these conditions rather uncritically. Here they are with critical comments.
1. The methods employed must conform to the demands of moral law and non-combatants must be spared.
At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were cruelly destroyed. If atomic weapons are used again the same would inevitably occur. So logically no war in which atomic weapons are used can be a Just War.
2. There must be reasonable hope of bettering conditions as a result of the war.
No sane person can believe that conditions can ever be improved by atomic war or by the other destructive weapons of modern warfare. It can only make them worse. Here again there can be no Just War.
3. There must be a moral certainty that a right has been violated.
Here we are in the rarefied atmosphere of the medieval schoolmen with their “finer education of less or more”. Who can talk of “moral certainty” when intrigue, duplicity, collusion, espionage and secret diplomacy have all been demonstrated as part of the political activity of all well-armed countries? What are the “rights” referred to? Each country determines its own “rights” in conflicts with other countries, and also makes its own decisions as to when their “rights” have been “violated”. As someone has said, “In war a country is its own judge, jury and executioner”. The accusation of “violation of rights” is often a cloak for national greed and national pride.
4. All attempts at peaceful settlement must have been tried and failed.
It would be unforgivable today for modern war to be inflicted on the world if this condition were not complied with. But who determines when “all attempts” have been made? Here again all that happens is that national leaders make their own decisions on the basis of self-interest.
5. The real motives for which the war is waged must be morally justifiable.
The sincerity behind this condition must be matched against its pathetic impracticability. We are with the schoolmen again and the angels dancing on the point of a needle. Who can assess the “real motives” for war? Motives of all the combatant nations in war are so mixed and tarnished that this condition can never be honestly complied with. END
A quote from the same book: "Any Christian country that expects Christians to disobey the laws of Christ is not a Christian country".
Loyalty to Christ and His kingdom transcends every other loyalty.
I'm unsure of the source of this quote:
“It is wrong for a nation to be exclusively concerned with its own well-being in deciding whether to go to war; it must demonstrate concern for the well-being of the world as a whole--including the well-being of the nation it is attacking.”
I find it very interesting that a "Christian" country, and it being the "land of the free", was the first to develop the scourge of nuclear weapons.
C) Texts
Text one:
"Then Jesus asked [his disciples], “When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?” “Nothing,” they answered. He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors’; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.” The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are two swords.” “That is enough,” he replied" (Luke 22:35-38, NIV).
Interpretation:
Here, Christ is speaking figuratively, warning the disciples of the persecution that lay ahead that they and their converts were to suffer. After all, the period of popularity that the disciples had enjoyed had changed. The disciples obviously misunderstood Christ and were ready to take literally what He had said, hence their producing of two swords. It's noteworthy, that an hour or two after Christ had spoken of such, he warned Peter to put his weapon away. Christ's statement, "That is enough", no doubt refers to the discussion, not the swords, given that this was no time to be arguing a particular point. Christ would hardly make the comments that He did about turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, drawing the sword leads to dying by the sword, and so on, if he condoned the use of weapons and physical force.
Text two:
“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience” (Romans 13:1, 4-5, NIV).
Interpretation:
Okay, let's see what this text is really saying:
No human authority exists except by God's permission and under His control. Their rise and fall is in His hands. Therefore, Christians must not take it into their own hands to resist or to dispose of such authorities just like the Jews did via certain revolts that took place in Roman times. Such would bring reproach upon the Christian Church and its message of peace and brotherly love. If the Christian leads a peaceable life, he or she has no need to fear the wrath of such authorities. The use of the word "sword" here is simply symbolic of the ruler's legitimate authority to inflict due and rightful punishment, such as via the courts regarding crime. After all, society must have rules to safeguard its citizens. This power that such authorities wield is entrusted to men by God according to His own purposes for man's welfare.
Paul is not implying that God always approves of the conduct of such authorities. Paul is not saying that it is the Christian's duty to always submit to such authorities. On the contrary, where the requirements of any government are contrary to the law of God, the Christian is to "obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29).
Text two:
"'...a time for war...' (Ecclesiastes 3:8, NIV)
Interpretation:
The above is not presented as truth, but as the writer's (Solomon's) speculation as he searches for truth.
D) A worthwhile article
Christian Pacifism by Myron S. Augsburger
Jesus said, "Put your sword back in its place ... for all who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Mt. 26:52). And again, "But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also" (Mt. 5:39). The Old Testament prophet said, "They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks" (Mic. 4:3), a prophecy fulfilled where the people take the way of Christ and his Spirit seriously. And the way of Christ is best found in his own words.
In Luke chapter six, we read, "But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you do lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners.... But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Lk 6:27,36).
In John 18:36 Jesus says, "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews". Again in Matthew 5:9, Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called [known as] the children of God".
These passages serve as a frame of reference for the discussion of non-resistance and pacifism. The discussion that follows takes as its foundation the explicit teachings of the New Testament rather than its silences. There are those who argue from silence--that since Jesus did not expressly condemn the centurion for being a soldier, it follows that military participation is right for the Christian. By the same logic one could argue for the practice of slavery, a stance taken earlier in American history. But the explicit teachings of the New Testament introduce a principle of love, a practice of respect for the ultimate worth of each individual, which when followed makes participation in both slavery and war antithetical.
The problem of the Christian and war is not one which can be viewed simply from the perspective of one's responsibility to his or her nation. We are now a global community in which we face the question of what violence does to all humanity. The increase of population, the problems of adequate food production and distribution, of meeting the basic necessities of life have made violence a way of life. Christians must have answers as they face problems of new dimensions in their relationship to other people around the world.
Furthermore, in viewing the question from the standpoint of our responsibility to our own nation, it appears impossible that there could be such a thing as a "just war" in a nuclear age with a world community. The arguments for a just war in history appear to be quite irrelevant in an age of modern, mechanized and nuclear warfare. But, theologically, the Christian must also face the meaning of the biblical affirmation, "as he is so are you in the world," or again the words of Jesus, "as the Father has sent me, even so send I you" (Jn. 20:21). Ours is a mission of announcing the good news of reconciliation to God, and through him to one another.
Minority Movement?
As Christians we are not here to provide an ethic for society or the state, but to clearly define an ethic for disciples of Jesus Christ.
In the American system of government it is difficult for this stance to be understood. We operate with the myth of being a Christian nation, and we seek to interpret for society an ethic that we can bless as Christians. We need a new awareness of the pluralism of the New Testament, that the crucial issue is the difference between the church and the world, and that the church operates "within the perfection of Christ," while the world operates outside the perfection or will of Christ. Christians influence the state for good through Christian ethics and integrity, but they do not equate church and state. Only an in-depth understanding of this issue can save us from a cultural and a civil religion. As one who believes in New Testament non-resistance, or New Testament pacifism, it is important to me that this stance be clearly interpreted as an evangelical and biblical stance, not as the stance of humanistic or moralistic pacifism. Theologically, this position begins with the reality and priority of membership in the kingdom of Christ. This entails living by the way of love, a spirit of brotherhood and reverence for life. While brotherhood is an important concept, kingdom membership has first priority in New Testament non-resistance.
The question of the Christian's attitude toward war is viewed best by beginning with the New Testament, with Jesus Christ. This is to affirm that Jesus Christ brought the full meaning of God's will for us. All the way through the Old Testament God had something further to say about himself, about the will of God for humanity, and we see this fully in Jesus Christ. One can find numerous incidents in the Old Testament where Israel as the people of God was involved in war, enjoyed the blessing of God in victory and experienced defeat when out of favour with God. But a study of the context makes clear that God was meeting the Israelites where they were, demonstrating to people who worshiped their tribal gods that Yahweh, the God of Israel, was and is the true God. This is not to say that the full revelation of the will of Yahweh was then present. Rather, we see that there is progress in this revelation. Throughout the Old Testament God always had something further to say - until the New Testament. We read, "But when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his Son" (Gal. 4:4), and that "in these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things" (Heb. 1:2); that is, the One in whom the whole comes to its culmination. In Jesus' words, "Think not that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them" (Mt. 5:17) - that is, to fill it full of meaning.
With this perspective we must recognize that peace is a holistic concept. Peace is not simply the absence of war. It is far more - it is positive, active peacemaking. The Hebrew word shalom contains in it the idea of wholeness or soundness.
To affirm that one is a member of the kingdom of Christ now means that loyalty to Christ and his kingdom transcends every other loyalty. This stance goes beyond nationalism and calls us to identify first of all with our fellow disciples, of whatever nation, as we serve Christ together. This is not a position which can be expected of the world nor asked of the government as such. The Christian respects rulers as God ordained them, to "protect the innocent and punish the evildoer." The Christian can only encourage the government to be the government and to let the church be the church. We ask the government to be secular and to let the church be free to do its work in society. The church enriches society by the many things it brings to it, and in its respect for government it does not subordinate itself to any particular social order but is in allegiance to its one Lord.
Properly read, Romans 13 is telling us that God ordains political institutions for ordering the society: But since God ordains the powers he remains above them. In that light our response on many occasions will be that as Christians, "we must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). We cannot assume that since God ordains government we are always obeying God in our obedience to it. We are not to be lawbreakers, for Paul says that the authorities do "not bear the sword in vain" (Rom. 13:4). But we also cannot disobey a divine law to obey a contrary law by the government. The passage in Romans 13 calls us to be "subject to" the powers, but it does not use the term "obey." Our ultimate allegiance is to the God who ordains nations to function for order in society. Any serious attempt to resolve the question of a Christian's participation in war hinges significantly on this issue.
A Global Community.
Grappling with the problem of war is not an isolated issue but has to do with the problems of the whole human community, involving race, poverty, equal opportunity and the freedom for persons to be individuals. To face this matter honestly we must look at the larger question of sin. As Samuel Shoemaker has said, "You do not wait for a war to look at the problem of evil, war is simply the problem of evil writ large."
Closely associated with the preceding is the fact that war is quite often for the protection of property. As Christians we will respect the right of the government to declare war to protect its own territory. But the Christian who is a conscientious objector to participation in war must be consistent with respect to his or her own attitude toward material things. The Christian must take seriously Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount that personality is more valuable than material goods and that we do not sacrifice life for the sake of goods [Lk. 6:29,35]. This means that as Christians under a government which enables us to become wealthy we cannot ask the government to sacrifice people's lives in protecting our goods. The Christian attitude toward material possessions is not that of a legal right but that of responsibility, of a moral obligation to use the things he has acquired to help others.
In our society another question we must ask is, What are the guidelines for Christians participating in government? In an attempt to be consistent with the premise just stated, it would appear that Christians may serve in political positions so long as they do not try to create a state church. It is our responsibility as Christians to call the government to be secular and to respect the freedom of Christians to serve in loyalty to their own king. Christians will help interpret to others who hold political power why the Christian must constantly say, "Caesar is not lord; Jesus Christ is Lord." Thus, Christians should only serve at government levels where they can honestly carry out the functions of their office without compromising their fidelity to Jesus Christ as Lord. They should not consider holding positions where they could not both fulfil the obligations of the office and remain consistent with their membership in the kingdom of Christ. To fulfil their obligations and violate their commitment to Christ would be wrong. Likewise, to live by their convictions and not fulfil the functions of their office with respect to the society which creates the office would also be wrong. The Christian in a political position serves the goal of effective government just like a secular person, but the Christian is a witness to the higher values of Jesus Christ. Christians ought never to use a powerful government position as a means to achieve Christ's goals for humanity. For the Christian, the desire to "rule" is always wrong; our stance is one of serving. This awareness will keep us from the struggle for power, a struggle which Malcolm Muggeridge has called "a pornography of the will."
One who accepts this stance - that New Testament non-resistance is the claim of Christ upon his disciples as an expression of the reality of his kingdom - will also follow other evangelical premises of faithfulness to Christ. For example, can one participate in war and take the life of a person for whom Christ died when our basic mission as Christians is to win that person to become a brother or sister in the Lord? Or, since the kingdom of God is global and transcends every national, racial and cultural distinction, when one's country is at war with another country can Christians participate knowing that by so doing they may be at war with persons who claim to worship and follow the same Lord?
To go back to the early church itself, according to several writers of history, there was in the church a significant percentage who renounced conflict and everything that produced war. The one thing Christians were armed with was love. E. Stanley Jones wrote that we search in vain during the early years of church history to find Christian people engaged in warfare. He states that Christians did not become soldiers. If they were in the army when converted, they resigned. Jones describes the early believers as saying, "we will match our power to suffer against your ability to inflict suffering, we will wear you down by our spirit, by soul force against physical force, by going the second mile, by turning the other cheek," until Rome finally stopped torturing Christians. That perspective on history underscores the New Testament emphasis that we go out not by force but by love; we seek to make our world an understanding community.
This disdain of military service held true until the period of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome until about A.D. 180. After Constantine's time, who from our perspective instituted a "fallen church" of which everyone was forced to be a member, there were many "Christian" soldiers.
In our own era, Martin Luther King, Jr. brought into the American scene a now synthesis. It was not novel in terms of what he emphasized from the New Testament, but because he borrowed from Gandhi's philosophy. He created a new synthesis by enhancing New Testament non-violence with Gandhi's strategy of non-violent resistance and applying these to the nineteenth? century liberal idea of "the kingdom of God in America." What King did was to confront society with this new dimension, and it shook the country to its roots.
King's philosophy is expressed in five points: (1) Non-violent resistance is not a method for cowards. It takes more strength to stand for love than to strike back. (2) Such resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win friendship and understanding. (3) The attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against the people doing the evil. (4) Non-violent resistance is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back. (5) This resistance avoids not only external physical force, but also internal violence of spirit.
On the premise that we cannot kill people for whom Christ died, John Howard Yoder emphasizes in his significant writings on pacifism that the cross has made a difference. Christ has come into the world to redeem all people and has acted for the sake of every person on the globe. We cannot kill a person for whom he died and rob him or her of the privilege of knowing the fullness of life that Jesus Christ offers. This calls us to express a pacifist position not by a negative but a positive stance. Ours is to be an active penetration into society with the redeeming love of God. Above everything else, we want our fellow men to become our brothers in Christ. When Jesus stated that the first commandment is to love God and that the second is just like it (to love your neighbour as yourself), he was asking that we bring to bear on the life of our neighbour that which we find most important in our own relationship with God.
From an evangelical perspective it may be said that wherever a Christian participates in war he has abdicated his responsibility to the greater calling of missions and evangelism. The way for Christians to change the world is by sharing the love of Christ and the good news of the gospel rather than to think we can stop anti-God movements by force. Jesus made this point ultimately in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Calvary's cross. As Christians, our answer to the violence in the world is simply that we don't have to live; we can die. This is the ultimate testimony of our belief in the kingdom of Christ and the resurrection. It is this same conviction which has motivated many people to go into unknown or violent areas of the world from which they may never return.
A Matter of Obedience.
Another evangelical premise that leads to a non-resistant view is that we regard Christ's Word in the Scripture as final. Having said that the New Testament is a culmination of God's will known in Christ, then it follows that his Word is final. He corrects the understanding of the old "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" attitude. God gave that position to limit violence, that is, only an eye for an eye. But now he declares that we are to love our enemies. He tells us that we will be better for the loving. We will be better people, better neighbours, better friends when we live by love. In answer to the question of whether this will work in our society, he showed us that we do not have to live; we can die. In dying we may sometimes do more for enriching the world than we would have done by living. We cannot answer the question of war on the basis of whether or not someone must suffer. Of course they will, one way or another. The question is, Which kind of suffering will we choose - that imposed by war or the suffering which comes because of love?
When troops move to take a beachhead, they do so with the conscious plan that they will sacrifice thousands of men. What if the Christian church moved into the world with the same conviction? What if we had a conscious plan to follow even though it might cost many lives? While there are conditioning factors to this comparison, it would appear that before the Christian church justifies giving the lives of so many of its people in military involvement it should look at the greater sin of being unwilling to sacrifice lives of affluent ease for the cause of building the kingdom of Christ.
Jesus says, "Put up your sword," and history has proven that warlike nations perish. When people take the course of violence, they suffer the consequences. This is seen in the image that America is creating in the world today. We are no longer looked on as a friendly, gracious people. We are looked at in terms of power. We have established a pattern of using force to answer the world's problems.
Whose Citizen?
As Christians we regard membership in the kingdom of Christ as our primary loyalty. Such an outlook is even more basic to the New Testament than the principle of love. Jesus himself said that he came to introduce another kingdom. Its spirit is one of love, but its platform of operation is loyalty to another Lord, an authority separate from any earthly power. This premise, which says that our primary loyalty is to the kingdom of heaven, underscores the fact that we answer first of all to Jesus Christ and his mandate alone.
This is true with respect to any given culture or nation in which a Christian lives. A believer will seek to be a good citizen, but with the awareness that there are many valid contributions Christians can make for the good of their fellow citizens when they give of themselves in a positive way. This should not be overlooked by those who imply that if one does not participate in military action he or she is not contributing to the nation. We carry an ethical responsibility to demonstrate that the position of conscientious objection to war is not something that you "turn on" during a war, as though this is the way to avoid several years of military service. Non-violence is a total way of life. It means that we give ourselves in service to others. We are not to build status as people who give themselves to a materialistic power struggle.
Some readers may ask, Does Augsburger not understand that God used war in the Old Testament and blessed it? The answer is simply yes, this is well understood, but interpreted in relation to the "unfolding revelation" in which God moved men to higher levels of understanding of his will. I say this with a deep conviction in the full inspiration of Scripture. There are no contradictions of meaning in the Bible. But I am also convinced that the Bible is not a flat book. It is rather an unfolding revelation of God's will in Jesus Christ. God is no longer using a nation to achieve his purpose, but rather using the fellowship of believers, the church of the reborn. Instead of using a nation, Jesus Christ has given us the Great Commission to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. This is our mission: discipling people to become members of the kingdom of Christ, not helping to justify participation in war. David Ben Gurion's question still confronts the Christian church: "When are you Christians going to begin working for peace?"
The love that is basic to the Christian's relationships with others is a volitional as well as emotional love. This means that we as Christians must find the way to build bridges of understanding. One problem that we face is to discern the course of love. A further problem is how to express that love. Certainly this involves more than merely talking about the problems. Many young people have given themselves through alternate service to the promotion of brotherhood, of peace and of understanding through rehabilitation and aid for those who are suffering. Non-resisters are not simply protesters.
Service in love must become a part of our whole philosophy of life. Our choice of vocation as well as our other involvements should be an expression and extension of the love of Jesus Christ. To open one's life to another makes the question of peace inescapable. Instead of waiting for a catastrophe to happen, we should be penetrating our world with acts of love to help alleviate its ills.
As Christians we believe in the infinite value of every human life. As Kant said, we should treat each person as an end in himself, not as a means to an end. We thus oppose any kind of revolutionary tactic which sacrifices persons for the sake of goals. Rather, from our Christian perspective we believe that deterioration occurs when people follow a course of violence as an answer to the world's ills. Believing in the sanctity of human life, we cannot be involved in anything, whether it is social injustice, violence, war or poverty, which interrupts a person's opportunities for a full life.
Committing oneself in ultimate loyalty to Jesus Christ means becoming a conscience to society, where that society operates beneath the level of the will of God. As members of the kingdom of heaven, obedience to Christ is the basic aspect of our approach to the question of war. The story of the good Samaritan highlights what it means to be a member of the kingdom of heaven. The interesting thing in this account is that it stands in judgment on everyone.
The story of the good Samaritan addresses the priest and the Levite as churchmen, and then shows that while these people could sit and talk about issues, when it came to concrete experience, they could not walk across the road to help a man who had been robbed and beaten. One of the sad facts about our life as a church in American society is that we can often talk about loving humanity in general, but not do anything about loving individuals. We can love people across the ocean and not walk across the street to help someone in need. The real consistency of our objection to war has to do with more than simply being opposed to war.
There are at least three other views of war held by the modern Christian church. One is that war is the lesser of two evils, and we cannot avoid it as an option. Another is that we turn to war only as a last resort. And another is that the Christian should be able to move beyond hate and kill in love. But from my perspective the issue is not answered by any of these, rather it is to be faced by the people of God on the basis of the character of his kingdom.
My intent here is to call for a Christian conscience to counteract violence by positive actions of love and thereby to promote peace in our society and in the world. Such activity is not a neutralizing of relationships, but an active expression of the love of Christ which treats every person as having ultimate worth.
Quotes regarding war (violence):
The worse the man, the better the soldier.
Napoleon Bonaparte
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
General Smedley Darlington Butler of the USMC (Highest Decorated Marine).
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory . . . and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.
Alfred Adler
No war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
Eugene Debs
People do not make wars; governments do.
Ronald Reagan
Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.
Ludwig von Mises
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Aldous Huxley
The only antidote to the poison of war is the public's courage to disagree with their leader.
Ramman Kenoun
We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of
force rather than the use of force.
Norman Cousins
War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.
Alexander Berkman
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
Gandhi
Every war is an atrocity, but every war that could have been avoided is a crime in which soldiers became criminals.
The poet, author
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
Omar Bradley
Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.
Albert Einstein
Evil means corrupt good ends.
Quaker pacifists, 1955 document
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
Force always attracts men of low morality.
Albert Einstein
There is no way to peace: peace is the way.
A.J.Muste
See the article AN INSPIRING ADDRESS which is found near the bottom of this page.
FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE
A) Christ, plus
B) The flawed Just War theory
C) Texts
D) A worthwhile article
A) Christ, plus
1) Christ never advocated war.
2) Christ never praised freedom-fighters.
3) Christ taught people never to retaliate or avenge.
4) The gospel of Christ condemns violence.
5) Christ preached a gospel of peace, and taught a new way of doing things.
6) Christ commanded us to love our enemies. Christ's cross serves as a model for His followers.
7) Christ commanded us not to murder.
8) Christ taught co-operation and reconciliation.
9) Christ said "Blessed are the peace makers".
10) Christ embodies a broad and deep vision of life that is thoroughly pacifist.
11) Christ himself practised pacifism, never striking anyone nor participating in or instigating revolutions. The Bible never says that when He drove the money-changers from the temple that He actually used the whip on the people themselves. Thus, He no doubt merely flailed it about. And don't forget that there were animals there too. Given that He is God, such is His divine prerogative, and not necessarily an example for us to follow.
12) It's hypocritical for Christians to preach Christ's gospel of love on the one hand, and on the other hand to go warring.
13) Christ rebuked Peter for severing the ear of the servant of the high priest. Peter was told to put his sword away.
14) Christ warned that those who take up the sword will perish by the sword (Matt 26:52).
15) Even when need necessitates the destruction of those who're evil, it's still considered as His strange act (Isa 28:21).
16) When Christians go to war they abandon the fruits of the Spirit.
17) Christian pacifism is grounded in theological affirmations.
18) Pacifism is in fact the original (or default) position of Christianity.
19) Constantine's arrival on the scene was responsible for the end of pacifism as the characteristic position of Christianity. Constantine, (who indulged in brutality, and who was baptised shortly before his death when he knew his life was coming to an end), made taking up arms and going to war an acceptable part of Christianity. Much rot within Christianity can be laid at Constantine's door and his Church and State fusion — such was the beginning of the worldly Church and secular Christianity. Constantine's measures, furthered by the persecuting Holy Roman Empire, saw pacifism ignored, discarded, and ruthlessly and brutally persecuted from the Christian faith. Some refer to Constantinianism as caesaropapism.
It was Augustine who first began to define when it was right for Christians to fight in wars. Augustine was responsible for many false teachings. Hardly a man to put one's faith in.
Is it any wonder now that “The only people who do not think Jesus was pacifist are Christians” — quote by Hindu Mahatma Gandhi.
20) Over time, the pacifist convictions of many Christians have unfortunately been dwarfed by the militaristic and nationalistic “Christianity” of the “Christian right”, so prone to misinterpreting Scripture in favour of its war stance.
21) A soldier is required to act without questioning, something that the sound Christian (who's to be obedient to his Lord first) should never do.
22) How can a Christian in all conscience shoot another Christian who's on the other country's side?
23) It needs to be remembered that Christians aren't living under a theocracy like ancient Israel once was, but rather, amidst a mixed multitude, which here, they join at their peril. What the world (or the State) does, and what the Christian should do, are often two different and contrary things.
(The above facts were drawn from various sources)
Professor Jonathan R. Wilson makes some very good points in the following comments regarding American Christians:
"We Christians may not do as Americans something that we must not do as Christians. As we listen to and debate arguments about going to war, note how often our Christian identity is subordinated to our American identity. We have been so formed by the collusion of the church with America that we find it difficult to even distinguish between Christian and national identity, and harder to subordinate our national identity to our identity in Christ."
"Gospel pacifism believes that God primarily works in the world through the church, not the nation. The church, as the community of disciples, is called to bear witness to the one hope that we have: Jesus Christ. Most of the debates about war, even in the church, are about what the United States should do. This is natural for those who primarily find their identity as Americans. But for Christians, our debate should be about what the church should be doing."
"Gospel pacifism argues that the church compromises its mission, corrupts its life, and abandons its witness when it follows the way of death by acting out of national, racial, and cultural identity. If this is the case, God's judgment looms over the church in the West and elsewhere."
B) The flawed Just War theory
1) The Just War theory has no basis in Scripture despite some claiming otherwise.
2) The Just War theory is grounded on the assumption that those political leaders who take such a step are wise and just men. We have no good reason for such faith in authority, even be that authority made up of Christians, and given history, even less so perhaps.
3) From the time of Constantine, the Just War criteria has been bent, broken, or completely discarded, and has led to crusade after hellish crusade — yes, far from just.
4) The Just War theory is rooted in a Constantine-ised attempt to make a war seem okay when it's still in fact evil.
5) The Just War theory does not teach people the will of Christ on when to kill but instead teaches what leaders in the fallen Church taught.
The following is an extract from the book "The Christian Pacifist" by David Ramanauskas.
Philip Dransfield a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship in his article The Just War, writes:
For many Christians the concept of the Just War was exploded with the atomic bomb in 1945. Any war which could destroy thousands of defenceless people so callously must be condemned as cruel and barbaric in the extreme.
Thousands of people were killed outright but thousands also were terribly burnt by fire or radioactivity and were left to die slowly without aid after the inferno.
Has the Christian Church ever repented of its tacit assent to this fiendish new development of warfare? Has it yet wakened up to the terrible fallacy of supposing that evil has sometimes to be done that good may prevail? Can it honestly claim that the cause of Christ was advanced in any possible way by such brutality?
It comes as something of a shock to find that there are a few people who still argue for the Just War. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki many found confirmation of the view that justice and war can never go together. But let us take the advocates of the Just War to be judged by their own principles and moral values.
The conditions which have to be fulfilled for a war to be called "Just” have been defined. Regrettably the Christian Church has tended to accept these conditions rather uncritically. Here they are with critical comments.
1. The methods employed must conform to the demands of moral law and non-combatants must be spared.
At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were cruelly destroyed. If atomic weapons are used again the same would inevitably occur. So logically no war in which atomic weapons are used can be a Just War.
2. There must be reasonable hope of bettering conditions as a result of the war.
No sane person can believe that conditions can ever be improved by atomic war or by the other destructive weapons of modern warfare. It can only make them worse. Here again there can be no Just War.
3. There must be a moral certainty that a right has been violated.
Here we are in the rarefied atmosphere of the medieval schoolmen with their “finer education of less or more”. Who can talk of “moral certainty” when intrigue, duplicity, collusion, espionage and secret diplomacy have all been demonstrated as part of the political activity of all well-armed countries? What are the “rights” referred to? Each country determines its own “rights” in conflicts with other countries, and also makes its own decisions as to when their “rights” have been “violated”. As someone has said, “In war a country is its own judge, jury and executioner”. The accusation of “violation of rights” is often a cloak for national greed and national pride.
4. All attempts at peaceful settlement must have been tried and failed.
It would be unforgivable today for modern war to be inflicted on the world if this condition were not complied with. But who determines when “all attempts” have been made? Here again all that happens is that national leaders make their own decisions on the basis of self-interest.
5. The real motives for which the war is waged must be morally justifiable.
The sincerity behind this condition must be matched against its pathetic impracticability. We are with the schoolmen again and the angels dancing on the point of a needle. Who can assess the “real motives” for war? Motives of all the combatant nations in war are so mixed and tarnished that this condition can never be honestly complied with. END
A quote from the same book: "Any Christian country that expects Christians to disobey the laws of Christ is not a Christian country".
Loyalty to Christ and His kingdom transcends every other loyalty.
I'm unsure of the source of this quote:
“It is wrong for a nation to be exclusively concerned with its own well-being in deciding whether to go to war; it must demonstrate concern for the well-being of the world as a whole--including the well-being of the nation it is attacking.”
I find it very interesting that a "Christian" country, and it being the "land of the free", was the first to develop the scourge of nuclear weapons.
C) Texts
Text one:
"Then Jesus asked [his disciples], “When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?” “Nothing,” they answered. He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors’; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.” The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are two swords.” “That is enough,” he replied" (Luke 22:35-38, NIV).
Interpretation:
Here, Christ is speaking figuratively, warning the disciples of the persecution that lay ahead that they and their converts were to suffer. After all, the period of popularity that the disciples had enjoyed had changed. The disciples obviously misunderstood Christ and were ready to take literally what He had said, hence their producing of two swords. It's noteworthy, that an hour or two after Christ had spoken of such, he warned Peter to put his weapon away. Christ's statement, "That is enough", no doubt refers to the discussion, not the swords, given that this was no time to be arguing a particular point. Christ would hardly make the comments that He did about turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, drawing the sword leads to dying by the sword, and so on, if he condoned the use of weapons and physical force.
Text two:
“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience” (Romans 13:1, 4-5, NIV).
Interpretation:
Okay, let's see what this text is really saying:
No human authority exists except by God's permission and under His control. Their rise and fall is in His hands. Therefore, Christians must not take it into their own hands to resist or to dispose of such authorities just like the Jews did via certain revolts that took place in Roman times. Such would bring reproach upon the Christian Church and its message of peace and brotherly love. If the Christian leads a peaceable life, he or she has no need to fear the wrath of such authorities. The use of the word "sword" here is simply symbolic of the ruler's legitimate authority to inflict due and rightful punishment, such as via the courts regarding crime. After all, society must have rules to safeguard its citizens. This power that such authorities wield is entrusted to men by God according to His own purposes for man's welfare.
Paul is not implying that God always approves of the conduct of such authorities. Paul is not saying that it is the Christian's duty to always submit to such authorities. On the contrary, where the requirements of any government are contrary to the law of God, the Christian is to "obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29).
Text two:
"'...a time for war...' (Ecclesiastes 3:8, NIV)
Interpretation:
The above is not presented as truth, but as the writer's (Solomon's) speculation as he searches for truth.
D) A worthwhile article
Christian Pacifism by Myron S. Augsburger
Jesus said, "Put your sword back in its place ... for all who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Mt. 26:52). And again, "But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also" (Mt. 5:39). The Old Testament prophet said, "They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks" (Mic. 4:3), a prophecy fulfilled where the people take the way of Christ and his Spirit seriously. And the way of Christ is best found in his own words.
In Luke chapter six, we read, "But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you do lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners.... But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Lk 6:27,36).
In John 18:36 Jesus says, "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews". Again in Matthew 5:9, Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called [known as] the children of God".
These passages serve as a frame of reference for the discussion of non-resistance and pacifism. The discussion that follows takes as its foundation the explicit teachings of the New Testament rather than its silences. There are those who argue from silence--that since Jesus did not expressly condemn the centurion for being a soldier, it follows that military participation is right for the Christian. By the same logic one could argue for the practice of slavery, a stance taken earlier in American history. But the explicit teachings of the New Testament introduce a principle of love, a practice of respect for the ultimate worth of each individual, which when followed makes participation in both slavery and war antithetical.
The problem of the Christian and war is not one which can be viewed simply from the perspective of one's responsibility to his or her nation. We are now a global community in which we face the question of what violence does to all humanity. The increase of population, the problems of adequate food production and distribution, of meeting the basic necessities of life have made violence a way of life. Christians must have answers as they face problems of new dimensions in their relationship to other people around the world.
Furthermore, in viewing the question from the standpoint of our responsibility to our own nation, it appears impossible that there could be such a thing as a "just war" in a nuclear age with a world community. The arguments for a just war in history appear to be quite irrelevant in an age of modern, mechanized and nuclear warfare. But, theologically, the Christian must also face the meaning of the biblical affirmation, "as he is so are you in the world," or again the words of Jesus, "as the Father has sent me, even so send I you" (Jn. 20:21). Ours is a mission of announcing the good news of reconciliation to God, and through him to one another.
Minority Movement?
As Christians we are not here to provide an ethic for society or the state, but to clearly define an ethic for disciples of Jesus Christ.
In the American system of government it is difficult for this stance to be understood. We operate with the myth of being a Christian nation, and we seek to interpret for society an ethic that we can bless as Christians. We need a new awareness of the pluralism of the New Testament, that the crucial issue is the difference between the church and the world, and that the church operates "within the perfection of Christ," while the world operates outside the perfection or will of Christ. Christians influence the state for good through Christian ethics and integrity, but they do not equate church and state. Only an in-depth understanding of this issue can save us from a cultural and a civil religion. As one who believes in New Testament non-resistance, or New Testament pacifism, it is important to me that this stance be clearly interpreted as an evangelical and biblical stance, not as the stance of humanistic or moralistic pacifism. Theologically, this position begins with the reality and priority of membership in the kingdom of Christ. This entails living by the way of love, a spirit of brotherhood and reverence for life. While brotherhood is an important concept, kingdom membership has first priority in New Testament non-resistance.
The question of the Christian's attitude toward war is viewed best by beginning with the New Testament, with Jesus Christ. This is to affirm that Jesus Christ brought the full meaning of God's will for us. All the way through the Old Testament God had something further to say about himself, about the will of God for humanity, and we see this fully in Jesus Christ. One can find numerous incidents in the Old Testament where Israel as the people of God was involved in war, enjoyed the blessing of God in victory and experienced defeat when out of favour with God. But a study of the context makes clear that God was meeting the Israelites where they were, demonstrating to people who worshiped their tribal gods that Yahweh, the God of Israel, was and is the true God. This is not to say that the full revelation of the will of Yahweh was then present. Rather, we see that there is progress in this revelation. Throughout the Old Testament God always had something further to say - until the New Testament. We read, "But when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his Son" (Gal. 4:4), and that "in these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things" (Heb. 1:2); that is, the One in whom the whole comes to its culmination. In Jesus' words, "Think not that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them" (Mt. 5:17) - that is, to fill it full of meaning.
With this perspective we must recognize that peace is a holistic concept. Peace is not simply the absence of war. It is far more - it is positive, active peacemaking. The Hebrew word shalom contains in it the idea of wholeness or soundness.
To affirm that one is a member of the kingdom of Christ now means that loyalty to Christ and his kingdom transcends every other loyalty. This stance goes beyond nationalism and calls us to identify first of all with our fellow disciples, of whatever nation, as we serve Christ together. This is not a position which can be expected of the world nor asked of the government as such. The Christian respects rulers as God ordained them, to "protect the innocent and punish the evildoer." The Christian can only encourage the government to be the government and to let the church be the church. We ask the government to be secular and to let the church be free to do its work in society. The church enriches society by the many things it brings to it, and in its respect for government it does not subordinate itself to any particular social order but is in allegiance to its one Lord.
Properly read, Romans 13 is telling us that God ordains political institutions for ordering the society: But since God ordains the powers he remains above them. In that light our response on many occasions will be that as Christians, "we must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). We cannot assume that since God ordains government we are always obeying God in our obedience to it. We are not to be lawbreakers, for Paul says that the authorities do "not bear the sword in vain" (Rom. 13:4). But we also cannot disobey a divine law to obey a contrary law by the government. The passage in Romans 13 calls us to be "subject to" the powers, but it does not use the term "obey." Our ultimate allegiance is to the God who ordains nations to function for order in society. Any serious attempt to resolve the question of a Christian's participation in war hinges significantly on this issue.
A Global Community.
Grappling with the problem of war is not an isolated issue but has to do with the problems of the whole human community, involving race, poverty, equal opportunity and the freedom for persons to be individuals. To face this matter honestly we must look at the larger question of sin. As Samuel Shoemaker has said, "You do not wait for a war to look at the problem of evil, war is simply the problem of evil writ large."
Closely associated with the preceding is the fact that war is quite often for the protection of property. As Christians we will respect the right of the government to declare war to protect its own territory. But the Christian who is a conscientious objector to participation in war must be consistent with respect to his or her own attitude toward material things. The Christian must take seriously Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount that personality is more valuable than material goods and that we do not sacrifice life for the sake of goods [Lk. 6:29,35]. This means that as Christians under a government which enables us to become wealthy we cannot ask the government to sacrifice people's lives in protecting our goods. The Christian attitude toward material possessions is not that of a legal right but that of responsibility, of a moral obligation to use the things he has acquired to help others.
In our society another question we must ask is, What are the guidelines for Christians participating in government? In an attempt to be consistent with the premise just stated, it would appear that Christians may serve in political positions so long as they do not try to create a state church. It is our responsibility as Christians to call the government to be secular and to respect the freedom of Christians to serve in loyalty to their own king. Christians will help interpret to others who hold political power why the Christian must constantly say, "Caesar is not lord; Jesus Christ is Lord." Thus, Christians should only serve at government levels where they can honestly carry out the functions of their office without compromising their fidelity to Jesus Christ as Lord. They should not consider holding positions where they could not both fulfil the obligations of the office and remain consistent with their membership in the kingdom of Christ. To fulfil their obligations and violate their commitment to Christ would be wrong. Likewise, to live by their convictions and not fulfil the functions of their office with respect to the society which creates the office would also be wrong. The Christian in a political position serves the goal of effective government just like a secular person, but the Christian is a witness to the higher values of Jesus Christ. Christians ought never to use a powerful government position as a means to achieve Christ's goals for humanity. For the Christian, the desire to "rule" is always wrong; our stance is one of serving. This awareness will keep us from the struggle for power, a struggle which Malcolm Muggeridge has called "a pornography of the will."
One who accepts this stance - that New Testament non-resistance is the claim of Christ upon his disciples as an expression of the reality of his kingdom - will also follow other evangelical premises of faithfulness to Christ. For example, can one participate in war and take the life of a person for whom Christ died when our basic mission as Christians is to win that person to become a brother or sister in the Lord? Or, since the kingdom of God is global and transcends every national, racial and cultural distinction, when one's country is at war with another country can Christians participate knowing that by so doing they may be at war with persons who claim to worship and follow the same Lord?
To go back to the early church itself, according to several writers of history, there was in the church a significant percentage who renounced conflict and everything that produced war. The one thing Christians were armed with was love. E. Stanley Jones wrote that we search in vain during the early years of church history to find Christian people engaged in warfare. He states that Christians did not become soldiers. If they were in the army when converted, they resigned. Jones describes the early believers as saying, "we will match our power to suffer against your ability to inflict suffering, we will wear you down by our spirit, by soul force against physical force, by going the second mile, by turning the other cheek," until Rome finally stopped torturing Christians. That perspective on history underscores the New Testament emphasis that we go out not by force but by love; we seek to make our world an understanding community.
This disdain of military service held true until the period of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome until about A.D. 180. After Constantine's time, who from our perspective instituted a "fallen church" of which everyone was forced to be a member, there were many "Christian" soldiers.
In our own era, Martin Luther King, Jr. brought into the American scene a now synthesis. It was not novel in terms of what he emphasized from the New Testament, but because he borrowed from Gandhi's philosophy. He created a new synthesis by enhancing New Testament non-violence with Gandhi's strategy of non-violent resistance and applying these to the nineteenth? century liberal idea of "the kingdom of God in America." What King did was to confront society with this new dimension, and it shook the country to its roots.
King's philosophy is expressed in five points: (1) Non-violent resistance is not a method for cowards. It takes more strength to stand for love than to strike back. (2) Such resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win friendship and understanding. (3) The attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against the people doing the evil. (4) Non-violent resistance is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back. (5) This resistance avoids not only external physical force, but also internal violence of spirit.
On the premise that we cannot kill people for whom Christ died, John Howard Yoder emphasizes in his significant writings on pacifism that the cross has made a difference. Christ has come into the world to redeem all people and has acted for the sake of every person on the globe. We cannot kill a person for whom he died and rob him or her of the privilege of knowing the fullness of life that Jesus Christ offers. This calls us to express a pacifist position not by a negative but a positive stance. Ours is to be an active penetration into society with the redeeming love of God. Above everything else, we want our fellow men to become our brothers in Christ. When Jesus stated that the first commandment is to love God and that the second is just like it (to love your neighbour as yourself), he was asking that we bring to bear on the life of our neighbour that which we find most important in our own relationship with God.
From an evangelical perspective it may be said that wherever a Christian participates in war he has abdicated his responsibility to the greater calling of missions and evangelism. The way for Christians to change the world is by sharing the love of Christ and the good news of the gospel rather than to think we can stop anti-God movements by force. Jesus made this point ultimately in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Calvary's cross. As Christians, our answer to the violence in the world is simply that we don't have to live; we can die. This is the ultimate testimony of our belief in the kingdom of Christ and the resurrection. It is this same conviction which has motivated many people to go into unknown or violent areas of the world from which they may never return.
A Matter of Obedience.
Another evangelical premise that leads to a non-resistant view is that we regard Christ's Word in the Scripture as final. Having said that the New Testament is a culmination of God's will known in Christ, then it follows that his Word is final. He corrects the understanding of the old "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" attitude. God gave that position to limit violence, that is, only an eye for an eye. But now he declares that we are to love our enemies. He tells us that we will be better for the loving. We will be better people, better neighbours, better friends when we live by love. In answer to the question of whether this will work in our society, he showed us that we do not have to live; we can die. In dying we may sometimes do more for enriching the world than we would have done by living. We cannot answer the question of war on the basis of whether or not someone must suffer. Of course they will, one way or another. The question is, Which kind of suffering will we choose - that imposed by war or the suffering which comes because of love?
When troops move to take a beachhead, they do so with the conscious plan that they will sacrifice thousands of men. What if the Christian church moved into the world with the same conviction? What if we had a conscious plan to follow even though it might cost many lives? While there are conditioning factors to this comparison, it would appear that before the Christian church justifies giving the lives of so many of its people in military involvement it should look at the greater sin of being unwilling to sacrifice lives of affluent ease for the cause of building the kingdom of Christ.
Jesus says, "Put up your sword," and history has proven that warlike nations perish. When people take the course of violence, they suffer the consequences. This is seen in the image that America is creating in the world today. We are no longer looked on as a friendly, gracious people. We are looked at in terms of power. We have established a pattern of using force to answer the world's problems.
Whose Citizen?
As Christians we regard membership in the kingdom of Christ as our primary loyalty. Such an outlook is even more basic to the New Testament than the principle of love. Jesus himself said that he came to introduce another kingdom. Its spirit is one of love, but its platform of operation is loyalty to another Lord, an authority separate from any earthly power. This premise, which says that our primary loyalty is to the kingdom of heaven, underscores the fact that we answer first of all to Jesus Christ and his mandate alone.
This is true with respect to any given culture or nation in which a Christian lives. A believer will seek to be a good citizen, but with the awareness that there are many valid contributions Christians can make for the good of their fellow citizens when they give of themselves in a positive way. This should not be overlooked by those who imply that if one does not participate in military action he or she is not contributing to the nation. We carry an ethical responsibility to demonstrate that the position of conscientious objection to war is not something that you "turn on" during a war, as though this is the way to avoid several years of military service. Non-violence is a total way of life. It means that we give ourselves in service to others. We are not to build status as people who give themselves to a materialistic power struggle.
Some readers may ask, Does Augsburger not understand that God used war in the Old Testament and blessed it? The answer is simply yes, this is well understood, but interpreted in relation to the "unfolding revelation" in which God moved men to higher levels of understanding of his will. I say this with a deep conviction in the full inspiration of Scripture. There are no contradictions of meaning in the Bible. But I am also convinced that the Bible is not a flat book. It is rather an unfolding revelation of God's will in Jesus Christ. God is no longer using a nation to achieve his purpose, but rather using the fellowship of believers, the church of the reborn. Instead of using a nation, Jesus Christ has given us the Great Commission to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. This is our mission: discipling people to become members of the kingdom of Christ, not helping to justify participation in war. David Ben Gurion's question still confronts the Christian church: "When are you Christians going to begin working for peace?"
The love that is basic to the Christian's relationships with others is a volitional as well as emotional love. This means that we as Christians must find the way to build bridges of understanding. One problem that we face is to discern the course of love. A further problem is how to express that love. Certainly this involves more than merely talking about the problems. Many young people have given themselves through alternate service to the promotion of brotherhood, of peace and of understanding through rehabilitation and aid for those who are suffering. Non-resisters are not simply protesters.
Service in love must become a part of our whole philosophy of life. Our choice of vocation as well as our other involvements should be an expression and extension of the love of Jesus Christ. To open one's life to another makes the question of peace inescapable. Instead of waiting for a catastrophe to happen, we should be penetrating our world with acts of love to help alleviate its ills.
As Christians we believe in the infinite value of every human life. As Kant said, we should treat each person as an end in himself, not as a means to an end. We thus oppose any kind of revolutionary tactic which sacrifices persons for the sake of goals. Rather, from our Christian perspective we believe that deterioration occurs when people follow a course of violence as an answer to the world's ills. Believing in the sanctity of human life, we cannot be involved in anything, whether it is social injustice, violence, war or poverty, which interrupts a person's opportunities for a full life.
Committing oneself in ultimate loyalty to Jesus Christ means becoming a conscience to society, where that society operates beneath the level of the will of God. As members of the kingdom of heaven, obedience to Christ is the basic aspect of our approach to the question of war. The story of the good Samaritan highlights what it means to be a member of the kingdom of heaven. The interesting thing in this account is that it stands in judgment on everyone.
The story of the good Samaritan addresses the priest and the Levite as churchmen, and then shows that while these people could sit and talk about issues, when it came to concrete experience, they could not walk across the road to help a man who had been robbed and beaten. One of the sad facts about our life as a church in American society is that we can often talk about loving humanity in general, but not do anything about loving individuals. We can love people across the ocean and not walk across the street to help someone in need. The real consistency of our objection to war has to do with more than simply being opposed to war.
There are at least three other views of war held by the modern Christian church. One is that war is the lesser of two evils, and we cannot avoid it as an option. Another is that we turn to war only as a last resort. And another is that the Christian should be able to move beyond hate and kill in love. But from my perspective the issue is not answered by any of these, rather it is to be faced by the people of God on the basis of the character of his kingdom.
My intent here is to call for a Christian conscience to counteract violence by positive actions of love and thereby to promote peace in our society and in the world. Such activity is not a neutralizing of relationships, but an active expression of the love of Christ which treats every person as having ultimate worth.
An Inspiring Address
Given by Kenneth Rawlings at Lewes Town Hall, Sussex, on Armistice Day (Remembrance Day) 1934 — that being, between the two world wars.
At a Service of Remembrance we ought to be clear not only as to what we are to remember, but to what purpose. Remembrance is not always wise; there are some things it is better to forget. Probably there are things in your lives and mine – mistakes, failures, perhaps even persons we try to forget because we know there can be no peace nor happiness for us until they are banished from our memory. Tonight we remember ten million men sent to premature and violent death. To what purpose do we remember them? We must make up our minds about that, or we shall be in danger of vague sentimentality, or something worse.
First we should remember that these ten million men were of all races. On an occasion like this, when the whole human family mourns a common calamity, distinctions of nationality ought surely to fade into insignificance. Let us remember the slain tonight as our brother men in the great family of God, the Father of us all. Secondly we must remember these men with admiration. Many of them died bravely. Most of them died for what they believed in all good faith to be a righteous cause. In a world in which there is much cowardice and selfishness it is good to remember the courage and self-sacrifice and devotion to duty represented by ten million men fallen in battle. If I spend no more time tonight praising them, it will not be because I want to belittle them – God forbid! - But because I believe we owe them a greater debt than praise – a debt which the world in general has not only failed to pay, but, as yet, seems unwilling even to acknowledge.
What we do owe them, these ten million slain who in the prime of their manhood turned their backs upon all the beauty and sweetness of life, who lived for years in mud and squalor and terror, who were thrust through with bayonets; or had their limbs torn off, or faces smashed, who were blinded or driven insane or hung like scarecrows on barbed wire and riddled with bullets, who were choked with poison gas, or scorched to death by liquid flames, or were drowned, or were imprisoned like rats in submerges submarines or collapsed dug-outs, tearing with bleeding fingers at their prison walls, fighting frantically for breath, suffocating, gasping, dying with blackened faces and protruding eyes – in God’s name what do we owe them for this? What compensation can we offer them?
If they look down on our Armistice Day futilities, our pomp and pageantry, our solemn marchings to and fro with drums and flags, and sometimes – God help us! – With the very weapons of death by which they perished, do they feel they are well repaid? Do they feel it was all worthwhile – the agony and bloodshed and horror – as they see us doing them honour, singing hymns about them, placing wreaths upon War Memorials? Or do they look down with wistful eyes searching for some sign or token that the world is in any way better or happier and that their bitter sacrifice has not been utterly in vain?
There is nothing quite so tragic as purposeless suffering. We do not regret any pain we may have endured if only we can feel that it has been of some use to someone. But it is bitter to suffer and see no fruit. “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow because her hour has come, but as soon as she is delivered of the child she remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born into the world.” What does she feel about it, I wonder if the child is born dead? I ask then, what is there to show for this travail of mankind on the blood-soaked battlefields of the world? Has any new life come from it so that those who suffered may remember no more the anguish for joy?
In a popular hymn the death of the men slain in the war is compared with the sacrifice of Calvary. The analogy is false – firstly, because Christ was not slain in attempting to slay other men, and secondly because His death won redemption for mankind. If the death of soldiers in battle is called a “Lesser Calvary” we have a right to ask what lesser redemption it has wrought. Is the world a happier and better place because these men died? Is it more peaceful, more prosperous, and more free? Has any evil thing been destroyed, or any good thing been established? Can we point to any solitary gain or blessing that has come to mankind because these ten million men went through that Hell of torture and bloodshed? We know the answer only too well.
In its broad effect upon the life of the world, the Great War has proved wholly disastrous and destructive. Every vile thing that flourished before it has flourished since, with redoubled vigour. It is to be a war to overthrow a great military tyranny, and that same tyranny is growing up again under our very eyes. It was to be a war to end war, and at this moment the nations are feverishly arming themselves in readiness for the next.
I come back, then, to this; What is our debt to the slain? It is surely this – to gather up all the powers of our minds and souls in an inflexible determination that even yet some benefit to the world shall result from their death; that even now, at the eleventh hour, mankind shall see the truth written in letters of blood across the globe; the truth, namely, that war is essentially evil, and that to resort to it or to countenance it in any shape or form, in any circumstance or provocation, is an affront to God and a crime against humanity.
This is our debt to the dead: To resolve that there shall be no more precious lives sacrificed to the god of war. If it can one day be said that the bloody massacre of ten million men shocked the world into final repudiation of war, and of everything that directly or indirectly leads to it, then, and only then, will it be true to say that they did not die in vain, but that the world has gained something commensurate with the ghastly price that has been paid.
But if by God’s mercy we are brought to realise the evil of war, and resolve to denounce it and to take no part in it, we must be prepared to meet with bitter opposition. We shall be attacked, first by those who think war is glorious. Perhaps we should not be troubled about them. People who lived through the years 1914 to 1918 and can still think there is anything glorious about war are beyond the reach of reason. Our only comfort is that they are elderly and will in course of time die out.
Then there are those who maintain that war develops many fine qualities in men. No doubt, but so does smallpox and cancer. Besides we know perfectly well that for one person whose character may be ennobled or purified in the fire of war, there are thousands who become brutalised and depraved, as the crime statistics in the post-war period very clearly show. Again, we shall be ridiculed by the kind of people who distrust ideals of any sort. They will tell us that it is impossible to get rid of war because you cannot change human nature. I believe there is someone who can change human nature, and He does. But at all events, human behaviour can be changed. In spite of human nature, civilised nations have abolished cannibalism, human sacrifices, slavery, torture, duelling, and other evils once regarded as incurable. Why, then, should not war be abolished through the awakening of the collective conscience to the monstrous wickedness of wholesale slaughter?
Lastly, we shall have to deal with those who say that they, too, want to abolish war, but that it can only be done by piling up armaments all round, or else by making one nation (our own needless to say) so powerful by land and sea that no other nation will dare to disturb the world’s peace. I find it very hard to be patient with such an argument as that. No doubt you may postpone war, possibly for a long period by maintaining a balance of power among the nations, or by allowing one country to be overwhelmingly powerful in armaments. But if there is one lesson that stands out plainly in the pages of history, it is the lesson that the arming of nations on any 87
pretext, whether for aggression or for defence and security, always ends sooner or later in armed conflict. And the longer the process of arming goes on, the more terrible is the conflict when it comes.
Let us waste no more time over these futilities. There is a much more lamentable form of opposition we shall have to face if we denounce war, and that is the opposition of Christian people who will not think out the implications of their religion.
It fills me with astonishment and a sort of helpless despair to realise that the Christian Church as a whole has not yet dared to pronounce war as a sin against God, and that so many Christians who accept Christ’s teaching as the supreme law of human conduct are prepared to justify something that is flatly opposed to the whole spirit of the Gospel.
By no possible sophistry can war be squared with the Christian moral code contained in the New Testament and particularly in the Sermon on the Mount. Even if war meant, as some people seem to think, the punishment of evil-doers, the striking down of oppressors that the oppressed might go free, or the destruction of some evil thing preying upon human lives, even then it could only be defended from a pre-Christian standpoint. But we know that modern warfare is nothing of the sort. Whom did our soldiers fight in the last war? Oppressors? Tyrants? The enemies of God? Of course not; they fought ordinary decent men like themselves. Our airmen dropped bombs on harmless civilians like you. They killed women and children, just like your mothers and wives and babies.
Modern warfare is indiscriminate mutual slaughter by people who have no quarrel with each other until their minds are poisoned by war propaganda. And it is just here that the essential vileness of war is most apparent. No war can begin, still less carried through, until the people who are to do the actual fighting have been tampered with in order to get their fighting blood up.
National pride, fear, jealousy and hatred – these are things that cause wars, but they are dormant in the average person until they are deliberately stirred into activity by propaganda. War, then, is evil, not only because it involves the slaying and mutilating and torture of men but because it depends for its very existence upon the deliberate fostering of the vilest passions of which human nature is capable – and in particular the passion of hatred. If you dispute that you must be very young, or else have a very short memory.
Don’t you remember the appalling and venomous hatred from 1914 onwards? Don’t you recall how even naturalised Germans who had lived in England from childhood were ostracised and insulted and spat upon? Don’t you remember how no one dared to perform the works of Beethoven and Wagner because they happened to be Germans? Don’t you remember how, day by day, our patriotic newspaper fed us with horrible stories of German atrocities – some of them true, but many of them grotesque falsehoods – until to the greatest mass of unthinking people every German was a monster of lust and cruelty, and anyone who dared to defend a German was howled down and called a traitor to his country?
And those of us who fought in the war, don’t we remember how it was instilled into us that to be a good fighter it was necessary to be a good hater; how we were told that “The only good German is a dead German”; how when we practiced bayonet fighting at the sacks we were made to snarl like wild beasts to stimulate our blood lust? Don’t we remember – if only we could forget! – How sometime we had to crawl out through the darkness like beasts of prey, throw our hand grenades, and then scuttle back to our trenches, leaving behind huddled heaps of bleeding flesh where a few moments before there had been living men like ourselves; and how we were congratulated and patted on the back, and someone said; “How many of the devils did you get?” And this is the thing that Christian men with the New Testament in their hands cannot bring themselves to condemn. This is the unspeakable vileness to which the Church of Christ gave its blessing in the last war, and is apparently prepared to bless again.
It is idle to pretend that modern warfare does not necessarily involve this shameful degradation of the human soul. It does, and we know that it does, if only we would be honest enough to admit it. We know that nothing could induce ordinary kind-hearted people like you who are hear tonight to slay their fellow creatures unless they were first inoculated with the damnable virus of hatred. And we Christian Ministers read the Sermon on the Mount in our Churches! We read it with great unction. We tell our people that Christ commanded his disciples to resist not evil, to love their enemies, to overcome evil with good, to be merciful and pitiful like their Father in heaven. And then as soon as the drums of war begin to beat, we explain it all away.
It is impracticable idealism; it may be totally ignored from the moment that a dozen statesmen decide to settle their differences by a general massacre. The rulers of this world, it seems, have power to suspend the laws of the King of Kings. The Gospel of Jesus Christ must be put on the shelf for the duration of the war. Christianity must go out when the guns begin to go off. And those guns! We watch them being multiplied, and the battleships and the submarines, and the bombing planes in readiness for the next war, and we make no protest. We only murmur platitudes about peace and good will, and repeat the popular catch-phrases about security and the honour of our country. Well, perhaps there was some excuse for us last time. Probably we did not realise then how unspeakably foul and devilish a thing war had become. We had our minds stuffed with picturesque and antique illusions; we were swept off our feet by an irresistible tide of false patriotism. But we shall have no excuse next time, for we know the truth.
And if at the first hint or threat of another war the Christian Church does not speak out and forbid it in the name of Christ, it will betray its Master as He has never been betrayed since His false friend sold Him for thirty pieces of silver.
Men and women! – and especially you young men and women in whose hands lies the only hope of the future, I implore you while there is yet time – while you are still sane and kindly, before the demon of war bursts his fetters and takes possession of you and turns you into beasts – I implore you in the name of God, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the name of humanity, in the name of the ten million slain whose eyes are surely fixed upon us now; for the sake of your children, as yet perhaps unborn, but for those whose tender flesh and pure blood the god of war is even now hungering and thirsting. I implore you to set your faces against this evil and to resolve that you will never rest until it has been thrust back into the pit of hell from whence it came.
And I desire to make my own pledge here and now before God and before you, and, as I believe, in the sight of the great army of the dead. I declare that as long as I live I will hate and denounce and oppose war; war in every shape and form; war of aggression or war of defence; war in any circumstances; war under any pretext or provocation. And I pledge myself to do all I can to root out of my own heart and out of the hearts of others all those evil passions that lead to war – national pride and jealousy and false patriotism. And I most solemnly declare that if war comes again in my time I will have neither part nor lot in it. I will denounce it and oppose it until my mouth is stopped, so help me God!
And if there are any of you who feel that what I have said tonight is in the main true, and can echo in your hearts the pledge that I have publicly made, will you have the courage to indicate it now by rising in your seats?
“The response was instantaneous. With one or two exceptions the assembled hundreds rose in their places.” – Sussex Express
From the book "The Christian Pacifist" by David Ramanauskas
Given by Kenneth Rawlings at Lewes Town Hall, Sussex, on Armistice Day (Remembrance Day) 1934 — that being, between the two world wars.
At a Service of Remembrance we ought to be clear not only as to what we are to remember, but to what purpose. Remembrance is not always wise; there are some things it is better to forget. Probably there are things in your lives and mine – mistakes, failures, perhaps even persons we try to forget because we know there can be no peace nor happiness for us until they are banished from our memory. Tonight we remember ten million men sent to premature and violent death. To what purpose do we remember them? We must make up our minds about that, or we shall be in danger of vague sentimentality, or something worse.
First we should remember that these ten million men were of all races. On an occasion like this, when the whole human family mourns a common calamity, distinctions of nationality ought surely to fade into insignificance. Let us remember the slain tonight as our brother men in the great family of God, the Father of us all. Secondly we must remember these men with admiration. Many of them died bravely. Most of them died for what they believed in all good faith to be a righteous cause. In a world in which there is much cowardice and selfishness it is good to remember the courage and self-sacrifice and devotion to duty represented by ten million men fallen in battle. If I spend no more time tonight praising them, it will not be because I want to belittle them – God forbid! - But because I believe we owe them a greater debt than praise – a debt which the world in general has not only failed to pay, but, as yet, seems unwilling even to acknowledge.
What we do owe them, these ten million slain who in the prime of their manhood turned their backs upon all the beauty and sweetness of life, who lived for years in mud and squalor and terror, who were thrust through with bayonets; or had their limbs torn off, or faces smashed, who were blinded or driven insane or hung like scarecrows on barbed wire and riddled with bullets, who were choked with poison gas, or scorched to death by liquid flames, or were drowned, or were imprisoned like rats in submerges submarines or collapsed dug-outs, tearing with bleeding fingers at their prison walls, fighting frantically for breath, suffocating, gasping, dying with blackened faces and protruding eyes – in God’s name what do we owe them for this? What compensation can we offer them?
If they look down on our Armistice Day futilities, our pomp and pageantry, our solemn marchings to and fro with drums and flags, and sometimes – God help us! – With the very weapons of death by which they perished, do they feel they are well repaid? Do they feel it was all worthwhile – the agony and bloodshed and horror – as they see us doing them honour, singing hymns about them, placing wreaths upon War Memorials? Or do they look down with wistful eyes searching for some sign or token that the world is in any way better or happier and that their bitter sacrifice has not been utterly in vain?
There is nothing quite so tragic as purposeless suffering. We do not regret any pain we may have endured if only we can feel that it has been of some use to someone. But it is bitter to suffer and see no fruit. “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow because her hour has come, but as soon as she is delivered of the child she remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born into the world.” What does she feel about it, I wonder if the child is born dead? I ask then, what is there to show for this travail of mankind on the blood-soaked battlefields of the world? Has any new life come from it so that those who suffered may remember no more the anguish for joy?
In a popular hymn the death of the men slain in the war is compared with the sacrifice of Calvary. The analogy is false – firstly, because Christ was not slain in attempting to slay other men, and secondly because His death won redemption for mankind. If the death of soldiers in battle is called a “Lesser Calvary” we have a right to ask what lesser redemption it has wrought. Is the world a happier and better place because these men died? Is it more peaceful, more prosperous, and more free? Has any evil thing been destroyed, or any good thing been established? Can we point to any solitary gain or blessing that has come to mankind because these ten million men went through that Hell of torture and bloodshed? We know the answer only too well.
In its broad effect upon the life of the world, the Great War has proved wholly disastrous and destructive. Every vile thing that flourished before it has flourished since, with redoubled vigour. It is to be a war to overthrow a great military tyranny, and that same tyranny is growing up again under our very eyes. It was to be a war to end war, and at this moment the nations are feverishly arming themselves in readiness for the next.
I come back, then, to this; What is our debt to the slain? It is surely this – to gather up all the powers of our minds and souls in an inflexible determination that even yet some benefit to the world shall result from their death; that even now, at the eleventh hour, mankind shall see the truth written in letters of blood across the globe; the truth, namely, that war is essentially evil, and that to resort to it or to countenance it in any shape or form, in any circumstance or provocation, is an affront to God and a crime against humanity.
This is our debt to the dead: To resolve that there shall be no more precious lives sacrificed to the god of war. If it can one day be said that the bloody massacre of ten million men shocked the world into final repudiation of war, and of everything that directly or indirectly leads to it, then, and only then, will it be true to say that they did not die in vain, but that the world has gained something commensurate with the ghastly price that has been paid.
But if by God’s mercy we are brought to realise the evil of war, and resolve to denounce it and to take no part in it, we must be prepared to meet with bitter opposition. We shall be attacked, first by those who think war is glorious. Perhaps we should not be troubled about them. People who lived through the years 1914 to 1918 and can still think there is anything glorious about war are beyond the reach of reason. Our only comfort is that they are elderly and will in course of time die out.
Then there are those who maintain that war develops many fine qualities in men. No doubt, but so does smallpox and cancer. Besides we know perfectly well that for one person whose character may be ennobled or purified in the fire of war, there are thousands who become brutalised and depraved, as the crime statistics in the post-war period very clearly show. Again, we shall be ridiculed by the kind of people who distrust ideals of any sort. They will tell us that it is impossible to get rid of war because you cannot change human nature. I believe there is someone who can change human nature, and He does. But at all events, human behaviour can be changed. In spite of human nature, civilised nations have abolished cannibalism, human sacrifices, slavery, torture, duelling, and other evils once regarded as incurable. Why, then, should not war be abolished through the awakening of the collective conscience to the monstrous wickedness of wholesale slaughter?
Lastly, we shall have to deal with those who say that they, too, want to abolish war, but that it can only be done by piling up armaments all round, or else by making one nation (our own needless to say) so powerful by land and sea that no other nation will dare to disturb the world’s peace. I find it very hard to be patient with such an argument as that. No doubt you may postpone war, possibly for a long period by maintaining a balance of power among the nations, or by allowing one country to be overwhelmingly powerful in armaments. But if there is one lesson that stands out plainly in the pages of history, it is the lesson that the arming of nations on any 87
pretext, whether for aggression or for defence and security, always ends sooner or later in armed conflict. And the longer the process of arming goes on, the more terrible is the conflict when it comes.
Let us waste no more time over these futilities. There is a much more lamentable form of opposition we shall have to face if we denounce war, and that is the opposition of Christian people who will not think out the implications of their religion.
It fills me with astonishment and a sort of helpless despair to realise that the Christian Church as a whole has not yet dared to pronounce war as a sin against God, and that so many Christians who accept Christ’s teaching as the supreme law of human conduct are prepared to justify something that is flatly opposed to the whole spirit of the Gospel.
By no possible sophistry can war be squared with the Christian moral code contained in the New Testament and particularly in the Sermon on the Mount. Even if war meant, as some people seem to think, the punishment of evil-doers, the striking down of oppressors that the oppressed might go free, or the destruction of some evil thing preying upon human lives, even then it could only be defended from a pre-Christian standpoint. But we know that modern warfare is nothing of the sort. Whom did our soldiers fight in the last war? Oppressors? Tyrants? The enemies of God? Of course not; they fought ordinary decent men like themselves. Our airmen dropped bombs on harmless civilians like you. They killed women and children, just like your mothers and wives and babies.
Modern warfare is indiscriminate mutual slaughter by people who have no quarrel with each other until their minds are poisoned by war propaganda. And it is just here that the essential vileness of war is most apparent. No war can begin, still less carried through, until the people who are to do the actual fighting have been tampered with in order to get their fighting blood up.
National pride, fear, jealousy and hatred – these are things that cause wars, but they are dormant in the average person until they are deliberately stirred into activity by propaganda. War, then, is evil, not only because it involves the slaying and mutilating and torture of men but because it depends for its very existence upon the deliberate fostering of the vilest passions of which human nature is capable – and in particular the passion of hatred. If you dispute that you must be very young, or else have a very short memory.
Don’t you remember the appalling and venomous hatred from 1914 onwards? Don’t you recall how even naturalised Germans who had lived in England from childhood were ostracised and insulted and spat upon? Don’t you remember how no one dared to perform the works of Beethoven and Wagner because they happened to be Germans? Don’t you remember how, day by day, our patriotic newspaper fed us with horrible stories of German atrocities – some of them true, but many of them grotesque falsehoods – until to the greatest mass of unthinking people every German was a monster of lust and cruelty, and anyone who dared to defend a German was howled down and called a traitor to his country?
And those of us who fought in the war, don’t we remember how it was instilled into us that to be a good fighter it was necessary to be a good hater; how we were told that “The only good German is a dead German”; how when we practiced bayonet fighting at the sacks we were made to snarl like wild beasts to stimulate our blood lust? Don’t we remember – if only we could forget! – How sometime we had to crawl out through the darkness like beasts of prey, throw our hand grenades, and then scuttle back to our trenches, leaving behind huddled heaps of bleeding flesh where a few moments before there had been living men like ourselves; and how we were congratulated and patted on the back, and someone said; “How many of the devils did you get?” And this is the thing that Christian men with the New Testament in their hands cannot bring themselves to condemn. This is the unspeakable vileness to which the Church of Christ gave its blessing in the last war, and is apparently prepared to bless again.
It is idle to pretend that modern warfare does not necessarily involve this shameful degradation of the human soul. It does, and we know that it does, if only we would be honest enough to admit it. We know that nothing could induce ordinary kind-hearted people like you who are hear tonight to slay their fellow creatures unless they were first inoculated with the damnable virus of hatred. And we Christian Ministers read the Sermon on the Mount in our Churches! We read it with great unction. We tell our people that Christ commanded his disciples to resist not evil, to love their enemies, to overcome evil with good, to be merciful and pitiful like their Father in heaven. And then as soon as the drums of war begin to beat, we explain it all away.
It is impracticable idealism; it may be totally ignored from the moment that a dozen statesmen decide to settle their differences by a general massacre. The rulers of this world, it seems, have power to suspend the laws of the King of Kings. The Gospel of Jesus Christ must be put on the shelf for the duration of the war. Christianity must go out when the guns begin to go off. And those guns! We watch them being multiplied, and the battleships and the submarines, and the bombing planes in readiness for the next war, and we make no protest. We only murmur platitudes about peace and good will, and repeat the popular catch-phrases about security and the honour of our country. Well, perhaps there was some excuse for us last time. Probably we did not realise then how unspeakably foul and devilish a thing war had become. We had our minds stuffed with picturesque and antique illusions; we were swept off our feet by an irresistible tide of false patriotism. But we shall have no excuse next time, for we know the truth.
And if at the first hint or threat of another war the Christian Church does not speak out and forbid it in the name of Christ, it will betray its Master as He has never been betrayed since His false friend sold Him for thirty pieces of silver.
Men and women! – and especially you young men and women in whose hands lies the only hope of the future, I implore you while there is yet time – while you are still sane and kindly, before the demon of war bursts his fetters and takes possession of you and turns you into beasts – I implore you in the name of God, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the name of humanity, in the name of the ten million slain whose eyes are surely fixed upon us now; for the sake of your children, as yet perhaps unborn, but for those whose tender flesh and pure blood the god of war is even now hungering and thirsting. I implore you to set your faces against this evil and to resolve that you will never rest until it has been thrust back into the pit of hell from whence it came.
And I desire to make my own pledge here and now before God and before you, and, as I believe, in the sight of the great army of the dead. I declare that as long as I live I will hate and denounce and oppose war; war in every shape and form; war of aggression or war of defence; war in any circumstances; war under any pretext or provocation. And I pledge myself to do all I can to root out of my own heart and out of the hearts of others all those evil passions that lead to war – national pride and jealousy and false patriotism. And I most solemnly declare that if war comes again in my time I will have neither part nor lot in it. I will denounce it and oppose it until my mouth is stopped, so help me God!
And if there are any of you who feel that what I have said tonight is in the main true, and can echo in your hearts the pledge that I have publicly made, will you have the courage to indicate it now by rising in your seats?
“The response was instantaneous. With one or two exceptions the assembled hundreds rose in their places.” – Sussex Express
From the book "The Christian Pacifist" by David Ramanauskas
Prose by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Conscientious Objector
I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me shall you be overcome.
