I have had some interesting discussions lately pertaining to the topic of Christian pacifism. By this, I mean the view that Jesus requires that all Christians forsake all violence in all (or nearly all) circumstances. This can include self-defense, defending others, participating in the coercive power of government, and military service.

Now, depending on your predispositions, this may sound either obvious, absurd, or simply curious. My intention in this post is to explain why I, however, utterly reject it as incompatible with Scripture and reason. To do this, I will begin by summarizing the chief lines of argument used to support it.

The Rationale for Christian Pacifism

Even if you think Christian pacifism is absurd, it is not hard to see where people begin to get the idea. Perhaps the chief evidence marshalled by proponents of pacifism is the Sermon on the Mount, specifically parts like Matthew 5:9, 38-39, 43, and 7:12. I’ll quote them here:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.

So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Taking these verses by themselves, one might reasonably conclude that Jesus taught complete non-violence without exception.

Pacifists will also point to some other lines of evidence. The example of Jesus’s life seem to follow these teachings. Jesus never went to battle, He pardoned the woman who had earned the death penalty, He never tried to fight off His Jewish or Roman opponents, and ultimately He submitted to death on a cross rather than harm anyone. Indeed, the cross should be the final word. If Jesus Christ suffered violence rather than doing it, there we see God’s heart. The same thing was later true of the Apostles, from when Jesus forbade Peter to draw his sword to protect Jesus from arrest to the martyrdom of almost all of them.

Finally, pacifists turn to the rest of the apostolic and early church. They argue that Paul taught non-violence like Jesus (e.g. Rom. 12:14-21), for example. And, they explain, almost all of the Christians after the New Testament were pacifists up until Constantine converted to Christianity. Then the Church tasted the forbidden fruit of political power, which led Her into a catastrophic fall from Jesus’ original teachings.

39 Problems, 2 Options

To some of you, many problems with these arguments may already be apparent, but the most important problem is the Old Testament. It is obvious that the Old Testament is not pacifistic in the slightest. It teaches clearly and consistently that violence is sometimes justified, even commanded by God. This isn’t just part of the Torah, which does not govern in the New Covenant, but came long before the Torah (Gen. 9). God sent the Flood in response to runaway human violence, and what did He do next? He instituted the death penalty to cut the cycle short with the justified violence of government.

I trust I needn’t provide more examples of God approving and commanding violence to combat human wickedness in the Old Testament. Anyone who has even skimmed it knows what I mean. So if the Old Testament is decidedly anti-pacifist, but Jesus taught pacifism, there are two options:

Jesus corrected the teaching of the Old Testament, which was already wrong, or Jesus suspended the Old Testament teaching to institute a new policy for God’s people.

The first option is the way of people like Peter Enns or Greg Boyd. I, for one, am disinclined to say that large swathes of Scripture consistently teach moral error. For those who believe that the whole Bible is authoritative and infallible revelation, it’s not an option.

The second possibility seems more plausible, and many Christian pacifists use some version of it. Many use divorce as an analogy. Just as God permitted divorce in the Torah but declared it firmly against His will when Jesus came, so also with punitive or defensive violence. They may invoke the concept of progressive revelation. God slowly revealed His way of mercy and peace over and against stone age barbarism.

So is this a good answer? I think not. To address this brings me to perhaps the most important point of the whole debate. Just what was Jesus up to?

Jesus and Torah

The pacifist argument about Jesus’ relationship to the Old Testament has some serious problems. To start with, Jesus’ opening clarifications in the Sermon on the Mount should give us pause:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

Matthew 5:17-18

These words have always raised questions about how much of the Torah binds or doesn’t bind New Covenant believers. But one thing should be clear: Jesus did not come to radically change the moral teachings of the Old Testament. The basic relationship between Jesus and what God spoke before Him is continuity.

This should be even more clear from what Jesus goes on to say. When He uses the format, “It was said x, but I tell you y,” He never modifies the law but explains its heart and meaning. It is not, for example, the case that in the Old Testament, lust was okay, but in the New Testament it became a species of adultery. Clearly, lust was adulterous the whole time, and Jesus clarified this to hard-hearted people who didn’t get the law.

This is where the difference between divorce and the forms of violence condoned in the Old Testament will become clear. The Torah legally permitted divorce, but it never commanded it or even strictly approved it. It only regulated it. And other Old Testament texts were clear that divorce is contrary to God’s general will for marriage. Never did any part of the Old Testament teach that divorce is generally acceptable or good. Jesus simply unpacked the logic of all the Old Testament teachings on divorce. (And contrary to some claims, Jesus doesn’t here overturn the permission on divorce, but simply qualifies it.)

The contrast with justified violence could hardly be greater. Unlike divorce, God repeatedly commanded that violence be employed to deal with human lawlessness. God specified the death penalty many times in the Torah, after authorizing it ages earlier. He sent Israel to war of His own accord and punished those who refused to kill everyone He required (that’s how Saul lost the kingdom, after all).

Given this background, we shouldn’t expect that Jesus would change the Old Testament duties regarding violence. It wouldn’t match the way He usually approached the older moral teachings of Scripture. So, if He really did change the rule to pacifism, we would need very clear and explicit teaching to overturn the Old Testament expectation. Some proponents of pacifism would say that this is just what we have, but I will now explain why I don’t think this is true.

Jesus the Prophet

Jesus said to love our enemies, turn the other cheek, and not resist an evil person. Doesn’t this add up to a pretty explicit statement of pacifism? Maybe Jesus really was giving a new teaching for a new era of redemptive-history. But I think that taking Jesus’ words in the proper narrative context shows that they do not prove what pacifists would like.

A number of arguments could be advanced to show that none of these teachings of Jesus should be taken as meaning an absolute rule against violence, but my focus will here is limited. What was Jesus up to in His teachings, and how does that help us understand them? To understand this, we must understand Jesus’ role as prophet. Jesus’ teachings were part of a prophetic ministry much like the ministries of Old Testament prophets. The narrative role of the prophet had a fairly consistent form. Israel had gone off-track, God was preparing to judge her, but He sent a prophet to warn her to repent so that those with ears to hear could make it through.

Within this context, the prophets often gave instructions specifically relevant to the impending judgment. Jeremiah, for example, warned Israel to be submissive and build a good life in Babylonian exile. This was not a timeless lesson that everyone ought to submit to oppressors and wait around for God to act. In the past, God had called up leaders to do quite the opposite for His people. But different circumstances and different judgments lead to different ways for God’s people to live, all within the general bounds of God’s law. The prophets would apply both the letter and the Spirit of the law, along with simple reason, to show Israel what she had done wrong and needed to do next.

Jesus came as the last and greatest in this line of prophets. The impending judgment of which He warned was the destruction of the Temple and much more of Israel. This was fulfilled in AD 70, and those who believed His prophetic message found new life on the other side. But what did Israel do to earn this judgment, and what did Jesus teach about repenting from this?

While the case would be too much to make here, the great sin was Israel’s refusal to offer up to God a harvest from among the Gentiles. The purpose of Israel’s election was the blessing of all nations. God placed Israel at the crossroads of three continents. He gave her a place in one of the largest and most stable empires in history, with unprecedented opportunities for travel and dialogue. By the Exile and other means, He spread cells of believing Jews around the Roman world. And how did Israel use these blessings? Did she lead the nations to worship Yahweh and submit to Him? Did she provide a fine example of humanity as God intended, so that the Gentiles would see and give glory to Him?

Of course, Israel did not do these things. Instead, she battened down the hatches, turning her covenant with God instead a status symbol. She failed to be exemplary humanity, so that the name of God was blasphemed among the Gentiles because of her. And, as for the most relevant part, she was so self-enclosed that she saw Roman rule as a threat to her mission rather than a blessing enabling it.

This last issue is the key to understanding the teachings of Jesus in question. Israel wanted to rebel against Rome. Instead of taking advantage of the pax Romana to be the light of the world and a city on a hill, she sought to overthrow the Roman Empire. The Jews largely expected the Messiah to come and cut down the pagan powers. And in the meantime, they were happy to prepare the way by provoking conflict. Israel’s sin was seeking violent revolution when it was not justified by the circumstances. They ought to have made use of the Roman world order to glorify God, but instead they kicked against the goads.

Eschatology and Laying Down the Sword

This is where Jesus’ message came in. A great deal of Jesus’ message was targeted to this sin for this purpose. Israel needed to abandon her revolutionary ambitions against Rome. She needed to repent from this self-destructive goal and believe in Him. And this called for a partial, temporary “pacifism.” This was not a pacifism expressing universal moral principles or a new law, but a strategy for faithfulness in Israel’s circumstances at the time.

Israel saw Rome as the enemy, but Jesus told them to show love to the enemy. They needed to pray for those who persecuted them just as Jeremiah told their ancestors to pray for the peace of Babylon. Israel blessed anyone who might overthrow their pagan overlords, but Jesus blessed peacemakers. Sometimes Roman citizens or soldiers might insult and abuse them, but they should respond with kindness to these foreigners in their land.

This is the historical and biblical narrative background to Jesus’ teachings. He did not intend to condemn the kinds of violence which the Old Testament had approved. He meant to turn Israel from the way of Barrabus, which would ultimately lead to many Israelites being crucified while the Temple was torn down and Jerusalem burned, to the ways that make for peace. This was, again, not because of principled pacifism but rather where Israel was in history and God’s plan. The pagan empire would fall to the kingdom of God, but not by a military revolution. It would fall from within, as Christ captured souls from their pagan allegiances to faith in Him.

This is a context-specific strategy, not true pacifism. Jesus intended none of it to overthrow old and consistent teachings about just violence. Rather, the sword of government was simply out of the picture. Israel did not legally hold that power; the Romans did. Christians had the least civil power, being neither limited authorities in Israel nor higher Roman authorities. A Christian governor would not be practically possible for some time. This also meant that just war would not be a question one way or the other.

The way that Jesus and the Apostles lay down the sword, then, was not a new and superior law for the New Covenant. It was a way of doing what God’s plan for His people needed as they waited for the kingdom of God to overcome the pagan world. This, in fact, happened in history. After a couple hundred years, the Roman Empire formally recognized Jesus as Lord and renounced paganism. So it was precisely as this point, when the purpose behind “pacifism as a strategy” was concluded, that the Church began looking (rightfully) back to the Old Testament for wisdom regarding lawful violence.

Conclusion

There remains, of course, much more one might say. In particular, as I mentioned above, there are many more arguments available explaining why Jesus’ teachings about love, turning the other cheek, etc. don’t teach pacifism. The subject of Jesus’ relationship to the Torah deserves (and has received elsewhere by others) more extended treatment. There are pacifist arguments I haven’t addressed. But I think that what I have written here should suffice to take the teeth out of the most common cases for pacifism. In summary, then:

Pacifism is incompatible with the Old Testament. So the old teaching must be either wrong or changed by Jesus. The Old Testament teaching is not wrong, so the only real option is that it was changed by Jesus. We have little historical reason to think that Jesus intended to change the Old Testament teaching on just violence by His teachings. We have much biblical and historical reason to think that what Jesus taught has a specific, contextual purpose that does not revoke, modify, or conflict with the Old Testament teaching. Therefore, lacking other strong evidence, we should understand Jesus as not having taught pacifism.

I also would like to provide some further reading on the topic. The Calvinist International has a great series, “Was Jesus a Pacifist?”, which starts here. Christopher Jones has an excellent takedown of the whole “the early church was unanimously pacifist until Constantine corrupted it” narrative, a topic for which I ran out of space, here. A post elsewhere agreeing with my view of Jesus’ “pacifist” teachings is available here. I have written in the past on just war theory here. And finally, read N. T. Wright’s Christian Origins series for evidence supporting a lot of what I’ve said about Jesus.

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