When Christians Disagree on War

Today's Scripture

Matthew 5:43-44 — "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

Romans 13:4 — "For he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer."

Isaiah 2:4 — "He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."

The Big Idea

The same Bible that commands "love your enemies" also says the government "does not bear the sword in vain." For two thousand years, Christians who love Jesus and take Scripture seriously have read those two sentences together and reached opposite conclusions about war. Today is not about winning that argument. It is about understanding why the argument exists — and learning to listen before we pick a side.

Reflection

Two verses that refuse to blink

Your phone buzzes. Another war. The headline names a city you could not have found on a map a year ago. And before dinner is over, two people you love will be arguing about it — one certain that somebody has to stop the aggressor, the other certain that followers of Jesus have no business blessing missiles.

Here is the uncomfortable part: both of them can quote Scripture.

The first one can open to Romans 13:1 — "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." Paul goes further. The ruler "does not bear the sword in vain," he writes. The state is "an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer" (Romans 13:4). And Paul was not naive about governments. He wrote those words about Rome — the same empire that would later cut off his head.

The second one can open to the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:38-39 — "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." Then Jesus raises the bar higher than any teacher in the ancient world had dared. Love your enemies. Pray for the people trying to destroy you.

The first Christians took him at his word. For roughly three hundred years, the loudest voices in the church said that a disciple of Jesus does not kill — not in the arena, not in the army, not anywhere. Justin Martyr, writing around AD 160, described what happened when violent people met Christ:

"We who were filled with war, and mutual slaughter, and every wickedness, have each through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons — our swords into ploughshares, and our spears into implements of tillage." — Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho

He was echoing Isaiah on purpose. And a few years later the Roman state executed him — while he was still refusing to fight it. That is why we call him Justin Martyr; a martyr is someone killed for refusing to give up the faith.

So there it is. One Bible. Two verses. Neither one blinks.

Buy a sword — then put it away

If you want to feel how strange the Bible's texture really is, follow the sword through a single night of the Gospels.

At the Last Supper, hours before his arrest, Jesus tells his disciples something startling: "let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one" (Luke 22:36). The disciples produce two swords. "It is enough," he says (Luke 22:38). Christians have argued about that scene for centuries. Was he speaking literally? Was he being ironic? Was he fulfilling the prophecy that he would be "numbered with the transgressors"? No one has ever closed the case.

Because a few hours later, when Peter actually swings one of those swords, Jesus stops him cold. Matthew 26:52 — "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword." Buy a sword; put away the sword. Same Lord, same night.

Add one more thread. Jesus once said, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). In context he is talking about families divided over following him, not about armies. But he chose the metaphor, and it should stop us from flattening him into a greeting card.

And over the whole Bible arcs the promise of Isaiah 2:4: swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, nations that "shall not learn war anymore." Whatever else is true, the story God is telling does not end in war. It ends in disarmament. Every Christian position on war has to reckon with that ending.

Augustine, the North African bishop who thought harder about war than almost any Christian in history, noticed something painfully honest about human beings:

"For every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace." — Augustine, City of God, Book XIX

Everyone says they want peace — even the invader. Every army in history has claimed it was fighting so the fighting could stop. That is exactly why slogans cannot settle this question. A thousand years later, the scholar Erasmus watched the wars of his own day and revived an ancient proverb that still stings:

"War is sweet to those who have never experienced it." — Erasmus of Rotterdam, Adages

The people most eager for war are usually the ones farthest from it. Both warnings cut in every direction. They warn the hawk who has never seen a battlefield. They also warn the rest of us that "peace" is the easiest word in the world to say and the hardest thing in the world to make.

Four rooms in one church

So what did the church do with this tension? Over twenty centuries, it built several rooms in the same house.

In one room is the just-war tradition. Just war is the old name for the view that war is always terrible but sometimes permitted — under strict conditions — to protect the innocent. Augustine laid its foundations; Thomas Aquinas organized them; most Catholics and Protestants have lived in this room since. We will walk through it carefully on Day 4.

In another room are the pacifists. Pacifism is the conviction that followers of Jesus may never kill, period. This room is older than it looks: the early church largely lived here, and for five hundred years the Anabaptists — Mennonites, Amish, Brethren — have stayed in it at the cost of their own blood, never anyone else's. Day 5 belongs to them.

C.S. Lewis stood in the just-war room during the darkest year of World War II, with German bombs falling on London, and he still refused to sneer at the other room:

"War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Notice both halves of that sentence. Respect, and disagreement. Lewis held them together. Most of us manage only one at a time.

And then there is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young German pastor who loved the Sermon on the Mount, watched his government begin to destroy its Jewish neighbors, and concluded that the church could not stand on the sidewalk wringing its hands:

"We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 'The Church and the Jewish Question'

He wrote that in 1933, before the war began. By 1945 the Nazis had hanged him. His story — the pacifist who joined a plot against Hitler — waits for us on Day 6, and it refuses to fit neatly into anyone's room.

Each room quotes Scripture. Each room has martyrs. That should slow us down. Proverbs 18:17 — "The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Most of us did not reason our way into our view of war. We inherited it — from a flag, a family, a news feed. The first voice we ever heard on this subject stated its case, and it seemed right, and we never let the other side come and examine it.

Tim Keller's counsel about doubt applies directly here:

"A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it." — Tim Keller, The Reason for God

Letting your inherited position be questioned is not disloyalty. It is health. James 1:19 says, "let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger" — a verse written for church arguments exactly like this one. And Thomas à Kempis, the medieval monk whose little book on following Christ has been read for six hundred years, diagnosed why the arguing is easier than the peacemaking:

"All men desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Wanting peace is cheap. Wanting the things that make for peace — patience, honesty, listening to the room you were raised to dismiss — costs something.

The Lord both rooms kneel to

Here is where today has to land. The argument about war is real, and this plan will not pretend otherwise. But before we enter it, look at the one thing every room in the house shares: a crucified Lord.

Jesus did not end his life leading an army. He ended it under one. He was arrested at night by armed men, tried by an occupying empire, and executed by professional soldiers who gambled for his clothes while he died. The most important event in history — the event Christians stake everything on — happened at the sharp end of state violence. And what did Jesus do with it? He did not call the legions of angels he said were available. He absorbed it. He prayed for the men with the hammers. He turned the empire's instrument of terror into the means of the world's rescue.

That is why his command in Matthew 5:44-45 is not just an ethic; it is a family resemblance: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good." God's love is sunrise love — it falls on people who hate him. At the cross, God treated his enemies that way. Paul says that includes us: we were not neutral parties God rescued, but enemies he died for.

So whichever room you end up in nine days from now, the test will be the same. Does your position on war make you more like the Crucified One — more honest, more humble, more willing to bleed rather than make others bleed carelessly? Or does it just make you more certain of yourself? The gospel is not "hold the correct opinion harder." The gospel is that while we were God's enemies, Christ loved us to death and out the other side. Every faithful Christian position on war grows from that soil or it grows crooked.

Isaiah's promise still stands at the end of the road: a kingdom where no one learns war anymore (Isaiah 2:2-4) — secured not by our swords, but by his scars. Nine days remain. Let every room make its case.

Going Deeper

Read Matthew 5:38-48 and Romans 13:1-7 back-to-back, slowly, twice. After the second reading, write down one sentence stating what each passage seems to ask of you when you let it speak in its own voice. Then sit with the gap between your two sentences. That gap is where Christians have wrestled for two thousand years. Today's job is not to close the gap. It is to feel it — and to ask God to keep you teachable while it is open.