When Christians Disagree on War

Today's Reading

Read Matthew 5:38-48, the heart of the Sermon on the Mount: "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 neighbor 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."

Then read Romans 13:1-7: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God... [the ruler] 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."

Read Isaiah 2:2-4 — the prophetic vision of nations beating swords into plowshares — and Luke 22:35-38, where Jesus, on the night of his arrest, tells his disciples that the one who has no sword should sell his cloak and buy one. Two swords are produced. Jesus says, "It is enough."

Reflection

Begin by noticing that the New Testament does not make this easy.

In Matthew 5, Jesus appears to forbid violent resistance with a finality no other ethical teacher in the ancient world had matched: not just an eye for an eye, not just love your friends, but love your enemies, turn the other cheek, pray for those who persecute you. For the first three centuries of the church, the dominant Christian reading of those words was that a follower of Jesus could not be a soldier. Origen, Tertullian, and others said so plainly. The early martyrs went to their deaths refusing to swear loyalty oaths to the empire and refusing to fight in its wars. This was not a fringe position. It was, more or less, the default.

In Romans 13, the same New Testament — written by the same apostle who repeatedly quotes Jesus — affirms that the governing authorities "bear the sword" by God's appointment as servants of his justice. Calvin, reading both passages together, concluded that what was forbidden to the private Christian out of personal vengeance was permitted, and sometimes required, of the magistrate acting under God's authority on behalf of the innocent.

In Luke 22, on the night before his death, Jesus tells his disciples to buy a sword. Christians have argued for centuries about what that scene means. It cannot be a permission for unlimited violence; a few hours later when Peter actually swings the sword, Jesus rebukes him and heals the wound. It is one of the strangest scenes in the Gospels, and it has resisted every confident interpretation.

This is the texture of the question. The same Bible that gives us "blessed are the peacemakers" gives us a warrior God who tells Israel to take Canaan, a Messiah who calls himself "no peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34), an apostle who calls civil authority God's servant of judgment, and a final book whose climactic image is Christ riding out at the head of an army to make war. Faithful Christians reading these texts together have reached different conclusions — not because some of them love Jesus less, but because the texts themselves require us to weigh, prioritize, and synthesize. There is no shortcut.

Augustine, writing in the fifth century to a Christian general named Boniface, gave the church its most influential framework: war is sometimes a tragic necessity, but its only legitimate purpose is peace; it must be waged with mercy, never with hatred; the soldier may carry the sword, but the desire of his heart must be for the cessation of war, not the prolongation of it. "Peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as a necessity..." Out of those instincts grew the just-war tradition: war must have a just cause, be declared by legitimate authority, be waged with right intention, be a last resort, have a reasonable chance of success, distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and use proportionate force. It is not a permission slip for any war the state declares. It is a series of constraints intended to make most wars impossible.

C.S. Lewis, writing in the dark days of 1940, took up the question with the bluntness the moment demanded. He could not, he said, square pacifism with the Bible's full witness, with reason, or with the practical reality that some forms of evil — the Nazi regime then bombing London — could not be stopped by good intentions alone. "I think the pacifist is wrong," he wrote, while granting that the pacifist's conscience was sincere. His essay "Why I Am Not a Pacifist" is still one of the most careful pieces ever written by a Christian on the subject.

And then there is Bonhoeffer — perhaps the most striking case in modern Christian history. A young pastor, deeply formed by the Sermon on the Mount, who wrote The Cost of Discipleship with its uncompromising call to follow Jesus's nonviolent way. The same Bonhoeffer eventually concluded that the only faithful response to the regime murdering Jews by the millions was to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He did not change his mind about the Sermon on the Mount. He held that he was committing sin, that he could not justify it on principle, and that he had to do it anyway and trust himself to grace. "When a madman is driving a car into a crowd of people," he is reported to have said, "I as a pastor cannot only comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must, if I am at the steering wheel, jam on the brakes."

That is not an argument the Anabaptist tradition will accept, and it was not meant to be. Five hundred years of Mennonite, Amish, and Brethren Christians have held — at the cost of persecution and death — that the way of Jesus is not the way of the sword, ever. They have read the same Sermon on the Mount and concluded that the cross is the alternative to violence, not its complement. Their witness is not a fringe view to be dismissed. It is part of how the body of Christ remembers what most Christians, after Constantine, were tempted to forget.

Today's reading does not resolve the question. It opens it. Over the next nine days we will work through the texts and the traditions in detail, and you will come to your own conclusions. But this is the first conclusion to come to: faithful Christians have disagreed about this for two thousand years. To take the question seriously is the price of admission to the conversation.

Going Deeper

Read Matthew 5:38-48 and Romans 13:1-7 back-to-back, slowly, three times. After the third reading, write down one sentence of what each passage seems to ask of you when you let it speak in its own voice. Then sit with the gap between the two sentences. That gap is where Christians have been wrestling for two thousand years. Today's job is not to close the gap. It is to feel it.