What homeland do they defend?
First, I'll make the best case for Christian pacifism that I can conjure. Then I'll attempt to refute it. Then, well, we'll see.
Part 1 - The case for Christian Pacifism
The objections to Christian pacifism typically take these forms:
"God kills people, so it must be acceptable [good?] for us to kill people sometimes, too."
"Pacifism would be terribly impractical and difficult in dangerous circumstances."
"God made governments [what kind? Rotary club? The CCP?] for these tasks."
"God didn't explicitly tell soldiers in the New Testament not to continue soldiering."
Or simply, "You first."
I'll be brief. The first argument is a non sequitur, which makes for bad philosophy; the second argument is consequentialism, which is an atheistic ethical framework in bad philosophy. The third argument is actually somewhat interesting because it can be argued directly from Scripture (readers of this blog post will want to shout "Romans 13! Romans 13!" until they're blue in the face*****). But alas number 3 fails because it cannot be universalized without reducing the assertion that all governments have the power of the sword to an absurdity when we give Pol Pot the same authority as King David. In other words, it's bad philosophy. The fourth argument is an argument from silence (and yes, you guessed it, that's bad philosophy). I kind of like the fifth point because it's at least clever.
[* "*Rom. 13:1-7 says to submit to the government, which does not bear the sword in vain. *This is probably the most widely used text to argue that God wants Christians to participate in justly authorized governmental killing. Paul says God has established government, Christians should be subject to it, and rulers are God's agents to punish wrongdoers. But just a few verses earlier, in words that seem to echo Jesus, Paul says Christians "do not repay anyone evil for evil; . . . do not take revenge . . . but leave room for God's wrath" (12:17-19). Many Christians argue that the two sets of statements, taken together, mean that in their personal lives Christians should never use lethal violence, but in their roles as public officials Christians rightly participate in government-authorized killing. How valid is this argument? Paul lists a number of things that being subject to government involves: not rebelling, paying taxes, offering respect. But nowhere does Paul say Christians have a duty to participate in the government's punishment of wrongdoers. A comparison of the Greek words in 12:19 and 13:4 demonstrates that the government does precisely the things that Paul has just commanded Christians never to do. In chapter 12, Paul says that seeking to live at peace with everyone means "do not take revenge [ekdikountes], . . . but leave room for God's wrath" (orgē). Then in 13:4, Paul employs exactly the same words — just used to describe what Christians should not do — to speak about what the state does. Rulers "are God's servants, agents of wrath [ekdikos eis orgēn] to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." Paul uses exactly the same words for vengeance and wrath in both places. Evangelical scholar F.F. Bruce is right: 'The state thus is charged with a function which has been explicitly forbidden to the Christian.'" Source]
If I'm honest, though, it's not the abstract philosophizing about what is consistent with, but not explicitly endorsed by, Scripture that troubles me about making the pro-violence-sometimes case; what bothers me are the real life instances where these cases apply. I'm actually deeply disturbed by people who, when you see them asked about the death penalty, you can literally see them physically straighten their backs, raise their chins, and regurgitate thoughtless one-liners about how glad they'll be to see sinners suffer for their sins. At least I hope they're thoughtless. Don't worry — I'll address this question of character much later.
Just War Theory is defended in the clean and sinless universal abstract, but wars are fought in the concrete particular by rotten sinners. In the abstract, the death penalty is defended as "justice"; in reality, it's sought as vengeance. In the abstract, war is justified as an act by competent authorities that were presumably [always?] established by God; in reality, the individual human beings that are sent to pull the trigger return fire on the enemy in order to save their own lives or others' lives—not to do some abstract duty (brief side comment: I'm thinking we'll probably return to more human methods of settling disputes after the next war; today's technological advances will seem like they were distractions from what matters. We recognize a winner by their excellence—not just by their mere survival—and what is excellent about drone-striking each other to oblivion from thousands of miles away? It's stupidity, and if the goal is to be powerful, then I don't see anything powerful about being that stupid.)
At any rate, yes, it's technically possible that capital punishment is a matter of meting-out God's justice. If that's good enough for a Just War Theory or a bolstered defense of putting people to death, then so be it. There are many Thomists who argue as much and do so effectively—and that's fine as far as it goes (i.e., it's good philosophy), but God's justice clearly isn't why anyone wants his enemies to die. God's justice doesn't need our help, after all. It's also a bit strange to imagine that we know God's intent for this certain specific class of sinners deserving of the death penalty, when we consider the fact that God judges all of us to be sinners outside of Christ. Why would God have such a unique and singularly-mandated apparatus to execute people who, depending on the law of whatever country, "deserve" to die?
Let's consider a passage about Luther and the Anabaptists: "… In 1540 he is reported in his Table Talk to have returned to the position of Philip of Hesse that only seditious Anabaptists should be executed; the others should be merely banished. But Luther passed by many an opportunity to speak a word for those who with joy gave themselves as sheep for the slaughter. … For the understanding of Luther's position one must bear in mind that Anabaptism was not in every instance socially innocuous. The year in which Luther signed the memorandum counseling death even for the peaceful Anabaptists was the year in which a group of them ceased to be peaceful … By forcible measures they took over the city of Munster in Westphalia … Yet when all these attenuating considerations are adduced, one cannot forget that Melanchthon's memorandum justified the eradication of the peaceful, not because they were incipient and clandestine revolutionaries, but on the ground that even a peaceful renunciation of the state itself constituted sedition (Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, New York: Mentor, 1950, 295-296)."
I'm really fascinated by the Anabaptists. Their theology is severely lacking in the way they don't understand justification, especially (but also with regard to vocations). But this is the first group of Christians that has piqued my interest for non-intellectual reasons.
There have been three Christian communities that stand out to me as essentially different than the world in the way they live uncompromisingly peaceful lives of expectation for eternal life beyond the grave: (1) the first Christian martyrs went to their deaths like lambs and didn't only theorize about joy in suffering but actually sang joyfully as they suffered; the Copts whom I've seen martyred in my lifetime forgave their children's killers on television and pleaded for the salvation of the souls of their killers instead of demanding revenge or the sword (this isn't all Copts of course, but I am picking out those for whom it is true); and finally, I've read about the Anabaptists who suffered persecution by all churches, including by the reformers whose principles resulted in the reformation of the Church and yet who only had those principles as theories until they answered pragmatic demands for life in a fallen world by making endless sophistical distinctions between meeting the needs of the heavenly realm and those of the earthly realm—the latter requiring some practical compromises lest things fall apart (after all, who would save us if we just let everyone walk all over us?)
The way I see it, these three groups are Christians of distinction in their certainty that God is in control and that we don't need to find ways to both love a man as we kill him while appealing to practical reasons like his danger to society, and so on.
But the answer to Christian violence apologists cannot be to say that we should separate entirely from sinners. We are sinners, and our vocation is work given to sinners despite their sin.
Still, I can't help but be a little disturbed by the fact that a necessary conclusion to draw from the rationale Lutherans, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics have all given against such extremist separatism is the following: if loving our enemy permits us to even torture, behead, or burn our enemies alive, then we have to be willing to torture, behead, or burn alive our own family members whom we shouldn't love any more or less than our enemies.
Yes, this does follow—and it is prima facie, well, disturbing (of course, when I say "we" have to be willing to kill etc., I mean those who are in a governmental role that is given this power; I don't have to assume that there are Christians, of course, who have these roles in government because I used to be one as an Army Officer. Curiously, I never thought, "I'm trained to be a mere killer for the government, which is part and parcel of being a Christian." Also, when I say we have to be "willing" to kill etc., I obviously mean that we have to be willing to do the duty God assigns to such sword-wielding positions—regardless of who the enemy is).
In "Can Soldiers, Too, Be Saved?" Luther writes this: "God calls the sword his own ordinance…It is not man but God who beheads, slays, tortures…" Luther is saying here, if you didn't catch it, that torture and beheading are not only acceptable, or evils God uses to his own infinitely good ends, but that they are instruments of God's justice when done by "civil authorities". Are these civil authorities comprised of any Christians? If so, then those Christians would be doing God's will and carrying out his assigned means to justice on earth by torturing and beheading people. That is the plain reality of what actually happened in Luther's time.
It's good to pursue practical questions in theology. Many of our churches speak to a so-called 'just war theory' and to capital punishment with derivations from vacuous hypothetical principles rather than remaining grounded in Scripture and in the reality we face in our fallen world. Yes, it is true that in the Old Testament especially we see God commanding just holy wars. He is not arbitrary, so this must necessarily mean there exists such a thing as a just war. But that isn't how just war theory has been dreamt up; instead, philosophers have drawn not from the Bible but from feeble attempts at reasoning about natural law. In their imaginings, it dawns on them that if we really followed Jesus' non-violence to the letter, we would be defenseless (God forbid!) and so they despair the outcome of non-resistance. To them, it's simply impractical on its face because bad things would inevitably happen to innocent people.
In other words, in principle, such a thing called a 'just war' exists and we can prove that from the Bible; but in practice, all wars ever since the Old Testament have been justified ad hoc by principles not deriving from the Bible at all (there's even a short list of all that's required for a just war—none of it even citing a solitary verse of Scripture). What soldier can consult that list and know whether or not to return fire? It's absurd. How is this a practical exercise in theology?
I recently watched a debate between the famous Roman Catholic apologist Dr. Kreeft and some non-resistance Anabaptists and I have to say it really bugs me to see how incoherent and chaotic all ways other than radical Christian discipleship are; Kreeft's strongest point seemed to be that such a radical change in the way we live—like sheep to slaughter—would be entirely impractical and would eschew the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita and of Socrates. Yes, you read that correctly. Know what Socrates was missing? The fall into sin. What sinners that make up our government would be trusted to make such decisions? Roman Catholics burned people alive so their souls might be saved by repentance given the pain that forces the "sorry" out of them, so, consulting their theologians won't be much help.
Now here's where I land on some of these ideas. The call to peace of heart and mind—which come through faith in Christ—is so primary and overwhelming that questions of when to draw our weapons and kill seem absurd on their face. But it isn't absurd to suggest that, since we've already conceded the principle of a possible just war, that we can therefore say the matter is settled. I can go my entire life without giving it another thought, right?
I suppose I could go on to forget this whole thing and decide—apparently along with millions of other Christians—that it's enough to find the principle of just war, just capital punishment, and so on, logically viable and leave it at that. But I know that I won't just bury this whole thing and wash my hands of it. When I read about these doctrines and find that others whom I deeply respected have come to stupidly-reasoned conclusions that violence is sometimes acceptable, it's painful to me. But why?
Given the nature and targets of my protests above, I find it possible that the source of my complaints is a gut reaction to the character of the people who espouse whatever apologies for violence. If they seemed to me to be wise and humble Christian people whose words and actions inspired faith in our God, then none of this would even come to mind. Why faith? Because these theories about justice imply that either God is absent from our world or that God settles with compromising his restorative way of peace in order to keep things relatively orderly in civil society. After all, the rationale is that things would fall to ruin if we had no justified interest in killing people from time to time, and this does not sound like the thinking of spiritually mature men or women of God. Governments don't kill people; people in governments kill people. So if He's involved, it's in telling individuals that off-duty they should be lambs, but when 8 AM rolls around the next day and they're on duty? Wolves.
In fact, it makes me feel isolated, alone—scorned, even—when I picture our theologians coming to these doctrines through the impoverished reasoning of amateur philosophers rather than in the spiritual maturity of confessing theologians. The concern is that I am not among my kind, and that these are not true Christians who would be peaceful or full of joy in every suffering, quick to forgive every enemy, never hatefully reaching for a weapon to harm.
The truth is that I want an excuse to live as nothing but peaceful. I thought Christians were born again to be peacemakers all of the time. We too easily grant that atheists around us are more or less equally moral actors; we think we're holding onto the essential thing by giving Christian culture credit as the source of their morality, making ridiculous claims like "American morals come from Christianity," and so forth. To correct this, I'd say that God—not a culture—makes us exceptionally good. By granting that morality is a product of culture, we prove the naturalist's point for him by giving morality a better explanation than God's mysteries will ever provide. Didn't those ideas about moral standards and all that come from the Bible, though? Sure. But it's not the secondary source of the idea or moral standard that matters most; more important is the primary source of our desiring to be good.
And is it really as complicated as all of this so-called just war theory makes it out to be? I'll say it again: Governments don't kill people; people in governments kill people. Consciously acting as a government enforcer at the same time that you love those whom you torture and kill 'for justice' seems like a lot to manage. Again, I can understand God, in his omniscience, being able to simultaneously judge and love mercifully; He establishes the principle that it is possible. But we are sinners!
In the Q & A section at the end of this video, the pastors in the room all agree that we are not to meddle in the affairs of other nations that are abusing their own people because that would be to meddle in God's punishment of the people who deserve their tyrant. What about when Hitler became the dictator in Poland? I was not aware that some midwestern Christian folks have this quirky view of history such that God works with "systems" rather than individual souls—that there are nation-states and other polities that God establishes, with all of their laws and governors, according to the desserts of the people of that nation. Do North Korean children born into that wasteland deserve it? Or does this only make sense when we refer to a "people" and not individuals? Once again, we have an abstract principle posing as practical theology!
That video of Lutheran experts in the field—folks who have presumably given this some thought—made me realize there's an essentially Lutheran understanding of God's unquestionable Providence at work in ordering what I thought was a fallen world. It's an attitude that sounds remarkably (perhaps suspiciously) 16th century European in its outlook. With that in mind, I sought out a good summary comparing and contrasting Anabaptist and Lutheran views of the use of violence to maintain such political order: (http://www.ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/MoelleringAttitudesTowardUseForceViolence.pdf).
Here are some main ideas, followed by my thoughts on them.
"According to Luther, there are lawless men who must be restrained by force 'like wild horses and dogs, and where this does not help they must be put to death by the worldly sword." Man is made in the image of God. We are not dogs!
"The commandment 'Thou shalt honor thy father and mother' by analogy can be extended to all authorities that God places over us, including ecclesiastical and secular powers." Is this on dogmatic and clear biblical grounds or is it because Luther was unable to extricate himself from his German feudalism according to which the rulers were fathers and mothers in all but biological relation?
[Luther believed that] "Even if the state cannot bring paradise on earth, it can prevent earth from becoming hell." But there's an internal contradiction here. The reason we cannot bring paradise is the same reason why we can't raise hell.
"Luther was conservative in his outlook on government because of his great appreciation for stability and good order. Almost any kind of oppression, it seemed to him, was preferable to outright anarchy and civil war. Nothing did he dread more than revolution and internal strife, which helps to explain why he was so alarmed by the peasant uprising. An imperfect state was always better than no state at all." Again I ask: On what biblical grounds? Never mind what a German dependent upon the order offered by princes "dreaded" would happen if he were to renounce his mixing-in with the political sphere to encourage its use of the sword!
"As an avid reader of Augustine, Luther was impressed by his elaboration of Ambrose's theory of a iustum bellum. Defense against barbarians and brigands sounded like a commendable Christian undertaking." I've read and understood this just war doctrine. It may be impressive as a work of philosophical abstraction about possible worlds in which we are not all sinners incapable of determining what wars are just or unjust (and therefore ahead of its time!), but it doesn't even pretend to draw from Scripture.
Update: All governments do have the power of the sword if they are organized groups of men and women who have the power to govern their people in matters that implicate life and death.
That means it isn’t necessarily absurd to attribute the power of the sword to every governing authority that qualifies according to that definition. In fact it’s perhaps tautological to say people and organizations that are tasked with, or capable of, some given powers are so endowed by the Creator.
BUT: The trouble I still have is in finding any occasion to justify actual warfare in history, or the death penalty, with the reasoning given by any parties that have historically had such powers or authority. I have never seen just war waged out of absolute necessity but only a people taking for themselves God’s name and endorsement ; likewise I’ve never seen capital punishment sought and executed as other than people taking for themselves the vengeance which belongs to the Lord. The rationalizations by which philosophers and ‘theologians’ qualify such acts are always abstract and hypothetical.
Finally, to say as a Lutheran might that it’s just a “vocation” to engage in these things is asinine and frankly heretical because by saying so, we’d be attributing every kind of violence to God as we claim that he’s acting through these agents.
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Part 2 - The case against Christian Pacifism
But maybe that was completely wrong. Who doesn't deserve death? What happens outside of God's Providence? The Anabaptist separatist intends to separate himself from sin—not just the world for some other unstated reason. But isn't this impossible? I guess I haven't reached the end of this search. I'll just have to keep digging.
Here's a good start:
The Social Doctrine of the Augsburg Confession and its Significance for the Present by Hermann Sasse: "...here is no Christian order for society, for that would be an attempt to make sin disappear from the world, that love would take the place of law, in other words, that the kingdom of God would have come in glory. But as the order of nature—one half of the created order—will cease to exist in God's new creation in the new heaven and the new earth ("there will be no more death" Rev. 21:4; "there will be no more night" 21:25,), so the secular order of law [Rechts]—the other half of the created order—will cease to exist at the last judgment, to which all legal order [Rechtsordnung] aims." ... "While the secular authority has been given the power of the sword, the spiritual authority has no other power than that of the Gospel. While the secular authority ensures justice and peace and so is concerned about temporal life and temporal goods; [the Augustana] says of the church: "The authority of the church or bishops gives eternal goods and is exercised alone through the preaching office" [AC XXVIII 10]. The preaching office here also includes the special preaching of the gospel in Absolution and the administration of the Sacraments, and by "eternal goods" is meant "the eternal righteousness of the heart," "the Holy Spirit" and "eternal life." The separation of the secular and the spiritual, of the state and the church, which is expressed here, serves "for the consolation of consciences" [AC XXVIII 4]. Christians can with good conscience "bear civil office, sit as judges, judge matters by the Imperial and other existing laws, award just punishments, engage in just wars, serve as soldiers, make legal contracts, hold property, make oaths when required by the magistrates, marry a wife" [AC XVI 2]. Condemned then are "the Anabaptists who forbid these civil offices (civilia officia) to Christians" and "those who do not place evangelical perfection in the fear of God and in faith, but in forsaking civil offices" [AC XVI 3-4]. They are condemned because they have a false understanding of the Gospel. For the Gospel "does not destroy the State or the family (politicam aut oeconomiam), but very much requires that they be preserved (conservare) as ordinances of God, and that charity be practiced in such ordinances." [AC XVI 4-5]. Christ's command to love remains in full effect. ... the secular and the spiritual are indeed to be dearly distinguished and must not be mixed one with the other, but as good gifts of God, as true orders given by God, they belong together, just as creation and redemption belong together as works of God. The orders of nature and law, through which God maintains his fallen world, are the presupposition for redemption and the order of redemption for the church and the kingdom of God." ... "The basic concept of the Lutheran social doctrine is the clear separation of the world and the kingdom of God in the sense of Christ's words: "My kingdom is not of this world" [John 18:36]. ... The divine order of the world, the natural order just as much as the legal order [Rechtsordnung] is the order which God gave to His fallen creation. Because of sin, law, state, government authority, and the sword are present. And only when sin is done away with, when [our] redemption has been completed in the new creation will the order of this world cease. Only when God has completed the last judgment will there be no more law [Recht]. The Christian, however, stands in this world bound to its orders as true orders of God, and yet in faith in Christ he is already a member of the kingdom of God. What to the modern man appears as a contradictory morality, as an unallowable compromise between official and private morality—when for instance the Christian in his vocation [Amt] must use the sword, yet must not do so as a private man—this is only an expression of the eschatological tension in which all Christian lives exist according to the New Testament. We are in the world and yet not of the world; sinners and at the same time righteous; we are redeemed, but "what we shall be has not yet been revealed" [1 John 3:2]. He who would resolve this tension—perhaps by the famous "either-or" of so-called "radical Christianity"—ought ask himself whether or not in his attempt is hidden a secret faith in man. And he ought know that he has put an end [auflöst] to the message of the New Testament, since he places a rational morality in the place of the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins." ... "The Augustana was the first Christian confession which gave a dogmatic definition of the church. But how the church of Christ, constituted by the pure preaching of the gospel and the pure sacramental presence of Christ, the church as the communion of saints, that is, [the communion] of justified sinners, who in this world live as sinful men and are subject to the created order of the fallen world and who as the justified are members simultaneously of the kingdom of God and stand under its orders, how this church as an empirical reality of this world should step forth as a visible reality [in Erscheinung], this question our confession does not answer."
Reinhold Niebuhr - Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist
"To look at human communities from the perspective of the Kingdom of God is to know that there is a sinful element in all the expedients which the political order uses to establish justice. That is why even the seemingly most stable justice degenerates periodically into either tyranny or anarchy. ... The ultimate principles of the Kingdom of God are never irrelevant to any problem of justice, and they hover over every social situation as an ideal possibility; but that does not mean that they can be made into simple alternatives for the present schemes of relative justice."
...
"A simple Christian moralism is senseless and confusing. ... It is senseless when it seeks to purge itself of this error by an uncritical refusal to make any distinctions between relative values in history. The fact is that we might as well dispense with the Christian faith entirely if it is our conviction that we can act in history only if we are guiltless. This means that we must either prove our guiltlessness in order to be able to act; or refuse to act because we cannot achieve guiltlessness. Self-righteousness or inaction are the alternatives of secular moralism. If they are also the only alternatives of Christian moralism, one rightly suspects that Christian faith has become diluted with secular perspectives. In its profoundest insights the Christian faith sees the whole of human history as involved in guilt, and finds no release from guilt except in the grace of God. The Christian is freed by that grace to act in history; to give his devotion to the highest values he knows; to defend those citadels of civilization of which necessity and historic destiny have made him the defender; and he is persuaded by that grace to remember the ambiguity of even his best actions. ... A truly Christian pacifism would set each heart under the judgment of God to such a degree that even the pacifist idealist would know that knowledge of the will of God is no guarantee of his ability or willingness to obey it. The idealist would recognize to what degree he is himself involved in rebellion against God, and would know that this rebellion is too serious to be overcome by just one more sermon on love, and one more challenge to man to obey the law of Christ."
But doesn't Niebuhr basically surrender to pessimism? And by doing so, isn't he admitting that it would be ideal to be as peaceful as Christ and therefore it's sinful to fall short of perfect imitation? If that's the case, then why would he defend all the ways in which we fall short (including our violence)? It's one thing, in other words, to admit that we are indeed too sinful to achieve pacifist ideals of walking equally perfectly as Jesus walked; it's something else entirely to then build up arguments and defenses for all of the ways in which we fail to be Christlike.
No, this isn't pessimism; it's realism. We know that we are sinners. We can't read Scripture then set it down and start constructing our beliefs about what we've just read—and that's what happens when we call the view in question "pessimism". We can't take this approach to reading Scripture because to do so is to set aside the authority of Scripture even now to tell us what is presently true about us. It is not just a record of others' thoughts on the matter. In other words, when the Bible says in Romans 3:23 that "all fall short," God is telling each of us, wherever and whenever we may be in history hearing those words, that we fall short of his glory. So never mind questions in the ether about moral perfectibility of man because they aren't relevant to our condition; those abstractions are like hypothesizing about how fast someone without use of his legs would run if he could run.
Our only option, then, given the uncertainty of a perfectly moral choice, would be total inaction—refusal to participate in the world, in history, in other peoples' lives. But we cannot escape history; inaction is a moral choice, too, after all. The good news is that Jesus Christ is the Lord of history. Amen.
Then there's something else about this that I haven't seen mentioned in the commentaries I've read so far. We talk easily about the Spirit leading us to repentance but then wonder why Jesus commands us to "strive" or to "agonize" to enter his kingdom. This is nothing less than God himself calling us to repentance. This Lutheran pastor does a good job answering the usual questions raised about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5FjqAJuuQY
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So where does that leave us?
My conclusion after doing the work I've shown above must be that (and this is a common theme for me) there are stupid and incoherent reasons for opposing Christian pacifism. Sadly, these reasons promote a spirit of hard-heartedness and lack of zeal or interest in Christians who decide the matter is settled with one lousy appeal to the impracticality of non-violence. A. J. Gordon : "If the doctrine of sinless perfection is heresy, the doctrine of contentment with sinful imperfection is a greater heresy. … It is not an edifying spectacle to see a Christian worldling throwing stones at a Christian perfectionist."
But there are also good and true reasons to reject not non-violence per se but Christian pacifism of the separatist variety. I'm confident I've made the case for a Lutheran understanding in the latter portion of this entry, with extensive quotes from both Sasse and Niebuhr.
How do I know that I've settled on the right answer though?
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Some pray for control when others pray for peace.
I believe there are actually many (millions?) of Christian pacifists who only give lip service to the legitimacy of violence because it's widely accepted and taught in our churches. The Holy Spirit still makes them peacemakers, regardless of what they may say.
It struck me today as I was putting my little girl to bed that I don't owe this world's violence any of my time or energy (or thoughts). Why contrive scenarios in abstraction where something so much outside of Christ would seize a Christian and force him to do its bidding? Have you seen Of Gods and Men? Know their story? Just watch that and imagine them to be fools.
The love and peace of Christ are coextensive and indwelling. These arguments that we should expel peace for a little while—to make room for practicality and for the legal orders supposedly established for us as new and constantly changing laws not written on our hearts, rather than as a quite limited protection to keep the chaos from the loveless world outside of Christ in check—are like the pinch of incense demanded of Polycarp. They are like the snake planting doubt as to whether God really did say not to take life and death into our own hands.
But does that mean we don't do what we must to prevent the suffering or deaths of our loved ones? No, just as we still need to train our own bodies through suffering losses in order to maintain physical fitness, we must also still use force in a world governed by it. Let's just never speak of it as though it were praiseworthy and not tragic.