Moving Toward Christian Pacifism

Syria's Ethnic/Religious Distribution

by Dave Mantel

A few weeks back, when the U.S. was on the cusp of violent intervention in the Syrian civil war, I was reading these studies about how firmly Americans are against entering into another war. In fact, it's the most anti-war we have ever been as a nation. A Pew Research poll has the statistics at 49%-29% against a war in Syria, which I found quite staggering. I know that our country is pretty tired of war, but to have such a high anti-war percentage in the average population is still pretty shocking to me.
 
I've been a pretty staunch pacifist for a number of years, now. Growing up in a conservative Republican-Christian home, I was inundated with the Just War Theory for most of my adolescence, and so when the war in Iraq started, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, I believed that it was God's will—that the only way for justice to be brought about was by militaristic methods. Then, in the summer of 2008, I went overseas for two months to Malawi, Africa, on a missions team.

Me, left with guitar, in Malawi

While I was on that trip I did a lot of reading, and a particular verse of scripture I read at the beginning of the summer kind of shaped my whole summer's reading agenda. It came from Isaiah: “He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”

When I read that verse, it began my journey down a road of questions. Important questions. Did war have a place in the Kingdom of God, or was there some greater, more perfect plan that God had in place for his people on “that day?” How do I reconcile a Kingdom in which God seems to desire to end war and a western Church that seems to perpetuate the idea that American military intervention is ordained by that same God? How much of my worldview was shaped by the culture I had been raised in, and was the shaping that had taken place bring me closer to or further from the truth of scripture?

I'll start with the presupposition that when Jesus came, he was the one to give us a clear, unfiltered vision of the Father, and what the will of the Father is for us going forward. Jesus gave us, humanity, interaction with the Father that we had never had before (“If you know me, you know the Father” (John 14:7), “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), etc). If we are to take Jesus' teaching at face value, we find things like “love your neighbor as yourself,” “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “those who live by the sword die by the sword,” “turn the other cheek,” “love your enemies,” and “blessed are the peacemakers.”

Roman gladius, a sword from Jesus' time

Much of the larger ideas of Jesus' teaching are based in these values—that others are more important ourselves, and that we should seek to reconcile all things, just like Jesus will do in The End (Colossians 1:20). The most common New Testament rebuttals to this kind of peace-oriented Jesus come from two isolated verses: Luke 22:36, when Jesus tells his disciples to go and sell their cloaks and buy swords before they enter Jerusalem, and Matthew 10:34, where Jesus says that he hasn't come to bring peace, but a sword. Contextually, the Matthew verse can be dismissed immediately, since it is very clear that Jesus is speaking not of a physical sword, but speaking metaphorically, the sword being a metaphor for spiritual and moral division. The Luke passage, however, presents a little more trouble, because it is not as clear what is actually on Jesus' mind when he tells his disciples to procure these swords. Here is the section in context:

Then Jesus asked them, "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)

This passage takes place right before Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem for the passover, right before the Last Supper, and right before he is arrested to be crucified. He quotes a passage that he is about to fulfill from Isaiah about being “numbered with the transgressors,” and then his disciples bring him two swords, to which Jesus replies that those are “enough.” We, the readers, should then be asking, “Enough for what?” Certainly not enough to overthrow the Roman empire like the Zealots were still hoping. Not enough to defend even against the high priest's guards, as we see in the garden of Gethsemane later on. It is also clear that Jesus did not mean for the swords to be physically used, because when Peter does use one (whose idea was it to give Peter one of the two swords, anyway?) to cut off the ear of the High Priest's servant in the garden, Jesus immediately rebukes Peter and undoes the violence done by Peter by healing the servant's ear.

Capture of Christ with the Malchus Episode, Dirk Van Baburen

It is likely that Jesus had his disciples carrying these two swords to help fulfill Isaiah's prophecy about being “numbered with the transgressors.” We know that Jesus was later crucified between two thieves (also read "insurrectionists"), and that political and religious insurrection was what the Pharisees feared the most from Jesus, and why they ultimately arrested and killed him. The fact that Jesus had two of his followers carrying weapons into Jerusalem no doubt expedited the process of the Pharisees in arresting Jesus, fulfilling Isaiah prophecy.

So, when viewed in context, the two biggest New Testament arguments against pacifism fall flat. Jesus' teaching, when taken as a whole, seems to overwhelmingly promote nonviolence, love, and peace over violence and war. For me, the simplest reason for becoming a pacifist was that when I read about and picture the Kingdom of God—the one in the future, after this world has passed away and we are living with a new Heaven and a new Earth—war does not exist there. Violence does not exist there. There is only peace and love toward one another. And not just putting up with one another, either. It's a true peace. That was enough for me.

P.S. The discussion of reconciling the many violent, war-filled Old Testament passages with the nonviolence of Jesus' teaching in the New Testament is a more difficult and much longer conversation than this one, but one worth having. I hope to cover that sometime in the near future as well.

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Photo sources: 
1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Syria_Ethnoreligious_Map.png 
2. Dave Mantel
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncrossed_gladius.jpg
4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dirck_van_Baburen_-_The_Capture_of_Christ_with_the_Malchus_Episode_-_WGA01089.jpg