Wheaton Scholar Argues the Early Church Was Pacifist
The Institute on Religion and Democracy published a piece by me yesterday on a lecture given by George Kalantzis at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. Kalantzis’s lecture, which previews arguments from a forthcoming book, was entitled “There Will (Not) Be Blood! Early Christian Attitudes Toward War and Military Service.” For those interested in the matter, Kalantzis framed his arguments as a direct challenge to some of the conclusions of Peter Leithart in his Defending Constantine (a book that was itself aimed at refuting some of the Anabaptist historiography of the Constantinian turn associated in particular with John Howard Yoder).
Here are the first few paragraphs of my article, but of course I’d appreciate it if you clicked through and read the whole thing over at IRD.
At the heart of Kalantzis’s lecture was his argument that Christianity and Rome embodied two radically clashing worldviews – worldviews involving not only contrary practices of religion and piety but contrary ethical commitments as well. Indeed, “the conflict between Rome and the Church was ultimately the collision of sacrificial systems.”
Rome embodied an understanding of the cosmos built on violence and ruled by gods that demand sacrifices. While the Romans tolerated various accounts of the truth they demanded that all Romans participate in those sacrifices and related cultic practices in order that the gods might be appeased and Rome prosper. That prosperity, like the cult on which it depended, was built on violence and military conquest.
Christianity, on the other hand, embodied an understanding of the cosmos shaped by Jesus’ triumph over sacrifice and death through his resurrection. Early Christian writers therefore rejected participation in the Roman army or even in Roman government because it implicated them in pagan worship and because it required them to perform actions fundamentally incompatible with the way of Christ. For Christians the bloodless sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper marked participation in a kingdom that transcends national divisions.
Read the rest here.
Posted on September 22, 2012, in pacifism and tagged Candler School of Theology, Constantine, Emory University, George Kalantzis, Peter Leithart, Roman Empire, Wheaton College. Bookmark the permalink. 8 Comments.
Okay, Matt, you’re hitting awfully close to some serious issues. Please explain Jesus’ comments to the centurion, or alternative, please explain where you differ (as I hope you do) from George Kalantzis.
I am not unaware of the pervasively religious nature of Roman military service (or for that matter, civil service). If I remember correctly, one of the imperial persecutions began after a soldier present at a sacrifice made the sign of the cross and the Roman pagan priests were unable to do their divinations as a result. I can understand the argument that under certain types of government, Christians who are not in principle pacifists or opposed to government service might have to oppose serving in the military or in government because of unacceptable conditions placed upon that service. (Communist regimes are an obvious modern example.)
However, it is pretty hard to argue that military service is unacceptable, even under the conditions of the Roman Empire, if Jesus Christ did not condemn the centurion or at least give him commands on what he needed to do that he was not doing. Furthermore, it’s not possible to make the argument that the centurion was forcibly drafted against his will and was merely compelled to serve by the Roman equivalent of a “press gang.” If he didn’t enter the Roman military voluntarily, he certainly volunteered for the Roman equivalent to “officer candidate school.”
Something similar could be said about a city treasurer who was numbered among the church members cited in the New Testament. Greco-Roman government service was also intensely connected to pagan religion, but apparently there were cases where Christians were tolerated in civil service during the apostolic era.
Well of course the Roman military was religious and quite pagan. Is it any surprise that the basic format of the epistle, immediately after the author’s identification and ID of the intended recipient, mentions prayers [and sacrifices] on behalf of the recipient?
And why should we doubt that Rome indeed had a worldview in which certain persons not sacrificing and making obeisance to idols was a national security threat? Have you never read the Martyrdom of Polycarp? Or is everything before Augustine just irrelevant, Darrell?
Now, I just have to ask: did Jesus consider himself called to preach to Gentiles? No; it wasn’t his purpose. Neither do we have a complete record of the event, but only the truncated form found in the Gospels. How do you know what he did or did not say to the centurion after that? Do you think that Jesus sat there and catechized the guy completely on a moral life? Because I’m under the impression that the conversation ended where it did because Jesus is willing to heal people even if they aren’t willing to become his disciples.
Therein, in fact, lies your problem: you could not in the first century become a disciple or follower of Jesus if you did not actually sell off everything you owned and follow him. But to do this, the centurion would have to quit being a centurion. So, the centurion DID have to choose between his job and Jesus; this would have been necessary even if Jesus were not a pacifist.
Unless of course Jesus had Jack Chick tracts to hand out to give basic Bible lessons. I guess in that case it would have been easier.
Gary, I have the Eerdmans edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers on my shelf and am currently re-reading the volume on the Apostolic Fathers.
I’m Reformed. I would have significant problems with a number of things in Chick Tracts.
Because I am Reformed I do not believe we can go beyond what is written. Nothing in Scripture indicates that the Roman centurion was told to quit the Roman military (and depending on his time in service, that might well have been impossible, at least without waiting a number of years).
Words mean things, but sometimes what people write isn’t what they intended to write, so let me ask specifically: when you say, “even if Jesus were not a pacifist” are you claiming that Jesus was a pacifist?
There is no room in Reformed Christianity, at least creedal versions of it, for pacifism.
Hi Darrell, Gary, Matthew, et. al.,
Darrell and Gary, I wanted to reply to your ongoing conversation about Jesus’ encounter with the Roman Centurion. Last week I started a website dedicated to helping Christians understand and apply what I have come to see as Jesus’ approach to peacemaking (www.enemylove.com). A few days back I posted a reflection entitled “What Can A Centurion’s Faith Teach Us About Peacemaking”. In that article, I make the claim that you cannot accurately interpret Jesus’ encounter with the centurion unless you can correctly answer this question: To whom did Jesus make the announcement about the centurion’s great faith? And I’ll give you a hint…it wasn’t to the centurion. In the end, I hope my post convincingly reveals that Jesus was actually teaching two lessons that are foundational to His approach to peacemaking.
Finally, let me briefly touch upon Christ-centered pacifism (which very broadly speaking is about overcoming evil with its opposite good). I grew up Southern Baptist and of the Reformed tradition like you Darrell, yet in later years found those two Christian traditions to be silent as to how I could work for peace specifically in those places where it is painfully absent! For the past seven years I’ve lived and ministered amongst the urban poor, first in Canada’s poorest neighborhood followed by planting my family in one of Jakarta, Indonesia’s numerous slum communities. Living in these localities, I am in desperate need of a theology/missiology (call it what you will) that equips me with the tools and framework for cultivating and spreading God’s shalom amongst the oppressed, and to do it in such a way that remains faithful to the way of Jesus. If your Christian tradition does not have an answer for this, then I’d encourage you to learn from other streams of the Christian faith.
Finally, a word of advice. Stop all of the endless intellectual debating around the permissibility of Christians using violence. Instead, plant yourself amongst the poor and oppressed, and you’ll quickly see that violence always disproportionately affects the poor. Standing amongst the marginalized, your perspective will change…for where you stand determines what you see. And once in solidarity with the oppressed, you’ll begin desperately searching Scripture for a faithful AND practical approach to peacemaking.
I hope this helps with the ongoing discussion you all are having. Matthew, keep up the great blog!
Greetings, Jason.
I’ve been debating for some time how to respond. I do think there’s a good chance that we’re far enough apart on basic presuppositions that we won’t be able to have enough common ground for a helpful discussion.
I’m going to try to respond to one area where I do think we have common ground: your urging that we “plant yourself amongst the poor and oppressed” and your correct observation that “standing amongst the marginalized, your perspective will change…for where you stand determines what you see.”
You are absolutely right that once people live in a poor community, eyes get opened to see things that typical suburbanites don’t see. However, I think we’ve come to very different conclusions about the raw data that we both saw.
I hasten to emphasize that I’m certain that you’ve seen worse poverty in Indonesia than I’ve ever seen in the United States — most of our poor people have a standard of living far higher than that of the average person in a poor third-world country — I have lived and worked in a number of different inner-city and rural poverty communities in the United States. Two of the three churches I served as a tentmaking pastor were in very poor communities, and in addition to that, I’ve lived for most of my adult life in areas that were definitely ghettos, barrios, or “white slum” neighborhoods. Spending most of my life as a reporter covering crime and courts has certainly caused me to be aware of the problems of the communities where I lived and worked.
In an American context, I firmly believe that long-term poverty is usually — not always, but usually — due to bad choices, either one’s own choices or (in the case of children and young adults) the choices of one’s family.
Some of those bad choices don’t involve personal sin by the person who is suffering. One obvious and all-too-common example of that would be a young mother who marries her high school sweetheart, quickly has four or five children, and then her husband divorces her. Another which is common in the “rustbelt” or Appalachia involves older men who were discouraged by their parents from going to college or trade school because they could get a good-paying unskilled labor job in a factory or mine, but are now in their fifties, in poor health due to years of hard physical labor, and won’t ever work again in the mine or factory because it’s closed down and won’t ever be coming back. Still other cases include business failures by people who did everything right, took reasonable risks, but got blown away by economic factors totally out of their control.
However, many of bad choices which lead to poverty **DO** involve personal sin.
The Reformed faith has a great deal to say about the sorts of behaviors which lead to poverty and lead to a stable (not rich, but stable) life. There are certainly exceptions, but especially with regard to generational poverty, lack of work ethics is the number one problem, followed closely and directly related to sexual promiscuity which leads to huge numbers of women and children in poverty while men run around and ignore their responsibilities to their own children.
And yes, I’m well aware that is not the case historically, or in much of the rest of the world outside North America.
Frankly, the sexual licentiousness which the middle and upper-middle classes began to glorify in the 1960s has borne devastating fruit among the poor. A middle-class woman with a college degree may not get hurt too badly if her husband cheats on her (or if she cheats herself). Take the same woman who was a stay-at-home mom, or who works in a minimum-wage job, and divorce or unplanned pregnancies create crisis situations.
Rich white liberals ought to spend more time thinking about the consequences for poor people of what they put on television for American society to emulate. The older forms of liberalism were quite aware of the importance of personal morality, hard work, and thrift, and if modern liberals really want to help poor people and refuse to look at biblical Christianity, they’d be well advised to at least look at what liberals were doing a century ago. While the older liberalism omitted the gospel, at least it retained some vestiges of Christian values which often — not always but often — lift people out of poverty.
Maybe the best Christian position should be to fight if the cause is just (defending attack, defeating an aggressor such as Japan or the Nazis) and to not fight if the cause is unjust (your nation is the unprovoked aggressor).
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