© 2009 by The Institute of Mennonite Studies

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.brazospress.com

in collaboration with Institute of Mennonite Studies

Ebook edition created 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-1287-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Unless otherwise indicated, scripture is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Editors’ Preface

Author’s Preface

1. Introduction

2. Refining Our Typology on the Ethics of War

3. The Pacifism of Pre-Constantinian Christianity

4. The Meaning of the Constantinian Shift

5. The Logic of the Just War Tradition

6. Criteria of the Just War Tradition

7. Interpreting the Just War Criteria

8. The Career of the Just War Theory

9. The Peace Dimension of Medieval Moral Concern

10. The Nonviolence of Rabbinic Judaism

11. The Pacifism of the First Reformation

12. Anabaptists in the Continental Reformation

13. The Peace Vision of Enlightenment Humanism

14. Quakerism in the Puritan Reformation

15. Quakerism in Early America: The Holy Experiment

16. Pacifism in the Nineteenth Century

17. Liberal Protestant Pacifism

18. Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Realist” Critique

19. Mennonites after Niebuhr

20. Biblical Realism and the Politics of Jesus

21. Other Biblical Themes

22. Just War Thinking Revived

23. The Lessons of Nonviolent Experience

24. Ecumenical Theologies of Revolution and Liberation

25. Varieties of Contemporary Catholic Peace Concern

26. Ecumenical Conversations

Study Guides

General Bibliography

Scripture Index

Subject Index

Notes

Editors’ Preface

The topic of this book occupied the lion’s share of John Howard Yoder’s time as a scholar, teacher, and ecumenical conversationalist. In one sense his attention to war and peace was inevitable. Given the variety of wars and peacemaking challenges the world faced during his lifetime, it would have been difficult for a Mennonite pacifist theologian/ethicist/historian to avoid addressing Christian perspectives on war, peace, and revolution. But Yoder addressed the subject with an intensity, consistency, and duration that can only be accounted for by acknowledging his passion for the subject.[1] This topic touched the heart of his Christian faith. He was a devoted and tireless evangelist and apologist for a faithful (and therefore, in Yoder’s view, pacifist) reading of the Christian story—in the Bible, and through the church’s first two millennia. He believed that this story is good news and wanted others to believe and live it. The central question, implicit or explicit, he asks about movements discussed in this book is, to what extent do Jesus’s teaching, life, death, and resurrection shape their convictions? His unapologetic commitment to a faithful, pacifist reading of the gospel is evident in these pages. It caused him to notice things that frequently go unnoticed, and to see in a different light things that others frequently do notice.

Yoder knew that there is no objective ground on which to stand to view Christian theology and Christian history. But the reader should not draw the conclusion that this book is ideological or polemical. As part of his Christian pacifism and his scholarly vocation, Yoder wanted to represent various perspectives fairly by stating them in their strongest forms and pushing himself and others to encounter the force of the case they make for their stance. With empathy, he sought to bring into the conversation Christians who hold views that were absent in his classroom, either because those Christians were strangers from earlier centuries and other parts of the world, or because they were enemies holding views antithetical to those of his listeners. The reader can judge whether he succeeds, but he clearly saw this task as part of his scholarly and Christian pacifist commitment.[2] He described movements within Christian history, illuminating their contexts and commitments to show how they came to be what they were. Yoder came at this history with an awareness of how Anabaptist history has been distorted by mainline Protestant and Catholic histories. He therefore sought to breathe life into historical movements, to see as they might have seen. He invites us to understand and respect them in their particular historical contexts, whether or not we agree with them.

In stating other perspectives in their strongest form, a surprising history unfolds. For Yoder, the history of Christian attitudes toward war and peace is clearly not a mainstream account that sees the church faithfully responding to the gospel by outgrowing its early pacifism, maturing and coming to accept responsibility, including the need to wage war. But neither is it a story of simple decline from the New Testament to the Anabaptists, as some within Yoder’s Mennonite tradition have told it. The most striking aspects of this story are the resilience through the centuries of the gospel of peace, and the abiding power of Jesus’s hold on people that invites them to imitate him in seeking peace and shunning violence. Again and again, Yoder demonstrates, people throughout history have seen Jesus,[3] and have been drawn to the power of the cross.

In telling this history, Yoder goes beyond understanding and presenting various perspectives. He evaluates and criticizes them. He is often direct and sharp in analyzing views, including aspects of his own tradition, that he finds wanting. His favorable treatment of diaspora Judaism, for example, challenges both nonpacifist and pacifist readings of the church’s story. And by noting repeatedly the ways Christians have unquestioningly supported the wars of their rulers, he challenges nonpacifists at least to take seriously the constraints embodied in the justifiable war tradition. His Christian pacifist scholarship requires that he fairly represent various traditions, but it does not mean that he sees all viewpoints as equally true.

Yoder’s creativity enriches our hearing of the story. He asks whether the standard way of posing a question is most helpful. He prods us to step outside our comfortable ways of seeing in order to look at things from another angle. He examines nooks and crannies of history that often remain unexplored. He challenges assumptions, and he asks us to challenge our assumptions—and his.

The place of this book in Yoder’s writings

This book examines the historical development of Christian perspectives on war and peace from the second century to about 1980. How did various types of views emerge?[4] How did they evolve? What contexts give rise to different perspectives on war? In this book these are central questions, together with questions of assessment: What strengths and weaknesses of various views come into focus as we trace their histories? How do they line up with the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ?

This book is distinguished from most of Yoder’s other books in that it was originally presented as lectures in a class with the same title.[5] This course had a long history. While an undergraduate at Goshen College, in the second semester of the 1945–46 school year, Yoder took a course from Guy Hershberger on “War, Peace, and Nonresistance.” Twenty years later, Yoder inherited the course from Hershberger and taught it in the spring of 1966 at the Mennonite seminaries. A few years later Yoder changed the title to “Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution”; he was also teaching the course at the University of Notre Dame by 1973.[6] Yoder last taught the course in the fall of 1997, just before his death on December 30 of that year. The continuity over those thirty years is remarkable. The topics remained much the same throughout the years, though sometimes ordered differently and with occasional adaptations to suit his audience.[7]

In the early 1970s Yoder’s class sessions were recorded and transcribed. In subsequent years the transcriptions were made available for students to read, so that class time could be devoted primarily to discussion. Yoder’s last redaction of these lectures was a 1983 text, in what Yoder called a “nonbook book” that was sold from the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) bookstore and later from the Cokesbury Bookstore at Duke Divinity School.[8] The present book is based on that compilation, which had been only lightly edited.

Because this book grew out of a course at AMBS, it opens a window on what Yoder thought future Mennonite leaders needed to know and ponder. In a sense, the original audience for this book is closer to his home than is the audience for many of his writings.

How the nonbook book came to be this book

Yoder occasionally talked about writing a book that would incorporate much that was in the 1983 volume, but which would be more tightly edited, more comprehensive and up-to-date, more fully documented, and shorter. For a variety of reasons, he never undertook this task. One reason was the difficulty of simultaneously accomplishing all these objectives. An additional complication was the relationship of this book to Roland Bainton’s Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, which Yoder used as a text in his class alongside his transcribed lectures. He did not want to compete with Bainton’s book while it was still in print by writing a replacement for it. He intentionally treated more briefly those subjects that Bainton had dealt with in depth, and spoke more fully about topics that Bainton had touched more lightly. Nevertheless, in a handwritten note, evidently written soon after the lectures were printed in 1983, Yoder stated, “In view of the uncertain future availability of Bainton’s book, these texts have been so edited as to be readable standing alone.”[9] While he recognized that his nonbook book was thinner on some topics than others, the same was true of Bainton’s volume—and of any historical/theological work.

When Yoder left AMBS in the mid-1980s, I (Ted Koontz) assumed responsibility for teaching the course that Hershberger and Yoder had developed. After Yoder’s death in 1997, I continued to use parts of the 1983 volume. But through the years I realized that while the nonbook book contained a great deal of valuable history and analysis, many students struggled with it. Awkward sentences, repetitive sections, poor or missing transitions, an unappealing format, irrelevant student questions, and supplemental readings made the going even more difficult than a serious theological work needs to be. I came to believe that editing the volume would enhance its value to students and other readers. It was not until the fall of 2005, however, that the opportunity to begin work on the project presented itself. Two graduate students at AMBS, Andy Alexis-Baker and Keith Benner, approached me about working together to edit the lectures. Although Keith Benner’s untimely death kept him from seeing the task through, Andy and I undertook the long process of editing Yoder’s lectures into their present form.

The present book is nearly 40 percent shorter than the 1983 volume. A significant part of that reduction was achieved by eliminating supplemental readings by other authors. We also eliminated two chapters near the end, one a listing of leading contemporary pacifists and their writings, and the other a description of “loose ends”—topics that Yoder could not include because of lack of time and space. We deleted student questions and Yoder’s responses to them when we judged them tangential to the topic of the chapter or when they evoked answers that repeated ideas presented elsewhere.[10] Finally, we significantly reduced the length of the volume simply by carefully eliminating unnecessary (we hope!) words, phrases, asides, sentences, and paragraphs. We have tried to achieve a good balance between its informal spoken origin in a classroom and what seems fitting in a scholarly written work, and between getting to the point and taking time to develop a point. We have moved materials around in some places, in an effort to make the book flow more smoothly. We have sought to avoid distorting Yoder’s meaning, either in what we eliminated from the text or in how we edited the text.

We made three main additions to the text. We inserted headings and subheadings to make the book easier to navigate. We also replaced Yoder’s original chapter on “Quakerism in Early America: The Holy Experiment.” In its place we used material from a transcription of a 1974 lecture, supplemented with some content from the 1983 volume; the approach Yoder had used in the 1974 class was easier to follow. Finally, we added some material found in a 1979 edition of this text: to the end of chapter 7 we added 1979 material on jus in bello, and to the beginning of chapter 8 we added several pages from the 1979 text on the evolution of the justifiable war tradition.

When we began this project, we considered updating its contents, at least by referring to related works by Yoder and perhaps even by incorporating excerpts from some of those works. Incorporating excerpts soon proved to be unworkable, however; many of his writings are related to themes addressed here, and incorporating them would have expanded an already lengthy book. In addition, the original text is set in the period of the 1970s and early 1980s, and in some cases later excerpts would have given the book a less coherent historical context. In the end we inserted only a bare minimum of references to later writings, only those relating directly and substantially to the chapters here. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Yoder’s thought on many issues addressed here continued to develop until his death, although its trajectory remained constant.[11]

Because the materials here originated as lectures, Yoder rarely included detailed documentation for the resources from which he drew. The general bibliography and the study guides provide the reader with references to the pool of literature he relied on. We have found, footnoted, and verified many specific references, but the book is not documented in as much detail as the book Yoder dreamed of writing would have been. In addition, the original text had no footnotes. We have moved some of Yoder’s tangential comments and references into footnotes.

Audience

We envision two primary audiences for the book. One is college and seminary students studying Christian ethics—especially, of course, the ethics of war and peace. We hope we have produced a usable textbook. The second set of readers is people interested in the thought of John Howard Yoder. This book contains an important part of his intellectual legacy. Although he did not have the opportunity to polish this volume for publication, his understandings of the history and types of Christian views on war and peace that are developed here illuminate and provide depth to many of his more strictly theological writings. In fact, it is difficult to understand Yoder correctly without understanding how he viewed Christian history as it relates to these themes. In addition, the course from which this book is derived is one Yoder taught almost annually throughout his long career. He clearly saw this particular agenda as central to his calling.

Thanks

Barbara Nelson Gingerich, managing editor at Institute of Mennonite Studies at AMBS, expertly copyedited the text, bringing to the task not only her skill as an editor but her theological training and knowledge of Yoder’s thought that began when she was a student in his classes. Thanks also to the Institute of Mennonite Studies for allowing her to include this project in her various tasks. Lee Camp, who was Yoder’s assistant for the course at Notre Dame near the end of Yoder’s life, sent us valuable material that helped us see the course’s continuity. Mark Thiessen Nation provided a 1979 edition of the text, which allowed us to compare it with the 1983 text. Without this 1979 edition, we would not have been able to see that chapters were sometimes essentially three lectures, compiled without much editing. We also discovered materials in the 1979 volume that we have incorporated into this book, particularly the jus in bello material in chapter 7 and the first several pages of chapter 8.

Our thanks to Martha Yoder Maust, Tom Yoder Neufeld, Michael Cartwright, and Mark Nation—managers of Yoder’s literary estate—who encouraged us to undertake the work of editing this book. In addition, we offer our gratitude to Annie Yoder for her gentle encouragement to us and for her part in allowing John Howard Yoder to be the scholar he was. We extend our gratitude to Rodney Clapp of Brazos Press, whose commitment to publishing this book remained steadfast even when we informed him with some trepidation that the text would be long despite our trimming. We are grateful to Glen Stassen, who read a draft of our manuscript and made helpful suggestions and corrections. Nekeisha Alexis-Baker provided helpful comments on the initial editing process and offered encouragement along the way. And we are grateful that AMBS is a context in which the topic dealt with here is given high priority; specifically, the seminary has given me (Ted) the opportunity to teach this material and time to edit it.

Finally, we are especially grateful to our mentor and friend, John Yoder. Working through this material again has been a powerful and inspiring reminder both of the range and creativity of his scholarship and of his devotion to his servant Lord, Jesus Christ. Our hope is that the perspectives offered here on the history of Christian attitudes to war and peace will deepen readers’ commitment to understanding the gospel more fully and following Jesus more closely.

—2008

Author’s Preface

The materials published here originated as a teaching tool, a study resource for graduate students in the history of Christian thought and contemporary social ethics. My intent was to provide the historical background students would need before they could proceed to do original thinking on issues of war and peace. The perspective from which I read the story is that of the historic peace church traditions, with more attention to Anabaptist and Mennonite history than to that of the Friends, and still less to that of the Brethren.

This material developed as a supplement to Roland Bainton’s Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, a monumental orientation to the history of Christian thought on the subject.[1] This project reproduces the substance of a course on Christian attitudes toward war, peace, and revolution that I have taught to several generations of students at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. The course consisted of a conversation with major written resources, including Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace. Because this book supplements an existing text, the person who reads it alone may find it uneven.[2]

The conversational form of this material is not merely a freer way to lead a class, or a lazier way to edit a book; it also reflects the open-ended nature of the subject matter and the unfinished quality of some discussions.

The informal style allows for another kind of freedom. Some sections of the story I recount neutrally or descriptively, as a historian of Christian thought. In others I argue explicitly with both sides of the debate, which are represented fairly, I trust, but with no pretense to neutrality. I take this approach especially where the political relevance of the Christian peace position is now under the shadow of systematic theological categories that I view as inappropriate. Examples are the sections on the “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania and the treatment of disagreements about the differences between Anabaptists and Quakers at their origins, the twentieth-century discussion about the pragmatic effectiveness of nonviolence, and the brief examination of biblical materials. In each of those cases, my biases are not one side of a debate. Instead I call for criticism of the terms in which the debate has been carried on by both sides. In these cases, I seek first to report on and referee the debate itself, and then to suggest how a more adequate analysis of the issues could move beyond it. If the claim were that this material is an objective textbook or a balanced research syllabus, this unevenness would be a shortcoming. For most readers, I trust that it will not be.

This text grows out of a specific Mennonite denominational identity, and I have retained references to denominational location while recognizing that the text may be used by non-Mennonites.

Since the publication of the Bainton volume, several excellent and accessible collections of primary sources on Christian attitudes to war and peace have appeared. They improve the reader’s ability to verify but also to complement the summaries by Bainton and by me. In many chapters I refer readers to relevant portions of these sources, but I have made no effort to ensure that the chapter itself refers to the content of all those sources. This text will aid learning best when readers take account of related sources, with this work serving as a thread leading through that wider material. The exception is my treatment of some of the experiences of Friends and Mennonites, where it can stand alone.

Since work on these materials first began, several major new studies have enriched our documentation in the field. Analysis that was appropriate in 1974 may be redundant if the reader is acquainted with those more recent and more thorough works. Nonetheless, I have made no effort to purge from this outline discussions that overlap with, for instance, the more recent work of Millard Lind[3] or Jean-Michel Hornus.[4]

The basic outline, following Bainton’s book, is chronological. I refer to scripture only as Christians of different epochs perceive its relevance differently. The same is true of the treatment of the tools of systematic ethics. I interrupt chronological tracking occasionally when our understanding of a topic, such as the just war tradition, increases because we pursue it over a longer time span. The treatment is intentionally short on biographical detail. The bibliography does not pretend to be up-to-date or full. Nor have I made any effort at elegance. The various chapters are not all the same size. The topics are not treated at the same depth. Sources are not cited with equal thoroughness.

I am grateful to the students who participated in various offerings of this class and to those who made the recordings and the transcriptions of the class sessions.

—1983

Introduction

Historical theology

We are working in the realm of historical theology, and in the first instance, ours is a descriptive task. Christians have taken many attitudes to war, peace, and revolution. We need to study and interpret each in its own historical context, for its own sake, and as historians of Christian thought, objectively. The task of reading a story objectively is not without problems, but at the outset we will seek to be historians and not apologetes.

History of ideas

The history we study here is the history of ideas, not of events. The real story of the Crusades, for example, would be an account of what those wars meant humanly, to killers and those killed. Narratives of how wars have been fought, or the story of military science—strategies, weapons, civilian involvement, the experience of being a soldier—are matters we will not study for their own sake.

Nor will the various options and logical positions be covered with equal intensity. We will give the just war position major attention. We will spend less time on the idea of holy war or the idea of the autonomous state, partly because those ideas are less debatable, less serious as moral options, and the people who hold them are less open to conversation. Yet we must remember that they remain real options, if not in theology, then in the social experience of many Christian churches. In fact, one of the reasons to be critical of the just war theory, which is careful not to approve of all war, is that in social experience it tends to cover for the other views.

Similarly, we could give more historical attention to the ideas of the historic peace churches. Anabaptists will be dealt with mostly at their point of origin as a model from the sixteenth century, with little attention to later migration or to their experiences with conscientious objection. We will consider the Quakers at the beginning of their experience, first in Britain and then in Pennsylvania. Other peace churches we will observe even less. We will devote little space to late twentieth-century ferment around the war question, with regard either to nuclear weapons or to the Vietnam experience. We will give little attention to serious interdisciplinary crossover in conversation with political science, although we cannot avoid some discussion of the concept of the state. We will make little effort to carry through interdisciplinary dialogue with sociology and psychology as related to conflict and aggression in groups or in personality, although that cross-reference will at least be noted.

One early section is devoted to pre-Constantinian Christianity, but we will not begin by looking at what the Bible says about war and peace. We can never read the Bible without doing so from a particular perspective. We will seek to be accountable about the perspective from which we read the Bible by not beginning there but by first seeking a wider experience with more questions. Then we will be more self-aware and will develop a wider agenda and a more precise vocabulary with which to return to the biblical material. If the pre-Constantinian church was pacifist, the New Testament was pacifist; there is little doubt about that fact. But our questions about how to understand that fact, how to relate it to earlier Old Testament perspectives and to later developments of Christian thought, will be more articulate if we deal with the Bible after we have seen something of the subsequent development of the story.

We need to consider one more general caution about the strengths and weaknesses of the particular denominational context in which we are working. Most Christians hold views about war different from those represented by me as a teacher in a North American Mennonite seminary and by many of my students. We have a special duty to be critically accountable, to use imagination, research, and experience in order to bring the perspectives of the absent to bear on our material. This exercise is imperative for any honest intellectual work. It is also an integral part of a nonviolent commitment to respect the dignity of the adversary, and especially of absent adversaries who cannot defend themselves. Let us therefore be self-critical about the narrowness of the composition of our group. Every time we can consciously do so, let us compensate by double-checking whether we have heard—and have properly and creatively understood—the views we are dealing with.

The problem of bias

Let us admit the general problem of bias in the study of history. History begins as apology. When people record events, especially when they retell events to one another or to their children, they are acting out of a need to make sense of how things happened, how those events contribute to defining who they are. Remembering matters because memory constitutes identity. So the fundamental anthropological function of telling one’s story is inseparable from bias. Rarely is the particular bias that of repentance. More often it is the bias of reproach addressed to others, combined with defense of oneself and one’s group.

With the passage of time, with awareness of the multiplicity of perspectives, and with development of greater temporal and emotional distance from one’s own starting identity, heirs to a tradition become more concerned about the objectivity of the story and the verifiability of the particular items recounted. The concern for objectivity makes history a discipline. We develop ways of testing our sources to know whether they are credible, and ways of testing how we read the sources to know whether we have taken them seriously as the product of their own context rather than of ours. Thus procedures, checklists, and questions emerge, which enable us to engage in a critique of our own apologetic bias about the past.

But despite the desire to be less subjective, less prejudiced, the claim to be objective can never be absolutized. Neutrality itself is no less a bias. The concern to step away from this or that commitment is itself a commitment. It puts blinders on one’s capacity to observe certain dimensions of what the story actually was. Those who simply claim objectivity, who believe that they can read the story with pure objectivity, as it really happened, are thereby less capable of self-critical self-transcendence than are readers who acknowledge their identity (which is a kind of bias) and then correct for it.

For North American Mennonite seminary students, the story of Christian attitudes toward the problems of war and peace, violence and revolution, is retold because of a concern arising out of one Christian tradition over against others. It is a minority tradition, which helps explain why the subject is so interesting to us and which sharpens our perception for some critical perspectives on the story. Even before we start the rereading, we have determined what seems to be the most consistent Christian answer to at least most of the questions we will review.

The corrective for this bias is not to seek to be free of bias. To take that route would merely mean looking for some other bias—although it might feel less like a bias, because it might be the bias of the main stream, whether that main stream is identified as historic Roman Catholicism, liberal Protestantism, evangelicalism, or something else. The effort to be less subjective and sectarian by getting out of the narrowness of a peace church commitment is especially tempting because of the normal psychology of adolescence, which may be characteristic of those of us who grew up in ethnic communities and who feel that the wider world is less prejudiced than the enclave in which we grew up.

We will not make the claim here to be without bias. Nor will we adopt the other easy answer to the question of bias, the answer of some self-styled liberation movements. Such movements assert that partisanship is a good thing and that only prejudice enables the proper reading of history, because history should always be read from a particular prejudice; otherwise, the claimed objectivity means letting oneself be co-opted by the oppressive structures. Rejecting both ideologizing partisanship and the claim to be completely objective, we point to this imperative: to confess clearly the considered commitment of the theological ethics of the historic peace position, and then to build into the telling of the story the correctives that flow from that critical self-awareness.

We should build into the story a special concern to hear the arguments for other views, to sense their power, intellectual or emotional. We should show special concern to give those other views the benefit of the doubt. These views might be espoused by some people who are not morally respectable, but we should not hold that failing against others who adhere to similar views with moral integrity. Finally, the corrective for bias is to engage in a process of testing by conversing with people who hold another view. These mainstream views are present in the literature, in wider society, in the media, and sometimes in our own guilty consciences and conformist reactions.

Questions of method in ethics

We turn now to another set of variables. For whom do we do ethics? Christian ethics are for Christians; that much is obvious. But if Christians know what is true and what is evil, is that truth any less true or that evil any less evil for non-Christians? Do we not talk the same language in ethics as our non-Christian neighbors? Can we talk with them? Within a democracy, can we make decisions together with them? And if we can, what criteria do we use? Do we need to filter and adapt our ethical commitments so that other people can understand them, respect them, follow them, or apply them? Or, in spelling out definitions derived from our faith, do we pay attention only to those people who share our value judgments? If not, what other guides do we have that are not derived from those judgments? The issue of how to transcend the particularity of truth claims rooted in Jewish and Christian history is a major theological concern for many of our contemporaries. For some, it is the first question of theological method.

If we were starting from scratch, we would have to face a certain kind of objective approach to the discipline of ethics. Can there be such a thing as ethics at all? Might the value systems of our time be so pluralistic that we lack any common language? Might a correct value system be so concerned not to impose extraneous values on others that we can say nothing to one another about right and wrong? That position would be agnosticism, a denial that we can know anything worth talking about. Or it would be pluralism, affirming the validity of many different views. Or it would be solipsism: I recognize that nobody else has to listen to me, any more than I have to listen to anyone else. These are forms of challenge to the very possibility of doing ethics.

Assuming we can do ethics, any perusal of a standard text provides evidence that there are different ways of doing ethics. Are we to use principles, or is the word principle itself the signal of a bad method? What is the place of tradition? What is the place of common sense? What is the place of the positive statements of church authorities? All these categories and approaches are debatable, but we will not openly or systematically debate these questions here.

Another widespread debate tries to throw light on what we are talking about by making distinctions of level or territory. This approach distinguishes between personal and social ethics, or between spiritual and outward ethics. It tries to reduce the confusion in ethical debate by separating levels—not (so its proponents say) in order to neglect one or the other but in order to deal with one at a time and clarify the priority of one over the other.

Here, where we are discussing violence and war, there is no intrinsic logical reason why we should deal with most of the questions of method that I have just identified—whether there can be ethics, for whom it can be, how it can be structured externally, what it starts with internally, how different areas or dimensions interlock—any more than we would if we were discussing any other ethical issue. But in conversations on the ethics of war and violence, we hear frequent appeals to these matters. Next to sex, killing is the most frequent example used by advocates of situationalism or of principle. Often, when the pacifist says killing is wrong, the conversation partner does not discuss the morality of killing but resorts to one of these other concerns: “Don’t be a legalist.” “Don’t mix the spiritual and the social.” “You are using the wrong kind of reasoning.” Therefore we cannot avoid some encounter with these method questions, although they would most fittingly belong in a separate treatment of the structures of and resources for ethics in general.

The ecumenical relevance of this course

This topic has clear relevance for Mennonites as a historic peace church. The special challenge for us is to reach beyond the obvious sectarian motivation for dealing with it. Rejection of war is not morally right for Mennonites unless we are ready to claim on some level that war is also wrong for others. If we claim that our rejection of war is not a peculiar folkloric distinctive of ethnic Mennonites but a moral obligation, then we cannot rest content with claiming that this is a right position. We are obligated morally to communicate it to others who have not yet understood it.

In North America now, Christians tend to justify denominational division by pointing out that each denomination holds particular views. Separate existence on the part of a denomination is warranted, then, because its members hold to special convictions which cannot be implemented if they are swamped within a larger organization that does not hold those positions. Recognizing our distinctive existence, justified by this set of commitments, it follows that we are obligated to be accountable. Anything distinctive about a denomination’s identity becomes a missionary mandate which that denomination is morally obligated to clarify in order to share it with others. There is a danger, obviously, in feeling too missionary or too self-righteous about this task. But an even greater danger comes with cultivating a distinctive identity for which one recognizes no obligation to be accountable in mission or in conversation. There is also danger in assuming that because pacifism is the stated distinctive position of our denomination, it is actually held by all members, and that they all understand it in the same way. In fact, many members of Mennonite churches are not sure that pacifism is an indispensable identity mark of the church.

We do not study this material only because it is a matter of denominational identity. The threat of war, the threat of violence within society, and appeals to violence as a tactic for social change are among the most prevalent threats to our culture, globally and locally; war, peace, and revolution are therefore concerns of everyone. We also study these problems because, more than most other moral issues, they are specimens of most of the main questions in ethical method. The question of when to kill and why serves as a test case for many big and broad questions of ethical method.

The significance of this study is reinforced if we take into account the fact that seminary students are church leaders in training. Leaders bear a special responsibility to know and articulate what constitutes the identity of their community. Mennonite churches face unresolved issues with regard to how our pacifism should work itself out in our time. Does it include a position for or against the death penalty? Does it include activist involvement with regard to corrections and prisons, or racism, or economic structures? What attitude does it imply toward the radical right? What attitude toward patriotism? What attitude toward noncombatant military service? These are unfinished questions within the main stream of Mennonite church membership. Leadership is and will always be needed. Basic understandings of why Mennonites are a peace church are articulated in different congregations in significantly different ways, and in the case of some of these differences, the people who hold alternative views would hardly recognize one another as belonging to the same believing community.

Another element in our taking account of the strategic importance of this subject matter is that it opens up challenging crossovers to other disciplines, including social sciences, social work and social service, atomic science, political science, and secular history. The interdisciplinary encounters related to our topic are probably more challenging and more important than in some other areas of ethical discussion. The subject also intersects with other theological issues: the doctrine of the church matters enormously for what we do with the question of violence, as does the doctrine of Christian hope or eschatology. The nature of New Testament authority; the authority of natural revelation; the meaning of the Resurrection; the meaning of the Holy Spirit; the possibility of obedience, regeneration, and sanctification: these broad theological topics become immensely real in their impact when we ask, “What will I do about my enemy? What is the meaning of the cross for my life?”

The relevance of the topic for ethnic Mennonites

Any group of people, but especially a minority group with a peculiar identity defined out of the past and in familial-ethnic terms, will produce for its future members a mix of challenges and options. This is true for Armenian Orthodox, it is true for Missouri Synod Lutherans, and it is true for Quakers and Mennonites. On the one hand, that distinctive identity is an inherited culture. One is born into it. It is the faith of one’s parents. One has no choice. On the other hand, it incarnates a vision of renewal. It is a critical perspective, one that in the past has worked critically against church and world. From the perspective of radical renewal, those two thrusts—the affirmation of a given past into which one is born and the critique of what one has inherited—present a problem for anyone growing up in a minority culture. It is a specific kind of problem for those who grow up in a free church pacifist culture. One’s response to that heritage can vary from the most sweeping adolescent rejection, dramatizing how far the ethnic culture reality is from living out its ideal renewal vision, to the most apologetic identification with one’s parents’ or church’s vision of renewal.

Awareness of a tension between Anabaptist vision and Mennonite reality will be part of our agenda. The peace witness becomes a focus of that tension. It can have other foci. We could focus that same adolescent agenda on believer’s baptism or nonconformity or simplicity. Yet the peace witness is usually the place of bluntest encounter with the problem of how one moves through the process of accepting or not accepting an inherited culture and the critical vision behind that culture. The peace question sometimes serves as a paradigm or sample test case for whether to be Mennonite, some other kind of Christian, or Christian at all.

War or violence is often the point at which people become convinced, by reading the writings of nonpacifists, that their inherited position is not intellectually viable or not morally what they want to live for. It is possible, without encountering those criticisms from outside, to be driven by the simple awareness that there is an outside world, that one has grown up in a ghetto, and to doubt whether that inherited identity can be useful at all. One can reach the conclusion that a mainstream view is more valid without reasoning deeply or struggling through it, and without great concern for intellectual clarity. It is more difficult than the rebellious adolescent thinks to define what is mainstream, even in terms of how widely it is represented. In our own neighborhoods, the statistical main stream is probably the pietistic and dualistic approach to social issues that we used to call fundamentalist and now call conservative evangelical. It is nonpacifist for a particular set of reasons. If one is more refined or more educated, one may identify the main stream as those who advocate taking charge of society, taking responsibility; its major representatives in our culture have been the Reformed tradition and the neo-Reformed Reinhold Niebuhr. It is possible to identify other main streams.

The background this course provides can enrich the student’s readiness to move in any of a number of directions. If the historic peace church view is right, the student should become more able to justify it, communicate it, and clarify what it means for one’s own obedience. If the historic peace church stance is unsatisfactory, the student should see more validly why that is and be freer to reject or correct it.

Refining Our Typology on the Ethics of War

The particular types proposed here are offered for the purposes of our logical analysis, without claiming that they will always have the same meanings in the literature and without denying that in between the relatively clean types identified here there will be mixtures and borderlines.[1] Further attention to the use of these logical types, the variegations within them and the interconnections among them, will be appropriate as we proceed.

Over against the more widely assumed understanding that there are two positions on war—the just war theory, which permits it, and the pacifist view, which does not—Roland Bainton, in his classic work Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, subdivides the typology by making a categorical distinction between the just war and the crusade. I propose to increase the usability of these types by adding yet another type, which seems to me to make the typology more rigorous and thorough.

How does a typology function in history or ethics or the history of ethics? My concern is to increase the clarity and objectivity of the historian’s analysis. I do not think that the difference between one typology and another will enable me to score any points for pacifism, any more than Bainton’s introduction of the distinction between the just war and the crusade had that effect for him. The purpose of the typology is to facilitate understanding of the points at which fundamental differences of axioms, logic, and context make for consistent differences in character, decision, and behavior. The purpose is to illuminate the coherence of each view rather than to locate each only negatively by contrast with some other. If one’s types are inadequate, the integrity or coherence of particular positions may be misunderstood.

Other kinds of typology could throw light on questions of moral discourse, depending on the sort of question one is interested in raising. In the realm of war, peace, and revolution, as in many other realms, it is possible to distinguish among different kinds of moral reasoning (deontology, utility, intuition, character, positive law), and certainly these kinds of distinctions would also throw light on how people debate about war. For our purposes, what will most fittingly distinguish the types from one another is the question of how the warrant to destroy human lives is adjudicated.

We are talking here only about war in the relatively representative sense of hostilities between the governments of nations. The reasoning might be analogous, but not strictly the same, if we were dealing with the violence of police, of prisons, and the death penalty. Even the closer approximations of contested territories, undeclared wars, insurrection, and mafia would also make for some differences in the outworking of the types.

The types defined

Blank check

Some say that the decision about the legitimacy of war is made by the ruler, who is not accountable to anyone.[2] Machiavelli dramatized one form of this position. There also are religious forms, traditionally referred to as “the divine right of kings.” According to its advocates, the authority of the ruler to make decisions is derived religiously, but the religion does not impose restrictions on how the authority is to be exercised. Another phrase for this kind of reasoning is raison d’état, a phrase that can also have other shades of meaning. For our purposes, to highlight the fundamental commonality that distinguishes Machiavelli, divine right, and fascism from other views, and to avoid choosing any one of them as typical, I use the nonhistorical phrase “blank check.” Rulers may be able to explain to themselves their reasons, which may be principled, idealistic, or simply selfish, but the rest of us (the citizen, the journalist, the diplomat, the moralist) cannot call them to account. Many people who grew up in the United States of America really hold this view, even though the government that makes the decisions, and which they are ready to obey implicitly, is one over which they theoretically have some control and for which they have some responsibility.

Pacifism

Others say that there can never be a warrant to destroy human life. We will call this the pacifist position, although the term pacifism is used in many ways. Sometimes the word is used to describe subcategories of just war thought. Sometimes it applies to vocational or personal convictions which are not generalized to apply to all other people. Those variations need not concern us here.

We note, without pursuing it, that the statement “There is no warrant to destroy human life” may itself be supported in a number of different ways. Some may claim that a specific definitive law, known by revelation or in some other way, formally forbids such destruction of life in any circumstance. Some might say that they are willing to look at many different circumstances, or even hypothetically to open the possibility of a rare or extreme exception, but that the likelihood of such a warrant being clear is so slight that for all catechetical and institutional purposes no grounds exist that justify preparing for such an eventuality. In straight logical theory these positions may be different; in social import they are parallel and we can, in this context, call both pacifism.

Holy war

Some find the warrant for war in revelation. A god or a prophet or a pope may command a war. The obligation to go to war under certain circumstances is not subject to calculation or evaluation by the agents. This position Roland Bainton called the crusade. I call it righteous war or holy war, for several reasons. First, this phenomenon exists in other religions and even in quasi-religions (such as some kinds of Marxism) and should not be labeled only with the name of the major Christian example of it. Second, Frederick Russell gives to the word crusades a narrower meaning to which we will refer later.[3] Third, it is fitting to have an adjective that states that the action of the warrior has positive moral merit—it is righteous or holy—rather than being merely licit.

Justifiable war

Some say that the war that can be justified morally must be evaluated by applying to it several stated criteria, measuring empirical data about the nature of the situation and the various foreseeable options. This fourth type is the justifiable war.

It is significant that such a war itself is not called just; its conduct isn’t a positive act of righteousness or moral merit. Instead, it is only justifiable.[4] A case can be made for it. In most forms of this doctrine, the justifiable war is not a moral imperative but is permitted if the nation or ruler in question chooses to carry it out. Those who choose not to fight are not sinning. For those who choose to carry it out, fighting does not become a righteous deed. It remains a regrettable though unavoidable lesser evil. In classical usage, the adjective just is applied to the cause but not to the war.

To be designated a justifiable war, the criteria justifying it must be public rather than revealed or secret. Their application is a subject of public conversation, in which many parties can be involved. In a democracy, any citizen can apply them, as in the case of Henry David Thoreau’s rejection of the Mexican-American war. In the late Middle Ages, a soldier could at least hypothetically apply these criteria. Martin Luther stated that if a soldier knew he was being asked by his lord to fight in an unjust war, he had a moral duty to refuse to serve. Obviously, a theologian should be able to apply these criteria, as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez did in their criticism of the colonization of South America, and as many critics of the war in Vietnam did. In other forms, the criteria are objectively defined so that they may be applied formally by arbitrators, mediators, and international courts, and informally by the information media, public opinion, and historians.

Although an understanding of why these principles should apply is rooted in and reinforced by Christian perspectives, the criteria themselves for their definition and interpretation are independent of the Bible and of all special revelation. Adherents of other religions and of no religion can with equal propriety be called on to respect them.

The criteria to be applied are numerous. They measure many different aspects of the situation. Thus their application in a given situation is not automatic or self-evident. The multiplicity of criteria can be sorted out. The tradition of conventional application has been growing, but the sorting process is complex.

The criteria interlock in such ways that the results of their application will seldom be univocal and will not automatically yield a single conclusion. There are different kinds of moral reasoning—deontological, utilitarian, intuitionist, and positivist, for example. Different kinds of questions are asked and different measurements taken in the application of the evaluation.

It is a sign of the incompleteness of the doctrinal development that we have no one single classic statement of all the criteria and just how they are to be phrased. An inductive sorting out of the heritage yields at least five different kinds of measurements: (1) A just war can be waged only by a legitimate authority. (2) It can be waged only for a just cause. (3) It may only use proper means. (4) It must have a right intention, in the objective sense of desiring to bring about a peaceful world. (5) It must have a right intention, in the subjective sense of not being motivated by hatred or pride.

How are the typology’s distinctions helpful?

The four options, then, are blank check, pacifism, holy war, justifiable war. They do not overlap. Almost every possibility one can think of fits within them. Now what is the typology good for? Obviously I can say that these types exist. Any kind of typology can be constructed logically. The test questions we must ask are: What good does this particular typology do? Why is it important to make the distinctions that it makes? Let me develop the case for this particular set of distinctions by itemizing them more fully.

Blank check or justifiable war?

The line between the blank check and the justifiable war is clear in logic, though not always in practice or in popular parlance.

The need for a warrant. What distinguishes justifiable war from the blank check is the fundamental notion that in the justifiable war tradition, one needs a warrant before one has a right to destroy one’s neighbors and their culture. Military activity is never beyond debate, automatically acceptable, or self-justified. It needs to be supported with moral justifications in each particular case. Going to war always must bear the burden of proof. This point needs to be made in our time as much as in any earlier time. For many who operate at least implicitly from the blank check perspective, the value of the nation is not debatable, the authority of national government is not subject to critique, and the moral value of their leaders is such that no questions are to be put to them when they command.

National interest and military necessity. Another more insidious form of the blank check is latent behind the simplest meanings given by some to the notions of national interest or military necessity. Perhaps in some cases those phrases can be given deeper and more precise definition, which might move us into the realm of justifiable violence according to the classical theory. Yet often—even usually—justifications of war by appeal to national interest or military necessity constitute variations on the blank check model.[5]

Holy war or justifiable war?

The line between holy war and justifiable war is less evident. Both require serious moral decision. Yet there are significant differences that can be observed all along the line of the multiple criteria of the justifiable war.

Probability of success. One regular mark of the justifiable war is the probability of success. If a war does not promise to obtain the goals for which it is to be fought, waging it even for a good cause will do more harm than good, adding the harm it does to the harm it tried in vain to prevent. In holy war, however, the criterion of probable success is not applicable; it may even be a sign of unbelief and rebellion against God.

Sacrifice and martyrdom. The sacrifices involved for one’s own party, as well as the destruction inflicted on the enemy, are seen in the justifiable war theory as always regrettable, tragic, and to be held to a minimum. In holy war, on the other hand, martyrdom is an honorable outcome. This characteristic of holy war correlates with its rejection of probable success as a moral criterion, for to die in a holy cause is itself a moral victory, apart from effectiveness in winning a war. A justifiable war position has no place for martyrdom, except in the minimal sense that sacrifices made in an early stage of the hostilities may contribute to morale and motivation or may in other ways increase the chances of a victory later.

Martyrdom is not just logically important; culturally and historically, it is also the most visible mark of holy war. Waterloo means more for the Bonaparte buff than do most of France’s victories. The Alamo and Custer’s last stand mean more to many Americans than do many victories. The same is true for the hagiographical status of Che Guevara or Camilo Torres, in contrast to more successful freedom fighters. Holy war is not based on pragmatic effectiveness and last resort, even though the apologetes for liberating violence claim that it is, when talking with pacifists. The appeal is to heroism and courage as constituting moral values for their own sake, as contributing to the validation of the cause in which they are invested, independent of calculation of probable success and therefore not subject to short- or medium-range effectiveness calculation.[6]

Last resort. The classical justifiable war theory calls for war to be a last resort, appealed to only after other ways of resolving a conflict and obtaining the required justice have been exhaustively attempted. Holy war has no criterion of last resort, because the destruction of the enemy or the inflicting of punishment is itself the cause that must be carried out.

Rights of the enemy. Within the justifiable war, the enemy has rights, including the immunity of noncombatants, and the enemy may sue for peace at any time. Prisoners have rights, and a certain reciprocal chivalry shapes the rules of combat. In the holy war, one’s enemies have no rights. They are beyond the pale.

Merely licit or morally mandatory. The justifiable war is only licit; the holy war is morally mandatory. The cause involved in holy war is such that it is not possible to calculate proportionality and discrimination in the damage it does.

The usefulness of a fourth type

What is gained by including a fourth type, the blank check, where there were three before? After all, as the number of categories increases, a typology loses in clarity what it gains in refinement.

My claim is that this gain in refinement compensates for the loss in simplicity. It is vital that we recognize that one of the real moral options has always been not to express any specific critical judgment at all on the violence of the ruler. That awareness has been hidden by the shadowy areas around the other three views. The misunderstanding persists that the blank check given to the authorities is a form of justifiable war. One result has been the common understanding of the doctrine of the just war as meaning blank check.

Another result has been that blank check solutions have avoided accountability for the kinds of reasoning that justify them. If we were to look more carefully, these would need to be itemized. There is (1) simple cynicism; (2) the divine right of kings; (3) several kinds of spiritualism or dualism, which declare this realm off-limits for Christian ethics and thereby make the ruler autonomous; (4) systematic philosophical fascism, which makes a reasoned case for the autonomy of the ruler; and (5) systematic realism (so-called), from Machiavelli to early Hans Morgenthau, which argues the simplicity and autonomy of the criterion of national interest, to push strongly (but not absolutely) in this direction.

Giving this position the label blank check—or realism, as Michael Walzer does[7]—emphasizes that citizens do what they are told. The designation does not exclude the possibility that the ruler might be reasoning morally. Positions one (cynicism) and five (realism) claim that the ruler who takes account of nothing but national interest is ruling rightly, and that for a ruler to take account of international philanthropic idealism would be to rule wrongly. The morality of the ruler’s decision to make war would vary with military technology, and it would also be different in those situations in which the ideology of democracy moves us to think that we are all rulers. Then various moral estimations of national interest would open up several additional debates.

When this clarification has been gained, the fourfold typology becomes much more useful for historical analysis. Borderline phenomena, such as the way the concept of justifiable revolution tends to move from one field to another, become susceptible to more accurate description.

The types applied

In stating the relatively clear definitions of these four major types, I do not claim that they will always—or even ever—be found in history in pure form. We are talking here about types of logical reasoning. But no one has to reason logically. It might be that some people are simply confused and normally reason illogically. They have every right to do so, as long as they are not claiming to be teachers or historians of ethics. People also have every right to experiment with other kinds of logic: nonlinear or Hebraic, primitive, romantic, or Zen.

There could be good reasons to mix the elements of these different logics in a particular decision-making situation. A mixed or eclectic view might be warranted for the sake of consistency with some value other than following a single pattern of reasoning. Even then, the analysis of types would help elucidate the process of mixing and thereby clarify the particular kind of consistency used by those who mix the types.

In using this typology, we do not mean to suggest that the people in the history we are describing knew, at their point in history, about the differences we now discern.[8] For Augustine, just cause could be determined either on political grounds or by special revelation, because he needed to include in his theory the biblical wars of Joshua, and he could not be too critical of those of Constantine’s successors. Later, Bernard of Clairvaux claimed to be interpreting divine revelation mandating the Crusades to the Holy Land. As long as political and religious causes are mixed, the distinction between holy war and justifiable war will not sift itself out. Likewise, until mechanical models of social process and engineering understandings of the effect of weapons are available, calculations of proportionality and probable success will not be clear. Thus the elements of the logical line separating the holy war from the justifiable war are less available in some cultures than in others—to say nothing of the other powerful justifications for refusing to ask the Middle Ages to talk in twentieth-century terms.

Similarly, if the logical difference between the justifiable war and the blank check has not been spelled out, it will be normal to confuse the rejection of a given war on the grounds of the just war theory—applied to a negative case—with the rejection of the theory itself. In modern times, this confused thought pattern is prevalent. People say, “The just war theory must be abandoned,” while applying the criteria of the justifiable war theory to conclude that any war they can now think of does not meet its criteria. This position constitutes a rejection of the blank check view but not of what the justifiable war tradition meant in the first place. It is a consistent application of the just war tradition to a negative case.

This difference between the blank check and the genuine original intent of the just war theory is not just a game in logic. It makes an enormous difference for such practical matters as conscientious objector law, catechesis of nonpacifist Christians, instruction of soldiers in the laws of war, prosecution of war crimes, and the language of political discourse in international affairs.

Exceptions

The history of Christian thought on the subject of warfare reveals some additional types that are not simple mixtures of the above types but go off the scale in different directions.

Some people have glorified violence for its own sake, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and in another way, Frantz Fanon. This stance withdraws the subject from the realm of meaningful moral discourse on a political level and therefore cannot and need not be dealt within our typology.

Near the beginning of World War II, Charles Clayton Morrison, then editor of The Christian Century, after having represented a pacifist position until the outbreak of the war, abandoned pacifism for the view that it was no longer possible to make moral decisions. War, he said, is hell, a punishment and a judgment, a suspension of the nexus of responsible decision, and therefore not a moral option. Not to fight is not an available choice. Therefore any orderly moral discourse about the grounds for fighting is set aside.

Closer to our discussion than the above exceptions are some specific additional types which can best be understood as interlocking forms of the basic four.

Frederick Russell, in his thorough encyclopedia of the many references to the just war theory through many different kinds of medieval European thought,[9] identifies the crusade as a type distinct from both the holy war and the just war. Instead of being commanded by God and carried out by the Christian sovereign, the crusade is commanded by the pope. Just how this represents a fundamentally different type, or even a significantly distinct mixture of holy war and just war, is not clear to me, but I am willing to try to understand the distinctiveness that Russell claims to discern. For this reason I prefer holy war as the label for the more consistent type.

Self-defense by a person, nation, or province, when the very existence of that entity is at stake, may move from the justifiable to the holy status. The implication is not that a distinct divine revelation mandates self-defense at the last ditch. Rather, the legitimacy of self-defense or the absoluteness of the threat to one’s very existence are such that the detailed criteria of probable success, last resort, proportionality, and enemy rights do not need to be met. An alternative way to frame this view would be to say that self-defense becomes a special form of a blank check rather than a special form of the holy war.

The types disentangled with time

I have said both that the three nonpacifist lines of reasoning are logically distinct and that they have interlocked with one another in the intellectual history of the West. This statement obliges me to give attention to their evolution as concepts.

When the amount of water being carried by those streams is limited, the three flow independently. In times of flood, however, their waters merge to form one lake. Then one cannot tell the waters from the three sources apart. Yet the three distinct channels remain at the lake bottom, they leave the flood plain separately, and they again carry their waters separately when the flood waters have receded.

The three streams are the three different kinds of logic, each of which I here identify in terms of stereotypical representatives.

One model for war is Joshua. He represents for Augustine the possibility that a war is commanded by a divine imperative. A given nation should be chastised by God’s representatives in the name of vengeance or the honor of God.

For Aristotle, to be just (dikaion) is to be appropriate. If I am a superior person, then it will be just for me to exercise authority and have a higher view of myself. If you are an inferior person (a slave, a barbarian, or a woman), it will be fitting for you to have an inferior position. The appropriateness of a war is based not on the cause being contested but on the intrinsic merit of the one waging it. A war is fitting if it is the expression of the dignity of the one waging it. If you were superior and I were inferior, the same would apply—but then, of course, I would not be doing the philosophizing. According to this understanding, a war might be just on both sides. Both parties might be intrinsically superior, or at least think they are.

The symbolic patron for the third vision is Cicero, philosopher of the Roman legal order. Justice for Cicero is what is administered by the laws, applied by administrators and the courts. The criteria for a war’s legitimacy are the criteria of stated rules and due process. There are firm standards, stated or assumed, which would be brought to bear in this due process. Their definition would be so clear and their application so logical that, even in the absence of a court, one could apply that legal thinking and thereby contribute to the accumulation of a body of traditions, precedents, and dicta to guide the discernment process in the future.

An undifferentiated mix: The fifth century to the fifteenth

These three streams clearly come from different sources, in terms of cultural history and logic. They do not move us to reason in the same ways. To apply them separately might lead to significantly different conclusions in particular cases. When in the age of Augustine it came to be fitting that Christians do their reasoning about the morality of power in the new context defined for them by the Constantinian shift, these three kinds of reasoning naturally fed into the same flood waters.

The heritage of Cicero flows into Christian thought through the gateway of Ambrose, who before his conversion was a Roman lawyer and civil officer. He immediately claimed his place in the history of the just war theory by reprimanding the emperor Theodosius for an especially atrocious massacre.

The stream flowing from Aristotle needed no special advocate in order to enter into the common pool, because it simply meant letting the rulers do what came naturally.

Thus we have from the fifth century to the fifteenth a relatively undifferentiated mix in which all these considerations flow together. Many of them are operative in the details of canon law. A few occasionally surface in the theological summae. But thinkers had neither the occasion nor the skill to disentangle them until the epoch of Renaissance and empire.

Progressive disentangling: Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

The progressive disentangling of the three strands can be identified symbolically with personalities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Ferdinand and Isabella, having won Europe’s last crusade by driving the Moors and the Jews out of Spain, went on with the same sense of mission to subjugate the Indies. The governments of Spain and Portugal, Columbus, and the pope continued to see that enterprise as an apostolic undertaking. It was not subject to the ordinary restraints of just cause or legitimate authority, because “savages” have no rights.

Over against this undertaking came a renewal of the critical tradition of Cicero. Francisco de Vitoria criticized the South American venture, thereby revitalizing the just war doctrine in order to make it usable for negative application and to restrain the violence and self-righteousness of the Iberian conquerors.

The Aristotelian vision was also at work in Latin America, especially at the point at which some argued that the Indians have no rights because they have no souls. But it was stated more pointedly in the writings of Machiavelli. A Renaissance man, he had the lucidity to unfold the notion that the prince is accountable only to his own interest, so that even his use of moral discourse is self-seeking.

This description enables us to diagram the three streams as they leave the common flood plain, each now to flow in its own channel. Henceforth, people who are careful about moral logic will be able to distinguish among the three types of reasoning.

Institutionalization

We should recognize one more chapter in the evolution of just war theory: its institutionalization. This occurred when Hugo Grotius and others transmuted the principles of ethical evaluation into guidelines for legal process. It had always been said that just war theory should incorporate the jus gentium. But what that jus or usage was had not been spelled out so that it could be used. Grotius began not only to spell out its content but also to illuminate the detailed rules of usage by their cross-reference to just war reasoning.

Various bedfellows

We began by noting that in ordinary discourse, it is assumed that there are two basic positions on the question of the morality of war: the negative view—pacifism—and, on the other side, the various ways of affirming that war is morally permissible or even mandatory. This outlook assumes that the differences separating the various ways of being affirmative about the morality of war are less important than their similarity. Even given the distinctions I have drawn, some may still assume that the three nonpacifist views are close together.

This simple grouping is not true to logic or to the facts. The three different ways of being affirmative about war, which we have now distinguished, are different among themselves in ways that go deep. They do not logically all line up together over against the pacifist position. What separates them from one another is just as important.

The holy war position stands with the pacifist position, and over against the other ways of affirming war, in that it is not a pragmatic position. The cause for which a crusader goes to war is not politically calculated but religiously revealed. No criterion of last resort is invoked. If a crusade has been proclaimed, any less radical approach would be unfaithful. The crusade usually is directed against the legitimate authority ruling in the territory one attacks. The enemy has no rights. Success is no criterion. Sacrifice is a positive value. Martyrdom in a holy cause is to be sought and is just as valuable, just as satisfying, as success. Thus the crusading mentality is like pacifism in its willingness to sacrifice for a lost cause; neither is ultimately guided by considerations of practical effectiveness.

If we attempt to measure differences in logic and not just superficial similarities in conclusions, the justifiable war position stands with pacifism against the other two views in affirming the need for restraint. It tests the legitimacy of the authority that wants to wage a war, as the other nonpacifist positions do not. It rejects in principle the blank check understanding of legitimacy, realism, or necessity. It affirms and protects the humanity and the rights of the adversary, as the other positions do not. The burden of proof resides with the advocate of starting a war, assuming that, other things being equal, war is not justified. Its major moral thrust in almost all situations is to call for restraint in declaring and waging war. The criteria of last resort and just cause are to be interpreted objectively, in such a way that the answer could be negative in a given case.

To be operational, a just war theory must provide criteria for saying that prosecuting a certain war might not be justifiable. Thus the theory is also honest about the damage inflicted by the weapons used. When dealt with honestly, the justifiable war position is willing to draw a line beyond which hostilities would be abandoned; in such circumstances the theory requires that one be willing to surrender or to lose or to abandon hope for redress. As we have seen, in modern times the justifiable war logic may lead to a practically pacifist position when confronted with the costs of modern war. This theory does not affirm that it is moral to demand success or victory at all costs, but only when the cost of the victory is less than the cost of defeat.

Even the Machiavellian view shares important perspectives with pacifism. It agrees with pacifism about the reality of power and about the limited likelihood that the weapons of war will ever be restrained or tamed when they have been let loose. The Machiavellian and the pacifist agree, against the other views, that one cannot win a war if one accepts gentlemanly restraints on necessary means. They agree that if those in power care for survival, they will not jeopardize their power base with quixotically heroic battles for great causes.

Thus each nonpacifist position has certain links with pacifism and contains differences from the other nonpacifist views.

The Pacifism of Pre-Constantinian Christianity

Christians and scholars of church history make different assumptions, stated and unstated, about why it is important and worthwhile to study the early church.

Why study the early church?

Some traditions espouse the notion of progress (a modern idea) or the notion of theological progress under God (a medieval idea); those who hold these views would be grateful that we have left behind the situation of the early church. After all, the early church was persecuted and weak—a minority—and that is not good. The situation in which Christianity found itself, beginning with Constantine or with Charlemagne or with modernity, is better. The church needed a point of origin, just as a person needs to start out as an infant, but we do not stay in infancy. Likewise Christendom properly left the New Testament and the first and second centuries behind, for wider, more mature, more developed understandings. That assessment applies to the ethics of the church as much as to other aspects of its thought and life. In this way of reading the story, then, the post-Constantinian situation is better, and we study the early church because doing so gives us a perspective that makes us grateful that we are not there any longer.

At the other extreme, the New Testament and the first century are viewed as a norm from which Christendom fell away. Yet the fallenness is not hopeless. The norm may still be operative as a power for reform. Thus there is some kind of criterion or even some kind of power in the early church. The first Christians were the real Christians. Studying their experience or making it a model helps us know what it means to be genuinely Christian in a later time.

Between those two extremes is a more modest view. It would not make commitment to the validity of the experience of the early centuries a binding model for all times. But it would say of early Christians, at least, that they read the Bible in a first-century context. They read the New Testament in the same world in which it was written, in the same language in which it was written. They probably read it, therefore, with more understanding than we do. Hence, how they read the New Testament is helpful to us in our reading of the New Testament, whatever the limits of their faithfulness.

Regardless of one’s opinion on the authority of the early Christian example, it is undeniably a challenge, in the realm of intellectual and cultural history, to study the inner coherence of the life of communities far from our own. Understanding ancient texts, whatever we think of their truth value, requires intellectual discipline.

Early Christian rejection of war: God or Caesar?

It is not difficult to characterize the basic tone of Christian thought in the first two centuries on the problem of war, peace, and violence. Historians may disagree about what issue predominates, but the central thrust is not seriously debated. The basic tone was one of polarity between Caesar and the God of the Bible.

Idolatry

That polarity between Caesar and God had several dimensions. One was the idolatrous character of Caesar’s empire. Sometimes Caesar commanded people to worship him because he himself or his office was proclaimed divine. Some sacrifices and ceremonies were designed to ascribe to Caesar or to his office the unique qualities of a divine being.

More often, however, the Roman Empire prospered through the worship of many specific gods. Christians were under pressure (sometimes more, sometimes less) to acquiesce in this or that form of idolatry. Idolatry was not linked only to the military, although it was often specifically linked to military exercises. Soldiers in a particular army unit would have had their own cult of devotion to a particular god to whom they were responsible, and who helped them.

The polarity between Caesar and God had ethnic and cultural dimensions. The Jews were a settled and recognized ethnic minority, and how they differed from the wider society was clear. Their rejection of idolatry was centuries old and acceptable to the Romans. The Jews had persisted in negotiating for Yahweh-worship as the condition of their continued separate existence, and they had eventually been granted permission not to worship Caesar—in exchange for giving their political loyalty to Rome, and in exchange for not being too missionary and therefore not troubling the hold of the other gods on the other people subject to the empire. Christians, who picked up the Jews’ heritage of opposition to idolatry, did not stay within that limitation. They became more missionary, and their attack on idolatry was therefore more offensive to the empire.

Sometimes Christians were directly persecuted. Historians do not agree about the extent to which being Christian was in and of itself a civil offense, or whether their punishable offenses were specific things Christians did or did not do because of their faith, such as refusing military service, or not paying certain taxes, or not participating in local community ceremonies. In any case, Christians frequently suffered—sometimes gravely—for being Christians, and as a result Christians came to regard Caesar as an incarnation of evil.

It makes a difference to historians to know whether a Roman policeman or administrator punished Christians for worshiping or following Jesus as such, or for other things Christians did that the Romans did not like. But it might not have made much difference in the Christians’ self-understanding; in either case, they would have tended to think that they were being punished for following Jesus. Yet they may have been punished for breaking a law that did not name Jesus, for something that other people would have been punished for. Most historians think that just to identify oneself as a Christian became a crime later in the empire’s history, as it had not been at first. That distinction is significant on legal grounds, whatever it meant to the Christians themselves.

Apart from wanting to be worshiped, Caesar was proud. Pride is not a virtue for a Christian. Caesar wanted to be a lord, and Jesus had told his followers not to want to be lord. Caesar represented waste and luxury, games and circuses, frivolity and pomp. Between Caesar’s way to be human and a Christian way to be human there was a global difference. Within that global tension there were specific differences in moral rules, but the difference was not just in the rules.

Oaths

One fundamental moral rule that made Christians different from the rest of Caesar’s people was their rejection of the oath. Superficially, a Christian might say: “Jesus taught his followers, ‘Don’t swear,’ and the Epistle of James restated the instruction; we keep all the rules we can, so we will not swear.”

But here again, the refusal has to be taken in a holistic sense, not superficially. The formula of the oath itself usually invoked a pagan deity; it was cultic. Those who swore an oath engaged in a kind of worship: they called on that deity to take charge of their lives, to make them keep their promise and to destroy them if they did not. Swearing an oath was therefore a celebration of a rite and not just a strengthening of one’s word through the use of a verbal formula. Beyond just marking disobedience to Jesus’s command, taking an oath usually meant assenting to a political loyalty and participating in a worship event that bound people to a lord.

Christians are free; they are slaves of God alone. They have no right to transfer their freedom into the hands of another person. The military oath was an oath of allegiance made to another person and thus incompatible with commitments made to God. It was not only because it was a military oath that the oath was rejected. It was also a moral sell-out, a sacrifice of freedom in making someone other than God the master of one’s life. The substance of the oath was thus in its social meaning. It was morally unacceptable, apart from the fact that it addressed the wrong god.

Bloodshed

Another Christian reason for not participating in the Roman military might be characterized this way: Caesar takes life. He sheds blood, and life is sacred. But it is important to avoid the idea that the reason the first Christians were pacifist had only to do with their rigor about bloodshed.

In fact, many nonpacifist historians still make the claim that the early Christians should not be described as pacifist at all.[1] They assert that the Christians rejected military service mostly because of idolatry. It was mostly because of the oath, or because of the persecution, that Christians did not want to be Roman soldiers. The rejection of killing was not determinative.

We have to agree that the pacifism of early Christians did not stand by itself. For every possible reason, Christians stood in a polar relationship to the whole authority structure of the Roman Empire. Their rejection of the shedding of blood was one coherent part of the whole. Speaking hypothetically, if a Roman state had existed in which Caesar had not taken himself for God, and had not told people to worship other gods, and had not put Christians’ friends and relatives in an arena to be eaten by lions, and had not stirred up the crowd in the cult of violence, then Christians would not have rejected the entire Roman authority structure as such.

Early Christians and the state as such

If we ask whether the early Christians rejected the state as such, we cannot answer. There was and is no such thing as a state as such. The state as such is an intellectual construct that is helpful for later purposes, but it is not present in early Christian thought. Therefore we cannot ask that question except hypothetically.

At those times and places where it was possible for early Christians to qualify their polarization with authority structures, they did so and did not feel that they were being unfaithful. By the end of the second century, Christians could and did use the civil courts to define property law—for example, to protect the legal status of a Christian cemetery. Christians did not feel that such involvement was a moral sell-out. Much earlier still, Christians were slaves in high places and did a decent job of household management and running errands for their non-Christian masters, even when their masters had places in the Roman administration.

The dualism was a total dualism, but it was practical and not systematic. The early Christians did not say, “First, the state as such is properly so defined that we can never have anything to do with the state as such. Second, Caesar is a state as such, and therefore we cannot have anything to do with Caesar.” It was the other way around. Practically, the fact of Caesar was a global fact. Idolatry, violence, circuses, public abuse of minorities and enemies, feeding people to the lions for the crowd’s amusement, war, and empire: these were all one package. That package excluded Christians not on systematic grounds but practically.

Even Tertullian, who as a lawyer and a moralist tended to sharpen the polarity and use either/or appeals to exclude the sword, did not base his rejection on a philosophical or systematic dualism dictated by a desire to be consistent. Instead he was serious and honest about the facts and about the way Caesar actually was. Tertullian believed that Christians could be good citizens, and that they could imagine what a good culture and a good law would be. A good Roman Empire would be one that would not persecute Christians, in which they would have their say and their rights, and in which the laws could be judged from their perspective.[2]

So the theoretical concept of a good government without cult and circus—that is, a state as such—would have been thinkable. It would be up to the historians to find it. One might say the idea was there implicitly when Tertullian said, “You would be a better Roman Empire if you did not persecute.” My point, however, remains: this hypothetical state was not a real option that clarifies why the early Christians were pacifists. If a nonidolatrous, nonpersecuting Roman state had existed, and had called Christians to military service, then they would have had to discuss whether they would fight for it. They would still have said no, but they would have been answering a question different from the ones they did answer.

I have stressed the polar opposition of Christ and Caesar. But does that particular opposition mean a total rejection by Christians of every conceivable state? What do we mean by total rejection? Do we mean rejection of states that do not exist? of any possible ideal state? of a possible nonviolent state? We cannot find that rejection in the early church, because there is simply no state as such. Theirs was a total rejection of a real state when it demanded of them: “Worship us!” “Kill for us!” Those are the two main things it asked. How can the historian test the difference between something still more negative, a thoroughly dualistic worldview, and (on the other hand) a readiness to see the state be improved and become capable of improvement? Those were not the available alternatives for early church.

Some people say that as soon as the early Christians used apocalyptic language, they affirmed a sweeping rejection and had no place in their worldview for approval of any social structure. Whether that is so depends on how one reads apocalyptic language. For some, Revelation 13 is apocalyptic because it sees government as a beast, and Romans 13 is more affirmative because it sees government as “under God.” Already in the New Testament the alternative options are present. They are both in the canon, and the debate can go on from there. Whether that difference is there in the canon depends on how one reads both kinds of literature, and how one understands canon.

It is possible to say that the Christians saw Caesar as so diabolical that they could not have imagined how there could be a nondiabolical Caesar. The question remains: Was that a global view of the early community? And was that a theory of all government “as such”?

Further caution about using the first two centuries as a model arises from the fact that military service was not obligatory. For much of the past two centuries in many places in the West, every healthy young man has been asked to do military service. Therefore we tend to think this was always the case, but in fact it has seldom been the case. It was not the case in the Middle Ages, nor was it the case in the early Roman Empire. Seldom was there a draft, except in particular times of crisis. More often, to be a soldier was a privilege. In the Roman Empire in the early centuries of the church’s existence, this privilege was granted only to Roman citizens. Sometimes it was even a privilege one could buy or inherit. A person was proud to pass it on to his son, partly because it meant status and partly because it gave a person the right to exploit others. Jews could not be soldiers; slaves could not be soldiers. These exclusions eliminated many Christians for the first generations. So one cannot take to the first century the question, what should Christians do about the draft? There was no draft. That they became less critical of the state with the passage of time does not mean that these Christians would have been less critical of the draft.

Church, state, and society: Continuity and change

New Testament acceptance of the state in an unbelieving world

The acceptance of the presence of the state was not something Christians evolved into over the centuries. It is there already in Romans 13. It is there when Jesus says, “Give Caesar what is his.” Accepting the idea that the state should exist was therefore not a product of Christians’ becoming less critical, less polarized. From the beginning, they were not in favor of violent revolution. They never proposed an alternative to the Roman state for the Romans, or even for the Jews. They had no non-Roman base from which to have any other vision of how the empire might be run other than by an emperor.[3] They were not revolutionary in the ordinary, modern senses of the word. When they objected to persecution, a part of their argument with the persecutors was always, “We are no danger to your turf. We have not done anything to justify the persecutions you are directing against us. If you were properly informed [here we get the beginning of an ideal notion of government], your decent Roman Empire would not persecute us, because we have done nothing to interfere with the proper thing that the proper state should do.” Despite the polarization, they accepted the presence of Caesar as authorized and disposed of by God in the economy of the unbelieving world.

Shifts beginning in the late second century

We begin to observe a significant slow shift in the latter part of the second century. In the pre-Constantinian age, for the first time theologians are addressing our subject. Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian, the three major voices from this period, all said the same thing with regard to war and military service. They all supported the view described above. They were all pacifists. They all put their pacifism within a global rejection of the Caesar system, which they experienced as diabolical. Nonetheless, a change was under way.

One shift was that some Christians were doing what these church leaders said Christians should not do. Tertullian admitted that there were now some Christians in the army. It was wrong. It was wrong on good grounds, which he cited from the tradition, and he showed no fear of being contradicted. He was contradicted only by people who did not know the tradition or who were being unfaithful to it. We have no record that they ever argued their case.

The church itself was beginning to drift. It still faced persecution once in a while, but not constantly. There were now people who were second-, third-, or fourth-generation Christians who had never really suffered for being Christian. They had not seen their parents or grandparents thrown to lions. They were living in an oppressive society, but it was oppressive to other groups too, and it was a better place to live than some others. Sometimes Roman law even defended Christians against local ethnic discrimination. Therefore they began to be less critical of the state.

Although the theologians in the late second century were pacifist, on other questions their writing became more apologetic. Apologetics in theology is the discipline of commending the faith to people who do not hold it. How does a believer explain to a nonbeliever what it is to believe and why believing is an intelligent thing to do? The apologetes were the people who began, from the second century on, to explain the Christian faith in terms their non-Christian neighbors could understand.

These apologetic writings are a sign that these Christians were beginning to care about the nonbelieving world and about the languages and value systems of unbelievers. The apologetes were trying to explain to people in the heritage of this or that non-Christian religion, or this or that non-Christian philosophy—especially the dignified philosophy of the Greeks—that Christianity is a superior wisdom. They argued that whatever truth there is in Plato, Christianity already had it in Moses. Whatever an intelligent seeker of truth searches for is there in the Christian faith (or the Jewish faith—the Jews were engaged in apologetics too).

Being an apologist meant accepting a degree of identification with surrounding culture. Christians were more at home in the world. They were less Jewish, less pilgrims and strangers. They still did not give in on the oath, on idolatry, or on the sword, but they were beginning to relax their sense of strangeness. They began to say, in a more positive way than before, “What we do is good for Rome.” For example, Origen claims that Christians fight better for the emperor by praying for him than if they were using the sword.

Creeping empire loyalty

By the early fourth century, this sense of loyalty to the empire as “not that bad after all” had grown. Christians still did not kill, swear oaths, or worship Caesar or idols. The church did not yet approve of Christians becoming soldiers, even in peacetime, but the church was moving in that direction. This was the epoch of the Pax Romana, an age of world peace. There were brushfire skirmishes with barbarians around the edge of the empire, but few Christians lived there. Most of the Mediterranean world had not seen war for centuries. Most Roman soldiers were simply bureaucrats. They carried the mail, administered roads, and enforced the laws and the prison system. In the fourth century, much of what soldiers did was not violent, except in the global sense that they were part of the system, or in the political sense that they had the status of officers. Yet they did not kill or persecute anybody; they did not throw anybody to the lions. They were probably even excused from the oath and the ceremonies.

Space opened up for Christians to be less polarized in relation to the authority system without abandoning their firm commitments against certain things—oath, cult, sword. Just before the time of Constantine, the Council of Arles forbade Christians to “throw down their arms”: that is, in peacetime to resign the status of soldier. This injunction did not imply that Christians could ever bear arms to fight. The sword was the symbol of the administrative status that helped run the peaceful Roman society; it was a ceremonial sword. When a soldier wanted to resign, he would go to his superior and throw his sword on the ground. The council at Arles said, “You do not do that in peace time. You should not be a bad administrator. If you are part of it, do not let the peaceful administration of the empire down.” The church did not encourage Christians to try hard to get into the military, but if a person had accepted the role of peacetime civil servant, then he should do it reliably. If that was what a man was doing when he converted to Christianity, he need not forsake it.

Another dimension of this creeping empire loyalty was acceptance of the cultural borders of the empire as the borders of the world. In Luke 2:1, the word for “the whole world”—oikoumene (now the symbol for church unity)—designates the Roman Empire. The decree went out from Caesar that “the whole world” should be taxed. Luke knew that the world was bigger than the Roman Empire, but in time Christians began to think that the world that counted was the cultural world, Caesar’s world. They no longer seriously thought that the barbarians, the Scythians, the Persians, the Ethiopians, were people God loves. Were primitive cultures to be respected? By this time some Christians lived outside the borders of the Roman Empire, to the north, to the east, and to the south. But the church of this period did not deal seriously with that fact. They accepted the Mediterranean-Roman world as the real world. They prayed for Caesar to prevail against the barbarians.

That is not what Romans 13 and 1 Timothy 2 call Christians to do. In these passages, prayer for kings is prayer for internal peace. “Pray for those in authority, for it is the will of God that we should live in peace.” Timothy was not told to pray—as Origen was ready to do—against the barbarians, the threat to the empire at its borders. The first-century Christians prayed for peace in the literal sense, for domestic tranquility within a society that would not persecute. The third-century Christians in the empire prayed for peace in the sense of prosperity for the empire over against the Goths, the Persians, or the Ethiopians. They did so despite the fact that there were Christians in those places by that time.

According to Philippians 4:22, “those of the household of Caesar” joined Paul in sending greetings. Might this phrase refer to the imperial household in Rome itself? Could it refer more broadly to people within the imperial administrative establishment? Does it refer to people who are freely involved as government administrators, or to slaves who had no choice in the matter, or to domestic servants whose household functions had nothing to do with government? We cannot tell. In any case, as slaves, Christians could get drawn into government service, even in Paul’s time. Before long, they were present in government work in disproportionate numbers. They were dependable people; they would not revolt, and they were more likely than some people to tell the truth. A slave-owner tended to trust his Christian servants with responsibility, except perhaps when he had to persecute them because of their refusal to worship any deity but God.

The Christian faith is a missionary faith. Where people in particular positions embraced the faith, it was not because they were recruited for those social slots but because Christian witness reached them there. People are won to a new religion mostly where there is the greatest mobility: conversion appears more in town than in the country, more in the trade classes than in the artisan classes, more among the mobile generation than among older people. Where the greatest social movement is, there the most Christians were to be found. Being “in Caesar’s household” was a good place for a slave or for a free person with no capital to make it economically and professionally, as over against some of the other trades which were more closed, or were structured in hereditary ways, or were linked to the cult.

Our impression that the first three centuries were marked by persecution is true, in the senses that Christians were ready for persecution and that numbers of Christians gave their lives for their faith in bloody ways at times during this period. Yet there were long stretches when they were not persecuted. Persecution happened often enough to keep respect for the martyrs alive, but it did not happen systematically enough to completely take away from third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation Christians the notion that there might be such a thing as a better-informed Caesar who would stop persecuting, or to shake their preference for Rome against the barbarians.

At this time the church did not have formal legal status; a Christian church or religion could not be legally recognized. Yet an association of friends could set up a club or a lodge, or a fraternal association to own a cemetery. This burial association had the right to incorporate and hold property. People who happened to be Christians would form such a funeral cooperative. That funeral cooperative would buy a piece of property in order to have a place to bury their dead, to support one another in that particular legally recognized mutual insurance need. Because they had that land, they could put a building on it. Because the building was there, they would meet in it. Lo and behold, there was a legal Christian church, without any recognition by the government.

Christians began to see themselves, and their neighbors increasingly saw them, as a religion among others. The global polarization was diminishing without the church having given in on refusal to participate in war or the oath, places where their ethical views were stated most firmly. The global polarity was gradually being replaced by a more benign view: Caesar’s world leaves us alone and tolerates us, at least most of the time.

Another aspect of this shift is the awareness that, in ways we have no grounds to scold people for, second-century Christianity was legalistic. Second-century Christian moral thought was superficial. It said, “That’s a sin; don’t do it,” and “That’s a virtue; do it.” There was no intellectual equipment in common culture for a more profound understanding of morality as holistic, personalistic. Legalism has come to be a pejorative term, but let us not be too sure it should be. In the second century, it described a way of dealing with issues in terms of rules: if Christians kept the rules, they did not have to think too deeply about why they kept the rules or whether the rules spoke to all situations. The concern for keeping the rules was not always a part of a wider view of discipleship, fellowship, worship, or hope. They could discuss the rules, could talk about how bad a particular offense was, and for how long offenders were to be put out of church, or whether a given deed was forgivable. In the second century, some had deep struggles about whether Christians could ever be forgiven if they sinned after baptism. Then Christians began to get a little more tolerant, conceding forgiveness once, just once. As they became more indulgent, they became discriminating. Some sins could be forgiven and some could not; some were forgivable under certain circumstances and not under others. This approach did not equip people to be profound social analysts or profound pastors. It dealt with ethical issues in ways that could get stale and shallow.

Shifts in church discipline

The earliest record of soldiers who were Christians dates from about 170 CE. The first ones probably converted while they were in the army and simply stayed in to finish their term of service. Although there was no change in the church’s views about idolatry or killing, there was an acclimating or an acculturation of the church, as a body, as a value system. Nobody approved of their staying in the army, but these soldiers were not excommunicated. The church was getting less rigorous about discipline, so Christians were less ready to excommunicate for this offense than they would have been for some other things. As long as a soldier had not killed and had not burnt incense to Caesar, why punish him for making his living as a road commissioner or a mail carrier or a prison guard? Being in the Roman army was not approved of, but it was not disciplined, much as in Mennonite churches today materialism or pride or remarriage is not approved of and yet not disciplined. The change was not in the stated ethics but in the meaning of membership.

During the wave of persecution around 250 under Emperor Decius, the tradition of polarity was still there as a resource that could be drawn on. Some held that those who lapsed—that is, those who denied their faith under persecution—could not be restored to the church. The first divisions in the church from that time on had to do with whether the people who fell away under persecution could be forgiven.

Mainstream Christianity, called Catholic beginning about the middle of the third century, was represented by the bishop of Rome and the other bishops in fellowship with him. It was on the side of comparatively easy restoration. It still saw denying the faith as bad, but it was a forgivable, pardonable offense. Novatian (and Donatus, who faced similar issues several decades later) did not allow back into the church people who had denied the faith. The bishop of Rome and his colleagues did. The church was beginning to make the case for less moral rigor. While the issue here was not the sword, these debates illustrate again the way the Catholic church was moving away from a radical polarity between Christ and the pagans. Denying the faith when Caesar told a Christian to do so was bad. Yet it was forgivable. In fact, the church that forgave denying the faith, and had regular ways of doing so, was better than one that gave those people too much trouble.[4]

Monasticism

In this context of growing tolerance for apostasy, the concern for rigorous Christian faith began to be refocused in monasticism. Increasingly, there were two kinds of Christians. Some people made special arrangements and developed special structures so that they could live the rigorous life that used to be the obligation of every Christian. This development meant implicitly that ordinary, run-of-the-mill Christians did not have to live with the same moral rigor. The church began to transfer to full-time Christians—those who in order to live faithfully were freed from the duties of making a living and of marriage—the obligation to live on that higher level. This move was the beginning of a trend that continued through the Middle Ages: clergy exemption. Even in the Middle Ages, when war was affirmed as proper and just, the clergy still were not to engage in it.

With time, Christians accepted the distinction of two levels of moral demands: the “counsels” of the gospel, incumbent on the few, and a minimal conformity with the moral requisites for being decent, which were asked of everybody. Yet even to the end of this pre-Constantinian period, Christians were saying the same thing about killing. Lactantius, in the early fourth century, was a tutor of Constantine’s son. He was right in the middle of the establishment. He still said that

when God forbids killing he not only forbids us to commit brigandage, which is not allowed even by the public laws, but he warns [us] that not even those things which are regarded as legal among men are to be done. So it will not be lawful for a just man to serve as a soldier—for justice [i.e., being a righteous person] is his military service—nor to accuse anyone of a capital offense, because it makes no difference whether you kill with a sword or with a word, it is killing itself that is forbidden. So in this commandment of God no exception at all ought to be made to the rule that it is always wrong to kill a man, whom God has wished to be [regarded as] a sacrosanct creature.[5]

Lactantius was in the court, teaching philosophy to Constantine’s son. The morality had not changed, but the context had changed. The dualism was less tense. Christians were becoming prepared for a change in their stance.

Two challenges

Two further elements of challenge concerning the early church come to the surface.[6] We will not attempt to argue them through but only to locate them.

Is there a contradiction between these two statements: (1) nonresistance is founded in the nature of God who, as revealed in Jesus, loves God’s enemies, and (2) history will culminate in God’s vindication of his suffering saints by defeating those who reject God’s righteousness? The latter perspective appears especially in the book of the Apocalypse, where the enemies of God are ultimately destroyed. This portrayal of divine wrath is embarrassing when measured by our understandings of nonviolent and dialogical ways of resolving conflict: is not the whole notion of divine judgment, even if it is not enacted by the saints, counter to the Gospels’ view of God? There is room for development of an understanding of the wrath of God as being compatible with love.[7] Such a modern apology or analogy would, however, take us beyond the task of interpreting the early Christians. They did not have a problem in reconciling a God whose righteousness is ultimately vindicated in history with the claim that the suffering servanthood of Jesus (which was the model for their own lives) is also the fullest revelation of the divine nature.

A second embarrassing specimen in our appropriation of New Testament dualism is the question whether the discipline of a community, in excommunicating a member who rejects the church’s commitments, might be (though nonviolent) a kind of unloving coercion, counter to the vision of the Sermon on the Mount. Especially if one reads the Sermon on the Mount as teaching nonresistance in the most literal sense, is not any moral pressure—even that of preaching and persuasion—a kind of resistance? If our response on these matters were serious, it would go beyond the early centuries. The particular understanding of nonresistance that puts the question this way is more abstract and logically consistent than Jesus should be taken to be, and owes more to Tolstoy than to the New Testament. To unfold that argument would go beyond our present assignment. Therefore I simply record this question as having been raised: is any kind of effective discipline within the believing community already one step along the way toward coerciveness and ultimately toward violence?

The Meaning of the Constantinian Shift

By the label Constantinian we refer less to the man Constantine than to the period, although the man did more than any other person to consummate the change. He was not the only architect of the change; it had begun before him and was not complete until a century after him. It amounted to a fundamental reorientation in the relationship of church and world.

From persecuted to privileged

The last major wave of persecution came at the beginning of the fourth century. Galerius, who ruled between 305 and 311, made one final attempt to stop the Christian movement. In contrast to some earlier persecutions, this time Christians were persecuted because they were Christians and not because of some other law they had disobeyed or some other conformity they had refused. It was now clear that this minority was by its very existence a threat to the empire. Historians think Christians by this time represented about 10 percent of the empire’s population. They were strategically placed, more numerous in the urban centers than in the countryside, and better represented in communications and commercial professions than in others. So the political authorities feared that if Christians ever became the opposition, they could paralyze the state.

This last wave of persecution did not succeed in suppressing the movement. Constantine (who was emperor from 312 to 337) represents an alternative strategy for the empire: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” He does not seem to have undergone a subjective religious conversion, although near the end of his life (in 336), he did receive baptism. He saw that the Christians’ God and God’s people made better allies than the other gods and their people. He allied himself with this significant minority in the empire, and each helped the other. The strategic alliance between these two factions in imperial politics worked. The Christians’ God seemed to help the emperor more than the other gods had. Tolerance of all religions, including Christianity, had been proclaimed by Galerius in 311, and from that time forward the alliance between church and empire advanced.

Constantine convened the Council of Nicea in 325 to unify the Christians and so that Christianity could be maximally effective in uniting the empire. The Christians were divided on an important but abstract theological question, the Trinity. Constantine called himself the bishop of the bishops. He applied to the religious structure of the church his pagan assumptions about the place of priests in the empire. Just as priests of other religions had been subject to Caesar, so now Christian priests and bishops were under the emperor. Constantine therefore assumed the right to convene the Christians to settle their disputes about the Trinity. He and later emperors vacillated about which side to take in the Trinitarian controversies, because it was not clear which side was better for the empire. Ultimately, Constantine, who was not yet baptized, had the decisive voice in shaping the conclusions of the Council of Nicea on the question of the Trinity. The crucial phrasing of the creed issued by the council was determined by Constantine himself, who attended the major sessions.

After Constantine, there was only one non-Christian Roman emperor, Julian, and he could not reverse the movement. The empire had become Christian, and Christians were now favored in the army and as public servants. As a result, another ethic emerged. Christians needed a new kind of morality, one appropriate to officials and people in office. It would not be an ethic for all people or all citizens, but it would be a way for people in specific offices to behave. Because Christianity did not have any sources suited to creating such an ethic, it had to be developed by thinkers who used sources they borrowed from the Roman heritage, especially from Cicero, a Roman moral philosopher. Ambrose and his disciple Augustine worked Cicero’s material into an ethic for Christian political officials.

The churches regarded this shift as a triumph, but to make their victory effective they had to use the world’s standard for the ethics of Christians in office. That is an extension of the duality that we saw developing in the late pre-Constantinian thinkers, who began to be pro-empire, not global, in their outlook. They began to believe that God does some things through the emperor and that God does other things through Christians. God keeps one kind of peace through the emperor and creates other kinds of peace through Christians; the two complement each other. When that duality is in place, that ghetto vision of the necessity of civil authority in wider society, then Christians are prepared to say that when Caesar converts to Christianity, God will use him as a converted Caesar—not to be a king like Jesus but to be a ruler who favors the Christians.

The last phase of the Constantinian shift came well after Constantine. Theodosius became emperor in 379 and finished the legal business of making the shift. He defined how the church had state support. In 380, an edict defined Catholicism as Trinitarian believers in communion with the bishops of Rome and Alexandria. The Council of Constantinople in 381 made it clear that it was this Catholic church, not other Christian bodies such as Arianism and Donatism, that had the support of the state. In 392, Theodosius issued an edict that closed pagan temples. It was not yet a crime to be a pagan. Individual non-Christians were not persecuted for being non-Christian. Philosophical schools continued, but public non-Christian worship was forbidden at this time.

From 399 onward, Augustine wrote treatises against the Donatists, a large group of North African Christians. They wanted a more rigorous morality and especially challenged the authority of bishops who had denied the faith in time of persecution. Augustine said that those who had separated themselves from the church, such as the Donatists, should be forced back in. Jesus’s words, “Compel them to come in,”[1] provided a warrant for imposing uniformity on the church. Augustine thought this action was an exception, out on the edge of Christian ethics, but he believed the state had a duty to force dissenting Christians back into the fellowship. In 405, after a series of church councils and in response to the advocacy of Augustine, an imperial edict identified the Donatists as heretics, confiscated their property, and banned their meetings.

This action completed the transition from the persecution of Christians by Rome to the imperial imposition of one Christian norm on all citizens. In 436, the army excluded non-Christians. People were still free to be non-Christians, but they suffered civil disadvantages and could have no public worship.

Theological and ecclesiological meanings of the shift

What matters most about this shift is a new view of the meaning of history that emerges with it. That change is deeper than the change in ethics. In the high Middle Ages, critics of this shift used the phrase “fall of the church” for this event. These critics did not invent the idea that Constantine was the turning point; that was the orthodox reading of church history. It was the dominant, official reading of church history that Constantine signaled a fundamental shift. What the radicals of the Middle Ages did was stand this evaluation on its head. Instead of seeing it as a victory for God and the church, they saw it as a defeat.

Since the early Middle Ages, the legend that reflected the new reading of history described a meeting of Pope Sylvester and Emperor Constantine, in which they agreed: “We are going to run the empire this way: one of us will do the church thing, and the other will do the state thing, and we will support each other.” In the medieval period, this agreement defined Christendom. It encompassed much more than the issue of violence; what was at stake were the integrity of church government and religious liberty, the civil freedom not to be Christian. It was more than a question of the church and ethics. Church government was in the hands of the civil government. There were still bishops, but the man who bore the sword—not ecclesiastical concerns—determined who became a bishop. This reality became the norm from that time onward.[2]

Some related aspects of the shift

Other matters are at stake, which we list here without dealing with them in depth.

Baptism. Because of this new relationship of church and world, becoming a Christian was no longer a voluntary decision. Historians debate about when people started baptizing babies; from this time on, though, it was consistent to baptize babies and not to leave anybody unbaptized. However the practice of infant baptism began, at this point it was generalized. From then on, there was no such thing as voluntary membership in a Christian community.

Rituals. Other rituals in church life became important. In order to make things easy for the 90 percent of the population who had not been Christian before Constantine, the church took in as much as possible of what the non-Christians had celebrated before. Christmas is one of the best symbols of this policy of incorporating pagan celebrations. Previously, Christmas had not been celebrated in the church; it was introduced in the age of Constantine. Likewise, the celebration of the Passion and Easter became fused with spring fertility celebrations.

Holy places and the cult of the dead. Holy places and the cult of the dead were integrated as other aspects of the policy that attempted to help those who had not been Christian to accept Christianity as the religion of the culture and the empire rather than as a minority movement.

The standard Protestant agenda and the shift

We should list another related set of questions, which might be called the standard Protestant agenda, things to which Calvin and Luther and others objected. These concerns are not automatically results of what Constantine did, but they correlate with the shift in the meaning of the church. For one thing, the shift in the place of religious ceremony is associated with the fact that people have a less profound understanding of the Jesus movement they have joined. For another, the papacy as the focus of hierarchy in church government, to which Protestantism objected, is an unfolding of Constantinian logic. It grew normally through the image of the pope and emperor as the two heads of Christian civilization. Even the question of the relationship of church authority and scriptural authority, a third item in the standard Protestant agenda, arose because Christians had to step out of the ethic and sociology of early Christianity and make sense of an ongoing evolution, which they believed God had led them into.

God’s way of working in history

There is a still deeper level of change. This is the level at which the shift matters most: how does God work in history?

New Testament understandings. According to the New Testament witness, God works in history on two distinguishable levels.

The church is a visible, confessing community. Its celebration is visible. Its confession is public. Its lifestyle differs from that of its neighbors, and the neighbors know it. This voluntary minority body is an organ of the work of God in history. People know where to go to find the church; they know what Christians do and how they differ from those who are not believers.

God also works invisibly to govern the world, through the fact that the risen Christ is at the right hand of the Father. “Sitting at the right hand” of the ruler is ancient language identifying the function of the prime minister, the one who makes the kingdom run. The risen Christ at the right hand of the Father governs the universe. Christians cannot always see how God is ruling the world, especially in times of persecution. They cannot immediately see that events in secular history or in cultural history have been providentially governed so that things come out in a certain way, but the early church confesses a hidden meaning and a meaning that believers can know sometimes through the prophets, and sometimes through experience and discernment. Thus the risen Lord uses the powers, including the economic and political powers, despite themselves, for his hidden purposes.

In short, New Testament Christians knew for a fact that God uses the church for ministries of proclamation, service, and fellowship, but they had to take it on faith that God governs the world.

Eusebius’s understandings. After Constantine, this faith fundamentally changed. Eusebius and Augustine, the two great minds of the fourth and early fifth centuries, worked out an alternative: God governs history through Constantine. In their interpretation, what Constantine did went far beyond granting Christians religious liberty. More profoundly, Constantine became for Eusebius a kind of savior, bishop, and theologian. Eusebius made the empire into the church, and the barbarian outsider became the infidel, the nonbeliever. In this visible order of God’s work in history, it was only fitting that there not be liberty for non-Christians or even for dissenting Christians.

Ecclesiological shift

With the Constantinian shift, the church itself was redefined. The true church was now invisible. The visible church was everybody, because everybody was baptized (except a few Jews, who did not count). But Augustine, who articulated the new dominant perspective, knew that most of those baptized were not truly elect in the objective sense. They were not the ones that God in his sovereignty had predestined for eternal salvation. Augustine also knew that most baptized people were not true believers in the subjective sense. In the depths of their hearts, they were not saved. They did not trust God for their salvation. They did not love their neighbors. Augustine knew this a priori because election is God’s secret, because what is in people’s hearts is secret, and because most people are hypocrites. And Augustine knew it objectively too because of the way people act: most of them could not be elect, most could not be believers. Augustine thought perhaps 5 percent would be saved, either from God’s perspective or from the subjective perspective, but he contended that no one could be sure which 5 percent constituted the body of the elect.

In Augustine’s view, it is pastorally preferable to have all insincere believers and hypocrites in the church. And because he was a neoplatonist, Augustine was philosophically inclined to resolve problems by taking refuge in dualities and invisibility. Things that are difficult to account for could be explained as existing on another level. What one sees in the visible church need not correspond to what one believes is ultimately real. In the visible church, people do not have to be elect; after all, how would we know whether they were elect? Members of the visible church need not be objectively sincere; after all, how would we know whether their faith was authentic? What is necessary is conformity. It is better to have a church in which everybody conforms, even though 95 percent of them are not believers, than to try to limit church membership to true believers. This approach enables the unidentifiable 5 percent who are true believers to find salvation, and the rest are pressured into at least being decent.

After the Constantinian shift, the true church does not consist of all who are baptized. Where does one find the church, then? One looks first of all at the priests, who are authorized by other priests—in a sequence of ordinations coming down from Jesus through the bishops—to perform the sacraments in which the presence of God is most clear. Even there God’s presence is not guaranteed, yet that is the place one has to look. That is the most valid place to find the visible church, but of course the priesthood is only a few people, and not all of them are faithful. Their sacraments are valid, but the people who administer them need not be good men. The marks of the validity of the visible church are the marks that apply not to the congregation but to the officials, to those qualified to celebrate the Eucharist. Yet even this visible sacramental priesthood has no true validity. A bishop does not have to be a true believer or one of the elect either. How would we know whether he was elect? Bishops can be hypocrites like anyone else. This neoplatonic dualism is thorough and determines that identifying the elect is not something we can handle, and therefore we are free to describe visible Christianity in non–New Testament ways.

In summary: before Constantine, Christians knew as a fact of experience that there was a church, and they had to take it on faith that God governs history. After Constantine, Christians knew for a fact that God governs history (Constantine was one of their number, after all), but they had to take it on faith that there is a church. That is the shift in the meaning of salvation history for which Constantine is the symbol. That is the philosophical meaning of the Middle Ages, in which the eschatology of the New Testament has been turned upside down.

Merging pagan philosophy with biblical wisdom

What resources entered into the new ethic that was needed now that the church’s circumstances had changed? Here I must move more rapidly than we might if we were studying the history for its own sake.

Christian eschatology merged with the classical vision of peace as a golden age.[3] There were Greek, Roman, and earlier visions of a past golden age which would come again, or of peace as a conceivable human fulfillment although it is not yet present. This pagan vision of classical Greek or Roman peace merged with Christian eschatology. The idea of Rome’s peace, the tranquility of an efficient empire, merged with the Hebrew prophets’ vision of Jerusalem as the center from which God’s blessing would go out for all people. Constantine’s historian, Eusebius, formulated this claim using the language of the Christian millennium.

Behind this fusion, secular philosophy and biblical wisdom merged. The most congenial form of that merger was neoplatonism. This philosophy had its own way of identifying a duality between the real and the less real, between the inner and the outer, the upper and lower, the ideal and concrete. That dualism was useful in explaining the tensions between the empirical church and the scriptural vision. Bainton deals with this dualism, which said, “We cannot be perfect in this world. What counts is the inner attitude.”[4] This was not a thoroughgoing dualism; people did continue to care about the world. But the dualism cut the nerve of the critique, taken straight from the prophets or Jesus, of this post-Constantinian social vision.

We could go to some depths in watching how this dualism worked to reconceive everything: what it means to believe, what it means to be church, what it means to be human. Augustine’s two cities, the city of God and the earthly city, represent the classical philosophical statement of his effort to reshuffle things. Sometimes the two cities actually mean two hierarchies. Sometimes they mean two churches, because the visible church is part of the earthly city. Sometimes the earthly city is simply evil and takes into itself the memories of the previous empire: persecution, idolatry, and all kinds of vices. Other times it is neutral and can be used for good, if the ruler is Christian. The same was true of pagan wisdom as well as pagan ethics: they could be evil, or neutral and usable for good. The earthly city is less important than the heavenly city, but it is in charge, so on earth it has a right to coerce and kill for self-preservation. The duality can be used to make sense of the fact that in this new post-Constantinian era what was desirable was an inclusive church, without prophetic, critical, or rough edges, admitting but not justifying its sinfulness.

God is triumphant on both levels, as before, but the way the levels interact is so different that the culture gap between Augustine and his predecessors cannot be bridged. Augustine built a new world, a new set of general concepts, and a new way of reasoning that adjusted to a whole new vision of the place of God in history and merged Christian tradition with common sense.

Common sense in modern American English sometimes means a source of knowledge used in an analogy to the five senses, as a way to perceive something; like “horse sense,” it may identify an ability to somehow know how things are. The original Latin and sociological meaning of common sense, however, was the common sentiment, what or how everybody thinks, the assumptions of a particular culture. Common sense originally was not one of the senses, the way I know something by smell or by sight, or by horse sense; it was not an organ of knowledge. Common sense meant consensus, what everybody thinks.

Augustine’s thought is a consensus kind of moral thought. It does not radically ask, do you get that from the Bible? Can you get that from revelation? It does not ask, can you get that from Plato? It just asks, does that make sense to all of us? Is that part of our cultural agreement? It includes Old Testament theocracy, but it doesn’t get the Hebrew story straight. Old Testament theocracy was ruled by special revelation, and was radically anti-idolatry and antipluralistic. Augustine’s thought merges New Testament reconciliation language with classical peace language and Roman order language, as if they were all the same thing. Rome, nature, and providence are all seen as essentially the same. Religion celebrates the unity of everything and the way things are.

In the later effort to try to understand this kind of system in terms of comparative religion, some people used the synthetic term ontocracy. Things are ruled by the way they are. The way they are is the way God wants them. God is the God of the way things are, the God of nature. So if Caesar is ruler, that is what God wants. If the world is Christian, that is the way it should be. This kind of commonsense logic is what underlies the just war system. It will take us some time to unfold it, because it is not derived from any one source. It does not come from any one prophet or thinker; it is just the common deposit of the common sense of society.

All this has profound implications for Christian thought about war, including the newly emerging standard view, the just war theory.

The unsystematic nature of just war theory

Is the just war system a system? It clearly did not begin as a system, in the sense of a group of thoughts that hang together. It began as a style or a stance. We must compile from bits and pieces the various elements of this total set of notions, and then figure out whether they fit together. Bainton compiled them from Augustine. It is striking that Bainton had to compile just war thought from snatches—here a statement, there a statement. We must try to make sense out of it and fit it together, but early Christian just war thinkers did not start by fitting it together. Nor did they start by borrowing from just one source. Just war is assumed to be a coherent whole, but it is not presented as such. It was not until Thomas Aquinas, half a millennium later, that a degree of system emerged. Even Thomas’s criteria are the kind of list found in a dictionary or an encyclopedia. He just put things in chapters rather than deriving everything from one source. It was not until the sixteenth century that a few writers tried to make a coherent intellectual system out of it. Until our time, there was no formal operational statement of how the just war theory should work.

This is an important observation. The just war position has been the official position of mainstream Christianity since Constantine, yet it has never been stated by mainstream Christians in a way that would enable anyone to hold them accountable for obeying it. We cannot look up the origins of the doctrine and find a normative statement by a pope or a Catholic theologian in the Middle Ages and say, “This has been defined now, so that we can look at what you nonpacifists did in the War of 1812, or what you did in the Thirty Years’ War, to see whether you did what you said you believed in.” We cannot do that. There is not any standard statement of the just war theory to which any nonpacifist can be held accountable.

So we have to proceed by induction. We have to gather—out of a mass of various kinds of statements, various kinds of literature, and various experiences—elements among which we will seek to find some kind of logic. We do this to make an inductive reconstruction of the common logical, sociological, and theological assumptions of the culture in which this kind of doctrine could be accepted as typical, normative, proper, and theological. We have to do that in the face of all the doubts that must be raised about the ability of any historical survey, after the fact, to make sense of things that were happening.

The assumptions of natural law

First of all, what are the theological and the logical assumptions underlying this just war theory? What is the source of moral knowledge? I said before it was common sense, meaning essentially that everybody reasons that way. But now let’s spell that out: what does that mean?

First, the source of moral knowledge obviously is other than Jesus in the New Testament in the material sense, because just war theory tells us to do things that Jesus in the New Testament did not tell us to do.

Second, the source of moral knowledge is other than Jesus in the formal sense, because we get this information by following another path than that of Jesus or the New Testament. We get it from Cicero, or we get it from watching our neighbors, or we get it from instinctive reactions, or whatever it is that develops this sense of propriety we call common sense.

We do not get just war theory from Jesus (form), and what it tells us to do is not what Jesus tells us to do (content).

Meaning of nature or natural

What theological claims have to be made when Christians reason this way? One traditional label for this approach is natural theology or natural law (although that label can be used in many ways). Natural here refers to the sense that nature, human nature, can be observed, and that we can find proof there for a certain way of reasoning. If we just look around, we will see that every culture has the notion that violence has to be justified, and that it can be justified by using criteria like the criteria of the traditional theory. So nature is the source.

In natural law, nature is also the content. The way things are is the way God wants them to be—it reflects their essence. We have the seasons, the course of history, and the nation. Any old fool knows what a nation is: just look, that is what it is. Is it a revelation of what it should be? A yes answer is typical of the natural law conception of knowledge. We already have knowledge by nature; therefore we cannot look at it deeply. Its validity consists in the fact that its validity is not questioned. Everybody knows that it is a common sentiment.

Nature, theological method, and revelation

The general question of nature as revelation leads us onto an important detour. When somebody says, “This is the nature of a thing,” what questions does this statement raise?

There are questions of theological method. Can we agree on what nature teaches? Can different people have different views? Or can we sustain the belief that nature teaches just one thing only as long as we are in a small enough culture that we simply do not meet people who think otherwise? The apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11 that nature teaches that women ought to have long hair. What does he mean by nature in that context? He does not mean that the anatomy of the hair follicle is such that in females the body is able to make long strands of hair and in males it is not. He is not talking biology. He is talking about a social custom or culture, in which a decent woman let her hair grow and a respectable man did not. But other cultures have different practices. In Paul’s argument then, nature refers to the cultural consensus of that group of people. Contra people who do natural theology, it is not at all clear that nature is accessible, that we can know it for sure or that it says these specific things.

Even if natural theology were sure at these two points—is it accessible, and does it say that?—there would still be a third question: what authority does it have over against the prophets or over against Sinai? What if nature, all nature, were fallen, so that if we go and look at it, it is a mess? Does that mean that God wants a mess? Does that mean that being messy is an imperative? What if our minds were so fallen and warped that, even if nature were true, we could not see it straight? Does God still want us to do what we think we see? These are sketchy samples of the method problems built into the ethics of common sense, and the debates about them are ancient and abundantly documented. We would have to deal with them in depth, and with other methods and tools, if we were to debate the challenge of natural law.

There is one classic New Testament text on the subject, Romans 2:14–16, which says that there may be Gentiles who by nature may fulfill the works of the law. Doesn’t it say that there is such a thing as nature, whereby outside of the covenant, outside of Moses and Jesus, there is a valid knowledge of the law and morality? Maybe. That is the best text there is on the subject and it is important to many people.

But several points can be made about this text. First, Paul does not say that most Gentiles or average Gentiles do the works of the law. The main thrust of this text is that they do not. They are condemned by the knowledge they have of the law they do not obey. “If some do keep the law, then they may be approved by their consciences” is a hypothetical statement.

Second, Paul does not say people know by nature a law that is different from what we know by revelation. He says they know by nature the same law we know by revelation. Gentiles know naturally that they should do the same works that we know from Moses that we should do. Formally, that is the reverse of the function given to natural theology when it calls for action different from what Jesus commands. If we use this passage of Paul to say there is natural knowledge that some can have apart from Moses or Jesus, we still cannot use it to say that there is a natural knowledge against the teaching of Jesus, Moses, or the prophets. Yet this is precisely what the doctrine of natural law does do.

The third doubt about Romans 2:14 is more embarrassing. By Gentiles, Paul probably does not mean the heathen. He probably means Gentile believers. At least that is what two New Testament scholars, Markus Barth and Clarence Bauman, think.[5] In any case, Paul is not saying that a valid knowledge of the will of God exists independent of and different from the knowledge we have in Moses and Jesus. So there is no support in this text for the notion of natural revelation, or the true nature of a moral obligation, in which the duty to run the government gives us a reason to disobey Jesus.

Other kinds of commonsense moral reasoning

Common sense claims that, apart from being careful or conscientious about the Bible and Jesus, there are ways to make moral choices that do not have to be derived from long arguments and that sometimes do make sense. Just war is not the only kind of commonsense reasoning. There are other kinds of commonsense reasoning, where one has to agree, after one has heard an argument, but one can’t quite explain why that argument is valid.

One form of commonsense reasoning is internal coherence. We claim to be doing something; is that what we are really doing? We claim to be freeing Vietnam, but are we really freeing Vietnam? We claim to be defending the free world; is the world we are defending free? This is not New Testament ethics, nor does it contradict the New Testament. These are good questions, commonsense questions, that are fitting to ask. To see why these questions are fitting would take us beyond our topic into philosophy, but let us just recognize the usefulness of this kind of commonsense reasoning.

Another kind of commonsense reasoning is “turn about is fair play”: put yourself on the other side and see how you reason. One example from the Vietnam experience tried to get Americans to imagine how they would feel if the Chinese occupied the southern half of Mexico and ruled it through a small clique of refugees from the northern half of Mexico, then bombed the northern half with Chinese airplanes because the United States was helping the northern half. This exercise reverses the Vietnam relationship to try to make sense of it. Why that should be impressive, why that should be convincing, a logician would need to explain, but it is one way we can and do argue. One of my children once said, “Wait until I’m big and you’re little.” We are taught to reason that way. We assume that moral relationships are somehow reversible and should be symmetrical.

Another sample of commonsense argument is the classic noblesse oblige: nobility obligates. If we claim special dignity, then we have to honor our claim. If we claim moral superiority, we have to be judged by a higher standard. If Marxists, materialists, or atheists use terror, that is honest. If we are not Marxists, materialists, or atheists, then we do not have the right to do what they do. That was also a usable argument in the Vietnam situation.

The above is sufficient to illustrate the point that there are other forms of commonsense reasoning, the philosophical weight of which one would have to debate. Just war is only one specimen, but it is the one to which we properly give attention here.

Constantinian assumptions behind development of just war

What was the cultural context of the just war as it developed? In what situation could it properly fit? It can apply only in Christendom, that is, in the Constantinian situation. One way to outline the new elements is to ask what would have surprised Tertullian about just war. What is new about the situation that made this ethic reasonable?

What if Caesar did it? Ethical guidance for the emperor

First, we have to give Christian guidance to the prince or emperor. We have to give him Christian guidance because he is a Christian. The ruler of the world is one of us. Not only is he one of us, but he is an important one of us. Not only is he one of us, but he will listen and he needs our guidance. We have to guide him, because if we tell him that one use of violence is justifiable and another use of violence is not, he will listen.

We cannot tell the ruler to be like Jesus or do what Jesus said. We cannot give the emperor the guidance of a pre-Constantine ethic, because that will not work. Why not? Because he could not stay in power, and staying in power is necessary. We want him to stay in power, because we would rather have him in power than one of the others. A ruler does, after all, what needs to be done. God wants him to stay in power, to rule the world, even if to stay in power means accepting a non-Jesus ethic. It is better that the governing be done by one of us than by somebody who is not one of us.

The meaning of ethics is how it works itself out when it is implemented. When we stop deriving our ethics from Moses and Jesus, the question whether a thing is right or wrong becomes the same question as whether its implementation as state policy will produce good results. We no longer ask about an act, is it like Jesus? Does it break the law? Does it express the inclination of the heart of a true believer? We ask, what if the president did this? What if everybody did this? Those are two different kinds of reasoning, but we need both from Constantine on. Everybody is Christian, including the ruler. We ask, what if everybody did it? What if the people in power did it?

So when one asks what it would mean, whether it would work in our society, to act according to nonresistant conviction, the test is not whether some poor person or someone without political power can act that way but whether Henry Kissinger or some other person in power could act in that way. If the person in power acts this way, how does it work? What would happen? That is the level on which to ask ethics questions. That is a level on which Tertullian could not have conceived of asking moral questions. Now Christians must be able to govern the world successfully, and the standard of morality has to be one that can be used to do that.

This way of reasoning not only assumes that the good guy should rule the world; it assumes that the world can be ruled. It assumes that if Caesar governs the world according to our Romanized Christian ethics, he will win. The good guys win, because God is on their side. We know Constantine is a good guy because God helped him win. This assumption that the good guys win is historically doubtful, of course. If we step back and read history, it is not clear that the good guys always win. If we step back and read the Old or New Testament, it is not clear that the good guys always win. But ever since Constantine, we know that the good guys win. In fact, winning is the way we know who the good guys are. We must try to reach back to the fourth century to understand how Constantine’s victories in certain battles convinced Christians that the God of the Hebrews was on the side not only of the Roman Empire, but of this particular pretender to the Roman throne.[6]

We can hardly imagine how deep a reorientation in the meaning of history was involved when it became obvious, because of the victory of Constantine, that the God of Moses is on the side of the people who triumph. This reorientation means that we derive our ethics from the imperative to make history come out right through our actions. God has no way to make history come out right except through our running it, so it is God’s responsibility, not ours, when we change our ethics in order to help God win. We are unselfish in the matter. We are just helping God run God’s world. That is the first new assumption about the logic of ethics. We have to enable Caesar, who is our man, to win.

What if everyone did it? Ethical guidance for ordinary people

Second, we need to guide the common, ordinary person—not heroes. We need to have an ethical guide that is possible, not heroic. The first question was, what if Caesar did it? The second is, what if everyone did it?

The morality of the early generations of Christians was heroic. They were ready to be thrown to the lions. People did not become Christians unless they were willing to risk martyrdom. The meaning of martyrdom, the place of the martyrs in the prayers of the church, was such that a lot of people were ready for martyrdom.

The presupposition was conversion, a reorientation of all life. The assumption people made on joining the church in the first century was they would take on a whole new set of obligations and a new definition of what it means to do the will of God. Apart from the scriptures and the community, people did not know what it means to serve God. Converts had to learn it. Catechumens turned their lives around. They spent years at it, because it took a long time to get ready for baptism. The church had to be sure that catechumens knew how to believe and how to manage their Christian life. They had to accept the authority of Jesus and the New Testament and the teachers of the church, as people who told them how different they had to be. Catechumens had to enter into a discipline that was not for everybody, in which sacrifice made sense. They saw discipleship as hard by definition, as heroic.

But starting in the fourth century, the church tried to make it easy for people to get in. They tried to decrease the danger of leaving pockets of unbaptized paganism by taking into the church aspects of pagan culture, such as Easter bunnies and Christmas trees. The church could not ask heroism of all these newly Christianized people: “They mean well. We cannot ask everybody to convert; only God can do that. We cannot tell which people are unconverted; only God knows that. We do not want to be uncharitable or untactful. We can’t have heroic ethical demands any longer. We have to have an ethic for everyone.”

Some people will still be called to more than a minimalist ethic. We need them, and we recognize them. Accredited minority groups in emerging monasticism still respond to the heroic vision. This heroic vision is different from the New Testament’s call to total discipleship, because of the symbiosis through which it relates to the mainstream. The monks recognize the others as Christian, and the others recognize the monks as better Christians. But the vision is still there. It is a testimony to the memory of the radical movement of the past. Those people, the monks and other “religious,” are not expected to run the world. We do that for them. They are free to be heroic and culturally independent, as reminders of our good conscience and our bad conscience.

Christianity becomes an aspect of mainstream culture

In this new relationship to the power structure and to history, the cultural function of religion changed. In this era the word religion is adopted to describe Christianity, which previously did not see itself as one of the religions. Religion is what holds a society together. A religious section or compartment is a necessary function in any culture. Some people do religion, other people do farming, and still others do politicking. Religion is a segment of society; its function is to hold things together, giving legitimacy and a sense of divine sanction to the rest. It is no longer a source of critique, condemnation, or radical change. It is an activity carried on by people who have their assured place in society. When Christianity becomes established, it consciously incorporates pre-Christian and non-Christian content. It is no embarrassment that some people bring into the church their pagan legal and moral thought, drawn more from Cicero than from the New Testament. This approach is a missionary method. Christians are no longer an alternative community; they are the ongoing mainstream of God’s public culture. In this process, mainstream political standards are baptized along with the population as a whole.

Next, we now assume that culture is unified. We assume consensus. This assumption could be challenged logically, but after Constantine, we do not challenge it logically. We assume that any intelligent person will agree with what we say. This assumption will be more evident as we go down the just war criteria list. Many of the just war criteria only make sense if we assume a consensus on what the terms mean. For example, the doctrine of proportionality warns us that the evil done in a just war must be less than the evil prevented. How do you weigh an evil against an evil? We are not told. It is just assumed that anybody knows that this evil is greater than that evil, though one of them may be human lives and the other one may be rights. Even when weighing things that are not commensurable, the assumption is made that, in any given situation, it is possible to calculate the various evils on the same scale.

Several places in the just war outline say that Christians may fight “only if they can do it without sinning.” But how does someone know that? Which sins cannot be committed? Obviously, the sin of killing is not avoidable in a just war, but there are sins that are avoidable. Different definitions of what is permissible and what is not are operative. One good example is that lying is always a sin. Christians may kill in a just war, but they must not lie. They may keep another party from being fully informed. They can let him deceive himself or remain ignorant, or they may ambush him, but they may not tell him an untruth. That would be sin. This example from Thomas Aquinas demonstrates that Thomas assumes that moral reasoning about truth telling goes on as before. At the same time, it has been abandoned about killing.

The same question-begging quality, this taking things for granted, applies elsewhere in just war reasoning. What is a last resort? What authority is a legitimate authority? Those are real questions. If just war theory is to work, they are crucial. Why aren’t they dealt with seriously? Because the theory assumes a unified culture. It assumes that everybody has the same education and values, and therefore the terms need no formal definitions. We do not have anybody from Timbuktu, Calcutta, or Hudson Bay listening in on our conversation and asking us to explain. We are in Christian Europe, with one basic cultural synthesis guiding us.

What if there had been a stronger faith?

As we look back over the “Constantinian reversal,” with all that we now see it meant, it is evident that a step in the argument was omitted at one point in the standard descriptive analysis. As we watched Christian thought adjust to the presence of Caesar in the church, the reasoning went, “Of course we cannot ask Caesar to live like a Christian”—that is, as the earlier Christians had thought Jesus wanted their pattern of life to be. That was self-evident at the time. But a critical observer, watching the logic of the argument without being in the situation, could ask why that should be. If God is providentially in charge of history, though that has not hitherto been visible, would not that divine sovereignty be able to bless the believing obedience of a Caesar who took the risk of faith like any other believer—but from his position of relative power—and loved his enemies and did justice? Does the argument need to grant that if a Caesar had done so, in the context of authentic faith, the results would have been bad? What would have counted as bad results in that case?

This question prefigures debates that will stretch all the way to the present. From the time of Constantine to that of Michael Sattler, including the witness of Petr Chelčický, people would assume that what it takes to be a Caesar is firmly defined by nature as a lifestyle and a set of moral assumptions counter to the gospel. The choice then, as it was stated by Chelčický and Sattler, is that Christians simply cannot be rulers. They can withdraw or be thrown out.

It would, however, be logically possible to argue the other way around. One could say that Caesar would be just as free as anyone else to take risks in faith. In fact, in an authentically imperial society, where there is respect for monarchy, where there is not a theory calling for the king to be ousted by a revolution, and where a pattern of frequent assassination or usurpation has not been established, Caesar would be free (for a while) to bring to bear on the exercise of his office the ordinary meaning of the Christian faith. It might happen that his enemies would triumph over him, but that happens to rulers anyway. It might happen that he would have to suffer, or not stay in office all his life, but that too happens to rulers anyway, and it is something that Christians are supposed to be ready for anyway. It might happen that he will be killed: but most Caesars are killed anyway. It might happen that some of his followers would have to suffer; but emperors and kings are accustomed to asking people to suffer for them.

If the view were still authentically alive—a view held by the earlier Christians and still repeated by the theologians in the age of Constantine—that God blesses those who serve him, it is possible that Caesars in some times and in some places might have done good, might have discovered creative social alternatives, might have solved problems, and might have loved enemies and fostered justice, despite the risks noted above. A systematic pessimism—denying that anything like that could ever have been achieved if Constantine had taken on the substance of Christian discipleship rather than only the name and baptism—denies not only the rhetoric of Christian belief in providence but also the actual lessons of modern social experience, in which there has been at least some progress in the direction of greater humanity and justice. In the development of Christian thought, we shall have to wait for the incomplete thoughts of Menno Simons, and then later for the more ambitious visions of the Puritans, before we can see what it would mean to try to put to the Christian sovereign the challenge of serious Christian discipleship.

The Logic of the Just War Tradition

We now move to an exposition of the just war tradition in its mainstream form.[1] To lay it out, we must telescope two kinds of presentation. Part of this tradition’s identity is understandable only if we see it evolving in history. On the other hand, it claims to represent a systematic way of looking at criteria for moral decisions. This claim is best understood if the element of change over time is minimized and the various criteria are listed in logical order.

Before proceeding to the actual description of the system, I need to make prefatory comments on reading history fairly and taking the just war tradition seriously.

Reading history fairly

As we watch Christians moving into thought patterns different from those they followed earlier, we need to engage in some self-criticism about how we criticize others. This undertaking extends the discussion at the end of chapter 1, on the perspective with which we do historical analysis.

It might be unfair to the early just war thinkers to state their position as I did, in terms of its logical assumptions, when those men merely intended to read their Bible as faithful Christians, just as people in earlier centuries had done. So what is the relation between our seeing that positions change over the years and the self-understanding of the actors in the story, who may not have perceived change at the same points or in the same degree?

In the last chapter, we described the change in the social situation of the churches and the importance of the epistemology of common sense or natural insight that characterized the basic logic of the new arrangement. We did not comment on the way Constantine or the Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries interpreted the Bible. Of course, Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries continued to read the Bible. They read their Bibles in view of the importance of the Constantinian shift for the fulfillment of salvation history. They also read their Bibles in view of the new commonsense epistemology, which assumed that biblical truth and ordinary human wisdom tend to coincide. Precisely because these assumptions were self-evident to them, they did not have to go to their Bibles to justify the Constantinian shift. Nor did their view of natural revelation need justification. It never occurred to them to go to their Bibles to justify abandoning a view of violence and the state that Christians had held for centuries. Our historical hindsight observes a change in ethical logic, but no thinker at the time was aware of any need to explain this shift. What they explained was the peculiar providential event of Caesar’s having come to the side of the church. By Augustine’s time, awareness was growing that even this important new arrangement was not yet the victory of God’s causes.

The place of hindsight—describing important changes and differing with the actors in the story about which changes were important—is puzzling, even if all we think we are doing is description. However, the description is also evaluation. Some think of the changes as progress, as clarification of truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others think of those changes as degeneration or deviation or just plain apostasy. Is there not something patronizing about saying, “Martin Luther thought he was conservative, thought that he was calling the church back to a faithfulness that existed before the Middle Ages, but as a matter of fact he was moving things forward into modernity”? Or about saying, “Augustine thought he was just moving on, reading the same Bible in his age that others had read before, whereas in fact he was importing neoplatonism into Christian thought”?

Certainly it would be improper and patronizing if we were to do this only with those with whom we differ, and if in doing so we were making a judgment on their intelligence or sincerity. But the reading of history cannot avoid observing the difference between what people were consciously arguing about and other dimensions of its meaning. Some of those dimensions are dictated by factors in the situation, which people in the moment are not self-critical about. Some of them are decided only later, by how the switches of history were set. Thus options we think we are choosing among may turn out not to be the ones we help bring about.

One corrective against letting this kind of analysis be unfair is to make a point of using it on ourselves as well. We look for assistance in seeing ourselves as others might see us, making more rather than less use of the tools of relative objectification.

Certainly, for Luther it was clear that his use of justification by faith to renew the church was identical with the totality of biblical culture. Certainly, for Augustine his synthesis of Roman legal tradition and Christian love of neighbor into the inchoate just war tradition was equally sincere. But if we are to understand each of these theologians, we must ask questions—which he himself was not in a position to ask—about his view of history and about the history of his views. The more precisely we can identify what for these men were unselfconscious—and therefore untestable—assumptions, the more respectfully we will be able to understand their critical and constructive contributions. To say that we should not undertake a critique of their assumptions because they sincerely claimed to read the Bible is not more respectful of those from whom we learn and with whom we converse. We should be asking how Luther read the Bible. We should know that when he says that the business of the prince is to be held separate from the preaching of the gospel, he does not mean by that statement what a medieval monastic or a Pennsylvania Mennonite would mean. We shall be more, not less, fair to historical figures by understanding more, not less, about how they were creatures of their time, and about how their reading of scripture, like their reading of politics, happened within the framework of their culture.

Thus no unfairness is intended and no injustice is done if we report, as a relatively objective fact of intellectual history, that when Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries began to justify military service, they did it not by finding new biblical materials or by deciding on bases from within the text that older biblical readings should be interpreted in new ways. Instead they inserted their understanding of the Bible within the framework of other new commitments, especially the conviction that the events of the fourth century had been providential, and the broad cultural assumption that it is fitting for Christians to assimilate the wisdom of their cultured neighbors. Those two understandings were not argued for on the basis of scripture. Rather, they defined a new framework within which scripture could be understood.

In a similar way, there is no injustice involved in reporting that, whereas the reformers and especially Martin Luther thought of themselves as standing in judgment on the way late medieval Catholicism had compromised with princes and their wars, the effect was quite different. The ultimate institutional effect of the Protestant Reformation was to weaken rather than strengthen the restraining forces that Christian commitment was able to apply to the belligerent drives of human nature and rising nationalist leaders.

Taking just war tradition seriously

My second prefatory comment has to do with why we take this nonpacifist tradition seriously. Some argue that the just war tradition was never held to sincerely or that it is only a cover-up or a sellout. Not all who doubt its clarity or integrity are pacifists.

We take the theory seriously because it is a general rule in historical theology that anything theologians have thought about carefully needs to be taken seriously, regardless of where we think it fits, and regardless of our judgment on the intelligence or morality of the people holding such a position. This presumption should be in place especially when the position is held to, even if not very clearly or accountably, by the majority of Christians through most of Christian history. For this reason, I cannot follow those who feel that even to converse with the just war tradition is an unacceptable concession.

If one is committed to nonviolent conflict resolution, it is a special requirement of the conversational process that one give the benefit of the doubt to the integrity of one’s adversary, even if on the surface the adversary does not seem to have earned that respect. Love believes and trusts all things, not because all things or all people are credible or trustworthy, but because it is the nature of God to go the second mile in attributing to us all more dignity and integrity than we have. So one of the assumptions of nonviolent conflict resolution is that one projects for one’s interlocutors their best possible image, rather than boxing them into our picture of all the wrong things they must believe if they hold to such a view.

By that statement I do not mean to say that I know for sure that people who use just war doctrine are themselves fully consistent logically or fully honest morally. But because what they say they believe is a system of criteria to be applied in particular cases, the way to test their claim is to look in detail at the criteria and the cases. We can still raise serious questions about whether the doctrine is internally consistent, whether the way it states criteria for moral judgment is manageable, and whether the criteria are defined clearly enough to “bite.” This we shall do, and it is a part of taking the doctrine seriously.

Taking the doctrine seriously extends to the point of giving it a better hearing than it has asked for. Although most Christians claim to hold this view, it is seldom stated carefully. It is far more often presupposed than exposited. Therefore, to debate with it, I will need to give it a more thoroughly worked-out consistency in form than it has in most contemporary discussions.

The world in which just war tradition makes sense

Before we interpret the gamut of specific prescriptions involved in the just war tradition, we need to grasp its general mood and style, and to situate it on the map of various available intellectual options.

Common sense and defining terms

This view is taken for granted as a part of a general cultural consensus or common sense, rather than advocated as novel or explained as if it were unknown. Our society assumes that just war theory is what people already believe.

It is a subsidiary aspect of this commonsense quality that many of the specific criteria and measurements it presupposes use terms that are not firmly defined. We tend to think that everyone knows what they mean. That a government is “legitimate,” that a weapon is “humane,” that one evil is “proportionate” to another, that we are in a situation of “last resort”—all these are measurements that will almost always be debatable, but which the doctrine assumes can be made with some confidence and accuracy. By making commonsense assumptions, the theory thereby tends to beg the real questions.

The standard language of the just war theory does not resolve things people debate when engaged in a profound moral clash. For instance, if the situation is a revolutionary or a dynastic war, then people do not agree on what authority is legitimate. To assert that a war shall be fought by a legitimate authority does not answer the question of which authority in a conflict has legitimacy. If there are two contrary visions of the formal legal ownership of a piece of land, then there are also two contrary views on what constitutes last resort, on what else must be tried before going to war over it. Here we see a concrete logical limit of the notion of natural or commonsense knowledge. If a problem is bad enough to fight a war, then the people involved will not have the same view; there will be no common sense about the basic issues. That is our first critical observation to help locate the doctrine and discover how it works.

Trust of our regime and our side

The just war theory makes sense in a culture in which one honors and trusts one’s civil ruler. This point is so evident that to some people it would not be worth listing. Yet in human history people have often not assumed that the ruler represented them. There have been cultures, primitive and highly developed, in which many people genuinely sensed that this power figure was their own. They owned that ruler’s power as incarnating and representing their interest. Nevertheless, in many other situations, those ruled have been much more realistic or cynical about the fact that the one ruling them was simply a bandit with claims to succession from an earlier bandit, or in some other way not morally representative of them. If people do not have emotional identification with the ruler as someone to trust and honor, then the just war system will not work.

The issue this observation raises is more than a question of legitimate authority. The theory presupposes a bias in favor of the civil order as worthy of confidence or capable of gaining trust. Not only does it assume that the ruler is a good person; it assumes that our side is the good side. There is a presumption that our cause is just. It does not simply make the neutral assumption that we all try to put ourselves in the position of a third party. We tend to assume that our side is the location from which to see the facts. The ethnocentric assumption is that our kind of people and our side of the squabble is the place to start. We may admit that we need to accept some challenges and checks, but we still begin with the presumption that in a given conflict, our way of seeing it is the right way. If instead we began with the basic presumption that our way of seeing it is the wrong way, that is, if we began with a biblical doctrine of sin, then the system would not work.

It is good for Christians to rule the world

The just war tradition assumes that ours is a better world than the world of Tertullian; the church is better off because the rulers are Christian than it was when the rulers were not Christian. This point repeats differently and more simply what I said before about the meaning of history and the change in eschatology: it assumes that if we have a choice, we prefer a world where Christians rule to a world where Christians do not rule. It is better for us, and it is better for God’s cause. This preference correlates with the axiomatic trust toward our regime that the theory presupposes.

Justifiable war as analogous to policing

The just war theory assumes that the violence done by a prince to his neighboring prince in a justifiable war is roughly (though not completely) analogous to the police function. The conflict takes place within a common humanity. This assumption is rarely stated in this form, but doing so illuminates the reasoning process.

War in the European Middle Ages was not international in the modern sense. Nations did not exist in the modern sense. What existed was a network of princely houses, which could have a degree of sovereignty and therefore could have wars against each other, but they were all still part of a wider order of Christendom. More than half belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. They were part of the interlocking network of feudal nobility, in which even adversaries recognized one another as being of the same class. The expectations dictating that prince A and prince B should limit their squabbles to just war rules were part of a wider order of commonly accepted morality, in which higher courts and neighbors living by the same rules could be called to help. People could appeal to the emperor or to the pope. If they did not, or if the emperor or the pope or the stronger prince or king let them fight it out, it was because these authorities saw the fight as conforming to the rules of the game.

Sometimes the top hierarchy let local princes fight it out because their war was part of the established order; it was not anarchic. Modern war is anarchy because we lack a wider network with mutual recognition among rulers. Medieval just war was not anarchy. It was subject to supervision, review, and possible intervention by the wider powers of church or state. If the conflict got too bad, the pope could arbitrate. The analogy to police violence is therefore somewhat valid, although medieval princes lacked a common court system or constitution, and the people killed were not citizens of the same country and were not guilty of a particular crime. The police analogy is limited, then, but it is one way of making sense of parts of just war logic.

The good guys will win

The next assumption of just war thinking is that the good guys will probably win. Since Constantine, we know that God is on the side of the good ruler. The cross is no longer the model for our political process. Once we know that a cause is intrinsically right, we tend to count on it succeeding. Once we know that a given social order is desirable, we tend to count on being able to enforce it. These are not biblical axioms. They are practical axioms of Western culture since Constantine. If we assume that the good normally do not win, then the whole just war system becomes unmanageable.

The good guys should win

Next, more importantly, we assume that the good guys should win. We assume we have a mandate to take charge of the historical process, to help God’s will triumph. We feel we have a duty to make history come out right—to use power to assure that the historical process at large, or our segment of it, takes right turns instead of wrong turns. We have a moral obligation to take charge of historical process from the top. Responsibility has become the word for that duty.

The moral inferiority of the other side

The last assumption we can identify is not usually stated. The just war approach is more convincing and more natural if we assume that the other side is not morally our equal. Barbarians have no morals. A war can be carried on (as in medieval Europe) with the sense that the people on the other side are much like us. That assumption helps those at war behave with a little more respect for the rules. Most often, however, the assumption is that the people on the other side are not like us. They may be literally barbarians or infidels. They may in some other way not be part of the same moral game. Therefore they are not worthy of being treated with dignity, as moral equals, or even nonviolently. Our conception of last resort can therefore be brief. We also know (or hope) that the other party is not heroic, not a crusading type, so that if we do bring superior power to bear on them, they will give in. They will learn that we are right because we are stronger, and they will give up. We do not assume that the other party is ready for martyrdom or a crusade, because then our superior power will not help.

Motivations for developing just war theory

Having identified these logical assumptions of the doctrine, we turn now to two comments about what motivated medieval theologians to develop just war doctrine.

Restraining the evils of war

The people who developed this doctrine had a wider concern than immediate political welfare. They wanted to bring some judgment to bear on what war did in breaking up Christendom. We can call it an ecumenical or cosmopolitan concern; we can call it a pastoral concern.[2] These people believed in a moral universe wider than the local principality. They believed that some moral judgment beyond provincialism should be in place. They saw that the other parties in Christendom, the other nations—not yet nation-states—were also part of Christendom; these were also created in the divine image and had rights (despite the absence of a civil forum to implement those rights). They could not stand up for those rights in a civil court, but those rights were represented by the objective criteria of just war theory. To speak of rights is to use modern language, but what rights language points to was also a concern for these theologians.

One can state essentially the same point in another way, focusing not on rights or pastoral concern but on the principle of moral judgment. These medieval theologians did not want to sanction holy war or the approach that lets any sovereign do whatever he pleases with the sword. Those were real temptations. It is better to say, “Not always,” than to say nothing about the violence of war. The ability to set limits of this kind is the positive value of the notion of Christendom. These Christian moral thinkers did not simply give up when rulers acted in ways that did not correspond to the gospel. These theologians said, “Do not go too far; at least use some restraint. If it is not thinkable to be pacifist, like the early church, then do not sell out completely to the moral autonomy and demonic self-determination of a prince’s pride; do not give him a blank check. And do not identify your political cause with God’s cause, as in holy war. At least recognize some limits.” Whether we express what is at stake in terms of the integrity of moral judgment or in terms of the welfare of the absent enemy, the theologians who first worked out the just war theory were trying to find handles for exercising restraint. The theory’s intent is to restrain the violence of the state. From the pacifist perspective, we may not think it does that well, but that was—sometimes clearly, always possibly—their intention.

War as a moral concession: “Justifiable” not “just” war

What is the nature of the approval given to the just war? Is it a blanket approval: “This is a good thing to do”? There may be points in a given text or the work of a particular author where it seems that way, but that is not the best light in which to see the whole structure. The just war idea is a concession to the sovereign who thinks he has to fight. It is not approval. A more precise phrasing would label it justifiable war rather than just war. War is not good or righteous in itself; it is a regrettable evil, justifiable only under certain circumstances. Just war theory is a concession, not an approval, not an obligation, and not a mandate. It gives permission only to the prince, who has a unique place in God’s purposes and in the society. The doctrine intends to make no change in the ethics of nonsovereigns.

Within this concession is a higher norm, a norm that is not set aside by the concession. We see that higher norm in the clergy exemption. After making the case that war is not always sinful, Thomas Aquinas asks whether it is lawful for clerics and bishops to fight.[3] In scholastic style, Thomas gives first the reasons for and then the reasons against. The reasons against are conclusive. Clergy may help a war in secondary ways, but they are not to do so directly through bearing weapons. It is unbecoming for them to shed blood. “It is more fitting that they should be ready to shed their own blood for Christ, so as to imitate in deed what they portray in their ministry.” “Portray in their ministry” refers to the fact that priests celebrate the Eucharist, a celebration of the death of Christ for his enemies. What clerics do in their ministry, Thomas says, is what they should do otherwise: die rather than kill. “For this reason,” he continues, “it has been decreed that those who shed blood, even without sin, become irregular.” This means that anyone who sheds blood in any way, even for a good cause, even on grounds that are ethically justifiable, cannot be a priest. Violence is not sin in the sense that it should not be done or cannot be forgiven. Yet the person is still out of order and cannot be a priest. It is sinful in the sense of creating a permanent moral blemish. A priest must be someone who has never shed blood, even in a good cause and even by accident.[4]

Penance rather than decision making

The next observation about the kind of approval medieval theologians gave to war is more foreign to our ways of thinking about ethics: the doctrine had more to do with penance than with decision making. We have to step back and ask historical and cultural-anthropological questions about where moral language was located in the social process. Modern people think of moral principles as coming at the front end of a decision process. Medieval culture did not reason this way. Medieval Europe lived the strange tension between a committed Christian minority of missionary monks and clergy, on one hand, and mobs of barely civilized barbarians, who had been baptized and who were now supposed to undergo moral education, on the other. The handle that monks had for teaching morals was not Sunday school or catechism or any other process whereby young people grew up hearing clear expositions of right principles from church teachers. There were far too few monks in Germanic Europe for that to happen. The confessional was the handle the church—that is, the clergy—had with which to direct the morality of the common people.

Before anyone could come to the holy ceremonies of the Eucharist, they had to do penance for their sins. The one who comes to confession asks, “What are my sins?” The priest responds, “What have you done? Here is an inventory of possible sins. One of them is, ‘Have you killed anybody?’ If so, ‘Was it in a just war?’” Even killing in a just war called for penance, though less than the penance required for other kinds of killing. So the place where moral insight came to bear on the decision process in early medieval culture was not in advance deliberation on questions such as, “Shall we go to war?” or “In this war, shall we kill civilians?” After the fact, after involvement in bloodshed, the clergy could determine how bad it had been, and how long the disciplinary process should be until those who had fought would again be in the state of grace and could be restored to the sacraments.

This pattern of moral reasoning probably applied to the prince as well. He did not usually use the theory as a procedure for deciding whether to fight a war. He did not call in his court theologian (though the medieval prince always had one) to describe what the threats or the choices were. The theologian did not then look it up in Thomas Aquinas and determine whether the situation justified going to war. Far more typically, the prince would fight first, and then he’d come to the court confessor to ask, “Now, how long do I have to do penance for that? How bad was it?” That was the cultural context of moral discourse in the Middle Ages. A cultural shift from the theory’s origins has taken place when we try to use this material to illuminate decision making about whether and how to go to war, or when sixteenth- or eighteenth-century people tried to use it that way.

The different vocations of princes and soldiers

I said before that the concession that war may be justifiable is a concession made to the prince because of his peculiar vocation. It follows from that observation that we should note one more negation: the ordinary soldier, who in this period was usually a professional or mercenary, is not responsible for these decisions. He knows little if anything about the reasons for the war. He does not have juridical background or access to the files. There is no news media. He has not done any negotiation. Before a war starts or before a battle begins, he cannot be expected to do a moral review of every cause. The agent of the justifiable war is the prince. The soldiers and the subjects need only obey. Medieval just war thought provides no basis for citizens and simple soldiers to take responsibility for their killing. They do what they are told. When medieval thinkers asked whether a war or a tactic was justifiable, the moral agent they addressed was the prince. Later, Martin Luther would raise the hypothetical possibility that a soldier could know that a war is wrong; in that case, he should refuse. But that shift comes only in the Reformation age, more than a thousand years after the origin of just war doctrine.

Ways to categorize the criteria

Before moving to the just war criteria, we should note that one could organize them in different ways. There are a good half-dozen different ways of reasoning that all come up in the outline of the theory in the next chapter. If we were to sift them by these logical categories, we would come up with a different listing. I will not discuss what ethicists would do with these various alternatives; I will not address the arguments for and against these alternatives. Just notice that if we went through just war reasoning with this kind of grid, we would come up with different categories from the traditional ones listed in the following chapter.

Teleology. Teleological ethics holds that certain acts are right because the end (from the Greek telos) to which they lead is good. Pragmatism and utilitarianism are teleological approaches to ethics. There are significantly different shadings within consequentialist ethics, but proponents of teleological ethics agree that it is ends that make deeds morally meaningful.

Deontology. Others say that ethics is about means. It is about the things that we should and should not do. We cannot justify wrong means by directing them to a good end. Means may be intrinsically wrong or right, forbidden or obligatory, apart from the end toward which they are aimed. Formed from the Greek root dei, deontology is an ethics of stated duty. Some things we simply must do because they are right. We do not calculate probable results. We must refrain from doing some wrong things, even though they could claim to bring about a good result. “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall” is a classic statement of this approach. The outworking of deontological moral reasoning may focus on general principles or on specific rules, and we could further subdivide rules and principles systems on the basis of the breadth or precision of the guidance they provide.

Motives. Joseph Fletcher, in his portrayal of situation ethics, says, “Just love, and then do what comes naturally.”[5] In seeking to do what comes naturally to love, moral agents will take some account of the considerations already named—rules and consequences—but we will not let it rest on that level. Ultimately, it is the benevolence of our intentions that determines the rightness of what we do.

Intuition. An intuitionist approach is slightly different from one centered on motive, although there would be overlap for some ethicists. In this approach to ethics, we just know what we should do, or it is given to us. The fitting thing to do will come to us.

Positive law. An ethic of positive law entails following the book. In North America, it means, for example, that we ought to drive on the right side of the road. That guidance does not arise from divine nature. It is not even rooted in human nature, but it has been decided and therefore we ought to do it. The root of this approach to morality is simply appeal to what has been decided or legislated.

Authority. This approach to ethics holds that because somebody with authority has stated a rule, we now respect it. As we read through the just war material, we will see that often a discussion that looked as if it were going to be a debate about ethics turns out to be a recitation. Sources will simply quote Ambrose. They do not ask how Ambrose would reason. The logic seems to be that if we can appeal to a church father, we do not have to think through his position.

There are other types of categorical differences that we should recognize, but which we will not use in this outline.

There is the difference between permission and duty. Just war properly so called is a permissive and not an obligatory kind of ethic.

There is the distinction between precepts, which are binding for everybody, and counsels (often referred to as evangelical counsels) which are good advice, something the gospel said we will want to do if we want to be serious Christians. If we really want to follow Jesus, then we will freely renounce property. We do not have to do so to avoid sin. We do not have to do so to stay in the good graces of the church and receive the sacraments, but if we really want to be Christian, it is a good thing to do. Evangelical counsels are not mentioned in just war theory, but throughout the Middle Ages they still were taught, and they still called for nonviolence.

Colliding obligations and their applications

Another set of questions addresses how different duties interlock. Take, for example, the positive rule against lying: do not deceive. A person may meet a situation in which, if she does not deceive, she is going to sacrifice another important value. Should she lie to save a life? How do we decide what to do when obligations collide? The just war theory does not tell us, although the question of adjudicating value collisions runs throughout the system. The theory does not state what the rules are when the rules conflict. The criteria do not determine how to work out the details of a criterion’s application to specific cases. For instance, we know for sure that we must never kill innocent noncombatants. But what is an innocent noncombatant? It would take a whole book to report where and how that category gets defined. How do we know whether a person is an innocent noncombatant whom we may not kill, or a lesser-evil victim of a situation, whose life we are authorized to take? That kind of detailed debate is not in this outline, even though it is obviously important when we seek to use the system to make judgments.

In the next chapter we set out the entire list of just war criteria, in chapter 7 we review and comment on the list, and in chapter 8 we examine the development of just war thought.

Criteria of the Just War Tradition

This synthesis or conspectus gathers together, in a more careful compilation than the reader will find elsewhere, all the just war criteria. I have included nothing that is original, nothing that does not arise out of the history of the doctrine. The compilation disregards historical development. It gathers items from all ages, some of which could arise only in modern times and some of which are now considered obsolete but which still serve to illustrate the thought pattern. Occasionally, one of the provisions most clearly at home in the Middle Ages and not taken seriously now is labeled (MA). No attempt is made to describe how the varied criteria interlock, whether they contradict one another, or how perfectly they must be met.

Jus ad bellum

The categories in this section are generally grouped under the heading jus ad bellum, that is, the law having to do with going to war. Until these criteria have been met, there is no need to discuss proper means.

I. War may be waged only by a legitimate authority.

A. The criteria for a legitimate ruler:

1. Dynastic descent from a previous ruler

2. Election according to custom or constitution

3. May be forfeited by being a bad ruler or tyrant; thus

a) Justice or good government

b) De facto ability to govern is indirectly a criterion.

4. Religious heresy may disqualify a ruler (MA); thus religious orthodoxy is a part of legitimacy.

B. The criterion of legitimate authority excludes:

1. War by private citizens or bandits

2. War between political units not on the same level

3. War against one’s own sovereign

For much of the just war theory, rebellion is not admitted. Later it comes to be admitted under conditions:

a) That an evil ruler has forfeited the right to rule (see I.A.3)

b) That lesser magistrates act to depose the tyrant

c) Or (hypothetically) that the entire people rise up as one man

C. Only a soldier under oath and under the control of the sovereign may fight.

1. Clergy, religious, and penitents are excluded or dispensed.

a) Military orders in a crusade are one exception to the exclusion of clergy.

b) Since the inception of conscription, the churches have tended to consider clergy exemption as a desirable privilege which Western governments ought to grant, but not as a right. Clergy have generally not refused to serve if drafted.

2. A mercenary may only hire on to fight for a cause he knows is not unjust.

D. Sometimes the question of authority to wage war is confused with the question of authority to decide when a war is just.

1. Since the criteria of the just war are verifiable, any bishop, moralist, lawyer, or counselor to a king can make the judgment, though there is room for honest difference on some details. This can be tested in international tribunals or by third-party mediation or arbitration.

2. A crusade can be declared only by an episcopal council or pope or prophet.

E. The decision to go to war must be legally made.

1. The formality of a declaration of war (V.A.4)

2. Respect for the nation’s own provisions

II. A war may be fought only for a just cause.

A. The offense must be:

1. Actual, not only possible

2. Intentional, not inadvertent or unintended or an honest error

3. Of substantial importance

a) It is wrong to go to war for a trifle.

b) The selfish interests of the princely house do not suffice; the community’s interests and rights must be at stake.

4. Objective, verifiable, not debatable on the facts

5. Unilateral, not provoked

B. The offense may be:

1. An aggression demanding defense, or a threat demanding deterrence

2. An injustice demanding reparation, such as:

a) Seizure of property

b) Denial of free passage on land or sea

c) Denying pilgrims access to the holy places (MA)

d) Breach of treaty obligations

e) Insult to the honor of nation or sovereign

f) Failure of a government to punish or make reparation for its subjects’ crimes

g) Interference with the passage of pilgrims, with the freedom of missionaries, or with the worship of subject Christian population (MA)

3. Committed against a third party

a) Against one’s ally

b) Against some innocent party on whose behalf one intervenes on humanitarian grounds

4. A moral guilt demanding punishment

a) Heresy, blasphemy, other offenses against God’s honor (Numbers 1, 1 Samuel 15) (MA)

b) Violations of the laws of nature and the rights of peoples. In colonial times, it was held, for example, that European intervention was justified by the practice of cannibalism, human sacrifice, or sexual immorality by “natives,” or by their natural inferiority or their inability to govern themselves or build a civilization.

c) Violations of the laws of nations needing to be punished in the interest of world order

III. A war may be fought only with a right intention: “intention” in the objective sense is the goal or end of the entire military/political enterprise.

A. The only valid intention is the restoration of peace, the creation of a total world state of affairs better than what would be obtained without the intervention. This includes the enemy’s real best interests.

B. National honor, territorial or commercial aggrandizement, or the weakening or destruction of enemy regimes are not valid ends.

C. These goals must be stated (see V.A.5).

IV. A war may be fought only with right intention: “intention” in the subjective sense is motivation, attitude.

A. Inadmissible intentions are:

1. Hatred, vengefulness, enmity

2. Cruelty, love of violence

3. Desire for power or fame

4. Material gain (booty, slaves, or territory)

B. The cause may be justified, but participation may still be sinful if one’s intention is wrong in one of these ways.

C. Valid intentions:

1. Love for the victims of the aggression

2. Trust in God

3. Willingness to face risk or sacrifice

4. Love for the enemy, desire to restore the enemy to righteousness

5. Humility and regret at the needfulness of the evil of war

V. A war is illegitimate unless all the criteria apply with due form and process.[1]

A. War must be a last resort, only after everything else has been tried. Refusal to use other resources for redressing a complaint invalidates an otherwise just complaint. Other resources that must be tried include:

1. Negotiation, mediation, arbitration

2. Recourse to international tribunals and good offices

3. Cooling-off times

4. The formality of a declaration of war, preceded by a warning

5. The war goals must be stated:

a) As an act of accountability to the world community

b) So that the enemy may at any time sue for peace on those terms

6. Time for the enemy to back down

7. The enemy must always be able to sue for peace:

a) The war goal may not be unconditional surrender.

b) Pursuing hostilities beyond reasonable redress makes the cause unjust.

c) Pursuing hostilities when the enemy has offered to negotiate makes the cause unjust.

8. Pressures short of war: economic sanctions, for example

B. There shall be respect for international law, customs, treaties, and international agencies.

C. The entire war must promise to be proportionately prudent, that is, to do less harm to the world system than the harm it seeks to prevent.

D. The war must be winnable; otherwise one suffers the evils of both war and defeat.

1. This follows obviously from proportionality and is a safeguard against crusading enthusiasms.

2. But some versions of just war theory make an exception for heroic hopeless self-defense.

E. Objectively, a war can be just only on one side. Subjectively, both parties may believe themselves in the right.

1. This is the reason for third-party involvement (A.1,2).

2. This is why subjects or citizens or soldiers should not accept their ruler’s word unquestioningly.

Jus in bello

VI. A war may be fought only by the use of legitimate means: these rules are called jus in bello (law within war).

A. Means must be indispensable, the only way, necessary.

B. Means must be proportional:

1. The damage done must not be greater than the damage prevented or the offense being avenged; no wanton or unnecessary damage.

2. The damage or punishment inflicted must be proportionate to the guilt of the offender.

3. Proportion must be tested on every level: a given weapon, a tactic, a strategy, a given battle. A higher level may overrule a lower one.

C. The means used must respect the immunity of the innocent.

1. The innocent are those who are no threat:

a) Women, children, the aged and infirm

b) Clergy, religious, foreigners

c) Unarmed men going about their ordinary vocations

2. The innocent may be patriotic, support the war effort, or participate in the wartime economy; the label innocent means only that they are no threat, are not combatants.

3. Obviously the innocent include neutral third parties

4. Special offenses against the innocent are:

a) Reprisals

b) The taking of hostages

c) Terrorism

5. But noncombatants may come into jeopardy indirectly:

a) By staying in a besieged city

b) By being close to a military target

6. Even the guilty may only be killed when they are a threat.

a) A surrendered soldier may not be killed.

b) A soldier returned to civilian life may not be killed.

c) After the victory, the guilty may be punished by due process:

(1) As vengeance/correction (MA)

(2) As deterrence/prevention

(3) But there should be mercy if possible

7. Slaves may be taken (MA) but not if the defeated soldiers or the subjugated population are Christian.

D. The means used must be discriminating, subjected to measured control. This is prerequisite if proportionality (B) and noncombatant immunity (C) are to be respected. If any weapon, any strategy, any military unit becomes uncontrollable, that infringes in principle on the discipline of legitimate means, even if the illicit actions have not yet been taken.

E. The means used must respect the dignity of humankind as rational and social.

1. No slander

2. No unnatural cruelty (mutilation, torture)

3. Keeping faith with the enemy (truces, safe conducts, no treason, perfidy, perjury)

4. Lying is always wrong (although one may use ambush and subterfuge, or permit the enemy to gather false impressions).

5. No pillage and no destruction of property unless the enemy might use it. Even when sacking a city to deprive the enemy of its resources, the women should not be raped, the temples plundered, or the fruit trees cut.

6. Do not fight on holy days or during times of proclaimed truce.

7. Do not profane churches or cemeteries. Respect sanctuary (MA).

8. Give quarter: that is, do not kill even in combat an enemy who surrenders.

F. Captives, victims, and occupied populations must be treated humanely. Soldiers who surrender shall not be killed. Occupied populations should be governed justly.

1. For many of these matters, there are now extensive international agreements defining their rights.

2. Spies and terrorists forfeit these rights.

3. The degree of bindingness of these rules varies:

a) Depending on whether one nation has signed the convention

b) Depending on whether the other party has signed it

c) Depending on whether the other party has belligerent status

d) But morally the bindingness of the rights at stake does not depend on whether texts are written or by whom they were signed.

Interpreting the Just War Criteria

One challenge to the adequacy of the just war doctrine is the fact that the kind of systematic presentation given in the previous chapter is not self-evident, is not always the same, and does not arise automatically out of the doctrine. It therefore has to be constructed by someone wanting to assess it. The people who developed the doctrine did not organize it; they did not make it clear and ready to use. But now, having the overall shape of the tradition laid out before us, we return to comment on details.

Jus ad bellum

Legitimate authority

First to be spelled out in the Middle Ages was the criterion of legitimate authority. In establishing that a just war can only be fought by the legitimate sovereign, the doctrine originally was politically conservative; it favored the established authorities. A rebellion could not be a just war. Later it became possible to argue that a revolution against an unjust authority would be justified, but our earliest sources did not ask about revolution. They were not democratically minded or critical. They still held to the biblical notion that a bad government is evidence of God’s punishment; to rebel against a bad ruler would be to resist divine judgment.

The criterion of legitimate authority means that a private citizen cannot wage a just war. Bandits cannot wage a just war. An ad hoc authority cannot wage a just war. If a rebellion could ever be legitimate, it would have to be undertaken in the name of another legitimate authority, not “the people,” the mob, the masses; these do not constitute an authority. By the time just war theory included a doctrine of just revolution, the sovereignty of kings in western European culture was not absolute but was part of a linkage of other authorities. Calvinism would reason from the sixteenth-century city-state (Zurich, Strasbourg, or Geneva, for example) that “lesser magistrates” possess a kind of authority in society, legitimized through an electoral process in the city councils. Nobles ruled most other places; that was the context for Calvinism in France, and then for the Calvinist revolution in the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century. The same was true in Scotland, and then in England in the seventeenth century. It was the nobles who had a right to be consulted by the king. In extreme circumstances, they could withdraw his authority from him.

From Calvin through the American Revolution, then, one government could legitimately rebel against another government. Revolution that is just does not arise from the base, from the people, because that entity does not exist as a legitimate authority. Legitimate authority has a legal social form; it is located in the sovereign or in other elements of government. These other elements may take up the authority they already possessed under the sovereign. As dukes, or as members of the diet of the Holy Roman Empire, or as members of the British parliament, they could legitimately say to the sovereign: “You have been our head in a covenant (feudal) relationship, but you have been a bad head. We are going to chop you off, and we will continue as the legitimate government.” Their legitimate governing saved the system from the tyrant at the top through a process that may be called a revolution, but it did not start from scratch. In this process, another person moved up, and the show went on with no fundamental shift in the social order.

Although the language of the time may have called the change a rebellion, the event was still fundamentally conservative. The system saved itself from the bad guy at the top, but it used its own structure and preserved the social peace with a minimum of violence. Local administration proceeded unchanged. Ideally, the king need not be killed, if he was prepared to abdicate. He could be put in prison or sent into exile on an island somewhere. Even if he had to be killed, only one person’s life was taken. In the late sixteenth century, when it developed as a doctrine, the term for this act was tyrannicide: taking the life of the bad guy. It is the most radical act justified by just revolution theory of the sixteenth-century Reformation period.

But tyrannicide or revolution is the exception. The fundamental point is that only legitimate authority may wage war. There are different kinds of criteria for recognizing a valid government. Which of these we use depends on our culture. In the Middle Ages, succession was usually enough to make a ruler legitimate. If there were dynastic conflicts, then people had to look behind succession for something else. Since the Magna Carta (1215), some traditions in the West grant that some kind of consent of the governed is necessary. The older idea was that the people immediately under a ruler had something to say about his legitimacy. The newer idea was that the consent ought to be everybody’s consent. A modern approach for measuring the legitimacy of the government is by appeal to a document. In our time, some governments regarded as legitimate do not have a constitution, but most do, and most use that text as the criterion of legitimacy.

Good administration (I.A.3) is a difficult criterion. According to it, a legitimate government is one that does a good job of governing. That quality is hard to measure. It became important in a later time, when theorists considered the problem of revolution. It was not an important criterion in the Middle Ages. Then it did not occur to people that they had the right to ask the question of good governance. They believed that if people had a bad ruler, God was punishing them. The thing to do was accept that punishment, figure out what they were guilty of, do penance, and then maybe God would give them a better ruler.

According to another criterion, a legitimate government has to be in control. It must in fact have the capacity to do what a government is supposed to do. This criterion gets harder to deal with in modern times, when we start having governments in exile, or two governments vying to rule the same territory. Which is the real government of Sicily? Is it Rome, or is it the Mafia? Sometimes no one really knew who the government was in large sections of South Vietnam in 1971, or in the Salvadoran or Afghan countryside in 1982. It is sometimes not clear who is the government, if de facto control is one measure. There were times in the late 1960s when it wasn’t even clear who was in charge on the south side of Chicago.

Just cause

In the classical language, it was only the cause for which the adjective just or righteous was used. Just war thinkers then would speak of “legitimate” authority and “necessary” means, using “just” only in referring to cause. A just cause bears the following marks:

A just cause must be of substantial national importance (II.A.3.b). When the just war theory had its origins, the only interests were those of dynasties, of princes who identified their prosperity with that of the people. Over time, theologians and jurists increasingly moved to solidify the social nature of a cause, until it had to have moral standing as being in the interest of a people or of a nation. War may not legitimately use the national structure to pursue the selfish interest of a clique within that nation. The notion of national interest is not meant to serve the selfishness of a particular clique or class; it has a wider set of meanings. It is not enough for leaders to say, “We need it,” or, “We can’t do otherwise,” unless the interest we are defending is in essence what makes us a people. In other words, certain national interests should be given up rather than become the cause of a war, if they are not the essence of a people. There are some offenses and some causes that are not worth fighting for. We cannot go to war simply because it is in our national interest; that interest must be profoundly justified.

There must be an unequivocal offense. The first three kinds of offense on the list—aggression demanding defense, injustice demanding reparation, and offense against a third party—are obvious. The fourth—guilt demanding punishment—raises the matter of holy war, of God punishing the Amalekites for their idolatry, for example. In view of the wrongness of vengeance as a personal motivation, this criterion is on the fringes of the just war theory. As time went on, theorists saw as less and less valid the idea of punishment, in the sense of reestablishing the moral order apart from the reestablishment of peace. That said, punishment continues to be a part of the motivation of the common people and ordinary soldiers.

An attack demanding defense and an injustice demanding reparation are the simplest classical causes of offenses that call for war. The offense must be material. Something wrong must have happened: the enemies’ occupation of territory that does not belong to them, or the commission of an offense or an act of aggression. The offense must also be formal. The adversary must know that what they are doing is wrong. If they don’t know it is our territory, then we may not stop them with military means. We must try other strategies to make them aware that they are guilty of aggression. Finally, the offense must be moral. The enemy must have responsibility for committing it; the offense must be something for which we can blame them, hold them accountable. It must not be something they slipped into inadvertently or indirectly, such as entering our territory because they had to cross our land to fight a good war with somebody else. We must be sure that the enemy is consciously doing something wrong and doing it to us.

Right objective intention

The word intention is used in the literature with two different meanings. I have pulled them apart here, calling one kind of intention objective (III) and the other subjective (IV).

Objective intention is the state of things we want to bring about: a better peace. The only justification we have for going to war is that the peace we now have is not a real peace, not a morally acceptable peace. Again on the objective level, vengeance has to be excluded. Vengeance is not only a bad inner motive but also an invalid outward end, except in the case of punishment ordered by God or punishment based on the judgment of some human institution such as a court. That kind of punishment is not the same thing as personal vengeance; it is not just striking back. It is setting the moral order straight.

Objective intention should be defined (V.A.5—declaration of war) so that it is accountable. We cannot simply say that the peace we want is that we be in charge of the globe, or that all middle Europe accept our authority. We have to tell the other side what this peace we want is. In this way, if the other side is willing, if they are intelligent enough to want to avoid suffering and reasonable enough to know they have less power than we have, we can get the peace we want without war. We state our war ends and say that we are willing to go to war if we have to, but of course we do not want to. The war end must be stated so that the other party can have peace on proper terms at any time. Otherwise, we do not have a right to go to war.

Right subjective intention

Subjective intention has to do with the inward will of the actors. They must not hate people or enjoy beating them up. They must not use these hostilities in order to gain money. Even vengeance in the strict just war theory is not proper. Nevertheless, things that are called vengeance may be permissible in two ways. The police function might be called vengeance, as in John Calvin’s thought. This use of the word refers to the repression or deterrence of violence, not to angry retaliation. As long as the holy wars of the Old Testament are dealt with under the heading of just war, they are in one sense vengeance as well, punishment by God. But they are not personal vengeance. Nobody has the right to go to war simply out of a desire to get back at the enemy. That is not proper intention.

It follows (IV.B—a war’s cause may be justified, but participation may still be sinful if one’s subjective intention is wrong), according to Thomas Aquinas, that wrong intention may invalidate the justifiability of a war. A war declared by a legitimate authority and for a just cause may yet be rendered unlawful by a wicked intention. Thomas quotes Augustine: “The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust for power and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.”[1] If our war is intrinsically just, but we wage it with hatred in our heart, it is still a sin. The intent is not to give a blank check to moral vice on an individual level.[2]

The criterion of last resort (V.A) is the formal way to implement the absence of evil intention or the presence of valid intention. If we are not motivated by hate, then we make every possible effort for peace.

Due process

Next we turn to considerations not usually listed separately, what I call “due process” criteria. They are always listed in the literature, but usually as subpoints under “cause” or “authority.”

The question of the legitimacy of the decision-making process (I.E) was not spelled out early in our history, because the people who would have asked it were not around. How is the decision to go to war made? When people have a constitution that specifies—as the United States constitution does—that the decision to declare war belongs to the Congress, what is the legitimacy of a military operation that Congress has not approved? That issue was a big part of the Vietnam debate but not of many earlier cases. Formal declaration of war has had its place in international law for centuries, but it often had loopholes. Thus some “acts of force” do not call for a declaration of war and in emergency circumstances are acceptable.[3] In any event, how the war started, whether by an act of aggression or by a declaration of war, is one of the things just war theory asks us to measure. Now that we have a weak but visible network of international courts and arbitration agencies, treaties and agreements about how to enforce treaties, those procedures enter into the legitimacy of a decision-making process. If a country has a mutual defense treaty with another country, and that country is under attack, that event is a presumptive argument in favor of the rightness of war, assuming that the treaty is still binding and that this attack is one of the cases the treaty covers.

Last resort (V.A) is a criterion to which we have already looked ahead from several other perspectives. Extreme means are not just, unless all other means have been used in vain. If other means have not been tried, then the war is wrong—even if all the other criteria could be satisfied. Thus there can be a just cause, a just authority, willingness to use only just means, and it can still be a bad war if less extreme measures have not been tried first. A part of last resort deals with the formalities of going to war. There must be a declaration of war and a time between the declaration and the implementation of hostilities, so that the enemy has a chance to give in without war.

The offense must be unilateral (II.A.5, V.E). If both parties offended, then they have a conflict to work out, but neither party has a right to kill the other. This criterion does not deny that both parties may think they are in the right (subjectively), but the doctrine does not admit that both parties can be in the right (objectively). It is only their ignorance, their prejudice, and their lack of full documentation that let both sides remain subjectively convinced that they are right. Logically, they cannot both be in the right, according to the doctrine.

The war aims must be defined (V.A.5). The other party must always be able to sue for peace. The sole condition is willingness to accept the peace for which the war is fought. To demand unconditional surrender is thus structurally a rejection of the just war theory. A conditional surrender must always remain a possibility. The conditions of surrender must be stated, and the war aims must be stated. If they are not, a cause that had been just up to that point ceases to be just and becomes aggression. Then the tables are turned, and the other side has a just cause.

Probable success (V.D) is one of the hard criteria to wrap one’s mind around at first. It sounds too pragmatic. Yet it makes a kind of moral sense. If winning is impossible, then there is no justification for war. The justification for a war is that if it is won, we will all have a better peace than the peace we had before. If it is lost, then everybody is worse off: the system is worse off, and our own people are worse off. The war adds the evil we commit to the evil the enemy commits in defeating us, and to both are added all the evils that we wanted to prevent in the first place. Unless victory is likely, the just war cannot exist. Naturally, as with the just cause criterion, people may hold different opinions about whether it is possible to win. Still, we must have a reasonable prospect of victory. Otherwise we have no right to do the damage to the other party. We have no right to sacrifice soldiers, people, abilities, and money in a hopeless cause.

If an enemy is bent on total destruction instead of being guided by a finite objective, then it may be justifiable to keep fighting in a hopeless cause (V.D.2). That case is on the borderline, because it gets us back into the blank check or the crusade. It needs to be recorded here because it comes up at this point in discussion, but it is a different issue.

Last, the notion of a better peace or the international “commonweal”[4] is vague but has increasing visibility in postmedieval times. The peace being sought has to be accredited as bigger than one nation; it must serve the international commonweal. The United States would have to claim that what is good for the United States is good for the world. If the good sought is good only for the United States, then the war is not justifiable even if the other criteria are met. We have an obligation to see that what we are doing represents legitimate interests of the wider human community, especially those parts that do not have an international organ to defend them.

Jus in bello

We now move to the criteria dealing with means.[5] As I said earlier, one of the classical distinctions is between the criteria that have to be met for a war as such to be authorized, jus ad bellum (the right to get into a war), and what you do once you are in it, jus in bello (how to behave in the process).

Proportion has two meanings, which are not always easily separated. There is the proportion between the evil you want to prevent and the evil you cause. If your action causes more evil than you prevent, then obviously you should not do it, even if the evil you want to prevent or avenge is a serious evil. We might call this “utilitarian proportionality.” This criterion is one of the lines of reasoning that point us back to the criterion that a just war has to be winnable. If you cannot win it, then the total sum of evil is obviously worse, because it includes both the evil you inflict and the evil you wanted to prevent but did not. Even more, there is the additional evil that the enemy has to commit in order to beat down your resistance.

Another kind of proportionality weighs the suffering you inflict on someone and the degree of their involvement or responsibility. In the classical period, when vengeance or punishment was still a possible just cause, this proportionality concern applied to the question of cause: “Did they do anything that bad?” In our time it applies to the discussion of who is a noncombatant, who is innocent, who has the right to have their immunity respected. Is the party in question innocent of contributing to the cause of the hostilities on the other side?

At this point a variable that is hard to handle enters in. It is an element of the reasoning we called “turn about is fair play”: that is, “If our enemy uses means that are in principle wrong, even in a just war, then we may do so too.” This we might call the “proportionality of graduated response.” Means that are intrinsically wrong may be made not wrong if the other party uses them first—although nobody admits it that boldly. We must never go all out, abandoning all restraint, yet we can go a little further out if the enemy does so first. I call this “weasel phrasing,” because it can be taken more than one way, but the issue is deeper than that. It is an overlap of or a collision between different styles of reasoning.

This is something we have to struggle to get hold of. For now we will call it “syntactical dissonance,” a failing-to-mesh of different styles of reasoning. It is the nature of natural law thought or commonsense thought that one does not have to settle on only one kind of logic. There are different kinds of commonsense reasoning. According to one kind, some things are listed in a book of prohibitions and others are not. If we do things on the list of what is prohibited, we have crossed a clearly defined line. Another kind of commonsense reasoning relies on a sliding scale. Using this approach, we have no firm line, but we do not go any further than we have to. The problem is that when we are seeking to determine the guilt of the enemy, we tend to assume that a firm line exists and that the other party has crossed it. But in measuring our own right to retaliate, we are more likely to use the sliding scale and believe that we can go as far as the enemy has gone.

There are more kinds of reasoning than these two, but in this case these two overlap and get confused with each other. People use whichever one favors what they plan to do. But they must claim that somewhere a line still exists, that there would be a kind of normal just war in which neither party would use illicit means. What those illicit means are is still defined in many ways. But if the enemy goes this far, then we may go that far, although we must never go beyond natural law; we must not abandon all restraint. The location of the line provided by natural law or restraint is not firmly defined; when the enemy passes it, we are not sure how far is too far. So we go a little further. Here meet conflicting structural assumptions about what goes on in the moral reasoning process. Do we have a firm threshold, which we must not go beyond even if the enemy does, because if we did we would be sacrificing the very moral claim for which we would be fighting? Or are we always justified in going as far as we have to go, as long as the other party went there first? As far as I can see, in the history of the doctrine that distinction is not clarified in a unified way. Different authors reason differently at that point.

The criterion that has received the most attention, especially in modern times, is discrimination. How to discriminate will involve many subcriteria. There is such a thing as an innocent person who has a right not to be brought into suffering by a war. Exactly how one defines the right not to be brought into jeopardy depends on other things. There is the question of guilt, which we have identified before. Some people are not guilty because they have done nothing to merit being threatened or destroyed. This innocence applies to noncombatants even within enemy society, and it usually includes women, children, the elderly, and sometimes all civilians. It applies even more obviously to people of neutral nations that are not in the battle at all and have no reason to be attacked or endangered. It also applies to surrendered enemy soldiers who no longer constitute a threat.

It is not logically clear a priori why discrimination should be the one criterion that gets much more attention than most of the others, but that is the case in modern times. The objection to massive bombing of cities begins at this point. Are those city dwellers guilty? Are they combatants? The debate about free-fire zones in the Vietnamese countryside—is it proper to consider anyone a belligerent who does not leave that zone after 72-hours’ notice by the American air force?—and many other questions debated in the Vietnam experience are forms of this question. It is a real one. Yet it is difficult to explain why this criterion is the only one picked up with great seriousness and argued about in great depth. Its definition always exposes borderline shadow zones. If we are committed to that principle, how will it apply to the bombing of cities? Does it make a difference whether the city contains a military target? What is a military target? The problems of application to specific cases are not our concern here. For now we seek only to identify the basic commitments.

The next criterion, respect for the dignity of humankind as rational and social (VI.E), is still more difficult for us to grasp if we are trying to be serious about how it will work. But it is also more important for the medieval thinkers, including (especially) Thomas Aquinas. The nature of humankind, generic humanity, must be respected. We must not dishonor humanity, even if we have to kill particular people. We must respect the divine image in the human person. This respect means we will not engage in torture, cheating on the rules of the game, or slander. We must respect the fact that the human person is a person, reasonable, a being of dignity with whom we can converse. We must respect the moral nature of the human condition and not sin against the natural law. The example that is the most visible in Thomas is the prohibition against lying. Thomas argues that it is wrong to lie to our enemies. But it is not wrong to ambush them because we do not tell them we are not there; we just let them think we are not. A modern form of this reasoning is found in John Ryan and Francis Boland’s Catholic Principles of Politics, a twentieth-century political science handbook that reflects a concern to keep this teaching alive in our day.[6] This moral framework prohibits treason, breaking oaths, and assassinations (VI.E); we must fight like gentlemen. The borderlines or thresholds of what is admissible are hard to define and malleable in our culture, but they seemed self-evident in the Middle Ages.

We have a set of guides—written agreements—that did not exist in the Middle Ages in the same form. They are much clearer in our time. Modern treaties define certain weapons as illicit. Records of arbitration and judicial processes have established in international law that certain acts should not be committed. Those who are guilty of doing so forfeit their rights. The exact status of international law, what makes it binding, and how it is to be enforced differ markedly from the status of the laws within nations. Yet a body of documentation and agreed criteria about means in warfare does exist and can be appealed to. These guides identify the line between what is and is not admissible.

The Career of the Just War Theory

Origins of the just war tradition: Three sources

At the beginning of the justifiable war tradition’s history, it is possible to disentangle three different thought patterns.[1] Although they are not separated in the early literature, they are distinguishable in their logic. When we want to analyze something logically and not only descriptively, we have to distinguish and disentangle the differences in logic, ideas, and vocabulary that were not so clearly segregated by the thinkers of the time.

Cicero is the father of the kind of just war reasoning that seeks to have the tools for making legal decisions. He was a philosopher of law or of the Roman state. He wanted criteria whereby rulers could know institutionally what a Roman army should or should not do, what a Roman administrator should or should not do, how a Roman judge should make a decision. He wanted usable criteria.

A second tradition reaches back as far as Aristotle: what is just is what fits one’s nature. If I am a superior person by nature, and you are an inferior person, it is just for me to be master and for you to be slave. To be just is therefore to be what fits one’s nature and status. This approach assumed that thinking about the state is done from the perspective of the state, the superior party in the social relationship. So the justice of the state is its own dignity. For a weak state to wage war is not just; it is not fitting, not in its nature. A strong state, led by a prince who knows what he is doing and has the power to carry it through, will be doing justice in fighting a war that he can win. So here the criterion is not discrimination, decision making, but rather the dignity and power of the party we are talking about. It is the same for a slave; the just thing to do is to stay a slave. From both directions this pattern of analysis supports things as they are and reinforces the direction in which they are already going.

A third tradition looks back to Joshua and the holy wars of the Hebrew Bible.

Let us think of these three traditions as rivers running parallel through a plain.[2] When that plain is especially low and marshy and the rivers reach flood stage, they form a single lake, even though their waters came from different streams. So in the Middle Ages, just war theory included all three of those rivers without being critical about the differences; that mix became the medieval doctrine.

At the end of the Middle Ages, the mix separates again as a result of critical thinking and critical experiences. The notion of holy war that came from Joshua and into the Middle Ages through Eusebius, glorifying Constantine, lived the longest in the Iberian Peninsula. Ferdinand and Isabella, “the Catholic kings” as they are called in Spanish, finished taking Spain away from “the infidels” and then went straight from that successful crusade against the Muslims into the capture of South America. Obviously the wars in South America were wars not for legitimate defense but for the expansion of Christianity. So Ferdinand and Isabella extended the Joshua model.

The Spanish moralist Francisco de Vitoria, seeing the injustice of that Spanish crusade, knew that the criteria of just war must be discriminating: they must tell us when to stop. They must protect other people against us. They must defend the Indians in South America against the Spanish Christians. So Vitoria resurrected the discriminating qualities of the Roman strand of the history of the just war to undercut the Joshua strand. Thus these two strands began to get disentangled from each other and to debate with each other.

A contemporary of Vitoria clarified the third strand, perhaps partly because he was debating with the same people. Machiavelli thought through honestly what it means to say that the prince has his own standards, that there is no other standard, that he does not need any justification other than his own interest. To use religious sanctions or warrants is all right as window dressing, to convince others, but it is not a real restraint. To use legality clauses is all right if that move will convince somebody, or if the prince has a sovereign under whose authority he has to make sense of his claim to be a prince, or if he is part of a feudal system and has a judge over him. But these ways of reasoning have value only if they work.

With Ferdinand and Isabella, Vitoria, and Machiavelli, then, the three streams become distinct again.

At the end of the Middle Ages, one other variation arises to make the picture still more clear. We learn to distinguish between developing the criteria—what the theologians do—and creating an institution. For the latter development we give credit to Hugo Grotius. International law grows as a legal system different from the theologians’ statements about what is right and wrong. So by the time of the Enlightenment we have four strands, each of them from the just war heritage but now clearly distinguishable. The holy war people say that their cause is transcendentally validated. The realists say that a prince does whatever he wants to do. The theologians ask questions in general about how to restrain their kings and conquistadores, but these churchmen lack the power to implement their critiques. And the jurists, with some power to implement, ask much the same questions the theologians have asked.

The image of the lake with three streams flowing into and out of it does not fit the realities of geology. But it is an image that helps show us how the language of just war could at one time be all together and then how more careful thought, precipitated by real debates and real discernment, disentangles and gives independent definition to those three or four strands. This image clarifies the fact that there have been three different ways to answer the question, “By what right do you kill?” (1) “I kill because I am that kind of a person,” (2) “I kill because this war meets certain identifiable criteria,” and (3) “I kill because God has said I should.”

Those are not only different statements; they are different kinds of reasoning, and they call for different kinds of criteria to measure them. They also differ about whether war can be just on both sides, or whether an outsider can observe. The three logics have different implications all the way down the line with regard to how the reasoning process will work. For Aristotle there is no outside measurement, so until we have had a battle, a war can be just on both sides. Two princes or two city-states can each be convinced of their superiority, and therefore war can be just on both sides. For the crusader, war cannot be just on both sides, because there is only one God. For the moralist, a war ultimately cannot be just on both sides, but because they have not worked through the debate adequately, both sides may subjectively think they are in the right. In this perspective, the war might even be unjust on both sides.

Christianization

The adoption by third-, fourth-, and fifth-century Christianity of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s legacies, and the salvaging of the Joshua legacy, are looked at later from the peace church perspective as “the fall of the church,” or as papering over the sin involved in accepting Constantine. In a broader sense, this adoption is a specimen of an affirmative general strategy or missionary method. The way for Christianity to move into a new culture is to take over and transform the values of that culture, whatever those values are. If we take over the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire has a usable vocabulary for social decency, the church baptizes that vocabulary and uses it. This move was easier because Joshua seemed to do something similar in the Old Testament. It was easier because Caesar’s conversion made Christians want to consider this shift as an important threshold; they wanted to see that God had saved something for them in Caesar’s function. In addition, the New Testament provides grounds for some valuing of secular structures. In Romans 13, Paul says that Caesar has a place; that what he does is fair; that if one is doing good, one need not fear the powers that be. So there is room for some kind of affirmation.

Thus we can see in a good light the grounds that can be appealed to in favor of Christianity incorporating just war language. Christians first used it for restraint: not to say, “Now war is all right,” but to say, “That kind of warfare is wrong.” Although some commentators point to Ambrose’s letter to Theodosius as the first example of this use, it is neither the most striking case nor a very clear one.[3] It is a landmark in Ambrose’s career that he had the moral independence to condemn a massacre the emperor committed as a part of taking control of the empire. When his predecessor died, a new emperor often had to fight two or three counteremperors in order to establish himself. Theodosius in particular had to battle with a set of neopagan contestants for the throne. One dramatic turning point in that victory came when he herded thousands of people into the stadium in Thessalonica and had them all killed. Ambrose told Theodosius, “That was not nice. You cannot go to mass unless you are sorry.” It takes some nerve for a bishop to talk back to an emperor that way. Apparently Theodosius did say he was sorry. I do not know how much nerve that takes on the part of an emperor. I do not know how much of a moral victory it was. The people were still dead. Yet history has recorded this exchange. Ambrose used the criteria negatively, and it went into the record that they can be used, that there are limits to even the emperor’s righteousness when he uses violence. This context puts the Christianization of the doctrine in a positive light.

Crusade

The next stage in the history of just war thinking is the new synthesis represented by the Crusades. As Roland Bainton indicates, the Crusades are not a just war properly so-called but are something different.[4] That observation is true about their development, although people at the time were not conscious of the difference.[5]

In what sense do the Crusades mark a major new synthesis? One element of a crusade is a divine mandate. The legend of the origins of the first Crusade has the mob shouting, “God wills it!” The Crusades involved winning the Holy Land—the land that the first holy wars were fought for—which “infidels” had taken from Christians. Part of the background of the Crusades was the special religious importance of pilgrimage in the early Middle Ages. A pilgrimage to the Holy Land was the best way to purge sins, the best kind of moral renewal. A criminal could be banished from his home province or town, but he could come back if he went to the Holy Land. The journey was a way of reestablishing one’s right to be part of the community. There were also very pious people who just went for the joy of being in those holy places.

The Crusade itself is a kind of pilgrimage; it too is a religious trip to the Holy Land. The first Crusades were not simply pilgrimages, but neither did they seek to seize Palestine; they sought to gain access to the Holy Land for Christian pilgrims. Only when the crusaders got there did they discover an easier way to ensure access: to own the place. So they set up some feudal principalities after the European model within the land of Palestine.

Another element of explanation, harder to prove or recognize as a distinctive element, must have contributed something. It is the strong cultural power of the holy king, of sacral kingship. This kingship had Roman forms, in which the king is seen as a god. It had Teutonic forms, in which the Germanic prince is regarded as a special minister of the gods. It unfolded dramatically in Constantine’s early victories, and later in Charlemagne’s missionary victories. So Christians not only incorporated the criteria of Roman legality into their understanding of righteous violence; they also took over the pagan worship dimension, in which the king is an elect instrument of the gods. They Christianized this form by making the god singular instead of plural, invisible instead of an idol, but the thought pattern continued.

One last new element contributing to the special vigor of this new synthesis in the Crusades is the dramatic encounter of Christendom with Islam, seen as an apocalyptic scourge. What does it mean that a new movement, younger than Christianity, appealing to the God of Abraham, accusing Christians of polytheism and idolatry, has dramatic military successes against the Christian world? Before the end of the eighth century, Islam had taken over most of Northern Africa and Spain and was slowly progressing into Europe. It was the dramatic equivalent of Marxism in the twentieth century. Islam was a threat of eschatological proportions, not just another enemy or another form of power. Islam was a threat on a world scale that called into question the very existence of Christian culture and the history of God’s victories through the emperor. Although it was still called the Roman Empire, beginning with Constantine the seat of the Roman Empire was Byzantium/Constantinople, which the Arabs, followed by the Turks, took over. The Crusades were responses to the fact that the Holy Land was in the hands, not of pagans in some simple pre-Christian sense, but of Muslims, the image of the awful power of a diabolical counterreligion (perhaps not unlike Russia’s Bolsheviks). It was a counterfeit of the true religion, because by rejecting the Trinity it claimed to be more faithful to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets than were the Christians—especially the eastern Christians with their icons. Christians thought that Islam was a diabolical threat to which they should respond with heroic measures.

Finally, some nontheological factors contributed to the Crusades. People saw an opportunity to make money, grab land, and enjoy fun and glory. Sources of social unrest in the West could be diverted, including younger sons who did not have a chance to become knights and critics of the social order who were unable to become rich in the transition from feudal culture to urban culture. Exporting all the critics to pursue a holy cause made things back home more restful. There was also the beginning of commerce, of travel and trade. The pilgrims not only went to a holy place; they also raised awareness that the eastern Mediterranean world under Arabic control was more civilized than Europe, not only in spices and silks but also in culture. In addition to trade, travelers from the West had a pretext for piracy and pillage out from under the control of the authorities of Christendom.

The Crusades were a new event, worthy of serious attention as a different form of just war. It is easy for us in the West to disown the Crusades as mixing religion with politics. Because we think we have disavowed this type of mixture, it is harder for us to recognize how heavily the legacy of the Crusades still weighs on our culture and on the rest of the world. To this day Middle Eastern politics occur under the shadow of those events. The castles the Crusaders built are still there. For the average Muslim, the Crusades define what it means to be Christian. While the Crusades are often dated from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, they did not end then. In the sixteenth century, for example, the Spanish took over the Algerian city of Oran, killing 8,000 people. The Spanish fleet was accompanied by a Roman Catholic cardinal, Francisco Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, and the ships sported banners on which crosses were embroidered.

The Muslim holy war tradition is not very different from that of the crusade. It is, like the Christian crusade tradition, ambivalent. Sometimes it needs criteria. One of those criteria is that all Islam must join it. If this stipulation were taken seriously in modern times, Muslims could not wage a holy war, because Islam is fragmented into many competing kingdoms. Yet in other Islamic traditions, anybody willing to die for a cause can claim that it is a holy cause. In the National Liberation Front of Algeria against the French (1954–62), the word that the Algerians used for freedom fighters was Arabic for “crusaders.” A liberation fighter is a crusader. So one can proclaim any war to be a holy war and be a sincere Muslim. The language is the same.

There is a structural difference in the Muslim case, but I do not know how often it was respected. Mohammed had clearly said that Christians and Jews who accept Muslim sovereignty are to be tolerated. Christians and Jews belong to a special category; they are “people of the book.” In the Qur’an, the people of the book have the right to exist as long as they let Muslims rule them. As the Roman Empire was crumbling and the Arabs were taking over, where the Christians gave in without fighting, the Arab conquerors granted them defined rights and self-government within the Islamic world. This status lasted in North Africa, for instance, until the second millennium. It lasted longer in the Byzantine world, and in some places up to modern times under the Turks. In general, dissenting Christians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were better off under Muslim governments than under the governments of other Christians. The Lutherans in Transylvania were treated better by the Turks than by the Catholics or by the Orthodox. Yet this guideline of stated tolerance for Christians and Jews is not always respected. When it was not respected, Christians were massacred, especially if they refused to submit. This response contributed to the image of the Arab hordes sweeping over Spain, an image as negative as that of the Christian crusaders.

The fact that a crusade’s justification is religious does not mean that limits and accountability are missing from it. Although in the third and fourth Crusades, crusaders pillaged Constantinople on their way to the Holy Land, the theologians never approved of those actions. So the criteria were still there. But when the cause is holy, and when the other party has no rights, then the remaining restraints can become merely theoretical.

Two elements from the crusade model remain in our Western inheritance and keep the model alive in our culture. First, a transcendent cause justifies downgrading the rights of the enemy. If we are fighting for God, then the communists have no rights; their denial of the true God forfeits their claim to humanity. That element from the crusade era remains in Western thought about any big battle. The second living aspect of the crusade mentality is the value of martyrdom. It is meaningful to die, even to fail or to die defeated, in a crusade. Here we see the importance of the criterion in the just war theory that had not got much attention in the past: a just war has to be winnable. A crusade does not have to be winnable. Those who die in a crusade go straight to heaven. In the Middle Ages, dying in a crusade was the only way to get straight to heaven. In a crusade, death is not considered a necessary sacrifice so as to win war. Death is righteous in itself, because it is in a righteous cause.

This view carries on in the West despite theories to the contrary. An element of martyrdom is present in our culture’s recognition of the moral dignity of the war dead. There is a close juxtaposition, theologically in need of debate, between such “martyrdom” and the sacrifice of Christ. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13): Jesus said that about himself. Many Western war monuments to the dead have that verse on them, as though what a dead soldier went out to do was to lay down his life for his friends. That is not what he went out to do. He went out to kill, and he hoped to come home. He went out to lay down somebody else’s life. The use of Jesus’s cross language is a dramatic pointer to the persistence of the crusade mentality in our culture.

An anthropologist would have to help us understand a third level of analogy to the crusade: the legendary quality of defeat. If people think God is helping them win their battles, it would stand to reason (I am speaking as an amateur) that they would celebrate their victory. But what do we really remember in the history of battles: Who won at the Alamo? Who won at Custer’s Last Stand? We remember the victories in the history books, but we celebrate the defeats. Who was Che Guevara? He was killed. If he were still alive, he would not be the Christ figure he is for Marxist South America. Similarly, the Catholic priests or ex-priests who were killed (Camilo Torres and Nestor Paz, for example) are much more dramatic in the mind of Catholic leftists in South America than are the ones who are still alive to fight. So again, martyrdom has a deep anthropological hold on Western Christians. That is a mark of the crusade, not the just war.

Clarification

Now we move to the clarification of the borders, the disentanglement. We have distinguished the three concepts, but how does the separation of concepts in real politics happen? I do not intend to look in detail at this issue but to locate the thought process that takes place as these separations become visible again, as the separate rivers leave the common flood plain.

The clarification meant, for instance, restating the rights of the victims. That is what Vitoria and Suárez did. They said that the original South Americans are people who have souls. The Aristotelian Spaniards would have said the native peoples do not have souls, as white North Americans would later argue that black people do not really have souls and are thus a lower form of life. That was the claim of the Spanish conquistadors in South America. But the theologians said, “No, they are God’s creatures, made after the divine image just like the rest of us, and they have the same rights.” Restoring the rights of the victim is part of the clarification. In one sense they were clarifying that the justifiable war criteria are political, not religious, not transcendental. The enemy has rights; how are we going to safeguard them? So they began to outgrow the crusade’s self-righteousness. The crusades all finally failed, except in Spain. The crusader kingdoms in the East were swept away by the next Muslim wave, so there was an occasion for some internal critique of the self-righteousness of the crusading mentality.

Renaissance humanism did a lot to redefine war. Erasmus was reasonably skeptical about human pride. Then there was Machiavelli, who as a thinker and an essayist and a humanist decided it would be more honest to call a spade a spade. Then for the first time the doctrine came to be systematized. It was not yet systematized to the extent that I have done,[6] with all the criteria in a row, but at least the humanists were thinking about it systematically and arguing about it. They did so much more thoroughly than Thomas Aquinas had done in the few paragraphs he wrote on the subject. Systematizing the criteria caused people to believe that the doctrine had some integrity, some consistency, and some authority. Thanks to these people, modern Catholics—if asked what Catholic teaching about war is—could say without any hesitation (or they would say, up until a generation ago), that a just war must meet these criteria. The humanists’ work helped distinguish the justifiable war from the crusade and from the colonial mandate.

In Augustine, defending the honor of God was a just cause. As the strands become disentangled, justifiable war comes to have a Roman—political rather than religious—justifying cause. A justifiable war, according to the main Roman tradition, has to do with peace, territory, and sovereignty. It must not be a religious cause in any transcendent sense or in any sacramental, religious, or ritual sense. How we differentiate between the religious and political, of course, depends enormously on how one defines them both. We can never really separate them, but we can separate what they mean concretely when contrasting the crusade and the justifiable war. Properly political criteria are restored by the justifiable war theory.

Some of the other criteria also come into play. Probable success spoke to political causes, while the crusade disregarded success. Justifiable means are typically more flexible in a crusade, because the enemy has fewer rights. Adversaries are seen differently if they are enemies of God and not just a political threat. Last resort does not apply at all in the crusade, because God wants people punished or God wants Israel to control Canaan. At that point nothing other than war will do—not mediation or arbitration or partial success without war.

So by the late Middle Ages, the concept of justifiable war clears up. A distinction between political categories, which can say no, and religious categories, which cannot, becomes clear in thought but not in sociology. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still saw wars of religion, Catholics against Protestants, in which crusading language was very much at home. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had wars of manifest destiny and wars of ideology, which were more like crusades or holy wars than like justifiable wars. The only operative criterion was whether the enemy was really an enemy; then almost anything goes. The bad guy has no rights.

Machiavelli and the just war

Machiavelli posed a serious challenge to just war theory. The Prince, Machiavelli’s reconception of political theory, takes the form of advice to the prince. He encouraged the prince not to let moral scruples stand in the way of pursuing whatever was in his self-interest, but also to use moral language when it was useful: when it helped mobilize people, when it helped demoralize the other side, and when the moral arguments supported his side. For Machiavelli, morality is not an independent criterion for a statesman.

What becomes of that Machiavellian view as the just war theory is clarified? All the way back to Aristotle, one of the notions of rightness, of justness, was simply what fits nature. The Spanish conquest of South America reflected this kind of thinking: a superior people have a right to expand; an inferior people have a right to be colonized. So a critique will need to attack that notion. Moralists, especially Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1480–1546) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1615), said, “The war of the Spaniards on the Indians isn’t a holy war; it isn’t the way to make converts or spread the church.”[7] They also said, “Whatever sovereignty the king and queen of Spain have over Spain, they have no sovereignty over South America. Therefore they need to legitimate what they do in that part of the world in terms of the welfare of the people living there.” These Christian theologians were beginning to say that a ruler has no absolute moral autonomy.

Yet this critical perspective on colonialism was not applied to Europe itself, a continent increasingly divided by burgeoning nationalism after the Reformation. In Europe, the doctrine of the divine right of kings was a major part of the spiritual arsenal of Western nationalism for centuries more. The test of the king’s legitimacy was dynastic succession: was he really the son of the king that went before?

Today the border between Machiavelli and just war is clear. Now no Western person who is philosophically responsible would say that the agent of civil government should not be questioned. Yet this border remains open in popular culture. The nation’s call for citizens’ sacrifice and loyalty is not often thought of as open to critique or subject to criteria outside itself: “My country, right or wrong,” as the saying goes. This characteristic is true of most nationalist rhetoric in younger and older nations, in democratic countries and in countries ruled by military cliques. The nation as such takes over the mantle previously worn by the sovereign. There is no clear “divine right” sovereign, but patriots speak and sing about the nation as morally self-justifying. No questions need be asked. So the absolutist mood is still with us. In ordinary discourse, the slogan “Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just”[8] does not mean that we have used objective criteria which confirm that our cause is just. The justice of our cause is not established as the conclusion of a test but is usually taken for granted as the starting point for talking about the righteousness of the nation. So the failure to make this critical distinction between the justifiable war and the moral autonomy of the sovereign is a problem that is still with us in new forms.

Through most of Christian history the distinctions separating the three nonpacifist positions were only incipient in the minds of thinkers. They were beginning to ask questions. The systematic clarification of four kinds of doctrine, including and distinguishing three nonpacifist doctrines, was not in their vocabulary or in the literature. Yet they argued about questions that add up to that distinction. We cannot impose on them the logic we see from our distance. But we may—albeit anachronistically—fruitfully illuminate the history by seeing those distinctions. So we are talking typology and logic more than history here.

The Protestant Reformation and the legitimation of war

Generally, the Protestant Reformation went beyond the medieval just war theory in the direction of legitimizing war. Protestants have been taught to think of the Reformation of the sixteenth century as undoing the mistakes of the Middle Ages—papacy, sacraments, justification by works, and other things. But on the morality of war, our model for interpreting the Reformation has to be turned around. The Protestant Reformation goes further in the direction of making war acceptable.

Loosing the bonds, making the state morally autonomous

First, the Protestant Reformation heightened the moral autonomy of the civil order. In the Middle Ages many things were wrong, but at least it was clear that the prince had to listen to the bishop. The state was within the church. The fundamental notion of moral scrutiny had been clear ever since Ambrose. The church, the theologians, the bishops—whoever spoke for the institutionalized cause of God—had something to say about everything in medieval Christian culture, including how the prince exercised his office. The Protestant Reformation undercut this function in many ways. Luther undermined it with the doctrine of two realms or two kingdoms: the realm[9] where the Word of God rules and for which the visible church is an instrument, and the realm of what the statesman does. This realm is also under God, but it is not under the church or its clergy.

In Luther’s view, every vocation, every sphere of society, has its own sovereignty. The economic structure of society manages the realm of work; the church should not intervene except for the bottom line, to say that a person should not sin in that area. The university should handle the realm of intellectual research; other people should not give the university rules. Luther stressed especially that the magistrate or prince should handle the civil realm. Luther did away with clericalism, the system in which priests tell the rest of society what to do. His Reformation in Germany brought liberation from a civil government dominated by bishops. To most people the idea that the civil order has moral autonomy from the religious order is one of the great acquisitions of Reformation social thought. God sanctifies both realms, so both are good. Both realms believe in each other, but they have to work separately. This view is reflected in contemporary Lutheran discussions about relationships to the state, and among one group of Reformed theologians as well, for whom the contemporary term is sphere sovereignty. Every realm of culture should stand directly under God. The religious sphere is the place of preaching and clarifying doctrine. It has no special privilege and nothing to say about the other realms. The effect in Luther’s Reformation is that the prince is not subject to criticism from the bishop.

Seeing the rulers as defenders and protectors of the Reformation

In fact, if the Reformation was successful, it was because the prince had put a new bishop in place, one who was sympathetic to the Protestant agenda. Now the prince was the bishop’s boss. A result was that clerics were unlikely to criticize the prince, unless he went especially far out of line and everybody condemned his actions. Then the clergy could do so too. The prince would not normally expect that religious criteria or theories would tell him what he must not do. Politically speaking, the Lutheran Reformation was a step toward state autonomy not only institutionally but in terms of ethics.

In the Reformed Reformation (especially in its beginnings with Zwingli in Switzerland), something similar happened, but the way we should think about it is quite different. There was a deep difference between Luther and Zwingli and their contexts. Zwingli was a theocrat. He believed that all culture must be governed not only by God but by the prophet, the spokesman for God. The preacher, not the bishop, has privileged access to the Word of God. The Word of God does not address how to become inwardly convinced of God’s grace for forgiveness and justification (Luther’s agenda). For Zwingli, the Old Testament prophets, who tell the world how to be just, exemplify the Word of God. The prophet tells God’s subjects how to do justice in the world. The Zwinglian Christian statesman had much more to do with the church than did the Lutheran Christian statesman. The Reformed statesman was an instrument of the Reformation, an instrument of God in the Reformation, a kind of savior figure. He had no autonomy over against the preacher, except on a practical level. The preacher said what must be done, and the statesman figured out how to do it, when to do it, how quickly to do it. He was supposed to straighten out the world in God’s name. He did not just keep the peace. His violence had a mandate.

The things that medieval clerics said to princes to hold them back—don’t desecrate cemeteries, don’t be hard on the innocent, don’t pillage, and don’t stop pilgrims—no longer fit the Reformation context. In place of the concerns of medieval clergy, which restrained the medieval state, the Reformed leaders cast the state as the savior of the Reformation. So in the Zwinglian or Reformed Reformation, a new kind of crusade emerged. What the state does, in the interest of its own people and its national welfare, is dictated by God and needed to heal or save the church.

Both Luther and Zwingli, in almost opposite ways, freed the state from medieval restraints on violence and war. Zwingli did so by saying that the state is needed to save the Reformation, and Luther did it by saying the state does its own thing and the churches ought to keep their clerical hands off.[10] At the time of the Reformation, in Catholic Spain (in contrast) Francisco de Vitoria criticized the political morality of the Spanish king and queen. Protestantism lacks this restraining impact of the just war theory.

Seeing the state as the organ of the Reformation

The nation was also the organ of Reformation. The state saved the church from Catholicism. There would not be a Lutheran church if the Lutheran princes had not pulled the churches of Germany and Scandinavia out from under the bishops and the pope, straightened them out, protected them, and enabled them to survive. Not only did the princes enable the churches to survive politically by saving them from warring Catholic princes, but the princes also gave the Reformation churches life institutionally. The princes financed the churches; they created their governing bodies and gave them legitimacy. The effect was that no church as an institution could talk back to the king or tell him, “You should not have done that.” The church leaders were all the king’s appointees. No theologian, expertly knowing the traditions, could be expected to say, “What you did is against the rule,” because the theologians were all employees of the king. Some heroic individual may have had more nerve than was wise, and may have talked back. But institutionally the church had no representative who could converse with the prince in terms of the just war theory, questioning whether what the prince was doing was politically right.

Seeing the state as the savior of the Reformation

The nation was not only the organ of Reformation; it was also the savior of the Reformation. War saved the Reformation. The wars of religion (the Thirty Years’ War [1618–48] and the French Wars of Religion that preceded it [1562–98]) were never only religious, but they had stated religious motivations and an impact on the status of the churches. Before these conflicts, Christians had fought wars against other Christians, but they were for territory, pride, or money. And Christians had fought wars of religion, but they were against the Muslim Arabs or (at the time of the Reformation) the Muslim Turks.[11] In the wake of the Reformation, beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century and continuing until the mid-seventeenth century, Christians fought wars against other Christians about religion.

This development further undermined the notion that the Christian religion would act as a restraint on war. It increased the self-righteousness of heroic Christian princes, who reorganized the church so it would be more faithful, and saved it from the Catholic powers. So the place of the prince in God’s purposes was more than a backdrop that allowed the gospel to do its thing. The prince became the head and protector of the church. The change in the cleric’s function reflects this. In the Middle Ages, every prince had his court preacher who was a confessor (and who sometimes was called that). He was the person who made sure the prince would be forgiven. This process included moral reprimand and preaching against sin. The priest in a medieval Catholic courtroom was a moral presence; people recognized that he would sometimes scold the prince. He was there to keep the prince from going too far and getting out of hand. In the Reformation the Protestant chaplain increasingly gives a religious mandate to what people do, whether it is celebrating marriages or justifying causes and crusades. Every crisis sees publication of collections of court preachers’ war sermons. The preachers are the people to make the case for the next war.

Setting aside confessional accountability

In the Middle Ages, the church prescribed penitential disciplines, in which major offenders confessed their sin and organized their life for several months around being penitent. Their penitence included being nonviolent. Sometimes penance called for pilgrimages. An unarmed pilgrim was the most vulnerable person on the road. In the life of medieval Europe, therefore, people renouncing violence because they were Christian were visibly present. The just war theory permitted the prince and his soldiers to do their military thing. Those who actually fought were a few professional mercenaries or knights who usually fought on a small scale. Just as many people—penitents and Franciscans, for example—were at the time living out a commitment to nonviolence.

The Reformation said that all the penitential stuff and all the monastic stuff had to go, because those constitute works righteousness. Such practices get in the way of salvation by faith. They make people think that working harder at being Christian helps their salvation. But the reformers taught that nothing brings salvation except throwing oneself on the mercy of God. That is salvation. To think that special acts—spending six months on pilgrimage, or three months begging, or even committing an entire life to being a monk—are any good for salvation is counter to the Protestant message of justification by faith. In the interest of cleaning up theology, the Reformation got rid of the visible minority who incarnated another way in society.

As I noted before, the just war theory was operative in the Middle Ages not because a ruler would sit down with a checklist before undertaking a war and ask whether all the criteria had been met. The confessional was where the real application of the just war theory happened in the Middle Ages—the place where moral education, moral discourse, and accountability occurred. Accountability occurred when people had to report what they had done wrong, and had to do whatever it took to obtain the assurance of forgiveness for those wrongs. The moral teaching came after the fact. Punishment after the act was the way morality was taught in the Middle Ages. For instance, a person would say to the confessor, “I killed people, but it was in a just war.” The priest would ask if the person could prove it was a just war. If he could, then the sin was not as bad as it would have been if he could not prove it. That was the way the just war theory was taught.

Protestantism did away with penance, with auricular confession, with moral accountability to anybody except your parents or the prince. So institutional Protestantism set aside the notion that there are moral standards that come to bear on my life, and that I must confess and atone when I have sinned against them.

Desacralizing times and places: War anytime and anywhere

Another element of medieval peace concern, the one hardest for moderns to understand as being realistic and operational, is the exemption of holy days and holy places. Why should one not desecrate cemeteries, not pillage monasteries or libraries, not fight on Good Friday?

The notion of the holy being represented within our world by certain days, places, and people, exempt from the ravages of violence even in a violent world, is far from us. We have trouble understanding holiness in place or time. We lack the training in cultural anthropology and the imagination to grasp how minds work when certain places and certain days are so holy that people will not fight there or then. For medieval culture this holiness was important and effective.

The secularizing impact of Protestantism insisted that nothing, no day or place, is more holy than another. God made all the professions and the entire earth. The Enlightenment dimensions of the Reformation, evident especially in the Reformed traditions, swept away the idea that ordained clergy, the religious, and certain places and consecrated things are special. That kind of tangible holiness had made islands of peace in the middle of a world at war. With Protestantism they vanished.

Shattering the unity of Christendom

Another element of the change, which was not what the reformers intended but was a cost they were willing to pay, was the sociological breakup of the wider Christian world. Whether we identify that world as the Holy Roman Empire or the Roman Catholic Church, the umbrella of Christendom was the context in medieval Europe for discussion about whether a war was just, or whether the conduct of a war was just. Both parties to such conflicts were at home in the same world, had the same moral heritage, and used the same yardsticks. They had a sense of being part of a wider civilization. If two princes or dukes were fighting each other, someone could mediate. When the conflict got too bad and could not be resolved, a king or bishop could act as a go-between for the parties. Symbolically, even if the war was too big for mediation, those prosecuting the war still had to admit that their enemies were part of Christendom and that both sides were supposed to use the same standards. The others were not infidels who could simply be massacred. They had rights because they were part of Europe and therefore Christian. Everyone recognized the emperor and the pope as representing the unity of Christendom.

The Reformation broke up the unity of the church and of the empire. It set aside the notion that enemy nations and adversary institutions have a claim on us. The beginning of nationalism in the modern sense—the notion that a nation constitutes a moral unit with no accountability to a wider community or culture—is a product of the Protestant Reformation. The breaking of the wider civil culture was done in the name of the church, in the name of the Reformation, and in the name of religious truth. Therefore one can fight wars for religion with vigor and a good conscience.

In the separation of church and nation, bishops ceased to have the right to be political actors. Before this break-up, bishops could act politically in two ways. They always had the right to be censors, to admonish or to condemn, to treat the prince as their son and tell him what to do. In addition, some bishops were themselves princes. Their bishoprics owned sizable territory. From the Reformation’s point of view, it was bad for the bishop to be a prince. From the point of view of the just war theory, it may have helped a little, because here at least was a sovereign whose successor would have to be elected. He could not pass on the crown to his son. Further, he was a sovereign committed to decency. The reformers wiped away that interlocking of religious authority with civil accountability. They wanted the bishops to stay with their sacraments and let the princes run the country.

The significance of the fragmentation of Christendom is illuminated when we see the just war theory as an analogy to the police function within society. In most social thinking, police power is legitimate within a society. This power is legitimate by virtue of its being limited. Police officers are accountable. They do not start by killing. They start by making an arrest, and at most will shoot only if they cannot stop the suspect. Otherwise, unless suspects have been tried and found guilty of a capital offense, they will not be put to death. These are all restraints around the legitimacy of police violence. Police officers and suspects both operate within the same wider moral and civil order. The just war theory is an effort to provide restraints somewhat like that, but without the existence of the wider moral order, or with that order as only a vague reality that is not institutionalized.

When the wider moral order of Christendom falls away, the analogy to the police logic falls away. The just war had assumed the rights of the enemy: one’s enemies were also Christians; they were also Europeans. The stated criteria seek to make operational the recognition that other people have rights, that even the enemy has rights. The criteria serve as advocates for those who are absent. The enemy is not able to converse with us, so these criteria stand in for the enemy and represent the enemy’s rights. That rationale was much more credible, much more natural, when there was one church, one world, one common Christian culture. When Europe broke apart in the wake of the Reformation, when the empire broke up into nations and the nation broke up into parties, then the notion that enemies should respect each other began to fall apart.[12] The parties lost the sense that they both participated in the same reality in some broad sense.

One by one, in other words, the Protestants dismantled the restraints that in medieval Catholicism had kept the just war theory from being equivalent to a blank check. They did not do so consciously, out of a desire to undercut the Catholic peace concern of the Middle Ages. It happened unawares, because of the Reformation criticisms directed against holy days and places, against penitence and confession, and against works righteousness. The cumulative effect of all these strands of cultural change worked against the ways medieval Christianity had restrained war. Significant restraints, as a part of the total Catholic package, were thrown away.

Creedal status of just war: Anti-Anabaptist polemic

Another change, less scattered than the anti-Catholic elements of the Reformation listed above, was the anti-Anabaptist polemic. A few people in the Reformation movement went further than others and asserted that the rediscovered gospel says killing is wrong. The gospel says that the church-state bond, which infringes on religious liberty, is wrong. Thus the Protestant reformers faced not only the conservative Catholic threat but also the inner threat of their own radical colleagues and disciples for whom the Reformation did not go far enough. To the official reformers, who worked with the backing of local governments to remodel the entire religious establishment, it seemed that the Reformation would collapse if they did what the radical reform voices wanted. If they abandoned violence and coercion in matters of faith, how could the Reformation defend itself? So, on the one hand, the official reformers were threatened by their own disciples and colleagues who went further than they in the direction of challenging the medieval heritage, including the just war heritage. On the other hand, they were blamed from the right for all the destructive impact of the Reformation movement—the Peasants’ War and all the disorder and confusion that swept over Europe north of the Alps in the 1520s and 1530s.

In order to defend themselves both against the Anabaptists and against Catholics who accused them of being the fathers of the Anabaptists, the official reformers affirmed in their creeds the rightness of the just war and of having Christians in government. The just war theory now acquired creedal status, beginning with the (Lutheran) Augsburg Confession written by Phillip Melanchthon in 1530. The Reformed, Lutheran, and Anglican creeds all say that Christians may fight in just wars. “Christians may without sin occupy civil offices or serve as princes and judges, render decisions and pass sentence according to imperial and other existing laws, punish evildoers with the sword, engage in just wars, serve as soldiers, buy and sell, take required oaths, possess property, be married, etc. Condemned here are the Anabaptists who teach that none of the things indicated above is Christian” (Augsburg Confession, article XVI, 1530).[13] “It is lawful for Christian men, at the commaundement of the Magistrate, to weare weapons, and serue in the warres” (Thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, English Edition of 1571, article XXXVII).[14] “It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate when called thereunto; . . . they may lawfully, now under the New Testament, wage war upon just and necessary occasion” (Westminster Confession, article XXIII/II, 1646).[15] Here we have the fundamental documents of the three major Protestant traditions present in the English-speaking world: Lutheranism, rooted in the German Reformation; Anglicanism, from its British origins (the Latin original dating from 1563); and the British free church or Puritan and Presbyterian or Reformed tradition, which was well defined long before the statement of it at Westminster.

Protestant tradition made the just war doctrine part of the definition of what it means to be a faithful Christian. It now had creedal status. This has never been the case in Catholicism. There is no Catholic statement of the just war theory that binds a Catholic to believe it. A lot of respectable people have taught it; therefore a conservative Catholic will tend to believe it with a good conscience. Nevertheless, Catholics do not have to believe it. It has never been promulgated by a pope speaking ex cathedra. It has never been promulgated by an ecumenical council. It has not been taught anywhere except from a teacher’s desk. A Catholic can deny the whole thing and not be a heretic. Johannes Ude, Dorothy Day, Jean Goss, and Dan Berrigan have denied it and are still irreproachably Catholic.

As to the substance of the doctrine, the Protestant creeds add nothing. They do not define it. They just say that it is not wrong for a Christian to be a sovereign and that it is not wrong for a Christian to fight in a just war. They assume everyone knows what that means. They assume it is adequately defined as the heritage of the culture, but it is not spelled out. That assumption is a testimony to the commonsense quality of the doctrine, and also to the Protestants’ conviction that they were not innovative. To this day, the Protestant creeds and most of their interpreters have given no attention to more careful definition.[16]

The just war theory has creedal status for Protestants, and it does not for Catholics. An implication of this development is that the just war doctrine becomes an affirmation and not a restraint. It means, on the popular psychological level, that the tradition reassures us that it is all right to fight a war. In Catholic moral thought, the just war theory functioned carefully. It called for restraint and self-criticism, in the interest of peace. “Did you ask these questions? Did you check these dimensions?” The context was the confessional query, “What sins have you committed?” In Protestantism the doctrine affirms and reassures. Despite Anabaptist criticisms, Protestantism sees the realm of the political as a morally acceptable realm in which Christians can do whatever they need to do. This includes, of course, engaging in legitimate wars with no qualms about the inevitable killing.

Parts of the Reformation saw moral scrupulosity as a bad thing. “Don’t be picky about living morally; after all, we are all sinners! What really matters is the message of salvation by grace. If something in the political realm isn’t morally clean, don’t be uptight about it. Just come to church and be forgiven.” The message of forgiveness may work against being petty in moral scrupulosity, and the people who said these things did not intend that one should have no principles at all. They were not antinomian. Pastorally, however, they said that people should not be preoccupied with not doing wrong, because people can never completely avoid doing wrong. The main thing is to have a robust conscience, so that we can live with the limits of the human condition and not be depressed, because we live by grace. The whole idea of morality is not meant to exercise restraint. That is an un-Protestant idea. Morality is for positive guidance, to give us a good conscience and motivation. The primary function of morality is not to tell us what we should not have done.

Each of these changes can be overstated. Any one of them alone would not make the point, but cumulatively they all run in the same direction. They all mean that for Protestants, the notion of the just war theory functioning as restraint, as it had in the Middle Ages, has been done away with. The acceptability of war is greater since the Reformation than before.

Loose ends

Before leaving the Reformation context, several themes should at least be identified. We will examine them more carefully later.

Just revolution

Reformed Protestantism introduced the doctrine of righteous revolution. Until the Reformation, the just war was always a holding action. It was always defensive, fought to restore something. It could only be fought by a legitimate authority. The Middle Ages assumed that legitimate authority was self-evident. If a person was the son of a prince, that person was a prince. If his father was not a prince, then he was not a prince either. The only problems arose when people debated about which son of which prince had the right to succeed. Legitimacy was an empirical question, so there could never be a right revolution. That conviction began to change with the Reformation.

The beginning of the possibility of this change goes back further. The wedge appeared in Thomas Aquinas.[17] Is sedition always a sin? Yes, it is. Thomas always started by affirming the argument on one side, then stating objections, and then refuting those objections. Sedition is always a sin, but some governments are tyrannical. Because they are tyrannical, resistance against them does not qualify as sedition. Indeed, it is the tyrant who is guilty of sedition, of undermining God-given government. So if the government is bad enough, its presumption of authority is questionable. Thomas never explains how to know when a government is that bad, or what to do once we know it is that bad. He does not say that those governed must revolt. He does not ask whether one should participate in conspiracies and plots, or whether to support the king’s nephew against the king’s son. Thomas seems to have implied something of the sort, but he did not spell it out.

The Protestant reformers—and the Reformed in particular—moved further in this direction. In the first generation (1540–50), Calvin saw no room for a revolution, but he did see room for people within the ruling elite to take over. Within the ruling elite, second-level people may take over and replace the one evil person at the top. The ruling class purges itself by a palace revolution, which is not sedition or a revolution against government. The action is religiously and ethically justified resistance against a particular sovereign in the interest of a better government. The actors are all part of the establishment.

By the end of the sixteenth century, Reformed writers explicitly made the case for tyrannicide.[18] John Knox in Scotland and the Dutch Reformed theologians, justifying their revolution against Spain, provide us with the clearest examples: “Don’t seize the bad ruler and send him away; kill him. Then the electoral council, or whatever body there is, replaces him.” Although this argument marks a significant shift, it is still within the just war tradition. It never says the mob has the right to rise up. That was happening in those days—peasants were revolting—but for the reformers that revolt was not legitimate. When the theologians moved from a just war in which the sovereign is always legitimate, to a just revolution in which there are grounds for unseating a sovereign, most of that thought process still looked like the just war theory. All the other questions, such as proportionality and winnability, could be pursued. But seeing just revolution as part of just war makes it harder, at some points, to distinguish between the crusade and the justifiable war. The main question is, what warrants prove that the present authority is disqualified and that a new authority is qualified? Some of those claims are not verifiable and objective. Therefore the development in late sixteenth-century Reformed thought of righteous revolution is a move back toward holy war, and thus one more weakening of the restraints the just war theory had meant to apply.

Individualization

Who makes the decision about whether a given war is just? If a given war is unjust, who is supposed to refuse to fight? People in the Middle Ages assumed that the prince was the person who made all the decisions. The other people just worked for him. But Luther said that if even a lowly soldier knows a war is unjust, he should not fight.[19] The idea that an individual soldier should use the same criteria and exercise moral responsibility was new. We do not know of any Lutheran soldiers who exercised moral responsibility in this way, but we know that Martin Luther considered it a logical demand.

The notion that individuals could use the just war theory to decide that they must be selective conscientious objectors was a major event in the Vietnam War story. Every American draftee had to decide whether to let himself be drafted and sent to Vietnam. He did not have to be a pacifist.[20] He could simply be a consistent Catholic or Lutheran, who believed in the just war theory and applied it honestly, so that as an individual he was responsible not to fight. This individualization is a modern theme to which we will return. It was not part of the medieval doctrine.

Usability

What good does the just war theory do? Does it convince us that the mainstream tradition is as serious as it claims to be? Or are the people who hold to this doctrine just covering up the fact that they want to fight and do not want to be criticized, so that we should denounce the doctrine itself? After examining its development, we could argue that the whole just war doctrine should be dumped. We could argue that we should not talk that language at all, because the notion that war might be justifiable is in itself immoral and apostate. Or should we say that if the just war theory did operate, its intention to restrain violence would be a good thing on balance? Then we would have less violence rather than more, even if there would still be war. We should be in favor of the just war theory working as much as it can; it is better than a crusade. Pacifist Christians should encourage nonpacifist Christians who hold to a just war theory to take it seriously.

Another usability question is, how has the doctrine actually been used? Before Vietnam, did Christian citizens ever seriously say they would not fight a war the prince wanted them to fight? Before Vietnam, did a person in government ever look at a war and say that a war would be good for us, we would make a lot of money, gain a lot of territory, boost our pride or strengthen public opinion, but it would be wrong, so we will not do it? Does that kind of thinking ever occur to a statesman?

Finally, once we have understood the criteria we can ask, has there ever been a war that met them?

We will come back later to these applicability questions.

International law in place of Christendom

We should note a new thing that happened in the early Enlightenment period. Remember the three nonpacifist streams coming into the same flood plain?[21] They all made one lake for a while, and then they came out again and divided. The new event after that division is that, while the theologians went on discussing criteria in terms of moral philosophy, international law institutionalized the just war theory. International law is seen as an academic discipline, a profession, and a body of documents and treaties. The man who symbolizes this development is the Reformed diplomat Hugo Grotius. He picked up the just war tradition and tried to make it work by giving it a usable legal form. We could say that he updated the Pax Romana or medieval Christendom as a vision for unity. In any case, Grotius showed that we can take these theories about wrong or right use of violence and phrase them so that courts can apply them.

When both parties wanted to get out of a war, when they realized that it was not worth fighting, they called on someone to arbitrate. In Grotius’s day, some wars were settled by such arbitration. What criteria did the arbitrators use to know what was fair? In the context of a broad moral consensus, in which people used the same moral vocabulary, institutional forms could develop to resolve specific conflicts between countries or between elements within countries. A legal profession and a legal library developed around criteria for evaluating conflicts. Like the rest of the just war theory, this undertaking combined a variety of ethical styles. Sometimes it appealed to “usage,” to what everyone already knows. This is called “the law of nations,” jus gentium, which originally meant consensus, common sense, without reference to any text. The law of nations is what any nation knows it owes to another nation, or what any ship captain knows he has to respect when he is a guest in another nation’s waters. The courts replaced the confessional as the place where the criteria became functional. People could go there to debate criteria and their application. On this basis, they began making promises to one another. They developed a network of treaties and created agencies to apply the treaties. Two parties agreed not to use certain weapons or pledged “mutual defense,” by which one country could legitimately enter another’s war. Finally in the twentieth century, standing entities (no longer merely ad hoc arbitrators) were created, including the Hague court and the United Nations. These institutions are the modern payoff of the development that began with Grotius: a body of principles that could be given formal institutional expression in courts and diplomatic negotiations. The fact that many nations recognized those principles as binding is significant. Officers in the U.S. army are given two manuals defining what they may do and may not do in time of war. One lays out the internal rules about the just war limits. The other identifies treaties which the United States has signed about the treatment of prisoners and illegitimate weapons. These treaties are therefore binding on every U.S. soldier. These agreements institutionalize the notion that just war criteria have a hold on us.

Just war, Machiavelli, and crusade

As we watched the just war theory disentangle itself from the other traditions, we have not studied the other traditions. We have not pursued in depth what has become of Machiavelli’s thought, how the dignity and power of absolutism have evolved in Western political thought. We have not followed the updating of the concept of the crusade. It is not in style to argue that holy war is a good thing. But what really goes on in the minds of parish preachers or ordinary soldiers might still be more like a crusade than they are ready to admit. We set crusade aside because nobody formally approves of it. Nevertheless, we should study it as a cultural tendency, as a constant temptation, as an open border on the edge of justifiable war doctrine, to see how it has been kept alive. This issue is important for us, especially in Anglo-Saxon history, because the most successful crusade or holy revolution in Western experience was the Cromwellian revolution, which had a lot to do with forming later Anglo-Saxon culture. That was a war for religious purposes. It was successful for twenty years. The case for the crusade still has a hold on people’s minds.

Synopsis of the just war theory’s career

1. Origins (three sources)

2. Christianization

3. Crusade

4. Clarification

5. Reformation

6. Secularization

7. Institutionalization

8. Individualization

Classification of developments

I. Weakening restraint

A. Reformation

B. Enlightenment

B. Totalization

a. Technique

b. Sovereignty

c. Citizenship

d. Economy

II. Renewing restraint

A. Enlightenment

B. Concert of Europe

C. Laws and treaties

D. Anti-obliteration just-war pacifism

E. Selective objection: Vietnam

F. Enforcement: Nuremberg

Some of these developments will be dealt with in subsequent chapters.

The Peace Dimension of Medieval Moral Concern

We have pursued the just war outline beyond the chronological limits of the medieval period. Now we come back to survey another side of the medieval experience. We should give considerable attention to this area, but we have little actual content, and few source materials appear in the anthologies. A part of responsible study is becoming aware of our gaps. The peace dimension of medieval moral concern is an area in which our information and my knowledge are limited. Examining this area may help correct assumptions we often make about how original the Reformation was and about how sweeping the change was when it came.

The reading of history is always a matter of tunnel vision. We see along the lines of the story we know. What we know about our story conditions how we are able to conceive of what went before. The processes in the past that succeeded dictated the shape of later society. They also dictated in large measure what records were kept of the other points of view and other phenomena. It takes a conscious exercise of imagination to remind ourselves that many things were going on in the fifth century or the eighth or the twelfth that were not recorded. There might have been records for many other things, but they were not preserved in libraries because they were not in line with the concerns of the victorious institutions. They are not part of the story we know from the past, a story taken up into our present.

Pacifist undercurrent in medieval culture

Constantine did not change everything, and later reformations did not change everything. So we tip our hat at this point to a pacifist undercurrent in medieval culture, about which we can know little except that it existed. The medieval church remained largely pacifist. It is a fact that caesars and princes and their soldiers were let into the church, and that an ethic developed to permit them to be in the church despite their killing. This change did not mean that many people saw the new ethic as normative for the rest of the Christians or believed that it set aside the earlier position. For most people, just war and canonical provisions allowing soldiers access to the church and the sacraments were concessions and exceptions, not the rule.

The lives of saints, for example, continued to be told for several centuries as stories of nonviolence, suffering love, and even conscientious objection. For example, Martin of Tours—for whom Martin Luther was named and in whose name the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church created an annual medal to be presented to a military chaplain—was a conscientious objector. He served with the Roman army in southern Gaul in peacetime, but when war came he refused to fight and became first a conscientious objector, then a bishop, and soon a saint in the Catholic roster.

As we saw before, the peace concern of the medieval church was institutionalized by the designation of holy times and holy places, which were to be completely exempt from the pressure of war. We do not understand the way medieval culture could consider certain times and places holy. Thus we cannot understand how it would be that a soldier would stop fighting at sundown, at the beginning of the Sabbath or Lent, or at a cemetery’s border. That sense of the holiness of certain times and places was real enough in medieval culture that it acted not just as a restraint on when and where soldiers could be violent. It was also a reminder that the presence of God is discernible and is recognized through its demand for peace. Clergy in the early medieval period could not be soldiers, and soldiers could not be clergy.

This institutionally defined portion of the medieval story is quite adequately handled by our readings.[1] Therefore we will give it least attention here. Let a list of its dimensions suffice:

1. The Peace of God protected specific places or persons.

2. The Truce of God forbade violent hostility at certain times.

3. Bishops engaged in diplomatic intervention to mediate or arbitrate.

4. Clergy, religious, penitents, pilgrims, and peasants had exemption from military obligation (and Peace of God protection); it was linked, in the case of the clergy and religious, to prohibitions on fighting.

5. The right of sanctuary was observed.

6. Peace awareness had a liturgical undergirding; there were, for example, masses for peace, celebrations when wars ended, and legends that developed around peacemaking saints.

7. Nonviolent—usually spiritual—sanctions dissuaded people from going to war, or from giving offense so as to promote war; these included excommunication and fostering the moral power of higher nobles.

Contradictory strands: Exceptions prove the rule

The Middle Ages, however, were not a peaceable time. What this chapter describes is the normative teaching of the church, which was seldom fully respected. When that teaching had any effect at all, it was as a modest restraint, not as an effective barrier. War was a nearly permanent condition in vast stretches of medieval Europe. Because war was so expensive to prosecute, and because the political units were so small, a war could be practically permanent; a violent conflict could lay fallow for a year or more, until the parties could again gain enough strength to resume hostilities. Although peasants were supposed to be exempted from fighting and victimization, they had no defense against plunder, which was the standard way to pay troops.

Minority movements were created that had a knightly ideal, a chivalrous vision, and at the same time were religious. There were military monastic orders, including the Knights Templar, the Knights of the Order of Malta, and the Knights of St. John. One can observe something chivalrous about Ignatius of Loyola and something military about Dominic and the Inquisition. These movements created a subculture of chivalry. The assignment of fighting to a particular knightly caste sometimes had the effect of narrowing the losses. Fighting was done, so to speak, by delegation. The knights would at least sometimes make it a point of honor to fight fair and spare the life of an enemy who surrendered, or to protect the defenseless, especially women. On the other hand, the need of the knights for something to do could have the opposite effect. They sometimes provoked wars or went on their own expeditions as near bandits. They also developed the tournament, a contest of military prowess, when there was no political value at stake. Like Roman gladiatorial combat, tournaments served as entertainment for the common folk, and as professional training. But they also served to maintain a pervasive atmosphere of social violence, and sometimes the jousts got out of hand. Sometimes the notion of knightly honor itself became a new cause for hostilities, when knights or their ladies claimed they had been insulted.

There was also the rising importance of the bishop as a prince. In the early feudal period, the bishops took on princely functions because no one else was morally credible and able to provide leadership. Increasingly, bishops were tempted to become princes, but with the partial limitation of not being able to pass on property to their sons.

Medieval Christians were mostly pacifist

Yet this worldly church—the princely bishop, and the militant soldier-priest—remained the exception. The main stream of canon law continued to say that a soldier could not be a priest or a priest a soldier. A priest who went to the battlefield had to go as a chaplain (confessor), and he could not have a lethal weapon for self-defense, only a club. Shedding blood disqualified a priest for ordination. For example, in 1527 a court under the Austrian government was to try and perhaps execute Michael Sattler, an Anabaptist. Various universities were invited to send theologians and law students to sit on the jury. Some people from the universities in Freiburg and Tübingen reported that they were clergy, or hoped to be ordained as priests, and that if they had any part in a trial in which someone was condemned to death, they could be disqualified for ordination. The court considered this a valid excuse. So as late as the sixteenth century, canon law stipulating that a priest shall not shed blood was still operative. Likewise Gian Matteo Giberti, reforming bishop of Verona, published a document in 1542 that clearly stated that clergy shall not bear arms:

By the institutes of the Sacred Canons the clergy is prohibited from bearing military arms because they cannot be soldiers of God and of the world at the same time, but they are not prohibited—and here the military is interdicted—from using their own proper arms, which are prayers and supplications, arms by which indeed the cause of God is advanced. For it was by means of such weapons, when Moses was waging his campaign with God’s help, that his people won their victories. It was by means of such weapons that the elder emperor Theodosius gained a miraculous victory over Eugenius and Arbogast. Therefore following the footsteps of our saintly fathers, we decree that any secular cleric, by whatever ecclesiastical rank he may be distinguished, who carries a sword and arms, unless he is by chance passing through dangerous places outside the city, or for some other compelling reason, with our permission or that of our vicar, shall forfeit his arms and for the first offense shall incur a fine.[2]

There was an exception. When traveling in dangerous country, one could be armed—but as a traveler, not a soldier. The normal weapon of the priest is prayer. The military, the text says, are interdicted from using those arms. In other words, people whose business is shedding blood do not have access to worship. People who have shed blood, even in a just war, do not have access to the Eucharist without a period of penance. The successes of Moses and Emperor Theodosius were attributed to the prayer of prophets, priests, Moses, saints, and bishops, rather than to the military prowess of the generals or the valor of soldiers. So we have several strands of the rejection of war: the stories of saints, holy times and places, clergy exemption, and the polluting effect of shedding blood.

Finally, there were dissenting groups within Catholicism. Franciscan penitents were dispensed from military service. The same was true of the Beguines and Beghards, the Brethren of the Common Life, and other renewal groups, which generally rediscovered the spiritual vitality and moral rigor of the early church, including rejection of violence.

The theological basis of medieval pacifism

There are two focal ideas in late medieval pacifism: imitation of Jesus and law.[3]

Imitation of Jesus

One medieval form of imitation of Jesus was the discipline of renouncing property. The monk was a mendicant, living from gifts rather than by working. Asceticism was the renunciation of comfort, pride, and power. The renunciation of violence was part of this larger withdrawal from the cares and bondages of the world. This position, by definition, cannot be taken by all Christians, because mendicants live in symbiotic dependency on wider society, on the economy and generosity of others. This kind of imitation was naive and symbolic, though not in a pejorative sense. It was not derived from a systematic intellectual analysis. It unfolded not from a clearly programmed vision for how to have a different world but from prior dispositions to challenge and undo what had cheapened Christianity since Constantine, and from a desire to restore the normativeness of Jesus.

When I say this rejection is symbolic, I mean that it was not thought through in terms of social science or institutional theory. It fixed on outward expressions that represent the heart of what had happened. The Franciscan radical went barefoot because Jesus did not wear boots. He celebrated creation (and criticized urbanization) by singing to the sun and talking to the birds. He dramatized the meaning of the Incarnation by constructing a manger scene. Poor people in the twelfth century understood more of that symbol than we do; for us the manger scene is romantic and cute, but they knew that to be born in a barn is no dignity or comfort. These elements of Franciscan asceticism and imitation led to the rejection of violence. Franciscans rejected violence in a way that does not convince modern moralists, but it was convincing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Jesus was the model in his renunciation of power, pride, stability, popularity, comfort, adequate food, rest, and also violence.

Law

A second emphasis of medieval pacifism was law.[4] Law now has a bad reputation in Protestantism, and even within Catholicism, as Catholics catch up with Protestant hang-ups. In order to understand what the Waldenses or Czech Brethren meant when they claimed to root their lives in the law of Christ or in the “minor precepts,” we must make an effort at cultural reconstruction. In addition to what they called the major precepts—the Ten Commandments and the two great commandments, loving God and neighbor—these believers found six additional instructions in Matthew 5. In the late Middle Ages, these were called the minor precepts. People debated about whether they were binding. Many said that the minor precepts are merely parables or pastoral applications, illustrations, or “counsel,” but unlike the major precepts, they are not simply rules to be obeyed. But medieval pacifists argued that the minor precepts offer guidance that Jesus gave for us to follow. Jesus taught these things. They have the form of precepts. If Jesus is truly the Son of God, then the precepts he gave must be valid precepts. These laws are to be kept. Therefore these instructions on loving the enemy, renouncing the oath, turning the other cheek, and renouncing divorce and remarriage are binding for Christians.

The argument that law is an inadequate basis for Christian morality has been stated in various ways. Lutheranism has made one understanding clear and present in our minds. Contemporary cultural developments have raised more objections from the perspectives of psychology, pedagogy, cultural relativism, and our endemic anti-Semitism. We must not permit our embarrassment over moral rules to stand in the way of understanding the Middle Ages. Law was the way people then talked about morality. If we want to understand how the medieval church could remain largely pacifist, despite exceptions for princes and soldiers, we must rehabilitate the notion of law. A partial answer is that the moral reasoning of ordinary people and priests was still on the level of legal application of the New Testament’s moral guidance.

The social critique described here became more visible in the second millennium, and it did not begin at the point of war. It rather began at the point of wealth, pomp, power, pride, and simony. Simony is the sin of paying for ecclesiastical office for economic gain.[5] Simony was criticized with more clarity, because the phenomenon became widespread. People acquired significant financial gain by holding church offices, especially the office of bishop. It made sense in financial terms to bribe the people who would elect the next bishop. Beginning in the tenth century, a movement called Christ’s Poor arose and criticized the clergy’s wealth. Christ’s Poor is the historian’s designation for a host of phenomena that popped up in various places in northern Italy and southern France which gradually led, at the end of the twelfth century, to the movements of Peter Waldo and Francis of Assisi.

The critique of violence was present by implication, but only by implication. It was not spelled out or stated in theory and was not necessarily decided on in practice. In these relatively primitive times, the notion of religious establishment underlined the problem, and underlay it. The question whether the Christian could be a ruler if he took Jesus seriously was present, but only under the surface. Questions about baptizing infants or about who is a Christian were intrinsically present, but they were not spelled out consciously. No free church alternative was developed in this period, although the critique that eventually led in the direction of the free churches was beginning to percolate.

We have said what we can say to locate the pacifism of the main stream of the medieval church. It persisted despite Constantine and despite concessions to accommodate soldiers. Soldiers were a small minority, and the concessions made to accommodate them did not apply most of the time to most people, and therefore did not immediately change the popular ethos.

The Nonviolence of Rabbinic Judaism

Now we move to the story of Judaism, a terrain even less known to many Christians, and one in which we are even less competent. So we can only locate the phenomenon of medieval Jewish pacifism. Our purpose is to correct some common misunderstandings; we cannot claim to retell the story as it should be told.

The standard Christian picture of the Jews

The standard Christian picture of the Jews locates them as the people over against whom Jesus stated his opposition to war and the state. Therefore the Jews are seen as pro-war, pro-state, pro-violence, over against Jesus—who rejects those things—and the New Testament.

There are reasons underlying this perception. First, although Christians claim the Old Testament, when we have problems with it we blame the Jews for those problems and identify them with whatever it is we have a problem with. We identify modern Jews or medieval Jews with the Jews who rejected Jesus. The fact that Jesus was rejected by his contemporaries as a king contributes to this understanding. We tell ourselves that the Jews wanted a real king.[1] In so doing, we assume that the people who rejected Jesus were the norm, for Jews. And somehow we ignore the fact that all Jesus’s disciples were Jews too.

Second, Christians assume that Judaism rejected Jesus and Paul, and that Jesus and Paul rejected Judaism. We further assume that Jews born in subsequent generations remained faithful to the earlier Jews who rejected Jesus and Paul and who also approved of statehood, kingship, violence, and war. This understanding is also fostered by a superficial understanding of the “six precepts,”[2] which leads us to think that what Jesus set aside, and contrasted to his teaching, is normative Judaism.

Third, this interpretation misreads the Old Testament. In the Old Testament story, wars, statehood, and kingship are left behind as the story develops beyond David, the division of the kingdoms, and through the double exile to the prophets. Beginning with Jeremiah, the model for being the people of God is diaspora. That judgment of God on kingship and statehood-as-usual is never reversed. Ezra and Nehemiah reinstate a social structure without statehood and kingship, so that even back home in Eretz Yisrael, the form of Jewish peoplehood is no longer that of an independent nation. The Jewish story also makes much of Joseph, Daniel, and Mordecai, who are models of social leadership without statehood. Each contributes to the health of a pagan political system, and each dramatically wins recognition from the pagan system that the God of the Jews must be the true God. Yet none of these faithful ones takes over that system and makes it a righteous state. To read the Old Testament as a fundamentally violent book,[3] so that we can make the Jews fundamentally violent by associating them with the Old Testament and with refusal to move beyond the Old Testament when invited to do so by Jesus, is to be wrong about the Old Testament.

Fourth, that reading is also wrong about what it meant to be Jewish in the time of Jesus. Most Jews in the time of Jesus were not Maccabean or Jewish nationalists. The Maccabees failed and were disavowed by later Jews. The books of the Maccabees are not in the Jewish canon. The people who wanted Jesus to be a “literal king” were not the Jews in general or the Jews who crucified him but the Jews closest to Jesus, his own Zealot followers. The Jews who rebelled against Rome in 66–70 CE were not the Jewish establishment, not the majority of Jews, not the structured leaders of the Jewish community; they were a minority of violent rebels. They were not mandated to revolt by the people or the rabbis (who were closer to Jesus than they were to either the Sanhedrin or the Zealots). Thus the notion of “the Jews”—meaning an entity which Jesus rejected and which rejected Jesus because they were violent and he was not—must be denounced as a later construction, as a partisan reading of history and not the real story.

Finally, this view reads Jesus and Paul wrong. Jesus did not say that he came to set aside Jewish understandings. He said he came to purify Jewish understanding of the law, and to save the law from misunderstandings, which were represented by some, but by no means by all, contemporary Jews. The things of which Jesus said “You have heard that it was said” did not represent the thrust of the law but rather a softening of the thrust of the law. Jesus reinforced the law rather than softening it.

Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem

This reading of Judaism is even more incorrect when we apply it to Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem. The normal Christian understanding seems to be that time has stood still for the Jews, that Jews are still and will always be the people who did not listen to Jesus. But Judaism could not remain that entity, even if the Jews who killed Jesus (if any Jews had killed Jesus, which they did not) could be identified, and even if the Jews who supposedly killed Jesus were typical or normative or representative or authorized Jewry (which they were not). It would be completely counter to history to assume that Judaism could have stayed through the centuries as it was during Jesus’s time. After the final fall of Jerusalem in 135 CE, all nationalistic and militant forms of Judaism collapsed. Even before that, they had not been official or recognized by the rabbis. The militant elements did not gain widespread public support except during the few months when they seemed to be successful. After 135 they were gone. The rabbis reorganized Judaism. The prototypical rabbi is Jochanan ben Zakkai,[4] who was almost a contemporary of Jesus. Just as the Christians had, he escaped from Jerusalem during the siege in the Zealot war (68 CE), and he set up a Jewish school in Javneh or Jamnia, teaching an ethic much like that of Jesus.

The system of the rabbis was really only identifiable as a system later, from about the year 200 on. The two major centers where that later development occurred were in Palestine under the Romans and in Babylon, both settings in which the Jews were without political and military independence. In other words, the cataloging and systematizing of the rabbinic heritage took place in a context of diaspora identity and included the renunciation of revolutionary and nationalistic violence. The Jews after 135 retained a special status under Rome. For the sake of this status, or because of it, they gradually pulled away from Christians, but not before the middle of the second century.[5] From then until modern times, Jewish identity is a tunnel, a separate story, little known yet never independent of the mainstream Christian story. Sometimes the Jews were tolerated and they prospered; many other times they were persecuted. Yet they never claimed the sword.[6]

Generally, Jewish ethics can be characterized as never justifying violence. It makes much of frequent nonviolent martyrs who did not fight back against their persecutors. God might be chastising them at the hand of their persecutors, and in any case, only God can save. Theirs is a story of frequent emigration and occasional prosperity and privilege after the model of Joseph and Daniel. Judaism successfully kept its identity without ever using the sword; it kept its community solidarity without ever possessing national sovereignty. In other words, medieval Judaism demonstrated the sociological viability of the ethic of Jesus. In terms of actual ethical performance, Judaism represents the most important medieval sect living the ethic of Jesus under Christendom. Jews were granted exemption from becoming “Christian” because of the racism and anti-Judaism of official Christianity. Their story thereby demonstrates inadvertently that the way to be a Christian sectarian minority is to live without the sword.[7] Judaism lived from the conviction of the sovereignty of God. Because God is sovereign, God’s people let God work. If God wants to save God’s people, God will. If God wants to chastise them, they should not try to defend themselves.

Judaism affirms the neighbor’s dignity. Even the outsider and stranger is a neighbor, especially in the age of diaspora. “Seek the peace of that city” was the instruction Jeremiah gave to the Jews in Babylon (Jer. 29:7). An affirmation of the dignity and potential wholesomeness of non-Jewish society is part of Jewish identity. In this we have a beginning statement of the distinctiveness, fiber, and viability of Jewish identity. It was the identity of a nonviolent community under the cross (if we may distort history to give to the word cross its original meaning rather than what it symbolized through the Middle Ages—persecution and wars).

Did Jews teach love of enemy?

Jews lived as a disarmed minority with a countercultural ethos. When we seek to spell out the position they were taking in terms of language with which Jews understood or interpreted themselves, it is difficult to be precise.[8] The bases of medieval Jewish pacifism included especially the following convictions.

Blood is life and belongs to God. Even the blood of an animal must not be shed except in a ritual context. Shedding the blood of a fellow human being is a fundamental denial of human dignity (Genesis 4), from which all other sins against society are derived. Old Testament exceptions to this prohibition are in the context of Mosaic provisions for civil administration or of holy war narratives and at most would apply in a pre-exilic Jewish state. Even there, however, they would not apply rigorously, because Judaism assumes an evolutionary process moving toward greater grace and humaneness.

The Messiah has not yet come. If anyone could rightly restore patterns of vengeance, which alone could justify shedding blood, it would be the Messiah. Yet when he comes, there will be a time of peace. If the time of his coming will be a time of peace, then his people participate in that coming by living in peace already. In fact, some Jews believe that living at peace contributes to the Messiah’s coming.

Judaism is concerned to learn from the Zealot experiences. These include the final catastrophe in 130–35 CE with Bar Kochba, the earlier catastrophe in 66–70 CE, and the still earlier Maccabean drama. All of these represented the same strategy, and all failed. All but the last failed at least partly because when the Zealots took power, they were unable to bring about the righteous and peaceful community they had promised. If anything is constitutive of rabbinic Judaism, it is the concern to remember the wrongness of the Zealot path, which God evidently had not blessed. In not blessing the Zealot path, God is saying something that God has had to say more than once and should not have to say again.

How God presides over the affairs of the goyim is not revealed to God’s people in any simple way. God rules over the whole universe and therefore also over the nations. Yet the way God rules over the nations is different from the way God rules over his people through the Torah. Therefore God forbids his people to draw immediate conclusions about which things in the world are of his doing and which are acts of rebellion against God. Because God has given no clue about his judgments in those matters, it would be the height of presumptuousness to seek to be the instruments of God’s wrath. It would be equally audacious to do in advance of the Messiah’s coming what God’s people think he would want done—and especially to undertake acts of judgment.

Suffering has a place in the divine economy. That the faithful must suffer is a mystery in the Jewish understanding of history. The tradition affirms a correlation between disobedience and punishment, and between obedience and prosperity. If God’s people suffer, they have disobeyed and should not defend themselves. Yet this link is not automatic, because sometimes the evil prosper. Sometimes the suffering of God’s people is beyond explanation. Auschwitz did not bring this problem to the surface for the first time. In any case, some suffering at the hands of the goyim is to be expected and accepted as sanctifying the name of God.

The above answers are varied, yet most of them agree in denying that the faithful can and should prevent their suffering or gain vengeance by taking up arms. Sometimes God’s people see their suffering as punishment for their sins; to ward it off would mean interfering with God’s chastisement. At other times suffering is thought of as discipline or as refining the spirit rather than as punishment, but again it would be wrong to prevent it. Whichever explanation is adopted, suffering happens within the framework of God’s sovereign control of events. Since God lets these things happen, God’s people should not prevent them.

The confluence of these considerations made the medieval Jewish experience consistent and convincing. The stance was viable because between pogroms, Jews enjoyed stretches of tolerance when safe niches existed for them. The stance was self-reinforcing and convincing, because the crude, violent, semi-pagan, tribal culture of their “Christian” oppressors was living proof of the moral superiority of Judaism.

The wider significance of medieval Judaism

In addition to historical corrections and clarifications dealt with above, renewed encounter with Jewish identity and Jewish agenda has far wider appropriateness in our study. As we are only now beginning to recognize, the whole structure of Western theology has long been skewed by anti-Jewish biases. A renewed encounter with Jews and the Jewish agenda is therefore an imperative, not only in order to be less unfair to Jews, but in order for Christian theology to become more biblical. This discovery of bias is most embarrassing to western European Protestants, because of their claim to possess scholarly ways of avoiding bias and reading the Bible straight. Yet Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologies have corresponding biases.

Since Auschwitz, Christians have sought to take account of their responsibility for the monstrous event we call the Holocaust. Jews also have been preoccupied with understanding it. The attention some people give to Holocaust studies as a new realm of research and teaching may be overdone. Yet through it essential themes have been brought back to prominence in theological research, rivaled only by the accents of liberation theology in their importance for academic and church theology.

Behind these contemporary imperatives for reformulation is the value of rediscovering the Jewishness of the New Testament, and acquaintance with greater diversity in the first-century cultural context. We can no longer read the Christian New Testament without careful attention to the Jewish environment of the time. If this observation is correlated with the correction mentioned above, we will rediscover the extent to which the Christian movement was and wanted to be a Jewish rather than a post-Jewish phenomenon. If we take the New Testament as a norm and not only as a launching pad, then the recovery of Jewishness must be a constant Christian agenda.

Finally, since Theodor Hertzl and especially since 1948, modern Judaism has moved rapidly toward acceptance of modern Western statehood as the proper vehicle of nationhood. Nevertheless, strong pacifist voices remain in American Judaism and even in Israel. But it is far harder for a pacifist Jew to stand by that conviction today among nonpacifist Jews than it is for Mennonites to do so among nonpacifist Christians.

This chapter and the previous one have been exercises not in spelling out a story and putting flesh on the bones but only in identifying where the skeleton stands. We have stretched our imagination toward awareness of the fact that beside the mainstream history, which says that since Constantine war is all right, there run several other parallel streams. These historical streams were perhaps even more important than the so-called main stream in terms of the numbers of people who belonged to them. Some of these people were sectarian, some were monastic, some were lay Catholic in good faith, and some were Jews. All of them carried on—despite Constantine, and before Francis and Waldo—the understanding that the believer living under the sovereignty of the God of the Bible renounces self-defense; trusts God for survival; and gathers with others who worship the same God and pray in the same trust, freed from military models of identity and defense by that God. This way of life may have been shaped by prohibitions in God’s law, or by imitation of a rabbi, or by the heritage of the prophets, or by trust in God’s intervention. In the Middle Ages, most people who were sincere believers in God, Jewish or Christian, were pacifists of that kind. It was really only the Protestant Reformation that made a Constantinian ethic the normative ethic for most people. Before that, it was an ethic of concession for the military and for the prince to whom God had given exceptional status and an exceptional ethic.[9]

The Pacifism of the First Reformation

In chapter 9 we noted that the medieval church was more nonviolent, in its understanding of what a Christian lay lifestyle ought to be, than we perceive it to be through the literature it left behind or in the historical record of the activities of medieval princes. The cross-reference to the Jewish community as an underground part of the Christian world showed another stratum in which roughly the same moral position was also at home.

When and what is (the) reformation?

A phrase used to designate the period we move to next is the “first reformation.” The phrase is used by historians from within that movement, the Czech reformation of the fifteenth century. There is certainly a sense in which the term first reformation is right. Modern historians often describe John Wycliffe or the Czech reformation as “forerunners of the Reformation.” That characterization assumes that we know what the Reformation is: the one that entered massively into Western history through Lutheranism and Calvinism, and in a derivative way through the free churches. Anything that happened before the Reformation is significant because it led up to it, as a precursor.

Whatever the truth of that portrayal, it does not help us understand the phenomena of the earlier centuries for their own sake, in their originality and their distinctiveness. If we look at a thirteenth- or fifteenth-century phenomenon and ask, in what sense is this movement a precursor of Luther or Calvin or the Anabaptists? it won’t quite measure up. It will be less clear about some things that were clarified later. We tend to see that lack of precision about certain definitions, certain oppositions, or certain polar options as a shortcoming, but it might be a strength. So we should step back from the question of later developments, and from the assumption that sixteenth-century models of the Reformation are normative, and try to read the fifteenth-century story for its own sake.

Caring about the relative independence and particular identity of the Czech reformation as contrasted with the sixteenth-century Reformation makes a difference for our generalizing about history. Is the Reformation a single sweeping event that happened only once? If it is, then before 1500 Christians didn’t have what it took to produce a reformation. And after the Reformation happened, it didn’t need to happen again, because it had been done right. That is the ordinary Protestant way of reading the story. If, however, the fifteenth-century reformation or the Waldensian reformation had its own character, if these movements were not simply the beginnings of something else, then perhaps we should think about reformation more broadly as a recurrent possibility in the life of the church through the ages. We would expect reformation to happen in widely different forms in various times and places; we would not think about the Reformation as one turning point in modern Western experience, to which everything before it and after it has to be related.

To understand reformation in the broad sense has implications for our doctrine of church, our understanding of how scripture works, and where we go for resources for renewal. Are we Protestant or evangelical Christians because of the Reformation that happened once and which had precursors and derivatives? Or do we think of reformation as a stance, as something that may recur in other times and places in significantly different and yet significantly similar forms? The latter thesis seems more true to the facts and much more interesting theologically.

Another value of looking at this particular Czech specimen is that it reminds us that before the Reformation, Europe was a cultural unit. The two major forces contributing to this Czech reformation before it happened and after it had begun were the Waldensian movement from across the Alps, and the English pre-Reformation of Wycliffe and the Lollards. The unity of Europe made it possible for the phenomenon of reformation to get from Lombardy and Britain to Moravia, through manuscript circulation and through the itineration of monks and scholars. The writings of Wycliffe were a major source of the thought of Jan Hus; the Hussite reformation found its sources clear across Europe in cultures with other vernaculars. Europe was that cosmopolitan, that united, and that free of provincialism. Two hundred years later, Europe could not have that experience of continental cross-fertilization, because the Protestant Reformation (associated with the Renaissance and with nationalism) had broken Europe into compartments. Europe was more of a unity before the Reformation than after. Recognizing this reality gives us an important reading on how the life of the church proceeded, before the state-oriented Protestant Reformation broke Europe into hermetic units.

The Czech reformation is also a case of creative and critical evangelical thought and identity that was not Germanic. From the fifteenth century on, there were Slavic reformations that we know very little about, because to this day we are part of a European culture that assumes that Slavic peoples are part of Asia. We don’t know their languages, we don’t read about the Slavic reformations, and we don’t take seriously what happened in them, in the fifteenth century or later. Thus they have a smaller place in our picture of the history of reformation than they properly should.

Jan Hus and the Czech reformation

There were earlier minds and leaders, but the first prominent figure in the Czech reformation was Jan Hus, who became a well-known preacher in the biggest church in Prague around 1400. He derived some of his message from Wycliffe and, in a broader sense, from an undercurrent of reform-minded critique within scholarly Catholicism of the time. The process of undertaking a critique of the medieval synthesis, the fusion of secular philosophy and biblical wisdom, was complicated.[1] It didn’t start with a full-blown Protestant message but with specific criticisms. Hus’s message catalyzed Czech nationalism. The people who listened to him began to see themselves as Czechs over against Rome, and over against the (Germanic) empire as well. They saw themselves as a people being renewed by the gospel, in the process of critically appraising the medieval synthesis.

Hus’s role in these developments made him a sensitive subject politically and ecclesiastically. The wider church had to deal with him. This period saw a number of attempts to renew and restore the Catholic church by means of councils; the so-called conciliar movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was one of the main hopes of late medieval Christians for change in the church. If all the bishops of the world would come together, or all the bishops of the Holy Roman Empire, they could take action to deal with the abuses and vices into which they had fallen and thereby renew the church.

A council meeting took place at Constance, on today’s Swiss-German border. Hus was invited there to defend himself against the charge of heresy. Emperor Sigismund promised him safe conduct: Hus would be free to defend himself and then return home. The council, however, did not respect that safe conduct; it condemned him as a heretic and burned him at the stake in 1415. The fact that an imperial promise had been broken and Hus had been martyred precipitated a new birth of Czech nationalism against Rome and against the empire. The result was a national uprising, which took off between 1416 and 1420. The confusion from 1417 to 1420 was too great to chronicle here, but developments moved in four directions (see fig. 11.1). Three failed.

1415–20

Four avenues after the death of Hus

Taborites

Militant Utraquists—Jan Žižka

Moderate Utraquists

Petr Chelčický

1467

Unitas Fratrum

Fig. 11.1 The Czech reformation after Jan Hus

After Hus

The Taborites were the radical left of the Hussite movement. They went into the countryside to a mountain to which they gave the biblical name Tabor. They created villages that practiced community of goods, and they lived in the expectation of the early return of Christ. Whether they would be soldiers to bring in the kingdom or would simply be the group going out triumphantly to meet the coming Messiah, their communalism and their eschatology were linked to the belief that the kingdom was coming.

The labels Utraquist and Calixtine indicate the way the moderate national groups defined their identity. These reformers could not find a rationale in scripture for the medieval Catholic practice of giving only the eucharistic bread to the faithful and reserving the cup for the clergy; this issue is a sacramental expression of much larger questions of the nature of the church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood. The first symbol of reform these moderates insisted on was the cup; the root calix means “chalice.” To this day the cup is the symbol of Protestantism in Czechoslovakia. The Latin word utra means “both”: the Utraquists are “both-ists” who insisted that the whole Christian community have access to both bread and wine, to the whole Eucharist.

The moderate Utraquists, as things settled out, were nobles, the social backbone of Czech national identity. They used diplomacy, and fought if necessary, to make the most of this uprising as a step forward in national identity. The Utraquist nobles negotiated with the Holy Roman Empire, using some military and much diplomatic activity, to work out a peaceable compromise that would permit them at least that one change in the practice of the Eucharist. The concession would prove that they had got their way, that their martyr had not died in vain, and that the Czechs were a nation. The latter was an important source of dignity from the late Renaissance on. After some negotiations, the empire promised them that concession. There were other treaties (compactata), but this deal is the best sample. In it, the empire agreed to defend (against the pope) the moderate Utraquists’ freedom to diverge at this one point of sacramental practice, as a reward to them for not rocking the boat otherwise and not pursuing a more radical reformation.

The militant Utraquists wanted the reformation to go farther; they wanted to change the clergy’s style of life and dismantle more of the medieval ceremonies. This group consisted in part of nobles and in part of leftover Taborite radicals; it was organized militarily with Jan Žižka as general. Not until the mid-1430s was the military wing of the Czech reformation’s national uprising completely defeated.

Gradually these solutions lost their hold on people. First the Taborites collapsed, because the Lord didn’t return. Then military nationalism was defeated, partly by the moderate nationalism. The earlier Hussites assumed they would fight against the devil and his hosts, who probably would take the form of Catholic armies and princes with the backing of the Holy Roman Empire. As things worked out, the militant Utraquists had problems among themselves; the moderate Utraquist nobles and the new radicals had fights, Czechs against Czechs. When Jan Žižka was finally slapped down, it was partly because Czechs opposed him. The moderate Utraquist noble nationalist movement seemed convincing and was successful for a while, but after the 1430s, with the radicals out of the way, the empire could again bring its power to bear on the situation. The popes, bishops, and the empire started breaking the promises of the compactata. They sought, bit by bit, to withdraw the concessions they had made and to completely re-Catholicize the Czechs. Then these moderate nobles lost confidence that their minimal approach to reformation had been the right and effective way to bargain. Because of the breakdown of these options, by the 1440s and 1450s a fourth direction gained general acceptance.

Petr Chelčický was a self-educated man. We know little about where he came from. We know that he lived in a village (Chelcice, from which his name derives) rather than in a city, that he wrote, and that his writings were respected and thus preserved. In 1418–19 he had been close to the Taborites but had rejected their path because of its violence. He had identified the issue of violence at the outset, as no one else had, and rejected violence on simple New Testament grounds. Without others who shared his alternative radical reformation vision, he held to it by himself for thirty years.

Then when the alternatives failed, in the 1440s and 1450s many began to think that Chelčický had been right all along. A structured community, which took the name Unity of Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), began. The organization began to crystallize in the 1450s, but historians use 1467 as the date of its formal beginning—with a stated theology and a full church structure, including leadership and the rest. In a sense the Unitas Fratrum is the first Protestant church. In another sense the Waldensians had been that. In yet another sense neither of them is, because the sixteenth-century Reformation had its own definition and its own start.

This Moravian group survived into the sixteenth century. Luther and his colleagues had to relate to it. They affirmed it at some points. By Luther’s time it had evolved considerably on one ticklish and difficult point: the question of the Christian’s peacetime involvement in social leadership and local civil government. It had already broken into two groups by 1520. The “minor” group was faithful to literal nonresistance and therefore said that a Christian should not be a member of a city council because of the oath and the sword. The “major” group said they would continue to refuse killing and would not serve in war. However, they could accept the compromises involved in social leadership in the small city-state, as part of the rising social elite of early middle European urban culture. This major group, therefore, was close to the rest of the Protestant Reformation and made common cause with it in the 1520s and 1530s. The movement continued to have its national identity and its own story until the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), when the whole Czech world was forcibly re-Catholicized and the entire Protestant movement in the country was wiped out or chased out. The remaining Moravian Protestants became refugees.

The heart of the Unity of Brethren

One can always debate what constitutes the heart of a movement. Chelčický would have said a straight line went from Wycliffe through Hus to him, that he was working out the implications of their reformation. His expression of it has to be called a radical reformation. The apocalyptic Taborites have remained a part of Czech imagination and peoplehood. The Czech communists have made much of the Taborite event, claiming that it was communism before its time. They appeal to it as part of their national founding but also claim that it was not viable. One proof that it was not viable is that it did not survive beyond a couple years. After that, the nobles seemed to succeed. They too had a sense of being radicals, of being courageous, of standing up against the whole world at great cost, and of trusting the gospel for their survival. Their approach worked for twenty years.

What lived on was the line of Chelčický, which by 1450 took an “Anabaptist” position in its conviction that a Christian cannot wear a sword and cannot swear oaths. However, these Czechs were a bit more legalistic about such matters than were the Anabaptists.

The normativity of the Bible and of Jesus

Peter Brock, the best contemporary historian of pacifism, gives a sense of what concerns were unique and at the heart of the Unity of Brethren movement:

The source of Chelčický’s whole philosophy lay in a return to the spirit of primitive Christianity. He took over from Wyclif, as we have seen, his conception of the Bible as containing all things needful for salvation; and from Hus and his predecessors and the Waldenses, as well as from Wyclif himself, he inherited the practical attempt to follow Christ’s example in everything. He made, however, a distinction—as, for instance, the Waldenses had done earlier—between the Old Testament, “material and concerned with gross matters,” and the “spiritual” New Testament; and it was only the latter which demanded unqualified obedience. The example of Christ and his apostles was to be the touchstone of all human conduct, of all earlier and later teachings. “For every doctrine [he writes] needs to be tested by Christ’s words and life, to see if it accords with His example and teachings.” There is no need for any additional “human laws (zákony lidské),” he proclaimed with Matěj of Janov, “since this law [i.e. of Christ] is no less sufficient today than it was at the beginning.”[2]

Note that Christ’s words and life, his teachings and example, are the standard. This much weight given to the human life of Jesus as model was new. Other people had said the teachings of Christ are normative, or the teachings of the apostles are normative on matters of theology, but the way Jesus and the apostles acted is not normative. For mainstream Protestantism and for mainstream Catholicism, the example of Christ was not as binding as his words, because theology matters more than behavior and is more portable, more transcultural. The Unity of Brethren was radical in part because example mattered as much as teachings. For them, no additional human laws are needed, because the law of Christ is as sufficient today as at the beginning. If the church fathers helped to interpret or enlarge on the Bible, their work was not rejected. If the fathers’ teaching countered the Bible, the Unity of Brethren did not accept it: “They were to act as additional confirmation of established truths, never to alter or extend the already perfect revelation. . . . The kernel of Christ’s teaching, the secret of his power, lay, according to Chelčický, in his law of love. This was the rock on which the early church had been built. Its whole existence for the first three centuries had been one long attempt to regulate every activity, personal or public, in accordance with this law.”[3]

Law

Geoffrey Nuttall uses the word law as a designation for how medieval pacifist groups differ from Protestantism.[4] Protestantism has given that word a bad taste. We need to understand why that is and to recall how people talked about morality before the sixteenth century stood between them and the gospel. Mainstream Protestant and free church thought sees law within the context of Luther’s reading of Paul. Luther read Paul as attacking the Jews in the same way that Luther attacked his own Catholic heritage: as attacking the possibility that people may find their salvation through works, through fulfillment of requirements. Luther rejected this “works righteousness” in Catholicism, and he saw Paul rejecting it in Judaism. The failure of his efforts to please God by obeying the “law” was the problem Luther confronted in his own coming to a deeper understanding of the meaning of grace. He assumed that it was the human problem. Therefore he found it in Paul, and he made the struggle between law and grace the normal pattern, the paradigm, for understanding the gospel’s meaning. For Luther, law was a crushing judgment and a temptation to pride. He defined the gospel by using the law as a backdrop against which to see it in contrast. The idea that in law God reveals a wholesome, healing, and redemptive guidance gets lost under the preoccupation with a saving experience of liberation from law understood as condemnation.

It is hard for us to imagine how people thought about morality before Luther and others constructed that screen between us and the text. But for this legacy of the sixteenth century, we would not read the New Testament in terms of a conflict between law and grace. Without carrying on the argument with the New Testament or with the sixteenth century, we need to note that in the fifteenth century the Protestant concern not to be legalistic was not present, was not relevant, and did not get in the way of the Gospel text. Medieval people normally dealt with all of life in terms of rules. They did not have the Enlightenment refinement that enables us to back away from specifics into general principles, or to concentrate on exceptions that undercut the rules, or to do any of the other things that we have learned to do in our culture so that (or because) we feel law to be an inhibition, heteronomous or inauthentic.

No, medieval believers wanted to know what God wants, so they asked what God said. The things God said were rules. Then they wanted to know what Jesus has to do with the picture, and they discovered that he clarifies the rules—most specifically in Matthew 5, where he says, six times, “You have heard it said, . . . but I say . . .” Is what Jesus says there authorized or not? If he is who we say he is, it ought to be authorized. It is to be kept, isn’t it? So in addition to the Ten Commandments or the two great commandments from the New Testament, they found “the six minor precepts.” That became a technical term in the Czech reformation. The six minor precepts are the six points by which Jesus reinforced and sharpened the law. Is he the Lord? Is he the Son of God? Well then, the law he gave, those six minor precepts, are also binding. Some deal with the oath and sexual ethics, but three of them have to do with violence, the enemy, and killing. So Christ brought the newness of the law of love in a clarified and reinforced formulation. He taught it, and he also lived it. We do not have Christ without the law of nonresistance. Nonresistance was not seen in the framework of the issue of how to get salvation by doing what God wants; that would be a sixteenth-century question.

The rules of Jesus as the principle of reformation

On a much more modest ethical level, what does God want? Jesus made clear that the law of love—meaning specifically the love of the enemy, nonresistance to the evil one—is the heart of the salvation that God brings us. This formulation is much more focused than the pacifism of the early church. The early church would have said those things too but not so pointedly, not so selectively, and not so coherently around that one notion.

Church and state: The fall of Christianity

The Unitas Fratrum asked, “How are we going to shape our critique of what the church has become in the Middle Ages? We have to go back to the Bible. What does the Bible give us? It gives us all we need. Since what we have is too much—too much tradition; too many adaptations; too many local adjustments; and too much compromise with sinfulness, power, and pride—the way to use the Bible will be (negatively) to say that anything the Bible does not authorize, we should not do. Positively, anything that the Bible does say clearly, we should use as a knife, a measure, a criterion for sloughing off the rest. These rules of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount are thus our principle of reformation.” Where those rules were not respected, the apostasy of the medieval church resulted. The chief problem was the fall of Christianity arising from the confusion of church and state with “Constantine.”[5] As Chelčický wrote already in the 1420s,

These two divisions, the temporal order of force and Christ’s way of love, are far removed from each other. . . . An action done because of the compulsion of Authority is quite different from one done through love and from the good will arising out of the words of truth. Thus civil authority is as far removed from Christ’s truth inscribed in His gospel as is Christian faith from the necessity of using such authority. Those in power are not led by faith nor does faith need them. . . . For the fullness of authority lies in the accumulation of wealth and vast gatherings of armed men, castles, and walled towns, while the fullness and completion of faith lies in God’s wisdom and the strength of the Holy Spirit. Faith supported solely by spiritual power stands firm without the power of authority, which only brings fear and can only attain what it wishes under the threat of compulsion.[6]

This approach is not legalism in the sense of rigidity about details or salvation by deeds. Yet the notion of the bindingness of this one teaching of Jesus clarifies the whole system and gives us a picture of the polarity between the two kinds of authority in the world, which makes sense of everything.

An image important in Chelčický’s writing reinforces the problematic nature of church-state relations in his time. “With Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity . . . ‘the emperor with his pagan authority, his pagan offices and laws and statutes’ had, like a monstrous whale caught up in a fisherman’s net, torn a gaping rent in the fabric of the primitive faith.”[7] One of Chelčický’s writings is called The Net of Faith. A net full of fish had been from the early church, indeed from the Gospels, a symbol for the church. But the net that was the church, and was supposed to separate the fish that were in it from the rest of the ocean, has been torn because two whales got into it. Those two whales are the emperor and the pope. Once the two whales have torn a hole in the net, it cannot hold the church together. A visible church no longer exists.

Chelčický considers that Sylvester should have made Constantine renounce his temporal power before receiving him into the church, thus condemning in effect the foundations on which rested the twin pillars holding up contemporary feudal society: the church and the state. No real Christian then or in later ages, therefore, could hold any state office: princes and rulers on becoming convinced of the true faith must resign their authority. “No one may stray from the way of Christ and follow the emperor with his sword, for this way is not changed just because Caesar has become a Christian.”[8]

The courts, conflict resolution, and the ban

This conviction led Chelčický to a rejection of the whole judicial system. How then should Christians settle disputes among themselves?

During the very first years of the early church, Chelčický explained, the imperfection of many of the new converts from Judaism and paganism had led the apostles to ameliorate the stringency of the ban upon all forms of litigation, Matthew, V, 40. They permitted the establishment of courts within their own community, to prevent greater scandal from arising on account of those not yet ripe enough to accept the full Christian doctrine of voluntary suffering appealing in their disputes to the pagan courts (1 Cor. VI, 1–8).[9]

So, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, Christians ought simply to let themselves be taken advantage of. If they are not ready to do that, however, then they should settle their disputes in a church arbitration process and not in pagan courts.

The Christian method was that of arbitration and of restitution for damage done, of punishment by exhortation and by rebuke. “But if the guilty person cannot recompense his brother in any other way, he must humbly do penance [Chelčický went on] and with this his fault shall be forgiven him and a sincere reconciliation take place. In this manner evil shall be curbed, and love and peace shall reign among the brethren.” If all other sanctions failed and the erring brother continued in his evil ways, he was to be expelled from their company. “No harm should be done him, such as killing him in his sins, but let him be cast out, thereby preserving our own purity.”[10]

As will be the case later for the Anabaptists, the ban is seen as an alternative to the civil sword. “All forms then of punishment based on violence were wrong, and no Christian could apply them. . . . The words of Christ, writes Chelčický, forbade the execution of the death penalty on sinners.”[11]

Warfare

In the earliest phase of the movement, many Taborite leaders rejected violence, following the example of the Waldensians. But during most of his life, “Chelčický’s testimony against all wars, defensive as well as offensive, was shared by scarcely anyone outside the narrow circle of his Brethren.”[12]

Chelčický remained firm in his opinion that participation in warfare was quite incompatible with the Christian way of life. We have seen him debating the point with Jakoubek of Střibro during the most critical months of 1420 with the crusading armies at the gates of Prague. The sixteen years of war that were to follow, its material devastation and the accompanying moral deterioration, only confirmed him in his opinion.

“For the sake of the future [he was to write] we should not pass over those things which we have now been suffering, and eyewitnesses of, for over fifteen years, . . . when for reasons of faith one side has risen up against the other in its wrath and savageness. . . . What this side has proclaimed as truth, the other has condemned as error. . . . The fire they have lit they have been unable to quench. Everywhere murder, rapine, and want have flourished and multitudes have perished. . . . Every town in the land has girded itself to battle, has been enclosed with walls and surrounded with moats. . . . Whoever would enter or leave the town is imprisoned and robbed and killed. . . . On every side there is only want and fear, in the home and in the fields and in the forest and on the mountains. Nowhere can they hide one from another. In the towns and castles every man must be ready for battle. . . . Nowhere may one find rest and peace. The labouring people is stripped of everything, downtrodden, oppressed, beaten, robbed, so that many are driven by want and hunger to leave their land. Some even must pay their dues to castle or town thrice over, even four times, now to one side, now to the other. For otherwise they would be driven from house and fields. And what is not taken from them by the castle in dues is eaten up by the armies . . . that pray [sic] upon the land.”[13]

This striking passage brings out clearly the social background on which Chelčický composed his stirring denunciations of the scourge of war.

What then was the basis on which Chelčický’s pacifism rested, as distinct from the emotional protest which the cruelties and destruction of the contemporary religious conflict aroused in him? War originated in his opinion with Antichrist. “God cannot say: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ since the Beast commands men to kill, hang, burn, execute, destroy villages and homes.” The Old Testament, he agreed, permitted the Jews to fight their enemies; and warfare was also natural among pagans, ignorant of the Christian way of life. . . . With the coming of Christ, however, the new Law of Love forbade his disciples to take human life under any circumstances; and this was proved by the example of Christ himself, of his apostles and the early church. All men were now brothers. The Christian’s weapons were spiritual, not material; and his aim was to redeem souls and not to destroy bodies and souls. For warfare would inevitably corrupt even the protagonists of a righteous cause. Wars waged by persons claiming to be Christians were more to be condemned even than unjust wars among Jews or pagans. The fact that leading church authorities over the previous thousand years, as well as the most eminent of his contemporaries, had accepted the possibility of a just war carried no weight with Chelčický, when compared to the injunctions of Christ. “If [St. Peter] himself should suddenly appear from Heaven [he writes] and begin to advocate the sword and to gather together an army in order to defend the truth and establish God’s order (zákon boží vysvoboditi) by worldly might, even then I would not believe him.”[14]

Finally, Brock identifies four pro-war arguments that Chelčický refutes.

“Some urged that much benefit would accrue if Christians ruled for the purpose of reforming bad Christians or those outside the faith. The only way to convert such people, Chelčický replies sternly, is through ‘the workings of the law of God,’ which consists in loving God and one’s neighbour. Such conversion must come as the result of free-will, never from compulsion.” In other words, we cannot use the present system to reform either itself or the church.

Others argued that prayers for those in authority, of which Chelčický approved following 1 Timothy, II, 1–3, implied a recognition of the place of the ruler in a Christian society. On the contrary, answered Chelčický, the reason for such prayers is “to gain the good will of heathen and cruel princes and soften their anger against us,” and to prevail upon God to prevent them from bringing much misery upon their peoples through war. Chelčický gave an equally negative answer to those who urged . . . that the existing social system could be purged of its defects, the state could be guided by love in its exercise of authority. Power can only be wielded, in Chelčický’s opinion, “by the worst of men who are without any faith or virtue, since it is by means of terrible punishments that the state compels evil doers to some measure of justice in outward matters.” Mercy and state authority were self-contradictory terms.

A more powerful argument against his position, however, might be found in the words of St. Paul, Romans XIII, 1–7, which were, he admitted, the main authority quoted by “Caesar’s priests”—as, like Wyclif, he called the clergy—to justify Christian participation in the state. In reply, Chelčický differentiated first between submission to pagan rulers in matters proper to them and the, for him, wholly untenable reading which would justify Christians becoming rulers themselves. He then went on to prove the absurdity of his opponents’ arguments by consideration of the historical circumstances in which St. Paul wrote these words, a member of an outcast sect living under the rule of the pagan Romans.

Armed rebellion was never justified even under the greatest provocation, for though “rulers sin by acting unjustly, [subjects] also commit a sin in seeking vengeance on such lords.”[15]

Internationalism

Two more related dimensions reach beyond the nonresistance issue itself in Chelčický’s thought. The first is internationalism. “A strongly-felt sentiment of internationalism was a natural corollary to Chelčický’s pacifism. The Hussite revolution, both in its genesis and during the course of its history, was to some extent a nationalist reaction to the encroaching German element.”[16] The Holy Roman Empire was German, and some of the nobles were German speaking and related to the German world farther north, while the common people and the lower nobles were Czech.

Traces of national feeling, as Czech historians have been quick to point out, are not absent from Chelčický’s writings. They are, however, rather implicit, half formed and never aggressive in expression. The Church for him was international. “Everywhere, among all nations and languages [he writes] there have been people who have believed in the gospel as preached by the apostles.” For the Christian every human being in distress is a neighbour to be helped. “If anyone, a Jew or a heathen or a heretic or an enemy, is ever in need, then according to our principles of love it is our duty to see that he does not die from hunger or cold or any other calamity.” Only for the false Christians did the boundaries of speech and nationality play any role in defining their attitude toward their fellows.[17]

Class inequality

Chelčický also rejected class inequality.

He was to direct his fiercest invective against contemporary social inequalities and the theories by which class divisions were justified. . . . Hus and his predecessors had championed both in theory and practice the rights of small craftsmen and peasants. They proclaimed the moral superiority of the simple countryman. But neither Hus’s predecessors, nor any party within the Hussite movement, had consistently advocated a total revolution in social relationships: the abolition of serfdom (poddanství) and the establishment of an egalitarian society. The Taborite chiliasts in 1419–20 had, it is true, preached a complete reversal of the existing social order. But the disappointment of their hopes of Christ’s second [coming] put an end to these communistic dreams after a few months. . . .

[Chelčický] protested, above all, against the traditional arguments on which the existing inequalities were based; against the theory of “the threefold people,” the three estates into which the Christian commonwealth was divided: the nobility, clergy, and commonality. The first two estates, according to this conception, represented the divine and the human elements in Christ’s mystical body, which were united with the third element, the working people, destined to serve their material needs, by the bonds of Christian love as members together of Christ’s Body. The lords temporal were to defend society by arms; the clergy’s task was to follow the way of Christ in poverty and in prayer and to teach the laity; while the third estate were to carry the whole burden of supporting the other two estates by their manual labour. . . .

Chelčický saw in a society founded on class inequalities the antithesis of a Christian social order. It was as completely pagan as the violence on which its whole structure rested. Since he denied . . . the need for armed force in a Christian society, the only justification for the privileges of the nobility, whose task it was to protect the other two estates, lost thereby its validity. The granting of titles meant giving that homage to men which should be reserved to God alone.[18]

Legalism in a good sense

So there is in Chelčický an egalitarianism, a specific critique of the stratified society, derived from the same gospel roots. Where he starts is what I call “legalism in a good sense”: the simple trust that we have words in the Bible that tell us what to do, that those words are clear enough that they can function critically and are adequate in their content to speak to all our fundamental questions, so that the Bible itself, the rules in the Bible, are a guide for reform. I do not mean that Chelčický is petty about words or only debates texts. From his simple gospel, he gets a global truthful vision. He gets, for instance, a critique of the class or caste structure of society that is not in the New Testament texts directly, but he makes a coherent connection to those texts. It is a holistic view, even though it starts with his rather literal sense of the status of the teaching of Jesus as valid law for Christians.

This perspective is so much like that of the later Anabaptists that historians ask questions about whether there was a causal relationship. There seems not to have been at the origins. Our concern is to understand the wholeness and the character of this kind of movement when it came into being. Certainly, in one sense at least, it developed historically in a way that confirmed Chelčický’s point. The other strands of the movement did not renounce the state, or the radical revolutionary antistate, or the nobles as a carrier of the national renewal—and they all collapsed. His movement, with no official status, was viable in the formation of the Unity of Brethren, although it was so rigorous that it could not stay that way very long. As it started growing and prospering, the questions of involvement in civil office became important, and the movement did not have ways to resolve those issues without breaking up. It divided on those matters in the early sixteenth century. Nevertheless, Chelčický had organized a church, through the power of his words alone, with no other authorities on his side and in a way that survived for two generations in his absence. That is longer than most human institutions survive without change in character.

Postscript at the close of the medieval period

Most of the outline here, like most of the outline of Bainton, has followed the ordinary Western Protestant way of reading the history of medieval and Reformation Europe. There are, however, important points at which that classical reading, which generally sets the stage for the other materials in our bibliography, has begun to undergo some serious revision.

The first point of revision is evidenced by the reference to the Czech Brethren in the writings of people such as Amedeo Molnár, for whom the “first reformation” is that which took place in Bohemia and Moravia from 1400 to 1467. The sixteenth-century movement became “the Reformation” in the memories of the churches of western Europe. Once that was decided, the blind spot for earlier history was reinforced by the fact that few western European intellectuals know Slavic languages or care about the Eastern European experience. Much, however, of what happened in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation did not take off straight from the Bible and was not highly original. Most of it had been there before. It is accidents of politics and culture that made the German-speaking reformations of the sixteenth century go down in Western memory as “the Reformation.”

A more sweeping revision, begun in recent generations, is the effort to read all history “from below.” Historians are beginning to look for different kinds of data in the early sources. They are trying to write the story of how it felt or what it meant to be living in ordinary life in the fourteenth century or in the eleventh. Instead of studying primarily the intellectual history of a cultivated elite, or the political history of the rulers of church and state, these historians pay attention to ordinary people. Instead of concentrating on major events recognized as turning points, they ask about daily life. Instead of examining official normative teaching, they ask about the popular experience of religion. Instead of assuming each culture to be monolithic and each nation to be an ethnic unit, they are open to seeing the great mix of nations. For example, the ducal dynasties of Catalonia were Goths. Scandinavians and Germans were scattered around other places that we normally think of as Spanish or French. These historians attempt, despite the difficulties of the sources, to see what the experience of women or of slaves could have been, and to ask what proportion of the people in any city were slaves or refugees.

It cannot be the task of this study to undertake or even to digest how reading history from below would appropriately apply to our topic. We can and must say, however, that to the extent to which that has happened, and will happen, it will throw a significant light on the history of Christian attitudes to war and peace. Dealing with other levels of society than the prominent ones, like dealing with other levels of the moral life than those dealt with by canon law and the confessional, will restore the balance of the story as it actually happened. This restored balance will lean in the direction of giving less attention to the just war tradition as representative of the Middle Ages, and more attention to the basic pacifist preaching carried over from the earlier centuries. The historian typically pays more attention to change than to stability, more attention to the theologian than to the common believer, more attention to the ruler than to the subject. It is on the upper level of each of these two contrasts that the just war tradition was our subject. If we look on the lower level, at what changed less, and at ordinary people, our conclusion will be that most Christians still saw killing as tragic and sinful, and told their children not to do it.

Anabaptists in the Continental Reformation

First I should identify some language conventions. When we seek to classify Reformation phenomena, usages vary.

Free church. The largest circle I will address here, the largest set of phenomena that some people try to define when working in this field, is free church. That is the term preferred by Franklin Littell,[1] one of the first “outside” historians to give a sympathetic and widely read interpretation to the Anabaptist movement. But the term free church has too many meanings. It may mean free in the sense of voluntary personal membership, or in the sense of not being governed by the state, or in the sense of not having a fixed doctrinal stance or liturgy. It excludes certain high church traditions, but it includes so many variations that it is not precise. In British usage, for example, it refers to any church not administered by a link with the state. Thus in Scotland the Anglican church is a free church, and in England the Presbyterian church is a free church. If one crosses the border the reverse is true, because each is the established church of the other nation. So free church is a usable term but not precise enough.

Believers’ church. Donald Durnbaugh, the most competent survey writer in the field, following Max Weber and recent North American historians, used the label believers’ church.[2] This name fits better structurally, because it identifies as definitional just one of the dimensions of freedom noted above: voluntary adherence by the members to the group. The designation means that the church is visibly composed of those who have confessed their faith. Usually such confession is made in connection with adult baptism, yet it may sometimes be in connection with some other kind of visible expression, such as a covenanting process or confirmation. The term has a somewhat unfriendly aftertaste, as if it indicated that the members of other churches were unbelievers. To those in circles not familiar with this usage, among people who do not know that it was invented by an outsider, Max Weber, it may seem proud.

Historic peace churches. A still smaller concentric circle would be the historic peace churches. All three of the so-called peace churches—Church of the Brethren, Mennonites, and Society of Friends (Quakers)—are believers’ churches; they all make a point of adult conscious membership. This label uses as a principle of discrimination a matter of personal and social ethics. Yet it happens that that is an important issue, and therefore not unfitting as a further way to discriminate. So there is objectivity to the claim that the three circles thus far named are concentric, that the direction of narrowing is progressive, and that those different labels display a coherent logic.

Radical reformation. This final label, radical reformation, is our term for now; it accentuates the fact that this narrowing process takes place in church history, in times of change and reform. We are interested in the movement toward the center of that circle, recognizing that in different times and places, and for different groups, this movement is represented somewhat differently. Yet there is a degree of parallelism in their agenda. That process of radicalizing reform, or the image of the church toward which it moves, is a concept of the church that is thinkable in every age, and actually present in many periods. When we use it, we are not yet saying that it is good or bad. It is a descriptive term. We may like it, and other people may not like it, but it is the kind of objectively descriptive term that a group of historians, with varying views about whether it is good or bad, can use. Let’s not assume that the word radical has a positive (or a negative) connotation, at least not in all conversations in all places. Radical reformation is a phenomenon. It is a pattern that events take on in church history. This phenomenon is what we are talking about, specifically now in its sixteenth-century incarnation. It is not deeply different from what happened with the Czech radicals of half a century before, but it is more weighty in many ways.

The importance of the sixteenth-century radical reformation

The radical reformation of the sixteenth century is more important than some previous expressions of reform partly because it happened over against other things that have come to be normative. If we ask Lutherans, Anglicans, or Roman Catholics where to find their normative definition of what it means to be Christians, they go to the sixteenth century. Roman Catholicism, of course, goes back far behind the sixteenth century, but the Catholic self-definition—as not Protestant—was focused in the sixteenth century at the Council of Trent. In fact, to use the word Catholic as we now use it—as designating one kind of Christians and not another kind of Christians—is a sixteenth-century phenomenon. Because all major Western Christian bodies define themselves from the sixteenth century, if we are interested in historical phenomena of radical character that are able to converse with other forms of Christianity, the most relevant and logical place to find them is also in the sixteenth century rather than in the fifteenth or the nineteenth.

A second reason to give particular attention to the radical reform of the sixteenth century is that Mennonites as a denomination have origins in this sixteenth-century movement. That fact raises a number of questions that we need to carry with us. The use of the sixteenth-century fathers for apologetic purposes puts a bind on the reading of history. If we assume that early Anabaptists are what make Mennonites now able to respect ourselves, that apologetic use may get in the way of our reading their story accurately. On the other hand, if we assume that Anabaptist forebears are what we have to react against so that we can respect ourselves, that anti-apologetic use puts a different kind of constraint on our reading of their story. Often the discussion of matters such as these within Mennonite institutions occurs between people making those two uses of these forebears: some are proud of the heritage and some kick against it. Both approaches stand in the way of reading the story fairly, although each may be pedagogically necessary at certain points in the growth process. We should not read the sixteenth-century Anabaptist figures assuming that they were right and that therefore we are right, that they give us something to be proud of. Nor should we read them assuming that they represent the narrowness of our Amish grandpa or our image of a narrow-minded farmer-preacher in a repressive church, in order to prove that they were not with it. Let’s try to read the story for its own sake. Then, as a question for its own sake, we may later face the problems of locating the place of these forebears in the identity of an ongoing community.

We have just identified, as one of our reasons for studying this material, the fact that it relates to Mennonite denominational identity. Yet that reason is not the most important one. Modern Mennonites are not committed to being faithful to sixteenth-century Anabaptists in any firm way. Neither the sixteenth-century Anabaptist doctrine of the church nor the Mennonite one would call for such a commitment. Even if we thought we had such a commitment, we are not following it.

The Anabaptist movement of the early 1520s was not a unity. The historian cannot talk about a unified Anabaptist position until after 1540, and then only on certain questions, and only because people representing the other options were persecuted out of existence. The free church vision does not give normative authority to any ancestors. Nevertheless we keep falling into the pattern of the high church traditions that do; we feel that since they have their ancestors to look to, we ought to have ours also.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mennonites have received much of their identity and definition from many other sources. They are not—and do not claim to be—simply the children of the sixteenth-century radicals. The renewed interest in the Anabaptists that marks recent generations of North American Mennonites, in college and seminary circles, is partly an institutional and psychological rallying cry. It does not really make these sixteenth-century figures our forebears. We should not assume that our denominational identity makes this a normative study.

Anabaptists are interesting because the sixteenth century has remained a model century for later Christian understanding. Also, the weight of the Corpus Christianum notion—the idea that the whole of society is Christian—is deeper and clearer then than in earlier centuries in its ongoing impact on the Western world. Since most people west of Prague do not speak Slavic languages and do not think Eastern Europe has much to teach us, it is the sixteenth-century events that really symbolize for our Western Protestant history the breakthrough on the question of Constantine. The Waldensians made the same basic critique, but it was not an institutional breakthrough because they accommodated on the local level. They did not form visible congregations in Catholic territory. They met, they prayed, they studied the Bible together, they rejected violence, but they kept taking their babies to be baptized, and they occasionally went to the Catholic Eucharist in order not to be denounced as heretics. The medieval mix did not call for, did not provoke, and therefore did not produce a complete model of a free church. It is noteworthy that the context in which a complete model appeared—for the Anabaptists—was within Protestantism, within the wider refocusing of the issue of biblical authority and the debate about what it means to have the church be reformed by scripture.

Radical reformation and war

If we read history with no assumptions about how history ought to work, and we then observe the Constantinian shift, it will not surprise us to encounter debate about whether that shift was a good thing. But it is striking that efforts to engage in critique of the Constantinian shift (or the church) that appeal to scripture or to the pre-Constantinian fathers as a basis for critique consistently focus on the issue of the sword. This recurrent critique happens without genetic ties; it is not clear that one radical reformation figure learned it from another radical reformation figure. A narrowing process takes place, in which the focus is on the same agenda, with its own intrinsic logic, whether the time we are reading about is the thirteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth century, or the Third World today.[3]

But we cannot prove such continuity among radical reformation movements, nor should we be too interested in doing so. Why should we want to prove an underground apostolic succession? The simpler explanation is to claim that there is something either about the New Testament itself or about the particular cultural and social context in which reformation happens, such that when a reformation gets more careful about being biblical, or more free, or more willing to be obedient, the problem of the sword just cannot help arising and moving to the center. Our interest, as there is concern for greater faithfulness, will be in the logic of how the problem of the sword arises and moves to the center. While our interest is in the logic, we have to tell some of the story in order to see the logic working.

Two sample texts: Conrad Grebel and Schleitheim

Two documents typify the earliest sources relevant to our topic. The first is Conrad Grebel’s letter to Thomas Müntzer. Grebel was one of the young enthusiastic supporters of Huldrych Zwingli, the reformer active in Zurich in the early 1520s.

Background to Grebel’s Letter: Zwingli’s Reformation

The Protestant Reformation was not a unity. There were two major foci of reformation on the continent of Europe (and another in England, not dealt with in this chapter). The upper Rhine basin was one cultural unit, some of it in the Holy Roman Empire and some not. Luther’s territory was farther northeast. The regions there were governed mostly by princes with sizeable territories. In the Rhine Valley, city-states had relative political independence. Luther’s Reformation arose out of the fact that he was a monk, concerned about his salvation and spiritual discipline. The Reformed Reformation arose more out of the fact that Erasmus was a humanist; it went back to the biblical sources to purify and simplify what it meant to be Christian.

Erasmus never became a Protestant, but his disciples—especially Huldrych Zwingli—did. After having been a popular preacher in some other places, Zwingli began preaching a Protestant message in 1519–20 in Zurich. He started at the beginning of Matthew and proceeded through the Bible, preaching one hour every morning and two hours on Sunday. People came because they did not have television and they thought religious discourse mattered. By mid-1522, efforts at conciliation or at convincing one another were not working, and it was clear that the whole reformation process was going to blow up. A whole new chapter in European history was unfolding. Luther had already been excommunicated, and no peace was possible on the ecclesiastical level.

Reform was also going to be a political football. The question of how fast the reformation process would move became more and more tense. In November 1522, Zwingli cut his ties to Rome. He resigned his pulpit, to which he had been named by the bishop. The city council of Zurich said he should go on preaching anyway. They did not recognize that they were creating the state church, but in effect that is what happened. For the first time, a person had a mandate to be a preacher of the gospel without the bishop’s approval, and Zwingli got that authority not from a local congregation (the later Anabaptist ideal) but from a government. Before that, all preachers had government authorization, but with the bishop. Now they had it against the bishop. So the Protestant state church began. Today some people even call this development the beginning of Protestantism; they define the state church as the first thing that (in 1522) made Protestantism Protestant.

People did not regard the city council in those days as political in the modern secular sense. It consisted of representatives from the guilds, tradesmen running the city as a marketplace. Only later did that entity come to be thought of as governmental. Conservatives accused Zwingli of heresy. The city council said, “Let’s have a debate to see whether the preacher we have employed is a heretic.” That disputation was held in January 1523. The great Catholic universities of Louvain and Paris were invited, but they did not send representatives. Johann Faber, the vicar sent by the bishop of Constance, said, “I refuse to discuss theology with a bunch of tradesmen.” So there was not anybody with whom to discuss it. The council in solemn assembly decided that nobody had proven that their preacher was a heretic, so he must not be a heretic and he could go on preaching. Then Faber objected, so they had a debate after all, even though he had denied the competence of the tribunal. As a result of the disputation, Zwingli knew he had the local state with him. He saw this backing as supporting reforms that he was concerned to move on with and not jeopardize. His more aggressive disciples during this period were nothing but his disciples. They did not see anybody else leading nearly as well, although behind Zwingli they saw Erasmus as the person from whom he had learned. These disciples kept pushing forward on specific issues.

In the summer of 1523, a question arose about whether to do away with tithes and interest. Tithes (technically the way the priest in the parish got his support), interest (in the sense of interest on loans), and rent on farm land were all seen as the same thing. Zwingli believed that it is a sin to take interest, because both Old and New Testaments prohibit it. Because they had not discovered any problem with the church-state relationship, the obvious way to stop interest was to pass a law. But the people who received interest were the government, which was not inclined to pass a law prohibiting it. Things came to a head in June 1523. Some villagers petitioned, “Now that Master Huldrych Zwingli has preached the gospel, and we know we should not have to pay interest, please let us stop.” The city council said, “We cannot afford to let you stop.”

Zwingli had to make his peace with the council’s decision. He developed the idea that it is the business of the civil order to compromise. Compromise is our word, not his, but our ordinary meaning of that word is what he meant. He distinguished divine righteousness, which is an ideal, from human righteousness, which necessarily dilutes the ideal to fit the sinful situation. God assigned government to do that diluting, to determine how far we have to water down the gospel in order to make it viable. Government has the divine authorization to mitigate the impact of the gospel on society.

Zwingli preached that view in June and then wrote it up as a tract later in 1523. At that point, his more radical disciples still thought they were with Zwingli, but later they came to believe that the preacher and the civil authorities should be a little further apart, because they have different functions: the preacher preaches the ideal and the civil authorities dilute it. Zwingli did not see the implications of that distance as clearly as some of the others did.

Tensions came to a head again in the fall of 1523 on the specifically religious issues around idols and the mass. Idols meant pictures—whether statues or painted images—in the churches, which people revered in worship services and carried in street processions. Zwingli took literally the condemnation of idols in the Ten Commandments, and applied that judgment to these pictures. He believed they should be done away with. When he finally got the chance, he took every kind of decoration out of the Reformed church buildings.

Zwingli also thought that the mass—in the sense of a ceremony in which the body and blood of Christ are held to be created again by a sacramental miracle, and then received as a renewed sacrifice—should be done away with. According to Luther and Zwingli, the mass was wrong because it is not biblical. Zwingli wanted to replace the mass with an evangelical Lord’s Supper, a meal that points to and signifies the sacrifice of Christ, but is not really his body and blood and is not really sacrifice. That change mattered for theological reasons that are a part of Protestantism in general.

A second public disputation in October 1523 dealt with these two offenses. It proved to everyone’s satisfaction that Zwingli’s view on these matters was correct. In this meeting, Conrad Grebel rose to say, “Now that it has been proven that these things must go, why don’t we say they must go?” He meant that right now, in this expanded assembly of the city council, the council might take action and call for change in the church. Zwingli said, “Wait a minute. This larger assembly is a fact-finding body and has no legal authority. We must leave it to the city council proper (“milords”) to decide how and when to implement the truth that we have now clarified.”

Zwingli was not calling into question the truth of the positions taken on the mass and on idols, nor did he expect any serious delay in implementing these changes, but the details of implementation had to be the business of the council and not of the ad hoc assembly convened to debate the issue. Grebel agreed, as far as we know: procedurally Zwingli was right, so the meeting did not make any decisions about changing these practices. Zwingli was authorized to produce a tract, which was widely circulated by the city council in all the villages, explaining why they were going to make these two changes. The changes, however, were not implemented. So in December of 1523, a group of preachers, with Zwingli doing the drafting, announced, “On Christmas day we are going to practice the new worship form. We are going to have an evangelical Lord’s Supper. If we do not, we will be condemned as liars by the Word of God.”

That announcement constituted a threat to the civil peace. If the preachers had followed through, many conservative people would have objected and maybe even rioted. The city council named a wider committee of more conservative people. That group made another statement, also drafted by Zwingli, calling for a more moderate, voluntary solution. Certain parishes, they proposed, would observe the Lord’s Supper this new way, and other parishes will be free to follow the traditional mass. Even that moderate approach the city council did not authorize, so Zurich observed a standard Catholic cultic pattern until Easter 1525.

At this point, Zwingli lost the confidence of his radical younger colleagues. They began meeting separately, studying other subjects, and developing convictions on other matters, especially on the issue of infant baptism, which had previously arisen as a problem in its own right. They began to take on a conscious identity as a group of dissenters. They did not consider themselves the church. They considered themselves a group of seekers, a caucus, who had been led into something new by Erasmus (in the broadest sense) and by Zwingli (in the narrower sense). Those leaders had let them down; they had not kept leading these seekers to see more critical implications of the gospel that Zwingli had first helped them find in the New Testament.

Grebel’s first letter to Thomas Müntzer

When the radicals had developed a clear enough identity, and had become convinced enough that they could no longer count on reconciliation with the present power structure, they began casting about elsewhere for friends. They wrote three letters that we know of. One of them went to Martin Luther, and one to Luther’s theology teacher, Andreas Karlstadt, who had become more radical than Luther and was having trouble in Lutheran territory because he wanted a more thorough reformation than Luther sought. The third letter was written to Thomas Müntzer, another independent preacher, also in Lutheran territory.

The Zurich dissenters wrote to these men in the Lutheran world to see if any of the three would support the Zurich dissenters. We do not know what Karlstadt did with his letter. He was soon driven out of Saxony and actually came to Strasbourg, then to Basel, and then to Zurich. He must have met with these people, but they did not make common cause. Karlstadt spent the rest of his life as a Reformed theologian in the Zwinglian movement.

We know that Martin Luther received his letter, because he told a man from Zurich who was studying at Wittenberg that he did not know what to do with it. We do not know whether the content of the letter written to him was the same as that of the letter to Müntzer. Whatever the letter said, Luther apparently did not answer it.

The third letter never got to Thomas Müntzer. It is still in the archives in Switzerland. It is the first extant document that demonstrates the independent existence of the group that later came to be called the Swiss Brethren, the first structured form of the Anabaptist movement. The letter shows the writers’ respect for Müntzer, thanks to his radical image. They did not know him well. They knew that some of his writings criticized the Lutheran concept of faith as fictitious, hypocritical, superficial: people just needed to believe that Christ died for them and then they were different, saved. They did not have to repent, have mystical visions, or change their way of life—just believe.

The Zurich dissenters liked that critique. They tended to assume that if Müntzer was critical at some points at which they were also critical, they must be close together on other matters too. Yet this letter also shows that they differed from Thomas Müntzer at the point that turned out to be his most fundamental offense, the point of violence. The theme of violence appears twice in this letter.[4]

Most of the letter is about other things. Müntzer had proposed a German mass, and had not made as many changes in its forms as they thought he should, especially at the point of music. After criticizing Müntzer’s introduction of new German chants, they moved to other questions about renewing the church. They encouraged him to proceed toward creating a new visible church according to the vision they projected: “March forward with the Word and create a Christian church with the help of Christ and his rule as we find instituted in Matthew 18 and practiced in the epistles.”[5]

The rule of Christ was a technical term referring to Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 18:15–20: If believers commit an offense, talk to them about it. The Swiss Brethren made this not simply a good piece of advice in pastoral relationships or personal reconciliation but a definition of the church. These verses in Matthew 18 are the only place in the words of Jesus where the word church is used, with the admonition to his disciples to do this. For the Zurich radicals, then, the way to reform the church is by observing the rule of Christ, not by getting city council votes or episcopal rulings. If something is wrong with the church, believers should talk about it. The way to reform a church is to talk to one another, to deal with offenses; the result will be forgiveness and reconciliation. They counseled Thomas Müntzer to apply the rule of Christ to reform the church: “Press on in earnest with common prayer and fasting, in accord with faith and love without being commanded and compelled.”[6] Theirs would have been a reformation without compulsion, a noncoercive reformation.

Two other things they objected to are reflected in the next sentence: “Then God will help you and your lambs to all purity, and the chanting and the tablets will fall away.”[7] The reference to chanting is about too much traditional singing in the mass. “The tablets” refers to Müntzer’s proposal to put the Ten Commandments on stone tablets in front of the church, to replace decorations, images, and “idols.” His proposal was an attempt to dramatize preaching the law and preaching grace, but the Zurich radicals disapproved of this new gimmick. They told Müntzer that if he kept working at reform, the singing and the tablets would fall away; they had confidence that his reformation would get more thorough.[8]

The letter continues:

There is more than enough wisdom and counsel in the Scriptures on how to teach, govern, direct, and make devout all classes and all men. Anyone who will not reform or believe and strives against the Word and acts of God and persists therein, after Christ and his Word and rule have been preached to him, and he has been admonished with the three witnesses before the church, such a man we say on the basis of God’s Word shall not be put to death but regarded as a heathen and publican and left alone.

Moreover, the gospel and its adherents are not to be protected by the sword, nor [should] they [protect] themselves, which as we have heard through our brother is what you believe and maintain.[9] True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter. They must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical [enemies][10] but the spiritual. They use neither worldly sword nor war, since killing has ceased with them entirely,[11] unless indeed we are still under the old law, and even there (as far as we can know) war was only a plague after they had once conquered the Promised Land.”[12]

Grebel’s second letter to Thomas Müntzer

Then it rained, and the letter was not sent, because the messenger did not go. Before the messenger could leave, Grebel and company got more news and learned that their picture of Müntzer was not quite correct: he had been preaching that violence could be used against the princes. Grebel drafted another letter, to go with the first.

Hujuff’s brother writes that you have preached against the princes, that they should be combatted with the fist. If that is true, or if you intend to defend war, the tablets, chanting,[13] or other things for which you do not find a clear word (as you do not find for any of these aforementioned points), I admonish you by the salvation common to all of us that you will desist from them and all opinions of your own now and henceforth, you will become completely pure. . . . Be strong. You have the Bible.[14]

Then follows a reference to the unfaithful theologians.

You have the Bible . . . as defense against Luther’s idolatrous forbearance, which he and the learned shepherds around here have spread throughout the world against the deceitful lax faith, against their preaching in which they do not teach Christ as they ought. They have just opened up the gospel to all the world so that many can read it for themselves, . . . but not many do, for everyone depends on them. Around here there are not even twenty who believe the Word of God. . . . If you should have to suffer for it, you know that it cannot be otherwise. Christ must suffer still more in his members, but he will strengthen them and keep them steadfast to the end. God grant you and us grace, for our shepherds are also fierce and enraged against us. . . . In time we too will see persecution come upon us.[15]

Forbearance. The term schonen is translated “forbearance” in the excerpt above. Schonung means to go easy on somebody, not to be too demanding, not to exert too much pressure. This forbearance is what Luther was calling for by the time of Grebel’s letter. The word had become a technical term in writing about how to go about reformation. Müntzer and Karlstadt disliked the concept, but Luther and Zwingli advocated being careful, not being too brusque, not crushing the well-meaning resistance of the people who do not yet see the whole point.

Luther and Zwingli thought that reformation should move gradually. It should not bowl people over. One must allow time for people to grow, to be won over. So, they claimed, there must be a delay—maybe even a delay of years—between teaching a truth that is critical of society and insisting that people act on that truth. This forbearance applies first of all to the common people. Luther and Zwingli believed that ignorant folk could not understand the new clarity, because it came from humanism. The gospel, for these reformers, was an intellectual innovation that common people could not understand right away. So these crude people must have time to give up their idols and rise to the higher spiritual faith that does not need idols, and does not need to be spooky about the value of the sacramental elements to bring salvation into the body. That educational task should not be pushed too fast. As a result, these reformers waited patiently until they were sure they could implement a particular reformation change without too much unrest.

Forbearance started, then, as a concession to the unrefined and unspiritual mass of people, who had not acquired spiritual maturity under the old form of religion. But after that principle had been stated, it also came to mean not going so fast that the reformers would offend anybody—especially the conservatively inclined members of the city council and people who had a mature and sober theological commitment to the other (traditional Catholic) position. Schonung began by being a pastoral pedagogical concern for people who did not understand the spirituality of a new faith, but it quickly became just another label for being politically cautious or pragmatic, for not doing anything without the support of the city council. That is what Grebel and friends were against when they wrote about “idolatrous forbearance.”

The sword. The basic logic about the sword in the two brief paragraphs quoted above includes just two points. First, the alternative to the sword is the ban. What Christians are to do with conflict in the church is to talk about it: go to the brother or sister with the intention of forgiveness. The way to process conflict is reconciliation, which must be noncoercive. Two communities are coming into view here. The civil community uses the sword; the believing community uses the ban. Ban is a bad word for it, because it names the negative outcome—excommunication—which results only when the process has not worked. If the reconciling conversation is successful, then people are reconciled, and no sanction is invoked. So rule of Christ should not be equated with ban. The noncoercive process of admonition and reconciliation is the way to handle conflict; it is the alternative to the sword. The reason we do not use the sword is that we have this other instrument to use in the Christian community.

Second, there is the logic of conformity to the model of Christ: “Christ must suffer still more in his members, but he will strengthen them and keep them steadfast to the end.” This understanding differs from previous patterns of pacifism not in its ethical meaning but in its spiritual and theological formulation. Grebel did not talk about the law of Christ. Medieval pacifists asked about law. They noted that “Jesus said this in the Sermon on the Mount,” and then they asked, “Is it true or not? Is it law or not? Is it meant to be obeyed or not? Does he have the authority to give us a law or not? Yes? Then we do it.” Grebel and his friends would not have objected to that kind of thinking, but it was not theirs. Their vision was of being members of Christ called to be in the world as Christ was in the world. Where this thought came from would require more lengthy study, but at least in part it came from Zwingli and Erasmus. Zwingli used the term discipleship, in the sense of following Christ, of being formed in the world the way Christ was in the world. Zwingli meant to apply that idea especially to the reformation of the church. He had once said, “The church was born in blood and can be reborn only in blood.” So the place of Christ’s suffering as the model for nonresistance goes back to Zwingli. Yet Zwingli had not meant to make it definitional.

Grebel and his friends did not proof-text in these letters. They did not argue about one particular biblical text that they were obeying, whether in the Sermon on the Mount or somewhere else. Instead they took a global stance, in which Christ’s model, and the choice between the sword and the ban as ways of dealing with conflict, determined the orientation. A difference between the Old Testament and the New was taken for granted. We could describe their logic this way: “If we were under the Old Law then we would still use the sword.” But they qualified that simple polarity—the Old Testament said war is good and the New Testament says it is bad—by adding that even in the Old Testament the sword was not the last word. Before the constitution of the nation of Israel, war was a duty: it was holy war. After Israel became a nation, war was a punishment from God and no longer a duty. So the Zurich radicals did not grant the simple Old Testament–New Testament polarity that the medieval pacifists had assumed. Instead Grebel and his friends saw a movement, a tension, and they accepted the new rather than the old, but they did not grant that the old was only the other side of a simple polarity.

In sum, the letter to Thomas Müntzer was a testimony to the first self-awareness of the dissenters who later became the Anabaptists. A clear, theologically founded rejection of the sword was part of that beginning, and it is all the more significant in view of the fact that the sword was not what was being debated.

The rapid spread of baptism and the need for Schleitheim

For Anabaptism to become a movement in its own right, much more had to happen. The next months must have been lived very intensively, but we have little written record of how the conversation within Zwinglianism was proceeding, until finally it broke down in December 1524. When the breakdown occurred, it was the baptism issue—not the question of the sword—that came to the surface. Only indirectly did the breakdown come at the point of whether government should reform the church, which had been one of the issues of debate a year before. The break centered on baptizing babies. This issue is related to the question of the sword by a certain theological logic: if the Zurich radicals challenged the linkage of church and state, then they challenged the identification of the whole population with the believing community. The challenge to infant baptism correlates with the move to distinguish between the community of faith and the wider community, but the radicals did not derive the questioning of infant baptism by reasoning back from their challenge to the church-state link or to the violence of the sword. They called for adult baptism by radicalizing Luther’s and Zwingli’s teaching about faith. Faith must be personal. It must be a response to the gospel. It must be related to personal repentance and cannot simply be dispensed by a sacramental institution.

Conversation to resolve that issue broke down. Then the debate became public. The Zurich city council took up the matter in January 1525; they declared it a crime not to baptize infants, and they instructed the dissenters to baptize their babies and stop meeting or leave. From then on, the movement scattered rapidly, gaining adherents throughout the Rhine basin. The baptism of confessing adults became central to the identity of these groups. Some of them had not thought through the violence question the way Conrad Grebel and his little circle in Zurich had. Some had just never considered it. A few had come up with more traditional ideas, including the view that violence is wrong for individuals but all right for the government. Others may even have had a kind of crusading revolutionary view.

From 1525 through 1527, whole villages in the region accepted adult baptism and other elements of the radical Zwinglian social critique (including opposition to tithes and interest) but did not adopt the same depth of understanding on the question of the sword. Some were ready to use violence to defend their right to have a reformation, and they sympathized with the peasants’ revolt that was happening at the same time. So it is not the case that this nonresistant position—as stated in September 1524—was normative for all the people called Anabaptist. We should not assume that that whole movement derived its theology from Grebel and his group. It grew too fast for that. Yet this nonresistant base was there before baptism, at the heart of the movement at its beginnings.

The movement had become widespread. It had no center—no synod, pope, or coordinator—to define its limits. As it spread, the only people who administered baptism were ones who had themselves been baptized, so they observed a kind of succession. We have no records from the first years of any people who baptized others without having themselves been baptized. Yet that commonality did not mean that all who practiced adult baptism had the same theology. People with different ideas could still form one community with regard to the practice of baptism. With the passage of time, these differences had to be sifted out, and the sifting out took until a meeting in February 1527, at Schleitheim, from which our other major document stems.

Schleitheim

Schleitheim was a convenient point of encounter between radicals around Zurich, which was the Swiss center, and those in the Black Forest, which was Michael Sattler’s home. We do not know who was represented at this meeting. It seems to have been dominated by Michael Sattler. From the Black Forest he maintained contacts with Strasbourg—the last place where he had been in touch with the Reformation leaders, and where he had given up on conversation with them. Nobody knows who else was there. We can figure out which Anabaptist leaders were not in jail at the time, but we do not know that they were present. One person likely to have been there was Sattler’s colleague Wilhelm Reublin; the two men were found together a few weeks later in the Black Forest.

Schleitheim is important first of all as an event in the formation of the community. It is an event of coming together. The cover letter says, in essence: “We were divided. We had been confused. You had been separated from us.” There was real tension and an awareness that the movement lacked coherence. The scattered people who were preaching and forming groups were in some contact with one another, but they were not together. The purpose of this meeting was to bring them together, and it succeeded—a result they saw as the working of the Holy Spirit. The cover letter states, “We who have been assembled in the Lord . . . make known, in points and articles, unto all that love God, that as far as we are concerned, we have been united.”[16] The statement—wir sind vereinigt worden—is stronger in German than in English translation. The German original uses a passive participle: “we have been brought to unity”; “unity happened to us.”

“We have been united to stand fast in the Lord as obedient children of God . . . , completely at peace.”[17] That phrase describes what happened. It doesn’t just identify a mood; it points to something that happened in the meeting: “We differed. We came together with our differences. We exchanged views. We debated.” The historian cannot know whether Sattler and company met for a day or three or four days. They came to agreement “uncontradicted by all the brothers, completely at peace. Herein we have sensed the unity of the Father and of our common Christ as present with us in their Spirit. For the Lord is the Lord of peace.”[18] In other words, “We came into unanimity, and that unanimity itself is the sign of the authority of the Holy Spirit working among us.”

So the seven points that follow were the fruit of a reconciliation event. These seven points they commended to the rest of the movement, those addressed in the cover letter. We do not know how this text—a cover letter with seven articles—was received by the churches. Did everybody immediately say, “Now we know who we are,” or were there more debates?

One of the difficulties about understanding free church structure is the temptation to compare it to other church structures, in which when word comes from the top, everybody knows it has certain authority. Schleitheim in a sense is a middle rather than a top. We do not know how the authority of a letter such as this one worked. It was accepted with some sincerity by some people, but how many people refused to listen to it or refused to be convinced by it? That we cannot know. With the passage of time this position became convincing and made sense to more and more people as a coherent position. The people who survived as an Anabaptist movement past 1540 all held to this position, but at the outset some (we do not know how many) did not.

Schleitheim on war

Now we must move to the section of the Schleitheim document on the war question itself. The first five articles are on other subjects: baptism, the ban, communion, separation, and shepherds. But in article 4, on separation, the question of violence first arises. The general notion is separation of the true community from the world (which includes worldly religion), dramatized by a conflation of Old Testament texts (quoted in 2 Cor. 6:15–18), in which God admonished the Israelites to flee impurity. After a list of worldly things that we should be separated from, article 4 continues:

From all this we shall be separated, and have no part with such, for they are nothing but abominations, which cause us to be hated before our Christ Jesus, who has freed us from the servitude of the flesh and fitted us for the service of God and the Spirit whom He has given us.

Thereby shall also fall away from us the diabolical weapons of violence—such as sword, armor, and the like, and all of their use to protect friends or against enemies—by virtue of the word of Christ: “you shall not resist evil.”[19]

Thus the first reference to the violence question occurs under the topic of nonconformity or separation from the world.

The last two articles are much longer than the others, an indication that there had been debate about them. The debate with other views is taken up in the text, as is not the case for the other five. That fact suggests that the last two articles deal with material that had been discussed at some length and depth already in the two years leading up to this event. Article 6 is worth reading and commenting on phrase by phrase.

“We have been united as follows concerning the sword. The sword is an ordering of God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and kills the wicked, and guards and protects the good. In the law the sword is established over the wicked for punishment and for death, and the secular rulers are established to wield the same.”[20] We must unpack the terminology here. First, “the sword is an ordering . . .” Ordering is a verbal noun. It is not the simplest term, nor the obvious one. It could have been said otherwise. An ordering is a process or an event. God does not say, “I want the sword and the state, so I hereby decree that there shall be the state.” There is no divine act of instituting. Instead God reaches into the chaos of fallen history and puts it in order: not order in the sense of mandate or command, but order in the sense of organizing and putting things in place. God intervenes providentially in this ordering process. God does not create the sword. God does not make oppression, but somehow God uses it and disposes it. Providentially is the early modern term for how God orders such things, disposing events so that what is already going on in the fallen world—of which the sword is typical—is not out of God’s hands. Yet the text does not say God wanted the sword or brought it into being.

God does that ordering, or lining up and organizing, within the fallen world, outside the perfection of Christ. That phrase has two meanings that coincide. The people at Schleitheim did not really separate the two meanings, although we can do so.

The chronological meaning of outside the perfection of Christ refers to being outside the realm or the level of understanding of the fullness that Christ brought; it points to the Old Testament or to the fallen world. The perfection of Christ is what Christ has brought to fulfillment. God works in a distinctive way on each of two levels: outside of and within the newness that Christ brings. So there are two epochs, two levels, or two dispensations: before fulfillment and fulfillment.

The sociological meaning casts the perfection of Christ as a more spatial image: church and not-church. Within the perfection of Christ means inside the visible Christian community, where the teachings of Christ are normative. The rest of the world is outside the perfection of Christ. Here again outside the perfection of Christ may refer to the Old Testament, as well as to the rest of the world today. So there is another duality. The realm where the sword has its place is the Old Testament (“the law,” it is called here: “in the law the sword is established”), and the civil order today (“and the secular rulers are established to wield the same”).

Article 6 then repeats what we saw in the letter to Müntzer. The process of admonition, within the confessing community, is the analogue or the alternative to the sword. It is the only sanction the community of faith has. It is the sanction of nonviolent invitation, reconciliation, and (if necessary) withdrawal: “But within the perfection of Christ only the ban is used for the admonition and exclusion of the one who has sinned, without the death of the flesh, simply the warning and the command to sin no more.”[21]

Now if we had only this much, Article 6 would be roughly analogous to the other articles in length and in simplicity. However, the conversation with alternative views goes on.

Now many, who do not understand Christ’s will for us, will ask: whether a Christian may or should use the sword against the wicked for the protection and defense of the good, or for the sake of love.

The answer is unanimously revealed: Christ teaches and commands us to learn from Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart and thus we shall find rest for our souls. Now Christ says to the woman who is taken in adultery, not that she should be stoned, according to the law of His Father, . . . but with mercy and forgiveness and the warning to sin no more, says: “Go, sin no more.” Exactly thus should we also proceed.[22]

The only sanction we have, even against threats against the order of society,[23] is telling people not to sin.

Next Sattler and company asked whether a Christian should be a judge. They answered no. “Second, is asked concerning the sword: whether a Christian shall pass sentence in disputes and strife about worldly matters. . . . The answer: Christ did not wish to decide or pass judgment between brother and brother concerning inheritance, but refused to do so. So should we also do.”

Then they asked whether a Christian should be a magistrate: “Third, is asked concerning the sword: whether the Christian should be a magistrate if he is chosen thereto.” A magistrate is a participant in civil government, a member of a city council. That structure was relatively democratic, much more so than in Luther’s territory. Tradesmen, through the guild, could become members of the city council. The guild named these people to be their representatives in the council of the city. A Christian tradesman could be drawn into that service, by being an honorable and respected person. The Schleitheim deliberations reached this conclusion:

This is answered thus: Christ was to be made king, but He fled. . . . Thus we should also do as He did and follow after Him, and we shall not walk in darkness. For He Himself says: “Whoever would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” He Himself further forbids the violence of the sword when He says, “The princes of this world lord it over them etc., but among you it shall not be so.” Further Paul says, “Whom God has foreknown, the same he has also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son,” etc. Peter also says: “Christ has suffered (not ruled) and has left us an example that you should follow after in his steps.”[24]

What is striking about the biblical references cited is that most of them are not texts dealing with the state, Caesar, or the sword. They are passages about imitating and conforming to Jesus. The text from the end of Romans 8 does not say anything about ethics directly, but it says believers are “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” The instruction these Anabaptists found in the New Testament is not in what Paul or Peter said about the state. Instead they pointed to the life of Jesus, to times when Jesus had to deal with a question similar to those they were dealing with. They said, in effect: “Shall Jesus act as a judge or a king? Jesus did not, so we do not. Shall a person worthy of the death penalty be executed? Jesus showed mercy and warned against further sin, and we should do likewise.”

Lastly one can see in the following points that it does not befit a Christian to be a magistrate: the rule of the government is according to the flesh, that of Christians according to the spirit. Their houses and dwelling remain in this world, that of the Christians is in heaven. Their citizenship is in this world, that of Christians is in heaven. The weapons of their battle and warfare are carnal and only against the flesh, but the weapons of Christians are spiritual, against the fortification of the devil. . . . In sum: as Christ our Head is minded, so also must be minded the members of the body of Christ through Him,[25] so that there be no division in the body, through which it would be destroyed. Since then Christ is as is written of Him, so must His members also be the same, so that His body may remain whole and unified for its own advancement and upbuilding. For any kingdom which is divided within itself will be destroyed.[26]

The foundation of the call for nonresistance is unity with Jesus. We could say “unity with Christ,” but the Christ Schleitheim invoked is not a cosmic figure, not just a present mystical guide, but Christ’s continuation in our experience, because we are to be an undivided body. We are to be a part of what he is, and he is what he was. We are to be in the world now what he was according to the New Testament. The reason is that God’s kingdom has to be represented by a body that has to be united. So Christ’s presence in the world is our unity with one another, but it must also be a unity between us and him as our head. We know how he was in the world. Article 4 had quoted the text, “Do not return evil for evil,” but article 6, which is about the sword, does not. Instead the only argument is a call for conformity with the kind of person Jesus was.

Now that argument does not answer all the questions. For the Anabaptists at Schleitheim, it adequately answered these three sample questions, which were the ones they had already encountered, and the answer always followed the same reasoning process. Jesus did in the world what we are supposed to be doing in the world. If we want to be his, we must be in him and with him. The way to be in and with him is to be the kind of people in our time and in our experience that he was when he was on earth. The mystical Christ who lives in our hearts, and the cosmic Christ who is running the universe—who can be found elsewhere in the New Testament—are not central for them. The model of Jesus is normative.

Schleitheim on the oath

Article 7 requires some explanation. It is on the oath and is based on simple New Testament scriptures. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely. . . . But I say to you, Do not swear at all” (Matt. 5:33–34). This counsel is repeated in the letter of James. Schleitheim understood these words sweepingly and simply as referring to all kinds of oaths. Medieval Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism had clearly set Jesus’s words aside as not applying to all oaths. The early Protestant interpretation that mattered in Schleitheim’s territory was that of Zwingli. What Jesus excluded, said Zwingli, was profanity and using God’s name in the oath in anger, to dramatize the importance of something, or to wish someone evil. Zwingli claimed that Jesus’s words did not apply to the loyalty oath (the promise to be a good citizen) or to the courtroom oath in which a person promised to tell the truth. Jesus did not deal with those functions of the civil oath. According to Zwingli, Jesus’s words applied to cursing and to cheap swearing but not to the civil oath that was a part of society’s structure.

It is not easy for us to make sense of the significance of this issue. Modern societies—beginning with the response of Anglo-Saxon society to the Quakers, who made the same point—have provisions for people who literally do not want to swear any oaths; these governments allow such people to make the same promise in another form, to make an affirmation. Formally, the issue is still present, but we have great trouble seeing why it matters so much, why this matter of a verbal usage should be as important as it was back then. Should we be that spooky about the name of God?

To understand the oath, we have to get beyond thinking that the Anabaptists were simply more literalistic than other people. Instead, they were much more politically aware. The sixteenth-century meaning of the oath was that it put the dignity of God behind the state and behind the whole social order. The social order that was just waning at that time was feudalism, a society held together by the oath. The word feudal (from foedus, “treaty” or “alliance”) means that a lord and a vassal swore to each other that they would abide by a covenantal relationship. It worked only because the oath held, because both pronounced the name of God over that relationship. They believed that God intervened in their relationship to maintain it, and that God would punish them if they broke it. That ritual and conviction were what held feudal society together. When people swore an oath, they believed in God’s presence in those words, so they were bound to that sworn promise. If people began to believe that the oath did not bind them, or if they began to refuse to swear the oath, then the ordered society of the Middle Ages would not work.

In the sixteenth century, the feudal society in the upper Rhine area was being replaced by a new kind of social structure, called Eidgenossenschaft (confederation) in Switzerland. Once again, the word Eidgenossenschaft meant a society bound together by an oath, a society held together because the confederates swore to be loyal to one another. In the Swiss beginnings, every male in the cantons swore loyalty to all the other cantons, promising to live according to the new confederate structure. That structure would hold together only if they believed that the oath they made to one another in the name of God would hold. The Swiss constitution—which to this day begins, “In the name of God Almighty!”—is the definition of that oath. This is an issue of cultural-anthropological realism: when people spoke the name of God over their relationships, they believed that something happened. Our modern rationalism makes it difficult for us to understand that ritual and belief; we do not take any of our words that seriously.

In effect, the name of God supported the state. It ratified and secured the civil structures. The young city-states, which came into being progressively, were also held together by an oath. That oath had to be repeated every year, because there was a new government every year. Every time a new council formed, the whole population had to gather in the marketplace and swear that during the coming year, they would submit to and respect the rule of the new group of milords. If Anabaptists did not swear, because Jesus said they should not swear, most people believed that society would fall apart. They believed that if on January 1 in Strasbourg, when the city gathered at the marketplace, someone did not swear loyalty to milords, then nobody would have to obey, and if nobody had to obey, the city would fall apart. So the issue of the oath was not simple literalism on a picky, superficial level. It was a challenge to the theological underpinnings of late medieval and early modern society, as that society claimed to be held together by a transcendental appeal to the God of the Bible and of providence.

The people at Schleitheim did not get to this deep political challenge by philosophizing about it. They got to it because they were obeying Jesus. Jesus says, in effect, “You are not omnipotent, and therefore you cannot make God the witness to your promises. You cannot obligate God to prove that you are going to tell the truth or perform what you promise, because you are not omnipotent to make sure you can perform it. So you have no right to use the name of God to back up your claims.” The Anabaptists at Schleitheim said that swearing is forbidden because the Bible says it is, but the impact of their literal faithfulness was to relativize the transcendental moral claims for society as being held together by the presence of God.[27]

We could say more by way of narrative but not much more in terms of the content or substance of the Anabaptist view. The suffering of Christ in his body, as formulated in the Grebel letter, or the refusal by Jesus to be a lord in the ordinary sense in his society when he was asked to do so: those are the two sides of the Anabaptist model. These Anabaptists believed that Jesus’s model applied to them, and that was all they needed. If we read more Anabaptist texts, we would not find many more ideas than this. When they later appealed to the teachings of Jesus—“Resist not evil,” for example—or quoted Jesus’s response to his disciples’ dispute, in which he said that the kings of the world lord it over them, and you should not do that (Luke 22:25–26), these “ethical” teachings were still reflections on how Jesus modeled a refusal to exercise violence but instead suffered violence.

Nonresistance debated, then espoused

This basis of the Anabaptist nonresistant position did not change down through the centuries. For the first few months this rejection of violence was contested. In the early days, as the Swiss Brethren movement grew rapidly, those involved found easy agreement on the point of forming local congregations and baptizing adults, but not everybody who was swept into the movement had the same theological background on the question of violence. Therefore not everybody who was baptized in 1525 was ready to pick up this whole package. Even after Schleitheim, nonresistance was not universally espoused. The Schleitheim position finally became dominant after all the other positions were sifted out, but that took awhile.

Balthasar Hubmaier was the one major theologian who came into Anabaptism with an extensive educational background. He never adopted a nonresistant position with regard to government, although he believed that the individual Christian should be nonresistant. Others had a revolutionary perspective. They believed that the end times would be characterized by righteous violence, but that it was not up to them to say when that time would be, or to precipitate it, or to declare it present. They had to suffer in the present, but they believed that when the Lord came at the end, they would participate in the battle and the victory. Still others solved the problems of the state and violence differently from Schleitheim. The Münster uprising would merit specific attention; it came half a generation later, in 1534–35. Nevertheless, by 1540 what came out of all this ferment was agreement, among the Anabaptists who were left, with the position articulated at Schleitheim.

Other tributary streams of Anabaptism

In these two central documents from the origins of Anabaptist peace theology we find clearly stated the essentials of the position that would remain fundamentally similar for a long time. However, these two documents did not stand for the whole movement at the time. People who came from other backgrounds brought with them other theologies than Zwingli’s radicalizing of Erasmus, and Zwingli’s young disciples’ radicalizing of his thought and practice. When those other resources came into the broader stream of Anabaptist practice, they had other ethical implications. Any serious survey of Anabaptism would have to be careful at this point.

For our purposes, which are more systematic-ethical than narrative-historical, it suffices to name in summary some major additional sources from which people—and therefore ideas and thought patterns—came into the broader movement that now came to be called Anabaptist.[28] So what were some of these other tributary streams of Anabaptism?

One was late medieval mysticism, which came into the movement through many already existing small circles of people who were critical of the superficiality of established religion. This stream is best represented in literary form by Hans Denck, who was already recognized as some kind of radical before he met people connected with the Swiss movement. He never took baptism with great seriousness theologically, but he did at one time administer baptism, and presumably he had received baptism as an adult. Still, his theology was late medieval mysticism, rather than having come through the filter of either Lutheran or Zwinglian Protestantism.

Second, there was late medieval Catholicism, as represented by Doctor Balthasar Hubmaier, the only theologian to come into the first-generation Anabaptist movement with intensive university preparation. With regard to predestination, freedom of the will, law and gospel, the possibility of doing the will of God, and original sin, Balthasar Hubmaier did not try to be Protestant in any sense shaped by Luther or Zwingli. When measured by standard Protestant doctrinal models, Hubmaier looks Catholic.

There were also Anabaptists of apocalyptic style, who claimed to receive visions or prophetic revelations. Some did not see visions but were committed to fantastic interpretations of prophetic texts. Some, including Thomas Müntzer, moved into this kind of visionary certainty from previous mystical preoccupations. Others, especially later at Münster, linked adult baptism with these positions. So they were formally Anabaptist, and they were clearly not offshoots of the Protestant Reformation (although Martin Luther’s thought was not without some apocalyptic strains).

So Anabaptism was a wide set of phenomena, too wide to be called a movement. This is true whether we understand the term in the broader sense in which from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century it was approximately equivalent to the twentieth-century label Bolshevik, or whether we understand it in the formal descriptive sense as referring to people who administered baptism to adults. Those who have been characterized as Anabaptists did not come from the same place, and they were not going to the same place. They had in common only one or two practices that put them in the same place in the eyes of critics within the establishment. There is no point in saying that one of these groups was legitimately Anabaptist and another was not, because we have no other criterion with which to define the legitimacy of an Anabaptist.

We could say that the Swiss Brethren movement had one kind of coherence. The Hutterite movement had another kind of coherence. The Frisian Mennonite movement had yet another kind of coherence. Those three movements went on in time long enough that we can make of their coherence a standard, a type, and we could say (after the fact) that other groups did not fit that type. We can also record the fact that no other groups survived beyond roughly 1540. Those who survived had come to relatively similar positions on the sword. Yet the measurement of survival is clearly a different criterion from whether they were Anabaptists in the first place or from whatever criteria we might use to decide which ones were right.

Another Anabaptist movement, establishment Anabaptism, did not prove viable. The radical Zwinglian message moved out so rapidly that it took over whole villages, for several months, to the north and east of Zurich. In those villages, the entire village (or at least the local decision-making power) committed itself to the understanding, received from Wilhelm Reublin or some other emissary from the Zurich origins, that baptizing babies is wrong, that baptizing adults on confession of faith is right, and that usury is wrong. They would commit themselves as a village to be a new kind of radically reformed Christendom on the local level. This commitment was not sectarian or separatist, because the whole village congregation made the move together. It was congregational reform, after the Zwinglian model. It was not revolutionary, because the people believed they were acting on the preaching of Zwingli, whom Zurich had authorized to preach. They knew their reform might be costly, because Catholicism might crush it, but they did not assume that the Zurich establishment would move in to crush it, because Zwingli had been preaching about the autonomy of the local congregation. They were economically radical, because Zwingli was teaching that all usury was wrong, and that the maintenance of tithes and interests in Zurich was a temporary compromise on the way to more complete reformation.

We know, with the wisdom of sociological hindsight, that this establishment Anabaptism was not a viable position. These Swiss villages were not going to be permitted to have the radical reform that would do away with obligations to pay tithes and interests to the lords, including the churches and orders that were also lords of the land. Inevitably, superior political forces moved in on these villages and took them in hand, making them either Catholic or submissive Zwinglian Reformed congregations under the discipline of Zurich or of one of the other territorial city-states.

This Zwinglian village radicalism, or nonseparatist congregationalism, was an important transition. During the period 1524–27, the people of these villages did not have time to think through nonresistance. The movement spread so rapidly that it did not bring to all these people the full clarity and depth of the rejection of the sword that had been articulated in the Grebel letter to Müntzer. The possibility that these radically reformed independent villages might have to defend themselves by violence was still open in the minds of most of them until it came to the crunch. The crunch might have come from the political threat of superior Catholic state power. It might have come from the theological threat of some Anabaptist teacher knowing more of the whole message from the Zurich origins, asking them whether they had thought through whether they had the calling from Jesus to defend their reformation by the sword.

This crunch came finally from both directions, but not until months later. It came from the perspective of power, when the organized peasant revolt was crushed in the course of 1525. The unsubmissive villages, which had not been part of the peasant revolts but were parallel to the revolts, became much more sober about the real possibilities of becoming politically independent of the empire—as they would have to be to make their ecclesiastical independence as nonsectarian nonseparatist villages stick. It was not possible to declare independence as a village in those days. The only way to declare their religious independence as a nonseparatist reformed village was to declare the political independence of the whole village. This meant that the reformation had to choose to abandon village sovereignty, to accept separatism, or to go back into the mainstream church.

Schleitheim as a turning point

Thus at Schleitheim the lessons from the two sides of that crunch converged. On the one hand, they continued to make the theological case for the position sketched in the Müntzer letter. On the other hand, there was the failure of the various visions of emancipation inspired by radical Zwinglian congregationalism. By the spring of 1527 the two lines of learning had come to a consensus. From that point on, this part of the movement would be organized around the clarity about the sword that is stated in Schleitheim articles 4 and 6. Schleitheim thus represents a turn in the total identity of Anabaptism, a centering process within the wider stream in which the restatement of pacifism is a coherent center, not an isolated element. In the internal conversation of Anabaptism there was, for the first time, a point of crystallization around which it became possible for the movement to work at its unity. Anabaptism would never have the unity of the state synod or of an episcopacy, but after Schleitheim it could begin to have the unity of intervisitation and of common positions on basic questions. This unity radiated out from the event of Schleitheim but only very slowly and never coercively.

Schleitheim represents a turn not only in internal unity but also in the wider conversation. The effort to converse with the mainstream reformers went on. The Anabaptists continued to ask their non-Anabaptist Protestant interlocutors for a chance to talk. They especially continued to go to the political authorities (Christian political authorities) to say, “Will you listen to us? The preachers won’t.” Many debates were organized through the next decade, but the radicals had given up on waiting for the mainstream Protestant Reformation to come their way. They were therefore ready to organize an independent (and that meant an illegal) underground church as the bearer of their message. They still hoped and asked for dialogue, but they abandoned waiting for dialogue before crystallizing their own church order.

Also in terms of argument, Schleitheim represents a turning point. As we saw, articles 6 and 7 are much longer than the other articles. These articles record other views and then incorporate an argument against those other positions. Thus we have a third phase, a rebuttal of the rebuttal, demonstrating how the argument matured in order to explain the nonresistant position over against the alternatives.

After Schleitheim: Solidifying the dualism

How did the Schleitheim position continue to grow? Apart from the fact that the alternatives gradually became weaker in numbers and in social viability, did the Schleitheim position change? It is probably correct to put most of what happened after 1527 under the general heading of “solidifying the dualism.” The dualism in Schleitheim article 4 (“Separation from the abomination that the devil has planted in the world”) was not the fixed, firm, and confident dualism of the ghetto or of the community withdrawing to the desert. It was tense missionary dualism, representing in the midst of the world a position the world could not tolerate. It was expressed mostly in biblical language. Schleitheim called for separation from the world at precise and specific points, for which reasons could be given one by one. In the Schleitheim articles there was no geographic isolation, withdrawal, or emigration. There was no systematic exclusion of whole blocs of culture. Instead Schleitheim named specific things “which the devil has planted in the world,” that these believers would not do; theirs was a pragmatic, biblical, occasionalistic separation.

With the passage of time this duality firmed up in the direction of a more polarized theology of separation and a more isolated sociology of separation. We can name various elements that entered into that shift.

One was the incorporation within the movement of a more radical eschatological view. The early Zurich people and the Schleitheim writers thought in some broad sense that they were living in the last times, but they did not speculate about how those last times were going to come about. They were soon joined by Hans Hut, a refugee from Thomas Müntzer’s movement, who brought his apocalyptic mysticism along. He agreed with the other Anabaptists that they should be nonresistant, but he agreed mainly on eschatological grounds: the present age is marked by the suffering of the saints, but soon another age would come, in which the saints will wage war for the Lord of hosts against all their enemies and will successfully destroy them. Thus Hut’s position was perhaps a nonresistance not of ethical quality but of apocalyptic timing. In another age, it would be proper for Christians to rule by the sword. That apocalyptic language gained entry into the South German and Austrian Anabaptist movement. It was no longer an argument for revolution, but it placed the non-Anabaptist religious and civil order in an even more unfriendly light, casting it as Babylon, the dragon. Thus it polarized the believers’ relationship to the civil order and to the churches that blessed the civil order in a more dramatic and flashy way than had happened before.

A second phenomenon that tended to reinforce polarity, making it more solid and simpler and with less middle ground, was the defeat of violent revolutionary efforts. First there was the Peasants’ War all over Germany in 1524–25, which came close to the Anabaptists just north of the Rhine. A decade later, in a different set of phenomena, Anabaptists overtook the city of Münster in Westphalia nonviolently and legally; they then created an Anabaptist state church. When it had to defend itself violently against an alliance of princes and bishops, the Anabaptist state church became increasingly radical—crazy, in fact—under the pressure of that conflict. It was destroyed completely.

What happened at Münster was not representative of the antecedent Anabaptist movement in the Netherlands, but it had had some support there. It provoked Dutch Anabaptists Obbe Philips and his disciple Menno Simons to reject it. Before the beginnings of Münster, there had been doubt about that violent option, but the Münster experiment had a considerable constituency before it collapsed. After the collapse, Menno Simons—standing on the shoulders of a previous but largely unheard position that had rejected violence—put together a post-Münster, anti-Münster, antirevolutionary, antiviolence, anti-apocalyptic vision of the suffering church. That vision was for all practical purposes the same as that of the Schleitheim text. It was different in some doctrinal ways but amounted in its social meaning to the Schleitheim position. Yet it was more polarized and dualistic, because it had been worked out in the course of debates against Münster within the Anabaptist movement and in debates with the Reformed and Catholic authorities. Menno and some other Anabaptists said, in effect, “Do not think we are like those people. We are very different.” The position that opposed any option of social takeover grew more solid.

The polarity was further reinforced by the fact that the sword was not the only issue. Opposition to the oath, which had an independent rootage in a literal reading of the Bible, also pointed away from involvement in the civil order.

As debate about the understanding of history continued, the Anabaptists spelled out further the fallenness of the church, and its fallenness pointed to Constantine. Constantine had been, ever since the early Middle Ages, the symbol of the victory of the church and the Christendom vision of Christian theocracy. Now that the radicals were questioning Christendom, Constantine became the symbol of the apostasy of the mainline church. Once again, theological change deepened and gave greater systematic resonance and background to the polarity on the question of the sword.

Among Anabaptists in the Netherlands there was an outworking of the distinctive doctrine of the Incarnation that had been taught by Melchior Hofmann. His concern at the start was not with ethics but with salvation. Hofmann claimed that Jesus could not be our Savior if he himself was a sinner. If he was truly the son of Mary, who was a sinful human being, participating in our sinful condition, which is transmitted to us from our human parents, then Jesus himself was a sinner by birth, and could not be our Savior. Therefore, Hofmann reasoned, Jesus must not have received his human nature from his human mother but rather from a miracle. Incarnation, in which “the Word became flesh,” means not the divine Logos taking on the humanity of the son of Mary but rather the Word transforming itself miraculously into a man-child born through the womb of Mary, passing through Mary “as water passes through a pipe.” Jesus did not derive his nature from Mary, because if he had, it would have been a fallen nature incapable of saving us. That was Hofmann’s soteriological concern.

With the passage of time, however, a correlation seems to have developed between that concern and the ecclesiology and church practice of Menno and his followers. They used biblical language about the church “without spot or wrinkle” as a description of the goal of the pastoring and Christian education of the church. It has been suggested—though I am not sure it has been proven—that the confidence of Menno Simons and his colleagues that the church could be purified (not perfectly but significantly) through preaching and discipline is somehow related to the Melchiorite claim that the humanity of Jesus was a miraculous and therefore perfectible humanity. Because the church is his body, we also can have victory over sin. We can participate in the kind of humanity that has been freed from the conditions of sinfulness through the miracle of the Incarnation. Our being born again makes of us, like Jesus, children not of the flesh but of the spirit. If there was such a connection between their view of the Incarnation and their view of the perfectibility of the church, it would mark another dimension of polarization between Christians and the fallen world.

Still another effort to interpret how the polarity got strengthened looks at the experience of the Hutterite colonies in Moravia. They began to be tolerated well before the end of the sixteenth century, and they became prosperous, better off than their neighbors. This experience of economic and social autonomy and self-sufficiency stood over against the imperial Austrian world marked by its brutality in rejection of all reformation. This experience strengthened the idea of a theology of two worlds, one of which is already operational in the church that is separated geographically, economically, and ethnically, which sends out missionaries to bring people in from the other world. So the duality again found confirmation.

In the Hutterite haven, believers exercised political responsibility. They organized everything—schools, trades, etc.—but they gave up on the outside world. Or rather, they made their peace with the fact that the outside world would tolerate them if they stayed in their territory but not if they sent missionaries. They still sent missionaries, but they expected to suffer for it, because the world is evil. In Hutterite thinking, the best thing missionaries could do was bring people back from the heathen outside of Moravia. Hutterites could not live out there, both because they could not have community life out there, but also because they were persecuted in most parts of the world. The havens, which they believed God gave them, were so few that they did not expect people to find churches elsewhere.

Still another element that solidified the polarization was the end of dialogue with the other Protestant reformers. That dialogue was quite serious until 1527. It continued a little until 1540. From then on, it was much rarer. There were still cases of formal disputations in 1547, 1571, and toward the end of the century in the Netherlands, but they were more and more exceptional. Day-by-day conversation with non-Anabaptist church leaders about what it means to be Christian was less and less possible. It was more and more possible to see established Christianity globally as simply the evil oppressive demonic structure.

Theology of martyrdom: Dualism’s culmination

The culmination of all this polarity was the experience of suffering and the development of a theology of martyrdom. We properly conclude with a reference to the article in the study guide by Ethelbert Stauffer,[29] based especially on the hymnody of the second and third generation of Anabaptists. The core of the Ausbund, the oldest Anabaptist hymnal and the oldest Christian song book in continuous use, is fifty-one hymns written in prison in Passau (in Bavaria). If you write your hymns in prison, you will not be spinning dreams about a better world, about how to have more power to change the world, or about progress in ecumenical dialogue. You will be singing about why it is meaningful to go on with a faith that brings you suffering, and why you still believe that God’s victory is sure, although yours is not. That hymnology of martyrdom was supported in early Anabaptist experience by prose literature of martyrdom, the martyrologies that culminated in publication of the Martyrs Mirror. This literature provides a thorough vision of history, in which it makes sense to live outside the power structures of the fallen, oppressive world.

As Stauffer indicates, the notion of suffering faithfulness is older than the New Testament. It arose at the latest in late pre-Christian Jewish apocryphal literature. It is prevalent throughout the New Testament and in other early Christian literature. In this literature, Christ is not simply a model whom we imitate, or a teacher whom we tag along behind. He is the archetype, the exemplar of how reality is. Suffering is combat, a good fight; it is the way to victory. Suffering is related to baptism, which incorporates us in the stance of Christ. By no means was this stance simply a matter of being rigid or literal about the words of the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. It was the meaning of being in the work of God in the world. As Stauffer indicates, Eusebius, the historian of the age of Constantine, wrote early Christian history in these terms, but he also brought it to an end, because he saw Constantine as inaugurating the epoch of God’s victory.[30] The theology of the cross as a social experience was present in the early work of Luther and some of his colleagues, and in early Zwinglian thought; it was present all through the early Reformation. It was only in Anabaptism, however, that it really survived, took root, and moved on to become a coherent total vision of how history makes sense under God.

The title page of the Hutterite hymnal quotes from Hebrews: “Ihr Ende schauet an und folget ihrem Glauben nach” [“Look at their end, the end of their life, and follow after their faith”].[31] God’s people have always been martyred. The author’s preface to the Martyrs Mirror includes the statement that “all of the Holy Scriptures seems to be nothing else but a book of martyrdom.”[32] The Hutterite hymnal includes the martyr stories of the Old Testament Apocrypha. The pattern of martyrdom is not a New Testament idea alone. It goes back to Abel. From the beginning, all the saints have died for Christ’s sake. Jesus was born under the cross, brought up under the cross, walked under the cross, and eventually died on the cross; we are his members. Menno calls the Christians “limbs of Christ,” “members” in the strict anatomical sense. “Since the word was truth, the world would not tolerate it,” those using the Hutterite hymnal sing in poetic transposition from John 1. Stauffer summarizes this:

The triumph of evil prepares the path for an overwhelming victory of God according to the paradox law of all dialectic. And that is true also for the divine work of Christ. The martyrdom of the Son of God is the victory of God in weakness and the indictment of the persecutors who perish in their last manifestation of power. Thus God’s work becomes through this catastrophe a power by which the originators of this very catastrophe break down. . . . Where the power of death has come to self-annihilation there the force of life breaks through for the salvation of the world.[33]

The cross is thus always both the unique historical and personal event of Jesus—and only Jesus—at the center of history, and also the general principle according to which God has always worked for all God’s people, throughout history.[34] The judgment which the Anabaptists expected to fall on the world that persecuted them they saw not as vengeance to set the faithful at ease, but rather as an answer to the problem of theodicy and as proof of God’s ultimate sovereignty.[35]

Gelassenheit

One additional emphasis that should be added, which is especially present in the Austrian origins, comes from Hans Hut and feeds into the thought of the Hutterites. That is Gelassenheit, a term carried over from mysticism. It means “having-let-go-ness,” abandon, surrender. The Christian experience in the face of God (following the language of mysticism) is one of abandoning self-affirmation, self-confidence, self-concern, and letting go so that God may be sovereign. The ethical implication of Gelassenheit is the willingness not to be in charge, not to be sovereign, not to be secure. True surrender is the price of being one with God. Once again it is much more than ethics, much more than doing exegesis of ethical texts. It is the total spiritual stance of believers who trust God for their righteousness and survival, and even for the success of good causes.

Historians’ inadequate understanding of Anabaptist dualism

To do justice to the topic of historians’ interpretations of Anabaptist dualism, we would need to discuss at some further length the adequacy of various historians’ understandings of the Anabaptist movement’s peace witness and its dualism. Robert Friedmann is the historian who has made the most of a polar theology, or “two-kingdoms theology,” in which the total separateness of the two worlds is an overarching and omnipresent theme. Hans Hillerbrand and to a lesser extent Clarence Bauman have also accentuated this duality. This accent supports the impression that in order to be nonresistant, believers must systematically deny and reject everything that links them to the world and create a counter-community—like the autarchic Hutterite Bruderhof—that goes on without the rest of the world and makes no contribution to it. I doubt that this position is adequate, although in this context I can explain only superficially.[36]

But first we should take account of later Mennonite history. Although it does not really belong here, because it happened centuries later, we need to notice it now in order to avoid a short circuit in our reading of this sixteenth-century history. Mennonites have been taught that the Anabaptists are the founders of their story, that we can be proud of who we are because of their integrity and martyrdom. So we tend to assume that the way they put things together is similar to the way our fathers and mothers put things together eighty or fifty or twenty years ago. Then, when we have some dissatisfaction with the “Mennonite peace position” as we got it from the last two generations, we read that dissatisfaction back into the sixteenth century. I may be able to say more clearly why that should not be done if I first make an excursion into later history to explain one major difference between the Anabaptists and modern Mennonites, meaning by Anabaptists the first-generation radicals and by Mennonites the set of ethnic communities that have come down through the centuries. The main experience that marked the sociology of later Mennonites has been that of finding toleration. In the late sixteenth century, a few people began finding toleration in the Netherlands by establishing a modus vivendi with the Reformed governments. These Mennonites became urban and soon were financially prosperous, and they made good use of the toleration they enjoyed. They would accept anyone coming to them for baptism, but they stopped preaching aggressively for conversion, stopped proclaiming the judgment of God on apostate Christendom, and in fact took in few people who were not children of their own members.

More important for the rest of the world is the pattern of rural migration in which Mennonites moved into territories where the local prince would welcome them because of the agricultural development that they would likely bring about. For the local prince, Mennonites were often better subjects than his other serfs and subjects, who were Catholic, or (in Prussia) Lutheran, or (later, farther east) Russian Orthodox. The Mennonites were more educated and took more initiative than those peasants. They were harder workers, better organized, and more honest about paying their rent and their taxes. Knowing that they were foreigners and guests, they were not likely to start a revolution. As guests of the sovereign, they recognized they had no other rights within that culture, and therefore tended to be socially allied with the sovereign, sometimes against the local peasants. Sometimes the land they farmed was land that indigenous peasants had farmed before, though less efficiently.

All these dynamics contributed to a tacit readiness to stop evangelizing. Mennonites were willing to stop telling the prince that it is not Christian to wield the sword; they were making peace—not consciously, not exclusively, but by implication—with the fallen society. They ceased to look at it as the apocalyptic dragon and began to regard it as a gracious sovereign—gracious in the literal sense that Mennonites were treated better than other people. That reality changed Mennonite attitudes toward the governments whose guests they were through the centuries. The shift in outlook was not one that the first century or the first half-century of Anabaptists could have made. When it had become established, then Mennonites needed to argue about whether tolerant symbiosis with the prince was an adequate application of the nonresistance of their sixteenth-century forebears. But is it not more fitting to say that the first century of Anabaptist nonresistance was a radical rejection of the political status quo? If we want models from these origins, do not the sixteenth-century Anabaptists provide for us a radical model that challenges us not to accept symbiosis with our culture? Because the later experience of getting along well with the authorities has marked so much modern Mennonite awareness, the concerns of social critics and of non-Mennonite observers find us in a bind between pacifism as passive and pacifism as radical.

Within our sources, the person who states this kind of problem most clearly is James Stayer. As Stayer points out, Hubmaier stood with Luther and Catholicism in accepting the existing order in which Christians bear the sword. The nonresistant Anabaptists (including those who met at Schleitheim) and the apocalyptic revolutionaries (such as Müntzer, Münster, and others) had in common that they all rejected the existing order, although some did it with violence and some without. Stayer suggests that that is a more basic commonality: both of these strands were radical, as over against the others, including Hubmaier, who were less radical and more willing to accept things as they were. Stayer is certainly right in wanting to increase the variation with which we read the story. He is also right in working against what he takes to be a kind of apologetic self-protection on the part of Mennonite historians, who affirm the centrality of the Schleitheim position without recognizing that it was not typical at the time.

That said, I think Stayer’s model is itself inadequate. It anachronistically brings into the sixteenth century conceptions of political realism or Realpolitik that were not at home in the sixteenth century. Nobody in the sixteenth century (except a secular philosopher such as Machiavelli) would have said that he was just doing what was possible, or just looking out for himself. Luther was a kind of political conservative because he was a theological radical. Zwingli was not a political conservative at all. He believed that government should do things that are costly, and that in fact government should be willing to take a position of martyrdom and costly discipleship. He did not believe it is always wrong to kill, and he thought that government should be doing nonrealistic theocratic crusading. Hubmaier affirmed that the police sword or the defensive sword of the state is not wrong, and that a Christian may be called to wield it, but he would not have affirmed either war or the crusade. Thus he too was critical, not simply establishing the ethics of the statesman as a reason for exemption from living by the ethics of Jesus.

So the great variation in Anabaptist views should not be reduced simplistically to the assertion that some Anabaptists were realistic about violence and others were not. The variegation, the scattering of positions, was much broader and more confusing than even Stayer makes it. Nevertheless, Stayer is right in saying that the nonviolent or nonresistant Anabaptists and the violent revolutionaries (most of whom did not baptize but were nevertheless called Anabaptists) do have in common that they took their moral signals from elsewhere than conformity or practicability. That is true. But it is not a truth that settles all other questions about how to interpret their views or distinguish them from their neighbors. Realpolitik, which Stayer attributes to Zwingli, is a modern concept. Zwingli was not a Realpolitiker. He believed that government should take risks because God demands it. It is therefore odd to use the notion of realism to describe Zwingli, who died in a crusade that he had stirred up. Nor does the label fit Hubmaier, who, although he succeeded twice for a few months in running an Anabaptist state church, was martyred in the end because the prince he trusted to protect him finally had to turn him over to the empire for execution. These men held positions that permitted Christians to bear the sword under certain circumstances, but these positions were not pragmatic or realistic or effective.

The Peace Vision of Enlightenment Humanism

This chapter names a recurrent attitude I call Enlightenment internationalism. This movement is not datable.[1] The term Enlightenment usually focuses on certain cultural developments after the wars of religion, after the Reformation had faded into memory in the late seventeenth century and especially the eighteenth century. Yet the sources of the mood that became powerful went back to Erasmus and even into late medieval visions of humanist internationalism.

The word humanist points to a renewal of affirmation of the values of being human. Humanism celebrates the potential of human nature for good, for progress, and for the wholesomeness of the values of people, who are seen not as mere puppets of Providence but as agents building their own world. Human history for the humanist is not just the anteroom of eternity. It matters what people are and do now. Humanism takes this world seriously, affirms its values, and cares not only about eternity but about what is at stake in a manageable, visible range. Humanism takes charge of the historical process. If humans can understand what makes things happen, then they can begin to help make things happen. This perspective contrasts with more primitive and conservative notions of social process, in which people assume that God (or magic or disaster or fate) does it all, that people can just hang on.

For our purposes we can see some similarity in two waves of this humanist culture: (1) in the Renaissance, around 1500, and (2) in the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. I will give a longitudinal slice from the Middle Ages until early modern times rather than simply telling the story of one of those places or times.

Historical manifestations of Enlightenment humanism

To speak more fully of the scope of humanism in Western civilization, one can identify at least four peaks rather than only two: The first is antiquity (itself a millennium rather than a period), during which visions of world peace constantly recurred not only among philosophies but also in the myths of empire from Alexander to Marcus Aurelius. That vision is sketched in the early pages of Roland Bainton’s Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace and more fully in Gerardo Zampaglione’s The Idea of Peace in Antiquity. The second is Renaissance humanism, part of the joy and ambition of which was the rediscovery of antiquity. The third is the Enlightenment. The fourth is the “world order” vision of the twentieth century; for some it is fully new, and for others it is a late flowering of Enlightenment themes. We neglect the first peak on the ground that this is a course in Christian thought, and because much of its meaning was taken up in Christian form in the later phases. We leave treatment of the last peak for later.

Renaissance

The word Renaissance indicates that the movement was not a new beginning. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was a renewal vision, a backward-looking vision, a concern for restoring a classical vision.[2] Renaissance humanism, with its antimilitary impact, understood itself neither as novel nor as an end of an age. It saw itself as reaching back to biblical sources and to classical Greek and Latin sources. There had been a classical vision of peace; poets and philosophers in classical culture envisioned a world at peace in various ways. Humanists used these classical texts as a timeless deposit of humanist antimilitarism.

Classical humanist resources for peace. One piece of the classical deposit is the myth of a golden age, an age of peace, an original cosmic order before things fell apart. According to certain cyclic visions of history, that golden age is also what humanity will be moving toward. That cosmic order of peace will be restored in the historical cycle. How humanity gets from here to there, nobody can say. But at least we know that there was a golden age, that human nature was—or was meant to be—peaceful. So we recognize that the present, the warlike, violent world, is not how things ought to be. War is a scourge. All these periods produced powerful poetry about the inhumanity, brutality, and wastefulness of war, the senseless destruction of relationships and persons and property. War is a tragedy that no one can stop. It falls on humanity and is not redeemable or preventable. The humanists saw war as an evil, as something people are somehow guilty of, even though they could not have done otherwise.

World empire was seen in ideal terms as peace. The humanists of antiquity did not look at real empires—the Persian empire or Alexander’s empire or the Roman Empire—in terms of what those empires were actually doing (that is, fighting wars to subjugate people who would rather be independent, or to take provinces away from some other empire). They helped these empires interpret themselves as peace. Emperors only say what is good and glorious about themselves; they do not feature how many people they have destroyed. They celebrate their military victories as establishing peace. They celebrate even their violence and their domination as peace. Of course, their descriptions of empire are not empirical; these idealized accounts are the tribute that even violence pays to the vision of peace.

On the personal level (to the extent in the classical world, especially among the Stoics, there was something like personal ethics), the virtue of magnanimity provided a basis for dealing with people in nonviolent ways. The good person is better than the average person, because the good person has a bigger soul. Magnanimity is evident when a person can afford to offer amnesty. A magnanimous person can give in, give quarter, grant a new start, or refrain from striking back. So classical humanism had resources, if not to construct peace, at least to make clear and compelling statements of what is wrong with the violence of a world at war.

Intellectual arguments for peace from the Renaissance. The Renaissance revived these classical ideas and added an international or transnational social experience. A person with decent Latin could correspond with comrades from Gibraltar to Stockholm, could participate in a genuinely international intellectual, spiritual, and Christian community. The vision of the holy empire did not cover all that territory, but it did cover the heart of it. Within it, there was again a vision of the emperor’s function in setting the world at peace. The Christian sovereign was potentially a part of that broad, organic, humane unity of the future that the scholar already knew about. Scholars saw themselves as consultants or advisors to the prince, as in the old days Aristotle had taught Alexander the Great.

Erasmus was a specimen of this reality. He wrote a text about how to be a prince, a contribution to the humanist literature genre that developed a vision of enlightened and humane Christian rulers who were to be guided by enlightened and humane Christian philosophers. These rulers would discover how stupid war is and how promising it would be to bring ordinary intelligence and magnanimity and Christian virtues to bear on the evils of war. Humanists developed an antiwar polemic, often presented in the elite literary form of satire. In the later Enlightenment, Voltaire and Jonathan Swift strengthened and polished the satirical genre. Later Mark Twain used it skillfully too, to show that war is stupid and brutal. As culture evolved, the reproach of stupidity cut more deeply. Stupidity and brutality describe the chief humanist vices; they are what is wrong with human nature. The potential glory of human nature is intelligence and refinement, so those who are stupid or brutal have failed to be humane. This critique is the worst kind of reproach.

War also destroys property, works of art, libraries, and beautiful buildings. And the goals of war are unworthy: people fight for things that are not worth fighting for. Just as people had begun to get past the feudal hierarchy, turning toward the unity of the empire, nationalists began to think that France, England, and Spain were entities worth fighting for. Even as the notion of the nation was coming to birth, humanists subjected it to criticism.[3]

All these arguments against war are intellectually powerful. They do not create a peace church, nor do they foster suffering servanthood, but from the perspective of human refinement, these scathing literary polemics make war look stupid and silly.

A common language

Because it does not depend on Jesus, and does not call for suffering servanthood but instead says, “Do not be foolish or destructive, but trust intelligence and trust organization,” the value of this approach (if you consider it a value) is that it provides a terrain on which pacifists and nonpacifists, saints and worldlings, may potentially agree. A person committed to the rejection of all violence can discuss with princes who are not committed to nonviolence the possibility of being at least decent, humane princes, more magnanimous and less brutal. One mark of this “Enlightenment” development—whether of the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Renaissance, or in earlier or later forms—is that pacifists can talk nonpacifist language about world peace and make sense. This development predated modernity. William Penn projected a world peace plan, and before him John Amos Comenius, a distant descendant of the Czech reformation, had done so. Comenius was the great humanist and educator of the Moravian tradition, whose church government in exile survived for several generations after no Moravian church was left. He projected peace plans. In modern times, the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the writer Victor Hugo have projected peace plans out of this same humanism. They argued that peace is intelligent, and if people organized to solve problems in a more intelligent way, then pacifists and nonpacifists—or even Christians and non-Christians—could agree on the stupidity of trying to destroy one another to solve problems. The Enlightenment lowered the barrier between Christians and non-Christians and between pacifists and nonpacifists.

One could make the same point in another way. These leaders and thinkers—bishops and popes or Renaissance or Enlightenment writers (including Erasmus)—were engaged in “pastoral” activity: they were expressing concern for how a community lives, which is not the same thing as governing that community. Normally we work at identifying what is right and wrong, with the prior assumption that we can get other people to do what is right and stop them from doing what is wrong. We assume that ethics is a part of the process of governing. Yet there is a lower-key way of doing ethics, which consists of counseling, illuminating, or consulting. Then we do not expect that what we are talking about will really be done, but we hope that conversation with people will help them make decisions more carefully on their own terms. We help them form their conscience.

This critique by the humanists can be seen as another way to translate the gospel’s or the prophet’s critical thrust—which says, “Sin is wrong”—into a more patient, pastoral, nondirective, “client-centered” fostering of ethical sensitivity. Humanists gently try to temper the violence, temper the enmity and stupidity, without calling it sin. According to the humanists, if one says, “That’s a sin,” people will crawl back into their shells. They will not listen, and they will not trust the critic, so one should not ask the impossible. One should hope to temper the violence but not ask or expect it to go away. One should work in the direction of sobriety.

Sometimes other words have been invented for this kind of approach. Both the peace thrust of the medieval church (which did not reject all warfare but brought to bear on it many tempering and qualifying factors) and the antiwar critique of humanism and the Enlightenment have sometimes been called “pacificist,” meaning that they are pro-peace, in favor of peaceableness. The term identifies a general ethical opposition to war and violence, except where force is seen as necessary to advance the cause of peace. Pacificists are not pacifist, because they do not say that war is wrong. They commend being as peaceful as possible. They seek to temper violence, and they drag their feet when confronted by powers that push for war. Enlightenment internationalism has something of this quality. It sees peace preaching and noncoercive condemnation of war as part of this tempering process. Just war theory—perceived modestly with the thought that it might keep things from getting worse rather than with the assumption that others will really follow just war guidance—can also contribute.

Some of that modesty is present in Erasmus’s work. He sometimes used just war theory not with the idea that rulers would cease to fight unjust wars but with the idea that using just war appeals to counsel such rulers might lead them to fight fewer unjust wars. Erasmus wrote in The Education of a Christian Prince:

A good prince should never go to war at all unless, after trying every other means, he cannot possibly avoid it. If we were of this mind, there would hardly be a war. Finally, if so ruinous an occurrence cannot be avoided, then the prince’s main care should be to wage the war with as little calamity to his own people and as little shedding of Christian blood as may be and to conclude the struggle as soon as possible. The really Christian prince will first weigh the great difference between man, who is an animal born for peace and good will, and beasts and monsters, who are born to predatory war; [he will weigh also] the difference between men and Christian men. Then let him think over how earnestly peace is to be sought and how honorable and wholesome it is; on the other hand [let him consider] how disastrous and criminal an affair war is and what a host of evils it carries in its wake.[4]

Erasmus knew that he was not going to stop the prince from going to war, but he wanted that ruler to be a little more modest and a little slower to declare war. This kind of humanism lets you make modest pleas to the prince.

Peace plans from the fifteenth century to the present are one expression of this phenomenon. From here we move also into the real peace machinery that is present in Grotius and within the development of international law. Some of the elite humanist thinkers were not just essayists (as Erasmus was); they were lawyers. They made projections for a world peace plan that had manageable criteria, and they proposed tribunals for enforcement and ways of getting kings to adopt treaties. Out of this Enlightenment internationalism grew a potential for real cultural impact.

Humanist theological vision

The heritage of Christendom?

What does it mean theologically to think about the unity of humankind or the unity of Christendom? Erasmus and Immanuel Kant perhaps thought this unity was a reality, but it was not. The unity of humankind, or the unity of one part of humankind (which usually meant civilized Christian Europe), is not an empirical fact. It is a vision, a theological commitment. Humanists and Renaissance figures made the confession of humankind’s unity, but it was still a theological commitment. A worldwide peaceable empire or concert of nations that is manageable, possible, or accessible is not a fact, a datum of experience. The oneness of humankind is an axiom. Where did these thinkers get that axiom?

Since Constantine, Christians had been operating, theoretically, with the assumption that a Christian empire governs the whole Christian world. But that assumption had been breaking up for several centuries, and these Renaissance figures do not feel like conservatives. So that is not where they got the axiom of the oneness of humankind. Generally, they were not in the main stream, nor were they powerful people allied with the imperial court. Erasmus, for example, became famous because of his writings, but he was a refugee most of his life. He never had high government protection and did not stay long in any place. Generally these proponents of human unity were mobile people. Immanuel Kant did not travel, but most of the others had no home. They looked forward rather than backward, which meant that they had a theology to lead them against the stream, to an affirmation of humankind’s oneness on grounds that did not come out of Sermon on the Mount nonresistance. Erasmus did read the New Testament, and he included the New Testament at the center of the classical texts that he wanted to rediscover and make operative again. But even for Erasmus, the Gospels were not the source of a vision of a peaceful world. What was?

Secular humanist internationalism as theological commitment

These people’s peace vision was not sectarian. It was for Christians and non-Christians, including Arabs and Turks (although they did not know much about them). These visionaries assumed they were talking about the whole world, and they knew there were “infidels” out there on the edge. Their time saw the beginnings of a global awareness, albeit a limited one. They began to open up to a kind of secularity at home; they worked toward a culture in which clergy would have less control, and in which dogmatic theology would have less weight and common sense would have more.

I will not argue more here about where their vision came from. I simply want us to recognize the fact that secular humanist internationalism, in the various forms in which we have encountered it, is a theological commitment. It is not a fact that humankind is one; it is a faith commitment. If people believe it, then they can act on it, and they find support for that faith commitment. But there is no way to prove that “truth” to people who believe, as racists or provincial people or sectarian people do, that humankind is not one. These makers of peace plans, from the late medieval visionaries to the world federalists of recent decades, are theologically committed to their vision. That vision should be acknowledged as a theological commitment and not accepted as common sense (which would have neither appeals nor warrants, and would need none).

The logic of the humanist internationalist peace vision

The logic that says we are part of a humanity greater than the present political units is completely unconvincing to ordinary people who have not opened their minds to the idea that Americans, Russians, and Chinese ought to be able to get along together. In 1914 it was unthinkable to say that French and Germans ought to get along together. The unity of a wider humanity is unthinkable when people reach beyond a certain distance. Yet on the smaller scale, people have believed in the unity of human society. There have always been contexts within which it is possible to imagine different people and even different political units living at peace. The logic is self-evident on one scale and not on another scale. The problem of scale seems to be arbitrary, yet not completely so; it is flexible, not given.

How big is the unit within which we can live at peace with different people? Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary is about five miles from the border between Indiana and Michigan, which are separate “states.” At times states within the American union have fought each other, but it is not thinkable that Indiana and Michigan could fight each other now. It is not thinkable that the United States and Canada could fight each other now, yet that is a much bigger border between nations that are much more separate. We are still more different from Mexico, but we cannot have a war with Mexico anymore. This kind of peace is not first a military decision, or even a political decision; it is an unspoken cultural decision that we and those people are part of the same humanity. Once we have come to see Mexicans or Canadians as fellow humans with us, we cannot fight them anymore.

Even if we decided we wanted to fight Canada or Mexico, we could not, because we do not have any fortifications along the border. Indiana has no troops that we could use to fight Michigan. Once a group of people decides that they cannot go to war with a certain group of other people, then war between these groups becomes impossible—and not just because a government in Washington says Indiana and Michigan cannot have a war. Between Washington, D.C., and Ottawa, which do not share a federal government, cultural events have created a sense of wider commonality than what we call a nation.

How much this matters is much more visible if one visits Europe. A traveler in western Europe, in areas where later wars have not been too destructive, would find a castle every twenty or thirty miles, because ten or fifteen miles was the radius within which it was possible for a baron to defend the villagers who were his vassals against an attack from a baron just across the border of his little barony. As long as the technology of war and transportation were as they were in the later Middle Ages, the size of a sovereign political unit was about thirty miles across. Theoretically, a prince or king was two hundred miles away; he was sovereign over both those barons next to each other, but he would never arrive on the scene in time if they had a war. They each had practical political sovereignty for the purposes of conducting war. Therefore each castle had to be big enough for all the villagers within fifteen miles of it; they would come there for refuge in case of hostilities. So the size of a territory within which people did not think of fighting their neighbors in the next village was only thirty miles across.

Then the technology of transportation and the technology of war changed. It no longer made sense to have baronies that small, so people moved into a situation in which they would not think of having a war between two baronies. Nor could one shelter all the people in the castle. Now they had to have something of the size that they began to call a province. Those provinces or principalities or duchies could have war with each other. Then soon those too were too small, and they started having nations. What moved a culture from one level to the other was not always winning wars. Once in a while these various groups would be incorporated into a larger group by a central king’s single military victory, but often the catalyst was a change of culture, technology, and consciousness, so that it no longer occurred to them that those people across that next river would be enemies they would want to fight a war with. Therefore they did not mobilize for it, and they did not fortify for it, and the result was that they could no longer have a war with those people.

The logic could go one step further. The abandonment of recourse to war is primarily an act of the will or an acceptance of the self-evident; it is a matter of recognizing a fact in the social system. Once we have recognized the fact that we simply cannot have a war with Canada, then it is the business of moral insight to underline it and make it self-evident. Maybe Christian moral insight could do more, but humanism is our subject now. We are talking of minimal, natural, universal moral insight.

Enlightenment internationalists said, “Can’t you see? It makes sense to accept the givenness of a common humanity. We have so much in common and depend so much on each other that it is stupid, inhumane, and dysfunctional to contemplate destroying each other.” It would be an important thing if natural moral insight would work that much. This position is not utopianism: it still has sanctions, and it still can manage confrontation. Enlightenment internationalism developed peace plans precisely in order to manage confrontation and arbitration, but it discerns a theologically founded prior reality in the unity of humanity. That unity is not present in a profoundly provable sense, yet it is there as consciousness. The humanist says, “Let’s structure for that consciousness. Let’s take the unity we have; let’s dramatize it. There is no more room for dealing with other people as enemies in war.”

This common humanity is usually self-evident to all of us with respect to people in the next barony thirty miles down the road, or in the next province 150 miles down the road. But we find it easier to ally with these others when both of us are enemies of somebody else farther away. That is the case if all Europe is united against the rest of the world, or the entire “free world” is allied against the Soviets. So the widening circles of unity still do not do away with enmity. Their progress is real, nevertheless, within themselves, and that is part of the logic of the humanist antiwar vision.

Here we are talking about a kind of secular wisdom that the church can bless: as Christian world citizens, let’s celebrate and affirm, as given by God, the unity of humanity. Perhaps it is even more. It may be a secular wisdom that the church ought to be committed to evoking, because after all the unity of humankind is a theological claim before it is an empirical fact. One of the ways Christianity must work into the wider culture is by translating its vision of the unity of humankind into a manageable vision, a vision one does not need to be Christian to understand.

Internationalism, then, is a classic humanist vision, with its roots reaching all the way back into classical times, coming to the surface in two waves in western European culture, in the Renaissance recovery of antiquity, and in the Enlightenment, as the dominion of the church over culture weakened. These epochs rediscovered the view of humanity as a unity, and articulated a vision of peace through recognition of common humanity. In each of these epochs we find people who saw beyond national divisions, regarded Christendom or Europe or the world as a unity, and projected how that unity might be implemented so as to do away with war. With its concrete plans for international peacemaking, the Enlightenment period stretches up to the present. Some of these plans are still imaginary and utopian; others, like the United Nations and its International Court of Justice in The Hague, have become partly functional.

When we try to locate this phenomenon historically and culturally, we note that it is not specifically biblical, as some of the other phenomena are. Relating it to the rest of our material will demand some discussion. I began with the simple parable of local borders that do not need to be defended. Why is the border between the United States and Canada unfortified? Is it that it would be difficult to fortify? Or is it that we have a cultural agreement that the people over there are not radically enough “they” over against “us” that we could conceive of them as enemy? The answer must be circular on the levels of both awareness and possibility. The more we are aware of another group of people as human, as like us, the less conceivable war becomes as a way of dealing with tensions in the relationship. If one nation is much bigger than the other, the small one could not defend itself, and that’s another reason to live in peace. With time, these minimal conditions for an absence of hostility can become a genuine possibility for decent relations, not just an armistice in which it is clear which side is the bully.

Levels of specificity

The people who made peace plans were not equally specific about how to measure them for feasibility. We can distinguish three degrees. One can say simply, “We are all brothers and sisters, and we should not have all this war.” That is an understandable message, but it does not give people many alternative ideas. Or one can say, “Why wouldn’t we do it this way?” and then propose a peace plan showing that it is not silly to say that war is stupid. Enforcing the plan would not be on the agenda, because the person who made the plan is not a statesman and would not have all the details about how the plan would work if it were enacted. Then, of course, there is the enforceable peace plan. This plan starts with treaties and tribunals and assemblies. It moves back from idealism into the business of the state. These three degrees of concreteness are qualitatively distinct: (1) saying that we are all brothers and sisters, (2) saying that we could have an overarching structure that solves intergroup problems, and (3) working at building and maintaining that structure. This last one involves the potential of falling back into enforcement, even violent enforcement, which puts the question in another light.

Christian response to humanism

Now what do we do with humanist internationalism? Is this possibility of an unarmed border simply a fluke in cultural history that happens only in certain places? Or is it in some sense a secularization of a Christian truth? If so, might it be a Christian truth that we could seek to spin off, to help people (even if they are not all Christians or Christian pacifists) to see beyond their narrow loyalties? Is it the business of Christian moral insight to foster, beyond the church, one view of the world rather than another? Some Christians do not want to commend a One World social vision to non-Christians, yet they do want to teach creationist biology to other people’s children. Should we foster, because it is true, the view of a neighbor nation as people like us, and the view of the world as a common humanity who could live at peace? Or do we want to avoid getting involved in propagating these ideas, because that message is not the same as Christian discipleship? It is in one sense utopian, but is that bad?

The notion is broad: humanity is a unity; therefore we need not and should not fight. That idea is not as deep, detailed, tragic, or costly as the view of minority discipleship that created peace churches. It is not true in all places. Should it be true? Should we invest in trying to make it true? Should it be a concern of the Christian church to encourage people—apart from whether they become believing Christians—to think about one another in the way articulated by the humanists? You may argue that of course we should. Then you will encourage the church to invest in preferring one culture to another, in favoring one philosophy over another, in trying to propagate one specifically Christian philosophy rather than another. Is that our business? Will it work?

If we negate this undertaking, we probably do so out of concern to avoid confusion. Humanist internationalism is not the gospel. In fact, it is a form of human self-righteousness and self-deception. It is not absolutely true that people can live at peace without the gospel. Even with the gospel, they have not often done so. So it would be a false gospel to project, as Erasmus and Kant and Comenius and others did, the notion of a world relatively at peace, or relatively less at war than in other times and places.

We want to avoid two extremes when thinking about how to respond to the humanist vision. One extreme argues against it; the other identifies it with the work of the church, particularly when “kingdom work” is an in-group phrase. Those alternatives leave room in between. Should some in the church work to foster this vision as their business? Farming and educating are not kingdom business, but some of us do them.

The humanist outlook is different in degree from the Christian gospel, but is it part of the same message? It does add an element. The peace plans are at home in this culture. Not everybody made peace plans; nonestablishment Christians did.

The humanist challenge to the just war tradition

Humanist thought shows that people can come to think of those across borders as people against whom they will not fight. Through cultural change, and not simply through imperialism, the question whether group A should fight with group B then becomes a nonquestion. When we observe that change as a possibility, and when we get ready to say that it might even be a Christian’s duty to propose this view, we see a new flaw in the just war tradition. One of the questions the just war tradition asks, in order to know if a war is a just war, is about just authority. Yet the people who developed the just war tradition never acknowledged that the choice of a just authority is a choice of existing borders—that is, of a geographically limited community, which therefore defines its enemy. They assumed the proper political units to be self-evident. Yet no fundamental logical or theological ground exists for saying what the particular border should be, within which we then ask who the just authority is. The just war theory took for granted existing borders, in which existing sovereignties within those borders were already defined. Only then did it ask, who is the just authority?

Postnationalistic humanism comes along with a commonsense vision, with a theological vision of the unity of humankind, and with cultural experiences of the unity of humankind. Then it says, “Those borders do not have that status.” The just war theory has no basis on which to answer that claim. One of its weaknesses is that it never made the theological or moral case for recognizing those borders. The just war theory takes for granted the choice of a limited community, and the attendant definition of a certain group of people as enemies—at the same time that the theory’s in bello restraints establish that some enemy entities have a right not to be destroyed. The just war theory does not argue this issue, so if we call its assumptions into question, it does not have a ready answer. This point is just one of the places at which the tradition simply started with existing medieval common sense. It provided no logical or theological basis for saying of any other group of people that they are “they” as over against “us.” The status of enmity between people itself has no theological basis with regard to any particular other people. Once it exists, nonpacifist theology has had ways of handling it, but the theory itself does not make the case for the existence of that enemy status.

Certain theologies add something here. Some say, “God made us into peoples and wants the peoples to be different.” That view exists in modern Western philosophy. It also exists in many primitive cultures, which see the members of their group as really human, while people of other groups are not so regarded. Basic linguistic data from many primitive cultures indicate that the only word for “human” in many tribal tongues is also the word for their tribe. Nevertheless, in between the primitive and modern Western romantic nationalism, no strong cultural or theological argument says that people across the river or people in the next language group are by definition—and ought to be—enemies to us.

The peace plans challenge just war theory in another way; in a sense they are a kind of just war theory. They try to make operational the claims that we have on one another, and they seek to limit violence to the minimum it takes to keep the peace. That tradition is mediated through the churches of the West. So the peace plans are themselves a fruition of the optimism of Western Christian culture. As such they are a kind of preaching, a confession of faith. They are not a sell-out to paganism or humanism, because they would only be conceivable with some kind of connection to the view of the world that relates to the God of the Bible.

Weaknesses of the humanist vision of unity

We have been reasoning from the strength of the vision of a common humanity, which keeps popping up again in various forms of humanism. What are its weaknesses?

Western Judeo-Christian origins

The humanist vision depends, more than its adherents grant, on specific, nonuniversal value systems. The vision claims that it is neither specifically Christian nor derived from a particular sectarian religious tradition. It means to be nonjudgmental, not to take sides, and to be universal in its attraction. It claims that decent people anywhere in the world would see things the same way. Affirming humankind’s universality and the dignity of all people, regardless of differences, should have the same power of conviction for everybody, at least on the same cultural level.

Yet reality is not that simple. The notion of humankind as a unity in itself is not a notion at home in all cultures. Certain primitive cultures and certain highly developed cultures of the past deny this claim. It is a Jewish and Christian idea. It may become universal in its relevance or in its implication, but it has its own cultural derivation. It does not come from everywhere, and not everyone can draw on it. It cannot therefore be presupposed of people from other parts of the world.

In the 1950s, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Warren Austin became impatient with the impulsiveness, provincial narrowness, and self-righteousness of all the parties to the conflict in the Near East. He made a speech in the U.N. asking the parties to the conflict to get together “like Christian gentlemen.” It did not occur to him that Muslims and Jews would not see this invitation in a favorable light. Even the Greek Orthodox Christians throughout the Near East, including many Arab Christians, do not share his vision of what it means to be a gentleman. They would have a Greek Orthodox or an Arab vision (those are different too) of what it means to be a gentleman. Notions of the universal dignity, tolerance, openness, and civility that now look like post-Christian, nonreligious, secular values for getting along with each other—which we therefore tend to think can be asked of everybody—are themselves a product of a specific Jewish and Christian Western culture. We cannot presuppose them in Buddhists, Hindus, or animists. We can hope for them in Western Marxists, because these people are also partly a product of that same story, but we cannot presuppose them in Chinese Marxists. In other words, this vision of universality—this idea of a post-Christian, secular, nonsectarian, nonjudgmental capacity to get along decently with one another—is itself a sectarian position, and specifically a Judeo-Christian one. So we are still making a statement of faith when we imagine how it might work beyond the church at one of its limits.

No universal idea of unity

Another weakness of the humanist vision is that seeing the world as one world is itself also a Western product. How does it happen that we can get news rapidly around the world? It is because of the global reach of Western communication and information technology. How does it happen that around the world, it is the English language, rather than Japanese or Arabic, that is usable? It is because the West took over the world. The unity of the world is a North Atlantic–based unity. It is not a directionless or centerless unity. Commercially, culturally, it is still a North Atlantic event. Nothing important for the unity of the world happens that is not somewhere between Washington and Moscow. When somebody from South America or Japan wants in on that process, they join the West-centered cultural imperialism. Not only is the idea of a unified humanity a Western (and that means post-Jewish Christian) cultural phenomenon; the fact that the world operates as a unity is also something imposed on the rest of the world by these same North Atlantic cultures. Neither Zulu nor Buddhist culture operates this way. Only Western, post-Jewish Christian culture thinks this way. That assertion does not make it wrong, but when we assume it is true, we are still in our own provincial skin. We have not become cosmopolitan or universal humans. We are still what we are with our particular vision. It may not be a bad one, but let’s not think it has become neutral or nonsectarian or universal.

No universal ethic

Another limitation of this vision is that no firm ethical system exists that applies in this wider humanity. What would the rules be if the wider humanity were to work? They would not be Buddhist rules. They would probably not be Jewish rules. We do not know what they would be. We can speculate, but then all philosophers have their own ideas, and they make up a still narrower community. Although some philosophical disciplines might enable us to develop broad ideas accepted almost everywhere, we still do not have an ethical system.

When we try to envision how a wide humanity at peace would work, we can reach for analogies from past experience. We can talk about how the original thirteen American colonies formed a federation, and that federation was able to move progressively to thinking of itself as one. We can talk about other federative experiences around the world, of which a few (though not many, beyond the United States or Switzerland) have been relatively successful in creating a new unity where no unity existed before. Of course one of the bloodiest wars in modern history was needed to make it clear that the American union had succeeded—which some of us would say proved that it had failed. So we do not really have a credible way to show how this vision of humanity at peace will work.

We do not have a set of rules that are widely accepted or acceptable or even culturally relevant to the problems we would face if we were trying to run a common humanity in some peaceable way. We can use imagination. We can say that unselfishness and a commitment to the dignity of the other party will go a long way. That may be true, but we have no social or institutional ethic for a unified humanity.

Unity based on having a common enemy

One more weakness of the image of unity that we have been talking about can be seen by looking at the U.S.-Canada or the U.S.-Mexico example. The cynic can argue that those unities have been viable at least in part because there has always been an enemy in view. When we made common cause with the near neighbor, it was in the context of being against somebody else. The reason the U.S. and Canada could get acquainted and live at peace with each other was that since 1812 they always had some common enemy. First it was the Indians on their western frontiers. Once they had put the continent together, then it was the kaiser or the czar who was threatening them, or somebody else that could be thought of as “they” so that we could be “we” together. In short, we do not have a trustworthy cultural experience of a “we”-feeling for all humanity. We can project that we should have, but we cannot show that that sense has been present in any way that we know how to build on.

We do not have to prove that the vision of world unity is capable of being institutionalized before we can work in small ways at being less stupid about overkill in the development of nuclear weapons, for example. But I doubt that one could argue persuasively from past arms treaties that a growing potential exists for making our recognition of each other’s dignity operational in the absence of an enemy somewhere else. It could be argued that if we were intelligent and sober about the threat of nuclear arms, we would already have made nuclear war itself our common enemy. But we haven’t.

No natural constituency for universal human commonality

Our slowness to work at nuclear disarmament (or even at limiting the arms race) supports my pessimistic statement that the experience of “we” without an enemy “they” does not move us. The vision of a united humanity is theologically true but culturally weak, because it has no natural constituency. The advocates for humanist internationalism are a cultural elite, usually academic, located sociologically in one narrow place. Erasmus and Voltaire were different from their neighbors and fellow citizens. As writers and thinkers they participated in a culture that was transnational. The people with whom Erasmus corresponded wrote in Latin (a dead language for everybody else), which they had learned as a result of their privileged schooling. Yet they believed that their real world was the bigger world. People for whom the real world is the bigger world are a tiny minority in any society. Scattered ethnic groups—diaspora peoples including Armenians and Jews—have some sense of a wider, united world. And the Christian church should be a people who experience themselves as part of a body that transcends nationalisms, and should begin to constitute a constituency for the idea of a common humanity. But there is no natural constituency for that idea.

Someone may say that new constituencies are now growing. One would be international bureaucrats, people who work (for example) for U.N. agencies such as the International Labour Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, or for the Universal Postal Union. A second possibility is that people who work for multinational corporations are coming to be a constituency supporting transnational unity. Perhaps the people of many countries who work for global industry come to have a sense of being at home all around the world. IBM has ghettos all around the world, but that is not the real world either. So there is no natural constituency for the vision of a united humanity except for people like Erasmus, and there would never be enough of them to make a world.

Weaknesses in the workability of humanist peace plans

Another large set of questions arises when we move past the general statement about the dignity of “them,” or past the statement that there should not be any “them” because all humanity is “we.” If the peace plan is just a dramatic way to incarnate the notion that we are all human, and that our problems ought to be soluble, things are not too complex. But if we try to make the plan work, another set of questions arises. Let’s start with the smaller issues.

The powerlessness of actual sovereigns

The notion of a peace plan, although it implies a critique of the present system of divided national sovereignty, is at the same time optimistic in its belief that national sovereigns are in fact sovereign. It believes they can deliver their constituencies (as American political terminology would have it). It has faith that if the English monarch would join the peace plan, England would come with her, and that the treaty would be ratified. It assumes that institutional bondages do not tie sovereigns to selfish interest groups within their nations. It also assumes that democratic presidents are not constrained by democracy. But in fact, if the people of England do not want to join a peace plan, then the queen of England cannot make it happen.

In 1978 it was not clear that President Carter could get the Senate to ratify the Panama Canal treaty he had signed in September 1977. When he won the first test of his presidency by a single vote, it was only because if he had lost it, he would not have been able to make any other treaties. The senators did not see the treaty as good, nor did the people of the U.S. necessarily believe that a promise Jimmy Carter had made was a promise the nation ought to keep. But the Senate was not ready to undermine Carter so early in his term in office and thereby make him incapable of doing any other diplomacy. Peace plans assume that sovereigns can effectively join in, and that a structure exists that can commit the nation to the new shape of the political unity. They also assume that sovereigns will keep their promises, that they will be decent, and that once the plan has been set up it will go.

The problem of enforcement

The still greater problem about the peace plans is that any plan that European dreamers would have been able to project, based on extrapolation from past experience, would look like the governments we have, in that it would call for enforcement, and enforcement would again mean a form of war. Roland Bainton sees that as a recurrent pattern.[5] The medieval church got the idea that Europe should live at peace—so much so that it sought to impose the peace of God on Europe. Bainton sees this impulse as leading into the Crusades, which attempted to enforce a theocratic peace.

Bainton notes that the early modern peace plans also needed enforcement.[6] The Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century, the arrangement that was set up after the Napoleonic wars, kept Europe relatively tranquil for a century. Again it was a form of imperial domination. Under such an arrangement, when a nation commits an offense, the alliance will seek to restore peace by putting that country back in its place. How does the alliance do so? Bainton’s argument is that we never get past the dilemma within the vision of trying to make peace plans work, of either letting the peace be broken (then peace has failed) or enforcing the peace (then we have made it fail). One could argue that the violence of the war to enforce the peace would be different in scale from the war that would happen if the peace really broke down. Yet that remains one of the unresolved problems within the vision of trying to make peace plans work.

We can suggest some reasons for hope for international organization that may partly get past this problem. When nations have developed practices of referring certain questions for arbitration and resolution, they recognize that they will not fight about at least those matters, because an international treaty deals with those issues. These matters can be adjudicated at The Hague or Geneva, or debated at the U.N. Then at least the number of tensions that are likely to come to a head militarily will be fewer. So there is a certain peacemaking momentum, short of real peace. At least nations do not go to war for every cause. The nation still retains sovereignty and freedom; it still claims that if its dignity or survival as a nation is really at stake, it will go on to war. But more and more, the nation can permit resolution of at least minor matters, at some small sacrifice, without a war. Some international conflicts do get resolved through this process, although (thus far) not many visible ones. An oil company or shipping company, whose interests in another time might have drawn the nation into a war, might now be unable to do so. So we may see a little progress here, but only at the small end and only with the small problems.

A second aspect of the vision, one promoted by the thinkers, one that would make a big difference if it would work, would be that the enforcement of peace would apply not to whole nations as offenders but to leaders within nations who do wrong things. Within a country, governments enforce the peace of the country against bandits, and perhaps (if necessary) against terrorists and revolutionaries, not against political units within the country.

The same would be true on the world scale. If a new Hitler were to start a new war, the international authority would not punish the country he led but would capture the leader or the clique or the party or the group of generals and colonels. The world authority would treat them as offenders, as criminals. Each country would have to be willing to let the world authority extradite their MacArthurs and their Kissingers. This will not happen, but the vision that it might happen is one of the growing edges in the speculation about how we could have a world peace agency. It would become a crime on the international level to be a war-maker in one country. The international authorities would not apply sanctions to England; they would just get Winston Churchill. They would not invade Germany but would go in and “surgically take out” Hitler. If the country did not cooperate, the action might be a commando operation, but it would not be a war. If the country did cooperate, the action would be a legal process, akin to turning over terrorists and airplane hijackers. The nation would turn over its fascists to the U.N. police force and go on. That’s still a utopian vision but a pertinent one. It focuses enforcement on the level of particular offenders rather than on the nation itself.

On a smaller scale, this approach would already be conceivable among the nations of the European Common Market, for example. It might be possible to say that anyone who comes out in the open as a racist or fascist cannot hold office in a Common Market country. That approach would be thinkable (if messy), and it could be enforced by the European tribunal at Strasbourg. Europe is united enough that any one country would be willing to give up that particular freedom in order to keep the Common Market going. The European setting would be one place where an international police force could perhaps deal with the offender rather than with the nation as a whole. So the speculation is not unthinkable.

Christian pacifism and enforcement

Christian pacifists are left with ethical questions about enforcement, any level of enforcement. Is the notion of any kind of national and international enforcement inconsistent with the Christian peace position? If war and killing for good causes are thought to be wrong on the national level, are they still wrong on the international level, even if the good cause is a little bigger, even if the damage they do in enforcement is much smaller than that of the war they prevent? Pacifists have tended to divide on whether serving in a hypothetical international police force would be excluded by their pacifist commitment. The question remains: is enforcement within the Christian ethical commitment to reject all violence?

The more rigorous say, “We would not serve in an armed police force.” Others say, “You should never have that police force: world peace will only work if it works without arms.” Still others say, “We could have an unarmed, nonviolent U.N. peacekeeping force,” and they have investigated at some depth how that would work. Those who are ready to get really close to the borderline might even say, “We can have a U.N. police force armed with guns with rubber bullets; it would have enforcement capability but not the capacity really to destroy.” Finally, some say, “What we are against is world war. If a world police force would keep the peace, pacifists would be the first people to enlist. They’d probably do it better than nonpacifists. They would be more sensitive and more willing to take the risks of nonviolence.”

Wars of pacifist idealism: The new crusades

The claim to be making peace can be a new self-righteousness, in which we are even less self-critical and even more confident about the holiness of our cause. So making peace becomes a new crusade, as it already has been for the two world wars. In World Wars I and II, the Allied side did not admit that they were acting for national interest. They did not talk about retaliation, about empire, or about markets. They did not even talk about maintaining borders. They talked about making the world safe for democracy or about ending war. Woodrow Wilson had stayed out of the First World War; he was reelected on the grounds that he had kept the U.S. out of war. To explain entering the war, after his public platform had been about staying out of the war, Wilson said, “This is the war to end all wars.” That claim made the enterprise a war of pacifist idealism. It made U.S. participation in the war less manageable—less subject to peacemaking negotiation, and less open to compromise—than if we had been less self-righteous about why we were fighting.

The same could be said of the early years of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The American people were told that it was a matter of restoring the peace in Southeast Asia and assuring the Marxists that they could not get anywhere with power. U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge once said that the reason we supported the heroic freedom of the Saigon regime was that we had to show the Communists that might does not make right. How did we try to show them? By superior might, obviously. The British Falklands victory (1982) had the same purpose. Thus the self-righteousness of claiming to fight for the sake of peace might make a war worse rather than better.

Peace plans as utopian critique of the present

There is nothing wrong with being utopian, if we know what we are doing when we are utopian. The word utopia has come to have many meanings. It used to mean something that would not come to be. Then it became a good word in some circles, with various kinds of Marxism and post-neo-Marxism. A utopia is a vision that, although it cannot happen, is worth talking about. In the long run, if we talk (even only hypothetically) about what a better world might be, if we sing songs about it, doing so will contribute to changing the values. We may stop thinking about the present balance of terror. We may question the present level of military domination and doubt military assumptions about problem solving. Utopia is helpful as leverage to get us to be critical of the present and to see that, at least in the details, things would not have to be the way they are. We cannot say for sure that we know how a world would run without any weapons, but at least talking about a world without weapons will make it easier to conceive of not needing an eightfold overkill in our nuclear arsenal. Maybe a threefold overkill would be enough to keep the Soviets off our shores. If we have to use soldiers for soldiering, at least we could make it so that we do not have to use soldiers to run Washington. That kind of creativity in seeing social alternatives is fostered by good utopias.

Of course utopias can be bad. Hopes that are disappointed can call forth resentment, or new forms of enmity, or other dysfunctional reactions. If we promise that with the passage of a certain law African Americans will all be free, and then they are not free, making that promise may not have helped. The new crusades in the name of peace are the best example of a wrong function of the utopia of world peace. When the U.N. is used to support U.S. intervention in the civil war in Korea, that kind of support may not make the U.N.’s existence a step toward world peace.

Sanctions as a secular ban?

Can there be something like a secular equivalent of the ban for dealing with offending nations? International ostracism and suspension of relations with nations that do not keep the rules have been tried. The old League of Nations used the word sanctions, referring to a sliding scale of relations. Depending on how bad a country is, other countries will not do certain things with them. They will not trade with them, or will not trade certain kinds of goods. The U.N. sometimes uses sanctions. After 1968, Rhodesia should not have been able to sell chromium to U.N. member nations, but the U.S. proved to be one of the least cooperative countries in enforcing the boycott on Rhodesian chrome. The U.S. government is not used to having much control over its business community. That case provides one sample of the difficulty of using bans in international relations. Here too we confront enforcement problems, although not military ones. Some nations will not respect the sanctions, because these nations do not happen to be in the part of the world that agrees with the international body. So the effectiveness of a boycott or an embargo is limited, because only a part of the world will go along with it. League of Nations sanctions did not work in the 1930s to punish Mussolini for going into Ethiopia (Abyssinia). The league collapsed in part because this effort proved ineffectual.

Nevertheless, nonviolent enforcement of this sort is thinkable. If we worked at the notion of a gradual growth of a sense of cosmopolitan unity, sanctions would be one of the tools at our disposal. Thus far they have worked best when the enforcement is not through commerce (because we cannot give orders to our business people) but through other subsections of the culture that are also international. One of the more effective has been sports. I do not know how badly the ban against South Africa (on grounds of racism in sports) hurt South Africa. When their tennis players could not compete around the world, did it affect the nation’s psyche?

Could there be something like a ban? An international body could have ways of letting a given nation know that others disapprove of what they are doing. But if those sanctions are nonviolent, they would never be coercive. They are relative. Probably they work best on a country like South Africa, where a committed dissenting minority still has some rights and a clear moral basis for their dissent. Then sanctions from outside help the internal dissenters. But sanctions from outside do not make much difference for a place that is completely crazy, like Idi Amin’s Uganda or the Soviet system, where nobody inside the country has any basis for talking back. Maybe they are still worth instituting as a witness (to keep the church vocabulary), but on the level of pragmatism they do not promise much immediate effect. But we can say at least that there is such a thing as nonviolent moral pressure that is more than moral. On moral grounds an organized group can exert economic and cultural pressures that affect the freedom of movements of goods and people, that have some weight, and that can be used to promote international peace.

An inconclusive conclusion

Our treatment of international humanism stops here without finishing. Unlike the stories of other movements we have been studying, this is not a datable one. It differs from the specific histories that we have been studying in that it has a similar shape up and down the centuries, from antiquity through Renaissance and Enlightenment and to the present. It is still very much with us, so we can return to it at any time.

Quakerism in the Puritan Reformation

We begin by reading a tract from 1660 that will give us a sense of the texture and the spirit of the early Quaker movement.

To the called of God, who believes in the light of the Lambe, to be read in their assemblyes in the Pure Dread of the Lord.[1]

Dear children and people of the eternal God, who have known the working of His mighty power, and have been exercised in the operations of His eternal Spirit, whereby He hath begotten your minds out of the world, in a great measure, and hath brought you into a feeling of His eternal presence, which filleth heaven and earth, wherein is the Joy unspeakable unto them that are reconciled to God by the Lord Jesus Christ, the immortal Word: Friends, you unto me are exceeding precious, and my desires and breathings for the Lord for you, are exceeding strong, that ye may be preserved in the sense and feeling of the power of an endless life, and that you may be all kept in the true faith and obedience of the truth, which lives forever; all minding to answer its requirings in every particular, waiting to feel its springings arising in you, whereby you may feel it quickening you up to God, that so your faith, and trust, and confidence may only stand in Him, who is able to deliver: For Friends, this know, the Lord will assuredly try you to the uttermost, and you must come through the fire which will consume your enemies. Therefore dear babes, be steadfast in the Lord according as He hath made manifest Himself unto you, and wait and watch in that measure of His life in you, which only is able to keep your minds and hearts out of the earth, and the things thereof, as ye singly wait upon the Lord, you will feel the growth of that birth in you, which is not of this world, which can endure the fire; oh, my Friends, wait to feed your growth and translation into this birth, which doeth the will of the Father naturally, this is the seed unto which the promises are, this is the elect which obtains, and cannot be deceived, this is the heir of the kingdom without end; this will God crown with victory, when the measure of its sufferings is fulfilled; this seed must work through all its enemies, and work them under its feet. Oh wait in the eternal power to feel and witness it in the particular, and be patient until God brings forth His work outwardly; look not out, neither be not dismayed at the strange transactions of the times, but look to the Lord, who only can save by what means He pleaseth, and let the Lord alone appear as He pleaseth, only be you watchful, that when He appears, you may be ready for His appearance, and watch in the light which will give you clearly to see His appearance, and what He requires of you; that so living obedience unto Him may be yielded: Oh Friends, Take heed that the things of this world draw not away any of your hearts. Remember it is them that are redeemed from the earth, that must reign in, and with the Lamb upon the earth. Take heed that your love stands not in any thing, or things that is of this world, for the trial will be great unto such. Dear hearts, I know that some of you have suffered the loss of much for His name sake already; oh faint not, neither be weary for all your sufferings are known unto the Lord; and He will not always so try you; but He will sufficiently recompense you, if you abide to the end: Therefore watch unto prayer, and pray in the Spirit, as it moves you thereunto, that you may be kept through faith unto the end of the trial, and that you may be prepared and made fit for the deliverance, which must come by an outstretched arm; and when you are tried deeply, either in prisons or otherwise, oh Friends murmur not, but feel the Lord’s strength to support you, that you may not bow to the enemy, in any wise, whose day is but short, and therefore he is wroth and rages; for such as bows to anything, but the name of our King, verily there torment and perplexity will be exceeding miserable, when the Lord shall deliver His chosen, who kept their integrity, and love not their estates, nor lives, but gave up all for His name sake: Therefore dear Friends, hearken you to the voice of the Lord, and keep you to the leadings of His eternal Spirit, and let His dread fill your hearts.

And you that feel but little sufferings and trials, take heed of a wrong security, and of a false ease and liberty, lest the day of the Lord come upon you unaware, and a violent storm unlooked for; and you that are in deep sufferings and trials, be not you cast down, but know that the trial of your faith is exceeding precious, and if you keep your minds stayed upon the Lord, then will you learn much in such a time, and you will feel the presence of God, and the virtue of His power, inwardly refreshing you, and you will feel the power of His majesty giving you authority suitable to the condition you are in: So as all Friends are kept in that which gives you the sense and feeling of your conditions, that principle of life will work your minds and hearts into contentedness with the will of God, which is your sanctification; So let the bond of peace be minded in all things, for it is comely among Brethren.

And now the God of life and endless virtue and power watch over you, and minister unto everyone of you, that which is suitable to your present conditions, and the Lord God Almighty preserve and keep you low, humble, meek, tender, innocent, upright, faithful and valiant (out of the snares of the enemy), and give you peace in all your trials, and let the patience of His Lamb be increased in you, that you may stand unmovable on the Rock of Ages, and retain the life which quickens in your understandings: And the Lord God open and keep open your discernings, that by no means the subtlety may beguile the simplicity in this the day of trial: Eternal Father unto Thee I commend all Thy flock, that Thou Father may fill them with wisdom, strength and courage, that to Thy glory they may be preserved in their several places and measures; to Whom be dominion and glory everlasting for Thy endless riches, for Thou Lord art worthy to reign over all; Even so come Lord God and take Thy kingdom.

I, the prisoner for the Lord salutes all you, who love the appearance of Christ in that love which abides forever.

Lambeth House the 14th of the 5th month 1660: George Fox the younger.[2]

Quakers and Puritanism: Origins of Quaker peace witness

Quakerism in its origins was not genetically related to sixteenth-century Anabaptism.[3] It arose within Puritanism, a new movement with only indirect relationship to the continental Reformation.

The English reformation progressed leftward throughout the sixteenth century, beginning with King Henry VIII (reigned 1509–47) and his repudiation of papal authority, and continuing through the reign of his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603). Henry VIII had disconnected England from Rome, for reasons that at the outset were more political than theological. The English reformation did not intend to be Protestant. It wanted to be Christian out from under Rome. Yet Henry opened the door to Protestant theology from the continent; the Church of England had room for people who were convinced by Luther’s or Calvin’s writings. Henry’s son Edward VI (reigned 1547–53) was hospitable to European-based Protestants, and he took in Protestant refugees from Europe. Then came re-Catholicization under Mary I (reigned 1553–58), and then re-Protestantization after her. This sequence of events strengthened Protestant loyalties, because the people whom Mary had driven into exile went to the continent as refugees, landing in Frankfurt, Geneva, or the Netherlands; their experiences radicalized their sense of being Protestant. Gradually the movement shifted leftward and became more Protestant, more like continental Calvinism.

This gradual progression went on through the last half of the sixteenth century, and a lot of debate and confusion accompanied it. Some of the criticisms originated in Calvin’s thought and addressed issues of salvation, justification, and the meaning of the death of Christ. Other questions arose about the meaning of the sacrament, moving away from Catholic understandings of transubstantiation. Still other debates were about bishops. Regarding bishops, first came Presbyterianism, with the conviction that synods should replace bishops. Next came Congregationalism, with its assertion that nothing should replace bishops. This gradual move took place among people who did not see themselves as tributary to one particular continental movement. They just read the Bible in England, and read it more and more freely, and therefore became more and more critical. By 1580 some Congregationalists said, on biblical authority (even though they were persecuted for it), that there should be no overarching church authority. They said it without leaving the Church of England, because the Church of England wanted to be biblical; the Congregationalists wanted the whole Church of England to take their position.

Congregationalism was not an antigovernment position to start with; its adherents told Queen Elizabeth that she ought to let the church be organized congregationally. They did not see that as an antiestablishment position; they saw it as the way establishment ought to go. (Later it did, in Massachusetts.) A little further down the road, the Baptists (first called Brownists)[4] raised questions about infant baptism. They had only a little contact with Mennonites in the Netherlands (to which Browne and some of his followers emigrated in 1581). The advocacy of believer’s baptism first arose among some people who did have such contacts, but they did not become the dominant Baptist movement in England.

Puritan characteristics and the move leftward to Quakerism

I have noted the formal agenda of English church reform as it became increasingly critical of the establishment option. What matters more is its spiritual content. The Puritans’ was a new model of spiritual experience, different from that of Luther and Calvin (although derived somewhat from Calvin) and a new model of social expression of the faith. The Puritan, much more than the sixteenth-century Protestant, was subjectively self-aware, attuned to something new about the nature of spiritual experience. This transformation took place before it reached the extreme forms of Quakerism. When that bore fruit, the way it worked itself out was a new form of peace witness.

Self-aware religious experience: The journal. The spiritual experience of the Puritan was most properly expressed in a journal. The main form of Puritan literature is autobiographical: “I struggled with the Lord.” It is personal and confessional. Yet it is not only autobiographical. What one said about oneself was a statement of one’s weaknesses and struggles. Journal writers reported that they were struggling with the Lord for years, until a point came when they found new freedom, new light, new willingness, or new brokenness. Then they entered into a new relation to God’s redeeming purposes and wanted to share it. Spiritual experience meant perceiving God autobiographically, not simply as the author of the Bible. Yet it was in the Bible that Puritans found models of that experience, and they interpreted their own lives as being like Abraham’s or Moses’s or Joseph’s or Paul’s. The Puritans saw paradigmatic Christian experience in the saints of the scriptures. They saw God not simply as the source of a holy book that tells people what to do; God was working among them in the present, overwhelming them in self-aware experience. This mode of religious expression is qualitatively different from that of the sixteenth-century debate.

Reform through sociological innovation. Puritanism was also a sociological innovation. The social tactics of the Elizabethan establishment were a political strategy to keep the lid on. Nobody wanted to be a middle-of-the-road Anglican. On the right were people who were born and raised Catholics and still believed in the faith of Rome. The clergy wanted loyalty to Rome and a high view of the sacraments. The common people wanted their candles, ashes, and feast days. On the other side were people who had read Luther and Calvin. Some had been radicalized, perhaps as refugees on the continent. There was no theological reason to be in between, but there were strategic reasons to be in between: Queen Elizabeth did not want her country to blow apart. So the establishment strategy was to keep things from coming to a head. Avoid clarity; avoid conflict; do not let people get organized. Keep ordinary parish life going; do not punish people for what they believe; only punish them for rocking the boat. Keep the parish structure, and keep bishops, but do not debate about what bishops are for. Keep the parish funding as it was, but do not discuss whether a person has to be a certain kind of priest to serve a parish. To keep power, the establishment strategy was to avoid clarity in a church that had no central, explicit theological integrity. Theological integrity would have been either pro-Rome or pro-Geneva. Those were positions that made sense. But because formal change was to be avoided, people could think almost anything, as long as they did not make formal changes. The people with Reformed ideas were free to talk about them, as long as they did not set up something they called a church. The strategy was to retain the Catholic form and let the content be rather flexible.

The social innovation that arose from this situation was an end run around the parish structure. A village priest might have been almost Catholic in his piety and preaching, or he might have been confused, or uninteresting. Instead of trying to convert the priest, or get rid of him, the Puritans just arranged for another structure beside him. They called it a lectureship, not a church, and it was funded through independent contributions by people of similar conviction. Any town’s merchant elite could fund a chair so a Puritan could give theological lectures. The lecturer would not administer sacraments, because the Puritans really did not reject the sacraments as they were then given in the church (they were not Catholic sacraments anymore). What mattered was that the lecturer clarified the meaning of salvation, the meaning of obedience, and the meaning of revelation by expositing the total radical Calvinist synthesis of God’s sovereignty working in the world for our salvation. This exposition would be done by an impressive, coherent, intelligent, organized lecture process. When the old priest died, the lecturer might get the call and become the next priest. Through this process the Puritans could take over a parish without any change in church structure.

The sociological prerequisites for proceeding in this fashion were two: (1) a mercantile class—people with money—who could fund the independent chair for a generation until the old man died, and (2) freedom of speech and freedom of publication. So the primary political concern of Puritanism in the first quarter of the seventeenth century was insistence on freedom of publication and freedom of speech. These were the things they struggled over with the police and courts. They did not push for freedom to form new churches, because they did not believe in taking that course. They wanted to reform the whole Church of England; they wanted every parish in the Church of England to become an independent Congregationalist congregation, or even an independent Brownist congregation (consisting of Congregationalists who did not baptize babies). They did not want to split. They wanted to take over the existing church with Congregationalist doctrine. To do so, they needed freedom of speech.

The struggles with the police and the government, then, were about publication of tracts, sermons, and theology books. These radical Calvinists took a Calvinist theology and applied it in a new place where they did not have the state’s support. In Strasbourg, Amsterdam, and Geneva, the Calvinists had been against freedom of speech because (in their view) the Anabaptists abused it, but now they wanted freedom of speech because high church people ran the government. That change in strategy is a shift in the meaning of how to go about having a reformation.

We’ve made two observations about characteristics of this movement: it located self-aware religious experience in the struggles of the soul, reported autobiographically, and it advocated for the freedom of intellectually well-organized communication through tracts and preachers. Those two marks defined Puritanism as a movement distinct from the continental Reformation. Out of these two features came the revolutionary process of the mid-seventeenth century.

The religious spectrum in early seventeenth-century England. The Puritan position became socially dominant in 1640, when Parliament rose up against the king. James I (king of England from 1603 to 1625), who gets the credit for the King James Bible, and his successor, Charles I (1625–49), were not really pro-Catholic, but they were pro-royal and conservative. They tried to move to the right from the Elizabethan middle, playing to the reflexes of pro-Catholic people. This strategy provoked the parliamentary rebellion of the 1640s. Parliament declared itself independent of the king and set itself up to get rid of the king. Their general, Oliver Cromwell, succeeded, in what they saw as a victory for the reformation and for God’s cause. Cromwell established himself as Lord Protector, a new kind of antiroyalist royal figure. Then his structure failed. In 1660 the Stuarts came back with Charles II, who assumed the throne (until his death in 1685) in what came to be called the Restoration. It was at this time that Quakerism was born on the left edge of the Puritan phenomena. So we observe this leftward movement.

On the first scale (fig. 14.1), toward the left are the Congregationalists, those who moved from Calvinist theology and said the church should not have synods; every congregation should be free. To the left of them are independents and Brownists who held that church membership should be for adults. By mid-century under Cromwell (fig. 14.2), Congregationalism had become the middle. Further to the left were a variety of more radical movements. The Ranters were people who made subjective certainty of religious experience into something ecstatic. They would raise their voices; “ranting” was their religious experience. The Diggers were a nonviolent revolutionary group whose concern for economic justice focused on the fact that the common lands belong to the common people. The nobles at the time were trying to fence in the common lands and reserve them for their own flocks and crops, in effect taking the common lands away from common people. The Diggers went onto the commons and started making gardens: they engaged in nonviolent demonstrations. The Levellers theorized about the demand for equality. They said that Cromwell’s organization, although a move in the right direction, was still too hierarchical. A liberation army should not have officers. They started reorganizing the army democratically, choosing and changing their officers by free elections—a strategy that undermined military discipline.

Fig. 14.1 Power distribution ca. 1600

Fig. 14.2 Power distribution ca. 1650

So the Ranters, the Diggers, and the Levellers were tested in the 1640s and 1650s. As those movements faded away or solidified, the Friends emerged. They were at the left edge of the Puritan radical movement, as the Cromwell movement first succeeded and then failed.

Two wellsprings of Quaker peace witness

For the Quakers, as for the Puritans of the seventeenth century, there was a strong and dramatic sense of the power of God at work both outside and inside, in English history and in the life of the believer. Both aspects of the work of God and God’s Spirit give a distinctive cast to Quaker convictions about peace and nonviolence.

Participation in God’s reshaping of history

The early Quakers had a powerful sense that British history is the arena of God’s work. Friends knew that what they were doing really mattered in world history. God does not gather up people just to have a people. History is God in history. Early Friends saw themselves as the whole point of history, but they were not peculiar in holding that conviction. A belief in the importance of one’s role in history is a key part of any revolutionist’s makeup.

The whole Cromwellian movement thought it was an instrument of God, saving the world by getting rid of monarchy—the fundamental flaw of an oppressive culture—and replacing it with a whole new order. Most of those who became Quakers were with Cromwell while he was succeeding. They were not pacifists yet, at least not consciously. Some of them, including George Fox the Younger (whose letter begins this chapter), were his soldiers. Then Cromwell’s movement did not work. It did not bring the kingdom of God but instead became tyrannical. Cromwell lost the support of his troops and the populace. The protectorate gradually lost its moral credit and was finally set aside in the restoration of monarchy. The early Quakers read each of these turns of history as a divinely managed event. The success of Cromwell, the later defeat, the restoration of monarchy, and the early missionary successes of Quakerism were all understood as forward steps in God’s working to save the world, not simply to save individuals.

It is no surprise, then, that Quakers differ from Anabaptists in the extent to which they see what is going on in the whole culture, in the world, as God’s work. Quakers are more optimistic about history: it can be used for good. They are more optimistic about the usability of social authority. Although not uncritical about the violence of authority, they are more optimistic about the possibility that the authority might do good, might even renounce violence or at least do relatively more good with relatively less violence. The violence issue is therefore not the center of Quaker identity as it had been of the Anabaptist movement.

In our review of Anabaptist origins, we noted that the issue of the state’s place in the Reformation began to be focused in Zurich a year and a half before there were Anabaptists. The issue of the sword was identified as christologically important four months before there were any Anabaptists, and in the letter to Thomas Müntzer their nonviolence was rooted in their Christology.[5] When the Swiss Brethren began, they were already consciously rejecting Müntzer’s turn to violence, and they debated the issue of who has the authority to undertake reform. So they started with a clear duality. The state being what it is—that is, the sword—they could have nothing to do with it.

Quakers came from the other side. They began with social optimism, with the possibility that God might use Oliver Cromwell. It was good to get rid of the king and to have the nobles be less important in Parliament. Move by move, Parliament promulgated laws that, if applied, would be more just. It took until 1660, ten or fifteen years, for the issue of violence to emerge and for their peace witness to settle. Cromwell’s failures motivated them to criticize his violence. They were moved as well by the so-called Fifth Monarchy, an apocalyptic revolutionary effort in 1661; it crystallized their rejection of violence. Their nonviolence was not where they started; it was a lesson learned in experience. It was not the result of biblical literalism or Christology. It arose from two other sources: (1) from the failure of Cromwell and idealists to bring about justice through violence, and (2) from the nature of religious experience.

The Friends were still open, more than the Anabaptists, to admonishing the ruler. They did not see him as pagan or as outside. They still entertained the possibility that a government could proceed without war. As they saw it; after all, Cromwell had resorted to violence, it was not because he could not help it, because exercising the sword is the nature of the state. No, he did not have to use violence, nor should he have done so. He should have governed without war. He should have been able to get rid of the king and the nobles without war. He had the power of God with him, and when God is on your side, you do not need violence. The Quakers were more ready than the Anabaptists to admit that a non-Quaker Christian might be a ruler, or that the non-Quaker ruler might be a Christian.

Inner Light

The centrality of the Inner Light, the work of the Spirit in the life of the believer, gives Quaker peace witness a distinctive character, in contrast to Anabaptist peace witness rooted in the early church and the Bible. We go back to the autobiographical, self-aware, and analytical quality of Puritan religious experience, to the inner person as the arena of God’s work. The light, the truth, the presence of God in me, against which I struggle but which I know would be my salvation, is terror and power; it judges and renews. The essence of pain is to know one’s sins and self-will. The source of the pain is the light itself. Modern Friends find it startling to see the Inner Light described in the early Quaker writings in terms of fierce judgment. The light that ultimately bestows joy, peace, and guidance at first brings only terror.

As soon as I heard one declare . . . the Light of Christ in man was the Way to Christ, I believed . . . and then my Eyes were opened, and all things were brought to remembrance that ever I had done. . . . The Ark of the Testament was opened . . . and the dreadful power of the Lord fell upon me. . . . Fear and Terrour . . . sorrow and pain . . . mine Eyes were dim with crying. . . . All was overturned. . . . And then something in me . . . as I bore the indignation of the Lord . . . rejoyced . . . the Captive came forth out of his Prison . . . and the new Man was made. And so peace came to be made . . . through Death and Judgment.[6]

In such experiences the Quakers regarded the light as God’s goad and probe, the truth. Sometimes this probing works through specific teaching or impulses, which the Friends called openings. These were instructions and specific guidance: “Go and do this.” “Talk to the king.” “Preach in the marketplace.” Sometimes the power made scripture clear and convincing. A particular text was suddenly transparent as a message to an individual: a text of judgment or renewal, or the same text as both judgment and renewal. Normally this power of the light works in community, enabling spontaneity of worship. The early Quakers had no fixed liturgy; they did not set up a program or prescribe a litany for worship, because they knew the Spirit would communicate. They knew the Spirit would tell somebody something, or (more naturally) tell several people things that would fit together into a specific message from the Lord. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Quaker worship was not a silent meeting. It was noisy. Many people had things to say, although not usually more than one at a time. It was orderly but by no means silent. The silence was a matter of waiting in the confidence that the Spirit planned to speak. Speaking is the Spirit’s nature. Anyone could be the vehicle through which the Spirit speaks, so the group did not say ahead of time who should speak.[7]

Another way the power of the Spirit works is in ethical change, by giving people the ability to obey. Friends concluded that if the power that has worked in them, overcoming their sin and selfishness, is that powerful, it can do anything, and they could do anything. They affirmed the ability to obey God through this power, despite the traditional Calvinist doctrines about sin and depravity and the inability of humans to fulfill the will of God. They reasoned, “If this is the way God works, we’ve got to have religious liberty. Nobody can stop us, and if they try to, they will fail. If this is the nature of God’s work, then nobody in government or church government can tell us what must not happen.” This angle on the religious liberty question is much more profound and personal than simply saying that according to Calvinist doctrine people should be free to preach the Word. These Quakers said that, and much more: “God did something in us that is sovereign, uncontrollable, unsupervisable, and ungovernable.” All these elements had roots in Puritanism before the advent of the Quakers. But in Quakerism this thrust moved further, through the breakdown of Cromwell and the creativity of a chaotic situation in the 1640s and 1650s. This thrust became determinative of a new form of community. After Cromwell, it became the new basis for church order; fellowship and pacifism followed from there.

George Fox the elder (1624–91) reported in his journal that he had addressed Oliver Cromwell as follows:

I (who am of the world called George ffox) doe deny the carrying or drawing of any carnall sword against any, or against thee Oliver Crumwell or any men in the presence of the lord God I declare it (God is my wittnesse, by whom I am moved to give this forth for truthes sake, from him whom the world calls George ffox, who is the son of God), who is sent to stand A wittnesse against all violence and against all the workes of darkenesse and to turn people from the darknesse to the light, and to bring them from the occasion of the warre, and from the occasion of the Magistrates sword, which is a terrorism to the evill doers which actes contrary to the light of the lord Jesus Christ, which is A praise to them that doe well, which is A protection to them that does well, and not the evill and such soldiers that are putt in that place no false accusers must bee, no violence must doe, but bee content with their wages, and that Magistrate beares not the sword in vaine, from under the occasion of that sword I doe seeke to bring people, my weapons are not carnall but spirituall, And my Kingdome is not of this world, therefore with the carnall weapon I doe not fight, but am from those things dead, from him who is not of the world, called of the world by the name George ffox, and this I am ready to seale with my blood, and this I am moved to give forth for the truthes sake, who A wittnesse stand against all unrighteousnesse, and all ungodlynesse, who A sufferer is for the righteous seed sake, waiteing for the redemption of it, who A crown that is mortal seeks not for, that fadeth away, but in the light dwells, which comprehends that Crowne, which light is the condemnation of all such; in which Light I wittnesse the Crowne that is Immortall that fades not away, from him who to all your soulls is A friend, for establishing of righteousnesse and cleansing the Land of evil doers, and A wittnesse against all wicked inventions of men and murderous plotts, which Answered shall be with the light in all your Consciences, which makes no Covenant with death, to which light in you all I speake, and am clear.[8]

According to Fox, the power that frees people from the occasion of war—from strife, selfishness, and anger—is what Fox witnessed to. Note how the appeal differs from that of earlier centuries: not to Jesus’s words that forbid the sword, or to the cross of Christ that gives an alternative model. The appeal is to the nature of regeneration. Their newness of life took them out of the context in which the sword makes sense.

James Nayler, who became a Quaker after meeting George Fox, once led a Palm Sunday reenactment. He came into Bristol on a donkey—not (he said) to impersonate Jesus but because Christ was in him. He was nevertheless convicted of blasphemy and eventually recanted for that instance of messianic pretension. What follows is apparently his deathbed statement:

There is a Spirit which I feel, that delights to do no Evil nor to revenge any Wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the End. Its hope is to outlive all Wrath and Contention, and to weary out all Exaltation and Cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the End of all Temptations; as it bears no Evil in itself . . . for its Ground and Spring is the Mercies and Forgiveness of God: its Crown is Meekness, its Life is Everlasting Love unfeigned, and it takes its Kingdom within Entreaty, not with Contention, and keeps [the kingdom] by Lowliness of Mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its Life. It’s conceived in Sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at Grief and Oppression. It never rejoiceth but through Sufferings; for with the World’s Joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken; I have Fellowship therein, with them who live in Dens and desolate Places in the Earth, who through Death obtained this Resurrection and Eternal Holy Life.[9]

Especially because modern Quakerism is somewhat loose about its relation to Christian history and scripture, and modern Quaker activism is closely associated with service agency work and reconciling activities, which are valid for their own sake, it is important to see the profound personal piety at the beginning of the Friends’ story. In the Quaker experience of salvation, the truth overwhelmed their personal need merely by its truthfulness. God overcame them through the power of the light alone, rather than through a teacher, a priest, or a government. ` The Quaker believed, “If that is what overcame me, then what is there to fight about? How would fighting help?” According to George Fox, “We know that wars and fightings proceed from the lusts of men . . . out of which lusts the Lord has redeemed us. . . . We do utterly deny . . . all outward war and strife. . . . That spirit of Christ by which we are guided is not changeable, so as to command us from a thing as evil, and again to move to do it.”[10] The Spirit of guidance is not arbitrary, not unmanageable, not incalculable. It is consistent. The Spirit, in which Christ and scripture said, “Do not kill,” will never say anything different. In the words of Fox, “The spirit of Christ will never move us to fight a war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the Kingdom of Christ nor for the Kingdoms of this World.”[11]

When the movement was ten or fifteen years old, this clarity about nonviolence became normative Quaker self-understanding. The source of evil is in oneself. The power of the Spirit is experienced in oneself. Therefore that Spirit must be powerful for others. Therefore the Quaker will not use any other means but Spirit. That is the core and originality of Quaker pacifism.[12]

The Lamb’s War: In the person and in the world

Puritanism marked the beginning of modern Western individualism, of introspection, in which people can talk to themselves and then to one another about how they are struggling with God in their souls. This development is distinct from classical mysticism, in which one has experiences that are ultimately indescribable. Puritan spirituality creates journals and undergoes experiences that one can describe fully and dramatically, thereby making inwardness manageable and discussable. In inwardness the power of God’s love overwhelms rebellion. It does so first by struggle and judgment, identifying one’s sin and burning one with the truth and the light, and then by restoring. This model of what restores a person to fellowship with God and to openness to God’s power spins into a new ethic, because the war is the same inside and out. The power is the same within and without. The power that could—without violence but with truth—aggressively change an individual, and win that person out of selfishness into discipleship, must have its social counterpart in dealing with the evil that is in other people. It does so with truth, with power, with confrontation, without destruction, with love, and with renewal. According to Hugh Barbour, “The Lamb’s War . . . was in essence not an outward struggle but an inward one. Its main weapon was the preaching of repentance and the light of Christ within men. The most direct effects of such preaching were inward battles against pride and self-will:”

The Lamb’s War you must know before you can witness his kingdom. . . . The Lamb wars . . . in whomsoever he appears, and calls them to joyn with him herein . . . with all their Might . . . that he may form a new Man, a new Heart, new Thoughts, and a new Obedience . . . and there is his Kingdom. . . . Do you deny your selves of your pleasures, profits, ease and liberty that you may hold forth a chaste . . . life of gentleness, faithfulness and truth. . . . Is this your War, and are these your Weapons?

Barbour continues: “The preachers had themselves been through the same struggle and judgment to which they called others, and had afterward found the sweetness of face and spirit and the strength in outward hardship for which Friends were later known. The struggle itself was their greatest bond in their first work.”[13]

This experience is the basis of fellowship. It is the content of witness. It provided the Friends with confidence that they could not deal with their neighbors in any other way, because God had dealt with the Quakers themselves in this way. The experience also gave them confidence that if they dealt with their neighbors thus, the inner struggle and the preaching that elicited it would be effective: “It will work with them because it has worked in us.”

Their optimism persisted despite persecution. In the best year, 1654, the Swarthmore letters[14] report at least twenty-two new imprisonments. No foreign country, not even Holland, had a clean record. In principle, persecution seemed inevitable, because the Lamb’s War itself requires struggle and suffering. According to George Fox, “that spiritt which makes the Just & the good & seed of God to suffer within is the same that makes to suffer without when it is cast out within . . . and all the sufferinges without is nothing to the sufferinges within.”[15]

So the conflict with the persecuting society that did not want to hear the Quaker missionary is the same as the conflict inside. It is the same power at work, the same phenomenon on both levels. Theirs was not a pessimistic focus on suffering for its own sake. Friends expected to suffer as they shared in the Lamb’s War. They also expected to win. Victory would come partly in spite of suffering and partly because of it, whenever their own pride and that of their antagonists were broken.

Friends deliberately brought their suffering to bear on their opponents’ consciences. Only by wounding the conscience could the Spirit free the seed within anyone. Friends investigated cases of persecutors who had become convinced. They kept records about their persecutors and documented two kinds of things that happened. Many persecutors were convinced and became Friends. Others God struck down. The Quakers kept books on both, because they believed God was working in society for decision. A decision had to go one way or the other.

Quakers argued that force does not change people’s minds. They also said that war is pride. They insisted that the way the world sees reality is not the normal way. There is another perspective on all reality, but people have to be shown it. As Anthony Pearson reports on a conversation with Oliver Cromwell:

I showed him the great things the Lord had done in the North, which was going over England, should pass over the whole earth. Now was the Lord coming to establish His own law and set up righteousness in the earth and to throw down all oppressors, and I showed him, that now should be no more wars and fightings without, for the seed was redeemed out of all earthly things, and that nature whence wars arise which are from lust. Then I showed him the way how the Lord had raised up the seed, and declared to him the cruel persecutions and let him see how the guilt fell on his head and the injustice of Queen Mary’s law. Then he stopped me and began a long discourse to justify that law.[16]

The Quakers contended with the present order, arguing that a better way to see reality is in terms of another order. God’s justice would sweep over the earth, starting in the north and coming clear across England and then across the world. The Spirit of God, the power of God, was at work inside and outside for reformation, purification, and restoration.

Quaker basis for peace witness: Natural theology or Christology?

“That of God in everyone,” which later became the most popular Quaker phrase, even though it was not typical of early Quakerism, can be given more than one interpretation. Fox had said that his call was to go around the world witnessing to that of God in everyone. What is that of God in everyone? In some modern interpretations of Quakerism, it points to something intrinsically unspoiled in all humanity, a divine power everywhere that only needs to be affirmed. It is the basis for modern humanism.

This interpretation differs from what the earliest Quakers meant. In no sense was their view comparable to universalism or to an undifferentiated humanism. They quoted John 1:9, about “the light that enlightens every man that comes into the world.” In so doing, they affirmed a connection with the same word, the same Son, whom we find in the Incarnation. A careful interpretation of “that of God in everyone” and “Inner Light” would see both expressions as early Quaker ways of pointing to what classic Protestant and Catholic theology called the preexistence of the Logos or the Son. The divine will and knowledge is real, apart from and before the Incarnation. We can speak to it only because of the Incarnation.

The Quakers did not affirm that everybody possesses some unhampered or unspoiled goodness, but rather that God is ready to speak to all kinds of people. So when Quakers speak to others, they expect an echo, whoever the others are. But the language is christological language. It is a statement about Christ’s having access to all people, and not about an intrinsic human dignity that all people possess despite the fall and independent of anything specifically Christian. The early Quakers believed that in anyone they came to they could call forth an echo. They could speak to something of God there, and that something could resonate in the other, so that the message they brought was never completely foreign. If they brought to people the message “Christ is coming to teach his people now,” they were not importing something that did not belong.

Is this conviction natural theology? The God of whom the early Quakers spoke was the God of the Bible, the only God anybody knew about in Puritan England. England had seen a thousand years of Christendom, and no Enlightenment yet. All of pagan wisdom’s God language had been swallowed up in Christendom. If there had been a way to ask if their God was the God of the Bible, the Friends would have said, “Of course we mean the God of the Bible, or we mean Christ, which is the first-century reality speaking now. We stand within the renewal of Christendom.” The only place they could go for God language was to Christian God language. They were engaged in correcting but not transcending it. They knew there were “infidels,” but the ones they knew the most about were the Muslims, who had the same God language, because they too considered themselves a renewal movement against Christendom. Friends did not know much about Buddhists. The typical infidel was the Muslim.

Thus they did not start with a generic morality. Morality was derived from an encounter with the Spirit. In the case of violence, the ethic flowed directly from the nature of the salvation experience. So they had to believe that if a Muslim encountered the Spirit, the ethics that resulted would be the same. They went to the sultan and asked him, “Is there something in you, such that when you do wrong, you feel you should not?” When he answered, “Yes,” they would reply, “We told you so; there is something of God in you. That is what we came to tell you more about.” Thus they assumed coherence between what they brought and whatever anybody already knew. They had not come to people outside the realm of biblical theism.

Western development of natural theology is often still biblical in the world in which it starts. It does not start from scratch, asking, “What does a Watutsi really believe, when you find one that has not been corrupted by missionaries?” or “What does a real Buddhist believe?” It asks what is true about Christianity apart from the specifics of Christianity. That is the way natural law thought developed in Western post-Christian history. Proponents of natural law in the West have always assumed that the Christian way into what is true for everybody would be an adequate way in. Therefore they never tested their notion of nature. Instead they said, “Let’s take away Jesus and Moses and see what we have left of the truth, which will be accessible to everybody.”

Quakers compared with Anabaptists

Anabaptism is more typical than Quakerism of the peace church perspective in some ways.

Differences

Unlike Quakerism, Anabaptism arose when all the other major church options arose, so that one can more readily compare it with those options. The sixteenth century was the classical century for Reformation origins, even for defining Catholicism over against the Protestant Reformation.

The Anabaptists kept some of the forms. Anabaptists were children of Zwingli with regard to sacramental practice. They kept the Lord’s Supper and baptized with water. Quakerism changed the form; therefore it is also less accessible to other Christian traditions.

Yet in many ways the Quaker experience is more accessible and more usable for our purposes. Quakerism arose a century later, in a time of greater pluralism and democracy. For this reason its relationship to the world was less polarized. The church-world dualism was less radically worked through in all areas of life and thought.

Still Quakerism displayed plenty of polarization. The church and the world were different. True believers looked forward to suffering. Their faith would be tested, their enemies would be destroyed, and the Lord would come and lead them. There is a lot of church-world polarity in that language. Yet in the social mix of 1660, that polarity did not result in the same degree of violent persecution, banishment, or death. Not as many Quakers as Anabaptists died at the hands of the state churches. A few were killed in Britain and New England, and a few missionaries on the continent were martyred, but in contrast to the Anabaptist experience, martyrdom was more an exception for the Quakers. So the polarization was less intense over against the world and the worldly churches. The conversation about social ethics was therefore less difficult.

The Quakers were less naive in interpreting biblical texts than were the reformers a century earlier, and the Quakers were less preoccupied with always having a text. They were more open to affirming that the Holy Spirit can lead in contemporary ways, but what they did was still rooted in the early church and the teaching of Jesus. George Fox knew the Bible by heart and quoted it all the time.

Quakerism began within Anglo-Saxon cultural and legal forms, which are closer to our own world in North America. Its sources are in the English language. We do not have to bridge cultural gaps and make sure words are translated correctly before we have access to first-generation Quaker experience. Thus for modern North American peace people, the Quaker story is more accessible than Anabaptist or Czech reformation stories are.

The Quaker experience is especially helpful to us because of the Pennsylvania experiment. Within the first century of Quakerism, the Friends had a government to run, meeting a challenge that the sixteenth-century Anabaptists could not have.

Similarities

Both the Quakers and the Anabaptists were anti-Christendom. They placed themselves in a context of sociohistorical self-awareness and were not naive. They knew about the long history of Christian unfaithfulness, symbolized by Constantine and by Christian government. They were against it and were saved from it. They saw it as part of the fallenness from which God liberates people. We noted this conviction in the opening text; the process of refinement and testing through suffering was still going on. The Quakers were clearer on that point than the Anabaptists were. Because the Anabaptists underwent intense persecution, they tended to think they had the whole truth; this new thing was already adequate. Quakerism, being more subjective and psychological, was inclined to see that the process of refinement and clarification was not over yet. There would be more testing and learning, more things to challenge, to reject, and to overcome. The Friends believed they were still in the process of being freed from the heritage of apostasy.

Both the early Quakers and the Anabaptists constantly referred to the early church and the teaching of Jesus. Modern Quakers have the reputation of being less serious about the Bible than other Protestants, and therefore less serious than the Anabaptists. That characterization is true in a superficial way. Yet Friends do not proceed as if they had no biblical base. They appeal to the early church in effective ways. They argue that the New Testament arrangement is still valid, and that the later arrangement is a fall. They appeal back behind the model of Constantine to the model of Jesus. They talk much about the change of dispensations: the newness of Jesus over against the Old Testament, the apostasy since, and now the restitution. Seventeenth-century Quaker writer Robert Barclay quotes Jesus and then observes, “What you are doing cannot be reconciled with that.”

Quakerism and Anabaptism consciously affirmed that suffering is part of faithfulness. This suffering has a specific vocabulary, some of it apparent in the opening text. The normal Quaker expression for the place of suffering in the witness of the community was the War of the Lamb.[17] The Lamb is the figure in the book of Revelation who is in charge of the history of salvation. The Lamb beside the throne in Revelation 5 is the same as the Son at the Father’s right hand in 1 Corinthians 15. The Lamb’s War is fought through our suffering.

Anabaptists and Quakers agreed on the importance of a voluntary community and discipline. They were not individualistic; they created a new body. This new body did not simply gather together isolated individuals who happened to have something in common. The body was implemented by bringing people together in a common commitment. This commitment was made operational by a process of taking responsibility for one another, admonishing one another, listening to one another, and correcting one another.

What does this community dimension contribute to the peace identity? The individual in a group context has more resources for morality than a lone individual has. In the 1930s, Reinhold Niebuhr would claim that groups tend to be less moral than individuals, an observation that is true in the realm of which he speaks. Yet a disciplined group of disciples tends to be more moral than its members. A group is a resource that helps its members be more faithful to what they have committed themselves to. The community is a training resource, a place to practice being the new kind of person that the Spirit has called its members to be. The community is a laboratory, a model, a paradigm of peaceful community. It can practice reconciliation and see how it happens. A group is also, both psychologically and economically, a support for risking commitment. To quote Robert Tucker,

Early Friends understood that revolutionists need the support of revolutionary communities. When today we read the accounts of men like James Naylor or Marmaduke Stevenson, we are struck first by their total faithfulness, second by their readiness to abandon family duties in the name of faithfulness. These were people over 30 who yet could be trusted, because they had behind them Meetings which, in endorsing their concerns, automatically took over their private responsibilities for them.

We still produce our Stevensons, but nowadays they are highly unusual and cause controversy among us. In the beginning it was their Meetings [i.e. their communities, their congregations] that made them what they were. The original Friends Meeting was a community of revolutionary faithfulness, revolutionary in a collective sense, even more than in its individuals.[18]

A person or couple of people sent on a mission to a risky place, leaving their family behind, did not have to be afraid that if they failed to come back, their family would not be taken care of. That confidence enabled the individuals to take risks that today—with our higher view of the moral obligation of nuclear family economics, and our lack of other people to help—would be almost inconceivable for providers within families to undertake.

Quakers and Anabaptists: Different contexts, same essential theology

We have seen two major strands that show how Friends could have an optimistic social attitude in the seventeenth century, in contrast to the Czech Brethren and the Anabaptists of earlier times. Internally, the subjectivity, expressiveness, and introspection about making peace with God—a mark of the cultural difference of the centuries—gives a sense of moral progress. One can analyze how God has worked; one can date it and put it in journals to share. The power of God works in ways that we can understand and help with, even though we cannot manage it. We can still trust the Lord that if we do it in this way, it will work. The power of love to change hearts is something that we can count on. The Anabaptists and Czech Brethren had a less analytical way of being pious and had less access to the notion that one might program a movement or help people find their way to reconciliation.

Externally, the social situation of the Quakers was never as brutal as continental Catholicism a century earlier had been. Before the opposition began, the Quakers had a sense of providential historical movement—in the development of democracy, in the falling of kings, and in the projection of what would be a more righteous society. People had access to social position. Quaker pacifists were not all ostracized or deprived of a chance to participate in social life. There were upper-class Quakers. A few judges and converts of lower nobility were tolerated. William Penn was a nobleman who inherited a territory; that could not have happened in the sixteenth century, but it did in the seventeenth. We will return to that story in the next chapter.

Both outwardly and inwardly, Quakerism arose in a culture in which people had good grounds for being more optimistic about the impact of a peace position and of being God’s people in the wider society. They did not think their outlook constituted a compromise of their faithfulness to nonviolent or nonresistant suffering or to the forgiving quality of the gospel. I accentuate this fact because later interpreters, reading through the filter of modern sociology and the ethical analysis of H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr, tend to drive a wedge between the Anabaptists and the Quakers, characterizing them as having fundamentally different theologies. As far as I can see, they do not. They have fundamentally the same theology, which grew in different cultures and therefore acquired slightly different shapes. The Quakers originated in a culture in which they had more room to grow. They faced less immediate repression and more opportunity to make a social contribution without being destroyed. They made the most of those greater opportunities. So they had a different place in society and developed a different cultural mood.

The more recent thought, the view that places Anabaptists and Quakers in sharp contrast, will be with us for the rest of the book. One major Mennonite stream makes much of this difference: “Quakers think you can save the world, and we Mennonites know you cannot.” That difference arose from a difference in cultural context at the origin and later was made into an antagonism or polarity in theologies. My claim is that it is not fair to the whole picture to accentuate that polarity as much as has been done.

Quakerism in Early America: The Holy Experiment

William Penn (1644–1718) was a convinced Quaker.[1] Converted after the beginnings of Quakerism, he was significantly younger than George Fox but still of a generation that knew Fox as the movement’s founder. He had noble family connections. His father, Admiral Sir William Penn, had supported Oliver Cromwell in the English civil war but then aided the Stuart king Charles II in being restored to the English throne in 1660. The royal house could not repay its monetary debt to Penn, so after Penn’s death King Charles gave the younger William Penn a piece of America instead. Penn found himself the proprietor of a territory, a landlord. To be a landlord in a country that has no government involved him in governing as well. He set up a management system which Quakers dominated from the 1680s until 1756.

Although the story of Quakers in colonial Pennsylvania is not widely known, most of the facts of the story are not in dispute. Our attention will focus more on interpretation, because the story has been used for debating purposes.

The Quaker experience in the administration of Pennsylvania is viewed as a specimen, an experiment, in how people with pacifist convictions about violence and power can exercise responsibility in public administration. After chronicling the Quaker departure from government in 1756, Roland Bainton concludes, “Thus faded the Quaker dream.”[2] Bainton takes that departure as proof of the failure of the experiment. The most negative reading about the experiment is that of some Mennonite historians.[3] Guy Hershberger, for example, studied the Pennsylvania story more than once. He writes:

Christians will cherish every effort put forth by statesmen for the prevention of war. But to the present time history has not proven a single example of a pacifist state, in the mixed society of the world, which has succeeded in the permanent prevention of war, let alone operating without prisons and domestic police. Penn’s holy experiment was the nearest approach to such a success, but after seventy-five years even this failed to the extent that the genuine peaceful Quakers, who could not agree to military operations, found it necessary to resign from the legislature which was appropriating funds for military purposes. The Pennsylvania experiment also proved unsuccessful from another point of view. Its politics, like politics everywhere, seemed to foster a struggle for power. Political parties were formed and pitted against each other to such an extent and in such a way as to destroy the peaceful spirit among them. This is related in a very direct way to the breakdown of the experiment in 1756.[4]

But matters are not that simple. Hershberger notes that “many Quakers do not feel, however, that this failure was necessary.” And Peter Brock, who covers the story in greater depth, comments that “the conclusions to be drawn concerning the viability of pacifism as practical politics have been keenly debated ever since.”[5]

When something is still being debated after two centuries, the problem lies in part in the definition of terms. This is a debate about systematic interpretation, about philosophy and the definition of terms, not just about the facts of what happened. We will look at the story with that debate in mind.

Defining the state

Because colonial Pennsylvania is going to be a test case for a definition problem, before we go on let us look at the definition problem. What we are trying to test by looking at that experience depends on definitions, and we will have to proceed by using some simplifications, types, and caricatures.

The state according to Thomas Hobbes

When one asks, “Could a pacifist participate in the running of society? Could a pacifist be the magistrate?” it matters a lot (as we saw in our study of the sixteenth century) what we think that state’s function is. We begin with a view articulated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who envisioned the basic human condition, before there was government, as a state of brute violence. This violent “state of nature” is brought into an orderly, viable shape only by somebody who is stronger than other people, so that a degree of brute violence is part of the definition of the state. This violence may be moderated or ameliorated by a constitutional process or a democratic process, but the definition of the state itself is its monopoly of violence. The state would not exist without that violence at its heart. So the sword, to use sixteenth-century language, is central to the definition of the state. Hobbes could not imagine a state that would not be defined by its function of wielding the sword. In this view, rulers are by definition oppressors, although they may be more or less humane; they may have more or less respect for the values of their subjects.

The state according to John Locke

Another approach, again in caricature, might be called Lockean. In the view of John Locke (1632–1704), the state of nature is characterized by freedom, not violence, and government is established by consent of those governed, for the sake of cooperation. The basic nature of government is the agreement of citizens to a social contract. At the heart of their relationship is not violence but agreement and bargaining: everyone gives up something so they can get along together. In Locke’s view, violent sanctions are at the edge, not the center, of the definition of the state. Violence is needed at the point at which the state breaks down, not the point at which it is defined. The ruler is a servant of the people.

Theoretically these two definitions of the state do not differ in whether they make room for violence, but Hobbes and Locke locate that violence differently, one at the center and the other at the edge, one as defining the state and the other as the extreme case of defense of the state when it is jeopardized. On the level of language and mood, the two are different.

The radical reformation

Given its context, sixteenth-century radical reformation pacifism was understandably more at home in Hobbes’s definition: the state is the sword. That is the word they used; that is the experience they had. The governments they dealt with fit that definition pretty well. The radicals of the sixteenth century were aware that they were revoking the Constantinian synthesis, and they therefore expected to once again be a minority church in a pagan world.

To accept the fact that the rulers in the pagan world are not Christian, and that they are oppressors, is no insult to rulers, because that is what they want to be—in the pagan world. It would not have been a compliment to Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, or Nero to say he was a Christian or that he was nonviolent. No, it would have been an insult. So to say of the pagan, violent ruler that he is pagan and that he is violent was not an insult at all before the radical reformation of the sixteenth century. Yet to say that this pagan, violent ruler is still somehow under the lordship of Christ or under the sovereignty of God is a positive affirmation of faith: God can somehow use government in God’s program even when Christians or Anabaptists do not take part in running it. That is an affirmation of belief in Providence. From a radical reformation perspective, it makes no sense to talk about Christians in the magistracy function; that is by definition a contradiction.

Quakers

The Quaker position was different. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Reformation had made progress, and some rulers now claimed to be Christian and willing to listen to their subjects. Oliver Cromwell in a church gathering would treat his subordinate soldiers as his equals. In church they were equal; in the army he was their commander. The times saw movement toward humanizing the relationship to the sovereign, toward the beginning of democratic process. Parliament could unseat the king. In its cultural presuppositions Puritan England began to move toward Lockean rather than Hobbesian symbolism. One effect was the emergence of a different set of assumptions about what a Christian can do. When the Quakers inherited Pennsylvania without fighting for it, without consciously stealing it from anybody, without committing regicide, they were in a very different position from that of the early church in its relation to pagan sovereigns, or from the radical reformers of the sixteenth century contemplating their rulers.

Thus the Quakers would not assume that the state is violent at the core, but rather that violence is one of the edges of the existence of the state, which does not drive us out of the state proper or out of the social structure itself. The Quakers would say, “We will criticize the Constantinian synthesis, but we do not systematically dismantle it. We do not begin by making our basic principle a rejection of the linkage of Christian identity and social structure.” The Quakers had had an experience of people in political power at least listening to Christian preachers, so they did not reject the linkage as basically wrong. George Fox could talk to Oliver Cromwell.

How Quaker radicalism is different

Now why is this Quaker radicalism, which criticizes the system but does not reject it, different?

First, we do not have to be logically committed to being thoroughly systematic. The Constantinian synthesis can be a mistake and still we do not necessarily have to sweep it away.

Another consideration would be that we cannot reverse history. Even though history went the wrong way, God can use it. Even if the merger of church and world in the Middle Ages was wrong, we still have the possibility of participating in the political order. We cannot reverse the historical fact of that merger, and maybe God can use it despite its wrongness.[6]

Third, some virtues were present in the Quakers’ situation, some freedoms they experienced which British society could respect by the middle of the seventeenth century. Very few Quakers were put to death.

Fourth, as time passed, a sense of respect across borders developed. It was no longer polite to call people non-Christian, whereas in other situations that would not have been an insult at all.

Finally, Quakerism had a kind of theological etiquette, rooted in the idea that somehow God is already there speaking in the other person, even if the other person is an oppressor, a Turk, or a person very different from us. There is that of God in that person, to which we can speak. This conviction correlates with nonviolence and with a certain optimism about the possibility of change.[7]

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Mennonite interpretation of the holy experiment

We have noted some differences between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same differences apply to the analysis of the Pennsylvania story. The differences were sharpened a little by the debate of the 1930s, during which ethicists began to read the Pennsylvania story with more intensity. We will look in chapter seventeen at liberal Protestant pacifism in the 1920s and 1930s. Conservative Protestantism rejected this liberal pacifism, contending that its optimism—something like the Quaker view—is unrealistic. These critics noted that at least the withdrawn and politically uninvolved early Christian pacifism was consistent.

Some people wanted to refocus that consistency. They had been told that the sixteenth-century Anabaptist withdrawal from the Hobbesian state was consistent, but seventeenth-century Quaker involvement in a democratic state was ultimately inconsistent, because of weaknesses that we will see when we get to that debate in the chapters on Reinhold Niebuhr and Mennonites after Niebuhr. These characterizations predisposed Guy Hershberger and other Mennonites to prove that we cannot use pacifism in politics. In order to keep pacifism clean, Mennonites must stay out of politics.

Niebuhr made the most thorough argument that pacifism will not work, that Hobbes was right: the state is defined by the sword. Pacifism is only possible if it withdraws and admits it has nothing to contribute to the social process. Niebuhr’s response was, “Of course, that is not what I am going to do. In order to be politically involved, I will disavow pacifism.” But the Mennonite historian said, “Well, we will accept noninvolvement in politics as the consequence of espousing pacifism. We will stay outside the political realm in order to try to be pure.” Both Niebuhr and Hershberger were interested in proving that pacifism has no viability in practical politics, and both proved it by saying that Pennsylvania failed. Let us question the clarity of this analysis.

First, the philosophical commitment that I identified with the name of Hobbes is a philosophical predisposition. It may well describe what the state was like in some earlier historical experience. It may well describe the Anabaptist experience of government in the sixteenth century. Yet it may not necessarily describe every state. And it does not build into its analysis room for historical progress. Maybe states can get better in some respects. Even if a state in its origins was simply brute violence, the evolution of democracy—in all its dimensions—might change the options or the definition of the situation. Might it not be that other understandings and other realities could evolve, by way of the democratizing process, which with the passage of time would give us a different kind of a state? The Niebuhrian analysis philosophically excludes that possibility.

A second sweeping philosophical presupposition of this analysis is that by definition—and not because we have tested cases—it is not possible for a Christian to live in the real world. That is a philosophical and theological judgment; it is not simply a definition of the facts.

When a leading nonpacifist thinker and the leading free-church Mennonite thinker of his generation agree on an analysis and disagree on their ethics, we may wonder whether the analysis is itself coherent. Niebuhr and Hershberger agree on some of the facts and draw very different conclusions. Should we not test, simply from the point of view of intellectual method, whether the thing they agree on is as much of an agreement as it initially appears to be?

What does the Pennsylvania experience show?

Now we come back to the story, with this question sharpened in our minds: what does the Pennsylvania experience show?

Let us recognize that if we were historians, that question would be questionable. Some historians would say that history does not show anything; the lessons of history are not clearly, objectively, univocally the result of the historical process. Drawing lessons from history is partly a subjective effort of the historian. It is always partly a projection of that historian, dependent on what questions are asked, what readings are taken seriously, and how things are put together. So anything we say about lessons from historical experience has to be subject to many footnotes about the extent to which the reading of history is itself a prejudiced operation. Nevertheless, assuming we might learn something from history, what did the Pennsylvania experience test? Was it a full test? What would have been a fair test?

First, the Pennsylvania experiment did not test whether it would be possible to run a government without the death penalty. Penn’s commitment to the English crown included provision for the death penalty as the sentence for certain crimes. Some Quakers of the third or fourth generation of the movement no longer saw the death penalty as “the sword” they had committed themselves not to use. They were not rigorous on that question. Yet they drastically reduced the rate of executions, and they reduced the number of things for which people could be put to death. Structurally, they almost did away with the impact of the death penalty, though they did not legally do away with the death penalty itself. So Penn’s experiment was not a test of whether a government could run without the death penalty. Some modern states are running that test now, but it was not tried then.

Second, the Pennsylvania experiment did not test whether pacifists could run a sovereign government because the colonial Pennsylvania government was under the crown and Parliament. Because of the powers above it, it did not have full control of its situation. This was an issue at the specific point of the obligation to go to war. The Quakers never formally accepted and affirmed this obligation, but the London government never formally dispensed them from it. So when the French and Indian War began, they were legally, juridically not free to refuse to participate. The Quaker government was under the crown at certain points, and those duties were not negotiable. They were part of a charter, and the crown changed the charter unilaterally.

Third, the Pennsylvania experiment did not test whether it would be possible to lead a unified population adhering to pacifist convictions. William Penn and his successors had a generous immigration policy, which meant that they were soon in the minority. For a while new immigrants did not mind being governed from Philadelphia by the Penn family and their immediate successors in the Quaker minority. The majority of immigrants were grateful for the refuge they had found, did not care much about politics, and lived relatively far from Philadelphia. But in time the descendants of those immigrants wanted their share in the governmental process. Then the minority tried for a time to hang on to power through gerrymandering[8] and other manipulation of voting rights, or through haggling and bargaining and laagering. But soon it became clear that the majority had not mandated their rule. By its very nature, a position that is not violent cannot work in a democratic country against the consensus of its constituency. A minority leadership might be accepted in certain peculiar circumstances, but when it is not, it cannot lead. But the reason it cannot lead is not that its nonviolent position is impossible to implement from a position of authority. Rather, it cannot lead because it has been voted out. If the voters do not support that nonviolent stance, it cannot do anything in the name of democracy. And that reason for its not working is different from the reason Reinhold Niebuhr and Guy Hershberger gave for the experiment’s failure.

It is not fair to test a position by asking whether it will work when most people do not believe in it. The pacifist Quaker government of Pennsylvania no longer worked after pacifists, a minority, were voted down; that circumstance does not prove that the position itself does not work. It proves that the Pennsylvania Quakers had moved from a position of social power to one without it. That movement was the fruit of the success of their own ethics, in letting people move into their state who could vote them down. Nobody in New England let that happen. Nobody in the southern colonies let that happen. Quakers let that happen, because they believed in democracy and in letting non-Quakers immigrate. The social evolution that took place over the generations, which finally pushed them out of government, is a sign of the success—not the failure—of their social ethics.[9]

Within these limits, it is hardly surprising that the experiment did not go on forever. Because the Pennsylvania Quakers were subject to the crown, they were not free to renounce defense. Because many of them were not deeply and conscientiously committed to a distinct ethical position and structures supporting it, of course it did not work. Because they were in the minority, they could not keep control of the government, which proceeded democratically.

This interlude, with all its limitations, is worthy of study. But it is usually interpreted by people with an axe to grind. I suggest that we read it with both axes to grind, rather than being sure ahead of time that we need to see in it a reinforcement of a Niebuhrian definition of the options.

How clear was the failure?

We have established that it is no surprise that the Pennsylvania experiment did not work forever. But how clear was the failure? And what was it a failure of? What is a failure in politics? After all, this group of people stayed in power from 1682 to 1756. That is a long time. Not many dynasties in world history and not many parties in democratic history have stayed in power that long.

The Quaker government in Pennsylvania during this period was generally more democratic than that of many other colonies. There was democracy in the rest of the colonies from Pennsylvania on north; there was less further south. But Pennsylvania made it possible to vote out the elite with time. And before that happened, it was possible, for a while, for the Quaker minority to get elected because they were respected. It was a long time before anybody in Connecticut or Massachusetts could vote out the minority establishment there. During this period the Quakers were relatively successful in being democratic.

They were highly successful—compared to the other colonies—in implementing a unique approach to their indigenous neighbors. Pennsylvania policies of the time were superior to those of other colonies in avoiding war, in respecting treaties, and in finding relatively peaceful ways to live together in the same territory. Even the crisis that resulted in the French and Indian War does not prove that war with Indians was unavoidable. The crisis proves that the French and the British were fighting in Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania government could not stay out of it. That is not a statement about the way to deal with Indians but a statement about how London and Paris controlled the new world. The crisis does not demonstrate that this particular local hostility with the Indians could not have been resolved peaceably, if it had not been that the French from the west were coming in with the Indians, and the British from the east wanted to have a war with the French. It does confirm that pacifist views cannot be imposed on nonpacifists. Yet that is not a very important proof. Nonpacifist actions can be imposed on pacifists by coercing them and putting them in jail. If the group is stronger, nonpacifist political options can be imposed on other nonpacifists and pacifists; by definition, people cannot be coerced into nonviolent commitment.

Although the Quakers who governed Pennsylvania were not against the death penalty in principle, they were successful in using it only minimally and in creating more humane prison conditions than prevailed in some other places.

Until the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1756, the Quakers were successful in avoiding official approval of any military activity, during a period when there were brushfire battles on the frontiers of the other colonies.

And it can at least be stated as a hypothesis that because of the greater democratic openness and commitment to a somewhat different style, Pennsylvania in this period probably had less fraud and corruption than did some of the other parts of the eastern colonies. But that is a relative matter and a difficult thing to test.

In terms of political realism, the Pennsylvania experiment was more of a success than some have recognized. It is a significant event in world history when a dynasty, a group of people with one ideological commitment, stays in power for three-fourths of a century while granting ever-increasing freedom to others to vote them out of office.

What would be a real test of pacifism?

What could be a fair test of the viability in the political arena of a position that is by definition noncoercive and accepts being a minority? That question gets us to the systematic or philosophical or theoretical questions that we want to discuss and try to make debatable.

Putting the question that way highlights the fact that when such an approach to politics does not work, it is not necessarily because nonviolent methods are irrelevant for society at large. It is not because we cannot do things in the political arena without violence; many things can be done in the political arena without violence. It is not necessarily because the pacifists pull out of social roles in order to keep their hands clean. The real reason is different from the one given by the Hobbesian theorists. It is that the democratic process does not authorize people representing minority positions to lead, except in peculiar circumstances. We cannot be elected by a majority if our position is different from theirs. And that is as true of Republicans or Democrats or Socialists as it is of pacifists: if we are in the minority, we cannot run the government. That is a statement about the nature of the democratic process, not about the peculiarity of the pacifist status.

People committed to the rejection of violence can continue to be politically relevant. They can advocate nonviolent options on many questions (but not for all the government deals with, of course); they can exercise leadership; they can find ways of making decisions, distributing rewards, and doing many other things that the political system does. They may even, to some extent, make sacrifices. Some of their causes will not be saved, and some offenses may go unpunished. But violent governments also make sacrifices: they leave some offenses unpunished through power brokering and other ways of defending the system.

So pacifists could share in government process, but there are two limits to that participation. (1) In a democratic country, a minority of pacifists cannot impose their views on a nonpacifist majority. But the same is true of every other minority. In a democratic country, a Democratic or a Whig minority cannot impose itself on a non-Democratic or non-Whig majority. (2) More basic for some definitions but not for others, a pacifist minority cannot defend national sovereignty at the borders of the nation. Yet not all violent governments can always engage in such defense either. In fact, in every war one of them fails to do so successfully. A nonviolent minority could participate in defending national identity without violence, as the Dutch, Danes, and Norwegians did under Hitler. And one can relate the national identity to a larger identity (the crown, the United States, or the United Nations, for example). Yet under the leadership of pacifists, national sovereignty cannot be ultimately defended.

The point of this argument is not mainly to advocate that pacifists engage in party politics or in government. Rather it is to demonstrate that the heart of the issue being debated here is not self-righteousness or refusal to be involved or scrupulosity—wanting to be innocent or to keep one’s hands clean. The real reason the Quakers got out of Pennsylvania government is that when they were no longer in the majority, they respected others who were. That was a consistent position to take. They did not ultimately fail to govern Pennsylvania, but they failed to help Britain pursue war against the Indians. And they did not overrule the electoral rights of the non-Quakers, and for that reason they were right to relinquish their power. Nevertheless, it is striking that they stayed in government as long as they did and accomplished as much as they did. Even when the Quakers did leave the government to others, it was not because they could not stomach the violence but because they were no longer in a position, as an elite, to project policies that a majority did not understand and support.

If Quakers relinquished political leadership because they were outnumbered, or because they were overruled by London, or because third- and fourth-generation Quakers were not quite convinced about the peace witness, then the Pennsylvania case does not show that a pacifist vision is either irrelevant or impractical. It only shows that when a majority of people no longer held to it, that particular test could not continue. On this ground, of course, constitutional democracy is not viable. Religious liberty and freedom of the press are not viable, if most of the people most of the time reject them or if a constitution limits them.

If particular Christian pacifists say they are not personally called to participate in the civil decision-making process because they have more promising things to do than be out-voted all the time, that is an honest vocational decision. The same reasoning can apply to not wanting to be in school administration or not wanting to work in a factory or not wanting to farm. If Christian pacifists say they are not personally called to participate in electoral politics, in civil service administration, and in party politics because that engagement is not the most strategic way to participate in the civil order, that is a meaningful thesis. If people decline to participate in governing because they are not at home in smoke-filled rooms and an atmosphere of wheeling and dealing, that is an honest response. It also applies to banking and corporate management. Yet if the Christian pacifist says, “I cannot participate because politics, by definition, makes the way of Jesus irrelevant—and the Quaker experiment in Pennsylvania proved that, because the pacifist Christians in Pennsylvania had to drop out of government,” at least we can challenge that person’s reading of history.

Pacifism in the Nineteenth Century

Part of the pacifist story in the nineteenth century is a stream within mainstream Protestant denominations. In 1815 businessman David Dodge founded the New York Peace Society.[1] Founding a society was a new way to address a concern. America had seen an enormous proliferation of denominations separated by traditional issues such as infant baptism, specific doctrines, or views of the sacraments. When a new issue arose, these American Protestants did not expect the old denominations to become the vehicle of that new concern. So for the purpose of addressing that issue, someone would create an agency, which did not call itself a church. To address two purposes, they created two societies, which would have different constituencies. Dodge created a peace society with the sole purpose of propagating a peace message. Other people created a society to promote Sunday schools, another for the abolition of slavery, and another to oppose child labor. For every cause they created a society.

We forget that the idea of forming such free associations was new in the nineteenth century. This development raised new problems for the unity of the church, the unity of Christian witness, and the accountability of Christian social impact. What does it mean if every time Christians get together to do something, they have to create a new organization around their new commonality, leaving behind the people who are not in agreement with that new commonality? These societies in the nineteenth century fragmented the institutional church even further.

The pacifism of the societies

David Dodge’s younger colleague Adin Ballou (1803–90) might have been the first person to use the term nonresistance as a label.[2] The word is drawn straight out of Jesus’s words. These urban, prosperous, white Protestants in the first half of the nineteenth century were literal about Jesus’s words, and about doing what Jesus said, without asking questions about social theory or practicability. Their idea was to do what Jesus said simply because he had said it. The idea was to set up an organization to tell people about nonresistance. If others did not agree, then those who differed would have to talk about their differences.

Now those who espouse nonresistance have been trained to think that a nonresistant stance is sectarian, anticultural, and naive, and that we have to argue on another level. In contrast, these cultured and articulate people (today not many businessmen write books that sell well) put their point simply: “Jesus says this, so we ought to do it.” They did not argue that it made sense, describe how it would work, or try to determine whether they could save the world or even run the country. There was a widespread feeling that the War of 1812 had been a bad, unnecessary war. Maybe people had begun to doubt whether it was good to massacre American Indians on the frontier. They may have had a sense that the Napoleonic wars in Europe had been destructive beyond all rationality. In short, maybe behind this focus on nonresistance was some wider sense of cultural appropriateness. But the way these Christians put their conviction was simply, “These are the words of Jesus, and we claim him as our authority.”

This period was the age of John Locke, who had tried to cut through the fog of theology by telling people to read the biblical text. He contended that the Bible is clear and reasonable, and that any reasonable human being could read it without relying on medieval theology or a high orthodoxy. This concept of simple revelation cut against the tide and mobilized educated, middle-class, urban, mainstream Christians in the northeastern U.S. to say simply that war is always wrong.

This movement did not have a church dimension. It was not a community position. Precisely because its adherents had found nonresistance in the New Testament, they lacked a deep sense of the problem’s long history. They did not have an awareness of a suffering community through the ages or of a peace church tradition. They knew about the Quakers, but by then most Quakers were not aggressive in mission and not strong in their pacifism. Quakers were not the source of this new sensitivity.

Sociologically this phenomenon did not have great staying power. It was led by a few courageous individuals and ended by the time of the Civil War. William Lloyd Garrison was the greatest figure in the movement. Garrison is known to most as an abolitionist, but he founded both a peace society and an abolition society. He published a separate journal for each cause, but both societies shared a mailing list and a printer. Gradually, however, abolition and nonresistance fell apart in the 1840s and 1850s. Those who were more impatient about abolition became less patient with obeying Jesus. People who were still convinced about obeying Jesus became less optimistic about freeing the slaves. Few people continued to hold to both causes, although Garrison himself did.

Theologically the movement was closer to the stance of the Unitas Fratrum stance than to that of the Anabaptists and the Quakers. Unlike the pacifism of the Anabaptists and Quakers, the peace position of this nineteenth-century phenomenon was not rooted in a wider theological context of suffering and the way of the cross or in a sense of the Spirit’s power. Like the Czech Brethren, these American Protestants simply pointed to Jesus’s words.

Personalist pacifism

Another strand of early nineteenth-century pacifism came from a few nonchurchly pacifists who developed a theory of government as intrinsically violent, or at least as intrinsically tending to violence and therefore morally suspect. According to these people, if we accept government part of the time, we at least do not accept it all the time. Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience (published in 1849) is a widely read example. He spoke from an independent homemade personalism rather than from biblicism. He is a larger figure in the awareness of peace movement people in our time than is his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82).[3]

These people were not religious or biblicist. They spoke in terms of common sense, of what is intelligent and reasonable. Yet the difference between them and the pacifism of the societies is not as profound as it might seem. Both assumed their whole society shared positive moral commitments. Theirs was a post-Puritan world, a world in which the language of human virtue was still relevant for everybody. They expected congruence between God’s will and public policy, or at least that the two should fit together. They judged the civil order from the perspective of an ethic derived from religious roots. In that sense, even though Emerson and Thoreau were on one side and the peace society people were on the other, both sides had Puritan roots. They were all updated Puritans. They all believed that one should move straight from moral norms into public policy, and that government should not do bad things. Neither side struggled deeply with the possibility that government might be fundamentally inhospitable to Christian moral insight, or practically impermeable to moral witness at particular times.

Late Quakerism could easily feed into nonreligious Emersonian social criticism. Quakerism was also English, also post-Puritan, critical, libertarian, and cultured. The early Quakers’ trust in “that of God in every person” had been much more orthodox and biblical. With this phrase early Quakerism confessed that the Christ of history and the Holy Spirit who wrote the Bible are still at work in people. In later Quakerism, that language was transmuted into a liberal humanism that affirmed that human common sense, rationality, and emotional empathy are the same thing as religion. By the nineteenth century, a new congruence between Quaker conviction and Emersonian humanist pacifism could develop.

Restorationist pacifism

Next we turn to look at the emergence of a new denomination, which did not originate in Europe. It is the frontier’s first and most solid product as a source of religion. When it started, it was called “the restoration movement.” The denominations that flow from it are called “Disciples” or “Christians.” The only denomination that still calls itself simply “Christian” is one of this movement’s fruits.

This new group began early in the nineteenth century. It sought to be ecumenical and antisectarian, because of the awareness (which could only arise in North America) that denominational pluralism—the very pluralism that is the glory of the American scene over against the establishment—offends the church’s unity. The destructiveness and waste of debating sectarian differences—infant baptism, the doctrine of the sacraments, the doctrine of ministry—made these Christians desire to be rid of what divides the church and to return to what Christians have in common: the New Testament as sole authority.

This movement’s first concern was not personal renewal. (Everybody was for personal renewal; frontier religious movements were revival movements.) This movement was concerned for unity. Its adherents believed that unity could not be attained by federating, by getting the structures together (especially at the top) and then debating until people agree on everything. Rather, they redefined what unity means. What had been separating Christians were creeds and supercongregational structures such as conferences and synods. These structures unite some Christians with a few others, but they separate those Christians from the rest. Similarly, creeds cause debate about details and separate Christians. So these restorationists wanted to return to “the New Testament pattern.”

That phrase assumes that the New Testament provides a pattern, which needs to be restored in practice. This pattern shows Christians how to run a church, and that the ministers they ought to have are the kind of ministers the New Testament churches had. The restorationists believed that if Christians went back to the New Testament pattern of church structure, and accepted only the New Testament as a doctrinal authority, we would not be divided.

The Campbellites

Some of the people who came into this movement were of Methodist background. More were of Presbyterian background. Many of the latter sort were conservative Scottish Presbyterians concerned about being faithful to the Bible. They had discovered, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, that the Presbyterian pattern of synodical church government has no biblical basis. So these convinced Presbyterians left Presbyterianism. One regional synod dissolved itself. They said, “We hereby act on the basis of the biblical truth we have discovered, which is that we should not have a synod.”

The movement’s main leader was Alexander Campbell, who was of Scottish Presbyterian background. His group gathered with people who came from other origins but had similar concerns. Their theological assumption was that the Bible is simple. They were in a cultural age determined by the rationalism of Locke and imbued with the belief that any old fool can read a text. If you have trouble with the text’s meaning, you have been reading too many church fathers; go back to the simple original text. Revelation and reason are not in contradiction. Restore the rational unity of the canonical verses and common sense by cutting through all the traditions, and the things that divided the church will disappear. Church unity was not Locke’s concern, but the concern for unity follows from applying Locke’s confident rationality to the text of the Bible.

One thing that helps simplify reading the simple text is dividing history into periods. This view emphasizes the fall of the church and stresses the difference between the Testaments, because Jesus distinguished between old and new. The Old Testament and medieval Christianity are removed as problems. Because these Christians granted medieval Christianity no theological authority, they bypassed debate with the just war tradition. A tension between church and world is normal, but because they (unlike the Czech Brethren or the Anabaptists) did not have to work their way out of the Middle Ages, they did not think too deeply about the church-world tension. Out in the frontier, in the fresh air, having left behind all the old patterns, they tended to believe they had a good society. They could probably even have a good national society, because if they could restore the church the nation too could be restored.

The Campbellites were patriotic Americans. In the beginning, some of them—including Alexander Campbell—were also millennial, convinced that a period would soon come in which God’s purposes would be implemented much more clearly than ever before.[4] So they had a vision not only for the church but also for a new culture in America, with no bondage to the old world and its limited possibilities. Campbell became critical of war, because in the 1840s and 1850s he saw it splitting his church. His church was in the north and the south, not in the east. It was in the band from Indiana to Georgia on the west side of the Allegheny Mountains.

So it was not pacifism but unity (including national unity) that was the starting point. When the Campbellites discovered that they could have neither national unity nor church unity if there were a war, Campbell began to respect the biblical teaching on violence, and he took note of the peace and nonresistance movement in the east. Before the Civil War began, he was pacifist. And the Disciples tradition has continued to have pacifists among it, although because of its anti-institutional nature, pacifist commitment is not a formal mark of the movement.

The movement has since split, as Protestant churches do, into many forms. It is hard to explain how a body that lacks formal unity can split. Because they did not believe in conferences, conventions, and synods, what held them together was another set of relationships formed by itineration, visiting preachers, and journalism. Any Campbellite preacher worth his salt had his own journal. Frontier culture and church life relied heavily on the mail, on circulating journals, to hold people together. And many preachers also founded little colleges. To this day the unity of these churches is structured by colleges and publishing houses. If you want to know who the Churches of Christ are, go to Abilene Christian College or Texas Christian University. The Churches of Christ have large institutions, but they are not churches.

Three major groups have grown out of this movement. In the north the strongest group, based in Indianapolis, is the Disciples of Christ. This group has given up on the original congregationalist theory, which holds that a denomination is not a church. In becoming a denomination they have departed from their heritage, but they still see ecumenical unity as a special concern. To promote unity the Disciples have initiated a secretariat and a journal. They subsidize major World Council of Churches projects as another way to unity.

Mainly in the South, the Churches of Christ hold more firmly to the Campbellite pattern, denying any structure beyond the local congregation. Only traveling preachers, journals, publishing houses, and colleges can speak for them. The radical edge of that group is the non-instrumental Churches of Christ, who reject the use of organs in worship.

Despite vagueness in structure, this movement was basically pacifist. During the Vietnam War, in one of their national conventions, the Disciples voted that they are a peace church. That decision does not mean that a lot of their members are pacifist, but they do affirm something of the peace church heritage.

The (Plymouth) Brethren

The next movement is less well known in the U.S. because it began in Britain and Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s. Some call this body the Plymouth Brethren, because of an early congregation in Plymouth, but they call themselves simply “Brethren.” This movement came out of a renewal in the state church, out of the Anglican Church of Ireland and (to a lesser extent) the Church of England. Organizationally the Brethren are radically congregationalist. They claim even more strongly than the Disciples that Christians should not have synods and conferences and nonresidential bishops. Earlier it might have been okay to have church in that higher sense, but the church fell. Although God could restore the church, humans cannot. While we wait for God to restore the church in the millennium, Christians should just have meetings, as New Testament Christians did. Yet they cannot be the church.

Related to this position is a specific eschatology, which many nondenominational Protestant radicals in American dispensationalism have since adopted. Like pietism, this set of beliefs does not lead communities to a peace position, but it does lead many individuals to be radically pacifist. Partly this pacifism emerges because of the group’s simple church/world dichotomy, an unconcern for any heritage, and a concentration on Christian renewal that is not accountable anywhere. These factors do not lead in a straight line to pacifism. And it is not a pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount, which the Brethren believe does not apply to Christians. The Sermon on the Mount was the way Jesus planned to run the world, but those in power would not let him do so. So Jesus started over and decided to create a church instead of running the world according to the Sermon on the Mount. Yet the central concerns of the Plymouth Brethren undercut considerations sometimes used to refute pacifism. The Brethren do not care about running the world. They say that politics is not part of God’s concern, and they can stay out of politics. So some Brethren are committed conscientious objectors, and others are devoted to military service, and they all get along fine on Sunday, because taking a stand on war is not part of the group’s self-definition.

The Wesleyan movement

The Wesleyan movement of the nineteenth century did not produce as firm a pacifist commitment as did other restorationist groups, yet it pointed strongly in that direction.

The seedbed within which this movement flourished was—as the name suggests—Methodism. Yet it moved beyond the structured Methodist communion. By virtue of its success in covering the frontier, by the middle of the nineteenth century Methodism had become an established Protestant church. In its preached message it had continued to call those who came to faith to a specific moral renewal and a life of holiness. But its social form increasingly became one of taken-for-granted authority and quasi-automatic membership. The fact that John Wesley retained infant baptism from the Anglican tradition did not make his group conformist. But when his followers were out from under the Anglican establishment, and Methodism had by its evangelistic vigor become at least the plurality (if not the majority) of church presence on the American scene, being a Methodist no longer required the radical decision of a century earlier. But when the Methodists sought radical renewal, they critically reappropriated elements from Wesley. On the level of doctrine, they radicalized the teaching of entire sanctification or Christian perfection. Although Wesley’s thought on this subject seems to have shifted, Wesleyans could quote him in support of their position that a believer can be substantially freed from sin’s power and made whole or—in one sense of the word—perfect. They believed this sanctification is not just a promised possibility; it is verifiable in subjective experience. One can know when it has happened.

This new doctrinal clarification or simplification took social form in the camp meeting or revival. These meetings gathered people who understood themselves to be Christians and were church members. But to be revived, renewed, or deepened in their Christian commitment, they needed to experience a new working of the Holy Spirit, which then could be identified as the event of entire sanctification.

This characterization has helped us locate the Wesleyan movement. This is not the place to discuss the movement’s theology or its sociological impact on frontier Protestantism. What interests us in the present context is that revivalism was also a base for Christian moral concern in the realms of abolition, women’s rights, temperance, and pacifism. The impact on women’s rights was soon forgotten in the wider society, although some holiness groups continued to have women ministers up until the early part of the twentieth century, when the linkage of the holiness churches with fundamentalism moved these groups back toward a more “Protestant orthodox” position. The pacifist thrust was represented by Dwight L. Moody and by Jonathan Blanchard, founder of Wheaton College, as well as by earlier revivalists.[5]

The Churches of God

At the intersection between the Churches of Christ (the Campbellites) and the Wesleyans, we find the Churches of God. Their restorationism is so thorough that to this day they refuse to call themselves a denomination and have no formal church membership. Their Wesleyanism is so authentic that their experience of church fellowship is a denomination-wide annual camp meeting or general assembly, at which some 20,000 people still gathered in the 1970s. There are two different branches, which did not split from one another but simply had different geographical centers: the Winebrenner branch (Findlay, Ohio) and the Warner branch (Anderson, Indiana). The Warner group once seriously considered some kind of mutual recognition with Indiana Mennonites. In that period they were the most successful denomination in bridging the race barrier, and they were—and to some degree still are—pacifist.

The Pentecostal movement

When we move to the Pentecostal movement, we are no longer in the nineteenth century. But in a cultural sense Pentecostalism belongs to that century, in that it continued the Wesleyan revival experience. Pentecostalism began as a revival in the Bible belt (a culture produced by revival), and in the southwest (where the whole culture had been produced by Methodists, and by Baptists—whose message was not very different). After a generation, that culture was not enough. So Methodist resources—willingness to change and the notion of being against the vice of worldliness—informed Pentecostalism. Another mark was literal obedience to scripture without rationalizing, without having to study through why it should be interpreted a certain way. Also somewhat characteristic of the camp meeting and more strongly of Pentecostalism was the absence of a commitment to social responsibility. That trait correlates with a membership coming from the lower classes, who lack the money, leisure, and training to be social leaders in traditional elite ways. Those are Pentecostalism’s resources derived from Methodism.

The Baptist and Disciples resources that informed Pentecostalism include playing down supercongregational church structures and theological systems and creeds, and being unconcerned about history. History was all wrong anyway, and Christianity needed to be restored, which had just happened recently. No historical consciousness is needed. People from the Churches of Christ say their group was formed in AD 33. Everything between then and now is unnecessary.

This Bible belt post-revival culture contains these resources for ethical radicality, but that culture forms an establishment that includes little by way of critique of Americanism as a value system.

Pentecostalism began in Los Angeles and in Topeka, Kansas, with new experiences of praise and worship. Soon it had a strong base in Texas. In the first generation it became rather directly and simply pacifist, for the simple reason that adherents took the whole Bible straight. The Old Testament law is part of the basis of their pacifism; the Bible says, “Thou shall not kill.” Some of the more extreme Pentecostal groups still make the Old Testament the basis of their rejection of military service. Others would take the New Testament literally. Then they articulate the kinds of thought we have seen at work ever since the Czech Brethren.

For a generation, Pentecostalism was not only pacifist but also racially integrated. The latter characteristic is probably also connected to Pentecostals’ way of reading the Bible, although I doubt that anybody consciously related the two phenomena. Some of Pentecostalism’s first preachers were African Americans. Between 1905 and 1915 the Pentecostals had racially integrated churches and a racially integrated revival movement. After they had been together for a generation, their success led them to strategize about how to grow more. Then they divided into black and white Pentecostal movements. The older Church of God in Christ was led by C. H. Mason (1866–1961), an African American. Pentecostalism’s antiwar position has been maintained by the Church of God in Christ and some of the small, legalistic branches of the movement, who make much of a special set of rules they believe still apply because these commands are in the Bible.

The pacifism and racial integration of the movement as a whole were not deeply rooted, because Pentecostals did not believe in being deeply rooted. They thought history, theology, and church structures did not matter, so they had no historical consciousness from which to sense a radical ethical position in the world. They did not criticize Americanism as such. The Pentecostals, being a new revival movement in the western half of the Bible belt, had no peace church neighbors from whom to learn a sense of history. (But when pressed by the government to explain their conscientious objection, Assemblies of God leaders claimed identity with the Quakers.)[6] The Pentecostals had no alternative view of the meaning of power or nationalism. Their rapid success in numerical growth swept people into the movement who had not restructured their views on anything except the gift of tongues. Their distinctiveness was located at other points that did not relate to undertaking a critique of Constantine or to seeing the church as a distinctive community. They had little experience of the church as engaged in a discerning process or of the other things that make more sense from the context of Quaker or Anabaptist peace witness.

Pentecostalism’s original pacifism was rapidly diluted. Already in World War I, when it was a movement only ten or fifteen years old, its pacifism was softened in order to send people to evangelize the troops. Pentecostals became aware of what came to be called “church growth theory,” which advocated going with a new message to places where people are mobile, worried, away from home, out of their own cultural context. So the Pentecostals sent missionary chaplains overseas with “the boys.” By the time of World War II, they created seminaries, because military chaplaincy required a seminary degree. They did not believe in seminary for their churches, but they gave chaplains a seminary degree in order to get them into the army. In 1967 the Assemblies of God—one of the largest groups in the Pentecostal movement—changed their constitution, which until then had been pacifist on simple New Testament grounds.

Utopian communities

To understand the major creative thrusts of any cultural period, we must also take note of minor thrusts. The far edges and the excesses of critique and creativity contribute as much to our understanding of what was filling people’s minds as does the final deposit of majority convictions and official conclusions. In that respect we will not understand the nineteenth century without taking note of the utopian communities and the further-out restoration sects.

The utopian communities represent a convergence of Enlightenment thought—as represented in French speculator and utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825); British social reformers such as Robert Owen (1771–1858), founder of a community in New Harmony, Indiana; and biblicist reformers including John Humphrey Noyes (1811–96), founder of the Oneida (New York) Community. The common thrust of these approaches is the belief that the entire social order needs to be reviewed and renewed. The way to proceed is to build speculative utopias in the air (that is, in literature) and concrete experimental ones in America. America, the place with room both physically and socially to start over again and get it right, was indispensable for this kind of pioneering, and some European pioneers came here just to do that.

Almost all these communities belonged within the wider restorationist movement of which I have already spoken, sharing the high priority the movement gave to restoration of personal relations on the primary level, its economic critique, and its critique of violent nationalism and authoritarian government. Most of these utopian communities included a dimension of rural culture to correct industrialized urbanization. Most of them did not work (as Quaker Pennsylvania did not work) in the sense of becoming permanent, of lasting for more than two generations in their original form. Yet I again protest against a too-simple measure of “not working.” The way of life of pioneer families and churches that were not part of experimental communities did not survive either. These communities did contribute to some strong continuing cultural movements such as cooperatives. The quality craftsmanship still associated with the Oneida Community and the Amana Colonies is worthy of respect.

Restoration sects

The historian’s label restoration sect applies to portions of the restoration movement that went over the brink into theological separation by committing themselves to a criterion of renewal other than the Bible (namely, writings by an authority figure) and to an instrument of renewal other than open dialogue (namely, creating a centralized organization). Joseph Smith of the Mormons created a synthetic salvation history that incorporates America into the Hebrew hope. Brigham Young succeeded Smith and founded Utah’s pioneer culture. William Miller, founder of the cross-denominational Millerite movement, brought to a head a calculating eschatological expectancy so strong that it remained an organizing force even when the kingdom had failed to come. Prophet Ellen Gould White clarified Miller’s predictions, and helped create in Seventh-Day Adventism a strong missionary culture. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement, did the same thing around Boston’s middle-class concern for human wholeness, and was likewise survived by strong organizers of a “mother church.”

These three movements have survived to our day. To know about renewal in America, we ought to know them better. In our day all three are shaken by internal dissent, by challenges to the revelatory claims of founder figures and the hierarchical style of present leaders. These challenges come in the name of democratic due process or in the name of theological integrity.

Only in nineteenth-century America would this kind of sectarian claim to restore true religion be so much at home. The Seventh-Day Adventists are not integral pacifists but do reject armed military service and bloodshed. The earliest Mormon strategy was nonresistant, before the pressures of persecution and patriotism pushed the Mormons into forming their own militia. The Jehovah’s Witnesses (younger but formally analogous) are not ethically nonresistant but reject military service, because they see civil government as diabolical. They too had a prophetic founder followed by a strong central organizer. In each case there is some counterpart to the pacifism of the more moderate restoration movements.

It would be too simple to write off either the localized utopian communities or the nationwide restoration sects as irrelevant excrescences at the edge. The edges of a picture define it. They not only intensify the image of restoration and the trust people were willing to put in promises of a new beginning; they also reinforce our sense of the credibility—at the time—of a simple ethic of revealed principles, as over against social strategies based on lesser evils and political control. Thousands more people participated in these movements than belonged to the settled peace churches, and they were willing to do the right thing simply because it was right. For the proof of that rightness they were willing to trust someone whose authority was a self-confident claim to know what the Bible meant, and to have unfolded that meaning in a way anyone could understand and pass on.

Leo Tolstoy

Following history from Europe to America, so that it could be our history, has made us bypass until now the most important single figure, for our purposes, in the nineteenth century. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) was the greatest storyteller of his time, using his skills to retell simple folk tales and create epic novels. A product of the parasitical bureaucratic-military class formed around the imperial court, for which formal Russian Orthodoxy was religiously irrelevant and westernized unbelief was stylish, Tolstoy underwent a personal conversion that transformed him into an advocate of peasant culture and simple faith.

A self-taught exegete, he translated and commented on the Gospels and from them developed a massive critique of doctrinal orthodoxy. At the heart of this critique was nonresistance: Jesus’s teaching of a new way is the center of the gospel, the Sermon on the Mount is the charter of that way, and the injunction “Resist not the evil one” is the key to the sermon. Only years later did he learn that he was not alone. He discovered the Czech Brethren, the Anabaptists, the Quakers, and the American peace societies. He maintained a massive correspondence with people all over the Western world, where his fiction was famous. He corresponded in his later years with the American pacifist politician William Jennings Bryan, who visited him, and with Mohandas Gandhi.

A flood of letters and comments on current affairs constantly linked his simplistic view of gospel morality with a shrewd criticism of the social sham and the injustices of aristocratic society. His polemic was brilliant, irresistible, anti-Western, and antibourgeois, yet he owed his power to the literary upper-middle class, for whom Western and westernized Russian publishers were eager to print his every word. Devastating in his criticism of the Orthodox Church, he saw no point in forming Christian communities—though he was respectful of the Doukhobors and the Anabaptists—and limited his own affirmative social doctrine to a lifeless anarchism that died before he did.

In his century, Leo Tolstoy stands second to none in his commitment to criticize oppressive misuses of Christianity perpetrated by bearers of the fraudulent dignity of church and empire. Yet Tolstoy stated his criticism in terms dictated by the monolithic culture he criticized. Thus his profound conviction of the whole system’s wrongness and his visionary awareness that Jesus’s message was radically different did not lead him toward creating a viable alternative. His rejection of oppression simply stood on their head the categories of the oppressor’s ontology and resulted in a no-win description of the game.

Coming to Jesus’s teachings with regard to wealth within the framework of his own social status and the class structure of Russian Orthodox society, he saw only utopian alternatives. He never found a way to share with his own former serfs a vision that could effectively ennoble their future. Coming to Jesus’s words about the sword from the perspective of his understanding of violence of Russian imperial politics, he saw no alternative but an imaginary anarchism, which could only exacerbate the polarization between czarist and Leninist extremes that would pull the empire apart a decade after his death.

It would be pointlessly patronizing to dwell on the possibility that Tolstoy’s last decades would have been less nasty had he heard more Augustine, Luther, Wesley, Kierkegaard, or Keswick. It is, however, a fact of intellectual history that his thought has had to hobble along without any mediating, reconciling, or synthesizing alternatives to his heroic and futile rejection of the way things are.

The evidence of the ultimate victory of the Orthodox and czarist establishment over Tolstoy is not the fact that censors sometimes prevented open publication of his texts, or that the police limited some of his disciples’ travels, but that that system succeeded in imposing on him the constricting terms of his rebellion against it. Over against tyranny and violence, he saw only the alternative of anarchy. The only alternative he saw to profligacy was not sexual wholeness but guilty monogamy, seen as a weak remedy for lust. As an alternative to feudal or early industrial capitalism, he offered nothing but vague ideas about giving away one’s goods. His cure for the illiteracy of the children of the serfs was to teach them fragments of salon culture.

Our concern is not to evaluate Tolstoy or to blame him for his limits. Our task is to learn how a vision for critique and renewal can be hobbled by insufficient distance from the way the agenda is laid out. As he saw it, Tolstoy had to choose between czarism and anarchy, and of the two, anarchism was relatively more like the Jesus of the Gospels. A third, fourth, or nth option, less polar and more creative, was not available to him. He cannot be blamed for not having found it. Yet we would be blameworthy, if—like so many critics of nonviolence—we were to take his not having found it as exhausting the options. Tolstoy renewed a view of Jesus as rabbi clarifying the true law, and a view of Jesus as Lord calling for costly obedience. There are resources here for finding that nth option: resources related to community, to system criticism, to constructive utopianism, to the potential for wholesome social change through conflict management and cultural pluralism. These resources can free us, both in logic and in practice, from the dilemma of needing to choose between a pure but ineffective faithfulness and a compromised but effective pragmatism.

Tolstoy has come to represent the caricature, by establishment religion, of the Jesus who calls us to cross-bearing discipleship. This caricature is typical of the Jesus and the Tolstoy of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and of Philip Wogaman’s Method of Christian Moral Discourse. The vulnerability of Tolstoy to this critical caricaturing is prototypical for any whose challenges to the axiom of establishment must be made to look puristic, picayune, and ahistorical. This patterning of the polarity continues to determine the way midstream American Christendom thinks, not because they have read Tolstoy, but because the assumptions to which he was captive continue to dominate wherever the intellectual heritage of Christendom is still determinative. H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr have done the most to popularize the faithfulness-versus-effectiveness polarity as the right way to understand Jesus’s critical impact. But plenty of twentieth-century pacifists have also accepted this analysis as a way to orient themselves.[7]

That such a pattern of analysis can stretch all the way from Tolstoy to the present is not proof that it is right; it proves the power of a paradigm to determine how people must think. The claim that faithfulness and effectiveness are always or generally related in such a way that the more we have of one, the less we have of the other, is the product of zero-sum-game thinking, not of the lessons of experience or of detailed analysis. It is a sweeping assumption made before the discussion ever began.

Recent decades of social analysis show that the assumption that every conflict situation is a zero-sum game is not self-evident. The same must apply even more in the field of logic. Not every situation is a dilemma. That teaching moral analysis requires concentration on dilemmas and casuistic extreme cases is an assumption about logical method that we need to challenge rather than take for granted. To claim that human nature is such that in the average or typical situation, one must always choose something that is objectively evil, is to seriously foreshorten the task of moral analysis. From a more traditional Christian perspective, it is to deny the Christian doctrines of incarnation and sanctification. If genuinely effective faithfulness is not a possibility within history, then what Christianity classically affirms under the heading of the sinlessness of Jesus Christ would be excluded by definition, and sanctification would likewise be rejected a priori.

These nineteenth-century renewal movements—Tolstoy, the peace societies, and the restorationists—had in common an educated and articulate philosophy and strategy of Christian renewal. Tolstoy’s was culturally flawed, but the others were not. They were neither withdrawn nor conservative. Their recourse to the New Testament as a fulcrum for critical leverage on the present was the fruit of their own creative encounter with the most original intellectual currents of their time.[8] The selectivity whereby Tolstoy came to argue that “Resist not the evil person” is at the center of the gospel message results from sophisticated critical accountability in both ethical and literary terms. You may go on to think that nonresistance, when taken in this heightened form, is an inadequate position, as I do. You may disagree with Tolstoy’s literary exegetical process of concentric reductions, or with Campbell’s “New Testament patterns.” But you are cheating yourself if you disagree because you think the people who developed those lines of thought were ignorant or uncritical or somehow allied with rural anti-intellectualism or with the vision of moral purity through withdrawal, against which you are reacting because of its place in your own history.[9] Other people were doing intellectually brilliant things in the nineteenth century, but in the realm of critical perspective on Christian social ethics, rooted in any kind of theological and scriptural accountability, these nonresistant Christian thinkers were the most serious intellectual phenomenon of the century.

Restoration outside the West

For our purposes the narrative properly ends here. But as epilogue let me note three movements that we will not come back to but which really should be noticed.

The Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu is the formal name of the first group. Kimbangu was a Methodist lay catechist who was pushed out of the mission church in the Belgian Congo in 1921 because he took too much leadership. The colonial government thought he was a violent revolutionary, so they put him in prison. His disciples were persecuted and clandestine for forty years. When they came out of the bush in about 1960, there were hundreds of thousands of them, not only in Zaire but in neighboring countries as well. Their peace position is not profoundly rooted in theology. It is partly drawn from their own prophet Simon Kimbangu, who modeled suffering servanthood. They do not have a deep teaching tradition. They are not critical of African nationalism. Yet if you ask them, they would say they are a peace church.

The second is a Japanese phenomenon, the “non-church church,” Mukyokai. Its founder, Uchimura Kann, was a Christian already when he came to North America to study. He was disappointed to discover that North America is not a Christian country. He then led an indigenous movement back home, the main concern of which was not to have Western forms. Their pattern of fellowship was lecture and Bible study instead of celebration of the sacraments. The movement was underground in the Second World War. They too are pacifists, although without a sharp focus.

The third case is the wide propagation across China and among overseas Chinese of house fellowships of the antitraditional traditions of the Plymouth Brethren, the Jesus Family, and Watchman Nee. Again their pacifism is simple, unreflective.

Church renewal and pacifism

We have observed that the phenomenon of pacifism tends to arise wherever there is church renewal. Pacifism arises where people are trying to be Christian without too much rootage in history. This general pattern we have now observed wherever there are frontiers. It happened in North America as a frontier culture, and again in the Third World mission church context as a frontier. Wherever there is room for new vitality going back to scripture, or encountering in new ways the challenges of the wider world, pacifism pops up.

Our interest is in the simple fact that the position arises. It arises not because of a mechanism but because of an opening, an opportunity for the growth of a particular format of renewal in ways that have a certain pattern. Its proponents are generally naive, of course. Renewal leaders are not people with a strong sense of history; otherwise the newness would not arise. But when they are freed from a strong sense of history to read the Bible in a warlike world, they come out wondering whether war is proper or compatible with the gospel, and deciding that it is not. This general phenomenon observable in modern church history is not much in evidence (naturally) when we read our theology from mainstream sources. That fact might suggest something about our strategy for ecumenical witness. Should we concentrate on trying to talk with institutional churches with long-established theological positions? If we are interested in propagating a witness against violence, should we instead look to the nontraditional renewal frontier, where people do not have as many good reasons for not listening, but also will not be as profound in their support or as thorough in their appropriation if they do hear?

Liberal Protestant Pacifism

Liberal Protestant pacifism was a dominant component of mainstream Protestant social thought in the United States and Canada between the world wars.[1] There were rough analogies in Great Britain, far fewer in continental Europe. The dynamics leading up to liberal Protestant pacifism include the gradual evolution of Christian thought in America during the preceding half-century. Others were part of the wider culture within which Protestant thought developed. I will first sketch these broader elements of the cultural environment.

Internationalism

The internationalist vision, which we observed in our study of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was still alive. Immanuel Kant’s peace plan was popular, a counterpart of the earlier visions of John Amos Comenius and William Penn.[2] After the Napoleonic wars, even conservative, nationalistic politicians saw that avoiding war was in their interest, and the diplomatic balances they set up (called by some the Concert of Europe) effectively saved Europe from major wars for a century.[3] The Crimean War, the one false note in the concert, proved to all involved that war is a mistake.

The cosmopolitan cultural vision of the time found expression in international peace conferences. To one of these Victor Hugo (1802–85) addressed a strong plea for peace: “The period of revolution is drawing to a close. The era of improvements is beginning.”[4] Leo Tolstoy wrote a critical passage of his Kingdom of God for one of these conferences in London in 1891.[5] Another peace conference was held in Rome. These stirrings in the literary/cultural world had a legal/diplomatic counterpart in a series of treaties and conventions governing the laws and customs of war. More than thirty such international agreements, which continue the line begun by Hugo Grotius, were reached between 1856 and 1936.[6]

Characteristics of liberal Protestant pacifism

Our title, “Liberal Protestant Pacifism,” identifies where this particular phenomenon arose. It arose only in the Protestant world, and was largely limited to the Anglo-Saxon countries, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. This current of thought, teaching, and action had the most prominence in the 1920s. We are talking about liberal Protestantism; the phenomenon we are observing is not at home in traditional, confessionally bound Protestant groups (the Lutherans, Reformed, or Scottish Presbyterians, for example) which are the most faithful to their sixteenth-century documents and their creeds.

These movements did not focus primarily on biblical theology or the church fathers but rather on incorporating common sense into contemporary Christian thought.[7] Liberal Protestantism was the vanguard of the intellectual consensus of Western modernity and did not think contemporary common sense could be contrary to Christian thought, because revelation and reason cannot be separate categories. They saw nothing unfair, had no sense of cheating or breaking the rules of theology, in merging common sense and contemporary rationality with the Western Protestant heritage.

Several key arguments emerged.

A first line of argument is exemplified in the statement that war does not settle anything. This commonsense statement became especially convincing in the 1920s. In the previous decade, President Woodrow Wilson had kept the United States out of World War I for the first months of fighting, and even ran for reelection on the grounds that he had done so. Then it became politically necessary to get into the war, and in order to explain his change of heart, Wilson dramatized the step with almost crusading arguments. He portrayed U.S. entrance into the war not merely as a way to help our friends against their enemies but as a crusade, a war to end war. But the war failed to accomplish that end. It did not create a new world order. The United States did not enter the League of Nations. Wilson’s idealism did not start a whole new pattern of international relations. As a result, people became deeply pessimistic about whether war does any good, about whether it is a rational way to solve social problems.

A second line of argument insists that neither side is innocent. Like the preceding point, this statement is indirectly a kind of just war reasoning. In just war reasoning, only one side can have just cause; one side is the good party and the other is the bad party. But things are not that simple. Neither side was innocent in the First World War. Either side could have prevented the war. This kind of argument continued into the Second World War period. People blamed the Treaty of Versailles for Hitler’s rise to power, and they blamed the abuses of czarism for the rise of Soviet communism. If the bad guy on the other side is not fully to blame for the threat to international order, then we should not use the blunt weapons of war in response to the threat. We also are guilty.

A third level of argument in this material refers to the Bible, to Jesus and the pacifism of the early church, even though this is not the real basis of liberal Protestant pacifism. One does not have to ask whether one line of reasoning stands alone, because they all coincide. These liberal Protestant thinkers could still say that the position they saw as contemporary common sense was also the standard Christian position from the New Testament.

A fourth commonsense resource was internationalism. Liberal Protestantism increasingly saw nationalism as sectarian or provincial and therefore unworthy of the highest human devotion. The church should be above strife between nations. The church should be on both sides or in favor of the other side, in favor of maintaining world unity when the nationalists want to divide us. The church is by its very nature an international community, and it should refuse provincial loyalties.

We should not simply play back these reasons but also interpret the kind of reasoning that is going on. The label liberal in twentieth-century theology points to this kind of reasoning, as contrasted with (1) fundamentalism, which says that we can lift the whole truth out of the Bible without confronting any problems of interpretation; (2) Catholicism, which classically said that we need the church to tell us how to understand the various truths that are accessible to the believer; and (3) sectarian minorities which—from the liberal perspective—combine the vices of the other two options by having both a tradition of their own and a claim to be biblical. Liberalism, by contrast, says that Christian norms will tend to coincide with reasonable humane moral insight, that we can expect a relatively high degree of agreement among philosophers such as William James, political scientists, and politicians such as the authors of the 1927 Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which the major nations had promised that they would never again use war to settle international disputes. Those various elites will agree with Christian insights.

So the first meaning of the word liberal—the one we are using here—is its theological rather than its political meaning. In this sense liberalism assumes that various sources of truth will reinforce one another. We do not have to choose between common sense, the lessons of history (for instance, the evident lesson of history that war does more harm than good), and specific biblical instructions on right and wrong. Liberalism assumes that these sources of truth, properly read, will coincide.

Liberal Protestant pacifism was weighty in the 1920s. What is the significance of this fact? Historically its significance lies in the fact that pacifism represented the last great thrust of American religious and moral concern for public life until the late 1960s, the last time that Christians entered the political arena with religious vocabulary and motivation and with the conviction that, as Christians, they must express themselves. That political involvement needed to be undertaken together, because they believed there is a common Christian social doctrine. Christians—meaning liberal, ecumenical Protestant Christians—can, should, and will take our country in the right direction, by getting our government to disarm and to promise not to use war as an instrument of international policy. We should, because this step is both common sense and Christian. We can, because we are, after all, in the best of all worlds: in Christian American democracy, where if we should do it, we can.

Roots of liberal Protestantism

Where does liberal Protestantism come from? Several different streams flowed together to form it. We will take time to note how many there are, and how different they once were, so we see how significant it is that they eventually coincided and reinforced one another.

Puritan humanism

One part of the heritage that liberal Protestantism fulfills is Puritan humanism. What do we mean by Puritan humanism? The Puritans were ambitious about changing the social order under God and making it less unrighteous. They believed that God’s righteousness applies to the real world, that the job of implementing God’s righteousness in the real world has not been done well, but that it could be done better. That task is neither hopeless nor a priori unmanageable. With God’s help, with discipline, with good people, the Puritans thought they could and should make a better world.

The Puritans discerned signs that God is making a better world. They looked at Oliver Cromwell, at the Pilgrims, and at the settling of America. In these events they saw God at work making a right social order through the good guys, whom God had both placed in charge and had given a relative degree of success. So they had a vision of the right order, and they believed that what is right would work. They saw no split between effectiveness and obedience, because those who obey God prosper in their undertakings for God’s cause. Nor did they see a split between revelation and reason, because what is right is reasonable. The will of God is neither weird nor given in strange words from a strange heaven, spoken into a world where they do not fit. The right thing to do is also the intelligent thing to do. So the Puritans fused the morality of the Reformation creeds with civil wisdom and whatever existed embryonically in the eighteenth or nineteenth century that we would now call political science. For the Puritans, these pieces all fit together.

What followed in the 1920s from Puritan humanism was the belief that because America and its allies won the war, we could win the peace. The horror of the world war had taught what people had not really known before (it had been a long time since there had been a real war): that we should and could and would just decide not to have wars any more. The purpose of the Great War was to end war. It failed, but (so the thinking went) with God’s help, we can do what we want to do. America is, after all, a new society; our ancestors came to this country because they had had enough of Europe’s squabbles. We tried to intervene one last time, in order to stop the Europeans from fighting one another, but that involvement just reinforced the fact that war is not the way to bring peace. Americans can do in our world what others could not, because our country started without bondage to historical patterns. Newness and optimism issued in confidence about human nature and the human enterprise.

Now Puritanism originally was also clear about human sinfulness. At the same time that Puritanism trusted that God wants us to do certain things and will help us do them, it was pessimistic about whether we would ever do so adequately. But the doctrine of sin within Puritanism became weaker with time, and confidence grew that God would enable God’s servants to do right. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau secularized the Puritan disposition to do good. They wanted a moral elite to lead a good and intelligent culture, but they did not root that desire in the traditional theology of the real Puritans. In his 1838 address on war, Emerson said: “War is on its last legs: a universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms. The question for us is only How soon.”[8] In its basic structure, Emerson’s statement is the Puritan vision secularized.

Evangelical revivalism

Evangelical revivalism was a second major stream that fed liberal Protestantism. Evangelical revival proclaims that human dignity is restored and that the one who has become a child of God has new resources. Puritanism talked about the order out there, which we can improve because God wants to make it better. Revivalism started from the inside: God has changed each of us and given us a new experience of God’s restoring patience, grace, and power. God motivates and enables us to be a different people in society. God gives us compassion for the victims of injustice and war. God gives us a concern to reach the outsider, which moves us not only to want to preach the gospel but also to go where the victim is. The Salvation Army is the standard symbol of uncalculating revivalist ministries to victims and to the poor. If Christians are going to be among these people with an invitation to faith, then we have to be there with soup and soap. The drama of revival—of individuals discovering renewal through the preaching of forgiveness of sins—convinces us that we can be good, that divine power can overcome our inertia, selfishness, and lack of vision, and give us ideas, guidance, tenderness of heart, and persistence. If we know what is good, we will work at it seriously and make progress toward the goal.

The most dramatic popular expression of this optimism (“We can be good, because God has renewed us”) was Charles Sheldon’s classic novel, In His Steps. The hero of this novel is a small-town midwestern pastor whose life is revolutionized because he decides to ask, in the face of any question, “What would Jesus do?” To know what Jesus would do, the pastor does not have to study the New Testament; the story has little to do with specifics of the Jesus of the New Testament. Reverend Maxwell just knows that Jesus would do the right thing. The real question is not, “What would Jesus do?” Instead, already knowing what is right, the pastor asks, “Would Jesus do it?” Of course he would. So Reverend Maxwell does not give up. He is courageous. He does not cheat or compromise with the Mafia, and God helps him. All the right people turn up at the right time, and with their help he is able to save Chicago.

This novel is an extrapolation from the power of revival. The big name in this realm in the last third of the nineteenth century was Charles Finney, the revival preacher with a specific theology about the ontology of renewal. He knew just what happens in individuals when we become capable of perfection through God’s power. He founded Oberlin College as a seedbed for social revolution on a pietist base. He named the college for an Alsatian pietist village pastor who had a wide reputation for impressive social change in the interest of the poor.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the same tradition was at work in Walter Rauschenbusch, who is usually misunderstood by people who read liberalism from the other end. They see in Protestant liberalism unbelief about the Bible and skepticism about clear truth. Walter Rauschenbusch was an evangelist and the son of a German Baptist evangelist. (Nineteenth-century German Baptists were evangelizers; they were not liberals in any sense). His father was an immigrant from Germany, well acquainted with German Mennonites. Walter Rauschenbusch translated English gospel hymns (many by Dwight L. Moody) into German.

Rauschenbusch has come to be the symbol of the social gospel. He is the one who gave currency to that phrase. But the name did not mean then what is has come to mean in later polemics; he did not disconnect the gospel from the roots of biblical preaching, or from accountability in church history, or from serious systemic analysis of how bad the world is, or from the call to individuals to open their hearts to forgiveness. Rauschenbusch was an inner-city evangelist who became concerned for the shape of society out of his commitment to personal evangelism.[9]

The revival movement’s potential for social concern has been forgotten or denied since the 1920s, because the fundamentalist controversy forced the heirs of revival and pietism into a tactical alliance with the heirs of creedal orthodoxy and social conservatism. Social gospel became a term of opprobrium. The historical record was falsified. For example, the pacifism of Jonathan Blanchard (founder of Wheaton College) and Dwight L. Moody was removed from the record by their heirs.[10]

An incarnation of both the Puritan and revivalist streams can be seen in William Jennings Bryan, prairie pacifist populist, presidential candidate, and secretary of state. Theologically a near fundamentalist (as was evident in the Scopes trial), socially a Puritan populist, Bryan shows how confident one could be from 1896 to 1912 that God’s will can be done in this country.

Other tributaries

In addition to these two main streams, which are different in their structure and origins but flow into the same phenomenon in the early part of our century, we can recognize accessory input from other sources. One is Quakerism becoming acceptable, getting out of plain garb and the limits of the elite Philadelphia society, with John Greenleaf Whittier becoming, in effect, the national poet laureate. Another is the domestic development of social concern, spoken for in the New England and New York stories especially by Horace Bushnell and Washington Gladden. A third is Tolstoy, whose emphasis on simple obedience to Jesus did not take, but who was known and read. A fourth is in Europe, beginning just before the First World War with a movement calling itself Christian socialism or religious socialism, which had a small but visible place in the Protestant life of the European continent. Finally, there is some awareness of Gandhi by the 1920s, though not really enough that it would count in structuring people’s thoughts. By the mid-1930s there was more.

The facets of social gospel optimism

The social gospel—in its popularized form, not in the depth of Rauschenbusch’s version—can be characterized as multifaceted optimism. This is not the social gospel in its origins or at its best, but it is the social gospel of the movement’s superficial adherents and its critics’ characterizations.

The popularized form of the social gospel is optimistic about solving problems. It sees in our Father’s world no ultimate tragedy, despair, or nonsense, and no insoluble problems. There is no ultimate problem of evil. Of course there is the problem of evil, but we are working at it. The world makes sense. God is on our side, and evil will not keep us from solving our problems.

This social gospel is optimistic about truth. Truth must be one, because God is in heaven. Jesus’s authority, common sense, and reasonableness, the experience of an evolving society, and the experience of Western liberal Christian progress all fit together in one whole. No deep cleft exists between revelation and reason or between moral obligation and effectiveness.

This form of the social gospel is especially optimistic about education. Truth makes its own way; we just have to disperse it and clarify it. On every front, ignorance is yielding to information. The physical sciences are accumulating new data, and the progress of science is a model for intellectual advance in all fields. We know so many more things; our task is to disseminate that information. Education and research will be major instruments in the victory of God’s causes through the victory of truth.

The social gospel is optimistic about human nature. We must clear away the barriers of ignorance, confusion, disorganization, provincialism, misinformation, and sectarian separatism, and then all will work out for the best. The successes we have already experienced—a democracy such as the world has never seen before, and railroads such as the world has never seen before, and skyscrapers, and much more—feed a mood that applies to the moral level as well. We need only build on the accomplishments already in place.

Now if the above statements describe our vision about society in general, obviously we will also be committed to pacifism. War is clearly a social evil. If it is an evil, we stop it. We stop it by teaching people that it is evil. We stop it by forbidding it and backing up that prohibition with sanctions. We stop it by creating alternative structures. Our pacifism will be of a specific kind. It will be a social gospel pacifism that has no need to struggle deeply with failure, or with tyranny’s continuing power, or with the challenge of the cross. Those things are all part of what we are overcoming.

These social gospel pacifists did not have to debate about revelation versus other claims: about whether to follow Jesus or be effective, for example, or about rationality or the data of experience. For these believers, all moral authorities are on the same side. Their position would be the church’s position because Jesus taught it, but it would be just as true without Jesus or the church. It does not need Jesus as an authority, because it is true in any case. The church is unnecessary as teacher, because everybody knows already that war is stupid and destructive and ought to be stopped. The church accredits itself by reinforcing what people already know. The church is also unnecessary as an embodiment of obedience, because the social gospel vision is one everybody can embody, especially governmental leaders and the bureaucrats of the League of Nations. We do not need any deep critical social analysis of the economic structures that make for war, or of the ethnic and racial egoisms that make for abiding polarizations, hatred, and insoluble problems, because we are moving past all that. These pacifists could not conceive of racial or ethnic problems that could not be solved by expanding the American melting pot.

This social gospel pacifism was the major stream of ecumenical Protestantism from 1925 to 1935. It set the tone for a generation of Christian thought about social matters. Despite the fact that it did not enjoy the full participation of leaders of local parishes, or of thinkers and leaders from the backbone of the historic confessions and denominational bodies, it was still the most visible interchurch (and beyond the church) pattern of thought for a whole generation. It had institutional organs, especially the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) in the United States, which had begun about 1910. It had its journalistic and opinion-building counterparts, especially in Britain. The most striking of these was an organization called the Peace Pledge Union. This group of people promised that they would never again support a war. In February 1933, the Oxford Union, a debating society at Oxford University, debated the resolution “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The vote was 275 for and 153 against; approximately 65 percent of those voting opposed ever fighting again for king and country.[11] This campus peace movement in the most prestigious British university represented this whole stream of thought.

Among specific religiously oriented agencies, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) was the most solid. It was specifically Christian (almost completely Protestant at that point) and specifically pacifist.[12] Other people supported agencies such as those of the Quakers. Non-Quakers who supported the Quakers would be listed as “Friends of Friends” in order to be in on their identity.

Elements of the cultural mood that supported the movement

To understand this movement’s power and its weaknesses, it helps to recognize that other elements of the cultural mood of the time assisted it.

This was a time of isolationism. Many saw North America as a new world and felt that the old world was not worth trying to save. North America had tried to stop the world war. That had been costly and had not worked well. The founding fathers had warned against entangling alliances with foreign powers, and they had been right after all. So a widespread mood of secular isolationism within American culture contributed to this pacifism, along with a populism that did not trust the traditional political mission for the country.

This was also the time of socialist internationalism. The socialist movement was anticlerical, internationalist, and almost pacifist until 1914, when it broke down into nationalist movements. Its proclaimed internationalism was not, after all, a solid basis for rejecting the First World War, although just before the war there had been strong antiwar sentiment within the socialist movement. In the 1920s, socialist pacifism was reaffirmed and gained force, overlapping with the Christian social gospel movement. A prominent symbol of the overlap was Protestant minister Norman Thomas, the socialist party candidate for U.S. president for every election from 1924 to 1948.

To this element might be added the revulsion with which the 1920s looked back at World War I. As the war dragged on, both sides saw the military costs clearly outweighing the benefits. Just war calculations about proportionality and probable success yielded negative answers, but the emotional and political wherewithal to stop the war was gone, and Europe went on bleeding in a war nobody wanted.

Opinion-forming elites in literature and politics carried on from there. Poetry written from the trenches by promising young poets (Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, for example), some of whom did not come back, contributed to an antimilitary mood and a bad conscience about nationalism which can hardly be understood by people who were not there. Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, tells the story of the war as destructive and dehumanizing, without any redeeming higher purpose or achievement.

For western Europeans, these factors led some to conclude that the socialist and internationalist pacifism of 1910–14, which they had betrayed in 1914, had been right after all. For many Americans, these elements produced a wave of isolationism, but also a sense of mandate to implement the Wilsonian promise that the world war was fought as a war to end wars. Even though an isolationist Senate refused to ratify the part of the Versailles treaty that created the League of Nations, America remained interested in helping Europe disarm, and U.S. diplomacy continued to promote arms restrictions until the mid-1930s. The two high points were the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1927, which formally renounced the future use of war, and the series of conventions whereby the major nations agreed to limit their naval forces in proportionate ways.

Even though the U.S. did not join the League of Nations, a mood of internationalism still supported the league, treaties, and international courts. The effort to achieve world peace through American participation in the League of Nations was a failed crusade, yet a vision for international cooperation to end war remained. It was losing ground, but some people still believed in it, especially at the time of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. The league started failing with major problems in Ethiopia and Manchuria in the mid-1930s, but there was still some hope during most of this period.

A mid-1920s Methodist statement from a meeting in Chicago provides a good specimen of a church that was largely taken over by the liberal pacifist mood:

Whereas we realize the war system is inherently wrong and un-Christian . . .

Whereas we believe that whatever evolutionary purpose war may have served in the past in the future it will prove futile as a means of securing any great social end . . .

Thereby be it resolved that we memorialize the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church to place itself on record as being opposed to the whole war system with its secret treaties, military alliances, unjust economic concessions, and competitive “preparedness” programs—and that in no way will we participate in any such movements, as history has conclusively shown lead to war.[13]

This statement exemplifies a simplicity that does not need Jesus but needs a particular reading of where we are. War might have had a social purpose in the past. It might have created national awareness. It might have moved people across oceans to settle new places. But on the evolutionary scale, we have now outlived war’s usefulness.

The weaknesses of liberal Protestant pacifism

On the surface of American Protestant culture, liberal Protestant pacifism was powerful. Its weaknesses as a position, and as a movement, are located below that surface.

Liberal Protestant pacifism had relatively little base in the grassroots of the churches. It was an elite movement of urban educated people.

It had little historical base. These liberals knew that the Quakers had always been pacifist, but they had little substantive awareness of the history of pacifism and its engagement with other positions. Those who believe in the doctrine of progress tend not to look to history for help in understanding things, so these liberals did not engage in debate with prior thought. Nor did they learn about earlier pacifist heroes.

The liberal Protestant pacifists did not engage in critical interaction with just war theory, which is in the creeds of the Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Lutherans.

This period did not produce a single coherent, systematic, book-length presentation on the Christian ethics of pacifism. Pacifism was popular. It was put forward in sermons, articles, dramatic statements, and popular booklets. It was strong, even dominant in certain circles—so much so that it did not have to be spelled out responsibly.

At certain critical points, the negation was clearer than any common affirmation. Everybody was against war. But this movement’s supporters did not have to settle on whether, if one is against war, one is also against police violence. And those who were anarchists with regard to domestic society did not have to decide whether an international police force should be formed in order to keep the peace.

Some would have supported police violence because that stance conformed to the Puritan vision, which sought to enforce goodness in order to avoid war. A police force would properly deal not with armies but with individual warmongers. Police would have authority to intervene within a given country in order to find the politician promoting war. They would not invade the country but would move in and extradite the warmonger. Instead of having soldiers fight soldiers, international police officers would catch those who promoted war. That was the vision.[14]

Other people said that if violence is wrong, an international police force is also wrong. Questions about how to manage violent and criminal behavior did not have to be thought through at any depth. Although Adolf Hitler’s power was on the rise, these liberals engaged in no study of alternatives to war. But if we will not fight Hitler, and we are confronted with Hitler, then what? Should we let others suffer? How much are we willing to suffer? Have we thought through what will work? Do we really believe that the League of Nations can somehow be resurrected and that it would stop Hitler? Or do we believe that he is not as bad a guy as he is made out to be?[15]

This movement made no clear decision on its deep theological logic. Is it an extreme form of the just war theory? Does it say, “We usually should not go to war, but under certain circumstances it would be justifiable at the fringes. However, in the modern world we will never have those fringes, because the weapons are so bad and the causes are so ambivalent that we will not ever have a sample that fits the criteria. Thus we can be wholeheartedly pacifist in the real world and still theologically within the just war tradition.” Or were these people pacifist in some deep sense, believing that to kill one’s enemy is always wrong? They did not have to decide between those options, because liberalism need not choose between different truth systems. They did not have to decide between revelation and reason or between effectiveness and obedience. Liberal Protestant pacifism was a movement that lacked a deep logical—or theological—foundation.

Much of the convincing power of the peace movement was derived from and carried by a particular kind of spokesperson who no longer exists in mainstream American parish culture: the powerful pastoral prophetic preacher. The 1930s saw a network of these great men, such as Ernest Fremont Tittle, Henry Hitt Crane, John Haynes Holmes, Harold Bosley, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Women were in the company too, especially Georgia Harkness, but not in the pulpits. E. Stanley Jones and Kirby Page were world missionary churchmen. The pulpit had not yet been downgraded by the competition of new media. Most of these leaders were Methodists. Their intellectual and spiritual giftedness was so widely recognized and so deeply respected that their congregations, without agreeing with them, supported them in their continuing personal pacifist commitment all the way through the Second World War. While lesser men lost their pulpits they did not, partly because their pastoral qualities and authority in the pulpit could not be denied. While liberal in terms of the categories of systematic theology, these leaders were pietist or activist in personality and style. They were not morally relativist as the next generation of theological liberals would tend to be. The pastoral and the prophetic dimensions of their ministries meant that they would be less shaken by the critique of the Niebuhrian age than were younger or more academic or more socialist people in the same movement.

The collapse of liberal Protestant pacifism

Liberal Protestant pacifism as a movement, as a constituency, and especially as a dominant mood, simply evaporated in the late 1930s, for the basic reason that in the face of Nazism and the League of Nations’ inability to intervene, political people simply saw no alternative to war. They had no alternative to national solidarity as the basis for necessary action. Internationalism was not strong enough to ground a critique of people’s national loyalties when tensions rose, nor did it have any credible institutions. When the nation had moved toward war, when the going got tough, liberal pacifists did not want to be parasites or fail to help. So a host of considerations swept the movement away.

On the organizational level the collapse was precipitated partly by a struggle over linkages between the peace movement and the socialist movement. Reinhold Niebuhr’s first critical thrust in the early 1930s against the Fellowship of Reconciliation—of which he had been the president—was to scold them for not clearing out the communists. Some people in the American socialist movement acted as a front for the Soviets, and those people tried to take over the FOR (as well as many other movements). For Niebuhr—who was still a socialist, but an anti-Stalinist socialist—the other pacifists were not critical enough, so he distanced himself from the FOR. That was just the beginning. The deeper reason, of course, was Niebuhr’s theological critique of liberalism.

We can only understand Niebuhr, to whom we turn next, as he was shaped by this liberal Protestant pacifist movement. People who read Niebuhr without knowing his matrix misunderstand him.

Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Realist” Critique

I include Reinhold Niebuhr in this book because of his handling of the question of war. But it would not be fair to deal with Niebuhr’s handling of war without locating him more adequately on the theological landscape. Niebuhr is, without much challenge, the most important American theological mind of the twentieth century. He came to this theological prominence not by expositing an ancient tradition from its sources, nor by exercising the authority of some office, but through his great skill and integrity as the man who deepened liberal theology beyond its initial potential into what some people then called neo-orthodoxy.

Niebuhr remained a liberal theologian in his epistemology. He believed that one should be open to all kinds of truth, from whatever source, without letting any authority—not even that of sacred tradition or the Bible—get in the way. He continued to believe that the best way to read the Bible is by submitting it to our modern Western judgment of what makes sense, rather than by subjecting ourselves in any heteronomous way to its authority. In this way he recovered a sense of the relative relevance and credibility of biblical and classical Christian thought.

Thus he restated the validity of Christian thought for a generation who thought they had outgrown such traditions. In so doing he was this culture’s greatest apologete for mainstream Protestantism: he made Christian faith make sense to people who were struggling with problems of evil in society and in human nature. He helped them see that what they were struggling with in contemporary terms was a symbolic or logical equivalent of what Christian thought has always dealt with under the heading of sin or the fall. His anthropological starting point undercut the defensive intellectual reactions with which the cultured despisers of religion (as Friedrich Schleiermacher had called them) in his time had thought they could easily set aside the fundamentalist faith of their forebears as culturally irrelevant.

So when we look at the side of Reinhold Niebuhr that centered on rejecting pacifism, we are doing both an injustice and a justice. The injustice is that we may fail to recognize that what made Niebuhr and his theology influential reached beyond the particular theme of war and peace and included wider concerns, with positive missionary and pastoral dimensions. Yet it is also a part of setting things right to see that restructuring theology around the issue of violence and war was at the center of his entire enterprise. Niebuhr’s entire theology unfolded from his having outgrown pacifism.

Reinhold Niebuhr brought American mainstream liberal Protestant theology to a major turning point. He was not orthodox in any serious sense. He was called neo-orthodox, together with Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, each of whom did some superficially analogous things. He restated some older ideas after liberal Protestantism had called them into question or left them behind or simply forgotten them. He restated them and said that they were there in the tradition: “We need a doctrine of sin. We need to be aware of the message of grace.” That sounded to liberal Protestants like orthodoxy, like what they had left behind. Yet it was postliberal, not preliberal. It was based on rational analysis of modern experience and not simply on quoting the Bible or the fathers. That way of reinterpreting classical doctrine is, in a broad sense, what the label neo-orthodox meant through the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

It was not ultimately a helpful label, because it grouped together people who did not belong together. Barth, Brunner, and Niebuhr in particular were very different from each other. They reasoned differently with regard to most of the details of a theological system. The term neo-orthodox tended to be used negatively, by people who wanted to signal that they themselves were more conservative. Or it was used by people within the main liberal stream, who thought neo-orthodox people had sold out on modernity and open-mindedness and gone back to traditions that we had outgrown. So we will not concentrate on the label, except to recognize its existence.

Niebuhr began his career solidly rooted in liberal Protestantism. His origins were in the German Evangelical and Reformed Church, and he was educated at the denomination’s seminary, Eden Theological Seminary, in Missouri. He then went to Yale and studied with D. C. Macintosh, who was writing about theology as an empirical science: theology is how we put together knowledge about how belief happens. For example, the doctrine of prayer is established by watching how people pray and how they get answers to prayer. Macintosh was not a skeptic; he was a believer. He believed people receive answers to prayer, and he was convinced that we could describe empirically how prayer works by observing prayer and the answers it obtains. In other words, he tried to use contemporary methods of empirical science to test theology. How much of traditional theology would come through intact? He undertook this enterprise with some confidence that it would still be the same discipline.[1]

Disappointment with liberal pacifism

In the First World War, Reinhold Niebuhr was a pacifist, on and off. He was an idealistic supporter of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson ran for a second term on the grounds that he had kept the nation out of the war, but then he took the U.S. into the war on the grounds that “we will have one more war as an exception, in order to get peace.” Niebuhr and many other people were disappointed in the 1920s, because one more war had not brought peace. So they went back to the pacifism to which that war was to have been an exception. Niebuhr’s first book dates from this period. Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic was a collection of incidental meditations, in which he mixed idealism and failure.[2] Yet his moral commitment was still pacifist.

In the 1920s, Niebuhr was pastor of a church of his denomination on Detroit’s industrial fringe. His experience there with the labor issue led him into Marxist social analysis. He became a founder of the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, which envisioned a nonviolent struggle within the democratic system; theirs was not Marxist socialism counting on a violent overthrow.[3] In 1928, Union Theological Seminary in New York invited Niebuhr to be professor of “applied Christianity,” a discipline somewhere between ethics and social pastoral concern; the chair was created for him. In the mid-1930s, he began to move from pacifist socialism to the position for which he was to become best known and with which he was to stay. The usability of his mix of nonviolent activism with partisanship for labor, his affirmation of a Marxist social analysis but not a Leninist revolution, broke down. The collapse of these syntheses was represented by communists’ attempt to take over the Fellowship of Reconciliation of which Niebuhr was president. The FOR was able to defend itself against that infiltration, but the struggle was a serious one in the 1930s. Thus a second element of Niebuhr’s disappointment was the collapse of the hope for nonviolent social change in the direction of justice.

Yet another change at the same time was a shift of attention from the domestic scene—from labor, management, and socialism—to the international struggle against Hitler. On the international level, nonviolence is less usable, or at least it seemed so to Niebuhr. Some people still trusted that a world government could stop Hitler, but Niebuhr was not sure it could. And he was not sure a world government would have been preferable, because it could become a world tyranny. In any case, a world government was not available, so there was no nonviolent way to respond to Hitler. That fact moved Niebuhr away from his pacifist vision.

An emerging pessimistic vision

Niebuhr then began to articulate a new vision that began by stating his pessimism about structures. In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), he began to clarify his new position. Despite the title, Niebuhr did not mean to say that individuals are moral and society is immoral; he meant to show that institutions face greater difficulty in being moral. Each person is partly evil, but institutions magnify our sinfulness more than they magnify our virtue. For example, an individual can live somewhat above the average, given the right ancestors and some idealism, self-respect, patience, and long-range vision. But if given responsibility to serve a constituency in an institutional office, that person cannot rise above the selfishness of the whole group. In other ways, society’s structures escalate the impact of selfishness and pride. Therefore we have less reason to hope for peace in the world than for peace and progress in one-to-one relationships. To this assessment Niebuhr added a pessimism about the nature of the individual. Niebuhr’s appraisal was informed by his reading of church history, especially the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Augustine, and Luther. He then developed a modern view of human nature illuminated by those past models.

Sinful human nature

According to Niebuhr, human nature consists in a tension that drives us into sin. The tension is between being finite and being transcendent—between being what we are in the givenness of our bodies and our social location, and knowing that we are more than that. We are destined for more and capable of more; we dream about more. The tension itself is not sin. Ideally we could live with this tension, but in fact it is hard to live with. Typically we resolve the tension by falling into oversimplification. We either accentuate our transcendence more than it merits (pride). Or we give in to our finitude (sensuality); we give up on trying to be transcendent and let things come naturally. Sensuality and pride—giving in to our finitude or overemphasizing our transcendence—are the typical but fallen outcomes of our inability to live with the fact that we are creatures (finite) made in the divine image (transcendent).

Niebuhr recovered orthodox and biblical perspectives on sin as a power to which we are captive, as intractable, as something that will not go away with better education or by ameliorating the structures that make people bad. Walter Rauschenbusch never believed that a better society would make sin go away, but he sometimes tilted in that direction when he criticized society. He argued that one of the reasons we have drunks is because we have skid row. It is not only that bad people create bad places; bad places make people bad too. If we clean up some of the social vices, we will also diminish the hold of some personal vices on some individuals. Rauschenbusch did not say all sinfulness comes from social evils, but he did focus on that side of the circle. And some liberals did believe that with adequate education and attention to the processes of social amelioration, we could get rid of the vices that have plagued humankind. Niebuhr said, “No, sin is not only our situation; it is also our nature.” Sin is not only present in some bad guy or bad institution outside of us; it is part of what we are. Sin is even part of the best in us. It is a part of our idealism. It is a part of our basic constitution. We will not become less sinful by being more intellectual or more spiritual or more educated; these are also occasions for sin. The pervasiveness of sin in human nature, personal and social, is an orthodox Christian doctrine that Niebuhr renewed in understanding and relevance.

His doctrine of sin came from his analysis of the social predicament, and then it was deepened by his philosophically refined interpretation of what human nature must be, if it brings us into this kind of social mess. Whether the human nature in question is individual or social, Niebuhr’s understanding of it developed from examining his contemporary reality. Then he discovered that the Bible said something similar. Especially his understanding of sin resembled some strands in Paul and Augustine and Luther. He read all the Christian sources. He worked out the analysis at length in his treatment of Christian intellectual history, showing that this view is the classic Christian tradition and liberals just forgot it.

Niebuhr did not say that this understanding of human nature is right because it is in the Bible. Nor did he say that it is right because the church fathers taught it. He said that it is right because it makes sense. It described what he was seeing in Detroit, what anybody with their eyes open could perceive about the way human nature operates. Niebuhr thought that the Protestant doctrine of sin—which in the sixteenth century would have been stated by an appeal to the Bible—could be updated and translated into terms acceptable within a liberal epistemology, within a doctrine of knowledge that uses reason and is open-minded about all the evidence of modernity.

Grace as pardon

According to Niebuhr, if we analyze our social experience, we will discover that sin is a social structure. Institutions are selfish neither by fluke nor by flaw but by nature. Institutions exist precisely in order to express the selfishness of groups competing against other groups. Seen as a personal structure, human nature is prey to transcendence and finitude, pride and sensuality. Therefore we cannot promise to replace sinfulness, or expect it to go away, or even hope that we can educate ourselves out of it or structure our society out of it. No, what Christian faith provides are resources for living with that sinfulness.

The first resource is forgiveness. Niebuhr saw grace as pardon rather than as enablement and moral power. Although we cannot help being sinners, God still loves us, accepts us, and uses us. No Christian tradition had denied that grace is pardon, but in the Wesleyan movement and in some high church or Catholic circles—even in some Reformed circles—the tendency had been to talk about God’s grace as enablement. God’s grace can help us do right. We can be guided by revelation, by proclamation, by the teaching of the church, by redeemed reason, even by being empowered in our will by sanctification. For these Christians, grace enables us to hope that the world will get better. Grace is the credit we give to God for the potential in the human situation for good. Niebuhr did not deny that potential, but he saw it as the small end of reality. What really matters is to keep seeing grace as pardon, as God’s forgiveness, as the possibility to go on even when we have blown it.

The significance of pacifism

Pacifism, in Niebuhr’s thought, is important for understanding the universality of sinfulness. The best way to see how sinful we are is to accept the relevance of Jesus’s command of indiscriminate love. God commands love, and love means a total commitment to the welfare of the neighbor, including the enemy. Niebuhr did not debate the pacifist call to love the enemy. Instead he said that it is only when the commandment is stated that radically, as pacifism rightly states it, that we know we cannot do it. Niebuhr updated what the Lutheran tradition calls the elenctic use of the law: the function of God’s law is first to show us that we are sinners. Luther had made this claim about the Ten Commandments and other laws. Niebuhr applied it to the Sermon on the Mount; the function of these teachings of Jesus is to show us that we need forgiveness. As pacifists claim, anything less than loving the enemy, anything less than bearing the cross for the enemy because of God’s love for the enemy, is less than God demands.

Niebuhr and liberal Protestant pacifism

Now we are in a position to spell out Niebuhr’s relation to liberal Protestant pacifism. This pacifism (or nonviolence in a broader sense) was the basic issue that led to Niebuhr’s theological change. He did not come to a different theology on the grounds of speculation, exegesis, or history. He came to a new theology because of his struggle with pacifism’s inadequacy in response to World War II. In that sense, he was clearly a part of the liberal pacifist movement. It is from there that he moved on, still in its terms, with regard to its agenda, stated in its way.

In social strategy Niebuhr remained theologically liberal. He believed in reason, in calculations of effectiveness, and in managing the social system—as do all decent folks in the democratic world where people hope for something better. He was a liberal in the sense that he sought truth by listening to all kinds of evidence. Biblical authority was not the last word for Niebuhr, although he thought it is good to know what the Bible says. He also believed that we can find something helpful in the church fathers, especially if we already know what we think and find that the fathers agree with us. He was not orthodox in any theological sense.

Niebuhr was still with liberalism in wanting a humane ethic. He did not say about war that anything goes. He wanted the social system that kills the fewest people. The reason to mobilize against Hitler was that if, out of a desire for peace, we fail to stop him, a worse war could be the result. Pacifism can aggravate the issues by siding with inaction or reaction; that course can actually get more people killed than Niebuhr’s nonpacifism would. Pacifism also can provoke the flip over into the crusade. If we keep saying, “We will not fight, because fighting is wrong,” but then cannot hold the dike, we may end up not with a modest use of violence but with a crusade like Woodrow Wilson’s war to end war, or like the Vietnam crusade. In order to explain itself and have a good conscience, the same idealism that tries to hold the dike against the pressure for war, once it gives in, becomes a crusading idealism rather than a realistic, pessimistic nonpacifism. In Niebuhr’s assessment, pacifism makes war worse. If it stops a war from happening now, the war that happens later will be even worse, because Hitler has got a running start. And the war fought by the formerly pacifist will be waged with greater self-righteousness, because in order to make the case for war, they have to be prouder of it.

Niebuhr against the crusade

So Niebuhr stood with pacifism against the crusade, against overkill, and against surrounding warmaking with ideological claims. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was critical of John Foster Dulles’s self-righteousness about saving the free world. Dulles taught a doctrine of massive retaliation, and he advocated forming a network of alliances around the world to restrain the influence of communism. Niebuhr was against that kind of overkill or political crusade in peacetime and in wartime. He opposed any notion that Western liberal nations could make the world good. But sometimes, with regard to responsibility (his word)—or his strong statements suggesting that it is our duty out of love to work for justice, and that justice does the best it can for the neighbor—we glimpse elements of what we might call Constantinian optimism. Niebuhr’s thought still contains optimism, in the responsibility to make the world come out right. Therefore in discussion with Niebuhr, and especially with Niebuhrianism made into a general social policy, it is fitting to see that the vision is to make the world come out right, or at least as well as possible.

Yet what Niebuhr meant by making the world come out right is so realistic, so aware of how little we can do to make it come out right, that he was not at all a crusader. He was not proud about how nearly right we could make things, because he was pessimistic even about the good guys. Over against the slogan, “Make the world come out right” (which is one way to talk about ethical responsibility), for Niebuhr social ethics is “just one damn thing after another.”[4] We cannot have an overarching social policy or claim to be improving things. Nobody is on top of things that much. We must just do the best we can in one mess after another. But doing the best we can usually entails some violence. We cannot get out of using violence by being pure or realistic. Getting out of it is not an available option.

In all his pessimism and his realism about the temptations of pride, Niebuhr retained a moral passion. We still ought to get in there and do the right thing. That right thing is not a liberal pacifist right thing, but it is still much more important than staying home. It is sinful, it is finite, and we are self-righteous when we do it, but it is still better than not doing it. What we must do is sin; it is destructive, it falls short of perfect love, and it is not unselfishness. Yet it is the right sin to commit. It is much better than the wrong sin. Niebuhr remained a pacifist in that he called this use of violence sin, as a mainstream just war theorist would not do except at the edges.

Niebuhr’s critique of varieties of pacifism

The issue of pacifism was the point at which Niebuhr became an independent theologian. It was not one of many questions; it was the central issue. Even if peace were not our theme—if we were talking about contemporary theology in general—we would still have to talk about ethics, and specifically about the issue of violence and war. Niebuhr’s condemnation of optimism also focused on wider social questions, especially on economics. Yet it was at the point of war that he made his turn in the mid-1930s. This is one of the striking points of theological history, that the issue of war is itself the hinge on which theological innovation and reformulation turn.

There are several kinds of pacifism; each has its own validity. We are going to talk for now about four, although the first three belong together.

The absolutist believes in simple obedience to Jesus’s clear words. If this is your position, Niebuhr would say, “God bless you. You cannot promise social effectiveness, nor can you normally be involved in social conflict. Yet if you believe in that simple obedience, your position is consistent. It usually means social withdrawal. But it is what Jesus said, so you have that on your side.”

Others hold pacifism as a special vocation. They do not impose it on everybody. They do not say that Jesus’s word is the last word for everybody. They say, “My calling is to take that path and to live my life that way.” But not everybody has to do that. Both of these forms of pacifism can claim to have Jesus on their side, to be consistent and honest. Neither claims to do the world any good; both are socially irrelevant and modest. Niebuhr thought it was good to have Mennonites around who espoused these forms of pacifism, because they make the rest of us feel bad, and that’s what the gospel is for—to convince us of sin, so we can receive grace as pardon.

A third form of pacifism is the pacifism of effective nonviolence. Moral Man in Immoral Society has a passage strongly commending Gandhi for having found a good way for weak people to push the world around. In the 1930s, Niebuhr claimed—prophetically, as it turned out—that this kind of nonviolence was probably the only way that American blacks would get their rights. Nonviolent action is the right thing to do, according to Niebuhr, but it is not absolutist pacifism, and it is not vocational pacifism. It is nonviolent power. It is involved, it cares about effectiveness, it compromises, it pushes people around, it analyzes, and it overcomes resistance. Niebuhr saw active nonviolence as honest. It does not love enemies in the direct sense of turning the other cheek, although it may respect their rights or their welfare. It does not kill our enemies and may be interested in winning them, but it does not love them in the deep sense. It claims to be effective and it claims to be righteous. Niebuhr argued, “You cannot have all of that. You can use nonviolent action as a form of involvement, but like everything else, it is sinful.” The fact that it is nonviolent does not make it less sinful. It might even make it more sinful, if its adherents become proud.

Liberal pacifism mixes all three of these types of pacifism. That is why it is wrong, according to Niebuhr: it uses the language of purity and the language of call to cover pressure tactics and nonviolent coercion. Niebuhr thought that mix was dishonest. You can do one or the other. Both are good. But the same person or group should not try to do both, because the games are different. The absolutists and vocational pacifists have no right to gang up on those of us who take responsibility to do the dirty work of keeping society afloat. Mennonites cannot tell others not to use violence, because Mennonites do not help keep the world afloat. Nonviolent activists cannot condemn those who use violence because their nonviolent method is also selfish, and because it will work only for certain problems and not for others. There is no nonviolent way to stop Hitler, for example.

How Niebuhr interpreted Jesus over against liberal pacifism

Niebuhr consistently interpreted Jesus in opposition to liberal pacifism. Jesus taught nonresistance.[5] Yet Niebuhr argued that Jesus’s nonresistance is ahistorical. It is not in the real world, so we cannot apply it to ourselves. Why?

Jesus was socially unattached. He had no office or duties. He was an itinerant rabbi, who even left behind the responsibility of being breadwinner for his family. So Jesus does not represent people in office.

Furthermore, Jesus taught other things that liberal Christians do not believe. Matthew 5 says, “Love your enemy,” and pacifists interpret this command literally. Matthew 6 says, “Do not accumulate money,” but most liberal pacifists keep money. Yet accumulating wealth for the purpose of security and accumulating political power for physical security are parallel in logic and parallel in Jesus’s teachings. They are found in the same texts. So Niebuhr asked, how can you be literal about one and not about the other?

Jesus was also unconcerned about effectiveness. If liberals shared that unconcern about effectiveness, then Niebuhr would trust them. He would put them back in the absolutist or vocational box. Yet they claimed to be effective. They asserted that we should not have had World War I, because we could have resolved that conflict another way. They asserted that we should not arm against Hitler, because we can defend freedom in some other way. They claimed to be concerned about effectiveness. Jesus was not.

Jesus’s ethic is an individual ethic not only in the sense that it calls the individual to decision and to personal virtues, but also because the only agenda it deals with is face-to-face relationships: “If somebody slaps you on one cheek . . . If somebody makes you carry a burden for a mile . . .” These words assume a context of one-to-one relationships, in which it is possible, at least modestly, to behave as Jesus commanded. But I cannot turn my other cheek if two people slap me on the cheek at the same time. I cannot carry two people’s burdens if they are going in different directions. If I have already given away my coat and my cloak, I cannot give them to the next person who asks. So Niebuhr asserted that Jesus is not relevant to our socially structured challenges and duties.

Another reason that Jesus is irrelevant was accented a little by Niebuhr himself and more by others: Jesus could freely talk about a dramatically new lifestyle, because he thought the world would end soon. He assumed that it would only be a couple more weeks, maybe a couple months—or at worst a couple more years—until God would intervene dramatically and set up a utopia by God’s own power. We do not need to save money or correct social abuses if we think that the world will end soon. So Jesus’s eschatology, his expectation of an early end, made his ethic possible. Because that eschatology was wrong, his ethic is impossible.

For Niebuhr another consideration, very different in its logic, pushed in the same direction. Even had he wanted social responsibility, Jesus could not have had it. He could not vote, run for office, go to law school, get a job, or climb a corporate or political ladder. The people he talked to had no clout. We are in a different world in so many ways. (1) Christians now are much more numerous. (2) In modern democracies, we have freedom to participate in the social process. Our social process is not an arbitrary king, doing whatever he feels like. (3) Since Constantine, all the people in office are members of the church. (4) Since the Renaissance, we have tools to interpret social process in terms of causality, sociology, and political science. Unlike people in antiquity, we know what makes things happen. (5) The stated commitment of our government is that we are our government; citizen responsibility and accountability are axiomatic. We could not reject responsibility even if we wanted to. These are new facts in the human situation that Jesus could not deal with. We do not hold that fact against him. Still, these changes make his teaching irrelevant.

So how did Niebuhr use Jesus’s teaching and make it relevant? By using love in two ways. Niebuhr sees love as (1) absolute suffering, as a principle of indiscriminate criticism that makes us all guilty, and as (2) a principle of discriminating criticism that helps us make relative judgments within the constraints of the possible, so we can do the best we can. We should keep the love command present, but that is really all the help we can get from Jesus. For Niebuhr, the case for responsibility does not have to be argued; it is just there. We are responsible. The constitution gives us responsibility. We cannot avoid responsibility by not voting, because not voting means a vote for the majority. The fact that we hold property, which is defended by the police and by the laws, means we are responsible. There is no way around having responsibility. We can choose to act in acknowledgment of it, or we can run away from it. If we run away, as Mennonites have done, that may be morally respectable. If we try to exercise our responsibilities with pragmatic nonviolence, that choice is good, and it may work, but we should not claim that it is clean. What we cannot do is mix a claim to act on biblical authority—which should lead to nonresistance—in supporting nonviolent resistance, which claims an effectiveness we cannot deliver and fails to resist Hitler’s tyranny. Democracies are selfish and feeble, but they are preferable to Hitler. When we have a choice between Hitler and a democratic state, and they are going to be killing each other anyway, we should at least, on the grounds of relative love, choose the less evil side.

The impact of Niebuhr

For Protestant America, and perhaps for all Christian America, Reinhold Niebuhr became the major theological mind of the twentieth century. That claim is especially true if we measure his impact by the attention he garnered from nontheologians beyond the church. Even Jimmy Carter claimed to get his political wisdom from Niebuhr, although I am not sure that was all that was wrong with it. Hans Morgenthau, who articulated the dominant political science view after World War II, was close to Niebuhr. In terms of public impact, Niebuhr has been read and heard.

Confronted with the rise of Hitler and with Niebuhr’s critique, the liberal Protestant peace thrust, so prominent in the 1920s and early 1930s, collapsed. It collapsed sociologically: the people who had joined it left it. The people who had pledged that they would never fight again changed their minds. The organizations that were set up around those pledges largely collapsed, with the exception of a few hardcore near-anarchists in the War Resisters League, a quiet circle in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and a core of committed Christians in the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Only those agencies survived, and they lost many members.

Liberal pacifism collapsed because it did not have an ethical answer to Hitler. The pacifists of the 1930s had an answer to World War I but not to the new threat of Hitler. The same people who in the 1930s said they would not have been willing to fight in World War I were willing, if necessary, to fight in World War II.

And then came Niebuhr’s critique, which argued against the theology of liberal pacifism from its ethic. His critique did not proceed from a challenge to its epistemology—the place of scripture, common sense, or experience—or its view of the church and the church’s place in Western society, or its view of atonement and the place of suffering. In those respects Niebuhr was still liberal. It was from its political ethic that he collapsed its theology.

Other kinds of Protestantism had not been swept along in the liberal stream and therefore did not need Niebuhr. The traditional Missouri Synod Lutherans and traditional Grand Rapids Christian Reformed, for example, simply stayed nonpacifist, as they had been. Niebuhr did not argue with them, nor did he prove anything that needed to be proved to them.

The remaining pacifists, whether peace church people or the few lonely pacifists left in the large churches, had to respond to Niebuhr. American theologians and ethicists could no longer think and write as if he had not been there. Already during the war, and especially right after it, people began to talk about a chastened pacifism, or about how a pacifist commitment would have to be redefined after Niebuhr’s critique and the events of World War II. After 1945, there were no pacifist writers to speak of who did not take account of Niebuhr’s analysis.

Niebuhr’s impact on Mennonite thought reinforced a Mennonite tendency to dualistic analysis. He provided tools for Mennonite thinkers, at both ends of the theological and sociological spectrum, to identify Mennonite nonresistance as different from pacifism. For a while, Mennonites used the word pacifism for what we did not believe. Guy Hershberger and Harold Bender, key leaders at Goshen, continued to use the word in a good sense. In the main stream of Mennonite popular media and preaching, however, pacifism was a bad word, because it was associated with theological liberalism and social optimum. Pacifists were people who thought you could save the world without making people Christian.

Two Mennonite writers who both responded to Niebuhr and liberal pacifism are significant typologically. John R. Mumaw was a Bible teacher and then president of Eastern Mennonite College, the most sociologically and theologically conservative of the Mennonite schools at the time. The separation between nonresistance and pacifism that he argued for defended Mennonite isolation and dualism. Donovan Smucker was at the other end of the Mennonite spectrum. He had served as a staff member for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Early in World War II, he visited Civilian Public Service camps and helped Mennonite draftees make sense of their peace commitment and see the meaningfulness of their Mennonite commitment and pacifist identity. He became convinced of Niebuhr’s critique of liberal pacifism and completely denounced that pacifism. So one of the most educated, urbane, sophisticated, theologically informed Mennonite thinkers and one of the solidest voices for intelligently conservative eastern Mennonitism said the same thing.[6] Both said that to be nonresistant, we must withdraw into our Mennonite enclave and refuse to be the kind of pacifists who think they are effective.

At the same time, Franklin Littell, a Methodist campus organizer and pastor, reinforced the Mennonites from another angle. He came to conclusions similar to Smucker’s and Mumaw’s: Gandhi and pragmatism are consistent but that stance is not really suffering love. Nonresistant withdrawal is consistent but it withdraws. In between the two are the people who think they can do good in the world, who are wrong at both ends.[7]

The point of this historical treatment is to recognize that, at least on the level of what was articulated, Mennonite dualism that says we cannot do anything in the wider world—because we want to be different from those pacifists who are naive about the possibilities of good—was not learned so much from four centuries of minority history as from accommodation to Reinhold Niebuhr. So Mennonite theology of separation in its most important formulation was derived from a professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary. The idea that Mennonites should try to be systematically apolitical is post-Niebuhr. Our sense of what it means to be consistently different from the world at the point of violence is interpreted not in forms that come from our own story, not in terms drawn from the wider peace church story of Penn and Garrison and Tolstoy, but from accepting the backhanded compliment that Niebuhr gave us when he said we are consistent but irrelevant. Since Niebuhr, Mennonites have been trying to live up to that compliment. It seemed like a better compliment than we had gotten from anybody else, so we tried to be irrelevant. Then we could at least be proud of our consistency.[8]

In the next chapter we will examine more deeply the impact on peace churches, especially the Mennonites, of Niebuhr’s critique.

Mennonites after Niebuhr

The preceding chapter reported briefly on the experience of Mennonites as they partook of the American Protestant experience under the impact of Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be helpful to place this encounter in the wider context of a longer history, even at the price of repeating some details. Niebuhrian thought, so important for North American liberal Protestant pacifism, also had an impact on peace churches. This impact was different in the different peace churches, because each had developed its own theological culture. Some Brethren and Friends felt quite at home within the wider liberal Protestant stream, and they responded to Niebuhr in the ways that were possible from the liberal Protestant perspective. Some were talked out of their pacifism on general liberal Protestant grounds. Niebuhr’s commonsense rationality about fallen human nature, not bound to a literal understanding of biblical authority, showed reasonable people that thorough pacifism is irresponsible and that Hitler had to be stopped. Thus some Friends and more Brethren outgrew their pacifism in the face of the Niebuhrian critique.[1]

Mennonite appropriation of Niebuhr’s critique is different for a number of reasons. For one, Niebuhr claimed to be biblical. He quoted Genesis and Paul. He did not interpret the Bible as an orthodox Protestant—to say nothing of an evangelical—would, but he did claim to agree with the Bible in his doctrine of human nature, the power of sin, and the need for God’s saving intervention. This characteristic made him sound closer to Mennonites than did the traditional liberal optimism about humanity to which Mennonites and most other historically rooted churches reacted negatively.

Second, Niebuhr agreed with Mennonites (against the older orthodox Protestant traditions) that Jesus taught nonresistance. Niebuhr’s understanding of the absolute love that Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount was not quite the same as the cross-bearing suffering love of the Anabaptist vision, or the war of the Lamb or the Inner Light of Quaker peace witness. But it sounded more like Anabaptist and Quaker peace witness than did the traditional just war doctrines with which Protestant and Catholic traditions had set Jesus aside.

Third, within the context of this respect for what Jesus actually meant, Niebuhr had a place for vocational pacifist minorities such as Mennonites. As long as Mennonites recognize that they are not responsible and therefore are not doing everything that morally must be done, Mennonites can find consolation in knowing that they are at least doing one indispensable thing, which only a vocationally nonresponsible minority can do: incarnate Jesus’s radical critique of those who make necessary compromises and dirty their hands. If Mennonites think they are right in some ultimate moral sense, or that most Christians should join them, they are wrong. If they think they have solutions to the world’s problems (as other pacifists think), they are even more wrong. But if they grant their inability to solve problems, and accept their nonresponsible absenteeism in mainstream social structures as backhanded complicity in the way things are going to happen anyway, then their position has dignity. Mennonites are a Protestant analogy to the monastic minorities in the Catholic cultural synthesis.

The Old Mennonite experience

This chapter’s narrative gives most attention to the Mennonite Church (“Old” Mennonite) experience.[2] The Old Mennonite constituency constituted a pool of articulate conservatism, which saw itself as specifically Mennonite and conservative. One particular segment of Old Mennonite intellectual leadership picked up as a compliment the characterization that the Niebuhrians offered. “Niebuhr says Mennonites have Jesus on our side,” these leaders thought. “We have a respectable place on the scene, as long as we recognize that we are politically irrelevant. Let us accept political irrelevance as a badge of integrity and argue that it is the right way to be disciples.” This worldly judgment of political irrelevance coincided in a striking way with the conservative experience of sociological nonconformity and separation. Old Mennonites accepted not only the general statement that Mennonite pacifism is respectable but also Niebuhr’s analysis of why it is respectable and why it is irrelevant.

So Mennonites agreed both that they were following Jesus, and that in order to follow Jesus they must be “apolitical.” They agreed that the very nature of political relationships is intrinsically violent; therefore true Christians can never have anything to do with it. They agreed that it is possible to get out of the social mix completely, in such a way as to be pure. They agreed that people trying to be pure have to withdraw. They agreed to a legal vision of how purity and sinfulness relate. Whereas Niebuhr understood the call to legal obedience as “the law,” which condemns because we all find ourselves sinners when we discover that we cannot keep it, Mennonites took that same legal description as a fair characterization of what they could do: be morally acceptable through social withdrawal.

Niebuhrian analysis reinforced Mennonite self-conscious nonconformity so powerfully that one school of thought within the Old Mennonite community has defined being Mennonite as being apolitical. The periodicals The Sword and the Trumpet and Guidelines for Today articulate this view. The call for distance from everything overtly political has meant that those representing this school of thought have criticized both Mennonite agencies’ social activism and also any concern with the details of how government operates. They opposed all war, and they thought it improper to state objection to a particular war on the grounds that it is worse than other wars. They thought that Mennonites could not bear office, because all involvement in political management partakes of the essential character of the entire system. For that reason, they also objected to criticizing those who do serve; Mennonites should—like the early church—pray for those in power and give them the benefit of the doubt. Thus this position, which sees itself as apolitical, is in fact a very conservative political partisanship in favor of the present regime and its stated goals.

This analysis drove a wedge between peace church pacifists, who accepted the dignity of an irrelevant vocational purity, and those who believed they had a calling to make the world more peaceful by contributing to programmatically possible solutions of the world’s problems.

Theological and cultural shifts after World War II

The dramatic experience of World War II brought these issues to a head. The issue of what kind of pacifists Mennonites wanted to be was congruent with the much bigger issue of what kind of Americans and what kind of Christians Mennonites were becoming. From different perspectives, Mennonites had just begun to join America. Those who had immigrated from Russia in the 1870s were perhaps more ready than some of the earlier groups to adjust to English language and culture, but because they had arrived more recently, they were just beginning to make that adjustment. For a longer period, the earlier groups of Swiss background had maintained a separate culture, with its dimensions of self-conscious separatism and nonconformity. For the latter it was not, as for the Russian immigrants, simply a matter of changing to a new language. It meant outgrowing what had been defined as a set of defenses against worldliness and urbanity, of which the English language was only one symbol. In the nineteenth century, this beginning adjustment led to several splits among Swiss-background Mennonites in America.[3]

In the twentieth century, church colleges expanded between the world wars. In 1920 Mennonites barely tolerated higher education, but by 1940 Mennonites accepted their church colleges as the preferred instruments for training future leaders. These colleges prepared a generation of especially qualified leaders for whom the separateness of the German-speaking rural community was no longer convincing. It was in fact what many wished to avoid. But the peace commitment, which World War II tested, was not necessarily linked with rural nonconformity. Those same culturally aggressive college products, who could never go back to the farm, evidenced idealism and sacrifice in their readiness to go into Civilian Public Service, an experience of community solidarity and sacrifice that had profound effects on the self-understanding not only of the young men in alternative service but also of the churches that supported them.

The simple way to describe what happened is to say that the pattern we saw in the writings of John R. Mumaw, Donovan E. Smucker, and Franklin H. Littell was convincing to many. A new generation of educated Mennonites made sense of things by uniting the leftovers of an old tradition of nonconformity and simple biblicism with some sophisticated modern social science realism. The difference between nonresistance (what Niebuhr respected) and pacifism (what Niebuhr, Littell, Mumaw, and Smucker had unveiled as unrealistic, impossible, and self-righteous) correlated in a striking way with an older Mennonite dualism. After all, for centuries Mennonites had been resigned to the fact that Mennonite ethics is only for Mennonites, and that the wider Christian world has to be let alone in its commitment to a non-Mennonite ethic. In other words, Niebuhr provided Mennonites with a new rationale for a dualism in ethics whereby war and violence and oppression are wrong for the “true” Christian (minority peace church Christians), and yet not really utterly wrong for the wider world (the non-Mennonite, English-speaking, churchgoing ruling powers of the countries that give us asylum).

Mennonite privilege and Quaker conscience

By reviewing the earlier history of the conscientious objector experience, we can illuminate the story of how Niebuhrian theology reinforced Mennonite nonconformity, in which Mennonites felt at home in a progovernmental abstention from party involvement. The Anglo-Saxon experience of conscientious objection—including the label itself—arose out of Quaker nonconformity, an involved and aggressive nonconformity. Quakers took responsibility for witness amid the events of the time; they participated in those events. They believed that both the way God works in history and the way God works in the heart—to say nothing of the way God works in the meeting—reinforce possibilities for meaningful participation in the way society goes. Thus Quaker pacifism has tended to be critical of existing systems.

Second, the Anglo-Saxon experience focused in its phraseology and in its legal philosophy on individual liberty. The very term conscientious objector focuses on the claim that the reason individuals are unique, and the reason we should respect their uniqueness, is their individual consciences. By the very nature of things, conscience must not be and cannot be measured by anything outside the one possessing it and that person’s own integrity. It is the peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon governmental system that it gives this kind of dignity to the conscience of the individual.

In the United States and Canada, Mennonite experience has until recently been fundamentally different in its long-range sociology and self-understanding. Beginning already in the latter part of the sixteenth century in a few unrepresentative places where a local lord would be tolerant, becoming more marked in the next generations, then becoming the dominant pattern by the end of the seventeenth century, German-speaking Mennonites in most places where they survived in Europe were, like Jews, the privileged protégés of local lords and princes. Local landlords would invite Mennonite farmers to clear a forest, settle a waste place, or drain a swampy valley. These lords generally preferred these outsiders to the ordinary peasants in the settled villages of their domain. Some reasons for this preference had to do with Mennonites’ social virtues: they worked harder, did not get in trouble, and paid their rent. Other reasons had to do with their weakness and vulnerability. Knowing that they were foreigners without civil rights, Mennonites were grateful to their hosts. Because they were guests and often refugees, they were grateful for a peaceful place to live and work. They would not raise critical questions about the legitimacy of the lord’s sovereignty or the quality of his government.

But the villagers often saw these Mennonites—as they often saw Jews who found refuge around a princely house—as privileged rather than as outsiders. This kind of special status was even more offensive in those cases (which may have been exceptional but did exist) in which Mennonites were brought in to farm land taken from villagers through seizure, taxation, and expropriation.[4] The Mennonite tenant farmers were of another religion and nationality, often spoke another language, and did not intermarry with the villagers. These factors contributed to their being understood, not only in the minds of the local villagers or peasants, but also in their own minds and in the mind of the lord, as allies of the feudal political and/or property system rather than as its critics. Thus Mennonites moved around Europe into places of refuge and were granted religious liberty not because it was the right of all citizens and they were also citizens, but because it was a privilege granted by arbitrary sovereigns to noncitizens. It was in the interest of these lords to play these hardworking and grateful foreigners off against poorer and less submissive subjects. The word privilege meant originally (and still means today in Paraguay) a private law, a law that does not apply equally to all but specifically to one kind of beneficiary.

Religious liberty in the Puritan reformation and in the Netherlands after William of Orange was a part of the growing objectivity and neutrality of democratic government. The religious liberty that Mennonites experienced elsewhere was like toleration of the Jews. It was a privilege granted by a sovereign. If you know which side your bread is buttered on, such privileges make you a friend of the sovereign.

What was true about religious tolerance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries carried over in almost the same form to the dispensation from military service. Mennonites enjoyed this privilege in various parts of German-speaking Europe when universal military training had become the pattern. Exemption from military service was not based on the sovereign’s respect for the integrity of every individual conscience. Therefore it was not too important to debate how deeply any particular Mennonite young man had thought through the problem of violence. This dispensation was, rather, part of a deal abundantly paid for by the cultural and economic performance of these immigrant groups, and by their reliability as subjects who would not revolt. It was not a right but a privilege. It was based not on integrity of conscience but on alternative benefits rendered to the sovereign. Consequently, it correlated with a fundamentally loyalist rather than a fundamentally critical attitude toward the lord’s regime as such, and especially toward his warlike qualities or the particular causes for which he chose to go to war.

When Mennonites came to North America, the terrain had been prepared by Quakers and Baptists with a conception of conscience different from the conception of privilege with which they were familiar. Seldom were they conscious of that difference, but what was soon apparent was Mennonites’ tendency toward loyalism and patriotism: We do not fight, because our religion tells us not to fight, but we are grateful to live in this free land. Therefore we agree with our neighbors and our governments that the wars they fight for our freedom are causes worthy of victory. We cannot, because of our ghetto culture and its moral scruples, contribute directly to that military success, but we want to avoid being obstructionists. We want to make our contribution as we can to the national effort. The form taken by our prayer for peace is our confidence—like that of Origen—that the peace God wants will be best reached through our nation’s victory. This is the position which I have called “The Non-Pacifist Nonresistance of the Mennonite ‘Second Wind.’”[5] Our interest here is in seeing that its solidity, coherence, and capacity to convince were strangely reinforced or renewed by the appropriation of a Niebuhrian analysis of the relevance of Jesus to social power.

Unsurprisingly, quite soon some found this solidly conservative restatement unsatisfactory, and as time went on, many more agreed. One set of unconvinced younger Mennonites were those whose acculturation had proceeded so far that reconstituting any dualism between church and world did not make sense. Their jobs in professions or commerce, or their education in the liberal arts or the social sciences or the disciplines auxiliary to the helping professions, had brought them into involvements simply irreconcilable with the language of church/world dualism. Some of them may have felt that in that social involvement they were making a specific and faithful Christian pacifist contribution without moral compromise. More of them felt that they had learned from their teachers or from hard experience that moral compromise is inevitable in the real world, quite apart from the question of violence and war. They had become Niebuhrian about matters other than violence. In business or law, they became sure that one cannot be perfectly loving.

Mennonite responses to the American civil rights movement

One major new experience was the response of Mennonite thinkers to the nonviolent action of American civil rights movement. Niebuhr, followed by Franklin Littell and Donovan Smucker, had said that this form of nonviolent action was derived from pragmatic pacifism. It might (or might not) be pragmatically effective, but it was not nonresistance, not derived from Jesus, not based on firm moral principle. Guy F. Hershberger during World War II had addressed this same criticism to the Gandhian tradition, especially in its westernized form as shaped by Richard Gregg and Krishnalal Shridharani.[6] Nevertheless, when the American civil rights movement got a new lease on life with events in Montgomery, Alabama (as recorded in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom),[7] Hershberger—on the basis of personal visits and conversation—was affirmative toward what King was doing.[8] Until then, he had seemed to accept the way Reinhold Niebuhr had identified the question; he had directed toward nonviolent activism in the Gandhian tradition (including the beginning of civil rights activism in the U.S.) the charge that it was coercive, but he did not firmly define that adjective. He wrote, for example,

Nonresistants cannot take part in pressure campaigns, in strikes, in picketing, or in devices designed to compel others to do justice to the Negro. . . . This is the method used by some of Gandhi’s followers, and . . . it is really a form of class warfare. . . . The nonresistant Christian cannot follow the methods of the nonviolent coercionists in demanding justice for . . . the Negro . . . , neither can he share the common prejudices and attitudes toward these people. His own attitude and his own relation must be thoroughly Christian.[9]

Still, Hershberger’s rejection of Gandhian concepts of class struggle, as they were then understood, left open the door for other kinds of action which would also be nonviolent but would be driven by a spirit of love. This door was entered when the nation and the churches learned of the 1957 Montgomery bus boycott. Hershberger’s favorable comments about King, and Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section’s placing of Vincent Harding in Atlanta, reopened the question, which has not come to rest since then.[10]

Reasons for Mennonite separateness

Hershberger’s text cited above, when taken alone, might give the mistaken impression that the thought of Niebuhr was directly causative in leading separatist Mennonites to take a “withdrawn” position. It is rather the case that American Mennonites were separatistic for a large number of reasons, including (1) the sixteenth-century experience of rejection and persecution; (2) four centuries of being immigrant minorities separated from their host cultures by language, religious practice, and lifestyle; (3) borrowing from the nineteenth-century Plymouth Brethren renewal movement the notion of separation as a theological virtue (an idea that had points of contact in the earlier Anabaptist experience); (4) borrowing in the nineteenth century from revival movements of the holiness type, which separated more thoroughly the spiritual from the institutional and saw spiritual progress as being reflected in withdrawal from “worldliness”; (5) borrowing from the early phases of fundamentalist renewal, in which an institutional and conceptual rejection of mainstream liberal churches became a theological imperative; (6) disappointment with the breakdown of the social optimism of mainstream cooperative Protestantism in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the initial antiwar position of the Federal Council of Churches folded and Mennonites were again, without preparation, obliged to stand alone as conscientious objectors; and (7) the “recovery of the Anabaptist vision,” a movement of intellectual rediscovery and synthesis giving a new confidence to American Mennonites after the 1927 founding of Mennonite Quarterly Review, and especially after the 1943 presentation of Harold S. Bender’s programmatic essay, “The Anabaptist Vision.”[11]

It was thus not from Niebuhr that separatist ideas were derived. It is rather that in the 1940s the intellectual and cultural power of Niebuhr’s reformulation drove bright young Mennonite thinkers into an updating of the older dichotomous analyses, despite the fact that their education and general socialization in American culture would have otherwise predisposed them to outgrow that separatism. Donovan Smucker, for example, though educated and socialized in American culture, updated and reformulated John R. Mumaw’s position. Likewise, Franklin Littell’s sympathetic outside analysis closely paralleled this Mennonite update. Both Smucker and Littell, like Niebuhr, had come through a Fellowship of Reconciliation phase. They had seen through the superficiality and unfounded optimism of some in that movement. Thus the analysis for which Reinhold Niebuhr was the best spokesman came to be the dominant analysis in Mennonite thought, without his ever being recognized as its source when Mennonites were explaining themselves to themselves.

A new phase of self-consciousness about Mennonite antipacifist separatism emerged after the memories of the World War II experience were fading and replaced by smaller challenges such as the Cuban missile crisis and American involvement in Vietnam. Here, because Mennonite young men were not called to great sacrifice, it was easier to restate the conservative position that war, although wrong for Mennonite Christians, is right for American governments. The advocates of that view by this time were more widely read. They could quote the statements of Niebuhr or John C. Bennett to the effect that the credibility of the Mennonite position would be in proportion to the thoroughness of Mennonite withdrawal from concrete political references. Increasingly, this convinced separatism (as distinguished in degree from inherited separatism represented by Mumaw) became one of the concerns of the Mennonite opinion magazine The Sword and Trumpet, and to an even greater extent, of the newly created Guidelines for Today.

Niebuhr and Mennonites in the late twentieth century

By the early 1980s, Reinhold Niebuhr is less known or read, while the analysis of which he was the classical spokesman is more and more taken for granted. The same is the case on the other side of the spectrum. Mennonites who are more integrated in mainstream cultural thought, and therefore more critical of the traditional separatist positions, do not deny that their pacifism is “more involved.” They differ with Niebuhr about approval for war. Nevertheless, they agree with Niebuhr’s thought categories in the sense that they use such words as involvement and compromise with the same meanings and frame of reference.

Most of the above discussion reflects internal identity questions of North American Mennonites. We should note briefly the fact that a great number of broad questions arise if one seriously contemplates relating these views to some other world, whether to other Christians (ecumenical relations) or to missionary outreach as is especially represented by classical foreign missionary activity. What is the place of the peace position in defining how Mennonites relate to other people? Some Mennonites present arguments according to which this element of identity is so centrally a part of the gospel that we must make sure that it is present. We need to compensate for its having been neglected by others. For that reason we should be willing to run the risk of making it seem central or definitional for our identity as other matters are not. Another set of missionaries, while continuing to affirm the nonresistant commitment as part of the full breadth of moral faithfulness, would share with the wider society or the wider church the view that the ground floor of Christian faith does not include it. It is a special piece of extra baggage, a distinctive vocational mission for a few. When relating to other Christians who do not have that special vocation—and even more when trying to win for the gospel “as such” people who have known nothing of it—it would be out of balance to make much of this distinctiveness. Even more would missionaries hesitate if teaching pacifism would jeopardize their visa status in the host country or divide the young churches there.[12]

Biblical Realism and the Politics of Jesus

We did not begin this course with the Bible. Neither do we save the Bible for last, as if a historical survey would answer all the questions. Instead, this biblical survey is part of a chronological development that has contributed to our intellectual world. For several reasons, a biblical investigation is more fitting now than it would have been as a launching pad at the beginning of our story.

Forces contributing to renewed biblical study

A first factor making it appropriate to treat the biblical material at this point is Niebuhrian analysis that has opened new questions. We have seen how an understanding of Jesus as apolitical combines revering Jesus with justifying behavior counter to his teaching and example.[1] Therefore we return to the documents with a more modest, more pointedly defined question. We will not ask, does Jesus teach pacifism? Niebuhr takes that for granted. Instead we will ask whether, according to the biblical accounts, Jesus’s pacifism was apolitical.

Alongside Reinhold Niebuhr’s analysis, a second factor we see is a new level of consciousness of ecumenical diversity in our time. Christians (like other religious people) have always differed about the proper interpretation of their heritage. Yet only in modern times do we have to face these matters with a clarity forced on us by the end of establishment and the rise of critical intellectual disciplines. As long as one established truth had the power of the state behind it, we had no need and no equipment for a fresh reading of canonical literature. Now all such recourse to establishment is gone. Scripture again comes into its own as the court of appeal, and its interpreters cannot force their conclusions on others but can only call on the intrinsic (nonviolent) capacity of their arguments to convince others.

In the third place, we are aided by the waning power of the scholastic Protestant orthodox approach to scriptural interpretation, especially as one strand of conservative evangelicalism brought it into our century.[2] For that orthodoxy, scripture’s perspicuity guarantees that we can understand without problems what the Bible says; practically, the idea of perspicuity means that these believers already know what scripture says. Infallibility protects against any significant clash with people holding other perspectives. For those within this world, a “high” conception of the authority of the scriptures—and a very high level of trust in their own adequacy to interpret the scriptures—has meant a low level of expectancy concerning whether those sacred sources have much more to teach us. Proponents of this infallibility have invested more intellectual creativity in defending their faith in debate with doubters and critics than in studying the texts themselves in renewed depth, intensity, or originality. Thus the chances that a newly relevant biblicism could rally a new evangelical social movement were undercut not by liberals but by the loudest “evangelical” voices.

Fourth, at the same time, people for whom the biblical literature does not have such a classically defined absolute authority have invested time and creativity in bringing effective new tools to bear on its interpretation. These tools include more knowledge in history and archaeology, and more sophistication in semantics and grammar. Real engagement with the texts was left to postliberal scholars in respectable ecumenical schools (Otto Piper, Paul Minear, Oscar Cullmann, and Karl Barth, for example). Biblical studies since the 1930s have been coming out from under the shadow of the old debates between Protestant and Catholic, and between scholastic and liberal Protestantism, and have found freedom to discover dimensions of the witness of these ancient texts that had not been brought to light by the scholastic epoch’s way of putting the questions.

Because our age asks questions about power and the social shape of truth, it also finds in canonical documents elements that speak to those questions. Earlier Protestant interpretation did not find such elements, because it did not ask these questions.

One particular subcase of this postcritical reorientation is called biblical realism.[3] This movement has brought about a paradigm shift in Bible reading, so that traditional dualist approaches—which separated outward from inward or human from divine—have given way to more holistic styles of reading. This holistic reunion of the physical and the social with the psychical and mental correlates culturally with the passing of the age of establishment and a renewed acceptance of the social agenda as a properly religious concern. So these new readings of scripture are both partly provoked by and partly an answer to the new questions of our day. Here I will list some simple examples from contemporary biblical literature. (1) Jesus’s ministry is now recognized much more widely as having intrinsic—not only incidental—dimensions of social challenge and power. (2) The Pauline cosmology of principalities and powers is widely recognized as having both transcendent and earthly dimensions. (3) The Pauline soteriology of justification is increasingly seen as not only forensic. It is also linked to the ordinary experience of social power. (4) The apocalyptic language of the New Testament is increasingly seen as proclamation and engagement rather than mere escapism. (5) Although the documentary and archaeological basis is slim, scholars are increasingly concerned to clarify the social style and setting of the writers of scripture as making a large difference for the meaning of their words.

Finally, the maturing of the church outside the West means that Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians have not only a moral right but a calling to read the scriptures for their world and from their perspective. Like the other four changes mentioned above, this one enforces a thrust toward holism and the pertinence of the political in the formulation of good news. This reading happens in one way when the leaders of Third World churches are trained by Western missions and are able to talk back to “first world” Christians in their own idiom. The idiom of this theology of liberation is biblical, but its style encounters North Atlantic thought on the terms set by scholarship in Europe and North America. In a far different way, the independent churches, which have no direct link to the history of the church in the West, recognize no duty to talk its language, and read their Bibles “straight” in their own setting.

These changes all point in the same direction: they encourage us to expect that issues of power, community, and violence are issues to which the scriptures speak, saying things that we might not have heard before with the same clarity. This change disconnects our search from some of the traditionally polarized “evangelical” debates about inerrancy or the choice between social action and evangelism. As those dead debates are set aside, the capacity of the text to speak on topics of war, peace, and revolution increases qualitatively. That capacity to speak would make no difference if the texts in fact were interested in otherworldly concerns alone, or were intrinsically supportive of oppressive social systems. But in fact the texts do deal with matters of justice and liberation.

The political Jesus

When we go to the Bible story, and specifically to Jesus, we are not simply asking, in the broadest way, what he says about violence, loving the enemy, or Caesar, but rather about what the biblical story in general and the New Testament story in particular say to the structural question, is Jesus politically relevant? Does Jesus agree, do the Gospel writers agree, do the apostles agree, that the duality between guilty responsibility and irrelevant purity, which dominates recent debate, is the way to interpret Jesus?

Jesus faced four options.[4] In his time real people were taking each of these four positions. (1) The Zealots wanted a righteous revolution. (2) The Dead Sea sects, for the sake of faithfulness, accepted distance from the mainstream society and ran their own culture. This position is not irrelevant; it sacrifices immediate relevance, and it abandons control. Yet the Dead Sea community claimed that religious withdrawal is a spiritually and morally relevant position, and also a base from which to care about the wider society. (3) Pharisees were like the Dead Sea sects in separating themselves from wider society, but they did so within the wider society rather than by emigrating physically. They emigrated culturally, by defining a lifestyle that kept them from being fully involved in and polluted by the presence of the Roman army with its idolatry and brutality. (4) The Sadducees and the Herodians represented a strategy of responsible involvement. They made the best of a bad deal. They were not traitors to their national identity, as the Zealots thought they were; they saved Jewish national identity.

In terms of what some people would call radicality, the scale stretches from the Zealots, who were the National Liberation Front of their time, to the Qumran communities representing the withdrawal option, through the Pharisees who were in society but separate, to the establishment position of the Herodians and Sadducees. Herod was a puppet king. The Sadducees took their name from Zadok the high priest. The Sanhedrin was the Sadducees’ body, which had to work with the Romans in order to keep the temple going.

Among these options, what did Jesus do? Here we are summarizing things I have dealt with at greater length elsewhere.[5] The biblical text gives us no indication that Jesus was tempted to be a Sadducee. This is so despite the fact that most Christians over the centuries, especially after Constantine, have been attracted to the Herodian/Sadducee option that Jesus was least attracted to. He was not tempted, at least not after his baptism, to be a desert sectarian or purist. He was close to the Pharisees; they were good guys, close enough for him to debate with them. He shared their desire to follow the law. But he condemned their desire to lower the demands of the law so that they could keep it, and he criticized their neglect of the weightier things of the law.

Jesus was most like the Zealots. He was with them in condemning the present system. He was with them in his call to people to follow him and risk their lives. He was close to them in his utter independence from calculating shrewd strategies for survival or even strategies for effectiveness. Yet the Zealots were at one point like the Romans: they believed that might makes right. They believed that the morally right position needs to be implemented by superior violence, and that God will bless that course. That was Jesus’s temptation. He was tempted to be a Zealot. Yet he rejected that temptation, not because the Zealots were too radical, but because they were not radical enough. They were too much like the Romans in believing that the sword was the solution. If we see that the Zealot option was a temptation for Jesus, and if we see that his rejection of it was crucial to his definition of his ministry, then we see that the whole key to the new order is its noncoerciveness. The meaning of the kingdom that Jesus talked about is crucially defined by its noncoerciveness.

The cross was the result of the fact that Jesus’s new regime was a kingdom: he talked about it in political terms, in connection with righteousness, decision making, money, power, offenders, and all the other things that politics deals with. Yet it was noncoercive. So the way he lived it was to die for it, and he told his disciples that they would have to do the same. And if the new order is characterized by noncoerciveness, then the community that bears this order will have to be a voluntary community. And that community will therefore have to be, for the time being, a minority community.

So then we have a fifth option.[6] This option is what came later to be called “church.” Church is a minority group living by a different style. In the Greek of the time, the word ekklesia was not a religious term. It was a political, secular term. It meant “town meeting” or “assembly”: a group of people gathered to do business of public concern. Jesus created this assembly directly, by gathering people around him during his earthly ministry. He created it indirectly, because his message after the Resurrection and Pentecost produced that new kind of body within society.

Jesus as public figure

The first thing to say about the biblical picture is that Jesus is a public figure. He uses political language. The authorities perceive him as a political threat and put him to death because of it. We can discuss what share the Jews and Romans had in his death. But it is clear, hypocritically or honestly, that the legal basis for his crucifixion in the Roman record books was the charge that he was an insurrectionist. That charge is the reason for an inscription on the cross, reported in all four Gospels. He was accused of being the king of the Jews. We may still debate whether there was falseness in the accusation or in other details about the process, but that accusation was the formal ground for his execution.

Jesus as teacher

What ideas help make sense of Jesus’s new stance in society? This new way of being political, through being the “other” community, embodies alternative political options and expresses and implies new ideas. Here we will not spend time, useful as that would be, digging through all the teachings of Jesus. But one element is certainly the proclamation of the kingdom as a new age in world history. The kingdom is at hand. The Beatitudes say, “The kingdom is at hand, so good for you!” They are not simply a series of virtue statements; they do not say, “You ought to be a peacemaker, because God likes peacemakers.” Instead they say, “The kingdom is here: blessed are the poor, because in the kingdom the poor are the people who are at home.” Certainly one assumption of the ethic of Jesus is that the new age has come; it is at hand.

Another characteristic of Jesus’s ethic is a strengthened sense of the presence of the Father in our life. God is described as father, not simply as judge or providential sovereign. God is a loving, suffering father who loves the evil people as much as he loves the good. Jesus often tells us to be like himself. But Matthew 5 is the only place where Jesus says we will be like the Father—when we love our enemies.

Another obvious theme in Matthew 5 and 6 is the fulfillment of the law. The law is not set aside. It is rounded out, intensified.

Jesus as model

So we have Jesus as public figure and Jesus as teacher. But Jesus is also pattern. The part of the study guide for this chapter that deals with Jesus as model is impressive in showing the many different yet parallel ways Jesus is spoken of as our pattern. We do not have one frozen model for thinking about the life of the believer in relationship to Jesus. This fundamental stance works itself out in many different styles. Jesus is our model in many ways having to do with death and suffering. That suffering is not for its own sake but is the cost of the kind of involvement in the world that he represented and to which he calls us.

Jesus is not generally a model in the New Testament. He was celibate, as far as we can tell, but even when the apostle Paul is arguing that it is good to remain unmarried, he does not appeal to the model of Jesus. Jesus worked with his hands as some kind of builder for a while, yet when Paul extols the virtue of working with one’s hands as a tentmaker, he does not appeal to the example of Jesus. So Jesus is appealed to as an example not generally but only at the point of the meaning of the cross. On that subject he is always appealed to. Every major strand of New Testament literature has this thought in its foundation.[7]

Understanding Jesus vis-à-vis liberals and Niebuhr

Perhaps we can understand the significance of these perspectives on Jesus and ethics better if we compare them with the views of the Protestant liberals and Reinhold Niebuhr. Our views of Jesus are products of the world in which we read him. How was Jesus understood in America in the 1920s and 1930s?

The intellectual context

First, recall that the Puritan heritage dominated the Protestant mainstream of America. Puritanism believed that God’s will could find effective implementation in society through the privileged position of Christians.

Second, this heritage reinforces certain assumptions about the way ethics has to work. Immanuel Kant gave the label categorical imperative to a way of reasoning.[8] Anyone has the right to state as a moral imperative something it would be good for everybody to do. That principle breaks down into several other assumptions that I will mention but cannot refine here. (1) A first assumption is that ethics is for everybody, so an ethical statement should be tested by asking what would happen if everybody did it. Can everybody do it, or is it too heroic for everybody to reach? (2) A second question is, if everybody did it, how would it work? If everybody in this country were a conscientious objector, what would happen if the Russians landed on the shores of California? The question, what would happen if everybody did it? is a question of social calculation, which was not Kant’s first point. (3) A third question is, can we ask it of everybody? Is it fitting to ask it of everybody? It was assumed that Christian morality had a claim on everybody, even on those who had not accepted Christian faith.

Third, recall our old emblematic friend Constantine, who stands as a symbol for the notion that Christianity is especially for the person who makes decisions for society from a position of power. That person may be the emperor of the fourth century or John D. Rockefeller (the most powerful man in America in the 1920s). The top person is a model for our asking what would be right and wrong.

Liberal Christians in the 1920s and 1930s combined all three of these elements: the Puritan assumption that society in its present power structure is usable for good, the Kantian assumption that ethics is for everybody, and the Constantinian assumption that especially the top person is the model of ethical liberation.

Jesus does not fit these assumptions

What problems does this set of assumptions make for reading Jesus? What do we find in Jesus if we read him with these questions in mind?

It turns out that Jesus does not fit the Kantian mold. He is not interested in commending his ethic as though it were for everybody. He is not interested in asking whether everybody can do what he teaches, or whether they will do it, or what would happen if they all did. He just does not ask those questions. He derives his ethical teaching from somewhere else, and therefore he does not have to filter it through that question.

Jesus has no special place for rulers. He makes none of the special concessions, found (for example) in just war theory or a crusade theory, for people God has placed in positions of power. If he says anything special about rulers, it is that their claims to being moral are especially dubious.

Jesus has a similar attitude to the Puritan notion that truth is what works. That is a logical secularization of a Puritan assumption. If God is in charge, as Calvin believed that God is, and if God’s people are given the responsibility to make the world run well, then it will, at least to some extent. When that notion is secularized, we get the idea that the good is what prospers, what works. We cannot find that view in Jesus either. He does not promise that the good will prosper. Instead he seems to place his own ministry and that of the disciples in the context of the suffering servant whose “prospering” in Isaiah 52 and 53 is precisely that he did not. He died. He was nobody. It was only the power of God that gave him some dignity in and after his death.

Another element in the American Puritan vision is the trust that “the people,” the democratic process, will be an instrument of God for good. Correcting old royalist visions of Puritanism, the parliamentarian vision said that it is through the process of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” (to quote our main Puritan theologian) that good will be done, that God’s will would be done. Yet Jesus does not give us confidence in “the people” either. He does give us a certain bias in favor of the poor—though not as uniquely good—over against the rest of society. They are in some sense bearers of God’s concern, but not as a counter-Constantine.

Jesus modernized

The challenge that Jesus puts to the whole mainstream of Western Protestant culture is so total, so global, that we can understand why the West had to develop a different Jesus, a modernized Jesus, whose import for ethics would be more compatible with America. It does not matter whether scholars could show historically some relation between this Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels. Whatever is discovered about Jesus in the ancient context does not really matter to the liberal Protestant emphasis. Its Jesus has to fit this modern optimism about the do-ability of God’s will and the usability of the structures of our society to do it.

Reinhold Niebuhr cut through this approach from one end. He charged that modern humanism claims to be liberal in the sense of being open to all truth, but it refuses to see the sinfulness of the human structures, evils that we can perceive empirically. Thus Niebuhr used liberalism’s epistemology, respect for facts and social data, to undercut liberalism. He related this critique of liberalism to the Jesus of the liberals by saying that their Jesus of love is up off the scale. Theirs is the apolitical Jesus, the Jesus of love who does not take account of structured evil.

In this chapter, however, we have looked past that critique to discover that the Jesus of the Gospels, as far as we can read, is not simply different from the Jesus of the liberal optimism that Niebuhr attacked. He also differs from Niebuhr’s ethic of responsibility by being a much more consciously political figure—in his statements, public action, and formal teaching—than Niebuhr was willing to admit. Therefore the Jesus of this story represents an option Niebuhr did not have on his scale. Remember that for Niebuhr the violence question was not just one compartment of a large spectrum of ethical issues. It was the key to his entire theology. So the encounter between Niebuhr’s critique of the pacifism he knew about, and the critique of Niebuhr by the Jesus of the New Testament witness, is also a specimen of a total theological encounter, not limited to the question of how seriously to take one text about loving the enemy. This encounter between Niebuhr and the Jesus we have described tests all the axioms of our ethics, including (1) the place of the nation; (2) the place of a North Atlantic community, which Niebuhr stressed as over against other definitions of who carries the meaning of history; (3) the question of continuity in social process; (4) to what extent we should be apocalyptic, hoping for things that we cannot hope for; (5) whether we should be revolutionary, giving up on the present. All those much wider elements of ethical stance are represented in the encounter between the political Jesus and Niebuhr.

What about texts?

We have set aside any debate about specific biblical texts. We could examine them, but I doubt that many of the references to biblical texts in the study guide are subject to any deep challenge about whether they say what I say they say or about how they relate to our topic. We are talking about a structure question. Most of our problems with the New Testament, with Niebuhr over against the liberal Jesus and the historical Jesus and any other Jesus, are not questions about a particular text. We have been looking at Jesus as global phenomenon in the first century—as teacher, politician, model, founder, and fulfiller of the Jewish hope—and at how that first-century phenomenon relates to Niebuhr’s question, since it has become the classic way of stating the question for our time.

What about effectiveness?

Central to Niebuhr’s rejection of the Jesus of the New Testament as a model for our ethics is his conviction that the ethics of Jesus would be ineffective. But the longer I look at the question of effectiveness, the less I trust the question. Do we mean short-range effectiveness or long-range effectiveness? Do we mean guaranteeing a certain result, or just contributing to a statistical mix in which the chances of a desired outcome may increase (and by how much)? The opposition between an ethic that “cares only about faithfulness” regardless of cost, and another that is “purely pragmatic” is a caricature. Nobody really will stay on one end or the other of this spectrum for long.

The person who says, “You must give up some of your scruples in order to be effective,” is still saying that the goal for which you should sacrifice scruples in order to be effective is in principle a good goal. So the argument that takes the clothing of principles versus effectiveness really means this principle versus that principle. It really means that the goal, for the sake of which I want you to give up other scruples, is so overriding in importance that those other things are less important. That is an ethic of principle. The question is, which things are you willing to give up for which other things?

Likewise, the people who say, “You must simply be true to God [or to yourself or to your conscience] and let the heavens fall,” are really saying that if the heavens fall, God has a better set of heavens ready. So they are not really thumbing their noses at results. They are trusting the God who gave us the rules to know more than we know about the results. So I am increasingly convinced that the debate between the effectiveness ethic and the principle ethic is a false debate. It has to be retranslated into this goal versus that goal. Then it has to be retranslated into who is in charge. By then it is clear that it is not after all a clean philosophical issue between two kinds of ethical reasoning.[9]

The present meaning of resurrection for ethics

One of the reasons that effectiveness reasoning is itself confusing is that it assumes a system-immanent causal matrix. If there is such a thing as resurrection, or if the Resurrection is in some sense a model for the believer’s life, which is said in some of our passages (Colossians 3, for instance), then we have to look at the available options in the conviction that there are more options than a greater-evil option and a lesser-evil option.

The present meaning of resurrection for ethics is that we are never boxed in. As believers, we are not to be calculating on the basis of the assumption that we are boxed into a world in which there are no new options. Many “saving” events in history were unforeseeable, unplanned, but they happened. The Resurrection was an impossible unforeseeable new option, and it happened. We do not know what happened in such a way that we could take it to the American Medical Association and show them what shape the corpse is in now. We cannot show them how resurrection works with modern, scientific, causal models. Yet we are committed to confessing as relevant for our ethics that there is a power in history that reaches beyond the boxes in which we find ourselves. So one more reason that the cross is meaningful is that even though it fails, it does not fail if there is resurrection.

You cannot translate that reality into pagan social science until after it has happened. When you think you are in a blind alley, you do not know that the new thing can happen until it happens. Once the new thing happens, of course, then it was possible. Look at some of the most striking events that now matter for our history. They could not have happened. The Montgomery bus boycott should not ever have happened in terms of ordinary social process in the American South. Nothing about his biography should have created a Gandhi. Most important events in the forward movement of history could not have happened. You could not have predicted them by extrapolating from the year before. Yet they did happen. We have to figure them out after the fact. But if you had looked at the scene in terms of statistics and probability, lifestyles and educational models, most of these things would not have happened. So resurrection is a Christian model for reading world history. That’s one more reason that we do not work on ordinary effectiveness and lesser-evil calculations.

Other Biblical Themes

The encounter with Reinhold Niebuhr’s challenge drove us to review the New Testament witness in a new light. We have read first the Gospel story and then the witness of the Epistles, all supporting a reading of Jesus’s meaning that refuses to be cast in dualist ways and relegated to the nonpolitical realm.

Issues of Old Testament interpretation

We turn next to the Old Testament. Old Testament faith does not appear to be nonviolent. What should we do about that? If what we have just analyzed is the New Testament message, what is it about the Old Testament that causes problems for us?

A first problem is holy war. Especially in the age of Moses and Joshua, God sometimes says, “Go slaughter those people.” The victors are not permitted to leave people—even women and children—alive. Holy war is undeniable in the foundational experience of the Hebrew people.

A second problem is the backward-looking positive evaluation of kingship and statehood, especially in David and one side of Solomon.

A third issue is the hope for a new David. Good kingship continues on as a goal. Hezekiah and Josiah represent the continuing desire to have a successful kingship. And despite the experience of a lot of bad kings in the story, the vision of a good kingship persists in the later expectation of a new David and a restored kingdom.

Fourth, in the so-called imprecatory psalms, we find resentment, even hatred, and desire for vengeance. These biblical materials seem to cultivate and celebrate a mood of vengeance. “God bless whoever smashes your babies’ heads against the rocks!” is probably the most dramatic specimen.

God is sovereign

What do we do with these Old Testament issues? A simple answer, given by some in the early church and later by Petr Chelčický and some Anabaptists, accentuates God’s sovereignty. God can simply change the rules, which is what God did. In earlier times God said, “Do it this way,” and it was the duty of God’s people to do it that way. If they did not, they were being unfaithful. Then later, through Jesus, God said, “Now you are to do it this other way.” These interpreters saw this change exemplified dramatically in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says six times, “You have heard . . . But I say . . .” In one reversal Jesus commands his followers to love our enemies, not wish their destruction. Because God is sovereign, and because our minds are not only finite but also rebellious and sinful, we have no business asking whether God is consistent. Why should God be consistent according to our standards? God is consistent according to God’s standards, which means that God does what God wants to do when God wants to do it. Why should we object if God says for a thousand years or so, “I want my special people to hate their enemies,” and then says, “Now I want my special people to love their enemies; I have the right to do that”?

Beginning in the nineteenth century, dispensationalism dramatically modernized this view. According to this school of thought, God habitually changes the rules and has done so seven times between Genesis and now. That freedom to change the rules is part of God’s majesty. An important assignment in dispensationalist thought is to figure out which rules God wants people to play by in any given period, and to clarify the scripture story as a story of changing covenants or “dispensations.” In Eden, God told Adam to obey in one way. After the fall, God told Adam, “Now the rules are changed. You have a different relation to nature, sex, and each other.” God gave Noah and his children yet another set of rules. Then God gave Moses a new set of rules for the people. The creation of the kingdom of Saul and David meant another set; the exile involved yet another set. Clearly another set is instituted with Jesus, and dispensationalism expects another one or two at the time of the rapture and the millennium.

The purpose of theology in dispensationalist thought is to know which parts of the Bible are for which time period. In 2 Timothy 2:15, Timothy is called to be a workman whose task is to divide the word of truth rightly. According to the dispensational framework, this work involves reading the Bible in order to know which passages apply to whom. An unblinking nonresistance in our time can be combined without difficulty with a recognition that in another time God’s people followed other rules. The dispensationalist answer is simple and clear: if a holy and sovereign God cannot change the rules, then God is not sovereign.

Yet a lot of people wish God would be consistent; they feel that somehow our understanding is not deep enough, if the God of the Old Testament story and the Father of Jesus have to be distinguished. Dispensationalism causes other problems too, because it is not exactly clear when the rules change for Jesus and his ministry. For thorough dispensationalists, the Sermon on the Mount is not for modern Christians. Jesus gave these rules for the period when there was still hope that the Jewish people might accept him as their king, and then the age of the church would not have been necessary. The Jewish people did not accept Jesus; therefore the Sermon on the Mount was put on hold. Now we have the age of the church, and the kingdom that Jesus announced in the Sermon on the Mount will come later. The need to divide the period even from within the New Testament makes things complicated. Nevertheless, we should respect a certain consistency and inner dignity in the dispensational position. And while a full dispensational scheme is new and rare, we must respectfully recognize that many pacifists have dealt with the problem of Old Testament violence by identifying dispensations—two rather than seven.

Different vocations

Majority Christianity presents the other extreme option; it claims that the Bible is all on the same level of pertinence and value. For subjects to which it speaks, the Old Testament is still normative, and the New Testament is normative for the subjects to which it speaks. They cannot contradict each other, because together they constitute one holy inspired book.

But we do have to sift to know what issues each speaks to. The Old Testament talks about how to be a righteous king, and those instructions are still valid if one is a righteous king. The New Testament talks about how we all can and should be loving individuals. The Old and New Testaments do not contradict each other, because a righteous king fulfills a different function from that of loving individuals. When we know the context in which we are functioning, the two do not contradict each other. So the theocratic vision of David and Josiah is the theocratic vision of Zwingli, Calvin, and Bucer, with no embarrassment, no sense of tension. The doctrine of vocation—held by all the Reformers and stated by Luther with greatest simplicity and clarity—best illustrates the need to discern which function a person is in. People function according to the rules that apply to their current station. If a man is a righteous king, then he fights justified wars. If he is an individual facing an angry neighbor, then he must love his enemy. There is no contradiction; there are just diverse functions.

What are the shortcomings of that view? First, like the dispensational views, it continues to raise questions about how we know which slot we are in at any time. Here we need to figure out which function, station, or office we are supposed to express. The larger question is, what does this view do with the New Testament’s internal claim that it is fulfilling the old, that it is moving beyond the epoch of the old? What of the New Testament claim that in Jesus a new kind of king has come or is at hand, who is the normative—and in some sense final—revelation? This way of dividing the Bible does not fully respect the sense of the Bible as a story and not a flat collection of instructions and models. To say it another way, the newness Jesus brought was not a claim about being different or original in responding to an angry neighbor; Jesus’s claim to newness was a claim about being a king in a different way.

Progressive revelation

Dispensationalism and Reformation “vocation” are the two extreme views. What alternatives can address the limits of both? Guy F. Hershberger advocated a view that we could call pedagogical. Sometimes he used the term progressive revelation, by which he meant that what God really wants, who God really is, is known ultimately and fully only in Jesus. Anything prior to Jesus is only on the way to him. From the perspective that comes later, what came earlier may rightly be judged not as wrong but as incomplete.

But there are different ways of being incomplete. Something can be incomplete simply because we do not know all there is to know. Or it can be incomplete in a deeper sense: it can be a concession. In Matthew 19, Jesus states that the Mosaic legislation permitting divorce (Deuteronomy 24) was a concession to the Hebrews’ hard hearts: “From the beginning it was not so.” Marriage was to be a lifelong partnership. Jesus said, “God never really wanted marriages to end in divorce, and I do not want it that way, so we can now restore the initial created purpose.” Hershberger says that war in the Old Testament is like divorce in the Mosaic legislation. It is a concession to weakness, to not having the Holy Spirit. It is a concession that we do not condemn, but which has been withdrawn now that we have the full gospel.

A deep problem with this view is that the violence and vengeance passages in the Old Testament do not sound like concessions. They sound like commands. They are not parallel to the marginal recognition of divorce. The material in the Samuel epoch about Israel’s desire for a king sometimes sounds like a concession. Sometimes God says, “I do not want you to have a king, but if you must have one, then do it this way.” Other times God seems more affirmative, but at least there is reticence about kingship. There is no reticence about holy war in the age of Joshua. We can say that unregenerate humans show how unregenerate they are; with that slant the imprecatory psalms will not be as much a problem. Yet holy war itself remains a problem in the Hershberger pattern, because it is commanded, and God reprimands people for not executing it thoroughly enough. Samuel scolds Saul for not having slaughtered everybody.

I think Hershberger also says (cautiously) that revelation is progressive, that “they just did not know it all yet.” The difficulty was that in the 1930s, liberals such as Harry Emerson Fosdick used the phrase “progressive revelation.” Hershberger needed to get away from the idea that revelation is evolutionary. Fosdick popularized Julius Wellhausen’s interpretation of the Old Testament, identifying anything like modern people as late, anything not like modern people as early, and the path from the one to the other as religious evolution. The Hebrews gave God the credit for their religious evolution by calling progress “revelation.” This view was so distasteful to those with a strong sense of biblical authority that Hershberger could not say it that way. But for Mennonites in the 1930s and 1940s, saying that God made a concession, telling Samuel, “Okay, I’ll give in; anoint Saul,” is understandable in biblicist terms.

Yahweh the warrior

Millard Lind presents another model, which has brought to light something much wider than his own invention. The phenomenon of holy war as a political and cultural experience in the early Hebrew period was, when properly understood, a new happening. It was not just war; it was something different. It had non-Hebrew analogues, but the creation of a people through God’s act to save them in war was an event that has to be understood in terms that go beyond the simple moral question, is killing right or wrong? That was not the first question. The first question was, what does it mean to live by virtue of God’s grace? The grace that we experience first in that story is God’s grace in saving a people—by drowning the Egyptians—when the people could not save themselves. That was the first experience of divine salvation. The Hebrews did not fight at all. They only had to obey the order to walk through the sea.

Later experiences of holy war were also miracles. They were not calculating, strategic applications of violence in order to achieve stated political goals. They were strange events. For example, in the battle against the Amalekites (Exod. 17:11–13), the Israelites’ victory depended on whether Moses could keep his rod high in the air, not on military strategy or tactics. Their success was a miracle. The same is true for the Gideon story, where the Israelites sent most of their soldiers home and armed the rest with torches. It is true of the Jericho story, where warriors and priests paraded around the city with trumpets. God saved the people by miracles. In some cases there was bloodshed, but the ethics of bloodshed was not the issue. The issue was a new way of being created and preserved as a people: by God’s intervention. God’s people wait for God to intervene.

Lind then shows that this understanding of holy war became a critique of kingship. First came a reticence to accept kingship according to the Canaanite models. The prophets continuously criticized the kings. Then—ultimately—God gave up on kingship, because it did not work. The story of Israel’s kingship was a story of failure. God was patient. God let Israel keep trying, and restored them again when they repented, but kingship never worked. In the age of Jeremiah, God said, “I give up on that. That is not the way to do it. Now we are going to use diaspora (scattering). This is now going to be the way to be my people.” Therefore the violent story of the Old Testament is to be taken first as a case history of living as a people by grace. In that ancient culture, when they had not spent time refining ethical models, part of living by grace as a people was seeing God wipe out their enemies—and sometimes helping God do so.

As an analogy or illustration, we consider a parallel in the Abraham story. Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22) illustrates the subjugation of ethics to something that is more than ethics. Why didn’t Abraham want to kill Isaac, when God said he should do so? We assume that it was because no father wants to kill his son. But that is a false perspective to bring to the story. In Abraham’s culture, such sacrifice was the right thing to do. Every father sacrificed the firstborn; it was the decent human thing to do. In fact, if he did not sacrifice the firstborn, a man would not have any other posterity. People understood that the firstborn—whether it be the first grain from the field, the first fruit of a tree or vine, the ewe’s first lamb, or the wife’s first son—belongs to the gods. So it was not ethical sensitivity or paternal tenderness that made Abraham reluctant to sacrifice Isaac.

Some modern use of Abraham’s story (that of Søren Kierkegaard, for example) projects these modern sensibilities onto an ancient narrative. But Abraham was tempted to do the right thing: Abraham did not want to sacrifice Isaac, because he believed God’s future was at stake. God had told Abraham, “In Isaac I am going to bless the world.” How could God bless the world if Abraham did the normal, decent thing and sacrificed his firstborn? So Abraham did not have the right to be decent or normal in sacrificing the firstborn, because God’s cause was at stake. Only in that context do we see what it means when Hebrews 11:19 says that the willingness to sacrifice Isaac is a type of hope in the Resurrection. Abraham was willing to trust God to save God’s cause, rather than making the “responsible” adjustments himself.

The question “Is killing wrong?” is not the right question to ask about sacrificing Isaac. Killing was not wrong in the cultures of the ancient Near East. Instead, the story invites us to ask who God is and what it means to listen to God. The wrongness of killing will come in due time, as the meaning of trusting God evolves. That wrongness emerged well before Jesus. It came in the prophetic period, with growing skepticism about kingship itself as a model. It came in Jewish experience; well before the time of Jesus, the rabbis no longer approved the death penalty. Most of the retributive penalties of Mosaic legislation were being dealt with by the time of Jesus not by literal action—by taking out an eye or tooth, for example—but by financial substitution. The Maccabees did not enjoy the support of most of the interpreters of Torah. So the violence of the Old Testament legislation was mitigated well before the time of Jesus. Jesus just rounds that out: even as Abraham let God’s future be in God’s hands, and Moses and Joshua let the survival of the people depend on miracle, so now we do not have to kill anybody.

Lind’s synthesis goes beyond the simplistic evolutionary views of 1930s liberals, who saw as early developments the things they disliked in the Old Testament, and things they liked as later developments. The liberals were short on notions of guidance and revelation, as if evolution somehow took care of itself (the idea of the automatic survival of the fittest). In those ways, Lind’s synthesis is different from the liberal synthesis. But in the formal sense of assuming organic growth under guidance, it is closer to that view than to anything else.

The New Testament and the legitimacy of the state

Romans 13

The second matter we must recognize, although it calls for a fuller, separate study, is the conversation with the mainstream tradition about the legitimacy of the state. Romans 13, 1 Peter, and 1 Timothy say, in parallel ways, that the church should affirm as good a government that wields the sword and collects taxes. Does this counsel constitute an exception to the validity of Jesus’s nonresistance?

This question is not only or even chiefly a debate within the New Testament. In fact, according to a growing consensus among scholars, the closer one gets to the New Testament, the less there is to debate. The debate comes later, as the perspectives of these epistles are taken into the age of Christian mission and especially of Christian success since Constantine. The New Testament clearly says that the state being accepted is a pagan state, a state in which no Christians had access to power for several generations. Affirmations such as those of Romans 13 are made not to encourage Christians to help run the Roman Empire (then an unimaginable idea) but to help Christians be at peace with the fact that they could not do anything about the Roman Empire in its negative impact on them.

Rome was beginning to persecute Christians. Paul was not far from the age of Nero. Paul wanted the Christians in the capital city to see that the world that was not under their control is still under God’s control, that God has a function for pagan power. That idea could feed into a dispensational dualism. In a way it did. Until Tertullian, among early Christians there were two moralities. The duality was not Old Testament versus New Testament but church versus world. God wants Christians to love their enemies and be prepared to suffer. God wants Caesar to be decent and not persecute Christians. Those two moralities are not completely compartmentalized. But they are different enough that we can admit the propriety, in its framework, of the state’s sword, without also saying that Christians have the duty to exercise it. But when we move past Constantine and then read this biblical material, it takes on a different meaning. From Augustine to modern times, the state is not the pagan state acceptable to Christians because it is under God’s sovereignty; it is the righteous state within Christendom, and Christians will of course participate in the state.

A number of additional questions crop up, if we grant (as most careful scholars would grant with regard to the New Testament itself) that Romans 13 meant in its time that Christians were to accept the pagan state without having access to power in it. Not many people doing ethics across the centuries in other Christian groups would grant that that is the last word. They would claim that Romans 13 applies even more to the present state than to the state of the time when it was written: in the Christendom context Christians are able to take over the state. “Now,” they say, “we can properly fulfill what Romans 13 says the state should do: reward the good, punish the evil, and be a servant of God. Given the opportunity to do it, this is the Christian duty in government. The early Christians did not have a chance to do it, but when we can, of course that is what we should do.”

There are two ways the reasoning goes from there.[1] First is what I call a positivistic view: what is, is good. Obeying “the powers that be” means that if one lives under Hitler in Germany, then that is the government Christians should support. Christians in the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century should support the Soviet government. If in a Christian democracy, Christians should support democracy.

The other view is what I call the legitimist view. It holds that God does not say that the actual powers that be are good, but that the notion, or concept, or ideal—the state properly so called—is good. Criteria for this state are given in Romans 13: a government protects the good and discourages the evil. But if a government protects the evil and discourages the good, then Romans 13 applies negatively. This was Karl Barth’s position when he said that Hitler’s regime was not a state; Hitler’s Germany is not what Romans 13 says the state must be. Therefore Christians must oppose Hitler as a nonstate or an unstate. Berlin Bishop Otto Dibelius articulated this view a generation later about the Marxist government in East Germany. He said that because the government denied God, it could not possibly be a legitimate government. He still obeyed it in order not to have trouble, but he would not obey it out of conviction, because that government did not believe in what government properly so called must be committed to.

Does Romans 13 say, “Accept whatever state exists, even if it is tyrannical”? Or does it say, “What God wants is government properly so called”? In the second case, Christians stand in judgment on a government, and they can even foment revolution. Neither of these patterns fits Romans 13. They are later patterns. The second view—that we can revolt against bad governments by appealing to an ideal in Romans 13—cannot be what Paul meant to say to the Roman Christians. Romans 13 says nothing about revolt. In fact, if it had any immediate pertinence to temptations faced by Christians reading it in Rome, it told them not to assassinate Caesar, because his power was all right even though it was pagan. Yet the notion that everything goes is not adequate either. The New Testament reports cases of Christian disobedience to authority. There is Christian unveiling of the idolatrous authority in Revelation 13. Each of these views is an inadequate updating of the text. Both assume the existence of a proper Christian civil ethic different from that taught by Jesus. Then they decide whether it is an idealistic ethic or a conservative ethic. They thus put Paul in a context that cannot be what he wanted.

Paul certainly thought he was doing the same thing that Jesus had taught, and applying it to the Roman situation. So we need something closer to Jesus to understand Romans 13. My claim is that Romans is part of the teaching of subordination. The term hypotassesthai (“subordination”) is used here as elsewhere.[2] Subordination is part of the way Jesus worked against the world. In that christological context, Romans 13 says something different from either the positivistic or the legitimist views. “Ordained” is not a fair translation of Romans 13, even if we did not have further confusion coming from our use of ordination for religious ministries. The passage just says these authorities are “ordered”—meaning “organized” or “lined up.” The image that I think is most fitting, because it is literal, is that of a librarian who puts books in order on the shelf. The librarian did not make the books, does not write them, does not necessarily approve of them, but simply puts them in order. That is what God does with the powers that be. God does not say, “Now I want a Hitler. Now I want a Stalin. Now I want a Jimmy Carter.” God lets the system work under divine providence, and we accept it.

Similarly, the translation “established by God” misses the sense of the Greek. The Greek does not mean “established” in our modern sense. The Greek means “ordered.” The Old Testament writers said about the devil, about the serpent, and about Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar that they were “ordered.” If we believe in a sovereign Creator God, we have to say something like that about evil. Paul is not saying, “The sword is good. You go be a caesar.” Romans 13 does not deny 1 Samuel 8, in which God warns the Israelites about what having a king would be like: oppression and taxes. It just says that God can use even that. The acceptable Caesar of Romans 13 was oppressing and taxing. In fact, he was far worse than Rehoboam or Ahab had been.

Revelation 13 and Romans 13

Interpretation has sometimes treated Revelation 13 and Romans 13 as opposite poles. But are they really opposed? Instead of seeing Romans 13 as over against Matthew 5 or Revelation 13, what if we tried to understand the texts as if they agreed? What if we approached scripture with the assumption that it coheres, even amid a great diversity of context and language? What if that agreement is an authority under which we stand, and the diversity—not contradiction—within the agreement is the flexibility and liberty of the early church and our own mandate? What would happen if we looked at Romans 13 in that light, trying to see in it agreement with Jesus? Matthew 20:25–28 (parallels in Mark 10:42–45 and Luke 22:25–26) says, “In this world men rule over others. People lord it over each other, but you shall not, because you shall follow me in servanthood.” Romans 12 and 13 say essentially the same thing: “You shall be servants. You shall be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You shall not take vengeance, because God will take care of that.” Romans 13 draws from that the deduction, “So we do not fight back against the Romans. We let Caesar have his function. We let stand the fact that the kings of this world lord it over people, because that is under God’s providence.” That is the same thing Jesus had said.

Revelation 13 agrees. It says, in effect, “You shall not fight back. In this world, men rule over others. In the situation where persecution is active, still we do not fight back. Still we let Caesar do his thing, even though we see that it is idolatrous and cruel.” That text concludes with a call for the patience of the saints. If we look at them correctly, we see no polarity between Romans 13 and Revelation 13, or between Romans 13 and Matthew 20 or Matthew 5. The polarization is only present if we assume that we must read Romans 13 as guidance for the post-Constantinian Christian Caesar, but that is one subject the text cannot speak to. We still have to try to speak to those questions, but we cannot do so honestly using that text.

Revelation is different from Romans in showing how bad the things are that God sometimes lets happen. But while Revelation 13 shows what bad things God allows, it does not say that all authority is of the beast. It speaks of one particular self-absolutizing desire on the part of two beasts who help each other make people worship them. It does not say that all civil order has that nature, that all civil order comes from the beasts. It says that the beastly form is one extreme form government can take; this kind of governing is one thing beasts can do. And it says that we should not worship the beasts. Jesus already taught that the kings of the nations let themselves be called benefactors. They glorify themselves. They create an ideology around themselves. There is clearly a great difference in tone between Revelation and Romans, because there is a great difference in circumstance. But the ethic for Christians is the same. The acceptance of the fact that we are not going to rebel against that bad government is the same in both cases.

Satan’s penultimate control

One further consideration on the state comes from the Gospel account of Jesus’s temptation, in which Satan says that he can offer the kingdoms to Jesus because they are under Satan’s control (Matt. 4:8–9; Luke 4:5–7). I do not see a deep contradiction between saying that God is ultimately in control and saying that Satan is penultimately in control. That is the whole meaning of Paul’s understanding of the powers. Jesus does not use “powers” language, but I suspect that the same thought is present. In the mystery of a fallen world, God and Satan are both in control—not in the same way, not on the same level, but in some real sense. If we make a pact with Satan, he can give us some power. Still, that does not free us from the higher, deeper, and longer control of the God who ultimately will not be mocked.

Historical change and the New Testament baseline

Other dimensions to the phenomena of change since the New Testament include not only the relapse symbolized by Constantine but also an ongoing story of critique of that relapse. Sometimes the critique is explicit in religious reformation experience, as seen in the development of the notion of religious liberty as over against Christian oppressiveness. This idea developed after Chelčický and meant something very different from what Tertullian had meant when he applied it only to non-Christian oppressiveness. Democracy developed as an outworking of Puritanism in the Anglo-Saxon experience. The notion of welfare as the purpose of the state developed; this welfare is different from Rome’s bread and circuses. The development of minority rights, citizen rights, foreigners’ rights, due process, restraint on government, constitutionality (making the sovereign accountable), elections (making the sovereign dumpable): all of these were changes in the reality of the political order. They must be handled in some theological context. One cannot say they make no difference. If we look at history, we can discern some things getting worse and some things getting better. Modern atomic warfare is clearly worse than Romans 13. Other things—such as the notion of constitutionality and the fact that in many Western countries people actually leave office if they are voted out—are new phenomena in the history of culture, which are for the good, and are to be greeted theologically.

We could use the concept of progress. We could use the concept of legitimacy within government, but without absolutizing it. We could use in responsible ways the notion that our time is not the time of Jesus, and thereby not be fundamentalistically committed to the New Testament pattern being forever the way things must be. But still we would be convinced that the New Testament baseline is the one from which we must measure and evaluate any change, and that no change will mean a fundamental revocation of Jesus’s ethic with regard to violence. What it will mean is refinement of ways our rejection of violence interlocks with continuing involvement in social process. Penn (or in our day, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.) is an example of political involvement that can be interpreted as an extension of the New Testament baseline in a situation that gives more room, rather than as selling out simply because he was active or involved.

Is God inconsistent?

The study guide poses a third question, of a very different kind: when the early Christian apocalypses describe God (or the Christ of the last judgment) as destroying God’s enemies, yet call Christians to imitate God by loving their enemies, are these writings theologically inconsistent? Resolving the problem of the Old Testament’s wars does not resolve the problem of God’s consistency. That problem abides with the New Testament Apocalypse rejoicing in the destruction of God’s enemies and with the ongoing mysteries of cosmic governance in a cruel world. The discussion it calls for does not belong here. I raise it as a problem because of Jesus’s special emphasis on nonresistance as imitation of the divine nature. For the early Christians, God’s consistency was no problem, but our understandings of ethical or psychic consistency make it a problem for us. Should we not do away with all language of vengeance or wrath? Is the prospect of rebellion against God ultimately resulting in destruction not contradictory to a message of suffering love? The issue cannot be avoided in philosophical theology or apologetics, but the New Testament does not seek to resolve it.

Just War Thinking Revived

In this last section of the book, we trade historical sequence for topical division. Each chapter will cover the same general period (the years since World War II), with some chapters reaching back to some earlier strand. Overlapping cannot be avoided, but we will not indicate all the possible cross-references. We will be dealing less than before with Christian attitudes and more with the new challenges that Christians find themselves needing to address. We turn first to a review of the way just war reasoning has come to life again.

International law and war

First we need to catch up with the development of international law as a secular political discipline. As European nations became more independent of the Holy Roman Empire, they found themselves becoming somewhat more interdependent in diplomacy and trade, needing to regulate their relationships on the high seas and in the shipment of goods. They developed a body of rules for behavior in relations between nations and relations with the nationals of other nations—for how to treat the crew of a ship that is in one’s own port and how to cooperate against piracy, for example. They defined some new lines in the conduct of war. For example: How should two nations at war respect the neutrality of uninvolved nations? To what extent may a blockade against a belligerent nation also apply against the nonbelligerent nation with which the belligerent is trading? From the age of Hugo Grotius to modern times, both in commerce and in localized wars, nations gradually accumulated rules for international relations. Who is noncombatant? What may warring factions do to third parties? These rules were added to the regulation of other levels of conflict short of war, such as piracy and freedom of the seas.

It was not church people but lawyers, merchants, and diplomats who accumulated these rules. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Hague conventions and Geneva conventions formally institutionalized criteria for legitimate weapons and the rights of prisoners. They created the Hague international court, a place to adjudicate international conflicts without going to war, often using criteria that had arisen from the effort to regulate wars. Here something happened to implement the just war theory in the world of diplomacy, but not in the world of church leaders or academic ethicists, who during this period had no special occasion to take those matters seriously. The wars that were being fought were always so right in the eyes of each nation’s own citizens that religious leaders and ethicists did not debate them, at least not rapidly enough to develop alternative ideas. People assumed that the old theological answers about the legitimacy of war were sufficient to cover any current war. It was literary people who sought to bring sensitivity to the horror and disproportionality of war. That concern did not develop through the work of moralists and interpreters of the just war theory.

Critical concern about modern weapons

With World War I, critical concern about several kinds of modern weapons began to surface, but only with World War II did those concerns grow. In World War I, people perceived poison gas as a whole new kind of monstrous weapon. It drifted unpredictably, with the winds. Armies could neither defend against it nor get out of the way. The wounds it caused were excessively painful, and the crippling it produced was long lasting. So a renewal of critical reflexes arose: some weapons must never be permitted.

That sentiment contributed to the pacifist enthusiasm in the 1920s. Poets and novelists saw in World War I something qualitatively worse than what had gone before. The numbers killed and injured, the brutality, the effects of trench warfare (in which people sat in holes in the ground a couple hundred feet from each other for months): all these factors created a new kind of war. But that development did not strike moralists as making war a new kind of moral challenge.

Obliteration bombing and discrimination

With obliteration bombing in World War II, we reach a new frontier. Criticism about these tactics arose among air force people themselves. As the bombing against continental Europe was escalating and cities began to be targeted, some British aviators initially refused to fly those indiscriminate missions. The American and British air forces differed in policy. The British, because their own country was suffering the psychological burden of direct attack, favored nighttime bombing raids, for psychological effect and to minimize loss of planes and airmen. The technology of the time meant that a night bombing raid might hit any part of a city. The British accepted that limitation of accuracy and bombed whole cities. The Americans had bombers that could fly much higher, and they were equipped with slightly more accurate bomb sights. The Americans’ psychological mood was not as dramatic as that of the British, because their homeland was not being bombed, and because they had come into the war later. Thus the Americans held to a more discriminating approach. They bombed in daylight, taking more risks but being more likely to hit identifiable military targets (assuming one knows what a military target is). Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces (from 1941 until 1945) Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold categorically rejected “terror bombing.” Of course, some military targets tend to be in cities—rail yard switching stations, for example. Thus the discrimination was not precise, but at least Arnold upheld a concern for discrimination.

One of the first massive bombings went the other way. It was the bombing of Coventry, a minor British city but the seat of a cathedral that was almost completely destroyed along with the center city. The British people did not know that this same kind of damage was already being done in their name on the continent. They thought that the Germans had escalated the war. J. H. Oldham, a major figure of the ecumenical movement, one of the first presidents of the World Council of Churches (which formed in 1948), wrote right after the bombing of Coventry that if the British had to do that kind of thing in order to win, they would not deserve to win. In so saying, he applied the just war theory to a weapon that is clearly indiscriminate and therefore fails to meet one of the theory’s criteria.[1] Oldham did not know that the British were already doing worse than that or that their attack would escalate. It did escalate intentionally, although the public was apparently not aware how dramatic the obliteration was, especially of Hamburg and Dresden. Oldham never followed up on his bluff; he never said, “We must quit, because our air force is doing something worse than what the Germans did at Coventry.” Yet at least he had stated the case for discrimination, demonstrating that the criteria exist and we can tell when they have been violated.

In America during the war, the clearest and most widely noted statement on bombing was an article by American Jesuit John Ford. It appeared in 1944, during World War II.[2] He said clearly that the Allies should not bomb population centers, and that any bombing they did must respect the criterion of discrimination. He did not supply a lot of technical detail. Of course, he did not know about the atom bomb, but it was clear that we had the capacity to destroy entire cities. Thus it was possible to make this kind of statement on the level of logic. Although Ford gets a lot of credit, he was not the pioneer. John Kenneth Ryan’s 1933 Catholic University of America dissertation had made the same point.[3]

These two contributions were about all that appeared on the American scene. We have no recorded discussion in the American public about the morality of the escalating levels of destruction. Pacifist minorities opposed the war, yet no one said audibly that war is admissible but certain weapons are not. That kind of discrimination was not reported during the course of the war.[4]

Hiroshima and nuclear pacifism

Hiroshima dramatized the newness of obliteration bombing and created a qualitatively new mood. Actually, the one nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima did not do as much damage as conventional fire bombs had done in several other places in Japan, especially in Tokyo, where they caused the whole city to burn and killed a million people. The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 100,000 people. In terms of actual destruction the nuclear bomb did not go over a threshold, but a psychological threshold had been crossed. A qualitatively new weapon existed; the secrets of the atom had been tapped. In response, during the late 1940s and the 1950s, so-called nuclear pacifism grew. This stance applied the just war theory to the nuclear case and rejected use of nuclear weapons. This position was not pacifism at all in the traditional sense, but it was critical. Some military people held it. Politically it was unpopular, and those who ventured in this direction were taking risks.

Thus from Hiroshima on, a new school of thought exists that says just war theory rules out these new weapons, because they are intrinsically not controllable. In the first place, even the small ones are too big to discriminate. Second, they produce fallout and atomic pollution that spread a track of continuing long-range poison around the globe. Therefore these weapons are not permissible. That conclusion then raises the question of where the threshold of permissibility lies. Is the problem really that the destruction is caused by a nuclear reaction rather than by big conventional explosives? There is a difference in fallout, of course, but not necessarily much difference in destruction.

Despite such questions, this “nuclear pacifist” response to Hiroshima in the late 1940s was a fitting one. If the escalation and destructive potential is qualitative, the criterion of proportionality is automatically left behind. The criterion of discrimination is sacrificed as well, if the quantitative expansion of destructive potential makes it impossible to say that the weapons are being targeted on specific military objectives. Thus the first response of many Christian thinkers in the 1940s was simple rejection. This nuclear pacifism applied the just war theory to a weapon that could not possibly be used with proportionality and discrimination.[5] The nuclear pacifist implications of this development were modest but real. Conservative Roman Catholic Cardinal Ottaviani expressed serious reservations about whether atomic weapons could ever be used justly. The World Council of Churches organized a study process, “Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age,”[6] which left its business unfinished, because it was too delicate in terms of church politics. But it could not avoid stating that an all-out atomic war was not morally justifiable and that a nation that had suffered a first strike could not morally justify an atomic reprisal. The group that made this statement was overwhelmingly nonpacifist. They merely reasoned carefully about the moral justifications of retaliation in the traditional theory. In the nuclear context, retaliation that cannot prevent something more from happening (because it is a second strike) is without moral justification. A first strike has no moral justification, because there can be no offense to which it is proportionate. Therefore the only excuse for maintaining an atomic arsenal is the claim that the balance of terror somehow helps prevent the arsenal’s use.[7]

Protestant ethicist Paul Ramsey did the most within American ethical thought to make the just war restraints real.[8] Arguing carefully, especially concerning noncombatant immunity, and without rejecting nuclear armament as such, he stated firm limits beyond which American armament must not go, limits that if respected would have rejected or excluded weapons and strategies already included in Pentagon planning. This restraint, while morally demanding, did not call for destroying nuclear weapons. Their use in certain circumstances was prohibited, but not their possession or even threatened use. Ramsey’s alternative to using atomic weapons in “massive retaliation” (Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s term) was “graduated response.” This position meant increasing the capacity for conventional war. Whereas Dulles relied on massive retaliation (“In response to any attack, we will blow up Moscow”), Ramsey said, in effect, “You do not have the right to blow up Moscow. You need smaller alternatives. You need more conventional weapons and ground soldiers, so that any conflict that arises can be stopped by proportionate means. You do not have the right to escalate, but you do have the right to stop an enemy on a manageable level.” The effect of Ramsey’s logic was to raise the military budget and increase the number of soldiers needed. Therefore listening to Ramsey did not profoundly jeopardize the Pentagon’s professional and economic interests. “Massive retaliation” shifted toward “graduated response.” Many hold that Ramsey and his colleagues contributed to that shift in Pentagon policy.

While this doctrine of restraint constituted a victory for the just war doctrine on one level, it left open the door on the lower edge of the nuclear scale for “tactical nuclear weapons,” the use of which might be within the limits of proportionality and discrimination. Thus while reaffirming the possibility of restraint as a concept, the doctrine at the same time legitimized continuing production and development of nuclear weapons and nibbled away at the notion that the atomic threshold itself should never be crossed. This nibbling away at the threshold occurred not only at the point of distinguishing between tactical and all-out nuclear weapons or uses. Other discussions continued to weaken the restraints that the doctrine had at first seemed to offer. These included discussions about the deterrent use of a threat that one may not morally carry out, and about the notion of a defensive first strike. Similarly the notion of noncombatant immunity became much weaker, as the enemy could be blamed for locating weapons near civilian populations.

The notion of a nuclear threshold expresses a matter more psychological than technological: the difference between “not too far” and “too far” had to be symbolized by something much more than just a point on a continuous curve. What was needed in order to identify a line that can be held is a notch, corner, or threshold that one can discern on the curve. Otherwise people make their own lines at different points all along the way, and that means no lines. The symbol for this psychological phenomenon is the firebreak. In the effort to stop forest fires, foresters or fire fighters remove bands of trees and plow the soil so that a fire will not be able to leap across to the other side. If a whole community of people share the same awareness that nuclear warfare is qualitatively worse than conventional warfare, then maybe you can hold the line; you have a psychological firebreak. For example, neither side in World War II resorted to poison gas, because it was thought to be qualitatively much worse than the other weapons that were being used. As long as a notion of qualitative difference can be maintained, the idea of “too much” is more manageable. Preserving this manageability is why nuclear pacifism did not apply its own criteria to the conventional obliteration bombings of World War II.

Other major figures did apply them, including popes and some theologians. In America it was Paul Ramsey who first clearly said that some past weapons and some past uses of those weapons are simply morally wrong. We should have surrendered, or at least negotiated for peace, rather than use the weapons we did use. Yet the main effect of Ramsey’s work was not that we should prepare to sue for peace but that we should find other weapons that are not as bad. His analysis illustrates one new thought pattern that has arisen out of the escalation of weapons.

Nuremberg, the duty to disobey, and war crimes

Nuremberg is a symbol for a broader phenomenon: the sanctioning and punishing of war crimes by court procedures after World War II. The largest tribunal of this kind was administered by the Allies in the city of Nuremberg, but other such tribunals functioned in France and in the Pacific theater.

This prosecution was the justice of the victors. The war crimes they punished had been committed by people within the losing nations. Nevertheless, the Nuremberg tribunals took care to ensure that the legal process had some objectivity. Those responsible argued at length that the proceedings were based in international law, rather than taking the tribunals for granted on the simple grounds that the Allies had won the war. The prosecutors chose defendants on objective legal grounds and only tried them for what they could clearly be accused of. Strong structures established the legitimacy of the entire undertaking, rooting it in international law, which demands that there be tribunals, an objective definition of what constitutes a crime, and careful respect for the rules of evidence and the rights of the accused to due process. The fact that it was not equal justice—war criminals on the winning side were not brought to trial—does not keep it from being an important enactment of the dominant North Atlantic legal culture’s claims about what constitutes responsibility in the laws of war.

Nuremberg confirmed that it is proper to refuse to obey an unjust order. People can be punished—the defendants at Nuremberg were punished—for failing to disobey an unjust order when they could have refused. Thus the judgment at Nuremberg dramatized the claim that the rules on the legality of war should be made operational, that they are binding, and that they provide a basis for judicial sanction. The defendants at Nuremberg were punished by American, British, and French judges not for having disobeyed American, British, and French law, but for having failed to respect a more fundamental legality and morality. These fundamental obligations are known to all reasonable human beings—if not universally, then at least within western European culture—and they are binding for all reasonable human beings. The tribunals not only claimed but acted out dramatically and violently (with the death penalty) the position that criteria of political morality, the legal status of which is broader than the legislation of any one country, do obtain and can be enforced on people who offend against those standards.

At Nuremberg, the Allied nations said to the world that a person may be punished for doing things that are wrong according to the laws of war. Military necessity, even the fact that one has been given a formal order, is no excuse. At the same time, Nuremberg prosecuted only people of a certain level of command, those who could take responsibility on their own. Some were put to death, and some were sentenced to long prison terms.

What does this experience say about the just war theory? It says that the theory has some power. If it does not keep people from committing war crimes (no law completely prevents crime), at least it provides a language whereby the perpetrators of those crimes can be held accountable. Some of the just war theory’s criteria can produce a duty to disobey. But Nuremberg also shows us some of the just war theory’s limits. It shows that the theory only works selectively. It provides language the victor can use to condemn the loser, but it does not provide a basis for equal justice. It thus reinforces winners’ claims to righteousness more than it calls them to be responsible for their own atrocities. Certainly Nuremberg did not prove that just war criteria are successful in restraining war fighting; it dramatizes cases in which laws were sinned against. Nuremburg did not prove that any national military establishment or any party in World War II operated within the just war assumptions rather than holy war or blank check assumptions.

Although any treaty entered into by the U.S. government is supposed to have force of law, the Nuremberg principles, not having the force of a treaty, have as yet no proven status in U.S. law. Appeal to them cannot provide a legal defense for conscientious objection or for a refusal to obey an order. Nonetheless, Nuremberg represented a moral statement by the Allies. It was a kind of morality play, and as with all theatre, the difference between hypocrisy and authenticity is not clear on the surface.

Vietnam and just war protest

The American experience between 1961 and 1975 was a first for Americans, and perhaps for modern Western Christians in general, in the way the just war inheritance came to bear negatively on a national undertaking.[9]

Almost all the just war’s major criteria applied in some way in the Vietnam experience. The criterion of legitimate authority applied both in the U.S. (were the decisions to get involved in the war made according to the American constitution?) and in Saigon (were any of the regimes from Ngô Đình Diệm through Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in any sense the legitimate government in South Vietnam?) The criterion also applied by asking whether a huge American intervention halfway around the globe had any basis in international law.

The criteria of discrimination and proportionality were discussed most. In a war without uniforms, it is hard to know who is a civilian. The establishment of free-fire zones, with the Americans simply decreeing that anyone in that territory would be treated as a combatant, was the most extreme way to declare the criterion of discrimination irrelevant. The extensive and lasting ecological damage caused by use of defoliants and other pollutants raised issues of proportionality, as did the large quantities of unexploded ordnance left on the ground (comparable to what was used in the whole of World War II over a larger area for much greater stakes).

At times the U.S. admitted that it was not fighting the war in Vietnam for Vietnam’s sake, acknowledging that the Vietnamese were being used as a surrogate in the struggle against world communism. This domino effect reasoning was illegitimate in two ways: (1) because domino theory defined the issue ideologically rather than in terms of real political criteria, and (2) because it placed the brunt of suffering on a population that did not bear guilt for the world communist threat and would not have been able to call off that threat if it had wished to.

The Vietnam War also violated the just intention criterion, especially in the subjective sense. If just subjective intention is ever possible, clearly we cannot have it when a war becomes racist. This one was. The Americans did not see the Vietcong (often tagged with the harsh racial epithet “gooks”) as human. The U.S. would do things to them that Americans believed we could not do to European enemies. These attitudes reflect something other than just intention in the sense of loving others as oneself.

So all up and down the just war criteria were grounds for objecting. Not every nonpacifist would have had to come up with a negative response on all the criteria, but on each criterion we can locate at least some reason for responding negatively.

But most people did not rely on just war criteria explicitly as they came to oppose the war in Vietnam. They used common sense. Their global negative judgment on the Vietnam War, which led many to costly personal refusal to serve, was based on an unformed and uneducated understanding of the just war tradition. Here we can make a significant observation about the structure of just war reasoning. These objectors were not guided to any great extent by formal catechism in their churches, or by instruction in civics or ethics in Christian high schools and colleges, into a conscious use of the just war theory interpreted by teachers in the Christian community. Their notion of the just war was probably informed more by the code of honor of westerns of film or television—in which the good guy never shoots first, and women and children are to be spared—than it was by moral teachers. These are the sources of moral education in American society: police shows and westerns. From these sources Americans know we are not to shoot those who are down, and not to shoot women and children unnecessarily. When people saw that we were doing those very things in Vietnam, they objected.

Interestingly, the teachers in churches and political science departments who did apply the just war theory to the Vietnam War were generally less critical of it than were young men called to serve. In the late 1960s, when the wave of resentment about and rejection of the war arose in the American intellectual community, some who participated did invoke the language of just war. Yet the people who took leadership were not political scientists and Christian ethicists but Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician, and Noam Chomsky, a linguist, and their like. Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey, who had been a dove since 1960 on the nuclear issue, was a hawk on Vietnam until the end (although supportive of the concept of selective objection).

Selective conscientious objection

Conscientious objection until that time had been based on the notion of individual conscience. The notion of conscience, as derived from the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, pointed to a source of sweeping, uncalculating moral certainty. In American law, the conscientious objector had to be against all war. He had to be absolutely against all war. He had to be absolutely against all war on the basis of religious conviction. This conception was appropriate to the traditional historic peace church objectors in both world wars. During Vietnam, however, many young men of draft age said, “I do not know about other wars. I just know this war is wrong, and I refuse to fight in it.” That position had—and has—no legal status in American law. But the law was broadened. In 1965 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the criterion of a transcendental appeal—“religious training and belief,” in the words of the law—could not be applied as it had been.[10] Previously, Quakers and Mennonites were almost automatically exempted from military conscription, but non–peace church members were not. The courts properly decided that if government says that one religious tradition—Amish, Quaker, or Mennonites—is a valid religious basis for being a conscientious objector, but that some other religion is not a valid religion for being a conscientious objector, that decision constitutes backhandedly an establishment of religion, which the U.S. constitution prohibits.

In several different stages—one asking whether a conscious belief in the existence of a personal God is necessary, and another asking whether belonging to a community that teaches these things is necessary—the courts gradually nibbled away at wording requiring specifically Christian or specifically peace church identity. By the middle of the Vietnam War, a draftee no longer had to be a member of a peace church and believe in a personal God in order to be granted conscientious objector status—as long as his conscience was absolutely opposed to all war. That precedent has not changed in American law, but church people began to question it. Lutherans and Catholics began to say that they have a right to equal protection before the law for their ethical teachings. They argued: “If a Quaker says, ‘I cannot go to any war,’ he is doing what his church tells him to do. If a Catholic says, ‘I could go to a good war but not a bad one,’ he is doing what his church tells him to do. Why does the government make provision for the Mennonite who follows his church’s teaching but not for the Catholic who does?” Logically, that is a valid argument, but it is not valid in American law.[11]

However, the Selective Service System’s actual practice often included some relative flexibility. It frequently did not apply the full rigor of the law to selective objectors. It was reported late in the Vietnam draft experience that although many selective objectors did not initially receive recognition as conscientious objectors, few finally went to prison.

The government’s position is understandable. Legalizing selective objection presents psychological and legal challenges very different from those associated with recognizing absolutist objection. When the absolutist objector refuses to serve, he does it at the behest of a conscience that is not discussable. He does not need any facts about this particular war to explain his position. And a government can either trample on or respect that conscience, which is inarguable. Anglo-Saxon polity respects it. But if a selective objector says he will not fight, he bases that position on arguable facts: on whether the bombs are too big, or whether the war has been declared, or whether noncombatants are being respected. All of those are debatable matters of fact, and they are also within the political arena. If a Lutheran or Catholic says on empirical political grounds, “This war is something our nation must not do,” that is a claim of politics, not religion. So we can understand why the system finds it more difficult to accommodate selective objection than absolutist objection. Had the government tried to find ways to recognize selective objection that would not have let half the young men in the country stay home, doing so would have constituted bypassing the political decision-making process in favor of an informal plebiscite asking how many draftees wanted to fight the war.

Conscientious disobedience also applies within the army. There too it is easier for the absolutist than for the selective objector. If a person says, “I do not mind being a soldier, as long as I do not have to go to Vietnam,” that statement constitutes military insubordination. It is hard to deal with as a matter of conscience, because it appeals to the rules the army is supposed to be using on itself. Absolute conscientious objectors are people who make transcendental appeals that our society can respect, even though they seem strange. We can be glad to have a few of these objectors around, but we need to keep them off the battlefield, because they help more back home. So within the military the difficulty of accommodating the selective objector also obtains.

Nevertheless, a soldier who refuses to obey an order he considers illegal or immoral can now use that defense in the court martial. When he is court-martialed, he can say, “What my superior told me to do is against the laws of war.” The military court is perhaps less likely than a civilian court to be honest, but if it is honest, he can be let off.

Radicalizing effect of strict just war reasoning

Most of the people who protested against the Vietnam War were not pacifist. At the beginning of the war, even Dan and Phil Berrigan were hardly integral pacifists, but they moved in that direction. One of the lessons to draw from this fact is an argument on the pacifist side: people who begin to be careful about the just war theory tend, as they work at it, to get more radical. Thomas Merton and the Berrigans started by saying, “That war is an atrocity.” As they got drawn into the movement, they began to see that atrocity is normal for the military system, and that they needed to engage in a deeper critique of the system itself. Most of them did not start as systematic pacifists. None of them began by having thought it all through. It was a brand new agenda for most of them. Dan Berrigan had not worked in ethics until the Vietnam era; he had written about sacraments and liturgy. The vast majority of Catholic pacifists began with just war reflexes and with a tender capacity to see how bad the Vietnam conflict was. Only gradually did they work themselves into a pacifist position. The exception would be Catholic Worker people, who were already pacifist in the 1930s.[12]

Just war and pacifism in conversation

It seems obvious at first blush that the just war position can provide a basis for conversation between pacifists and nonpacifists. Just war advocates claim that the theory is relevant to the real decisions made in the political world. The theory enables one to contribute in a relevant way by saying no to some things while not condemning everything. The theory’s proponents claim that the standards it applies are not esoteric but are logically accessible to any reasonable person. It should therefore follow that the language and the standards of the just war tradition would be especially apt for serving as a means of conversation. It is then fitting that we look at whether such conversation can happen.

James Douglass and Paul Ramsey

James Douglass, a pacifist, and Paul Ramsey, a just war ethicist, each included a section in one of their books that responds to the other. In The Non-Violent Cross, James Douglass entitled one chapter “The Anatomy of the Just War.”[13] We turn first to him. Can he converse with Paul Ramsey on just war terms?

Discriminating between noncombatants and combatants. Douglass quotes a passage by Ramsey in which, while avoiding very firm commitments, Ramsey makes it clear that there would be limits beyond which it would be wrong to use nuclear weapons.[14] At that point, Ramsey stood almost as definitely as a pacifist would in contradiction to the standard U.S. Department of Defense preparedness doctrine. As Ramsey himself summarizes, “I clearly concluded from the just war tests that the obliteration or area-bombing in the European theater in World War II, the fire bombing of Tokyo, and the atomic destruction of the two Japanese cities were inherently immoral acts of war.”[15] Thus the early Paul Ramsey did condemn certain acts of war that were not only thinkable but had been committed. He was not convinced by the American authorities’ claims that these activities were necessary. But later Ramsey became much more open, at least as Douglass reads him.[16] Ramsey would accept 25 million casualties in a nuclear strike aimed at a military target (though necessarily including civilians in its destruction) as enormously preferable to a counterpopulation tactic that would indiscriminately kill 215 million. For Ramsey this is still discrimination; for Douglass it is not.

One of the tests for whether the just war theory is a serious instrument of moral discrimination is to ask whether one can conceive of a situation in which the right thing to do would be to accept military defeat, because the only alternative would mean doing something morally inadmissible. As Douglass indicates,[17] in 1965 Ramsey was still ready to deal seriously with this possibility, using for it the label preemptive surrender. Later this possibility fades away. Ramsey does not repudiate it, but he ceases to think about it.

Threatening to do what it would be wrong to do. Second, as Douglass reports it, Ramsey is willing to permit preparation for a war that one must not wage: a nation may threaten to use weapons that it would be immoral to use. Ramsey would even say that although it would be immoral in some cases to use certain large, undiscriminating weapons because the inability to discriminate would bring about disproportionate indirect destruction, we may nevertheless threaten to inflict that wider destruction.

Although Douglass does not make this point, in Ramsey’s logic the concept of intention takes on a shade of meaning significantly different from its classical meaning. Previously, intention had two meanings: (1) an objective one, regarding the long-range purpose of the entire undertaking, and (2) a subjective one, regarding the motivation or the mood of the person making the decision to use violence. With Ramsey’s position a third meaning has arisen: (3) the secret intention not to carry through with what one threatens to do. Our citizens and soldiers need to believe in all seriousness that we would use these illegitimate weapons, and the enemy must believe that we will use them. Otherwise the weapons will not serve as a threat. Yet somehow another level of intention must be present in the minds of the rulers for there to be moral accountability for the last-minute refusal to order the bombing or to unleash the missiles. Do those who govern have that much control?

Double intent, double effect. Behind the variety of intentions on that level, Ramsey uses another distinction from classical Christian thought: the doctrine of double intent. The doer of a deed intends its direct effects but not its indirect ones. The surgeon removes directly a cancer of the uterus and indirectly kills a fetus. The bomber destroys a military target but indirectly destroys civilians. The direct effects of a bombing may properly be the destruction of armed forces or military targets, yet as a part of the deterrent strategy, decision makers may be aware that fallout will strike a lot of nonmilitary targets. They do not intend that indirect effect, but they know about it and count on it. Here Ramsey goes back to the medieval distinction called double effect. One level of this intent is what we want to happen: that we hit only the military targets. The other level of intent is what we know will happen: that civilians will also suffer. And we let the enemy know that we know that we will also hit civilian targets, although we do not intend to do so and will not take responsibility for it. We do not intend to kill civilians, but we deal seriously as a political datum with the fact that the enemy knows we will kill civilians.

Douglass asks whether this just war theory is working after all. Although the just war doctrine serves to affirm the criteria for discrimination, we are left doubting that such discrimination can be effective in the future. Again and again, as we get closer to it, the point at which Ramsey would draw the line against forms of violence seems to be pushed back. Public responsibility to refuse to use an unjust weapon is relegated to secrecy: those in government make the last decision, always acting until the last minute as if they were capable of the worst.

Douglass also argues that just war theory assumes that somebody exercises responsible moral control over the decision to go to war or to use a certain weapon. In fact, historical realism shows that often crucial decisions are not consciously made by the right person. For example, Douglass points out that nobody knew what kind of atrocity the British pilots were going to commit over Dresden.[18] The just war doctrine would call for specific bomber pilots to refuse to fly such a mission, but if they are not informed about the nature of the mission, the just war model is inoperative. We cannot always locate a point of personal decision in every soldier or subject; we cannot always locate a point of decision in the public administration structure. The more clearly we recognize the absence of any such decision point, the more clearly we see that the threats being issued do constitute the real policy and will be implemented; they are no mere threat, which we retain the liberty not to carry out. The bluff becomes the effective policy. The secret intention not to go through with the destruction, by being secret, ceases to be effective.

Selective objection. Another test of the just war doctrine is whether it provides for selective conscientious objection for individuals. Ramsey can conceive of an individual who objects selectively, but he doubts that a government can afford to recognize that objection. The government’s refusal to recognize such a possibility means that the logic of the just war tradition is rejected by governments as much as by pacifists. Yet Ramsey’s commitment to making the just war tradition workable is still sufficiently strong that he keeps looking for ways selective objection might be recognized without undermining the very possibility of government.

Last resort. Another test of the just war tradition in interdisciplinary debate would look at how alternatives to war are to be measured. The concept of last resort presupposes, or rather demands, that all the alternatives are tested. War is legitimate only when all the alternatives have failed. But the sober testing of the last resort claim itself demands a sizeable effort to define and evaluate the alternatives. Douglass criticizes Ramsey for failing to look seriously for alternatives—and for assuming as a result that alternative ways to resolve conflict do not exist.[19]

Ramsey’s response to Douglass. Paul Ramsey’s response to these challenges carries the ad hominem title, “Can a Pacifist Tell a Just War?”[20] In essence, Ramsey’s answer is no. He doubts the honesty or the intelligence of a pacifist who attempts to use the just war tests. Someone who says war is sin does not have the right to test whether people who say it is not sin are reasoning consistently. Douglass should rather admit that he has nothing to say about the subject, because we should indiscriminately reject all sin.

Although Ramsey does not admit this, I think that he refutes his own position in the process of scoring debating points against this critic. Do not just war theorists claim that the central strength of the theory is its use of criteria that are objectively evident and that apply to all kinds of situations, criteria that do not depend on the mindset or the worldview of the person applying them?

Where Douglass sees Ramsey as progressively selling out and becoming less critical, Ramsey defends himself by saying that he is simply getting more relevant. He claims that he is showing greater detail in the capacity to be discriminating. For instance, he spells out in increasing detail the distinction between counterforce and countercity nuclear strategy.

Summing up. I commend closer attention to this exchange of views, because some of the detail has ongoing relevance. I grant that Douglass weakens his debating position by making two points at the same time. Sometimes he tries to prove the inadequacy of the just war doctrine by showing that it does not work or that people who use it are not consistent. Other times he uses the doctrine’s logic to drive people who are committed to it toward at least a degree of effective criticism of the wars society is actually preparing for. I agree that the just war tradition honestly applied would lead at least to nuclear pacifism. I agree that when Ramsey does not follow the theory to that conclusion, either he is not using the theory carefully or the theory itself does not always work. But proving that the theory does not work is a different subject. Here I am interested in using the theory to encourage others to be more discriminating. I want to encourage nonpacifists to grant to the just war theory maximal critical impact on the readiness to resort to violence. We should be more concerned about the lives of those who are threatened than about the reformation of a doctrine.

Paul Ramsey is likewise disappointing. He addresses the challenge to his own honesty by insisting that he was relevant when his criticism was more sweeping and simple, and that he continues to be discriminating when his criticism is less naive. But he does not show that the doctrine works effectively to produce clear discrimination. Instead he resorts to the ad hominem argument that pacifists should be so interested in their own consistency that they should have no interest in asking whether the nonpacifist is consistent.

Gordon Zahn and James Johnson

Another similar effort to converse is an exchange between Gordon Zahn and James Johnson. Zahn is a Roman Catholic sociologist who was one of a few Catholic conscientious objectors in World War II. He suggests that it should be possible to look at the American experience in Vietnam after the fact and make the just war theory operational retrospectively by showing what it should have condemned and what it could have permitted.[21] He states the challenge provocatively. He suggests that “the Vietnam conflict be taken as a test case by writers who would persist in the illusion that these [just war] standards are, or indeed could be, taken into account in the policy decisions reached by military leaders and magistrates.”[22]

In this phrasing are several distinguishable theses: (1) Zahn assumes we can tell what it would mean for the just war standards to be taken into account or not; that is, that they are objective and measurable in such a way that the difference between their being applied and their not being applied would be subject to historical confirmation or falsification. (2) Zahn says that these criteria were not applied in Vietnam. This is a statement about actual practice. (3) He says that the just war standards cannot be applied. This might mean that they are intrinsically inapplicable; that is, that they would call for kinds of discrimination and procedure that are unthinkable. Or it might mean that the discrimination they call for is logically thinkable but that no responsible military or political figure would engage in it.

Zahn then goes on to identify some major dimensions of the Vietnam experience being talked about as violations of the laws of war or of just war morality. He suggests that after the fact is a good time to carry through an international process of evaluation, to press a judgment on the many dimensions of the immorality of the Vietnam conflict, judging the tactics of both sides by the same standard. Zahn is confident that this process would yield the result that, at least on certain points, the Vietnam War would stand condemned, and that thereby the just war doctrine would confirm in the negative case both its logical applicability and its practical inapplicability.

James Johnson of Rutgers University, author of one of the best recent books on the development of the just war theory in post-Renaissance Europe, answered Zahn, rejecting the entire proposal.[23] In part, Johnson argued that Zahn is not qualified to have an opinion on these subjects, because as a pacifist he knows ahead of time that war stands condemned. Zahn’s claim, however, is not that modern war stands condemned by Zahn’s longstanding Catholic pacifist standards. Zahn is rather asking that the just war theory, which he does not hold but which others claim to respect, be taken seriously by the nonpacifists. Johnson fails to see that Zahn recognizes the just war position’s claim to integrity, and therefore Johnson seeks to put Zahn down with ad hominem arguments. He suggests that, because Zahn already knows that the verdict on the Vietnam War will be negative, the study process he calls for would not be done in good faith. But when has the good faith of a study process depended on the absence of conviction of those who ask for it?

A large part of Johnson’s argument against Zahn is the claim that, because we have not fought any wars of this kind, we cannot possibly have the rules to determine what was wrong. He says,

It makes little sense to blame just war theorists for not applying just war “standards and conditions” immediately to the Vietnam war. We are still in the process of finding out what these standards and conditions imply, and the case of the war in southeast Asia . . . does indeed provide a “test case.” But it is not a “test case” for immediately applying these standards, . . . it is a test case for finding out what they are, in the sense of what they require in this form of war that took almost everyone in the West by surprise.[24]

In other words, the criteria are so general that one needs to have fought a new kind of war in order to know how they would apply there. They do not provide guidance before the fact—at least not negative guidance in identifying things that must never take place. They would only provide general orientation after the fact for evaluating more and less acceptable infractions of rules. But evaluation after the fact is what Zahn asks for.

Johnson is a qualified interpreter of the just war tradition. Thus it is striking that he does not admit or respond to the challenge to demonstrate that the tradition is in fact applicable. He says, as is true, that the number of just war thinkers is small. This is a correct observation in the face of Zahn’s assumption that the personnel should be available for the study he wants, but it also constitutes a significant concession in the face of this tradition’s claim to be the mainstream of Western moral thought on war.

Johnson also confirms that just war thinkers practice their skills mostly on cases that do not exist. They are either in the hypothetical present (for example, Paul Ramsey’s concentration on the nuclear bombing of Moscow) or can be studied only after a conflict is over. Johnson confirms that the just war thinkers have little access to the military and political people who make decisions. Johnson counts that fact as an argument in favor of the doctrine’s honesty: it gets no hearing and therefore cannot be held accountable for things that happen in its name. “This is a moral doctrine, not a legal, political, or military doctrine. To have effect in any other way than through the moral sentiments of those fighting a war . . . just war concepts must be translated into legal, political, or military form.”[25] This statement is undeniably true on one level. But if the theory’s proponents appeal to this fact in order to justify the inapplicability of the criteria whenever the makers of legal and military rules choose not to apply them, that appeal constitutes a serious negative reading on the utility of just war doctrine. Such translation into legal form is just what Zahn wants.

At the end of his article, Johnson repeats a point that had been made by others, to the effect that in actual American practice a different pattern of thought is dominant. On whether a war’s cause is just, Americans, believing themselves to be basically a peaceable people, tend to be conservative and to delay entering hostilities. But when they have determined that a cause is just, American history and personality tend to display little respect for restraints in bello. American wars tend toward becoming crusades. This observation is a further reminder that the just war’s primary restraining effect with regard to what is legitimate within war is even harder to fulfill than is the concern for restraint at the point of deciding whether to enter a war.

Johnson says that Zahn opts out of the debate because he knows that the evaluation of the Vietnam War will be negative in the end. However, Johnson then defends the honesty, purity, or truthfulness of his own doctrine by showing that his view also condemns what it cannot stop. Johnson admits that “there never was a just war,” but then skews the import of that observation by saying that it is the same as saying that “there never was a world without war.”[26] But the question is whether the just war criteria can operate in any real war. The question is whether, in a world that is not without war, the just war doctrine functions to enable those who hold it to reject the wars that should not take place, according to its own standards.

Johnson is certainly right in arguing that it is not a new notion to claim that modern war’s escalated destructiveness should make it henceforth illegitimate. Not only was this notion applied in the Middle Ages to the crossbow; it was especially prominent after the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. Yet to say that a “new” idea is not as new in intellectual history as some people think it is does not constitute an answer to the idea or a refutation of it. If it turns out that the just war theory becomes less rather than more able to be critical as the destructiveness of war escalates, that should certainly constitute a reading on our question. If, on the other hand, the rising stakes force some nonpacifists to exercise real restraint, that might save some lives.

The Lessons of Nonviolent Experience

By the phrase nonviolent experience I mean a complex of thought and action nearly unique in history.[1] The events covered in previous chapters brought to the surface a problem that people could not solve, the conflict between nonviolence and the abolition of slavery. In terms of intellectual history, then, the problem has its roots in the nineteenth century. We have seen the conflict between nonresistance and abolition within individuals, most dramatically in William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s and 1840s. Then in the 1850s, the two movements pulled apart. On the nonresistant side was Adin Ballou, who represents simple biblical renewal in mainstream Protestantism. He said that the Christian thing to do is what the Bible says, and then we will see what we can do about effectiveness. Leo Tolstoy was the Russian Orthodox equivalent. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson said analogous things on a different philosophical or theological base. On the other side, in the abolitionist camp, were Elijah Lovejoy and other abolition leaders. The split that developed was between people who said simply, “Do the right thing—and it cannot mean war,” and those whose concern for a righteous cause led them to accept war in the end. That split dramatizes the tension between the effectiveness agenda and nonviolent commitments. Nobody made any progress in addressing that nineteenth-century split until the twentieth century.

Then through nonviolent movements, Gandhi challenged British rule in India, and Martin Luther King Jr. challenged racial discrimination in the United States. After Gandhi and King (to cite the two most widely known symbolic figures) came a broader procession of nonviolent movements, such as those led by César Chávez, Danilo Dolci, Lanza del Vasto, the Movement for a New Society, and Daniel and Philip Berrigan. This twentieth-century explosion of movements using active nonviolence or nonviolent direct action has achieved something. In Gandhi’s case, active nonviolence was at least a major element that brought the British to grant India independence. In Martin Luther King’s case, it was a major element in America’s decision to be a little more honest on paper about racial justice.

Because we are reading this story in a mental world shaped by the impact of pragmatic social concern and its expression in the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, we will look first at the fact that these experiences have in some sense been successful. They have achieved concrete social goals when particular campaigns specifically targeted those aims. Deeper and harder-to-measure values such as self-respect and internal cohesion within the minority community, or changes in the consciousness of public opinion or ruling minorities, have been achieved. At points at which the immediately stated ambitious aims were not achieved, the efforts resulted in other learnings of long-range importance. Militant minority convictions have been consolidated, and leadership has developed. We will therefore ask in various ways what to think of this relative effectiveness achieved by nonviolent direct action.

Effectiveness and nonviolent direct action

The world in which these experiences were successful was a particular kind of world. The lessons they taught can hardly be universal. We can make several observations about where these movements have seen success. Nonviolent activism’s techniques have worked best in situations where the rights of those who protest have some kind of recognition, where there exists a tradition of common law, or a constitution, or a concept of gentlemanliness on the part of the powerful people to which the protest can appeal.

We have less in the record by way of successful resistance to fascist powers and police states. Still, we have the example of Norway under Hitler, and two Hungarian cases.[2] Prague 1968 and Solidarity 1980 could be added, as well as smaller-scale episodes in Latin America.

We do not have striking examples of protest movements continuing for many years without some success. A certain element of success along the way seems to be necessary in order to make a movement feel like a movement. The dominant reading—a debatable reading—is that there is no hope of early success in places like South Africa, and therefore less has been attempted and less achieved.

We lack significant experience of transnational actions (that is, efforts in which allies come from across national borders) or in which a nation would defend itself nonviolently against another nation’s aggression. We have no significant example of one population intervening in a conflict nonviolently to help another (unless we count white activists’ work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights movement in the U.S.). In most successful cases, nonviolent commitment has blended with an element of in-group identity, pride, and power that would not have applied in a transnational way.

Generally, successful movements show strong dependence on personality and charisma. A special kind of leader is needed. Seldom is the momentum maintained into a second generation.

Successful cases have not usually had as their moral and sociological footing a minority or voluntary religious community but rather a total population group, defined ethnically or geographically. Exceptions to this generalization include the earlier experience of the Society of Friends, and some events in Jewish history.

Dimensions of the effectiveness discussion

The effectiveness discussion will have several dimensions; let us align them here before we proceed to look at a few of them more carefully.

From the perspective of a nonpacifist ethic based on responsible concern for the course of events, the possibility that nonviolence could effectively serve certain social goals changes the calculation; the classical just war criteria of last resort and proportionality are all subject to change. For oppressed groups with no serious recourse to armed revolt, the possibility of nonviolent change opens new vistas of potentially liberating initiative. Reinhold Niebuhr already recognized this possibility in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Most liberation theologians have not yet dealt with it seriously. There is less to record for larger groups and so-called strong nations that would be capable of violent self-affirmation but might renounce it as disproportional, not last resort, or not morally admissible. But from history it is increasingly possible to project what such an alternative might look like.

For those who adhere to a deontological or absolutist ethical position, the focus on the way of the cross as simple renunciation is changed. One can do reconciling or liberating things without sinning against love for the adversary.

For the theoretical advocates of pragmatism, the debate changes from qualitative terms (should we reason consequentially or not?) to quantitative ones (what is the lesser evil, and how do we measure “less”?). At the very least, this change calls the nonpacifist to recognize quantitative—cost-benefit—limits in obtaining by nonviolent means some of the desired goals. Costs might outweigh benefits. This was logically true even before modern military and police technology raised the possibility that the costs of violence might be greater than any possible evils the violence claims to prevent. The change in the argument might go further; needing to quantify, precisely and objectively, might open new doubts about whether the very image of measuring incommensurable kinds of evils on a single scale is deceptive.

Puzzles and paradoxes in the use of effectiveness reasoning

There are also puzzles and paradoxes in the use of effectiveness reasoning, quite apart from the challenge of the deontologist.

The adjective direct is often used to characterize nonviolent action. Sometimes it refers to bypassing ordinary means of decision (the electoral and legislative processes, the courts, the police, and bureaucratic means of protection and redress, for example) by going directly to the place an offense is committed (a segregated restaurant or an army base, for example). Yet the place of offense is often not where the decisions that one wants to change are made.

People also use the terminology of direct action to mean that such actions influence public opinion. Yet how public opinion ultimately leads to institutional change is unclear, as are the workings of the other influences (media, religion, money) that press on it. Direct is, in any case, hardly the word for this kind of nonviolent action.

Both the time frame and scale of concern are full of paradoxes. A loss now may lead to a victory later. A small victory may mean a long-range defeat (as when early in the Carter presidency, the planning for the B-1 bomber was set back in a trade-off for developing Cruise missiles). An evil such as Joseph’s captivity (Gen. 50:20) or Israel’s exile may be used for cosmic good.

Nonviolence: Tactic or principle? Comparing William Miller and James Douglass

Differences between two major scholars, William Miller and James Douglass, in interpreting nonviolent action are worth exploring as they illuminate a central issue.

William Miller, writing in the early 1960s, incorporated into his thought the lesson taught by Reinhold Niebuhr. Like Niebuhr, Miller clearly distinguishes between nonresistance and nonviolence; these are two different models of thought, one based on principle and the other on prudence, one on faithfulness and the other on effectiveness. The more we appeal to Jesus, the more we must abandon effectiveness. On the other hand, the more we take responsibility for outcomes, the less pure we can be, even though we can argue that nonviolence, although impure, would be more effective than violence. Nonviolence is just like politics: it depends on power and on planning, on calculation of effects, and on willingness to compromise. Its success is always mixed and impermanent. Nonresistance, on the other hand, means loving as Jesus did, without calculation, without concern for effects.

By taking for granted this Niebuhrian cultural consensus, Miller did not need to prove the necessity of this either/or. But why are religious authority and practical effectiveness alternatives? What does posing them as alternatives say about the meaning of religious authority and about the claims of revelation? When we affirm this disjunction, what kind of revelatory claim do we thereby make for the criterion of effectiveness? If we espouse a criterion of effectiveness, do we not hold a prior theological prejudice against Jesus as authority? Picking up the conversation where Reinhold Niebuhr had left it, Miller does not need to deal with these questions.

Similarly, when nonviolent direct action has been separated from nonresistance and from principled obedience to Jesus’s words, the moral case against violence is no longer clear. If we accept the need for some compromise, why should we limit the amount of compromise we will accept? Nor is it clear what case can be made for action. If action makes us guilty, could not inaction be as good? What is the moral imperative for action that is different from the moral imperative of nonresistance?

Douglass does not presuppose the need to choose between effectiveness and faithfulness. Douglass speaks about “the native power of the weak over the apparently strong” and “the power of truth to overcome the world by love.”[3] Then the gospel is not (as Niebuhr assumes) moral principles unrelated to effectiveness, but rather the belief that moral principles, especially truth and suffering, will be effective to overcome the world. Thus Douglass affirms a clear unity between the nature of God and the course of events. If the truth is revealed, and if someone is willing to love it and suffer with it, it will prevail—not only in some distant eternity or some other world but on the surface of the course of events. We need not choose between faithfulness and effectiveness (though we will need to wait). The cross is a power, and suffering is a way to move history.

What questions are raised by Douglass’s approach, over against that of Miller? When Douglass encourages us to count on faithfulness to principle as being effective, does this stance really support a morality of principle (because we trust right action to be effective)? Or does it undermine commitment to principle by not facing the difficult crunch of what we would do if and when faithfulness to principle does not succeed? To say it in another way, Douglass seems willing to accept the mechanistic model when he speaks of love or of truth as the strongest force. When the strongest force has its way, its success is no miracle, not even a surprise. If we know that that force is strongest, we are still talking in mechanistic terms. Maybe the particular path from obedience to victory is unclear, but like water that will find a path to the sea, we can proceed without knowing for sure what that path will be. Or perhaps the timing is unsure: a bubble will burst sometime, but we cannot be sure ahead of time just when.

Douglass places trust in others—even those who are evil—to see the right, if it is dramatized adequately, and to do the right they have seen. He regrets that neither Marxism nor Christianity trusts the truth to change the adversary.[4] “Trusting the truth” is an apt condensation of Douglass’s vision.

If by Christianity Douglass means traditional, established—magisterial or Constantinian—Christendom, his condemnation is probably correct. Any so-called responsible view of political power and the Christian attitude toward it assumes that the adversary is not subject to any appeal—at least not in the crucial case—except that of superior power. That is to say, those adhering to this view cease to deal with their adversaries in personal terms; the enemy becomes an object. Thus objectified, enemies are expected to respond to the causative pressures brought to bear on them, and are expected to move in the direction in which the greatest force is exerted. This assumption about the adversary becoming an object is questionable on grounds other than Christian faith. If personality is sometimes unpredictable and if some pressures produce backlash, then the image of a coercive superior force ceases to adequately describe how the object of our pressures will react.

The tension we have been describing in the form of the contrast between Miller and Douglass is also observable in the standard descriptions and caricatures of nonviolent action. On the one hand, we could collect a set of statements to the effect that nonviolence is the pure and easy way, always the simplest way out, the one that involves no agonizing problems, because decisions are always made in advance. This is the caricature of principled nonresistance as it is understood by those who reject the principle. The other caricature accentuates the fact that nonviolent techniques are effective. In fact, they can in one sense be coercive. They may provoke violence. They may oblige people to do things they do not really want to do—as if obtaining by persuasion a change in behavior were somehow itself a form of violence.

I have been seeking to describe sympathetically Douglass’s position. What are some points at which his position may be doubted?

We need to ask whether the record is as simple as Douglass’s portrayal of it when he reports it as an objective fact that truth has worked in the past. What does it mean to say that the Christian cross conquered Rome? In a sense it did, but in what sense? It took three hundred years. Can we wait that long? More important, did the Christian message actually conquer Rome, or was it rather the church that was conquered? Do the experiences of Gandhi and King prove that nonviolent methods work, or do they prove only that in some cases the methods’ chance of working is as good as that of any other approach? Or are the experiences of Gandhi and King proof that nonviolent methods have more chance of working than war has? Or do these experiences only prove that nonviolent methods can sometimes work?

Is the statement that the cross conquers finally a faith position, a confession rather than a fact, so that effectiveness is an apologetic elaboration that seeks to undergird and confirm a commitment based on other grounds? Would Douglass abandon nonviolence as soon as it failed? What would “fail” mean? Whenever we say that nonviolence works, we need to ask next whether we would drop it if it did not.

Another formulation of the doubts about Douglass will suggest that an adversary may be radically evil. One may see the truth clearly and nevertheless fight against it. Violence may distort all perception, so that the angry person will never see the nonviolent adversary, however much that adversary suffers in front of him. Maybe what is wrong with the spiritual vision of fallen human nature is not myopia, which could be corrected by glasses, but rather a cataract, which cannot be corrected without changing the eye itself. Maybe oppressors are captive to powers greater than themselves, so that even if they did see the truth, they would not be able to change the course of events.

We can state the issue in still another way: Jesus was not successful. Jesus did not promise his followers that if they did things right, they would conquer within time. The noncoerciveness of agape includes renouncing the promise of power; it includes renouncing the mechanical model of how to move history. Yet that acknowledgement does not mean simple despair or unconcern. It rather means a promise of victory, the paradigm for which is the Resurrection.

One of the reasons Jesus does not promise effectiveness is that he reckons, as the Bible does, and as modern Westerners frequently do not, with the intractable evil of the bad guy. Some evil people, but not all, will be redeemed by a suffering response. More than this, the Bible is realistic about the evil that is structured into the social order. When great numbers of people operate together, they tend to be more selfish than when they operate individually (as Niebuhr claimed). But beyond that, the structures themselves perpetuate certain kinds of distortion and selfishness.[5]

Perhaps still more profound is the biblical recognition, which Niebuhr refocused in the twentieth century, that the good guys are not good enough. Those who mean well are often misled by their awareness of their own good intentions.

To these observations about the limitations of nonviolent power we should add the inventory of philosophical arguments against determinism in social relations. This inventory includes the fact that the picture always has more sides than we are aware of; the fact that sometimes our mistakes are more productive than our control of things; the fact that when the other parties in a relationship are aware of what we are trying to do to them, their backlash against our efforts may produce the opposite of what we sought.

The mood of the civil rights movement until the late 1960s was formed by a sense of progress and victory. “We shall overcome” was not only a hope; it was beginning to be a reality. Yet from some other perspectives that received increasing attention at the end of the 1960s, King did not succeed. Whether the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was effective was subject to debate. The Black Panther movement and the later days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were representative of those claiming that nonviolence had failed. This kind of debate is unavoidable, if one lets the case for nonviolence rest on claimed success.

A third way

I began by describing William Miller’s appropriation of the Niebuhrian structure, which leads him to divide radically between nonresistant suffering love for the sake of faithfulness, and nonviolent organized action for the sake of results. Then I stated the case of Douglass, who does not accept that division, and then some of the possible arguments against Douglass. Now I turn to my own effort to combine some agreement with both.

Miller, by accepting the dualism, agrees not to promise victory. He therefore concedes a point to the established order, which also believes that love is not relevant. I suggest that we should not concede that point. On the other hand, by promising victory Douglass agrees that the promise of good effects is integral to nonviolent action’s ethical basis; he thereby lays himself open to two kinds of questions: Is the ethical claim itself based on Christ and revelation, or does it have the same basis as the appeal to force? Will the commitment to nonviolence be refuted when it fails (the Black Panther view)? I suggest that we should not promise that much.

I propose a third possibility. If Christ is Lord, then we do not try to prove our hope. To attempt to prove our hope is logically and theologically illegitimate, because to prove it, we would have to subject it to—or locate it with reference to—some other more fundamental, visible, or sure standard. That, however, would mean giving our loyalty to another lord. That other standard would then be our absolute. This move is something like trying to prove which religion is the highest or the purest by using standards external to the religions one is comparing. Then those standards themselves become the higher religious claim. Thus I borrow Douglass’s language to affirm my faith in the Resurrection, in a hope that cannot be destroyed by my failures or jeopardized by my inability to manipulate events.

Second, to prove hope is semantically unclear; people will have varied readings about whether efforts have met with success. If cross and resurrection are the model, then long-range success may come by way of martyrdom. That model is not only what is appealed to by those who say that in three centuries the church overcame the Roman Empire; it is also what South American Marxists mean today when they say, “Che is alive!” or what patriotic Texans mean when they say, “Remember the Alamo!” Physical defeat and moral victory may go hand in hand; conversely, conquest today can collapse tomorrow.

I therefore disagree with Douglass when he seems almost to concede to the established power thinking the belief that only demonstrably powerful strategies are morally justified. I disagree with Douglass if his intent is formally to promise that the cross will always win, although I am not sure he means ultimately to do that. But I will still use language like that of Douglass in order to proclaim the hope that I cannot prove. In order to reaffirm, to illustrate, and to translate the meaning of that hope, I will use effectiveness language as does Douglass, but without founding my hope on that language or its apparent proof claims. I will furthermore use the language of effectiveness in order to challenge the other hopes in which many, with equal irrationality, place their trust. Trust in violence is also an irrational trust; violence usually fails. Thus attention to the relative effectiveness of nonviolent techniques is a way of uncovering the mystical trust of the self-styled realists in the efficacy of violence. I challenge the other simple hopes, which also make untenable promises, by stating my own hope—even though that hope is not founded in the promise of effective nonviolence.

Another reason I use the effectiveness language of Douglass, without sharing his optimism, is that if we compare two different lines of action in terms of promise, we must give them a fair test by measuring them with the same yardstick. When people argue that organized military force will achieve certain desirable goals, the alternative against which we should test that claim is not doing nothing, or some improvised nonviolent gesture, but rather what could be done if the same amount of creativity, funding, advanced institutional planning, and strategic thought were invested in a nonviolent response. Only when comparable resources are allocated on both sides can we accurately compare the efficacy of two techniques.

Thus, as testimonies of relevance, I will use Douglass’s effectiveness language. But I will not base my claim to Christian ethics on those projections or (especially) on my capacity to deliver. I agree with Miller’s realism as an ethics position. The cross gives no promise of manageable success, and its claim on me is not dependent on any such promise. But as faith I accept the absolutism of Douglass. If faith says that loving nonviolently is what to do, we have no time to waste on discussing when and why it cannot be done, or on conceding points to the Niebuhrians, who explain why it cannot be done after first deciding they would not do it.

The strange logic of effectiveness

Let us notice a peculiar byway along the path we have covered. I just observed that when violent and nonviolent techniques are compared, with a view to their relative promised effectiveness, the comparison is only fair if we hypothesize equal preparation and equal resources on both sides. It is but one further step in the same direction when we ask what would constitute genuine fairness and honesty in an argument based on projected effect.

Here a peculiar negative paradox is at work in the argument of the person on the street or the Black Panther in the alley. Such a person will say that Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Jesus failed because he was killed. The strategy is discredited because the man who led it was destroyed before he could achieve the victory of justice. The critic believes this is a conclusive argument, even though Jesus and Gandhi and King predicted their martyrdom. They were not surprised; it did not contradict their expectations. Their personal defeat, if it was defeat, was in their plans and therefore does not refute their vision. On the other hand, the same advocate of righteous violence will not consider the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a failed tyrannicide, or of Camilo Torres and Che Guevara in failed revolutions, as proof that their ethical approach failed. Death does not prove their method was wrong, even though for them death was not part of the projected method, and even though their movements did fail.

So we have the strange paradox that a position taken on the grounds of efficacy is not discredited when it fails, yet a position taken on the grounds of principle is discredited when things unfold as its adherents expected, when faithfulness is expressed in martyrdom. Is there not a paradox in this way of weighing the argument? My only explanation for this illogic is that arbitration by arms has some mystical or mythic macho appeal, despite that position’s claim to compute—in cold-blooded fashion—costs and benefits, last resort, and lesser evil.

Some promise remains

The abiding attraction of violence should not stand in the way of recognizing that the experiences of the past two generations have brought about a change of consciousness among many morally insightful people of all religions and no religion: that nonviolent direct action techniques have at least some still-untapped effectiveness in some times and places. The 1970–73 World Council of Churches study spoke not for pacifists but for all serious observers:

The world and the churches have been both inspired and challenged in recent years by examples of new and sophisticated nonviolent movements for justice and freedom. Some of these—for example the Gandhian movement—have been non-Christian. Others—such as that of Martin Luther King—have been Christian. Together their witness has brought the churches of the world to examine anew the style of the involvement in the struggle for world justice and peace. . . .

We are convinced that far too little attention has been given by the Church and by resistance movements to the methods and techniques of non-violence, in the struggle for a just society. There are vast possibilities for preventing violence and bloodshed and for mitigating violent conflicts already in progress, by the systematic use of forms of struggle which aim at the conversion and not the destruction of the opponent and which use means that do not foreclose the possibility of a positive relationship with him. Nonviolent action represents relatively unexplored territory: Initiatives being taken by various groups and individuals to help the exploration happen deserve the strongest possible support from the WCC and the churches.[6]

Thus it is a mislocation of the problem when Christians who see themselves as integrally pacifist and others who see themselves as not completely pacifist concentrate on the difference between them. This difference only applies at the points at which the just war tradition would claim a probability of success in the restrained use of violent means by a just authority for a just cause. Both parties must agree that for most causes in most situations, especially under the menace of nuclear escalation, nonviolent tactics must always be tried first and tried harder than they have been tried in the past. The above discussion, as it wrestles with the impossibility of saying that nonviolence will usually or always work and what difference that awareness would make for moral evaluation, largely sets aside the obvious point that military means also fail most of the time to reach the goals they promise, and that usually their failure is more costly not only to the oppressors or aggressors one seeks to restrain but also (and in fact usually predominantly) to those victims one claims to be defending.

A new stage in debates about nonviolent action concerns the application of nonlethal means of social struggle and defense to realms where it has not yet been broadly applied. Sir Stephen King-Hall, a commander in the British Royal Navy and an instructor in the war colleges of the army and the navy, edited a weekly military science newsletter. The first newsletter after the Hiroshima bomb already stated that this new scale of destructiveness was going to make all past thinking about war obsolete. King-Hall went on to argue that Britain should renounce nuclear armament as counterproductive on purely military grounds and prepare to defend by nonnuclear means those British values that can be defended at all.[7] King-Hall is a nuclear pacifist not on moral grounds but on strategic, selfish (anticommunist) grounds. His colleagues have never undertaken a serious answer to his argument.

Gene Sharp and George Lakey have argued at some length and with professional seriousness the possibilities of nonviolent action for changing or defending a society. At the very least, we must grant that the case they make for a relatively high level of effectiveness, in some circumstances and toward some ends, is quite credible. It is easily comparable with the chances of success for lethal violence in either terrorism or war.

Kenneth and Elise Boulding, Adam Curle, and James Laue are major figures in the sociology of conflict resolution. They have demonstrated how on a subnational scale we have much to learn about good and bad ways, effective versus destructive ways, of processing conflict. Not only do they provide theoretical underpinning to the Sharp/Lakey argument; they also remind us that most intergroup conflict is not violent, and that the conflicts that do lead to war often have a long premilitary incubation time during which other recourses could be used. The decisionist model presupposed by just war rhetoric and some ethical theory, which assumes that at one point some statesperson decides to fight or not, is superficial and deceptive.

Apologetics in the face of nonviolent experience and pragmatism

With Niebuhr we have learned that the several sciences are in charge. The question is not whether we learn from them; they have won us over. As soon as we talk effectiveness language, we have agreed to join them in their interpretation of our common world, in their categories, and the only question is whether there is anything more that we can do.

We can argue as apologetics (that is, making a faith commitment meaningful so that it does not look stupid) that the hypothesis of the various sciences—that their methods ultimately allow them to comprehend the whole world—is intrinsically unverifiable. They can never prove that nothing exists beyond what their tools can handle. So we may logically affirm that something might exist beyond what their tools can handle, and it might be that that is where God is. We can go on claiming to have a bigger worldview than the one they have. Yet is it sure that “my discipline is bigger than yours” is an argument for being Christian? And is it sure that within what each discipline can deal with, we grant its sovereignty?

We may have another way of coming at this issue. We find that way first in Gandhi, King, and Douglass. That way is a deep commitment to the unity of ends and means. Gandhi says that it is an illusion to think we can use evil means for a good end; means and ends are the same thing. If we think we can use means that are in themselves evil for a good end, our analytical grid has not been inclusive enough. Gandhi asserts this on the basis of a non-Western view of the universe, derived from Hindu and Buddhist categories of the unity of everything. Although Douglass is Western, he is a prescientific and contemplative Catholic for whom a vision of the whole world united in the mind of God is prior to any of our analytical tools. King openly cites Gandhi to make the same point. That point is rooted for him partly in the black Baptist experience and partly in the Christian personalism of his studies in liberal Protestant seminaries.

The trust that things hold together in such a way that any moral shortcut will blow up in our faces was true for each of these three men before he sought empirical verification of it. These three people, all of whom serve as examples of not selling out to Niebuhr’s dilemma, appeal to a non-Western worldview or a pre-Western view of the wholeness of God’s cosmos. The way we moderns take things apart to distinguish between (for instance) means and ends does violence to the wholeness. Therefore any use we make of these categories will have to be modest.

This modesty is difficult to practice. Usually we first accept the mechanistic view that almost everything is explainable. Anything we say about God has to go beyond that realm. We have various ways of explaining that the “beyond” is not stupid or irrational or inexplicable or unaccountable. Yet our explanations still come from our having first been at home in the world that teaches us to analyze and to a large extent master. The pre-Western Hindu or the Catholic contemplative or the black Baptist preacher does not say that these modern tactics and techniques of analysis are wrong, but he does not trust them much and does not expect much from them. Therefore he is not embarrassed when they try to tell us what we cannot do, because he does not expect the techniques to encompass all we can do. Especially he is suspicious of tactics at the point of their strength, which is in pulling reality apart and separating ends from means. That proficiency itself is what these men of faith say is cheating, what we cannot really do. So whenever we think that a certain amount of evil will bring about a certain amount of good, we are the ones who are cheating. We are bringing an analytical tool into God’s universe. As soon as that universe is not together under God or in God, it is not a universe.

Special and general revelation

The whole problem we have been talking about could be rephrased in terms of a debate about revelation. General revelation is the kind of knowledge that does not need Moses or Jesus or any specific event in order to be made known. It has the authority of coming from God and being true. Niebuhr, if he were trying to make himself understandable to orthodox Christianity, would say that the term for what he is doing is general revelation. It contrasts with special revelation, which adds specifics through the particular stories of Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Jesus. All Christians at least since the Middle Ages have said that there are two kinds of revelation and that we must hold them together. But which is normative? Niebuhr says that we can’t receive special revelation if we don’t first have the basics of general revelation; therefore the general (wider) encompasses and overrules the special (smaller).

Sectarians, on the other hand, think the special disqualifies the general. “Naive” sectarians believe that what Jesus tells us to do is special revelation, and that is why we must do it; we believe that what the general revelation people are doing is less than that. Niebuhr would come back and ask how we know who Jesus was. Jesus said he was the Son of God. But how do we know who God is? We must have known that before. How did we know that? Aha—general revelation! According to Niebuhr, we cannot say meaningfully that God speaks without having an a priori definition of who God is. So general revelation has to come first. Jesus must fit within this larger frame. This larger frame is all the other things we know. Among the things we know is the awareness that we never follow Jesus faithfully. But Jesus comes to us and tells us we are not expected to follow him faithfully, because he wants to forgive us. He wanted to die for us. Because he died for us, we should not try to die with him too faithfully; otherwise he would not have needed to die for us. This portrait is a caricature, but it is there in the Augustinian alternative.

Does all this make any difference now, if we come back to our conversation about the gap between faithfulness and effectiveness? First, since Gandhi, King, Dolci, Chávez, and Sharp, we now know that we can do a lot without violence. The actual historical experience of people taking some cues from Jesus has raised our estimate of the effectiveness of nonviolence. Second, since the recent revisionist review of American political history, we have to be much more modest about what we can do with violence. Canadians are not sure an American revolution was needed to gain freedom. Civil War historians are not sure that that tragedy was necessary.[8] So it can be argued that within this scientific cause-and-effect system, not beyond it, the effective potential of violence is decreasing as we look at it more critically, (a) because the weapons are getting worse, and (b) because a revisionist reading of history sees that violence did not do nearly as much good as the people who wrote history texts told us it had. (After all, it was the winners, not the losers, who paid them to write the history texts.)

These developments mean that the lines on the chart are rising as they reflect what nonviolence can do, and they are falling as they reflect the utility of violence. They may not have crossed on the graph, but they are close enough to weaken the Niebuhrian case that we sometimes have to do violence in order to be effective. What we have to prove by appealing to transcendence or revelation is getting smaller and smaller. Does that do us any good? Or is that just intellectual cheating, because we still have to decide whether we do the right thing on absolute grounds or pragmatic grounds? Or might we say that we are approaching a point where analysis within the system-immanent box leaves us room for a kind of Pascalian wager?[9] If nonviolence works, we have won the universe, and if it does not work, we are all dead anyway—so we might as well try it.

We have come to a point at which nonviolence is increasingly effective. If we are still at a point at which nonviolence will not save us, at least we know now that violence will not save us either. So we will try nonviolence anyway. Is that position intellectually credible, or is it cheating? At the least, there is a new way to put the point. Gene Sharp, making political science sense of anecdotal experiences of what nonviolence can do; revisionist historians, questioning the utility or necessity of violence; scientists, projecting the damage we would do if we ever try violence again, and weighing the damage that conventional forms of violence are doing to the Third World and ecology: all these have brought us to a point at which Niebuhr’s question, although proper theologically, is no longer interesting in human terms. It depended on a significant difference between those two curves on the graph. Is this line of argument intellectually questionable because it is trying to prove something out of contemporary experience that ought to be proven theologically?

Additional questions

By concentrating our questioning on an apologetic phase of the interpretation of nonviolent experience, we have left untouched the practical interpretation, which would have dealt with such questions as these: In what kinds of situations is nonviolent action least likely to “work”? Are there unresolved issues of strategy and/or tactics needing special attention in the analysis of nonviolent experience? Are there borderline ways in which formally nonviolent activities may offend human dignity?

We have also not discussed other apologetic themes. These include the following: Nonviolently making someone do what you want them to is still coercion; it is not “resist not evil.” Nonviolent initiatives may actually provoke adversaries’ violence in response, thereby precipitating a worsening of the global setup. Nonviolent activists may wrongly convince themselves that by virtue of their renunciation of violence, their social analysis is right. Not having to be hardnosed about the cost of conflict in terms of lives, they may too easily provoke conflicts in which the people they lead lose more than they gain.

We could discuss still more debates. One concerns what it means to disobey a law. The most thoroughly developed position by Gandhi and King says that we should disobey a law when it is unjust, because it has forfeited the right to be considered as the law. But a procedural limitation remains, in order to safeguard against chaotic arbitrariness in which all kinds of people could on any grounds declare any law unjust: the person who disobeys an unjust law with conviction must be ready to pay the standard legal price of prison or some other punishment. This willingness protects against arbitrary subjectivity and demonstrates that disobeying a specific law does not mean disregard for law as such.

It is going one step beyond that position to say that some laws are not unjust in themselves but they may be disobeyed when they serve to defend some injustice. Examples might be rules about parade permits, or access to public places, or the freedom to strike. In these cases, the wrong is not in the specific law itself but in the way it is being used.

Another position says that because the law should not exist, neither does the obligation exist to accept the price of breaking it. Sometimes, as with the defense of Dr. Benjamin Spock for advising others to refuse military service, the defense shifted from avowing guilt (thus accepting punishment) to pleading innocent and thereby inviting the jury to nullify the law.

Still others (Daniel Berrigan, for example) evaded capture and imprisonment because their objection was directed not at a single unjust law but against a system that was itself unjust. This perspective challenges not only particular laws but also a government’s claim to sovereignty.

These must suffice to count as specimens of the types of issues in strategic thinking that arise with more systematic attention to civil disobedience as an instrument of witness or social change.

Ecumenical Theologies of Revolution and Liberation

Before turning to the main topic of this chapter, Latin American liberation theology, I want to root this theme historically.[1] Many who talk and write about liberation theology, as well as many who resist it, deal with it as a great innovation. For some individuals and groups and for some places, it is an innovation. Yet in the wider frame of Western intellectual history, it is not an innovation.

The historical myth of liberation

Freedom through revolution is the primary political myth from the late eighteenth century onward. This expectation dominates our time: when there is lack of freedom or oppression, whether direct civil tyranny or economic or institutional oppression, revolution is the way to respond. The whole of this hope is greater than the parts. The vision of what revolution will do is more convincing and more widespread in our culture than can be explained on the basis of the vision’s particular elements and their origins. What are some of those elements?

The heritage of 1776 secularized the Puritan vision, which was Calvin radicalized. According to Calvinism, lesser magistrates have the right to bring about a revolution. It is not a revolution in the deep anarchic or chaotic sense, because it is the system saving itself. The dukes replace the king with a better king. The American Revolution secularized this vision, because the American program derived not from traditional orthodox revelation but from confident humanism. According to the United States’ Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident [that is, unquestionable within nonbiblical common sense], that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” “Creator” is still Judeo-Christian language, but here the terms are those of deism. The language of individual rights is not how the Puritans would have put it; they would have said that God has put people in the framework of covenant obligations. But the rest of the reading is the same. When the king does not do his duty by his people, then the people, in the persons of their lesser magistrates, have the right to get rid of the king. The way the Americans pursued this right was not by insurrection within a country but by detaching the colony from the empire. This Puritanism, secularized, breaking out from under an empire into national autonomy, is one element of our heritage.

The French Revolution of 1789 is another element, although it had a different cultural situation. France did not come out from under an empire; it rebelled against a regime within the nation. The theology behind the French Revolution is not secularized Protestantism but secularized Catholicism and Voltaire’s antichurch heritage. It is not the lesser magistrates but “the people” who have a right to rise up. The logical and practical effect was a much more disorderly revolutionary experience, going on into terror and then into Napoleon. The French Revolution failed; France soon fell back into monarchy. Still, the vision remains an important part of our thought.

The nineteenth century was marked by a series of revolutions in Latin America. One country after another became “free.” The so-called liberators were not indigenous national figures. They were professional consultants who went from one country to another and provided Latin America with a network of a dozen independent countries, all having come out from under Spain and Portugal. They could get away with this project because the Monroe Doctrine defended their right to pursue it. The local authorities who became free were not the people but the colonial aristocracies.

The twentieth century has seen major revolutions. The Russian revolutions of 1917 ended with the Soviet one. In the years after World War II, decolonization sometimes came with bloody revolution, sometimes with less violence but great agitation, sometimes with no violence but with a mood of angry rhetoric about rising up against colonial rulers in London, Paris, or Lisbon. Finally, there was Mao’s revolution in China.

If we compare these models of revolution, we observe great differences in how they make sense and in what sense they succeeded or failed. They differ in what they meant to the common people. In the rhetoric of liberation, nineteenth-century Latin American independence movements look like independence. Yet poor people were often worse off after independence than before because the new regimes were feudal. At a time when the Spanish and Portuguese governments would have imposed a greater degree of humane justice, gradually freed the slaves, and granted some rights to the indigenous peoples, the local bosses, warlords, and landlords took Latin American colonies out from under Spain and Portugal. They did so in order to have greater freedom to oppress the common people. Probably the crowning example of this kind of revolution—liberation language used to maintain an oppressive regime—is the Boer War, which laid the groundwork for an independent South Africa. The Afrikaner colonists wanted independence in order to maintain apartheid; British law would have undermined it. Today the people who think that the great heritage of revolution always frees people do not consider the fact that many revolutions have hardened local oppression, while colonial governments would have had a relatively humanizing impact if those territories had remained colonies.

The different revolutions have different theologies. Some are secularized Protestantism, some are secularized Catholicism, and some are Marxist. They differ in their notions of liberty. That difference does not matter for the conclusion dominating our culture: when things get bad enough, have a revolution.

Just revolution as a historical shift from just war to holy war

When it began in the high Middle Ages, the just war theory did not have room for a doctrine of just revolution. It only admitted—out on the edge of things—that if tyrants are bad enough, rising up against them is not the sin of sedition. That possibility has footnote status in Thomas Aquinas and in John of Salisbury. Then in the age of the Huguenots came an ideal doctrine of just revolution through the lesser magistracy. In this doctrine, the regime heals itself. Normally, this change would not be very violent, barely more than a coup d’état. If a king’s dukes were that unhappy, then his position was weak and he knew it. He did not have much reason to fight hard and probably did not.

The next step is the move from the idea of elite revolution to revolution in a much more dramatic and destructive sense. This kind of revolution called into question the whole system, on the ground of a right that resides in the people—in all the people or the majority of the people, the common people or every individual. This idea was rigorously carried through in the rhetoric of 1776, but it was not the reality of 1776. When the French Revolution carried that idea through rigorously, the revolutionaries had no history to go on, no abiding institutions to take over. They just smashed everything and hoped for something healthier. What happened was not free anarchy but Napoleon.

When a population takes seriously this view of popular revolution, they do not ask questions about the winnability of their struggle, about proportion, or about just means. The revolt becomes ideological, and their talk is the classical language of holy war. Without testing, one knows what the cause is, and that cause makes anything acceptable. So we have shifted from the realm of just war to that of crusade; revolution has evolved from a winnable reshuffling of power among elites into a holy cause. Most of the just war questions go unasked. Only the criterion for what constitutes a just authority is needed, and proponents of the cause conclude that the present government no longer meets that criterion. In the Middle Ages in order to know what a just authority was, people just saw that there was a king. With this shift, legitimacy becomes debatable, ideological.

In the modern rhetoric of freedom, all “the people” support the revolution. In fact, that is hardly ever the case. What really happens is that a new elite seizes the spotlight, asserting that it has the right doctrine or that it has the people behind it. This is the logic of ideological conflict or crusade, not that of justifiable uprising. Despite this difficulty in the logic of the theory of revolution, at the popular level people act as if they have proven that revolution is proper. Revolutionaries can claim, “We cannot do otherwise; we are on the side of the people, and we have a right to revolution.”

In the popular mind, such a revolution is sure to be successful; people assume that the criterion of winnability has been met. The revolution is psychically invincible. In fact, though, few revolutions have succeeded in setting up the regime they promised. Those who have won their revolution, however, write the textbooks. Thus we come to assume that the parallel to just war holds.

Revolution and liberation in twentieth-century ecumenical circles

This common wisdom of the age is already generations old. Now we ask how the theologies of revolution and liberation that have marked Christian discussion in the latter part of the twentieth century adopt and adapt this common wisdom of the previous centuries about revolution.

This discussion is ecumenical, and not simply in the sense that different traditions talk with each other. Its institutional basis is ecumenical organizations. The people who discuss a theology of revolution are people who are not very loyal to their respective church or nation. They are exiles or international bureaucrats serving international agencies, or people who have been prepared by their nonprovincial experience to look at social change from outside loyalty to a particular country or regime. It was international Christian groups that talked this way first.

“The world struggle”

The World Student Christian Federation (WSCF)—a product of the early twentieth century ecumenical Protestant missionary thrust—created a cosmopolitan, theologically liberal, Protestant, culturally internationalist elite. Their report, The Christian in the World Struggle, is a monument of the kind of thinking that went on in the late 1940s and 1950s.[2] M. M. Thomas, a Christian from India who was later chair of the central committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC), was the major author of this book. An ecumenical lay leader all his life, he left his scientific training to become an international secretary of the Student Christian Movement.

Thomas wrote about “the world struggle.” Although he talked about a necessary dialogue with Marxism, his notion of revolution was broader than the political and economic issues the Marxists raise. Revolution meant modernization and internationalization. Missions, democratization, international communication, and international commerce would all work together to civilize the world and liberate it from oppression. These ideas would bring revolution and enable each nation to create its own free liberal democratic structures.

In the 1950s, with World War II over, Thomas and others saw this change beginning. India and Pakistan were becoming free; the British were backing out of their African colonies; the French and Dutch would have to do the same. It was a world revolution of enfranchisement, in which social justice language, not Marxism, was central; Western liberal democracy was what thrived around the world. Mission agencies favored this notion because it meant the final downfall of pagan religion, of religion that opposes Western culture. They thought not only that this change was producing liberty so the church could go about its mission, but that the change was the result of the church’s mission. Most leaders of the nationalist movements graduated from Christian schools founded by Christian missions. Some of them were alive because they had been treated in mission hospitals. So they thought the Christian world mission had brought them to the point where the young nations were working through the world struggle.

Many early WCC staff members got their international training and identity from the WSCF. The group identified with cultural progress and the forward movement of the entire world toward an age of democratic liberation. The revolution was on its way. It was linked with modernization, with democratization, and with a relatively peaceful transition out from under empire into national sovereignty.

“Responsible society”

Events did not confirm this optimism, but the vision evolved from there. In 1948 the constitutive assembly of the WCC in Amsterdam circulated five volumes of serious preparatory theological exchange, projecting the social-ethical slogan “responsible society.” The planners intended it as a slogan, a symbol, a direction, rather than a clear concept: The churches’ vision for society is neither capitalist nor communist, but free, humane, and without ideology. The vision was Christian in inspiration but open to all in participation and common to all in content: any decent human would want that kind of society. The fact that Indonesian Christians have to work with a majority of Muslims, or that Christians in India have to collaborate with a majority of Hindus, does not make any deep difference. The responsible society vision saw everyone collaborating to build a new society. Therefore it was a vision for rapid change if not revolution. This slogan kept serving until the late 1950s, when critics began to say it was empty and did not articulate much about what to do.

“Humanizing the world”

Other language for the same idea gradually evolved. In 1963 the Department of World Mission and Evangelism (DWME) of the World Council of Churches held a major convention in Mexico City. The theme was “worldliness.” They sought to redeem the word worldly, to make it a good word. The DWME claimed that the Christian mission is to people in this world, not to call them out of it.[3] Christians must get out of their ghettos. They must stop using private language—private both in the sense that it only talks about the individual and in the sense that other people cannot understand it. The Christian mission in the world is to join in what God is doing in the world. What God is doing in the world is making it more humane.

“Humanizing the world” replaced “responsible society” as a visionary slogan. The phrase did not have a precise definition, yet it set its own agenda and provided a vocabulary for criticizing specific abuses. Christian worldliness meant that Christians and non-Christians alike could know what a society worthy of humans is, and they could work for it together, even in those places where Christians are a minority. Naturally, Christians have special responsibility where they have power. DWME Christians saw themselves as few in number but well placed and already having or likely to have some power in the Third World. In Indonesia, Japan, and India, Christian minorities—because of their education, skills, and links to the West—had influence in their society beyond what their numbers would lead one to expect.

“Theology of revolution”

Over time it became more and more clear that this vision for rapid change was not going to work out as smoothly or as quickly as those advocating it had hoped. Rapid change would have to be conflictual. So they started talking again about revolution. This second round of revolution language first found a podium in the Church and Society study conference convened in 1966 in Geneva by the WCC Study Department. Here, the slogan “theology of revolution” was first given broad currency. Revolution became the term to adopt, define, and baptize. People appropriated it as a way of talking about what they wanted to do in society. Yet everybody defined it differently. The Russians at this conference said that the whole world needs revolution, and because the Russians had had a successful one, the world should join with the Russians. The western Europeans said that revolution is all kinds of rapid social change, beginning with the industrial revolution. Technological revolutions are probably more important than regime changes. Likewise, changes in economic production and distribution are more important than regime changes. Representatives from the so-called Third World continued to think in terms of nineteenth-century Latin American liberation and contemporary African nationalist movements. They hoped in the old scheme: we get liberty and a good regime by rising up against the old one—with violence, if necessary. After 1966, that was a dominant mood in the literature. It was deepened by specific implementation in several directions.

In 1968, the WCC Assembly at Uppsala saw heightened concern for this agenda. Development was the dominant theme. Even the people talking about bishops and how to get churches together had to talk about the poor. Out of this came two developments, different in scale, weight, and direction, but both important. The small one was an action the assembly took in saying that nonviolent resources for rapid social change in the direction of greater justice should be studied.[4] Out of the studies came the awareness of the potential, greater than most people think, for significant social change without violence. The big development was a special “Program to Combat Racism,” a new ad hoc branch of the WCC. The program decided not to combat equally all kinds of racism everywhere but to concentrate on one particular form of racism, the most destructive at the time, which was white racism in the black world. Proponents of the program decided to do this in dramatic ways, by finding places where a special situation would give exceptional visibility and witness value to token expressions of moral support. They knew this gesture would not do away with racism, but it could educate people about racism. So beginning in about 1970, the WCC gave token donations to liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola.

What does this development have to do with our revolution agenda? The money (designated for humanitarian causes) went to a group carrying on a classic just revolution against the Portuguese regime in Mozambique in 1970, and later to groups acting against Ian Smith in Rhodesia, and still later to groups organizing against the regime in South Africa. By the nature of the revolutionary situation, these groups tended to think of their righteousness in crusade terms rather than just war terms. Their sense of righteousness was heightened by identification with the race issue, in the light of which they saw the other party as obviously wrong. The dramatic ideological heightening of the revolutionary cause’s righteousness became even greater when it was linked with the racism question. What had already been theologically problematic became even more so.

We noticed that in 1948 the effort was to separate this Christian vision for world liberty from the Marxist/anti-Marxist debate. More and more the discussion shifted on that matter and increasingly affirmed the economic dimension of oppression. The visionaries tended to say less often that people are oppressed because they do not have the right to vote, or do not have freedom of speech or freedom of migration, or because their country is a colony. They began to say more often that people are oppressed because they are poor and because the market for their products is rigged. They discovered that some of the politically “free” ex-colonies were not better off in the economic sense or even in the social and civil liberty sense than before. This discovery heightened the economic elements in descriptions of oppression. Even democracy did not bring freedom. Even independence from Britain did not bring freedom. So as time went on, the focus shifted from the civil and political to the economic dimension of the desired liberties.

Challenging the self-righteousness of liberation

New Theology, No. 6 is a useful collection of articles around the themes of revolution, nonrevolution, violence and nonviolence, peace and power. Revolution—the central theme of this collection—has many different meanings. The book includes three different postures with regard to “the revolution.” (1) Some, especially Jesuit Rolland Smith, affirm revolution in a reflexive way. His is an uncritical affirmation of change, not literally for its own sake, but with the trust that change will be better, because the present is so bad. (2) Other voices, more sober, call for change, but do so with self-critical modesty. They try to use the just war theory’s discriminating language: We need some change but it will not come without conflict. Sometimes this conflict will have to be violent, so Christians should be concerned—in addition to justifying the conflict—to limit the violence. A statement of Third World bishops goes carefully in this direction, as does Jan Lochman’s article.[5] (3) A few articles add perspectives that clearly mesh with these concerns and yet are more critical. I would say that in some ways these pieces, by Herbert Richardson, Richard Shaull, and Hans-Werner Bartsch, are more correct.

Richardson argues that Martin Luther King saw that a commitment to nonviolence expresses a deeper understanding of the nature of sin than other people have.[6] The struggle against evil within the system of ideological conflict never solves anything. One ideology lives off its opposition to another and thereby strengthens what it opposes in the very act of opposing it. King understood how structures of evil in the world drive people to evil acts and oppress them until they are sick, filled with hatred, and fearful of all outsiders. This awareness gave his theology a critical focus and originality. So what those who desire change need is a readiness to suffer more than the other party, a readiness to take on more than our share of the cost to change. King (and Richardson) affirmed revolution, but King would say that we must not think we can defeat evil with its own weapon.[7]

Richard Shaull writes about subcommunities and about the church as a counterculture.[8] Although he is a Presbyterian, he is interested in perspectives on critique and change that come out of minority postures. “The time has come,” he notes, “when we must rediscover—in church and society—the meaning of our sectarian heritage. . . . Our Western liberal society needs badly the resources provided by the Christian sectarian tradition.”[9]

Bartsch, a German Lutheran, contributes a more traditionally theological exegetical piece, “The Foundation and Meaning of Christian Pacifism.” He sees pacifism in terms of communication rather than effect.[10] When we love our enemies, we will not necessarily achieve some social goal with them, but we are communicating to them that God loves the godless, that God loves God’s enemies. Justification by grace alone can be proclaimed only through renunciation of violence as a way of dealing with conflict.

So there are in this little book several different angles undercutting the self-righteousness of revolution yet arguing that opposing oppression is God’s agenda. Change is a moral imperative. Christians ought to be discussing how that change should come, not whether it must come or whether we should be for it.

Latin American Catholic liberation theology

Liberation in the years after Vatican II became a dominant current in Latin Roman Catholic thought. The broad antecedents of this current are to be found in everything that we have dealt with so far, but not in the sense of direct borrowing. The Latin American Catholic theologians we now turn to did not read much of the Geneva ecumenical literature or North American Protestant thought. The closer antecedents of this movement can be found in some liberation language current in the Northern Hemisphere by the late 1960s—Black liberation, women’s liberation—themselves representing the notion of liberation as a better way to say revolution.

Why is liberation a better way to say revolution? Liberation language points to broader values than a mere change of regime. It says that the goal is to set people free, not simply to get rid of the bad guy. This shift is especially important in Latin America, because its peoples for decades have been getting new regimes. None of those new regimes brought freedom, despite all the talk about it. So people in Latin America are skeptical about revolution if that does not mean a really new structure. Still, the reading in Latin America is that they have no hope of getting any liberty without getting a new regime; they are in a situation of last resort, and they have no possibility of incremental progress toward liberty.

What is not new

It is important, as a corrective against the shortsightedness of the standard account (by both friends and critics) that we have placed the current popularity of liberation in a longer time frame. What has not changed is that revolution in the interest of freeing the oppressed (there are other kinds of revolutions) continues to be—ever since Cromwell—one of the typical forms that just war rhetoric takes. We may summarize the specific marks of that form of the just war stance.

Just cause. First, advocates of revolution to free the oppressed assume the righteousness of the cause because the regime against which they rise up is unjust. By what criteria it is known to be unjust and at what point that injustice moved beyond the threshold of “tolerable frailty” to “worthy only of destruction” are issues not easily argued (although proponents of revolution may engage in some rudimentary form of last resort reasoning). The literature in question just assumes that the destruction of the present infamous regime will be a good thing.

Proportionality. Second, measurements of proportion are seldom possible in this case. The possibility that the revolution itself might do more harm than good, even though its goals are righteous, is difficult to measure with objectivity and precision. Even more, in the aftermath of a successful revolution, will the victors be able to administer well the society they have seized? Generally its proponents decide that the revolutionary cause is just by leaping over those questions.

Winnability. Third are issues of winnability. Most revolutions do not succeed. Some succeed in the sense of seizing sovereignty but do not succeed in establishing effective governments. Some establish effective governments but are not able to withstand the new enmities they have provoked; people lose their freedom again by choosing another protector to whom they become tributary. In the face of these questions about winnability, the friend of revolution faces powerful temptations to lapse into the rhetoric of the crusade: to glorify defeat or at least be unconcerned about victory as long as the cause is heroic. This construction of the martyr image around a failed insurrection may—over generations—contribute to a later success. Witness the symbolism of the martyr Sandino in Nicaragua. Nonetheless, the first time around, the revolution failed. Neither Che Guevara nor Nestor Paz nor Camilo Torres (the three best-known martyrs, two of them Catholic) did the revolutionary cause any immediate good by dying for it. It is even less morally acceptable that revolutionary rhetoric should claim the lives of thousands of anonymous youths, to whom are denied the fame of martyrs, and whose mothers may lack even the consolation of knowing where and why their sons died. In sum, moral discourse around revolution tends to slip from the shape of justifiable war to that of the crusade.

Legitimate authority. Behind the previous questions is that of just authority. By definition, the classical just war tradition called for violence to be a tool only of legitimate governments. There is then no avoiding a difficult redefinition when some declare, on grounds that are not fully objective, that a given government—although effectively in control of its territory, and enjoying at least some kind of legitimacy on the shoulders of previous political process—is not only inadequate but worthy of direct destruction. Who has the right to make that claim? The valid revolutionary authority cannot expect any accreditation from the present regime, except in the negative sense that as the insurrection becomes stronger, the defensive injustices of the old regime may become more radical. The revolutionaries can get no approval by plebiscite; if they could, no revolution would be needed. To say it the other way around, in orderly societies a change of government through free elections is the normal form of revolution. Unlike the Christian thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we no longer have available the possibility that the lesser magistrates will themselves eliminate the tyrant, with the total civil elite thereby healing itself.

Thus the people claiming to have the authority to implement a violent revolution are a minority, often a small minority, self-appointed, with only tenuous relations to any kind of legitimation that is not logically circular. They are the legitimate authority simply because they claim to incarnate the just cause: that is, because the doctrine that guides them or the goals which they have set are shown to be correct on argumentative grounds. These grounds will not seem convincing to the authorities they are attacking or even to many of the people whom they propose to liberate.

The difficulty of accrediting a revolutionary elite includes the general unreadiness of oppressed populations to trust people who promise to liberate them. Often oppressed peoples prefer a bad situation they understand to a better one promised by a stranger. Sometimes they would really prefer in their hearts to support the revolutionaries but cannot afford to do so, for fear of reprisals. A revolutionary elite can sometimes escape the country when their attempt to take over has failed, but ordinary people cannot. Other times the common folk genuinely doubt whether the liberation being promised is truly in their interest. Therefore the leaders argue a revolution’s legitimacy on the basis of the doctrine that those leaders say they hold. Once again, the reality is more like a crusade than a justifiable war.

Centering attention on a violent takeover of government from the top represents a questionable reading about the nature of the political context. (1) In many situations of deep injustice the resources in money, organization, or leadership are so limited that even with a different government, the situation could not be significantly improved any time soon. (2) A focus on revolution gives little attention to the possibilities of nonviolent direct action, which if taken seriously would have significant implications for last resort and proportionality. (3) A focus on violent takeover generally gives inadequate attention to the situation of oppressed minorities, which—because they are small—could not have an effective revolution even if they wanted to be violent. (4) Nor does a revolutionary agenda give attention to the room for negotiation and brokering that minorities enjoy even in situations in which they have no hope of having control. In all these ways, focusing on the moral imperative of revolution is dysfunctional. It shifts attention from reality to a possible extreme case, concluding that a violent insurrection should almost be the normal thing to plan for. None of these questions is new. Most of them, if asked carefully, disqualify the colonial uprising of 1776 and the Southern secession of 1861. Whether they validate the Cuban revolution or the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua would be a closer call.

What is new

In all the matters of basic ethical outline, we have seen that liberation theology advocates have added nothing to the earlier discussion of revolution. But the fact that this discussion has arisen in another geographic, political, and cultural context has changed the nature of this discussion in important ways.

First, we have moved from a predominantly Protestant context to a predominantly Catholic one, and from a first-world context where Christians are in the minority to one where the church, although weak, is old and omnipresent. Large numbers may be involved if “the church” commits itself to a particular social goal. Churches in Latin America are weakened in many ways, but they are not demoralized as in parts of the North Atlantic world by questions about whether the faith deals with something real. That old and solid tradition means that the discussion of social goals is more serious than if we were speaking with scattered evangelicals or an intellectual elite.

What difference does it make to this thought pattern that it is Roman Catholic? In some important ways, liberation theology takes off from a starting point that is culturally prior to some things that have determined North Atlantic Protestant and secular culture. Latin America experienced no Renaissance—with its Christian internationalism, its humanistic rejection of violence, and its relativizing of crusading righteousness. Latin America never experienced, until recently, a Protestant Reformation dismantling the unity between the church and state, and pushing to greater degrees of radicality the appeal to the New Testament as a criterion of moral renewal. Latin America never knew the Puritan revolution that swept England in the 1640s, or the nonviolent “glorious revolution” that gave the United Kingdom its present form of government, or the American Revolution with its focus on the limitation of governmental power. In terms of cultural history, when Catholic liberation theologians discuss theology in the middle of the twentieth century, they sidestep five centuries of Protestant and secular culture in Europe and North America. The high schools these theologians went to in the 1950s were teaching a curriculum taught five centuries ago. The curriculum of the graduate studies they did in Louvain was an approach to theology that has been taught for centuries. These theologians place new words and images atop a cultural scene quite different from the ones where those words and images were used before. We should not be surprised that their language is more like that of a crusade and less about checks and balances, more like enforcing righteousness and less like the division of powers, more like a rebel caudillo and less like a popular uprising. None of these observations speaks pejoratively to the truth or the moral quality of the social analysis those experiences produced; we simply need to locate the phenomenon.

A second effect of the Latin and Catholic context is that the world into which they bring this concern for liberation is a Constantinian world. They can still assume one church, one national unity. They still assume that the nation must move as a unit, must be freed as a unit. The way to accomplish this goal is to create a new regime that will be blessed by the people who have the moral insight, in the same way the old regime used to be validated by the people who claimed the moral insight. Together the people will be liberated by a new righteous regime which the church will bless. The difference is that the new regime the church will bless is a liberating regime instead of an oppressive regime, but the shape of the church’s thinking about that moral problem is still Constantinian.[11] To get over one kind of Constantinianism, these thinkers adopt another. They do not make pluralistic, secularized assumptions about society and social change. They simply say, “The church made the mistake of blessing an oppressive retrograde ruler; now the church must clean up that mess and bless a decent progressive ruler.”

Another characteristic of this thought pattern, Catholic in form, is its attitude toward secular common sense. Protestant and sectarian traditions make an issue of not quite trusting the wisdom of the age and natural insight. In contrast, Catholicism since the Middle Ages has been affirmative about what people naturally know—about common sense, about ordinary decent human wisdom. In the Middle Ages that human wisdom was Aristotle, so theologians baptized Aristotle as their common cultural wisdom. In recent decades some have adopted Marxism, because Marxist analysis seems to make most sense of the mess society is in. That move is not a sellout, because Christianity has always borrowed the best available secular insight. Marxist language describes the feeling of oppression and economic suffering these theologians sense. Still more deeply and in a more catholic way, Marx is helpful. These thinkers assume Marx is right because he represents a philosophical fruition of the wisdom of the age. This is especially clear in Marx and the Bible, by José Miranda, for whom “Marx” means the young Marx who was a late Hegelian, who had the best philosophical way of explaining how history must go.[12] That best philosophical way Marx interpreted in terms of cultural developments in the German university. It is right because its reasoning is right, because its arguments are correct. Because Marx has the right dialectic, liberationists use it to interpret their concern for history, just as Thomas used Aristotle.[13]

The world where this new school of theology has been elaborated is a continent now in its fifth century of being colonized. The liberation needed is not simply a domestic realignment of resources within a national economy; it means regaining national identity and integrity by getting out from under the neocolonial control of the first world’s banks and corporations. Liberation—meaning release from domestic oppression—correlates in the movement’s rhetoric with liberation—meaning national independence.

Liberation theology’s redefinition of violence

One of the most regularly encountered arguments of liberation is the redefinition of violence. There is institutional violence, the overtly oppressive state with its denials of rights and due process. There is structural violence, the injustice of social and economic structures that, even in the absence of overt killing and torture, crush personality and keep mortality rates high. Then there is liberating violence, directed against institutional violence and structural violence. Because the revolutionaries’ violence is a last-resort response to the violence of the system, they are not free to decide whether violence should be used. This logic is not different from the traditional just war argument for revolution. It is clothed in what purports to be a semantic clarification, but the case includes all the old, debatable judgments regarding just authority, just cause, last resort, and winnability. One specific peculiarity of a Latin moral culture is the sense that an argument has been conclusively delivered by means of a redefinition of terms.[14]

The redefinition of terms has not advanced the essential moral argument but has only rendered it more complicated, by increasing the number of meanings that some basic terms contain. If in some cases people justify insurrectional violence as a response to structural violence, other cases may arise in which people justify structural violence in response to insurrectional violence. If violence is not all wrong, then maybe structural violence is not all wrong either. That variant is not just playing with words. It is the self-understanding of the form of tyranny known as the national security regime. It is also the way Cuban and Sandinista rulers, for example, have tended to see dissenters. The redefinition is then simply a new rhetorical form for the claims of just cause and last resort, as the advocate of revolution feels those criteria are self-evidently met by the injustice of a particular social system. We have good reason to consider this move a possible reformulation of the classical thesis, but we have no reason to assume that it sets aside the ordinary questions of proportionality, winnability, and just authority (among others), which the classical doctrine demands that we look at.

A capacity for decided moral commitments

One further source of strength of Latin American liberation theology that correlates with its rootage in Catholic culture—and with its growing attraction for people of evangelical background—has to do with the moral simplicity of identifying intrinsically evil deeds that we must never do. The general mood of moral discourse in North Atlantic culture is pluralistic and relativistic. If you say, “The Christian church must not tolerate injustice,” people with all sincerity assume that you represent a precritical orientation and that your claim on them is set aside when they say, “There are many different points of view about what constitutes injustice,” and “so many factors are involved that one cannot be sure that this deed is worse than other deeds.”

Catholic and evangelical cultures have not been fully immersed in post-Enlightenment relativism, so their moral nerves still carry messages related to absolutes. Those traditions are not therefore naive. Roman Catholics have had a highly developed confessional casuistry that long ago linked statements about moral absolutes with great flexibility in falling short of them in particular cases. Yet ordinary Catholic moral thought can still think some things are intrinsically wrong (even if they would promise to bring some good consequences) and some things are intrinsically obligatory (even though costly). Even less does ordinary evangelical discourse in these matters undermine the capacity to think of such direct moral obligations.

When Catholic thinkers affirm God’s preferential option for the poor, that statement of moral commitment has a more solid hold on their loyalties than would be true for mainline North Atlantic Protestants using the same words.[15] This greater capacity for decided moral commitments explains two characteristics of liberation literature of recent decades. The first is its tendency not to be self-critical about its propensities toward holy war logic. Those who hold moral absolutes do not expect to find strong considerations on the other side, or even to discover strong reasons to step back and test the validity of their own commitment. Readiness to question one’s own rightness is itself part of the enervating impact of Enlightenment. The other consideration, to be evaluated more positively, is the grounding that such greater moral simplicity gives for perseverance, for distinguishing between a righteous cause and one’s own self-interest, and for a readiness to make long-range sacrifices for a cause not yet close to success.

The possibility of nonviolent revolution in Latin America

The liberationists’ claim that their case is different from earlier revolutions thus has some substance. That claim is also made with reference to the availability of nonviolent revolutionary alternatives, which some say only apply in democratic countries, or only fit the personalities of African Americans or people in India. In relation to culture, we can identify a number of explanations for why nonviolent action is a less significant alternative in Latin America and therefore why the use of violence in the name of liberation should be subject to less criticism.

A first factor is specific to Latin American culture. We call it machismo when it points to the need of every self-respecting man to affirm his manhood by acts of bravery and moral power. We call it caudillismo when leaders who act in that way are respected, while leaders whose style is more dialogical or democratic are not. Some cultural historians discuss whether those traits are specifically Latin or Mediterranean or Islamic or Arabic or Catholic. Some, who assume that the more dialogical style of the northern European cultures since the Enlightenment is better, would name these traits as part of an exercise of cultural superiority. Others would reverse the evaluation. Here we cannot enter that debate, but we need to recognize its existence. It was one of the complicating factors in the crisis over the Falklands/Malvinas. The social and psychological function of violence in relation to human dignity differs from culture to culture. The investigation of alternatives to violence that is demanded by the just war tradition, and therefore imperative for just revolution thinking, will therefore proceed with different coefficients in different cultural settings.

Second, although the heirs of the Spanish invaders call Latin America “Latin,” a majority of its population in most areas (except for the southeastern shore) is of indigenous American origin. These cultures are demoralized. Most are heirs of tribal cultures that have been sucked into the vortex of urbanization and lost their cohesion and morale. Before that, they were held in near serfdom under the heel of the hacienda. In some areas, notably Mexico and the Andes, this subjugation was all the more painful because of the monumental evidence that centuries ago theirs had been great cultures, morally and technically superior to the European cultures of that time. A people in a broken and demoralized state cannot be expected to do sober cost-benefit analysis and critical legal evaluation. All that can be asked of them is that they rise to consciousness of their oppressed state and—in line with the pedagogy of Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon—that they be strong with the memories of Moses and the (mistaken) legend of the nineteenth-century liberators. Only through the polarizing and invigorating impact of a righteous social cause, leading them to claim their own dignity in an act of righteous hostility, can the demoralized underclass be liberated.

Third, nonviolent direct action is in several ways specifically correlated with the Anglo-Saxon cultural world, not easily fitting in the Latin cultural world. Only where the rule of law restricts the government’s freedom to put people away without due process is it a usable strategy of dissent to fill the jails, as Gandhi and King did. Only where the language of politics has been refined by notions of free speech, free assembly, and the value of dialogue can dissent formulate alternatives in other ways than simple polarization. Only in a culture boasting a high level of literacy can movements from the base hold together. Only societies that have developed around notions such as the priesthood of all believers or the vocation of the Christian layperson can provide grassroots leadership.[16] Only in places with an Enlightenment heritage can one think easily about the function of government as something neutral or objective rather than necessarily aggressively and self-consciously righteous. In all these respects, the link of nonviolence with the world of Protestantism, Enlightenment democracy, universal elementary education, and fair play works against the accessibility of nonviolent alternatives to the Latin American mentality. Add to this list of factors the simple limitation of information. In most of Latin American society, people even on the most cultivated levels know little of the stories of Gandhi and King; and even less of César Chávez and Danilo Dolci, Lanza del Vasto or even Adolfo Perez Esquivel. Future creativity is nurtured by telling the stories of past creativity; imagination is self-propagating. Similarly, the absence of stories and imagination is self-stultifying. The definition of the situation as a desperate one in which there is no other recourse is itself a part of the narrow cultural vision both created by and contributing to the machista picture of human conflict.

A further sense of Latin American difference is more solidly founded. Technology has significantly escalated the resources of the police state. Modern bureaucratic organization, rapid communications, and techniques of data storage and retrieval make a repressive organization far more efficient than in the good old days of simple brutality. This change decreases the possibilities open to underground communication networks, the chances of keeping alive a counterculture in the country or in the barrio. Political scientists inform us that a whole new understanding of the relationship of powers is arising in the so-called national security state, which is a far more rational and efficient mechanism than old-fashioned tyranny or honest corruption was. The greater the degree of technical sophistication with which an oppressive bureaucracy operates, the greater is its capacity to use the violence of dissenters as an excuse for aggravating the oppression.

It is not fair to speak only about aspects of social style that point directly to power. We could argue in other ways that the Mediterranean personality is less prone to respect the kinds of social analysis that maximize the potential for nonviolent conflict resolution. Some will say that the Latin person is impulsive, intuitive, decisive, impatient with careful nuances. This kind of argument raises two kinds of questions: Do people in fact differ in just that way? Can that statement be made without itself being racist or ethnocentric? A more basic objection is that impulsiveness and intuitiveness are often a part of the artistic appropriation of nonviolent action for social change. It is the routinized mechanical approach to society that most easily cuts the edge of moral categories.

A new theological method

Liberation theology goes beyond earlier theologies of revolution in degree, in that instead of only thinking about revolution as a subject, it claims to be developing a new way to do all theology. It is appropriate that Juan Luis Segundo entitled his book Liberation of Theology. The very activity that theologians do has a different meaning if it is seen not only as reflection but as reflective participation in the action of God who liberates. Robert McAfee Brown’s title, Theology in a New Key, makes the point well. The interlocking of faith and practice, action and reflection, is not brand new in theology or in other intellectual disciplines. In Christian experience it has been at home especially in the pietistic, mystical, and Puritan traditions. Marxism is one strand of Western philosophical history. There some liberation theologians found the linkage of faith and praxis. While not being original, their method is radically new when measured by the way these Latin Americans were taught to do theology.

A further element of novelty in Latin American liberation theology is the proximity of the concrete revolutionary experience in Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua. When Karl Marx wrote about revolution as a necessary event, it was in the distant future. Recent events give rise to the question, “Are they what was to come, or are we to look for another?” As success and as failure, as fitting the recipe and as differing from the recipe, these revolutionary experiences change the nature of the discussion. They lead some people to adopt Marxist categories to describe them, and they make other people more critical.

Another shift in the shape of the discussion comes from the experience of neocolonialism in the hemisphere. Whereas Marx talked about revolution within a country, Latin Americans talk about their countries becoming independent of the political control of the United States and the economic control of banking and corporate structures.

On the issue of revolutionary violence, when a revolution is relatively successful, as in Cuba or Nicaragua, liberation theologians tend to be less critical of it than they had been of what it replaced. When a revolutionary effort fails—whether it is that of the Tupamaros in Uruguay or of Salvador Allende in Chile—that failure may be taken either as a sign that the revolutionaries made mistakes or as the proof that only fundamental violence will work. When violent efforts—such as those of Che Guevara or Camilo Torres—fail completely, the leaders tend to be thought of as martyrs (which proves the rightness of their cause) rather than as failures (which would prove the wrongness of their methods).

Despite this tendency, popular parlance is wrong in equating liberation theology with advocacy of violent insurrection. Some liberation theologians do not believe that violence is morally wrong in all times and places, but do strongly believe that it is tactically wrong now in Latin America and is for that reason morally wrong now. Some, most strikingly Archbishop Hélder Câmara and Nobel Prize–winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, have held that violence is always inappropriate for the disciple of Jesus Christ, and yet affirm revolution or liberation as the purpose of God for the world, affirm God’s preferential option for the poor, and affirm the link between action and reflection in a valid theology. Some hold that the church should support a just revolution when it can happen, but deny that if the revolution succeeds, the church’s job will be only to bless the new regime. It is thus a serious foreshortening of the issue to identify theology of liberation with simple approval of insurrection.

None of these observations constitutes in itself reason to reach conclusions about the adequacy of this theological stream. If the question of adequacy were to be dealt with as a matter of theological ethics, and not as a matter of recent intellectual history, I would argue that all Christian theology in our day must be a theology of liberation. At the same time, a valid theology of liberation needs to be protected against Constantinian temptations, as does any other theology that has a social importance. If I differ with some voices of this movement, it is because I agree with others in claiming that the normativeness of Jesus applies to violence in good causes as well as to violence in bad causes.

Any way of doing theology should be called a theology of liberation if it describes the human predicament in terms of unfreedom (servitude, oppression) and therefore describes the work of God on our behalf as liberation. It is possible to cheat on those terms and transpose them allegorically into existential or pietistic terms. Nonetheless, I see no honest way to respond to the biblical message without including those categories. I see no way that a Christian or Jewish theology can with integrity fail to be a theology of liberation, concerned in concrete ways with unfreedom as what is wrong with us and with freedom as what God does for us.

Summary evaluation

I have made fragmentary evaluative remarks along the way. Can we project any summary evaluation on the basis of this introduction?

Christian liberation theology and Western liberalism’s limitations

Liberation is certainly the right agenda for Christian concern for society. It is the language of Moses and Amos and Jesus. The Bible gives us sufficient warrant for saying that partisanship for the unfree is the place to stand.

What about the claims of Western democratic liberalism as the vehicle for liberation? Many liberties have been defended by this cultural tradition. The values of Western democratic liberal culture are the fruit of a correct critique of what went before. And yet this democratic liberalism is false as a promise for the rest of the world. It cannot deliver. It is tied to the wealth and power and cheap fuel of the West. Its alliance with modernity and secularization is going to be self-defeating. It is not the same thing as the gospel.

The dishonesty of Western church responses to liberation theology

Is the newer Latin liberation language going to be better? We have to respect it, because it comes from a deeper involvement in a worse situation. The first thing to say, in terms of the ethics of ethics, is that the defensive, angry, and threatened response of many North Atlantic Christian thinkers to this liberationist mood is wrong. When the WCC Program to Combat Racism started giving money to liberating movements, some bishops in England and church presidents in Germany said church money must never go to support anything violent. Yet they were not pacifist back home. They were not critical of German involvement in NATO, for example. They were only opposed to poor blacks at the other end of Africa using violence for liberation, especially if they did so with socialist rhetoric. Something dishonest is happening when mainstream church leaders in the Northern Hemisphere stand in judgment on revolutionary movements in the Southern Hemisphere for using the same kind of “justifiable” violence that the theology of the mainstream churches has always approved.

Points of dialogue for pacifists and liberation theology

Pacifists have good reasons for challenging the trust that some liberationists have in both the efficacy and the moral legitimacy of “necessary” violence. That challenge takes the form of these reminders: some liberationists have not really reached the situation of last resort by trying all conceivable nonviolent alternatives; they have not soberly tested their chances of success; they have not realistically weighed the amount of suffering they are imposing on their own people; and they have not gauged the likelihood of creating a better regime if they do win. The pacifist has a right to address questions to liberation theologians about their theology of history; their acceptance of Hegelian visions of historical progress and rising levels of wisdom; their way of understanding Jesus, human or Christian hope, and the place of the church in the world. All these debates would be fitting if structured carefully between pacifists and liberation theologians, whose view on these matters are little more than a new edition of the case for righteous revolution we have been debating ever since the Huguenots and Oliver Cromwell. Yet pacifists must insist that this questioning does not put them over against liberation theologians in that theology’s debate with North Atlantic nonpacifist church people who are more critical of insurrectionist regimes than of colonial administrations, and more critical of revolutionary minorities than of the national histories of their own countries.

To put it simply, the points at which the dominant liberation theology is to be challenged are the points at which it is not original, the points at which it simply translates earlier crusading arguments for revolution that have been dominant for centuries in the North Atlantic. The places where it is more worthy of support are the places where it is more original: in regaining for theology the legitimate preoccupation with matters of economics and social form, in the polemic against establishment and linking the church with the powerful, and in the readiness to use relevant secular wisdom when it is fitting and objectively helpful in clarifying specific issues. At all these points any Christian pacifist should be, as Câmara and Berrigan are, a part of the liberation theology movement.

Marxist hope and biblical hope

We would still have to debate whether the relevant secular wisdom represented by some borrowing from Marxism is as relevant, as adequate, as carefully screened, and as helpful as our liberationist friends tend to assume. Marxism is less convincing—as economic doctrine and as political philosophy—to people in Eastern Europe, where it has been tried, than in those places where it is a critical minority stance.

Still, Marxist analysis is authentically present. It needs to be accepted as the place that important dialogue has to go on about liberation. This theological-ethical process is at work in cultures where the needs are more evident, where the tyranny is more blatant, where the hopelessness is more impressive than in the West (where even if the price for gas doubles, we will still drive). The Marxist mood is more promising precisely at the point at which Marxism as economic science is least satisfying: Marxism promises a better world. Not right away, and not without violence, but it is sure to come because it is a material necessity. Marxism therefore has no message for a desperate situation, where there is less hope than before, as is true in parts of Latin America. In terms of economics or political science or anything else one can use to project, things are getting worse and not better. This getting worse is true not only of all possible gradualist solutions but also of all possible radical solutions.

A biblical vision of standing with the poor regardless of whether we can free them right away, and of being freed as poor with the poor as a foretaste of the reign of God, even under tyranny—those possibilities are conceivable in a situation of bitter oppression, as Marxist optimism is not. This theme divides liberation theologians among themselves.

This issue opens a sensitive debate that it is hard for gringos to be involved in, a debate about the relation between Exodus and exile. Exodus is the dramatic model of how God saves, setting people free by killing the firstborn of the oppressor, drowning the enemy, and taking people out to get a new start. Yet the Hebrew liberation story does not end there. The last stage of the social revolution of the Jewish community is exile. Jeremiah says, “When you go to Babylon, do not live in tents, expecting to get back to Judea in a couple years. You are going to be there at least seventy years. So settle in; buy land and invest; have your children learn the language and marry there; seek the peace of that city. Live in exile within an oppressive, alienated structure all your life.”[17] Ruben Alvez has been partly disowned by some of the other liberation theologians because he says Latin Americans are in a Jeremiah situation and not in a Moses situation: this is not a time when we can lead anybody out into liberty. What we have to do is live with unliberty, in the knowledge of the memory of Zion, and in the hope of liberation. What kind of life do you live if that is your message?

As to ethics in the narrow sense, nothing in the theological mood of liberation and revolution is new ethical structure. All we find are new forms of the just war, new forms of the just revolution, and new forms of the crusade. It is all pre-Niebuhrian, as to strict logical language. So with regard to thinking about the ethics of war, peace, and revolution, the challenge of liberation theologies is not novel. It is fundamental, but it is not novel. It does not raise any questions that have not been around since Calvin, except insofar as the sociological context of the people with whom we are conversing can lead to change.

A call for study of nonviolent tactics

One last necessary evaluative comment is the strong reinforcement of the argument present in the WCC study process (1971–73) on “Violence, Nonviolence, and the Struggle for Justice.” People advocating guerrilla methods of violent warfare as the only way to have a revolution have not given serious attention to the possibilities of more effective nonviolent tactics. They have undertaken no careful study, theoretical or practical, of the limits of violent tactics and the potential of nonviolent tactics for the particular issues in this kind of situation. The leap over alternative strategies to terrorism is almost immediate, both for the tactician and for the ethicist. Since the proliberation just war ethicists are pupils of the antiliberation just war ethicists, this continuity in tactics should be no surprise. They have reversed the assumption that the church should bless traditional causes and assume instead that the church should bless the cause of change. That anybody, the church or social scientists or psychologists, might be able to contribute new perspectives on the means of change is not in their picture. It is our delinquency as peace church witnesses, and not basically a failure of scholarship or intelligence on the part of the liberation theologians, that best explains their not having dealt with this dimension with any seriousness.

Varieties of Contemporary Catholic Peace Concern

It would be wrong to think that Roman Catholic thought is still back where we left it with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, updated by Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez. The huge Catholic communion has not gone through the Protestant story that we have been recounting. It is thus no surprise that more momentum, variety, and creativity should have surfaced when that vast community opened up conversation with modern culture. Some of the contemporary themes we treated have had a Catholic component. Catholics have led much of the just war seriousness of recent decades. Liberation theology has been predominantly Catholic in its Latin American form, though less so in its feminist form, still less in the black and indigenous incarnations.

Our agenda here is the several forms of peace concern specifically at home within Catholic culture. Before proceeding with the inventory, let me anticipate the general lesson the survey will support. We have tended to assume that Roman Catholic moral thought (1) is uniform, monolithic; (2) affirms “nature,” common sense, and human wisdom; and (3) generally permits just war casuistry. This picture is not false, but of whom and when is it true? It is true of academic moral theology, especially before 1965. Yet most Catholics are not academic moralists. And in Roman Catholic culture, academic moralists do not have the weight that Protestant colleagues have in their context. The bishop—usually more pastor than scholastic—and the saints fill that position. Classical Catholic morality was lived in the context of confession and penitence; that is, the casuistry dealt with an acceptable lifestyle, while Protestant ethics was becoming more a matter of self-acceptance.

A Catholic priest or bishop could talk about natural law. Yet in his function as priest or confessor, that was not where he lived. He was not interested in how Catholic systematic ethics differs from Protestant, which is where the focus on natural moral knowledge became a debating matter. The saints did not meditate on nature but on Jesus, and most of them were nonviolent, if not expressly pacifist. Freeing Catholicism from the image imposed on it by an academic debating typology lays bare its diversity and flexibility. What makes the Roman communion catholic is not Rome but its being an umbrella with room beneath it for many variations. Under this umbrella pacifism has never been labeled a heresy.[1]

Absolute law

One element of Catholic theological identity is the notion of absolute law. The law of God is revealed in a way that can be known, though we may not know why it is as it is—just as we sometimes accept the decree of a human sovereign as binding simply because it has been issued. If God reveals God’s will, it is not up to us to ratify that which God says is binding. God’s law need not make sense from our perspective. It need not cohere logically with a theory of social analysis or a mechanism of social action. God is God, and we are ignorant and sinful; therefore at times we will simply let ourselves be told, “This is God’s will. Do it!”

This sense of revelation’s simple authority is more at home in the Franciscan tradition than in the Dominican or Jesuit schools. It is a minority position within Catholic thought but nonetheless one with historical and logical claims. It has never been declared heretical, and it is rooted deeply in piety. The Austrian theologian Johannes Ude was the strongest advocate of this view among professional theologians in the 1930s and 1940s. The title of his book is “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”[2] The concept of a revealed divine command is by its nature not subject to calculation or negotiation. The sacredness of life is not something we can relativize or weigh against some other value.[3] Ude’s position is by no means simplistic or literalistic. His book, written while he was in hiding from 1941 to 1943, is a richly documented debate with every strand of nonpacifist Christian argument, as well as with fascism.

The cultivation of virtue

One classical pattern of moral reasoning in Catholicism has always been the cultivation of virtue. This focus is very different from the focus on God’s absolute law, yet it has in common with that approach a relative unconcern for controlling the situation, or for casuistry. A Christian by nature is meek, or is ready to suffer, or is a servant, or is nonviolent. True Christians are committed to cultivating that character, which determines their way of living and being.

This concentration on the Christian life as a matter of quality rather than impact is most at home within the disciplined religious life. That characteristic makes it easy for Protestants to disqualify it as not involved with the real world, or as self-righteous. Nonetheless, despite the dominance of the just war tradition, through the centuries this heritage of religious discipline has enabled some Catholics to remain free to confess and contemplate the full meaning of Jesus as both Savior and model.

This commitment to virtue need not lead to social inefficacy. It involves its own style of historical impact. No one can say that Francis of Assisi and Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa have had no social impact. Their pattern for decision making and goal setting bypasses the social mechanism models of cultural process that Western intellectuals have come to trust. Yet in the religious community that assumes ritual and spirituality are real, that trait is not a disadvantage. Thus it is natural that one of modern Catholic pacifism’s foundational components has been represented by the bearers of an understanding of nonviolence as a spiritual discipline. Nonviolence is neither a negation nor an absence but an affirmation. It is spirituality before it is ethics or politics. To reject violence is to affirm or defend the integrity of what one refuses to violate even in the name of some good cause. That active renunciation of violation, that defense of the potentially violated, is the active translation of the ancient virtue of meekness—the quality of self-emptying that makes its practitioners apt subjects for inheriting the earth.

People who live this way tend to have disciples and houses where they receive the needy, and therefore to create—at least ephemerally—new forms of community. Yet the center of that concern is not a communitarian ethos. They tend to refuse to go along with social patterns at certain points, and also to take symbolic stances of disobedience, but it would be a misunderstanding to think of them as first of all practitioners of civil disobedience. They tend to feed the hungry or house the homeless or care for the sick, but again it would be a misinterpretation to begin with their effectiveness as innovators in the realm of institutionalized social services for especially disadvantaged groups. These derivative descriptions are misunderstandings to the extent that they look away from the focus on cultivating Jesus’s servant image in the believer’s body, soul, and spirit. That forming of Christ is an end and not merely a means to some ethical goal. We can trust that, to the degree that image is formed, it will produce social goods and social values, yet it is not because of those values that it is valuable. Nor is its claim on us heightened by noting that they will probably be forthcoming. To love one’s enemies, to be a servant, and to be meek, are themselves more adequate definitions of doing God’s will than are tactical projections about how to cause certain desirable states in the larger social system.

This mode of ethical thought is not uniquely or narrowly Catholic. It can also make sense for people in other religious and social systems. Yet it is more at home in Catholicism than in mainstream Protestantism, which is often more concerned about social effectiveness and avoiding self-righteousness.

The papal encyclicals

As the pastor in a village can call people to live in peace with one another without becoming their judge or policeman and without even assuming that they listen to his specific moral guidance, so the Roman Catholic Church, and especially its visible father figures, the popes, can represent a moral quality of urging against war and toward peace.[4] This activity is not simply the application of a moral theory. Beginning with Benedict XV, pope during World War I, popes broadcast to the world a message at Christmas that constitutes a plea and a prayer for peace. Pius XII, who presided over World War II, renewed the tradition. His 1944 address was especially important, because instead of simply projecting an ideal and a plea, he changed the doctrine about ethics and war (perhaps without intending to do so). He said, as had not been said before, that all aggressive war is wrong. That teaching provoked objection on the part of moralists who recognized it as an innovation that had not been adequately explained. Because a Christmas message is in no sense an ex cathedra promulgation, the faithful did not have to believe him. Nevertheless, the message constituted a strong nudge in a direction in which popular understandings had already been moving.

As the village analogy illustrates, what is going on here is not normative moral teaching, in the sense that henceforth every believer must do what the pope says, even though the just war tradition would seem to call for that. Nor is it a judicial process, deciding which party in a given war is fighting for an unjust cause or has been using improper means. The tradition would also seem to call for that. The papal messages do not make much use of the just war tradition. We could evaluate this observation as itself constituting a part of a mosaic of evidence against the claim that the just war tradition genuinely informs Catholic moral identity. The just war tradition is one Catholic tradition, not the official one and not always operative. One further piece in the negative mosaic is the observation that these messages never invite Christians to disobey unjust governments or unjust orders—that is, to take a position of selective conscientious objection, as the theory would demand. Rather the appeal is for an international authority to keep the peace and express moral judgments from above the parties to the conflict, an authority that could enforce those judgments with political and perhaps even military sanctions. But when such supranational entities came into being, they did not necessarily become the instruments of the popes’ ideals. The popes’ call for them, however, may well have predisposed Catholics toward an overly optimistic view of what the United Nations actually could do.

A new level of concern was reached with John XXIII. His Mater et Magistra signaled a new intensity of concern for social justice. He convened the Second Vatican Council, which opened the doors for major attention to many questions, necessarily including matters of war and peace. His Pacem in Terris (1963) went even further, calling for disarmament and a ban on nuclear weapons, as well as repeating the call for a world peace authority. His successor, Paul VI, took the unprecedented step of visiting the U.N. in New York in 1965, again calling dramatically for peace as an international commitment.

This heightening of the pastoral peace thrust was significant in its symbolism but strikingly limited in theological content. It did not provide any new application of the just war theory, even though other Catholic moralists had been undertaking that extension of the theory for some time. It did not project any dramatic vision of the powers’ rebelliousness or modern society’s apostasy in its idolatrous subservience to and worship of Mars. The call for a new world order to administer the peace is unrealistic and out of touch with the reality of the U.N. Its openness to the modern world is more optimistic than Catholic experience would justify. Its call for people to trust one another and to negotiate to solve their problems is just as insufficient as are the pleas of the village pastor to his parishioners to work things out more reasonably—and nonetheless just as true, as far as it reaches.

Evangelical counsels

Not profoundly different from the cultivation of virtue as far as outward appearance is concerned, but quite different in intellectual understanding, is the confession of the bindingness for some Christians of the evangelical counsels. The word counsel in this technical sense is set off against precept or mandate. The latter level of moral demand is binding on all Christians under pain of falling from grace. Thus the target set by a precept must be attainable. Another level of moral appeal is called advice or counsel. The counsels state what God really wants us to do, but they are not implemented or enforced by any process of binding discipline and are perhaps ultimately not even attainable. The call to voluntarily accept these counsels can be seen as the form the free church witness takes within Catholicism. It is sometimes expressed in monastic orders but not only in that form.

As is the case with the earlier discussion of cultivation of virtue, this view involves some acquiescence—which is theologically questionable—in a lower level of morality for run-of-the-mill Christians. It means accepting the fact that the church at large or Christian culture at large never fully takes on the gospel’s yoke. At the same time, however, it has the advantages of avoiding Puritan legalism—both the negative legalism that says, “Everybody does it, so it must be all right,” and the affirmative legalism that says, “We must so behave to dominate society.” It also avoids the sectarian concern for validating a position by pointing to its irrelevance.

Using the word counsel against the word precept weakens slightly what is actually meant here. These gospel thrusts are not simply noncommittal counseling. They are what Jesus added to the law in order to fulfill it. He added the six sharpening or fulfilling or clarifying or intensifying specimens of Matthew 5. These six are specimens of the claim that the law is fulfilled and at the same time revealed as insufficient in itself. The life of those who follow the evangelical counsels is an incarnation of that critique. Counsel is too weak a word. For the people committed to them, they are binding moral obligations, and obedience to them is possible—to some extent at least—in the power of the Spirit.

Openness to nonviolent social change

A major element of discovery in the Catholic concern for peace in the middle of the twentieth century has been a new openness to the efficacy of nonviolent social change. Archbishop Hélder Câmara of northeastern Brazil represents this vision well, as do Jean Goss and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, and James Douglass.

The experience of Gandhi and King, taken in a broad sense, has given a new lease on life to the Catholic vision of Christianizing general human moral values. Though they recognize that it was wrong to Christianize imperialist powers, these believers can now baptize into Catholic social responsibility the tactics of Gandhi and King. Especially in Latin America—where one can count on the continuing Catholic loyalty of the common people and a widespread acceptance of a Catholic Christian worldview—this new means may constitute another natural, commonsense way to Christianize the social order, after the old ways of linking the church with state power failed or even betrayed their cause. Catholics coming for the first time into this set of concerns can thus avoid stopping at the barriers set up by Anglo-Saxon Protestant realism with regard to the limited power of the democratic process and the difficulty of creating new social institutions. Also absent is the barrier of Protestant conceptual consistency, which demands a decision between nonviolence as a strategy of power, on the one hand, and nonresistance as a gospel ethic, on the other. As we saw earlier, James Douglass avoids making that hard choice. Several factors increase the relative trust in popular nonviolent movements: the misery of the Latin American masses, the fact that Latin America has not seen genuine democracy, and the fact that most other governmental change has come through demonstrations in the streets. This trust grows in proportion to the loss of confidence in alternative processes, whether revolutionary or within the system. This approach is catholic in the sense that it is planted within a Catholic population, and in the sense that it shows no embarrassment about incorporating within Catholic morality insights about both theory and tactics that have been learned from other places—even from India.

The power of liturgy and sacramentality

The return of Catholic leadership to the peace movement brings with it an especially significant kind of power that Protestantism, of both the rationalist orthodox and rational liberal forms, spent the recent centuries weakening: a visceral and communal sense of the liturgy, spirituality, and sacramentality. This can be said both about the traditional sacraments, all of which have a meaning for reconciliation and community maintenance, and for the wider power of symbol and prayer to say and do more than the words of proclamation and argumentation. Worship events, when seen as social statements and social action events, when interpreted as liturgy, enrich the moral impact of actions and gestures. They also broaden immensely the scale of community involvement. They make the contributions of the old, the young, and the weak just as important in protest or proclamation as are the contributions of the strong and articulate.

Sacramentality is a rubbery term if we try to argue about it. But it affirms the wholeness of a community of many kinds of members and the integration of word and deed, mind and body, tradition and relevance. Whichever dimension one chooses to notice most, the enrichment brought to the peace movement by Catholicism is notable.

A serious use of the just war theory

We need only a brief reference here to the obvious fact that in recent decades the serious use of the just war theory in providing a criticism of war, while not restricted to Catholics, is Catholic in its resources and vocabulary.[5] That the just war categories are used to forbid war and not only to justify it, and that they are called on to provide a basis for individual selective objection and not only for illuminating political decisions, are recent developments.

Wherever this critical process has taken place seriously, the outcome has been a kind of pacifism, whether the criterion that drives most in that direction is discrimination, proportionality, or legitimacy. The opponents of such negative use of the just war theory in our time have generally countered its criticism not by affirming that modern war does after all meet the just war requirements but rather by retreating to arguments that belong in the category of the crusade: (1) communism is an absolute evil needing to be warded off at any price; (2) our society is absolutely worthy of defense because it is Christian (or, in other contexts, because it is Jewish or Islamic); (3) another kind of violent undertaking is absolutely worthy because it is defending the innocent or the Jews or the poor.

The “peace bishops” who rose to prominence in the American Catholic communion in 1981 stand within the just war tradition in their threshold arguments (no nuclear attack could ever be last resort, discriminating, proportional, winnable, etc.). But their moral persuasiveness comes rather from the pastoral and evangelical structures described earlier.

Ecumenical Conversations

One mark of the post–World War II period was a new awareness of modern war’s destructiveness. Another was the beginning of the end of North Atlantic control of the world, with Soviet advances in Eastern Europe; the progressive disengagement of the Dutch, French, and British from their empires; and the communist takeover in China. Another was the creation of a world council of churches, giving institutional continuity to the commitment of the major non-Catholic Christian denominations to listen to one another. What difference will these changes make for our topic?

The war question in ecumenical conversations

Our earlier overview followed one line of theological development through liberal ecumenical Protestantism to Reinhold Niebuhr. Those views were most visible in the 1920s and 1930s, but they were not representative. Only the most flexible, open, liberal Protestantism was changing enough that themes leading to pacifism could arise, themes including social concern and internationalism. The Roman Catholic communion and the older Protestant traditions—conservative Lutherans, conservative Presbyterians—were not touched by the thinking in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that we examined in chapters 16–18. Pacifism was a liberal Protestant phenomenon.[1]

It is appropriate that we look at the World Council of Churches (WCC) as a special institutional focus for our subject matter, one that might hold possibilities for cracking open conversation on the war question. Why? For one thing, the issue of the morality of war might be handled more adequately in a world council context than in the frozen forms of interrelations represented by denominations, each of which is committed to some answer and intrinsically inhospitable to challenges that help define their identifies.

Second, the WCC is a world agency. Its structure gives visibility to the fact that the Christian community should not be basically national in its structures. Roman Catholicism is always committed by its structures to being a universal community, but most Protestant groups are not. Most Protestant groups of the Reformation were created by a particular national government. Even in the later centuries of developing religious liberty, most denominational entities are still structured by Protestants on a national level. The WCC incarnates the awareness that national bonds and bounds should not be limits. So its structure reflects a pro-peace bias.

By its nature, a world council of churches will only make sense as it continues to rise above nationality. It is a shortcoming of almost all organized church union negotiation that it assumes the nation as a boundary of fellowship. The Ecumenical Review provides a periodic overview of church union negotiations, in progress or successful. Nearly all these are limited to the boundaries of a nation. Nevertheless, we should not hold against the WCC or any world agency the fact that some church union is national, and the deeper, more compromising fact that some efforts toward church union might even be nationalistic.

Any world agency is a laboratory and training ground for international understanding. The same is true of most international organizations and any international Christian organization. It is true to some extent of a denominational fellowship—whether Catholic, Methodist, or Mennonite—that seeks to be worldwide. In fact, any lived experience of regular encounter with Christians from other parts of the world is capable of producing an alternative consciousness to correct our built-in biases. Eugene Carson Blake, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church (USA), said that he was enabled or driven to take a more critical attitude toward American involvement in Vietnam because he regularly encountered Christians from the rest of the world, to whom he was bound because he represented American churches in the upper echelons of the world council.

Yet the WCC has a far more specific historic peacemaking identity. First, one well-kept secret in the history of the world council is the contribution of pacifists and near-pacifists in its early existence. Historians recognize as one of the precursors of the world council an international conference at Constance on world peace through the churches. It was convened in 1914, too late to help avert World War I, but it nonetheless brought together the people who in 1925 began laying the foundations of the world Christian social action fellowship called Life and Work. That same Constance conference was also behind the formation of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the small but important ecumenical pacifist network.

Second, the elite that got together in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s to foresee the creation of the WCC consisted of European-oriented, open and socially concerned Protestants. The general progressive Protestant social movement of the time was represented by people including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. Bonhoeffer himself was a pacifist, and Barth had been almost a pacifist, although not as bluntly as Bonhoeffer in the 1920s and 1930s. They were symbolized in the WCC by the first general secretary, Willem Visser ’t Hooft. The people who brought together the agencies—the leadership, staff, and board—were disproportionately involved in social concerns, which included seeing the war problem as a moral problem.

Concern for social issues was especially important for one of the agencies that joined to create the WCC. The WCC was formed in 1948 as a merger of two organizations. One of them was called Faith and Order; it discussed matters of creed (faith) and church polity (order). The other was Life and Work. In some places, especially in England and Germany, the same people led the WCC and the pacifist agencies at the time. The most dramatic example is Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a founder of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), head of the German branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation through the 1920s and 1930s, and at the same time the main representative of the Life and Work and Faith and Order movements in Germany. In preparation for 1948, when the creation of WCC demanded a strong institutional base in church hierarchies, the movement had to cease to be a movement and become a federation of church hierarchies. To that end, people more acceptable to bureaucracies and constituencies had to take initiative from Siegmund-Schultze and others like him. For that reason, historians have played down the pacifist element of the history of the world council. Yet the political realism of people such as Willem Visser ’t Hooft did not mean disrespect for the more prophetic period of the movement’s origins. Visser ’t Hooft continued to think of himself as a friend of the peace movement within the world council.[2]

This personal overlap had a more precise focus during the period of the struggle against Hitler. Most of the leading personalities in the European nucleus of what was later to become the world council had ties of sympathy and common theological conviction with people in Germany who were resisting the Nazi takeover of the churches. These ties enabled a new beginning after the war, in which theology such as that of Karl Barth, and ecumenical church politics such as that of Martin Niemöller, enabled a new start in Europe-wide ecumenical relations. This new beginning would not have been possible with either a more inclusive or a more traditionally Lutheran theology. In the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and Germany, this dominant theological tone enabled a great simplification of agenda during the first generation of the life of the world council. That simplification could not last, and the WCC gradually opened to other theological streams. Yet the neo-Reformed Confessing Church nucleus was of vital importance for the first generation of the world council. It is no accident that this theology is correlated with an experience of criticism of government, antimilitarism (though not pacifism), and in the 1950s with opposition to the rearming of Germany under the NATO umbrella. So the movements that led to the formation of the WCC embodied considerable peace openness.

The World Council of Churches

We now back up to review the formal process and conversations leading to the formation of the WCC. In 1937, Faith and Order and Life and Work met separately in two places in Britain. They met in Britain so people could attend both, as preparation for the long-range vision of merging the two in a world council of churches. The study documents and statements of these entities, which were not yet the WCC, are still thought of as part of the canonical deposit of the World Council movement. The “World Conference on Church, Community, and State,” held at Oxford 1937, was sponsored by the Life and Work Movement. Rising tensions in Europe were evident, and Christians had a sense of urgency about meeting together on matters of social ethics. One of the texts that Donald Durnbaugh reproduces in On Earth Peace is the “Report of the Section on the Universal Church and the World of Nations.” This statement makes strong reference to the evils of war.

War is a particular demonstration of the power of sin in this world and a defiance of the righteousness of God as revealed in Jesus Christ and him crucified. No justification of war must be allowed to conceal or minimize this fact.[3]

It also outlines three Christian responses to war.

(1) Some believe that war, especially in its modern form, is always sin. . . . They are therefore constrained to refuse to take part in war themselves, to plead among their fellows for similar repudiation of war in favor of a better way, and to replace military force by methods of active peacemaking.

(2) Some would participate only in “just wars.” Here there are at least two points of view, depending upon the definition of “just war.” The first view holds that Christians should participate only in such wars as are justifiable on the basis of international law. They believe that in a sinful world the state has the duty, under God, to use force when law and order are threatened. Wars against transgressors of international agreements and pacts are comparable with police measures and Christians are obliged to participate in them. But if the state required its citizens to participate in wars which cannot be thus justified, they believe that Christians should refuse, for the state has no right to force its citizens to take part in sinful actions. Many would add that no war should be regarded as “just” if the government concerned fails to submit the subject of dispute . . . to arbitration, conciliation or judgment of an international authority.

Those who hold the second view would regard a “just war” as one waged to vindicate what they believe to be an essential Christian principle. . . .[4]

(3) Some, while also stressing the Christian obligation to work for peace and mutual understanding among the nations, hold nevertheless that no such effort can end war in this world. Moreover, while recognizing that political authority is frequently administered in a selfish and immoral way, they nevertheless believe that the state is the agent divinely appointed to preserve a nation from the detrimental effects of anarchic and criminal tendencies among its members, and to maintain its existence against the aggression of its neighbors. It is therefore a Christian’s duty to obey the political authority as far as possible and refrain from everything that is apt to weaken it. This means that normally a Christian must take up arms for his country. Only when he is absolutely certain that his country is fighting for a wrong cause . . . has the ordinary citizen the right to refuse military service.

Of those who hold this view, some would admit that individuals may be called directly by God to refuse categorically to take part in any war and so draw attention to the perverted nature of a world in which wars are possible. . . .[5]

We do not affirm that any one of these positions can be held to represent the only possible Christian attitude. The church must insist that the perplexity itself is a sign of the sin in which its members are implicated. It cannot rest in permanent acquiescence in the continuance of these differences, but should do all that is possible to promote the study of the problem.[6]

This statement of the “trilemma” facing the Christian is unsatisfactory on the level of ethical rigor. Nonetheless, the 1937 statement identified a greater openness to the pacifist witness than any of the member churches who sent delegates to the meeting would have made room for back home. It states that the radical pacifist position is one of three positions with logical integrity, and that it has not been rendered irrelevant by events or logic, or set aside through any ecumenical discussion in modern times. Its call for additional attention to the issue was clearer than some later world council statements: “The church . . . cannot rest in permanent acquiescence in the continuance of these differences.”

Amsterdam (1948): Constitutive assembly of the WCC

The next stage of development is 1948. The constitutive assembly was held in Amsterdam in that year. In the assembly workings is a section discussing “The Church and the International Disorder.” Here again is a reference to the wrongness of war. “War is contrary to the will of God” is one of the chapter subheadings. It reveals that those assembled were still divided on whether war now can be an act of justice. Once again they presented three positions, but not quite the same three as articulated by the Oxford statement of 1937.

(1) There are those who hold that, even though entering a war may be the Christian’s duty in particular circumstances, modern warfare, with its mass destruction, can never be an act of justice.

(2) In the absence of impartial supranational institutions, there are those who hold that military action is the ultimate sanction of the rule of law, and that citizens must be distinctly taught that it is their duty to defend the law by force if necessary.

(3) Others, again, refuse military service of all kinds, convinced that an absolute witness against war and for peace is for them the will of God and they desire that the Church should speak to the same effect.[7]

In the first position, war is not just, but it is necessary, unavoidable. In other words, war is a sin we have to commit. This is the stance of Reinhold Niebuhr, who was a participant. This position misunderstands the meaning of the just war tradition—as if it meant that war is a righteous act—and then negates that claim. Its effect is to undercut any detailed seriousness about just war criteria. Anything we do is sinful; anything may be necessary.

There is a rider within the second position: “In the absence of impartial supranational institutions . . .” It is reminiscent of the earlier suggestion that if we did have international institutions, maybe war would be clearly wrong. So these are still not the only clean logical types.

Evanston, Illinois (1954): Second assembly of the WCC

In response to these general statements, the peace churches worked hard to pick up the challenge in a way that could enable a dialogue. M. R. Zigler, the European field representative of the Brethren Service Commission, arranged for WCC general secretary W. A. Visser ’t Hooft to write two letters. One asked for documentation from the peace churches about how conscientious objectors are treated around the world. In this way conscientious objection got on the agenda of the world council; it was a new question for many parts of the world.

The second letter opened the door for a statement of the peace churches’ position. In response, the British Friends, American Brethren, American Mennonites, and the IFOR each produced a statement. These were put together with a common preface and circulated under the title—a quotation from Amsterdam 1948—“War is Contrary to the Will of God.”[8] These statements were taken to the world council staff, saying, in effect, “When you implement the special call to the theologians, this is our contribution. What are you going to do?” The Geneva staff replied, essentially, “If the peace churches cannot get four churches to agree on a unified statement, how can the WCC get 150 churches together?” So the peace church representatives went back to their desks. They took scissors and paste and made one statement out of the four, entitled “Peace is the Will of God.”[9] They submitted the document in 1954 to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, at Evanston, Illinois. But there was no place to deal with it, because it was not in the standard machinery of world council process. Most of the Mennonite and Friends churches were not member churches. Nonetheless, “Peace is the Will of God” remains a landmark in common peace witness, both in its inclusiveness of subject matter and in its inclusiveness of sponsorship and formal involvement in the drafting process.

The Evanston assembly included topically organized study-and-drafting sections. Again our question found its place, this time in Section 4, “International Affairs; Christians in the Struggle for World Community”; subtitle: “The Desire for Peace and the Fear of War.” The study described more than before how bad the situation is, naming—for example—the development of new weapons. The study’s conclusion, however, is less clear than before. Unlike Oxford, it does not name the pacifist/nonpacifist debate as an ecumenical challenge; it does not state that the church in its divided stance has a moral problem. Also less clear than before is the discussion of whether a specific or a distinctive or faithful Christian position would answer some of these questions, rather than simply setting three answers side by side.

WCC special study process on nuclear war

The next opening of the theme has to do with nuclear war as a specific challenge. Might we get somewhere if we said that nuclear war is so much worse than previous types of war that people who thought the question was closed or hopeless will now pick it up with new urgency? The WCC Study Department structured a special study process with the title, “Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age,” from 1955 to 1958, coming out with a strong conclusion at some points.[10]

The new threat of nuclear weapons led to the expectation that a study on preventing war in a nuclear age might bring to light some elements that had not been thought about otherwise, and might therefore enable some kind of progress in the otherwise deadlocked pacifist/nonpacifist debate.[11]

The product turned out to be an interesting object lesson in the difference between politics and ethics. A study commission of fourteen people, only three of them pacifists in any sense, came up with a clear statement that in a situation of all-out nuclear war, there is no justification for retaliation; therefore the Christian answer, the proper moral course, is surrender. So all-out nuclear war is never permissible. These are not pacifists speaking. This statement is simply an honest use of the standard logic of the just war position. But then comes the loophole: “We purposely refrain from defining the stage at which all-out war may be reached.”[12] So there is still room for a sliding scale. They also say a lot about discipline, which is needed if nations are to have these weapons for deterrence purposes rather than for use in war.

This statement was made by people who had the time to think carefully, logically, and honestly about questions of proportionality and immunity. Yet the church leaders on the 110-member Central Committee of the WCC, who read the first draft but had not thought through the details of the logic themselves, were so offended by the possibility of surrender that the entire study was almost formally rejected on the basis of those few “nuclear pacifist” lines. The document was saved by an action recommending more study and specifying that it would be circulated only under the express statement that it was a provisional study document.

Yet the same pressures making it threatening for the document to circulate made it more threatening for the study to continue. The Study Department simply shelved the commitment to continue this study because the subject was too hot politically. After some time, a revised document was circulated under the names of commission chair Sir Thomas Taylor and Study Department secretary Robert Bilheimer.

Other historic peace church dialogues

The reference group standing behind M. R. Zigler in these matters was called “The Continuation Committee of the Historic Peace Churches and the IFOR,” a hybrid entity. Friends were represented by the peace secretary of the London Yearly Meeting, with no reference to the (few) Friends on the continent or the many in America. The Church of the Brethren was represented by their service commission, which was in Europe for relief work and youth work camps and which kept an office in the WCC building. The Fellowship of Reconciliation was represented by its international secretary, the Quaker Percy Bartlett, bypassing the strong continental FOR presence. An appointee of the Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section represented Mennonites; that appointment bypassed European Mennonites.

Between the failure of the second assembly at Evanston to make serious progress, and beyond the inconclusive conclusion of the “Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age” study, personal contacts of the kind referred to above in the work of M. R. Zigler continued. It was clear by 1955 that a broad group of German theologians and church leaders, including Martin Niemöller, were critical of the rearmament of Germany, were taking antiwar positions, and were open to a dialogue with the historic peace churches with whom they had not had earlier contacts. A second growing concern was an awareness among the peace churches—especially their European representatives, who had had more occasion for contacts with nonpacifist thinkers—that the in-group quality of its past expression had kept others from hearing the peace witness. The peace churches had not been stating their witness in ways that focused on making it understandable to nonpacifist interlocutors. American Mennonites were so marked by an experience and a mentality of separation that they were not sure they had a message for nonpacifist Christians in positions of social responsibility, to say nothing of non-Christians. Some were even embarrassed to be called pacifist. Friends were conscious of having an independent theological culture, with a tradition of low respect for arguments of systematic theology and ethics and for the other institutional churches, and with a high level of optimism with regard to the possibilities of a good society. Thus their witness could be too easily set aside by European mainstream churches as humanistic or typically Anglo-Saxon. Thus the peace churches recognized that they needed to do some homework in order to articulate their witness in the language of the people to whom they were trying to speak.

Puidoux: New visibility of the peace churches

A session of the Continuation Committee of the Historic Peace Churches decided that a special study session would be convened by peace church people and their sympathizers. The pacifists’ goal was not to convince nonpacifists of pacifism but to explain themselves better to the majority churches. They would look not just at their position and its foundations but at how it is articulated and how it faces the challenge of recent developments in ecumenical theology. To assist the peace church representatives, sympathetic observers from the majority churches would be invited. These observers wanted to help the peace church witness get a better hearing by avoiding formulations subject to misunderstanding. The effort was to get a nonsectarian statement of the Christian peace witness and to have the help of nonpacifists, especially people in the Confessing Church wing of the German Protestant movement, who were willing to be critical of past militarism without being committed to traditional pacifism. The expectation was that most of these people would come from the Niemöller wing of German Protestantism. Niemöller was willing to share in sponsorship of such a study. He recommended that his younger colleague Heinz Kloppenburg, who was almost pacifist and already relating to the German Fellowship of Reconciliation, would be the right person to share in convening and in planning the program. Out of these contacts arose a study conference on “The Lordship of Christ over Church and the World,” held near the village of Puidoux, Switzerland, in July 1955.

The topic chosen seemed to be the most promising front along which progress might be made toward better formulations. The idea that Christ is Lord over the world is a biblical phrasing. Although new to Mennonites, they could not simply push it aside, because it is biblical. In New Testament scholarship since Karl Ludwig Schmidt and Oscar Cullmann, this phrase was increasingly seen as relevant for articulating a moral concern for the rest of society. At the same time, it provided a way to interlock with the more optimistic social concerns of Quakers and social gospel liberal pacifists, while acknowledging that the world is different from the church in the way it relates to Christ as Lord. This language was also the subject of study efforts and publications in the World Council of Churches context, including a book by General Secretary Visser ’t Hooft, whose Stone lectures at Princeton had shown how convictions about Christ’s kingship over the world had sustained the churches’ resistance to totalitarianism during World War II.[13]

Durnbaugh’s On Earth Peace records the documentary and the institutional results of the Puidoux effort. The study conference process represented a new level of visibility and encounter between the peace churches and the other churches, yet without achieving as much genuine dialogue as ecumenical rhetoric would have permitted one to hope. The historic peace church representatives’ idea had been that because we are not the kind of entity the WCC is structured to deal with, we should try to clarify our peace witness in contemporary terms, trusting that the witness, once stated, would find its own way through the existing church agencies or through people’s minds.

From 1955 to 1962, this international, interchurch pacifist/nonpacifist discussion process went on, with four major conferences and smaller ones on the side. Out of this conversation came a sizeable bulk of theologically worthwhile discussion about how to state a Christian peace witness in an ecumenical arena in which you cannot appeal to your own church fathers and authorities.

Picking up the WCC story

New Delhi (1961): Third assembly of the WCC

The next world council assembly was at New Delhi in 1961. The war question as such got less attention than it had before. The assembly did not specifically recognize the pacifist/nonpacifist question about the moral propriety of war. The sense of priorities had changed. The arrival of the Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe had shifted council membership; they were strong on peace in the sense of the Soviet party line but unaccustomed to discussing debatable ethics. Merging with the International Missionary Council had changed the council structurally, broadening its agenda and decreasing the centrality of Europe-centered concerns, of which war was perceived to be one. Delegates were less afraid of nuclear war and more concerned about decolonialization. There was a recommendation that the liberation of the rest of the colonial world should take place without violence. Some of the Africans, Latin Americans, and Southeast Asians countered, asking, “Why should we be nonviolent, when North Americans and Europeans were not?” That was the only point at which this issue was identified in 1961.

Uppsala (1968): Fourth assembly of the WCC

In 1968 the assembly was in Uppsala, Sweden. Again the gathering gave no direct attention to the fact that Christians differ about whether war is morally permissible. Again the approach to the subject was indirect. The last action taken by the assembly took account of the fact that Martin Luther King had been designated to be a keynote speaker at this assembly. He had been assassinated a few months earlier, but he was present in memory. In honor of his memory, the assembly took action to recommend giving attention to nonviolent action as a way to seek social justice. The action did not condemn violence but noted the positive potential of nonviolence.

Out of this action came a modest study. One WCC staff person, David Gill, spent half of his time for two years catching up on the literature in the area of conflict resolution and nonviolent action, convening a few study conferences, and coming up with a significant report, “Violence, Nonviolence, and the Struggle for Social Justice,”[14] which concludes that the potential of nonviolent action is much greater than most people know. The report suggests that in hot spots around the world, where violence is a major danger, Christians should make nonviolent alternatives visible. The WCC could make competent troubleshooters available to go to the difficult places with that message. The WCC Central Committee said this 1973 report was beautiful but that they did not have any money. That was the end of that proposal.

Nairobi (1975): Fifth assembly of the WCC

The WCC assembly in Nairobi again paid no direct attention to the issue of war as something Christians differ about in principle. Again there was an effort to deal with the question indirectly. A proposal recognized militarism as a special problem. Since 1970 the WCC had dealt with racism as a particular problem, having designed a Program to Combat Racism (PCR) to make it clear ecumenically that racism is intolerable among Christians. Couldn’t they do that with militarism? Like race, the military is a fact of the real world, but—like racism—militarism is a sin. Could they run a parallel educational and study effort? They undertook a modest process, an analysis of militarism as a sociological vice that Christians should be working against even if they are not pacifist.[15] The idea again represents an end-run around the pacifist/nonpacifist logjam, in the interest of keeping some conversation going on the subject.

The form and mood of the conversations

The substance debated in all these contexts overlaps with material we have dealt with in other forms: there is no really new material to debate. What we can ask about this review is what impressions it offers with regard to form and mood.

The historic peace churches are seen by others and sometimes see themselves as being boxed into minority status: as having a position that is in some sense valid, because groups have a right to their own distinctive traditions, but the validity of which is contingent on their keeping it to themselves. Whether they be the Quakers (who are too independent of biblical and theological tradition), or the Mennonites (who are too tied to the New Testament), groups whose peace witness is incorporated in their minority experience are on those very grounds both respectfully tolerated and denied a hearing about real substance.

On the other hand, pacifism is represented by exceptional prophetic individuals who have come to a distinctive position by their own paths and without the support of the churches.[16] Their witness is heard and respected because of the personal qualities of the individuals, but is also undercut by the fact that they are isolated. Numerically, they are voted down in their churches and have no voice or mandate except in their individual pulpits. Each takes his own path and develops his own vocabulary and style of argumentation to articulate his position. Its elite cultural quality reinforces the notion that it is a position for spiritual heroes rather than for ordinary Christians. By the nature of the case these prophets can expect no ecumenical hearing, because they do not speak for a confessional position.

The North American experience is unique in that our most important nonpacifist, or even antipacifist, Reinhold Niebuhr, had dealt with pacifism in his own experience, and the form of pacifism he rejected was the form he had held rather than the form other Christian pacifists hold. At least some pacifist arguments had been noticed and taken seriously. The case of Karl Barth is somewhat parallel. Generally speaking, however, in the rest of the ecumenical movement most people who set aside the pacifist witness as having the right to be on the map but not really worthy of a hearing have come to that position without having the moral right to do so, because they have never dealt with it. Most North American Protestant pacifists before 1965 were post-Niebuhrian: they had dealt seriously with the critics of their position, just as Niebuhr himself was postpacifist. The nonpacifists in the rest of the world church are still prepacifist and pre-Niebuhrian.

So much for the story around the world council. I see it not as institutional history but as a privileged window on intellectual history. The conclusion is that there has been no profound dialogue. There has been no progress in coming to a theologically interpreted unity on the traditional debate. Most nonpacifist Christians have still never heard a Christian pacifist witness that makes a theological case. Most Christian pacifists do not believe that it is fruitful to invest effort in conversational contacts with traditional churches. The people from the ecumenically committed non–Roman Catholic communions who come to such conversations, the nonpacifists, are usually pre-Niebuhrian: they have not granted that Jesus teaches the radical love for the enemy that Niebuhr granted. Thus their affirmation of the propriety of war is less refined and less sober than Niebuhr’s. The conversation needs to start over every time the world council organizes a meeting. Because participants are not convinced nonpacifists who have encountered pacifists, as people in Niebuhr’s age had, the discussion process does not move forward. It goes backward, as the generation of Niebuhr from this continent and of Puidoux on the European continent are leaving the scene. If we wish to converse about the war question tomorrow with theologians and church people, it will be with people who are less aware of the problem than their predecessors were decades ago.

The Church Peace Mission

Another entity is less easily identified. In 1950 North American peace church people were concerned for a domestic new beginning. The war was behind them. The threat of nuclear war was very much alive. The memory of Hiroshima was still fresh. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, being theologically liberal and ecumenically inclusive, did not have the ear of many people in mainline church communities or seminaries. Therefore a new agency was created to discuss the war question church to church. The Church Peace Mission was established in a conference in Detroit and held large conferences until 1959 in Evanston. Mennonite churches were involved in this process more than in earlier ecumenical conversations. Brethren, Friends, and people from the Fellowship of Reconciliation were also involved in it. The organizers made a point of its being a church-based discussion process.[17] From 1959 on, a modest effort at having smaller conversations continued, ending in the mid-1960s. Organizers hoped the effort would contribute to church-to-church ecumenical debate on the North American scene. It turned out about like the world council experience. Nobody on the other side was interested in talking. Nonpacifists do not take the pacifist option seriously enough to invest in conversing with pacifists in an ecclesiastically responsible way. The issue is not nearly as interesting as Eucharist or bishops as something to differ about, or as interesting as justice as something to do together.

Summary evaluation

A general conclusion from this brief narrative is that interchurch representative conversation holds little promise. There is little room for serious conversation between pacifists and nonpacifists about this difference. Ecumenical concern, the desire for agreement among Christians on important things, does not move a significant number of nonpacifists to want to converse about the question; it does not even move them to be informed about pacifist theology. Pacifists, on the other hand, tend to be more predisposed to want conversation because they are conscious of their minority status, but they are often pessimistic about the potential for discussion. Many come from minority groups that are institutionally pessimistic about whether the other churches are to be taken seriously. Thus this subject matter is no more nearly resolved. In fact, it is less adequately explored than in the age of Niebuhr.

For Christians, war is intrinsically an unresolved source of division just as much as any other theological difference is, but nobody doing theological ethics is dealing with it. In contrast to Niebuhr’s age, now most nonpacifists, even social ethicists or theological ethicists, have not seriously dealt with it. In Niebuhr’s time the most mature and sophisticated nonpacifists were ex-pacifists. Today’s nonpacifist Christians are pre-Niebuhrian rather than post-Niebuhrian.

The way any of these concerns can arise afresh in our time, at least to some extent, is when the question of killing or war becomes a subheading within some other current of thought.[18] There was, for example, the situation ethics fad in the 1960s; proponents held that we are guided little by general principles. The right thing to do has to be sought within the context of the available options, and the main issue in decision making is freedom for the situation. Specific questions of killing and war were drawn in as specimens of the claim that it is impossible sometimes not to kill, and as specimens of the fact that whatever decision one makes in a given situation, it has to be made then and cannot be made before, outside the situation, or according to general principles. Questions of war and killing are among the choice themes for exemplifying the stance known as situation ethics.[19]

Similarly, since the late 1960s much Christian moral concern has focused on rapid social change. In 1966, as we saw earlier, the Church and Society division of the Study Department of the WCC convened a study conference on “The Church and Revolution.” Once again, the issue of legitimate violence arose. It arose not in the broad context of thinking about the morality of violence in general but in the much more biased context of a prior commitment to rapid social change in the destruction of the prior order. Yet the concrete thinking within these theologies of liberation and revolution about the case for violence or about the sacredness of life or about the conditions under which violence might be legitimate is not original at all. It repeats the standard just war language, although a little less carefully, because the people using it think they invented it and they have no rootage in the medieval and early modern history when all this was talked through.

Ecumenical conversation is a moral imperative. But it is not very effective or rewarding in the context we speak of here—on these organizational levels of the world council and its analogous communities. I do not expect that, without a deep change, a debate about the fundamental pacifist/nonpacifist division will ever happen in the present cultural context. To run a council of churches, people not only have to believe that the gospel calls us to unity; they also have to produce enough successes in unity that the funding will continue. A council of churches is not a body with its own constituency. It is like a faith mission. If exciting things do not happen, it does not get support.

Trying to solve the division between pacifists and nonpacifists is one of the least exciting things to do, because no breakthrough in theology is forthcoming. On the Eucharist, the Reformed and the Lutheran theologians in Europe have decided that the difference between Calvin and Luther on sacraments was a mistake. The difference between the Lutherans and the Catholics is still being worked on, but people on both sides think they are getting somewhere. On those themes there is some promise of breakthroughs. Those in conversation can redefine the terms, or they can say that the ancient debate was about some other subject, or that they do not have to stay with their fathers. But on whether we ought to kill people, no breakthrough is possible. In several of our conversations at Geneva, it was clear that the study process would be evaluated in terms of its potential for a breakthrough that could be publicized. According to the mood of many, this issue is not ready for solutions, so it is better not to study it.

It would be a separate exercise to try to distill from this story some wisdom or principles learned from the analysis. Just one specimen must suffice. An easy mistake to make in ecumenical conversation on any subject is to bring into a particular conversation one’s own prior information about how the person one assumes one is communicating with ought to think. It is a mistake for a missionary to go to Algeria thinking that everybody there is a convinced Muslim ready to debate the classical issues of Christian/Muslim controversy. Likewise, many people who have not given the pacifist position a hearing have not thought deeply about a different position either. We should not box them into another position by ascribing to them a narrower or more informed allegiance to some other position than they really hold. Many nonpacifist Christians would even use the phrase “just war” but without any informed knowledge about what that tradition would commit them to.

Similarly, it may be a mistake to suggest that the most precisely profiled pacifist tradition produced by history is what people should think of next, as if the specific pilgrimage of the Mennonites or the Quakers represented a path that all others might follow. Should we not rather believe that people can begin where they are and move forward to some other place, whether by gradual steps or by a deep conversion? This posture asks that we be patient in not imposing what we “know” as we engage in conversations with Billy Graham or the Catholic bishops or a council of churches.

The reason for conversing with other Christians is not that they are likely to listen; it is that Christ is Lord. The duties derived from the givenness of Christian unity in the work of Christ are no more dependent on our successfully discharging them than are the duties of feeding the hungry or of loving enemies. We are still left with the hard stewardship duty of deciding through what channels and on what level or scale such conversation among the traditions should best be undertaken. We have been watching primarily conversations relating to freestanding ecumenical agencies because they are visible. That characteristic does not make them the best place to invest. But neither does it relieve us of the responsibility to converse with other Christians about peace and war, whether in these forums or in other settings.

Study Guide for Chapter 3

The Pacifism of Pre-Constantinian Christianity

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 53–84.

Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914, 3–24.

Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude to War (1919 edition).

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 37–54.

Hornus, It Is Not Lawful.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 25–46.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 48–53.

Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History, 1–14.

Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 443–62.

Other topical reading

Cadoux, Cecil John. The Early Church and the World: A History of the Christian Attitude to Pagan Society and the State down to the Time of Constantinus. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1925.

Campenhausen, Hans Freiherr von. “Christians and Military Service in the Early Church.” In Tradition and Life in the Church: Essays and Lectures in Church History, 160–70. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968.

Fontaine, Jacques. “Christians and Military Service in the Early Church.” In Historical Problems of Church Renewal, vol. 7 of Concilium Theology in the Age of Renewal, 107–19. Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1965.

Gero, Stephen. “Miles Gloriosus: The Christian and Military Service according to Tertullian.” Church History 39 (1970): 285–98.

Helgeland, John. “Christians and the Roman Army AD 173–337.” Church History 43 (1974): 149–63.

Oetting, Walter W. “Early Christian Attitudes toward the Roman State.” Concordia Theological Monthly 34 (1963): 8–18.

Ryan, Edward A. “The Rejection of Military Service by the Early Christians.” Theological Studies 13 (1952): 1–32.

Questions

1. What was the central concern of the Christians of the early centuries that led them away from military service: the moral rejection of killing, the idolatry of the Roman state, or the lack of opportunity? Or was something else central?

2. When Christians began to accept military service, why did they do so? Was it a change in ethical convictions, or did something else change?

3. Was there any significant difference between the pacifism of the second-century Christians and that of the New Testament?

4. Did the rejection of Roman military service by pre-Constantinian Christians mean a commitment to anarchism, or political disloyalty, or indifference to social and political issues?

5. Describe the differences in tone and logic between Tertullian and Lactantius.

Study Guide for Chapter 4

The Meaning of the Constantinian Shift

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 85–135.

Heering, The Fall of Christianity, 1–243.

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 11–32, 55–84, 92–136.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 49–72.

Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, 259–315.

Questions

1. Was the “Constantinian shift” really the doing of the man Constantine, or is he only a symbol and symptom?

2. Was the Constantinian shift a rapid reversal or a slow change of accent?

3. Would the reasoning of the just war type reported from Ambrose, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas be equally valid to give moral guidance to a non-Christian ruler? Is there anything specifically Christian about it?

4. What are the differences between the logic of Augustine and that of Origen? What is it about Augustine’s theology that makes the just war appropriate?

Study Guide for Chapter 8

The Career of the Just War Theory

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 17–43, 85–135.

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 55–269.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 47–154.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 54–67.

Other topical reading

Grotius, Hugo. The Rights of War and Peace. Translated by Archibald Colin Campbell. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979.

Ramsey, Paul. The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility. New York: Scribner, 1968.

———. War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961.

Russell, Frederick H. The Just War in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Ryan, John Augustine, and Francis Joseph Boland. Catholic Principles of Politics. New York: Macmillan, 1940. See chapter 10, “The Ethics of War.”

Tooke, Joan D. The Just War in Aquinas and Grotius. London: S.P.C.K., 1965.

Walters, LeRoy Brandt. Five Classic Just War Theories: A Study in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Vitoria, Suarez, Gentili and Grotius. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1971.

Questions

1. What were the significant changes in just war thought from Ambrose to Grotius? Were they the result of theological insight, experience, or social change?

2. What record do you find of the contribution made by the just war doctrine to actual political decision making? Did it influence decisions about whether to fight?

3. What is the logical and causative link between the “Peace of God” and the Crusades?

4. Were you ever taught the just war criteria? If so, where? In religious instruction? In public school social science or citizenship courses? In military training or ROTC?

Study Guide for Chapter 9

The Peace Dimension of Medieval Moral Concern

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 101–35.

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 177–84.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 73–77, 157–62.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 54–59.

Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 435–37.

Other topical reading

Peace plans

Jirí, z Podebrad, King of Bohemia, 1420–1471. The Universal Peace Organization of King George of Bohemia: A Fifteenth Century Plan for World Peace, 1462/1464. Prague: Publishing House of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1964.

Wynner, Edith, and Georgia Lloyd. Searchlight on Peace Plans, 31–34. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949.

Classical background of Renaissance peace concern

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 17–32.

Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, 16–184.

Institutional limits

Cowdry, H. E. J. “The Peace of God and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century.” Past and Present 46 (1970): 42–67.

Minority expressions

Peter Waldo

Francis of Assisi

Davison, Ellen Scott, and R. B. Richards. Forerunners of Saint Francis and Other Studies. New York: AMS Press, 1978.

Greenaway, George William. Arnold of Brescia. New York: AMS Press, 1978. First published 1931 by Cambridge University Press.

Molnár, Amedeo. A Challenge to Constantinianism: The Waldensian Theology in Middle Ages. Geneva, Switzerland: WSCF, 1976.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.

Study Guide for Chapter 10

The Nonviolence of Rabbinic Judaism

Topical reading

Cohen, Hermann. “Peace.” In Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, 446–62. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995.

Gendler, Everett E. “War and the Jewish Tradition.” In A Conflict of Loyalties: The Case for Selective Conscientious Objection, edited by James Finn, 78–102. New York: Pegasus, 1968.

“Judaism and Peacemaking.” Fellowship 42, no. 1–2 (January–February 1976); entire issue.

Kimelman, Reuben. “Nonviolence in the Talmud.” Judaism 17, no. 3 (1968): 316–34.

———. “The Rabbinic Ethics of Protest.” Judaism 19, no. 1 (1970): 38–58.

Neher, André. “Rabbinic Adumbrations of Non-Violence: Israel and Canaan.” In Studies in Rationalism, Judaism & Universalism: In Memory of Leon Roth, edited by Raphael Loewe, 169–96. London: Routledge&K. Paul, 1966.

Neusner, Jacob. First Century Judaism in Crisis: Yohanan ben Zakkai and the Renaissance of Torah, 137–41. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1975.

Schwarzschild, Steven. “On the Theology of Jewish Survival.” Central Conference of American Rabbis Journal 15, no. 4 (1968): 2–21.

———. “Shalom.” Confrontations: Literary Journal of Long Island University 21 (1981): 166–76.

Schwarzschild, Steven, and Allen Solomonow. Roots of Jewish Nonviolence. Nyack, NY: Jewish Peace Fellowship, 1981.

Tamaret, Aaron Samuel. “Passover and Nonviolence.” Judaism 17, no. 2 (1968): 203–10.

———. “Politics and Passion: An Inquiry into the Evils of Our Time.” Judaism 12, no. 1 (1963): 36–56.

Study Guide for Chapter 11

The Pacifism of the First Reformation

Reading from the General Bibliography

Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914, 25–28.

Other topical reading

Brock, Peter. The Political and Social Doctrines of the Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries. The Hague: Mouton & Co., Publishers, 1957.

Questions

1. Does any causal connection or line of descent link the pacifist minorities (Waldensian—Czech—Anabaptist—Quaker)?

2. Look for differences in reasoning or in practical attitude among the several movements, or between them all and the pre-Constantinian church.

Study Guide for Chapter 12

Anabaptists in the Continental Reformation

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 118–21, 152–57.

Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914, 59–174.

———. Pacifism in the United States, 3–7.

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 185–90.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 182–93.

Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History, 32–49.

Other topical reading

Bender, Harold S. “The Pacifism of the Sixteenth Century Anabaptists.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 30, no. 1 (January 1956): 5–18.

Stauffer, Ethelbert. “The Anabaptist Theology of Martyrdom.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (1945): 179–214.

Stayer, James M. Anabaptists and the Sword. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1972.

Yoder, John Howard. “Anabaptists and the Sword Revisited: Systematic Historiography and Undogmatic Nonresistants.” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 85, no. 2 (1974): 126–39.

Study Guide for Chapter 13

The Peace Vision of Enlightenment Humanism

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, chapters 8, 9, 11, 12.

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 226–38, 274–83.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 155–63.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 54, 68–88.

Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 294–405, 410, 431–37.

Other topical reading

Chapiro, José. Erasmus and Our Struggle for Peace. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950.

Comenius, Johann Amos. The Angel of Peace. Edited by W. A. Morin. Translated by Milos Safránek. New York: Pantheon Books, 1944.

Cox, Richard Howard. Locke on War and Peace. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

Hemleben, Sylvester John. Plans for World Peace through Six Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943.

Souleyman, Elizabeth V. The Vision of World Peace in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972. First published 1941 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Questions

1. What is the basis for the Enlightenment abhorrence to war? Is this basis for Enlightenment humanism different from the basis of the medieval church, of Anabaptists, or of Quakers?

2. What moral-philosophical presuppositions are made about the springs of social action? Is humanity basically good? Is society basically good? Is one better than the other?

3. Is there a clear concept of the state in Enlightenment internationalism? Would a world government have less of whatever it is that makes smaller governments fight each other? Would war under the auspices of an international government be just? Would a world with one government be better than one with many?

Study Guide for Chapter 14

Quakerism in the Puritan Reformation

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 147–51, 157–72.

Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914, 255–330.

Guinan, Peace and Nonviolence, 62–65.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 194–98.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 90–93.

Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History, 50–66.

Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 420–39.

Other topical reading

Barbour, Hugh. The Quakers in Puritan England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.

Barbour, Hugh, and Arthur O. Roberts. Early Quaker Writings, 1650–1700. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973.

Benson, Lewis. Catholic Quakerism. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Book Services Committee, 1966.

Tucker, Robert. “Revolutionary Faithfulness.” In New Theology, no. 6, edited by Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman, 199–228. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Questions

1. How was seventeenth-century England different from earlier continental Europe?

2. How was Puritan religious experience different from that of Germanic Europe in the 1520s?

3. What changes in the attitudes toward our theme follow from these contextual differences (1) on the part of Cromwell, (2) on the part of the Quakers, (3) as to the nature of religious experience, and (4) as to the shape of a Christian peace witness?

Study Guide for Chapter 15

Quakerism in Early America: The Holy Experiment

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 152–72.

Brock, Pacifism in the United States, 21–158.

Guinan, Peace and Nonviolence, 139.

Lynd, Nonviolence in America, 3–23.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 163–80, 199–200.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 93–99.

Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 399–406, 414–19.

Other topical reading

Barbour, Hugh. The Quakers in Puritan England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.

Beatty, Edward Corby Obert. The Social Philosophy of William Penn. Pamphlets in American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1939.

Bender, Wilbur J. Nonresistance in Colonial Pennsylvania. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1949.

Bronner, Edwin B. William Penn, 17th Century Founding Father: Selections from His Political Writings. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1975.

———. William Penn’s Holy Experiment: The Founding of Pennsylvania, 1681–1701. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978. First published 1962 by Temple University Publications.

MacMaster, Richard K., with Samuel L. Horst and Robert F. Ulle. Conscience in Crisis: Mennonites and Other Peace Churches in America, 1739–1789: Interpretation and Documents. Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History, no. 20. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1979.

Questions

1. Did Penn and his followers have a theory of government? Did they see themselves as landlords or as rulers?

2. Was there something about Quaker theology that made it appropriate for these Quakers to take on the task of governing a colony?

3. Did Quakers withdraw from governing Pennsylvania because nonviolence had been proved ineffective in governing?

Study Guide for Chapter 16

Pacifism in the Nineteenth Century

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 190–95.

Brock, Pacifism in the United States.

Lynd, Nonviolence in America, 25–108.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 170–80, 201–11.

Other topical reading

Nineteenth-century Americans worthy of further study

William Jennings Bryan

Ballou, Adin. Christian Non-Resistance in All Its Important Bearings. Philadelphia: J. M. M’Kim, 1846. Reprint, New York: Garland, 1972. Excerpts in Lynd, Nonviolence in America, 31–40; and in Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 11–22.

Alexander Campbell

Clarence Darrow

Ralph Waldo Emerson

William Lloyd Garrison

William James

Henry David Thoreau

John Greenleaf Whittier

Leo Tolstoy

A Confession, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe. The World’s Classics 229. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays. The World’s Classics 449. London: Oxford University Press, 1936.

The Law of Love and the Law of Violence. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.

Recollections and Essays. The World’s Classics 459. London: Oxford University Press, 1937.

Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1987.

Question

1. Note the interlocking of biblicist and humanist styles of argument. Which arguments, weighty in recent decades, do these nonresistant writers deal with, and which not?

Study Guide for Chapter 17

Liberal Protestant Pacifism

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 190–220.

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 291–300.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 216–30.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 250–68, 332–439.

Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History, 67–81.

Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 134–323.

Yoder, Nevertheless, 1–56.

Other topical reading

History

Abrams, Ray H. Preachers Present Arms: The Role of the American Churches and Clergy in World Wars 1 and 2, with Some Observations on the War in Vietnam. Rev. ed. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1969. First published 1933 by Round Table Press.

Brittain, Vera. The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers. London: Allen & Unwin, 1964.

Brock, Peter. Pacifism in the United States, 920–39.

Chatfield, Charles. For Peace and Justice: Pacificism in America, 1914–1941. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971.

———. Peace Movements in America. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.

Clark, Grenville, and Louis B. Sohn. Introduction to World Peace through World Law. Chicago: World without War Publications, 1984. First published 1973.

Biography

Hentoff, Nat. Peace Agitator. New York: Macmillan, 1963.

Jane Addams

E. Stanley Jones

Toyohiko Kagawa

Kirby Page

Preachers in prominent urban Protestant churches, 1935–1955

Harold Bosley

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Henry H. Crane

John H. Holmes

Protestant evangelists and pastors in Europe

Hallie, Philip Paul. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1994. First published 1979 by Harper & Row.

Lasserre, Jean. War and the Gospel. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1962.

Trocmé, André. Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. First published 1961 by Éditions Labor et Fides.

———. Politics of Repentance. New York: Fellowship Publications, 1953.

Questions

1. What assumptions does liberal Protestantism make about the nature of humanity? Of social organization? Of the sources of social evils?

2. What are the roots of this theology in the experience of American Protestantism?

Study Guide for Chapter 18

Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Realist” Critique

Reading from the General Bibliography

Lynd, Nonviolence in America, 499–530.

Other topical reading

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Christianity and Power Politics. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969.

———. An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. First published 1935 by Harper.

———. “Love and Justice and the Pacifist Issue.” Part 4 in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson, 241–301. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957.

———. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. First published 1932 by Scribner.

———. The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation. Two volumes. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996. First published 1943 by Scribner.

Yoder, John H. Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1968. First published 1954 in Zeist, Netherlands.

Questions

1. Does the Niebuhrian critique apply equally to all kinds of pacifism (early church, radical Protestant, liberal Protestant, “just war pacifist”), or does it undercut some types more than others?

2. Would the Niebuhrian critique be equally cogent for someone who had not, like Niebuhr, passed by way of liberal pacifism?

3. What elements of his position did Reinhold Niebuhr continue to hold in common with liberal (“social gospel”) pacifism, in contrast with traditional Protestantism?

4. With what does Niebuhr’s critique replace liberal pacifist optimism? Is it with a just war stance with clear criteria? Is it with playing by ear in politics? Is it with some ideological loyalty (for example, the defense of justice or democracy)?

5. How would a Niebuhrian position be most consistently applied to post–World War II developments, such as nuclear arms and the Vietnam War?

Study Guide for Chapter 20

Biblical Realism and the Politics of Jesus

Reading from the General Bibliography

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 53–84.

Macgregor, New Testament Basis of Pacifism.

Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History, 1–14.

Yoder, The Original Revolution.

———. The Politics of Jesus.

Other topical reading

Berkhof, Hendrik. Christ and the Powers. 2nd ed. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977.

Cullmann, Oscar. The State in the New Testament. London: SCM Press, 1963. First published 1956 by Scribner.

Eller, Vernard. King Jesus’ Manual of Arms for the Armless: War and Peace from Genesis to Revelation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1973.

Tolstoy, Leo. A Confession, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe. The World’s Classics 229. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Trocmé, André. Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. First published 1973 by Herald Press.

Questions

Jesus as political figure

1. Read the Gospel according to Luke straight through as a narrative. What kind of political impact do you see in the expectations expressed in chapter 1, in the expectations expressed by John the Baptist, in Jesus’s first sermon in chapter 4, in the events and discourses of chapters 5–18, and in the Passion account in chapters 19–23?

Jesus as moral teacher

1. Read Matthew 4–7 and Luke 4–7 for their moral teaching. Are they new to you personally? Are they new in contrast to what you know of Jewish traditions? Are they new in contrast to Gentile common sense? What differences are there between Matthew’s and Luke’s versions?

Jesus as model: The death of Christ and the life of his followers

Read these biblical texts slowly, asking what they mean ethically.

Being in Christ as the basic logic of Christian existence. Gal. 2:20; Phil. 2:5–11; 1 John 2:5–6; 4:17

Dying and rising with Christ in a broader than ethical sense. Rom. 6:5–11; 8:3–11; Col. 2:20–4:6; Eph. 4:20–24

Dying with Christ as the meaning of the apostolate. 2 Cor. 4:10–11; Phil. 3:10; Col. 1:24

Dying with Christ as the mission of the church. Luke 14:25–27; parallels Mark 8:34–35; Matt. 10:34–39. Also John 15:20; Phil. 1:29–30; 2 Tim. 3:12; Heb. 11:1–12:5; 1 John 3:16; Rev. 13:10

Loving as Christ loved. John 13:34; 15:12

Servanthood. John 13:12–17; Luke 22:25–27; Matt. 20:25–28; Mark 10:42–45

Submission and suffering (even when unjust) as a theme in social ethics. 1 Pet. 2:18; 5:5; Rom. 13:1–7; 1 Cor. 14:34; Eph. 5:21–6:9; Col. 3:18; Titus 2:9

The cross as victory. Rev. 5:9–14; 12:10–12; 17:14; Col. 2:15; 1 Cor. 1:22–29

Background

Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 115–34.

Study Guide for Chapter 21

Other Biblical Themes

Topical reading

War in the Old Testament

Exodus 15–17; Judges 5–11; Psalm 37:7–9

Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 44–52.

Lind, Millard. Yahweh Is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1980.

Yoder, The Original Revolution, 91–111.

———. The Politics of Jesus, 78–89.

The state

Romans 13; 1 Timothy 2; 1 Peter 2; Revelation 13

Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1964.

———. The Original Revolution, 55–90.

———. The Politics of Jesus, 193–214.

Questions

1. Does the Old Testament sanction war?

2. Is the state authorized to make autonomous decisions in its realm? Are there criteria for evaluating the functions of governments, distinguishing between good and bad states? Is there any basis for judging what a Christian government or a good pagan government would look like?

3. When the early Christian apocalypses describe God (or the Christ of the last judgment) as destroying God’s enemies, yet call Christians to imitate God by loving their enemies, are these writings theologically inconsistent?

Study Guide for Chapter 22

Just War Thinking Revived

Topical reading

Obliteration bombing in World War II

Ford, John. “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing.” In War and Morality, edited by Richard A. Wasserstrom, 15–41. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970. First published in Theological Studies 5, no. 3 (1944): 261–309.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 147–54.

Hiroshima and nuclear pacifism

Batchelder, Robert C. The Irreversible Decision, 1939–1950. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 341–51.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 253–60, 283–94.

Ramsey, Paul. The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983.

———. War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961.

Nuremberg, the duty to disobey, and war crimes

Baird, Jay W. From Nuremberg to My Lai. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1972.

Maser, Werner. Nuremburg: A Nation on Trial. New York: Scribner, 1979.

Smith, Bradley F. Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

Taylor, Telford. Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

Vietnam and just war protest

Falk, Richard A., Gabriel Kolko, and Robert Jay Lifton. Crimes of War. New York: Random House, 1971.

Finn, James. Protest: Pacifism and Politics. New York: Random House, 1968.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 300–314.

Selective conscientious objection, especially regarding Vietnam

Finn, James. A Conflict of Loyalties: The Case for Selective Conscientious Objection. New York: Pegasus, 1968.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 326–33, 246–50.

Rohr, John. Prophets without Honor: Public Policy and the Selective Conscientious Objector. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971.

Shannon, Thomas A. Render unto God: A Theology of Selective Obedience. New York: Paulist Press, 1974.

Question

1. Do these mid-twentieth-century experiences show that the just war tradition is capable of exercising effective restraint? If so, which criteria were most usable? If not, which criteria were most to blame for the tradition’s not working?

Study Guide for Chapter 23

The Lessons of Nonviolent Experience

Topical reading

Nonviolence

Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross.

———. Resistance and Contemplation: The Way of Liberation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.

Hope, Marjorie, and James Young. The Struggle for Humanity: Agents of Nonviolent Change in a Violent World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977.

Lynd, Nonviolence in America, 271–96, 520–30.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 216–39, 294–350, 316–25.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 225–34, 328, 346–52, 442–44.

Miller, Non Violence.

Seifert, Conquest by Suffering.

Civil rights experience of Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi

Bondurant, Joan V. Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.

Fischer, Louis, ed. The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology. New York: Random House, 1962.

Gandhi. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 204–19.

Payne, Robert. The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969.

Shirer, William L. Gandhi: A Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Civil rights and race: FOR-CORE, King

King, Martin Luther Jr. “The Sword that Heals.” In Why We Can’t Wait, 15–38. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Lynd, Nonviolence in America, 379–498.

Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 363–84, 391–411.

Miller, William Robert. Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Life, Martyrdom, and Meaning for the World. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968.

Alternatives for national defense

American Friends Service Committee. In Place of War: An Inquiry into Nonviolent National Defense. New York: Grossman, 1967.

Boserup, Anders, and Andrew Mack. War without Weapons: Non-Violence in National Defence. London: Francis Pinter Ltd., 1974.

Hare, A. Paul, and Herbert H. Blumberg. Liberation without Violence: A Third-Party Approach. London: R. Collings, 1977.

———. Nonviolent Direct Action: American Cases, Social-Psychological Analyses. Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968.

Hinshaw, Cecil E. Nonviolent Resistance: A Nation’s Way to Peace. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1956.

King-Hall, Stephen. Defense in the Nuclear Age. Nyack, NY: Fellowship Publications, 1959.

Lakey, George. Nonviolent Action: How it Works. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1963.

Lynd, Nonviolence in America, 307–78.

Lyttle, Bradford. National Defense through Nonviolent Resistance. Chicago: American Friends Service Committee, 1958.

Miller, Non Violence, 97–130.

Muste, Abraham John. How to Deal with a Dictator. New York: Fellowship Publications, 1954.

The tactical strength of nonviolent action

Carter, April, David Hoggett, and Adam Roberts. Non-Violent Action: A Selected Bibliography. Rev. and enl. ed. London: Housmans, 1970.

Gregg, Richard Bartlett. The Power of Nonviolence. 2d rev. ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1966.

Lakey, George. Strategy for a Living Revolution. New York: Grossman, 1973.

Sharp, Gene. Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives. Boston: P. Sargent, 1970.

———. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston: P. Sargent, 1973.

Study Guide for Chapter 24

Ecumenical Theologies of Revolution and Liberation

Topical reading

Berger, Peter L., and Richard John Neuhaus. Movement and Revolution. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

Boesak, Allan Aubrey. Farewell to Innocence: A Social-Ethical Study of Black Theology and Black Power. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977.

Brown, Robert McAfee. Theology in a New Key: Responding to Liberation Themes. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978.

Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970.

Gish, Arthur G. The New Left and Christian Radicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973.

Kirk, J. Andrew. Liberation Theology: An Evangelical View from the Third World. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979.

Marty, Martin E., and Dean G. Peerman. New Theology, No. 6. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Míguez Bonino, José. Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975.

Miranda, José Porfirio. Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression. London: SCM Press, 1977.

Ramsey, Paul. Who Speaks for the Church? Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Segundo, Juan Luis. Liberation of Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976.

Snoek, C. Jaime. “The Third World, Revolution, and Christianity.” Concilium 15 (1966): 18–27.

Yoder, John Howard. “Exodus and Exile.” Cross Currents 23, no. 3 (1973): 297–309.

Questions

1. Does the literature offer one common sense of what the revolution being written about would mean? Is it an available political alternative, or is it something else?

2. Can the ethical options regarding Christian participation in revolution be correlated with the pacifism/just war/crusade logic? How does testing the concept of just revolution change the just war criteria?

3. How do the advocates of the right or duty of revolution relate this idea to Jesus? To Christian tradition in general?

4. Is the rightness of revolution contingent on its chances of success? Does the calculation of such chances matter?

5. Do the advocates of revolution have clear criteria of legitimacy that they apply to themselves, to possible allies, or to the system they condemn? Are all revolutions good?

Study Guide for Chapter 25

Varieties of Contemporary Catholic Peace Concern

Topical reading

The pope as pastor

Papal Christmas messages

United Nations visit by Pope Paul VI, 4 October 1965.

Flannery, Harry W. Pattern for Peace: Catholic Statements on International Order. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1962.

Guinan, Peace and Nonviolence, 141–47.

Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 269–83.

Pacem in Terris (papal encyclical issued by John XXIII, 11 April 1963).

Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et Spes], part 2, “Some Problems of Special Urgency,” chapter 5, “The Fostering of Peace and the Promotion of a Community of Nations.” In The Documents of Vatican II, edited by Walter M. Abbott. New York: Association Press, 1966.

Régamey, P.-R. Non-Violence and the Christian Conscience. New York: Herder and Herder, 1966.

Stratmann, Franziskus Maria. The Church and War: A Catholic Study. New York: Garland, 1971.

———. War and Christianity Today. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1956.

Yoder, Nevertheless, 11–17.

Conservatism about the moral law; life as sacred

Ude, Johannes. Du sollst nicht töten! Dornbirn, Austria: H. Mayer, 1948.

Yoder, Nevertheless, 26–31.

Zahn, Gordon Charles. In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter. London: G. Chapman, 1966.

The evangelical minority ethic

Yoder, Nevertheless, 73–80.

The Catholic Worker movement

Cornell, Thomas C., and James H. Forest. A Penny a Copy: Readings from the Catholic Worker. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Dorothy Day

Ammon Hennacy

Peter Maurin

Other biographies

Lanza del Vasto

Jean Goss and Hildegard Goss-Mayr

Thomas Merton

Responsibility

Gandhi and nonviolence

Douglass, James W. Resistance and Contemplation: The Way of Liberation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.

Resistance

Daniel Berrigan

Philip Berrigan

Liberation

Hélder Câmara

Adolfo Perez Esquivel

Contemplation and demonstration

Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross.

Theologizing in a new key

Comblin, José. Théologie de la paix. Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1960.

Topel, L. John. The Way to Peace: Liberation through the Bible. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979.

Study Guide for Chapter 26

Ecumenical Conversations

Topical reading

Bilheimer, Robert S., and Thomas Murray Taylor. Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age. London: SCM Press, 1961.

The Christian and War: A Theological Discussion of Justice, Peace and Love. Amsterdam: The Historic Peace Churches and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1958.

Church Peace Mission (U.S.), Commission on Christian Conscience and War. The Christian Conscience and War.

Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace.

Muste, Abraham John. Essays of A. J. Muste, 302–21. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.

Peachey, Biblical Realism Confronts the Nation.

Yoder, John Howard. Karl Barth and the Problem of War. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970.

———. Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism, Church Peace Mission Pamphlets, no. 6. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1968.

General Bibliography

This general bibliography identifies resources that are regularly referred to in the book without full identification. A topical bibliography is provided in the study guide for most chapters.

Biblical and theological

Lasserre, Jean. War and the Gospel. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1962.

Macgregor, G. H. C. The New Testament Basis of Pacifism. Nyack, NY: Fellowship Publications, 1960.

Raven, Charles E. 1950. The Theological Basis of Christian Pacifism. New York: Fellowship Publications, 1950.

Régamey, P.-R. Non-Violence and the Christian Conscience. New York: Herder and Herder, 1966.

Rutenber, Culbert Gerow. The Dagger and the Cross: An Examination of Christian Pacifism. New York: Fellowship Publications, 1950.

Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972.

Historical

Bainton, Roland H. Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-Evaluation. New York: Abingdon Press, 1960.

Brock, Peter. Pacifism in Europe to 1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

———. Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

———. The Roots of War Resistance: Pacifism from the Early Church to Tolstoy. Nyack, NY: Distributed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1981.

———. Twentieth-Century Pacifism. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970.

Cadoux, Cecil John. The Early Christian Attitude to War: A Contribution to the History of Christian Ethics. New York: Seabury Press, 1919. Reprint, 1982.

Heering, Gerrit Jan. The Fall of Christianity: A Study of Christianity, the State, and War. New York: Fellowship Publications, 1943.

Hornus, Jean Michel. It Is Not Lawful for Me to Fight: Early Christian Attitudes Toward War, Violence, and the State. Translated by Alan Kreider and Oliver Coburn. Rev. ed. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1980.

Nuttall, Geoffrey Fillingham. Christian Pacifism in History. Berkeley: World Without War Council, 1958. Reprint, 1971.

Zampaglione, Gerardo. The Idea of Peace in Antiquity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973.

Anthologies

Guinan, Edward. Peace and Nonviolence: Basic Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1973.

Holmes, Arthur Frank. War and Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1975.

Lynd, Staughton, ed. Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.

Marrin, Albert. War and the Christian Conscience: From Augustine to Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago: Regnery, 1971.

Mayer, Peter. The Pacifist Conscience. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Sibley, Mulford Quickert. The Quiet Battle: Writings on the Theory and Practice of Non-Violent Resistance. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963.

Weinberg, Arthur, and Lila Shaffer Weinberg, comp. Instead of Violence: Writings by the Great Advocates of Peace and Nonviolence throughout History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

Theory of Christian nonviolence and pacifism

Douglass, James W. The Non-Violent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Miller, William Robert. Nonviolence: A Christian Interpretation. New York: Schocken Books, 1966. Reprint, 1972.

Seifert, Harvey. Conquest by Suffering: The Process and Prospects of Nonviolent Resistance. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.

Trocmé, André. The Politics of Repentance. New York: Fellowship Publications, 1953.

Yoder, John Howard. Nevertheless: A Meditation on the Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1971.

———. The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1972. Reprint, 1977, 2003.

Summary statements of Protestant-ecumenical conversation

Church Peace Mission (U.S.), Commission on Christian Conscience and War. The Christian Conscience and War: The Statement of a Commission of Theologians and Religious Leaders Appointed by the Church Peace Mission. New York: Church Peace Mission, 1953.

Durnbaugh, Donald F. On Earth Peace: Discussions on War/Peace Issues between Friends, Mennonites, Brethren, and European Churches, 1935–75. Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1978.

Peachey, Paul. Biblical Realism Confronts the Nation: Ten Christian Scholars Summon the Church to the Discipleship of Peace. Scottdale, PA: Fellowship Publications, with Church Peace Mission, 1963.

Scripture Index

Genesis

4, 141

22, 326

50:20, 356

Exodus

17:11–13, 325

Numbers

1, 90

Deuteronomy

24, 324

1 Samuel

8, 330

15, 90

Jeremiah

29:5–7, 391

29:7, 140

Matthew

4:8–9, 331

5, 135, 138n2, 151, 154, 294, 314, 330, 398

5:33–34, 181

6, 294, 314

18:15–20, 170

19, 324

20:25–28, 330

20, 330

22:21, 48

Mark

10:42–45, 330

12:17, 48

Luke

2:1, 51

4:5–7, 331

14:23, 59

20:25, 48

22:25–26, 183, 330

John

15:13, 112

Romans

12, 330

12:17, 180

13, 327–31, 156, 332

1 Corinthians

6:1–8, 154

15, 237

2 Corinthians

6:15–18, 177

Philippians

2, 180n25

4:22, 51

1 Timothy

2:1–3, 156

2 Timothy

2:15, 322

James

5:12, 181

Hebrews

11:19, 326

Revelation

5, 237

13, 330–31

Subject Index

abolition (slavery), 255, 366n8

Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, 326–27

Ambrose, 38, 58, 108

apocalyptic language, 47, 183, 188, 311

apologetics, 21, 49–50, 364–65

Aquinas, Thomas

exempted clergy from warfare, 83

just war invalidated by wrong intentions, 99

killing without sinning, 72–73

respecting human dignity, 104

resisting tyranny, 125, 371

systematized the just war tradition, 65

Aristotle, 382–83

nature of ruling and justice of war, 36, 38, 105, 114

relativity of just cause, 107, 114

Augustine

common sense reasoning, 64

Joshua’s holy war as model for warfare, 34, 36

just cause in war, 113

state violence against the Donatists, 59

synthesized Roman law and Christian tradition, 77

two cities, 64

use of Cicero, 58

visible and invisible church, 62

Ausbund, 191

Austin, Warren, 209

Bainton, Roland, 27, 28, 65, 109, 241

Ballou, Adin, 254, 353

ban

alternative to the death penalty, 153–54, 173, 176, 178

secular sanctions as a type of, 216–17

baptism, 58, 60, 71, 174–75

Bartsch, Hans-Werner, 377–78

believer’s church, 161–62

Bernard of Clairvaux, 34

Berrigan, Daniel, 123, 344, 354, 368, 390

Bible

biblical authority, 61

biblical realism defined, 311

historical critical methods, 310–12

infallibility, 310, 312

breakdown of church-state ties allows for fresh reading of, 310

blank check

differences with just war, 31–32, 35, 40, 101, 114–15

type of position on war, 28–29

usefulness as a type, 33–34

Protestantism dismantled differences with just war, 122

See also Machiavelli, Niccolò; realism

Blanchard, Jonathan, 261, 277

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 362, 374n3, 403

Boulding, Kenneth and Elise, 364

Bryan, William Jennings, 266, 277

Calvin, John, 125, 316, 323

Câmara, Hélder, 388, 398

Campbell, Alexander, 257–59, 268

capital punishment, See death penalty

Carter, Jimmy, 212, 213, 296

Catholic Worker, 345, 395–96

chaplaincy, 119, 133, 200, 263

Chelčický, Petr, 73, 147–60, 227n5, 322, 331

chivalry, 33, 132

Christendom

Donation of Constantine, 60, 152n5

Anabaptists and Quakers as anti-Christendom, 236

church and state collusion, 60, 328

context for the just war theory, 69, 80–83

encounter with Islam, 109

establishment Anabaptism as a type of, 185

fragmentation of, 120–22

fallen away from the New Testament, 42–43

humanist heritage and, 201–202, 205

international law, 127–28

Judaism as a sect within, 140

Quakers as renewing, 234

See also Constantine; Constantinianism; state

Christ’s Poor, 136

church (selected topics)

as an international community, 273

helps members to be more faithful, 237

political option of Jesus, 314

popular social gospel vision of, 279

renewal, 170, 234, 259, 260, 269–70, 276–77

state-church, 166, 188, 195

visible, confessing community, 61

without spot or wrinkle, 189–90

church councils

Arles, 50–51

Constantinople, 59

Nicea, 58

Churches of God, 261

Cicero, Marcus Tulius, 38, 105. See also Ambrose; Augustine

civil disobedience, 255, 368, 395–96. See also nonviolent action

civil office (holding), 158, 179, 241, 245n7, 251–52

civil rights movement, 305–306, 355, 360

clergy

apostolic succession, 62–63

bishops

arbitrators of conflict, 132, 146

authority over princes, 116, 121

bribery and, 136

chosen by the emperor, 60

English king as archbishop, 117n10

as princes, 121, 133

exemptions from military, 83–84, 89, 131, 133, 134

part of medieval hierarchy, 157

higher moral standard, 54

holiness of life not needed for sacrament validity, 63

Lutheran, 116

Reformation desacralized, 120

See also Ambrose; chaplaincy; confession; Constantine; prayer; Utraquists

coercion, 55, 122, 293

nonviolent, 367–68

coercive superior force, 358

Comenius, John Amos, 199–200

common sense

anti-war resource, 273, 274, 342

characteristic of liberation theology, 382

Constantinian way of thinking, 64–68

humanist internationalism not a form of, 202–3

just war, 79, 345, 348

original meaning of jus gentium, 128

rather than biblical focus, 255–57, 272

See also Augustine; revelation

conciliar movement, 146

conscientious objection to war

Civilian Public Service camps, 297, 302

ecumenical dialogue, 407

Mennonites, 303–5, 307

Nuremburg, 340

Pentecostalism, 262

saints who were objectors, 131

selective objection, 342–44, 347–48, 397

Vietnam War, 126–27

See also draft

confession

confessional casuistry, 384

context for Catholic morality, 394

evaluates action after the fact, 84–85

function in medieval society, 84

Protestant abolition of confession undermined just war theory, 115–120, 122, 124

Quaker journals as confessional, 223

restoring the confessional, 159

secular courts as replacing the confessional, 128

conflict resolution, 364

Congregationalism, 186, 222, 225

Constantine

bishop of bishops, 58

symbol of apostasy for Anabaptists, 189

symbol of apostasy for Czech Brethren, 152

symbol of a shift in Christian ethics, 57, 59–60, 63, 316

would have been free to live out New Testament ethic, 73–74

See also Eusebius; Christendom; Constantinianism

Constantinianism

better for Christians to rule, 80

Christianity’s cultural function and, 72–73

Constantinian assumptions behind the just war, 69–73

fall of the church, 59, 108, 189, 236, 257

Kantian assumptions and, 316

liberation theology and, 382, 388

merging pagan philosophy with biblical wisdom, 63–65

Niebuhr and, 292

papacy as unfolding of, 61

Protestant Reformation makes Constantinianism normal for most people, 143

Quakers and, 244

radical reformation critique of, 164–65, 243

reinterpreting the Bible to justify military service, 76–77

shift in ecclesiology, 61–63

shift in the meaning of history, 59–60, 71

See also Christendom; Constantine; history; responsibility

counsels, 54, 87, 397. See also precepts

Crimean War, 272

Cromwell, Oliver, 225–27, 229, 233, 243, 244

crusade, See holy war

Curle, Adam, 364

Day, Dorothy, 123, 395

death penalty, 154, 179, 247, 249, 327

Declaration of Independence, 370

democracy

challenges early Anabaptist view of the state, 246

constrains rulers, 212

deceives people to think they rule, 34

false promises, 389

liberation, 373–74

making world safe for, 215

majority threat to, 251

preferable to totalitarianism, 295

Puritan confidence in, 317

Quaker experience, 238, 248–51

See also Levellers; nonviolent action

Denck, Hans, 184

diaspora, 138, 139, 140, 326

Dibelius, Otto, 329

Diggers, 225

discipleship, 71, 72, 74, 173

dispensationalism, 259, 322–24. See also progressive revelation

divine right, 28, 33, 114–15

Dodge, David, 253, 254

Donatists, 59

Douglass, James, 345–49, 356–61, 364–65, 398, 399

draft, 48, 89, 126–27, 342–44. See also conscientious objection

dualism

Anabaptist, 187–92

early Christian shift in, 55

historians’ misunderstanding of Anabaptist, 193–95

Lutheran two-kingdoms, 116

Niebuhr’s influence on Mennonite, 296–98, 307

neoplatonic, 62, 63–64

New Testament, 55, 328

Mennonite dualism after Niebuhr, 302–3

potential problem in blank check type, 33

pre-Constantinian practical, 46

Quaker, 235

See also vocation

Dulles, John Foster, 291, 338

ecumenical dialogue, 187, 270, 308, 372–78, 401–4. See also Federal Council of Churches; Fellowship of Reconciliation; World Council of Churches; World Student Christian Federation

effectiveness

faithfulness versus

historical trajectory of debate about, 353

Jesus and, 318–19

Niebuhr and, 293, 294, 297

nonviolent action and, 366

third way, 360

Tolstoy and, 267–68

good people always win, 81

good people do not always win, 70

holy war not based on, 32, 40

ineffectiveness of violence, 366–67

military means usually fail, 363

nonviolent action and, 293, 354–59, 361, 364, 367, 392

not in conflict with faithfulness, 268, 275, 278, 279, 283

probability of success in war, 32

triumph of science and, 364–65

unfair comparison of violent and nonviolent effectiveness, 361, 362

using the language of without optimism, 360–61

See also just war; martyrdom; nonviolent action

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 255, 256, 275–76, 353

empire

as a vision of peace, 197, 198

creeping empire loyalty of early Christians, 50–53

Pax Romana, 50, 128

Erasmus, 166, 199, 201, 202, 211

eschatology, 63, 188, 294–95. See also apocalyptic language

ethics

deontological, 28, 30, 86, 355

follows from encounter with the Holy Spirit, 234–35

function of typology in ethical analysis, 27–28

intuition, 86

Jesus and ethics, 309–320

lack of a universal ethic, 210–11

meaning of resurrection for, 319–20

methodology, 22–23, 67, 267–68

moral evaluation at the end of action, 84–85

pastoral guidance, 82, 124, 200

positive law, 86

situation, 86, 415

teleological, 86

utilitarianism or pragmatism, 30, 102, 297, 355–56

universalizing of, 67, 69–72, 315–16

See also Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac; common sense; confession; Douglass, James; Kant, Immanuel; precepts; counsels

Eusebius, 62, 63, 106, 191

faithfulness, 267–68, 319, 356–57, 362, 366. See also effectiveness; martyrdom; suffering

Federal Council of Churches, 279, 307

Fellowship of Reconciliation, 280, 284, 287, 296, 414

Finney, Charles, 276–77

Ford, John, 335–36

Fox, George (the elder), 229–30

Fox, George (the younger), 220–21, 226

forgiveness, 53–54, 119, 124, 170, 173, 290

Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 283, 325

Franciscans, 134–35

free church, 161

freedom of speech, 224, 386

Gandhi, Mohandas, 354, 364–65, 398. See also nonviolent action

Garrison, William Lloyd, 255

gelassenheit, 192

God

control over the powers, 331

righteousness of, 274

sovereignty of, 322–23

wrath of, 55, 332

Yahweh the Warrior, 325–27

See also history; Jesus

golden age, 63, 197–98

Grebel, Conrad, 165–74, 175, 182, 186, 277n9

Grotius, Hugo, 39, 107, 127–28, 201, 272. See also international law; jus gentium

Guevara, Che, 32, 112, 362, 379, 388

Henry VIII (king of England), 221

Hershberger, Guy F., 241–42, 246, 248, 305–6, 324–25. See also effectiveness; Quakers; progressive revelation; nonresistance

Hiroshima, 336–39. See also nuclear pacifism

historic peace churches, 162, 409–10

history

Anabaptist and Quaker refusal to undo, 244

apologetic use of, 194–95

authority and, 42–43, 46n2, 164, 257–58

change, 331–32

Constantinian meaning of history, 59–60, 62

Constantinian progression of, 42–43, 59–60

cross at the center of, 192

cyclical vision of, 198

descriptive task, 19, 21–22

deemphasizing, 262, 269–70, 282

dividing the Bible into Old and New Testaments, 257–58

drawing lessons from, 247

from below, 159–60

function of typology in historical analysis, 27–28, 34

God is in charge of, 61–62, 141, 177, 226, 244

humanism and, 196–97

limited knowledge of, 130–31

Marxist view of, 382–83, 390

New Testament teaching on God’s way of working in history, 61

New Testament as baseline for evaluating, 331–32

peaceableness left out of records, 144, 159–60

reading history fairly, 21–22, 75–78, 138–39, 163, 164

salvation history, 63, 237, 264

Hitler, Adolf, 283, 288, 291, 294, 295, 296

Hobbes, Thomas, 242–46, 250

Hofmann, Melchior, 189

Holy Spirit

Anabaptist unity, 176

Quaker view of how the Spirit works, 228–29, 231, 233, 234

Wesleyan movement view, 260

holy war

America’s wars tend towards, 351

crusade, 39, 89, 106, 109–12, 118n11

differences with just war, 31–32, 34–35, 40, 99, 113, 126

guilt demanding punishment, 98

just revolution as, 126, 371–72

just war opponents tend towards, 400

liberation theology, 382, 385

martyrdom and, 32, 40, 111, 112, 379, 388

not based on effectiveness, 32, 40

Old Testament holy wars, 99, 106, 321, 324–26

sixteenth to nineteenth century holy wars, 114

superior power ineffective against crusaders, 82, 92

transcendental validation of war, 35, 107

type of position on war, 29, 36

wars of pacifist idealism, 215–16, 273, 291

See also Augustine; Bernard of Clairvaux; just revolution; martyrdom; pacifism; Russell, Frederick

hope

not demonstrable, 360–61

science and, 364–65

Hubmaier, Balthasar, 183, 184, 194, 195

human nature

just war’s trust in, 241n3

optimistic view of, 196, 198, 199, 233–34, 278–79

pessimistic view of, 268, 288–89, 290, 359

Puritan view of, 275

Hus, Jan, 145–50

Hut, Hans, 188

Hutterites, 190

idolatry, 43–44, 46n2, 53, 167

Incarnation, 189–90, 234, 268

international law

in Christendom, 127–28

just war and 91, 100, 104, 405

legal system regulating war apart from theology, 107, 333–34

See also Grotius, Hugo; jus gentium; Nuremburg

internationalism

Chelčický’s vision of, 156–57

Christian evaluation of, 206–7

Enlightenment internationalism, 196, 200–201, 202–6, 211, 271–72

liberal Protestant pacifism and, 273, 284

socialist internationalism, 280, 281

theological commitment, 202–3

Islam, 109–111

Jehovah’s Witnesses, 265

Jesus

as a model to follow, 150, 155, 173, 180, 182–83, 315

imitation of, 134–35

Niebuhr’s interpretation of, 294–95, 309

not successful, 359

political options of, 312–14

Protestantism created a different Jesus, 317

public figure, 314

Resurrection, 319

sits at the right hand of the Father, 61

See also ethics; effectiveness; nonresistance

John XXIII (pope), 397

Johnson, James, 32n5, 349–52

jus gentium, 39, 128

just war

criteria must be public, 30

crusade as a type of, 109–112

differences with blank check, 31, 35, 114–15

differences with holy war, 31–32, 34–35, 40, 99, 113, 126

evaluation after war, 350, 351

elevated to creedal status in Protestantism, 123

humanist challenge to, 208

“justifiable” versus “just,” 30, 83–84, 97

liberal Protestant pacifism and, 283

modern weapons and, 334–38, 352

nonbinding teaching in Catholicism, 123

not the majority view, 351

papal messages neglect, 396–97

Protestant weakening of, 115–25

provides a basis for pacifist/nonpacifist dialogue, 345

radicalizing effect, 344–45

separate type of reasoning, 30–31

threats to use illicit means, 346, 347

usability of, 351

who decides when war is justifiable, 37–38, 85, 126–27

unsystematic, 65–66, 75

See also common sense; just war criteria; nuclear pacifism; Nuremburg; Vietnam War

just war criteria

discrimination, 103, 334–36, 337, 345–46

just cause

holy war and, 34

only one side can have a, 273

outlined, 89–90

relativity of, 107, 114

religious and political, 113

revolution and, 379

substantial national importance, 97–98

unequivocal offense, 98

last resort

holy war and, 33

less extreme measures must be tried first, 100, 348

nonviolent action’s challenge to, 355

outlined, 91

revolution and, 378, 383

two contrary views on what constitutes, 79

way to implement valid intention, 99

legitimate authority

bias in favor of the civil order, 80

historical develop of criterion, 95–97

outlined, 88–89

revolution and, 125, 379–81

which authority?, 79, 341

proportionality, 72, 102–3, 337, 341, 379

right intention

objective, 90, 98–99

subjective, 90–91, 99

secret, 346, 347

unintentional effects, 346–47

Vietnam War violated, 341

winnability, 32, 363, 372, 379

Kann, Uchimura, 269

Kant, Immanuel, 200, 315–16

Karlstadt, Andreas, 169, 172

Kimbangu, Simon, 269

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 354, 360, 362, 377, 412

King-Hall, Sir Stephen, 363–64

Kingship

divine right of kings, 114

Israelite, 48n3, 138, 321–22, 324, 326, 327

sacred, 109

See also state

knights, 132

Lactantius, 54–55

Lakey, George, 364

Lamb’s War, 231–33, 237

Landmarkism, 165n3

Laue, James, 364

law

absolute law, 394–95

Luther’s use of, 151

Medieval use of, 151

Niebuhr’s use of, 290, 301

of Christ, 150–53, 173

of God, 156

See also international law; legalism; natural law; precepts

League of Nations, 281, 283, 284

legalism, 52–53, 153, 158, 398

Levellers, 225

liberal (defined), 273–74

liberation theology, 311, 378–92

a better way to say revolution, 378

all Christian theology must be, 388–89

Catholicism and, 378, 381–82

different types, 383n13

dishonesty of Western church responses to, 389

Exodus theme, 391

less critical of revolutionary regimes, 388

pacifism and, 390

redefinition of violence, 383

should not be equated with violence, 388

See also Marxism; revolution

Lind, Millard, 325–27

Littel, Franklin, 161, 297, 302, 305, 307

Locke, John, 242–43, 244, 254, 257

Luther, Martin

gradual reformation, 172

law and grace, 151, 290

soldiers and unjust war, 30, 85, 126

undermined just war tradition, 116, 117

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 28–29, 33, 39, 106–107, 114

Magna Carta, 97

martyrdom

Anabaptist theology of, 190–92

early church and, 71

effectiveness and, 32n6, 361, 362

holy war and, 32, 40, 111, 112, 379, 388

Jewish nonviolent martyrs, 140

Martyrs Mirror, 165n3, 191

reverence for slain soldiers as martyrs, 112

See also persecution; revolution; suffering

Marxism, 209, 373, 382–83, 387–88, 390–91

means and ends, 364–65

Miller, William, 356–57, 360, 361

monasticism, 54–55

Mennonites as equivalent to monastics, 300

Mormons, 264, 265

Movement for a New Society, 354

Mumaw, John, 297, 302, 307

Münster, 188

Müntzer, Thomas, 169–174, 184, 186, 188, 227

mysticism, 184, 188, 192, 228n7, 231

nationalism

Cambellite, 258

Czech nationalism, 146–48

divine right of kings and, 114

liberal Protestant critique of, 273

Protestant origins of, 121

natural theology, 66–68, 233–35

natural law

assumptions of, 66

development from Christianity, 235

dignity of humans, 104

meaning of natural 66–67

proportional response, 103

syntactical dissonance, 102

See also Aquinas, Thomas; common sense; law; natural theology; revelation

Naylor, James, 230

Niebuhr, Reinhold

against holy war, 291–92

critique of pacifism, 246, 292–94

general revelation and, 366–67

influence of, 296–98, 306

initial pacifism, 284, 287

interpretation of Jesus, 294–95, 317–18

liberal characteristics of, 285, 286–87, 291, 296

Moral Man and Immoral Society, 288, 291, 299, 355, 359

not orthodox, 286, 291, 299

Sermon on the Mount, 290

sinfulness, 288–89, 300

See also effectiveness: faithfulness versus

neo-orthodoxy, 286

New Theology, No. 6, 376–78

noblesse oblige, 69

nonresistance

abolition and, 254–55

the ban and, 55–56

caricatures of, 358

Jesus and, 152, 265, 294, 295, 300

problem of God’s nature and, 55, 332

nonviolence (pacifism) versus, 295, 297, 305–6, 355, 356–57, 358, 399

Schleitheim and, 180, 183

Zwinglian origins, 173

See also Ballou, Adin; Hut, Hans; nonviolent action; Schleitheim; state

nonviolent action

accepting or not accepting punishment, 368

Catholic openness to, 398–99

charismatic leaders of, 355

democratic assumptions, 385–86

direct action, 356

effectiveness and, 354–56, 366, 367

ineffective against some regimes, 295

language of stronger force, 357–58

limitations of, 358–60, 367

Niebuhr’s analysis of, 293–94

Pascalian wager for, 367

resistance to Hitler, 354

untapped potential of, 362–63, 392

See also civil disobedience; nonresistance; pacifism

nuclear pacifism, 124n16, 336–39, 348, 384n15. See also Hiroshima

Nuremberg, 129, 339–40. See also conscientious objection to war

oaths, 44–45, 50, 180–83, 287n1

obliteration bombing, 334–36, 339, 345. See also nuclear pacifism

Oldham, Joseph H., 335

Origen, 49, 50

pacifism (selected topics)

agreements with Machiavellianism, 40–41

differentiated from pacificists, 200

different ways to use the term, 29

different types, 293–94

personalist, 255–56

restorationist, 256–57

socialist, 280–81, 287

theological innovation and, 292

undercurrent in Middle Ages, 131

wars of pacifist idealism, 215–16, 273, 291

zeal for peace causing war, 213

See also holy war; nonresistance; nonviolent action

papal encyclicals, 396–97

Paul VI (pope), 397

peace conferences, 272

Peace of God, 131, 132, 213

Peace Pledge Union, 279

Peasants’ War, 122, 126, 175, 186, 188

Penn, William, 199, 238, 240, 247, 332

Pentecostalism, 261–63

persecution

Augustine versus Donatism, 59

early Christians and, 49, 52, 53, 57

Quaker experience of, 232, 233

different from Anabaptist experience of, 235–36

Pius XII (pope), 396

Plymouth Brethren, 259–60

police

Anabaptists and police, 195

different pacifist views of police, 215, 282–83

enforcement of internationalism, 206, 213–14

Guy Hershberger on Quakers and police, 241

international police force, 214–15, 282, 283

just war as analogous to police function, 80–81, 121

liberal protestant pacifism and police, 282

police function as vengeance, 99

police shows as cultural moral guide, 70n6, 342

police state, 354, 386

police technology and utilitarian calculation, 356

Reinhold Niebuhr and police protecting property, 295

Roman army as police, 44, 50

WCC statement that compares just war to, 405

powerlessness of rulers, 212–13

prayer

against the state’s enemies, 51

empirical observation, 286–87

for the state, 51, 133, 156, 305

instead of weapons, 133–34

precepts, 87, 135, 138, 152. See also counsels

preemptive surrender, 346

progressive revelation, 324–25. See also dispensationalism

Puidoux, 410–11, 414

Puritanism, 222–26, 256, 274–76, 315, 316–17, 367

racism, 24, 140

apartheid, 217, 371

WCC, Program to Combat Racism, 375–76, 389, 412

See also civil rights movement; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Pentecostalism

radical reformation, 162

Ramsey, Paul, 338–39, 342, 345–49, 351

Ranters, 225

Rauschenbusch, Walter, 277–78, 289

realism, 33, 34, 195. See also blank check; Machiavelli, Niccolò

Reformation

a continuous process, 144–46

revision of standard Protestant history, 159

religion, 65, 72, 360. See also conscientious objection; religious tolerance; wars of religion

religious tolerance, 58, 244n6, 304, 331

Renaissance, 197–99

restoration sects, 264

responsibility

defined, 81

Jesus could not exercise, 295

Quaker Pennsylvania as a test case for pacifist responsibility, 241

Pentecostalism, 261

Constantinian optimism, 291–92

revelation

general versus special, 365–67

and reason, 257, 272, 275, 278, 283, 357

revivalism, 260, 261, 262, 276–77

revolution

American Revolution, 366, 370–71

Anabaptists and, 188, 194–95, 304

Calvinism and, 96, 125–26, 370

dysfunctional moral imperative of, 380

early Christian opposition, 48–49

ecumenical debates about, 372–78

French Revolution of 1789, 370, 372

Jewish renunciation of, 139

Latin American context, 381–82

martyrs, 112, 362, 388

myth of freedom through, 369–71

not possible in early just war thought, 89, 95

poor people often worse off because of, 371

possibilities in Latin America for nonviolent, 385–87

Quaker’s and, 226–27, 237–38

revolution as holy war, 125–26, 129, 175, 312, 371–72, 379

Revelation 13 and, 330–31

Romans 13 and, 329, 330–31

See also Aquinas, Thomas; Constantinianism; Cromwell, Oliver; Diggers; holy war; liberation theology; Marxism; Münster; Peasants’ War

Richardson, Herbert, 377

rights

nonviolent protest, 354

Muslims granted rights to Christians, 111

of the enemy, 39, 40, 82, 93, 112–14, 121–22

secularized, 331, 370

women’s, 260

See also civil rights movement

Rule of Christ, 170, 173

Russell, Frederick, 29, 36

sacramentality, 399

sanctions, 91, 132, 214, 216–17, 279

a type of nonviolent enforcement, 217

See also ban

Sattler, Michael, 133, 175, 176, 179. See also Schleitheim.

Schleitheim, 174–83

Anabaptism after Schleitheim, 186–94

self-defense, 36, 92, 133, 143, 171n11

separatism, 177, 185, 187–89, 302, 306–308

Seventh-Day Adventists, 265

Sharp, Gene, 364, 367

Shaull, Richard, 377

Sheldon, Charles, 276

Simons, Menno, 188–89, 192

simony, 136

Smucker, Donovan, 297, 302, 305, 307

social gospel, 277–80

state

autonomy of, 115–16, 121

Christian support of the regime in power, 328

church-state relationship critiqued, 122, 152–58, 177–80

controls a territory, 97

early Christians and the state as such, 46–48

God did not create the state, yet puts it in order, 177–78

Hobbesean view of, 242, 246

humanist critique of the emerging nation-state, 199

Lockean view of, 242–43

Niebuhr’s view of, 246

New Testament and the state, 48–49, 327–31

organ of Reformation, 117–18, 166

perceived threat of Christianity to, 57

protector of Reformation, 116–17

Quaker view of, 243–44

radical reformation view of, 243. See also Schleitheim

savior of Reformation, 118–19

Zwingli’s view of, 167

See also Constantine; Constantinianism; diaspora; Hobbes, Thomas; kingship; Locke, John; Machiavelli; revolution

Stauffer, Ethelbert, 190–92. See also martyrdom

Stayer, James, 194–95

Suárez, Francisco, 30, 112–14

Suffering

Anabaptists and, 179, 182, 190–92

cost of following Jesus, 315

early Christians and, 40, 49

Enlightenment pacifism not rooted in, 199

Jewish understanding of, 141–42

love as, 295

pacifist societies not rooted in, 255

Quakers and, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237

tool for social change, 357, 377

virtue, 395

See also Lamb’s War; martyrdom

Swiss Brethren, 169, 170, 183, 185, 227

Sylvester (pope), 60, 152n5

Taborites, 147–48, 149

television as a moral guide, 70n6, 342

Tertullian, 45n1, 46, 47

Thirty Years’ War, 118, 149

Thomas, Madathilparampil M., 373

Thoreau, Henry David, 30, 255, 256, 275, 353

Tolstoy, Leo, 254n2, 265–68, 272, 278

treaties, 100, 128

Truce of God, 131

typologies, 105–115

tyrannicide, 96, 126. See also Aquinas, Thomas

Ude, Johannes, 394–95

unity

European, 145–46

necessity of enemies for, 211

See also Christendom; restoration sects; Schleitheim

utopia, 216, 263–64

Utraquists, 147–48

Vietnam War, 69, 126, 215–16, 341–44, 349–52

Vitoria, Francisco de, 39, 106, 112, 114, 117

vocation

different for princes and soldiers, 85

Lutheran concept, 116, 323–24

pacifism as, 293, 300, 301, 308

Waldensians, 149, 154, 164

wars of religion, 114, 118

Wesleyan movement, 260–61

Wilson, Woodrow, 215, 273, 287, 291

withdrawal, 134, 245–46, 301, 307–8, 312. See also separatism

World Student Christian Federation, 373

World Council of Churches

“Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age,” 337

Faith and Order, 403, 404

historical trajectory of dialogue about war, 402–9

“humanizing the world,” 374–75

Life and Work, 403

Nairobi, 412–14

New Delhi, 411

nonviolent action, 362–63

pacifist roots of, 403

“responsible society,” 374

typologies on war and peace, 405, 406

“Violence, Nonviolence, and the Struggle for Justice,” 392

Uppsala, 375–76, 411–12

See also ecumenical dialogue; Federal Council of Churches; Fellowship of Reconciliation; racism; revolution; World Student Christian Federation

Zahn, Gordon, 349–52

Zealots, 138, 139, 141, 312–13

Zwingli, Huldrych

acceptance of oaths, 181

discipleship, 173

gradual reformation, 172

not politically conservative, 195

Reformation in Zurich, 165–69, 174–75, 185

theocracy, 116–17

Notes

Editor’s Preface

[1]. Yoder was deeply engaged in debates around Christians, war, and peace for his entire adult life. Already in the 1950s he was a key figure in ecumenical conversations on war and peace in Europe, and he taught the course out of which this book grows almost annually from 1966 through the fall semester of 1997.

[2]. See Yoder’s introduction to this book. Elsewhere he claims that it is the historian’s responsibility to exercise an “axiomatic nonviolence . . . toward the defenseless dignity of the story back then” (John Howard Yoder, “The Burden and the Discipline of Evangelical Revisionism,” in Nonviolent America: History through the Eyes of Peace, ed. Louise Hawkley and James Juhnke [North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 1993], 28).

[3]. See John Howard Yoder, “‘But Do We See Jesus’: The Particularity of Incarnation and the Universality of Truth,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 46–62.

[4]. The theologian or ethicist engaged in a critical and a constructive task must find ways of making sense of the almost infinite variety of historical data. In this task Yoder found it useful to identify types of positions. He scoured Christian history and sought to identify these types: typical, recurring patterns that have a common logic or shape. Such classification is useful for understanding and for teaching. At the same time, Yoder was wary of rigid boxes that distort or reduce the complexity and variety in a particular historical movement and minimize significant differences between movements given the same label or assigned to the same type. His book Nevertheless (see the general bibliography for more information) is a typology of the type known as pacifism; in it Yoder suggests there are at least twenty-nine types of pacifism. He was sensitive to the fact that typologies can be used to unfairly simplify certain types, strengthening one’s preferred view by misrepresenting—or even doing violence to—others’ views. See his critique of H. Richard Niehbur’s Christ and Culture typology: “How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture,” in Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 31–89.

[5]. Yoder’s Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2002) had the same origin.

[6]. See the syllabus in the John Howard Yoder Collection, Hist. Mss. 1–48, Box 188, Mennonite Church USA Archives, Goshen, IN, MCA-G.

[7]. In later years, for example, Yoder included more work on Catholic peace initiatives for his students at Notre Dame.

[8]. John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution: A Companion to Bainton (Elkhart, IN: Mennonite Co-op Bookstore, 1983). This volume is in the AMBS library (and a number of other academic libraries) for any scholars who want to go back behind the editing we have done in the present book. No library, to our knowledge, has copies of previous editions which we drew from to restore the text where material was left out of the 1983 volume.

[9]. John Howard Yoder Collection, Hist. Mss. 1–48, Box 188, Mennonite Church USA Archives, Goshen, IN, MCA-G.

[10]. Initially we planned to include some of the student questions and Yoder’s answers, in order to retain more of the original oral feel. In the end, however, it seemed best in some cases to include in new sections Yoder’s ideas that emerged in response to questions (but without stating the question). In other cases it worked best to include elsewhere in the text parts of answers; in those cases we either supplemented or replaced other text.

[11]. Readers wishing to locate other materials by Yoder should check Mark Nation, A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Writings of John Howard Yoder (Goshen, IN: Mennonite Historical Society, Goshen College, 1997); and Mark Nation, “Supplement to ‘A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Writings of John Howard Yoder,’” in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, ed. Stanley Hauerwas (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 472–91.

Author’s Preface

[1]. See the general bibliography.

[2]. Where Bainton’s work gives a topic less attention (for example, nineteenth-century restoration movements or early Pentecostals), I present the subject as if providing the student’s principal access to it. Where Bainton’s treatment is more complete, and the historical background is more widely known, this text is skimpy. Seldom do I debate with the way Bainton interpreted his material.

[3]. Millard Lind, Yahweh Is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1980).

[4]. Jean-Michel Hornus, It Is Not Lawful for Me to Fight: Early Christian Attitudes Toward War, Violence, and the State, trans. Alan Kreider and Oliver Coburn (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1980).

Chapter 2

[1]. This chapter is based on notes first used in discussion on January 20, 1978, at an informal session of the interest group dealing with war, peace, and revolution, at the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Ethics, Chevy Chase, MD. [A later presentation further refining typologies on war is John H. Yoder, “How Many Ways Are There to Think Morally about War?” The Journal of Law and Religion 11, no. 1 (1994): 83–107.—Ed.]

[2]. The sequence in which these alternatives are described is not intended to have any logical meaning.

[3]. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

[4]. [In this book Yoder frequently speaks of justifiable war but sometimes of just war, perhaps out of habit or in deference to traditional terminology. In either case he typically means “justifiable.” See the discussion in chapter 5.—Ed.]

[5]. James Johnson has been especially insistent in warning against the prevalent popular notion that the existence of the just war tradition means the blank check, that war is all right. What Johnson calls the “original just war question,” underlying all the others, is that advocacy of war always has the burden of proof. Whenever that insistence is lost, the drift toward the blank check has begun. [See James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).—Ed.]

[6]. Of course, one can never entirely avoid long-range effectiveness calculation. Because the blood of martyrs has been the seed of the church, both violent and nonviolent martyrdom can claim longer-range effectiveness. But that is not what is being debated when the advocate of guerrilla violence is arguing against the Gandhian, or the holy warrior against the just warrior.

[7]. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

[8]. LeRoy Walters, followed by James T. Johnson, has noted (as a critique of Roland Bainton) that moral thinkers in the Middle Ages did not consciously make the distinctions noted above.

[9]. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages.

Chapter 3

[1]. James Johnson, Just War Tradition and Restraint (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3–47, is typical of this effort to downgrade the significance of pacifism for the early Christians. Because Tertullian saw soldiering as idolatrous and associated it with other idolatrous activities, such as goldsmithing, Johnson concludes that “the evil of violence was not here an issue.” The text by John Helgeland (see the study guide for this chapter) is similar.

[2]. In the last two generations, scholars have used this history in two different ways. If the early church is to be appealed to as a norm, and if the early church was pacifist for the sake of pacifism—that is, if the Christians refused military service because military service is wrong—then of course that stance provides guidance for us. Some historians then made a counterargument: “Yes, the early Christians did refuse military service, but they did so because of the idolatry, or the circuses, or the persecution. If (as in later Christian nations) there had been military service without idolatry or circuses or persecution or oaths, they wouldn’t have been against such service. Therefore we can be faithful to the guidance of the early church without being pacifist.” The latter (traditional) argument, found in the older literature, is taken less seriously today. Although this argument can still be made, no one who has worked carefully through the work of Cecil John Cadoux—to say nothing of Jean-Michel Hornus—argues it at length. See the study guide for this chapter for these sources.

[3]. One might wonder whether they would have viewed David’s kingship as an alternative. But neither the Messianic Jews (later called Christians) nor the other Jews then were as affirmative about David as a model as later Christians have sometimes thought. After all, the Davidic kingdom was a flop. It broke down in two different ways. It broke into two kingdoms, each of which failed morally in a different way. By the time of Jeremiah, God said, “I don’t want to try that again.” By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jewish people were reconstituted without political sovereignty. The Maccabees tried something else, but that failed too. Jewish minorities attempted it again in the late sixties CE, but that led to the destruction of Jerusalem. They tried it again in the 130s, and that again led to the destruction of Jerusalem. So the David model was there, but at that time it meant a Jewish independence movement around Jerusalem, and most Jews at the time did not support that movement. No Jews supported it after it had failed. So the notion that we must have another David at Jerusalem is not helpful in throwing light on what the early Christians would have thought.

An alternative to a Jerusalem-based independence movement would be a future worldwide Davidic kingdom. That is certainly one way of stating a polarity with Caesar, but it is hardly a way to describe what a good Caesar would be like. Thus the memory of David did not work well as reinforcement for the willingness to let Caesar’s kingdom exist. It would work when Constantine came along. Then Christians reached back to good King Josiah who cleaned things up, and to good King David who won wars in God’s name, and to King Joshua who smashed the Amalekites in God’s name.

[4]. [Christians divided into three competing communions after the Decian persecution, following (1) Novatian, representing a rigorist position, in which those who had bought certificates without sacrificing or those who actually sacrificed were excommunicated with no hope of reconciliation; (2) Pope Cornelius and Cyprian of Carthage, who allowed the lapsed to reconcile with the church on their deathbed after a life of penance; and (3) a laxist position, which allowed those who refused to do any sort of penance to partake in the Eucharist.—Ed.]

[5]. [See Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 6.20, as quoted in Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude to War, 159–60; also in Marrin, War and the Christian Conscience, 39–40; and Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 73; with slight variations.—Ed.]

[6]. These questions arose out of classroom discussion in 1978–79.

[7]. Rachel King has argued this kind of position. See God’s Boycott of Sin: A Consideration of Hell and Pacifism (New York: Fellowship Publications, 1946). It is also compatible with the notion of hell or punishment that C. S. Lewis unfolded poetically in The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946).

Chapter 4

[1]. Luke 14:23.

[2]. Even today, in some churches, to be a bishop a person must have the approval of the government. The highest Protestant form of this vision is Erastianism. Erastus was a German but was read and quoted in Britain in the seventeenth century as an advocate of a Protestant form of Constantinianism.

[3]. See this chapter’s study guide readings from Zampaglioni, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, and the section on “The Ideals of Peace in Antiquity” in Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace.

[4]. See Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 95–97.

[5]. [Yoder refers here to Markus Barth, “Speaking of Sin: Some Interpretative Notes on Romans 1:18–3:20,” Scottish Journal of Theology 8 (1955): 288–96. We were unable to locate references to this topic in Bauman’s writings.—Ed.]

[6]. There were often several Roman emperors, until one would defeat the others. One contemporary expression of this way of thinking is our culture’s fundamental tool for moral instruction: the police show and the western, in which the good guys always win. Sometimes it takes half an hour, sometimes an hour or even two. We know they will win. In some of the more refined “mature” westerns and spy shows, the only way we can identify the good guys is that they win, because both sides use the same ethics. In classical westerns and spy shows, the good guys never shoot first, and they live clean lives. In modern westerns and spy shows, the heroes do not live clean lives and they might get hurt, but we know they are the good guys because they win before the last commercial.

Chapter 5

[1]. [While Yoder regularly moves between speaking of justifiable (or just) war as a “tradition” and as a “theory,” he clearly sees it most fundamentally as a tradition—a historically evolving school of thought—not as a strictly logical, coherent, testable and tested theory.—Ed.]

[2]. My treatment of this concern appears in Yoder, Nevertheless, 13–17. See the general bibliography.

[3]. Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 109–11.

[4]. Later on this separateness was weakened. Exceptions were made in the special case of the military monastic orders, such as the Knights Templar. But for this period that hadn’t happened yet.

[5]. [See Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966).—Ed.]

Chapter 6

[1]. The title “due process” does not appear in the standard documents, yet it permits a helpful clarification. The items grouped under this heading appear on all the standard lists as qualifying phrases, whether under cause, intention, authority, or means. Because of their distinctively procedural quality, it is fitting to group them separately here.

Chapter 7

[1]. Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 108.

[2]. According to Augustine, we must always be sorry that we have to go to war; we must be “mournful” (see Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 98).

[3]. John A. Ryan and Francis J. Boland, Catholic Principles of Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 251.

[4]. Ibid., 158.

[5]. [A 1979 edition of the text included this material on jus in bello, which was apparently inadvertently left out of the 1983 transcription of Yoder’s lectures.—Ed.]

[6]. See especially chapter 20, “The Ethics of War,” in Ryan and Boland, Catholic Principles of Politics.

Chapter 8

[1]. [The first several sections of this chapter, down to the heading “Machiavelli and the just war” (p. 114), were apparently inadvertently omitted from the 1983 text. The text here is edited from the 1979 class handout.—Eds.]

[2]. See fig. 2.1, in chapter 2 of this book.

[3]. See Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 55–60. Holmes does not provide enough annotations for us to make sense of this incident. In Holmes’s introduction to Ambrose’s letter, Holmes claims that Ambrose has recognized “the necessity of war for the sake of a secure peace but he unhesitatingly denounces the needless bloodshed of the siege of Thessalonica” (55). Holmes does not annotate clearly enough that we know from this text what that bloodshed was and why Ambrose denounced it.

[4]. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 112.

[5]. See LeRoy Walters, Five Classic Just War Theories (listed in the study guide for this chapter).

[6]. See chapter 6 of this book.

[7]. See Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 118–36, 195–225.

[8]. [This phrase comes from the fourth stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”—Ed.]

[9]. The spatial image realm is not exact, but for our purposes it will have to do.

[10]. In England, things proceeded in another way, but the effect was the same. England, of course, had its reformation because of a national withdrawal from the Roman Catholic community. The king functions as archbishop or as theologian. Henry VIII in fact wrote (or at least signed) theological treatises.

[11]. Although the Crusades against the people who held Palestine were religiously motivated and in that sense fit the pattern of holy war, they were not wars of religion like the wars of seventeenth-century Europe. The Crusades in Palestine were not wars in which people with one theology fought people with another theology—about theology. The crusaders were fighting about the Holy Land. They were fighting for the pilgrims’ rights of access to holy places. Though the two parties were religiously different, that difference was not really what they were fighting about. They were fighting about turf and property and travel routes. In the seventeenth century, however, Europeans actually fought about whether to have a Roman Catholic priest or a Lutheran preacher in this parish. Religion itself—doctrine and ritual—was what people fought about; it was not simply that there were two different religions behind the battle and that the battles were religiously motivated.

[12]. That notion often falls apart in other ways for parties who are still further away from each other in terms of cultural and religious background.

[13]. John H. Leith, ed. Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, 3rd ed. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 72–73.

[14]. Ibid., 280.

[15]. Ibid., 220.

[16]. Around 1960, there were two notable pacifists in the Church of Scotland: Garth MacGregor, author of The New Testament Basis of Pacifism, and George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community. At the height of the early awareness of the challenge of nuclear armament, they went through normal synod process in the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, proposing that the use of atomic weapons be declared unjust. They could not get anyone to be serious about the creed.

The very notion of creeds is tired in our time. I mention this episode as evidence of the fact that people can hold to just war doctrine without sensing an obligation to define it. The people who defended having the just war phrase in the creed also defended British participation in NATO and collaboration with the United States in producing and deploying atomic weapons. They claimed that these actions are covered by the statement on just wars in the Reformed confession. But they would not admit any obligation to spell it out, to make it work.

One Reformed group brought just war perspectives to bear on nuclear weapons in a critical way in the early 1950s. Although doing so did not stop the Dutch government, the Netherlands Reformed church said nuclear weapons are not morally permissible.

[17]. See Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 117.

[18]. Catholics were also discussing righteous revolution against the Protestant regime in England.

[19]. See Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 140–64.

[20]. [U.S. law still required that any draftee who seeks to be legally exempt from fighting must espouse pacifism, despite this shift in understanding the moral implications of just war thought.—Ed.]

[21]. See fig. 2.1.

Chapter 9

[1]. See the readings from Bainton, Holmes, Marrin, and Cowdry listed in the study guide for this chapter.

[2]. Quoted in John C. Olin, The Catholic Reformation (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 137.

[3]. Geoffrey Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History, refers to these points as he describes the Waldensians and Czech Brethren, but they also apply to those expressions of medieval pacifism that were not in tension with the established church.

[4]. [A similar but in some ways more developed discussion of law can be found in chapter 11, in the section on the heart of the Unity of Brethren. See also Nuttall, “The Law of Christ,” in Christian Pacifism in History, 15–31.—Ed.]

[5]. The name derives from Simon the magician, who according to Acts 8:18–24 attempted to buy from Peter and John the ability to bestow the Holy Spirit on anyone by laying his hands on them.

Chapter 10

[1]. Dispensational Protestantism is especially literal and simple about the kind of kingship they think Jesus came to offer, which they think the Jews rejected.

[2]. These “minor precepts” are found in Matthew 5, in which Jesus is quoted as saying six times, “But I say to you . . .”

[3]. For a fuller exposition, see Yoder, The Original Revolution, and Yoder, The Politics of Jesus.

[4]. Jochanan ben Zakkai was the head of the rabbinic school movement and in one sense the founder of rabbinic Judaism.

[5]. [See John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); edited by Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs. This is a posthumously published collection of Yoder’s essays on Judaism and Christianity.—Ed.]

[6]. There was once a fluke around the edge. A south Russian kingdom, the Kazakhs, became Jewish, apparently by some kind of collective national conversion, but not in a way that changed the character of mainstream Judaism.

[7]. I do not mean by this brief characterization to suggest that we are able in this context to spell out in detail the ethic itself—how Jews were nonviolent.

[8]. In beginning this discussion, we should remember that Christians in the early centuries, like Jews, were not narrowly or dominantly committed to the love of the enemy as the only explanation of their peace position. For them too elements of church/world duality, the abhorrence of idolatry, having no power, etc., contributed to their self-understanding.

[9]. [In the material distributed for this class session (also in the 1983 version), Yoder included a substantial group of pertinent excerpts from original Jewish sources. A brief description of Islamic understandings of war was also included.—Ed.]

Chapter 11

[1]. See the section of chapter 4 on merging pagan philosophy with biblical wisdom.

[2]. Peter Brock, The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren, 43–44.

[3]. Ibid., 44.

[4]. [See Nuttall, “The Law of Christ,” in Christian Pacifism in History, 15–31. Compare the section of chapter 9 of the present volume on the theological basis of medieval pacifism.—Ed.]

[5]. “This was a familiar theme among the medieval sectaries and, linked up with the legend of Constantine’s Donation which allegedly gave the Pope temporal power in Italy, it provides an oft-repeated motif running through all Chelčický’s writings” (Brock, 45). The legend of the “Donation,” which the critics of Constantine also believed, was that Pope Sylvester and Constantine had actually exchanged documents, so that the authority of each was affirmed by the other.

[6]. Brock, quoting Chelčický (ibid., 45–46).

[7]. Ibid., 46.

[8]. Ibid.

[9]. Ibid., 52.

[10]. Ibid., 53.

[11]. Ibid., 54. The rejection of oaths is also parallel in its simplicity, in its basis in the Sermon on the Mount.

[12]. Ibid., 56.

[13]. Ibid., 56–58.

[14]. Ibid., 59.

[15]. Ibid., 47–48. Here is a clearly thought-through Anabaptist-type understanding of the relationship between church and state (but it is an anachronism to say it that way).

[16]. Ibid., 62.

[17]. Ibid.

[18]. Ibid., 63.

Chapter 12

[1]. See Franklin Hamlin Littell, The Free Church (Boston: Starr King Press, 1957).

[2]. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 144–45; and Donald F. Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

[3]. One theory, of underground genetic continuity, attempts to trace the faithful church through the centuries. This became the official theory of many of these groups. In the Martyrs Mirror, Dutch Mennonite historian Thieleman van Braght developed an in-depth notion of underground continuity (The Bloody Theater, or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Saviour, from the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660, trans. Joseph F. Sohm [Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1951]). He organized his book by centuries. In each century he found some trace of Christians who refused to worship idols, bear swords, or baptize babies, and they were persecuted for it. The first third of the Martyrs Mirror is not about the Anabaptists. It shows that a faithful underground church always existed during the first fourteen centuries CE. Van Braght does not claim to prove that this faithful church had institutional continuity, but he does give the impression that there was continuity in passing the word on from one to another. The twentieth-century Plymouth Brethren historian E. H. Broadbent (The Pilgrim Church: Being Some Account of the Continuance through Succeeding Centuries of Churches Practising the Principles Taught and Exemplified in the New Testament [London: Pickering & Inglis, 1931]) does claim to prove that point (or more accurately, he asserts that it could be proven if we had adequate documentation; he claims to find traces of connection here and there). He points to intervisitation and communication: people traveled from Bulgaria to southern France and from there to Austria and to Flanders in such a way that this movement had its own underground apostolic succession. That view is still taught today by one branch of the Southern Baptist movement, where it has the label landmarkism.

[4]. [Yoder’s original text quoted from Conrad Grebel’s Programmatic Letters of 1524, trans. J. C. Wenger (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1970), but corrected Wenger’s translation at several points. We have used a newer translation, which conforms to Yoder’s at key points, from The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985).—Ed.]

[5]. Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism, 289.

[6]. Ibid., 289–90.

[7]. Ibid., 290.

[8]. [Yoder inserted his own commentary into the following extracts. We have included his brief interpolations as footnotes.—Ed.]

[9]. The Swiss Brethren thought Müntzer agreed with them at this point, but they were misinformed.

[10]. [Yoder’s interpolation.—Ed.]

[11]. Grebel and company renounced not only war but also self-defense.

[12]. Ibid.

[13]. These three incongruous elements had in common that they were not according to the gospel; Grebel is saying essentially, “If you advocate these three nonscriptural things . . .”

[14]. Ibid., 293.

[15]. Ibid.

[16]. John Howard Yoder, The Legacy of Michael Sattler, Classics of the Radical Reformation, vol. 1 (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1973), 35 (italics added).

[17]. Ibid.

[18]. Ibid.

[19]. Ibid., 38.

[20]. Ibid., 39.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. Ibid., 39–40.

[23]. Although the woman taken in adultery was not in that sense an insurrectionist, it’s the sample we find in the text.

[24]. Ibid., 40.

[25]. If the reference is to any particular New Testament text, it would be Philippians 2: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

[26]. Ibid., 41–42.

[27]. For our time, we might well ask about the meanings of our substitutes for the oath. Is a substitute formula—in which you cross out “I swear” and write in “I affirm” but still make the same promise—what Jesus meant or what the Anabaptists meant?

[28]. If we wanted to be still more careful, we could distinguish between the broader movement of people who actually did baptize (and for whom the label Anabaptist was therefore technically fitting), and the still broader group of people who were called Anabaptists by their critics in the Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed churches, or in later church history down almost to the present. An example of the latter is Thomas Müntzer. He had doubts about infant baptism and thought that baptism should probably be administered at about three or four years of age, so that those baptized would remember that it had been done to them. But Müntzer never actually baptized anybody but infants and therefore was not in a literal sense an Anabaptist. Yet until recently, mainstream historians have usually dealt with him as an Anabaptist. The city of Münster, on the other hand, while disavowing many elements of the theology that we have discovered in the Zurich origins, did actually baptize adults and thus technically does need to be called Anabaptist. But on many other subjects its theology was closer to Zwingli than to Conrad Grebel’s letter and to Schleitheim.

[29]. Stauffer was a New Testament scholar of German Mennonite origin. In the 1930s and 1940s he was attracted to Mennonite hymnology, especially the Ausbund, because in its theology of martyrdom he found something that he had also found in the New Testament.

[30]. From Ethelbert Stauffer, “The Anabaptist Theology of Martyrdom,” 182. [Throughout this section on the theology of martyrdom, Yoder picks out specific points and summarizes Stauffer’s article.—Ed.]

[31]. From Die Lieder der hutterischen Brüder (Scottdale, PA: Hutterische Brüder in Amerika, 1914); quoted in Stauffer, “Anabaptist Theology of Martyrdom,” 185.

[32]. Quoted in Stauffer, “Anabaptist Theology of Martyrdom,” 188.

[33]. Stauffer, “Anabaptist Theology of Martyrdom,” 192; citing Der Lieder der hutterischen Brüder and the Ausbund.

[34]. See Stauffer, “Anabaptist Theology of Martyrdom,” 197.

[35]. Ibid., 203.

[36]. I address this subject at greater length in my article “Anabaptists and the Sword Revisited”; see the study guide for this chapter.

Chapter 13

[1]. [This chapter in Yoder’s lectures appeared between the two chapters on the Quaker experience. He wrote, “I put it into our outline here because one of its high points was the European Enlightenment epoch, which was roughly comparable in time with the Quaker experience, and because it has been largely a European experience.” The editors of this volume have elected to keep the Quaker chapters together, and to place this chapter in the chronology at the beginning of the movement, at (roughly) the time of the Reformation.—Ed.]

[2]. See Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 173–89.

[3]. Bainton refers to Dante’s Catholic and humanist ideal, in which the vision of the universe at peace is such that the nation itself is wrong. See Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 121.

[4]. Quoted from Holmes, War and Christian Ethics, 177–78.

[5]. This is an axe that Roland Bainton grinds, though not very aggressively or visibly. Every once in a while he drops a comment on this subject: the concern to structure the peace is one more cause of war. See, for example, Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 111–16.

[6]. Ibid., 180, 183.

Chapter 14

[1]. Thus far the title; from here on, spelling has been modernized.

[2]. George Fox, To the called of God who believes in the light of the Lambe to be read in their assemblyes in the pure dread of the Lord (London: Printed for Thomas Simmons, 1660). Reproduction in Early English books, 1641–1700 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1981), reel 1188, item 34. [The author of this letter is George Fox the Younger, who had been a soldier and died in 1661. He was not the founder of the Quaker movement.—Ed.]

[3]. Some debate the fine points of that statement, but it reflects the dominant opinion among historians at present.

[4]. [Followers of Robert Browne, the Brownists were early advocates of a congregational form of organization for the Church of England, in the time of Henry VIII.—Ed.]

[5]. The Czech reformation had the same qualities. Petr Chelčický had begun by rejecting the turn of the Taborites to violence.

[6]. Francis Howgill, The Dawnings of the Gospel-Day and Its Light . . . (n.p., 1676), 43–44. Quoted in Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 98; see the study guide for this chapter.

[7]. Some modern Friends have the idea that silence itself is the essence of worship; in this they may have rediscovered medieval contemplation or been influenced by Buddhist or Muslim mystics. A silent meeting is not totally unmanageable in terms of Quaker origins, but it does not have the character of early Friends meetings.

[8]. Journal entry for 5 January 1654. Quoted in Mayer, The Pacifist Conscience, 90–91. [Mayer notes that Fox had been arrested amid rumors that some people were plotting to kill Cromwell. He was released when he had affirmed in this letter that he had no violent intentions toward anyone, including Cromwell.—Ed.]

[9]. Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 429.

[10]. Quoted in Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 205–6.

[11]. Quoted in ibid., 206.

[12]. Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History, uses the phrase “the dignity of man.” If we are not going to use with our neighbors any power but the power of the light, we are indeed affirming their dignity. But that affirmation of human dignity is not what modern humanism affirms in valuing the dignity of personhood. The Quaker stance affirms first of all the power of the Light: because we can trust the power of the light, therefore we will use no power on our neighbors other than the truth.

[13]. Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 40–41. Barbour quotes James Nayler.

[14]. Swarthmoor Hall, near Ulverston, England, was a center of Quaker activity, correspondence, and support for itinerant missionaries.

[15]. Quoted in Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 207.

[16]. Quoted in Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 194–95.

[17]. See especially the work of Hugh Barbour.

[18]. Robert W. Tucker, “Revolutionary Faithfulness,” 204; see the study guide for this chapter.

Chapter 15

[1]. [This chapter is based on a classroom lecture Yoder gave on March 5, 1974. It is available in CD format in the library at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana. We elected to use the 1974 lecture rather than the longer and less focused treatment of the Quakers in early America from the 1983 transcription of Yoder’s “Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution” lectures (which form the basis of the other chapters in the present volume). At points we did incorporate a few materials from the 1983 volume, to supplement the 1974 lecture.—Ed.]

[2]. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 172.

[3]. In this chapter I am focusing on the criticisms of the Pennsylvania Quakers made by more separatist pacifists. Another set of criticisms comes from antipacifists, who argue that those who attempt to run a society without using violence are too optimistic about human nature, and that war is therefore necessary and right. Those who take this position are not nearly as clear as they sound. To trust human nature to show restraint in running a war is more optimistic than to trust human nature to run a peace. Those who think that people will behave decently with bombs in their hands have a much higher view of human nature than do those who think that people can solve some social problems if they have no bombs. The real issue is not that one view is more optimistic about human nature than the other. The real issue is whether a person is willing to declare certain categories of people as enemies, as being outside the human covenant. Militarism trusts human nature enormously. It believes people can train to destroy one another and then be trusted not to do it all the time. It trusts them to engage in such violence modestly, with restraint, and to stop when they are done; to respect noncombatants; to avoid pride; and to turn the government back to civilians when the fighting is over. Neither philosophically nor historically is that trust well founded; militarism is liberal humanism. It is more optimistic than pacifism is about human nature.

[4]. Guy F. Hershberger, War, Peace, and Nonresistance, rev. ed. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1969), 178.

[5]. Brock, Pacifism in the United States, 81. [See this volume and Brock’s The Quaker Peace Testimony, 1660–1914 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), for the history that Yoder does not recount here.—Ed.]

[6]. Likewise, the sixteenth-century radicals were not logically committed to saying no to everything that somebody else said yes to, and they did not mean to deny that history moves. They were committed to the normativeness of Jesus for their life. When they talked about the restoration of true Christianity, they meant restoring the relevance of Jesus as norm. They did not mean that they could return to the second century and make the church and the world as they had been. These radicals did not claim to reverse or undo history. They affirmed—based on Old Testament passages—that God uses history despite our errors. So when the radical reformation perspective has preferences among possible governments, favoring those that provide greater liberty for everybody—including the pacifist Christian minority—this stance denies neither our biblicism nor our pacifism. We can have opinions about the wider society without in any sense selling out on our ethical radicality. Although the received typology holds that sixteenth-century Anabaptists were apolitical, that opinion is again the product of our typology and not of the story. [This footnote and the next one are excerpted from the 1983 transcription and reflect Yoder’s refusal to draw a sharp line between Quakers and Anabaptists, even though—as in the main text here—he recognizes significant differences in emphasis. His discontent with a socially disengaged interpretation of Anabaptism and with schemes that limit Christian political options to withdrawal (and irrelevance) or relevance (but sinfulness) is reflected in his essay “Anabaptists and the Sword Revisited: Systematic Historiography and Undogmatic Nonresistants,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 85, no. 2 (1974): 126–39.—Ed.]

[7]. Part of Mennonite and Quaker concern is to be nonviolent in talking with people who claim to be Christian, even if we think they are not acting in ways we see as consistent with that claim. If we doubt that the behavior of people in government conforms to Christ’s model, that doubt does not free us from dealing with these people on the basis of their claim to be fellow Christians. In a good part of the world, sovereigns claim to be fellow Christians. To tell them they are not Christians is not just impolite; it also does not properly deal with the present shape of our neighbors’ faith claims, which interpreted national history and Western Christendom as a Christian position. Assuming that people in politics who identify themselves as Christian do so in good faith is only the other side of what the Friends called “answering that of God in everyone.” Commitment to nonviolence means human respect for people exercising power and claiming to do so as human, even if they are not claiming to do so as Christian. We cannot simply disqualify their confessional claim and declare them pagan. And we need not believe the ethicists who tell us that we should deal with the present civil order as only pagan, as by definition incorrigibly violent in all its manifestations and therefore something which, if we are honest, we have to stay out of.

[8]. The gerrymandering may have been unintentional. Philadelphia was more important in state government than were the farm counties in the western region. The Quakers began to feel guilty about that—another element of their eventual willingness to let the majority take over.

[9]. One might also ask if the Quakers governing Pennsylvania by the 1750s themselves believed in nonviolence. The Quakers in government were fourth-generation Quakers. As happens in almost any voluntary religious community, and even more so in situations of cultural isolation and social power, convictions change. When in 1756 the Quakers did not have a vision for running a nonviolent campaign against the Indians on the western border, this was partly because they were no longer the children of Penn and Fox. They no longer believed the same things. Whether they tried to remain pacifist is not a fair test of whether the original Quakerism could have done it.

Chapter 16

[1]. In 1813, Dodge published War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1905).

[2]. See Adin Ballou’s 1846 book, Christian Non-Resistance, in All Its Important Bearings, Illustrated and Defended (repr., New York: Garland, 1972). Leo Tolstoy read some of Ballou’s works and gave a sense of international identity to the whole movement.

[3]. Emerson and Thoreau are landmarks in U.S. culture and literature. Yet much more attention should be given to John Greenleaf Whittier. He was a Quaker and an Emersonian. His stature in peace witness would be much greater if we did not assume that writers of hymns are not theologically significant, and if Richard Nixon’s hometown and college had not been named for him.

[4]. Alexander Campbell was the founder and editor of a journal called The Millennial Harbinger—the messenger of the news that the millennium is coming.

[5]. The best introduction to an understanding of the holiness movement’s ethical radicality is in the works of Timothy L. Smith and Donald W. Dayton. See, for example, Timothy Lawrence Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957); and Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

[6]. [“From the very beginning the movement has been characterized by Quaker principles. The laws of the Kingdom, laid down by our elder brother, Jesus Christ in His Sermon on the Mount, have been unqualifiedly adopted, consequently the movement has found itself opposed to the spilling of the blood of any man, or of offering resistance to any aggression. Every branch of the movement, whether in the United States, Canada, Great Britain or Germany, has held to this principle” (“The Pentecostal Movement and the Conscription Law,” The Weekly Evangel, 4 August 1917, 6; quoted in Paul Alexander, “Historical and Theological Origins of Assemblies of God Pacifism,” Quaker Theology, no. 12 [Fall–Winter 2005–2006; http://www.quaker.org/quest/issue-12-alexander-1.htm]).—Ed.]. When the Brethren came to Pennsylvania, they were a one-generation-old revival movement. If they had not landed next to the Mennonites in Quaker country, they might not have emerged as a peace church either. The same is true of the Brethren in Christ.

[7]. [Yoder refers here especially to William Robert Miller, Nonviolence: A Christian Interpretation (New York: Association Press, 1964), and to many Mennonites writing between 1935 and 1955. Yoder discusses the latter writings in chapter 19, “Mennonites after Niebuhr.”—Ed.]

[8]. Tolstoy learned from French Enlightenment and revolutionary thought and responded creatively to philosophical nihilism, and soon to Marxism; Campbell appropriated the philosophies of Locke and Scottish common sense.

[9]. [Yoder is addressing his Mennonite students, shaped by the legacy discussed in the chapter on Mennonites after Niebuhr.—Ed.]

Chapter 17

[1]. This chapter makes no claim to give a full account of liberal Protestant pacifism. The bibliography fills out the history more fully.

[2]. Weinberg, Instead of Violence, 410.

[3]. This peace in Europe was helped, of course, by the fact that during this age of empire building, leaders could use soldiers in other parts of the world to build their power base.

[4]. The year was 1849, according to Weinberg (Instead of Violence, 347–53); 1851, according to Mayer (Pacifist Conscience, 84–86); see the general bibliography. Both sources agree that it was held in Paris.

[5]. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays, The World’s Classics 449 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 445.

[6]. For a broad sense of the texture of international awareness during the period underlying the one we will be discussing, see Leon Friedman, ed., The Law of War: A Documentary History (New York: Random House, 1972); John H. Barton and Lawrence P. Weiler, “Modern Disarmament Efforts,” in International Arms Control (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

[7]. See Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 211–15.

[8]. “War” by Ralph Waldo Emerson; quoted in Mayer, Pacifist Conscience, 118.

[9]. Rauschenbusch also studied Anabaptist origins. He was the first person to dig out from the sources and translate into English the important letter that Conrad Grebel wrote to Thomas Müntzer in 1524. One other specimen of the spin-off of social concern from revivalism is British Methodism, which is widely seen as the major source of British socialism.

[10]. The revivalist rootage of most of the social concern of the period 1870–1910 was long neglected. For its rediscovery, see especially Timothy Lawrence Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957); David Moberg, The Great Reversal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972); and Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

[11]. [See Jan Morris, The Oxford Book of Oxford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 374.—Ed.]

[12]. See Vera Brittain, The Rebel Passion (listed in the study guide for this chapter).

[13]. [Yoder is apparently quoting the memorialization of the Methodist ministers of Chicago issued on April 28, 1924. Portions of the memorialization are quoted in a story on page 3 in The Christian Science Monitor of April 29, 1924. We were unable to verify the accuracy of the remainder of the quoted text.—Ed.]

[14]. One of the best statements of this idea was A. A. Milne’s Peace with Honour (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934), 138–41. Milne (best known for his Winnie-the-Pooh books) argued for international legislation to avoid war, proposing that when Winston Churchill got belligerent, they would come and take him away.

[15]. Some would have said, in effect, “We understand that there are reasons for what Hitler is doing. He probably is not as bad as our politicians and journalists make him out to be.” One leader of the British peace movement and labor movement was slightly crippled. In about 1937 he made a trip to Europe and was received by Hitler. When he came into the room limping, Hitler got up and came around his big desk and got the man a chair. “What a gentleman! Must not be as bad as people say!” That interpretation is not the standard, but it is possible for optimistic liberal pacifism to be unrealistic about or blind to the power of evil in concrete institutions and people.

Chapter 18

[1]. Macintosh was a pacifist. Canadian by birth, he made an issue of not taking a loyalty oath when becoming a naturalized citizen of the U.S. His case went to the Supreme Court and set a precedent that allowed people to be naturalized without taking an oath of loyalty.

[2]. See Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (New York: Willett, Clark & Colby, 1929).

[3]. The Fellowship of Socialist Christians was akin to the Christian socialist movement a decade or two earlier in Germany, Switzerland, and France.

[4]. To quote the colorful vocabulary of my Southern Methodist colleague, Stanley Hauerwas.

[5]. This view is most clearly articulated in Niebuhr’s An Interpretation of Christian Ethics.

[6]. [The primary sources to which Yoder refers are John R. Mumaw, Nonresistance and Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1952); and Don E. Smucker, “A Mennonite Critique of the Pacifist Movement,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 20 (January 1946): 81–88.—Ed.]

[7]. [See Franklin H. Littell, “The Inadequacy of Modern Pacifism,” Christianity and Society 18 (Spring 1946): 18–23.—Ed.]

[8]. [A fuller analysis and critique of Niebuhr in relation to pacifism is Yoder’s Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism, listed on the study guide for this chapter.—Ed.]

Chapter 19

[1]. Ernest W. Lefever, formerly of the Church of the Brethren, was one of the most prominent among those argued out of pacifism.

[2]. [The “Old” Mennonite Church was the largest Mennonite body in North America. Around the turn of the twentieth century, its history, theology, and culture were significantly different from that of some other Mennonite bodies, including the second-largest body, the General Conference Mennonite Church, which was seen as more liberal. However, the differences gradually narrowed after World War II, so that by 2002 the two North American groups merged and reorganized to create Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA.—Ed.]

[3]. [See Theron F. Schlabach, Peace, Faith, Nation: Mennonites and Amish in Nineteenth-Century America, The Mennonite Experience in America, vol. 2 (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1988), 118–27, 220–23, for more information on these splits.–Ed.]

[4]. For example, Mennonites were brought in from Switzerland to Montbéliard, then a German principality (now part of France).

[5]. Yoder, Nevertheless, 105–13.

[6]. See Guy F. Hershberger, War, Peace and Nonresistance, rev. ed. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1953), 188–95.

[7]. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).

[8]. Hershberger was a respected author, professor, and churchman. Because of his person and his position as long-time executive secretary of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee, his views had weight in the Mennonite Church.

[9]. Hershberger, War, Peace and Nonresistance, 273, 274, 275.

[10]. [In 1961 Vincent Harding, an African American Mennonite who had been pastor of Woodlawn Mennonite Church in Chicago, opened a Mennonite Central Committee Voluntary Service unit in Atlanta. He worked closely with King and passionately advocated that Mennonites join the struggle against injustice rather than being passive.—Ed.]

[11]. [Given as Bender’s presidential address to the American Society of Church History in 1943, “The Anabaptist Vision” was first published in Church History 13 (March 1944): 3–24, and soon thereafter in booklet form (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1944).—Ed.]

[12]. That debate in Mennonite missionary thinking has grown in recent years, with the publication of Robert Ramseyer, ed., Mission and the Peace Witness (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1979), which gives attention to it in the context of mission histories.

Chapter 20

[1]. I have itemized six subarguments in this realm in the introduction to The Politics of Jesus, 16–19.

[2]. There are other strands. One of the great mistakes both “evangelicals” and their critics make is to think that evangelicalism has only one definition.

[3]. I am not using the term realism in the way that Reinhold Niebuhr uses it. Dutch Reformed missionary theologian Hendrik Kraemer invented the term biblical realism. This realism simply says, “To the extent we can, we seek to understand the Bible in its own terms, to think the way the Bible thinks, to use its thought patterns rather than our modern thought patterns, to ask what questions the Bible is asking, so that we will hear the Bible’s answers as answers to the right questions, rather than taking our modern questions straight to the Bible.”

[4]. This is a typology, a schematic analysis. It therefore has its limits and its arbitrariness.

[5]. [See “The Original Revolution,” section 1 of part 1 of Yoder, The Original Revolution; and “The Kingdom Coming,” chapter 2 of Yoder, The Politics of Jesus.—Ed.]

[6]. It would be linguistically honest to say that Jesus was a nonviolent Zealot. But there were no other nonviolent Zealots, so apart from Jesus, it is an empty set. If the word Zealot is taken in the broad sense, as identifying someone who cares enough about God’s sovereignty to reject what God condemns, and is willing to die doing so, then Jesus and the so-called Zealots were two samples of that impulse, one nonviolent and the others violent. But since Jesus is the only nonviolent Zealot we know about, it makes more sense to have five types rather than four.

[7]. See “The Disciple of Christ and the Way of Jesus,” chapter 7 in Yoder, The Politics of Jesus.

[8]. What follows is not fully faithful to Kant’s sophistication, but it is the form in which we have appropriated it.

[9]. See “Christ the Hope of the World,” section 3 of part 2 of Yoder, The Original Revolution, about the many ways not caring about effectiveness is actually effective. To think “I’m going to be effective” is often an ineffective thing to do. It makes you lose patience. You cheat yourself by making short-range compromises.

Chapter 21

[1]. I have discussed these views in The Politics of Jesus, chapter 10, “Let Every Soul Be Subject: Romans 13 and the Authority of the State.”

[2]. There are different forms of tassesthai. It is sometimes hypotassesthai (“be ordered under”) and sometimes simply tassesthai, tetagmenai (“ordered”).

Chapter 22

[1]. [According to Oldham, “Christianity has no meaning unless for every man there is a point where he says: ‘Here I stand before an absolute: this is unconditionally forbidden’” (Christian News-Letter 48 [25 September 1940]); quoted in Yoder, Nevertheless, 136, n. 14.—Ed.]

[2]. Ford, “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing” (see the study guide for this chapter).

[3]. Ryan’s dissertation was published as Modern War and Basic Ethics (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub. Co., 1940).

[4]. On the British scene, in contrast, the matter was hotly debated in the press, with Vera Brittain notably against and George Orwell for unrestrained city bombing. It was debated as well in Parliament, with Bishop George Bell of Chichester against and Archbishop William Temple for.

[5]. Before long, Hiroshima was seen to represent something even worse. President Truman had announced that the bomb was directed against a military target. Then it became clear that the bomb had struck an entire residential and commercial city. We discovered that the scientists who had produced the bomb had been much divided about whether that use was legitimate. (The scientists’ movement of education and protest is still represented by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.) Before long it was reported that even the claim that the bomb shortened the war was untrue, that the Japanese had already begun to sue for peace and that this last great destruction was to some extent a gratuitous evil.

[6]. See the rewritten report: Thomas Murray Taylor and Robert S. Bilheimer, Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age (London: SCM Press, 1961).

[7]. The Reformed Church of the Netherlands, in a 1962 statement, was the only particular church body taking this kind of position. It meant in principle a moral rejection of the Netherlands’ involvement in NATO. But nothing serious happened to implement this negation—a reminder that just war theory makes no provision for its implementation when people applying it have judged that a certain weapon or strategy is not morally admissible.

[8]. See the study guide for this chapter for information about Ramsey’s books The Just War and War and the Christian Conscience.

[9]. The best earlier parallels are the anticolonial arguments of Christians in Britain, the Netherlands, and France in the period after World War II. Only in the case of French decolonization, and for the French much more clearly in Algeria than in Vietnam, did this firm negative critique apply to an actual war.

[10]. United States v. Seeger 30 U.S. 163 (1965).

[11]. [A 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision—Gillette v. United States, 401 U.S. 437 (1971)—broadened eligibility for conscientious objector status to those who are pacifists on grounds other than religious belief, but the decision refused eligibility to those who conscientiously object to specific wars. According to the Selective Service System, “Beliefs which qualify a registrant for conscientious objector status may be religious in nature, but don’t have to be. Beliefs may be moral or ethical; however, a man’s reasons for not wanting to participate in a war must not be based on politics, expediency, or self-interest. In general, the man’s lifestyle prior to making his claim must reflect his current claims.”—Ed.]

[12]. Yet some who worked with the Catholic Worker in the 1930s and 1940s because they were drawn to the movement’s identification with the poor and its unconditional commitment to service later got serious and became “relevant” again—editing Commonweal or running for Congress. For these, staying pacifist was seen as a mark of theological immaturity. Pacifism as a theologically acceptable stance came only after they wrestled with the Vietnam phenomenon.

[13]. James Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and Peace, 155–81.

[14]. Ibid., 159.

[15]. Ramsey, The Just War, 273.

[16]. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross, 160.

[17]. Ibid.

[18]. Ibid., 169.

[19]. See ibid., 173–74.

[20]. Ramsey, The Just War, 259–78.

[21]. Gordon Zahn, “War and Its Conventions,” Worldview 16, no. 7 (July 1973): 46–49.

[22]. Ibid., 46.

[23]. Johnson’s book is Just War Tradition and Restraint (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). His response to Zahn is “Rationalizing the Hell of War,” Worldview 17, no. 1 (January 1974): 43–45.

[24]. Ibid., 45.

[25]. Ibid.

[26]. Ibid.

Chapter 23

[1]. The best survey is William Robert Miller’s Nonviolence: A Christian Interpretation. See the general bibliography.

[2]. See Miller, Nonviolence.

[3]. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross, 13, 18.

[4]. Ibid., 17.

[5]. See “Christ and Power,” chapter 8 in Yoder, The Politics of Jesus.

[6]. Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace, 375, 382.

[7]. The mature expression of this position is found in King-Hall, Defense in the Nuclear Age. See the study guide for this chapter for information about this source and for readings by Gene Sharp and George Lakey.

[8]. It became economically ineffective to have slaves. It was becoming inefficient to try to manage slaves. Therefore slaveholding wore itself out. It also surfaced again in another form in Reconstruction. The record is ambivalent. Slavery might have gone out of style without the war. Injustice remained in new forms despite abolition.

[9]. The original wager proposed by philosopher Blaise Pascal held that in case God exists, we had better believe in him.

Chapter 24

[1]. [Yoder also suggests, without elaboration, that the following contemporaneous movements and people provide helpful comparisons and contrasts: Black Power, Camilo Torres, Hélder Câmara, and the New Left in the U.S.—Ed.]

[2]. Madathilparampil M. Thomas and J. Davis McCaughey, The Christian in the World Struggle (Geneva, Switzerland: WSCF, 1952).

[3]. The DWME stood on some things Bonhoeffer had said a generation earlier. In the same key were Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1966); and Johannes Christiaan Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966).

[4]. See Donald Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace, for such a study.

[5]. In Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman, New Theology, No. 6 (listed in the study guide for this chapter), see Bishops of the Third World, “Gospel and Revolution,” 243–54; and Jan M. Lochman, “Ecumenical Theology of Revolution,” 103–22. Lochman was a Czech theologian who later moved to Basel. For a whole generation, he advocated and engaged in Christian-Marxist dialogue.

[6]. Herbert Warren Richardson, “Martin Luther King—Unsung Theologian,” in New Theology, No. 6, 178–84.

[7]. [Yoder here included excerpts from Robert Tucker’s article in which he argued that the early Friends were revolutionary by (1) knowing that what they were doing really mattered in world history; (2) possessing a revolutionary vision of a new order; (3) not being class bound; (4) recognizing that revolutionaries need communities; (5) having a revolutionary discipline summarized in the word faithfulness; and (6) having a revolutionary apparatus, a structure, a way of meeting and communicating.—Ed.]

[8]. Richard Shaull, “Christian Faith as Scandal in a Technocratic World,” in New Theology, No. 6, 123–34. Shaull was an officer of the WSCF, then taught ecumenics at Princeton University.

[9]. Ibid., 132.

[10]. Hans-Werner Bartsch, “The Foundation and Meaning of Christian Pacifism,” in New Theology, No. 6, 185–98.

[11]. My fullest expression of this observation is an outline that developed in conversations in Montevideo in 1966, published as “Christ the Hope of the World,” in The Original Revolution.

[12]. Miranda, Marx and the Bible; see the study guide for this chapter.

[13]. Gustavo Gutiérrez, author of A Theology of Liberation (1973), was the first widely popular liberation theology author and has been a major spokesman of the movement. A more philosophically, systematically, theologically oriented theologian is Juan Luis Segundo. The title of his book, Liberation of Theology, points to the idea that theology is more proper theology when liberation is its agenda. Hugo Assmann is more blunt than the others in his adoption of Marxist language and analysis, and nearer to saying that being in favor of the revolution is all that counts. One Protestant—who has worked with this movement but is more critical and more aware of some of the harder questions that need to be asked, with more theological contact in the northern world—is José Míguez Bonino. All these authors are worth reading in a serious study (see the study guide for this chapter).

[14]. When we identify our current interlocutor as Latin, that adjective has resonances reaching back to the Romans. This statement means something much more complicated than the notion (which would be false) that people who speak Romance languages necessarily reason differently. Instead it is related to the so-called realist intellectual culture propagated for centuries by the dominant educational institutions of Latin Europe. This culture centers in the defining of terms more than does the nominalist, postindustrial, and culturally pluralistic debating style of northern Europeans.

[15]. The same applies in other fields. It is no accident that a large part of the vigor of the wave of nuclear pacifism in the 1980s was carried by Billy Graham and by Catholic bishops, not by mainline Protestant church leaders and theologians. The reasons would be similar.

[16]. To this day, most Catholic priests serving parishes in Latin America are not indigenous.

[17]. [See Jer. 29:5–7.—Ed.]

Chapter 25

[1]. Some of the following material resembles—in expanded form—sections of my book Nevertheless. There I undertake the cross-referencing of similarities and differences of various styles of pacifism with more simplicity but also with more care to be systematic. Here the effort to be systematic will be set aside. I seek only to describe.

[2]. Johannes Ude, Du sollst nicht töten! (see the study guide for this chapter).

[3]. Something of this simplicity was probably also within the background of the uneducated Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter, although he drew on other sources as well, especially the lives of the saints. See Gordon Zahn’s book on Jägerstätter, In Solitary Witness (in the study guide for this chapter).

[4]. See also “The Pacifism of Christian Cosmopolitanism,” in Yoder, Nevertheless, 11–17.

[5]. See the chapter “Just War Thinking Revived” in the present volume.

Chapter 26

[1]. To some extent this has changed, especially since World War II, although some of its roots go back to the period between the wars. An excellent source for these concerns is Donald Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace (see the general bibliography). Durnbaugh surveys one stream of ecumenical conversation: interchurch agencies and especially the World Council of Churches as a context for interchurch conversation.

[2]. In subsequent years, research secretary Victor Hayward, associate general secretary Allen Brash, mission and evangelism secretary Emilio Castro, and general secretary Philip Potter have been pacifists, several of them members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

[3]. Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace, 34.

[4]. So there is one group of people for whom just war is defined institutionally and the other for whom it is to be discerned in terms of the cause.

[5]. This is a description of vocational individual pacifism.

[6]. Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace, 35–36.

[7]. Ibid., 40.

[8]. See ibid., 46–72.

[9]. Ibid., 73–90.

[10]. Why did the WCC take this tack? An important policy consideration in the operation of an agency such as the WCC is the need to be seen to be working at a point where work needs to be done. It is fruitless, in the minds of most, simply to keep on worrying a problem if it cannot be resolved, especially when the existence of the problem is part of the reason the organization exists. When an ecumenical conversation can lead to a breakthrough of some kind by redefining or resolving a problem, that demonstrates the usefulness and the mission of the organization. One can doubt, on the level of principle, that an ecumenical agency needs to justify itself by making visible progress on the issues with which it deals, but agency policymakers often think it does. So it is most attractive in the policymaking of a new agency to work at a frontier where those engaged are likely to make progress.

[11]. Something of this study process is reported in a fragment in Durnbaugh, On Earth Peace, 185–95.

[12]. Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age, §66.

[13]. Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft, The Kingship of Christ: An Interpretation of Recent European Theology (New York: Harper, 1948).

[14]. Ibid., 373–85.

[15]. Canadian Mennonite journalist Ernie Regehr and Brethren churchman LaMar Gibble participated in that study.

[16]. These include the founders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the strong pastoral preachers mentioned in our review of American Protestant pacifism, rare nonconformist pastors such as André Trocmé, and scholars such as Friedrich Siegmund-Schultz.

[17]. Several significant pamphlets were produced out of this process, as well as one book: Paul Peachey, ed., Biblical Realism Confronts the Nation (see the general bibliography).

[18]. The other promising tack is to straddle the subject. Disarmament, antimilitarism, and nuclear freeze may present for a time such straddling options.

[19]. For the authors of books on situation ethics, sexual questions were most interesting, but violence was the subject of the second most interesting set of anecdotes and test cases.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Editors’ Preface

Author’s Preface

1. Introduction

2. Refining Our Typology on the Ethics of War

3. The Pacifism of Pre-Constantinian Christianity

4. The Meaning of the Constantinian Shift

5. The Logic of the Just War Tradition

6. Criteria of the Just War Tradition

7. Interpreting the Just War Criteria

8. The Career of the Just War Theory

9. The Peace Dimension of Medieval Moral Concern

10. The Nonviolence of Rabbinic Judaism

11. The Pacifism of the First Reformation

12. Anabaptists in the Continental Reformation

13. The Peace Vision of Enlightenment Humanism

14. Quakerism in the Puritan Reformation

15. Quakerism in Early America: The Holy Experiment

16. Pacifism in the Nineteenth Century

17. Liberal Protestant Pacifism

18. Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Realist” Critique

19. Mennonites after Niebuhr

20. Biblical Realism and the Politics of Jesus

21. Other Biblical Themes

22. Just War Thinking Revived

23. The Lessons of Nonviolent Experience

24. Ecumenical Theologies of Revolution and Liberation

25. Varieties of Contemporary Catholic Peace Concern

26. Ecumenical Conversations

Study Guides

General Bibliography

Scripture Index

Subject Index

Notes