Did Jesus Teach Pacifism?

A couple of days back, I posted about Sean Smith's reporting on the War in Iraq. It is so real--and shows war to be so grotesque--that it made me ask whether it is possible to love the warrior and hate the war.

A friend responded with the article linked to this posting's title by the Rev. John Piper about just war theory, suggesting that if the war is just, it is possible to honor, if not love, both warrior and war.

I wanted to respond to the article in a full posting, because "just war" has been a topic much discussed related to Iraq. Of course, no one is arguing about Iraq being a "just war" anymore...

In any case, here's my take on the article, and by extension, just war:

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Piper does an OK job of articulating the major ideas behind the just war tradition: basically, if you're being attacked or know that you can prevent another from doing certain harm, you are justified in violence.

I would, however, challenge his rationale in a couple of places:

1) Piper gives a fair account of the chief weakness of pacifism: in a sinful world, maintaining order requires police and/or a standing army. The argument in favor of Christian pacifism is that Jesus teaches and practices and expects us to follow kingdom ethics. It is a given for Christians that following these ethics puts us constantly at odds with the world and makes us seem utterly "foolish." Is pacifism--which flows from Jesus' teaching and life and suffering--just foolishness to be dismissed as irrational... or is it so crazy it just might work in transforming a violent world? Is it the Christian community's job to transform the world through radical witness, or concede humanity's proclivity to violence and ensure a minimum level of safety by participating in public-spirited violence in the form of law enforcement? This is no small (nor obvious) question. The devil is always in the details.

2) Piper's reading of Luke 3:14 is bad. The passage does not "allow" military service--it simply acknowledges that it existed in JtB's world. John the Baptist is telling soldiers how to live after they've repented; but just 'cause he doesn't tell them to STOP being soldiers, doesn't mean that we should take this tiny passage and create a normative teaching for the Christian community that says "it's OK to be a soldier." This is flimsy. The Cornelius or centurion texts would actually serve this purpose much better, Rev. Piper, but even Jesus' acknowledgment of the existence of soldiers in biblical times doesn't normalize it in our time.

3) Piper's reading of John 18:36 is also flimsy. When Jesus says "if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would be fighting," his point is not the normalization of the practice of fighting for just causes. The opposite. Jesus is simply stating that his kingdom is not of this world and that his followers should not fight for it. Jesus makes no prescriptive statement here about the acceptability of "this worldly" fighting. Instead, Jesus invites followers to live a new and changed life--a life in the kingdom--not just blithely accept the ways of the world. To infer from this text Jesus' endorsement of militarism is weak and lazy scholarship.

4) Piper's interpretation of Paul about restraining and punishing evil is essentially sound. The best Christian writing on the obligation of the state to restrain evil deeds is by Reinhold Niebuhr in "Moral Man, Immoral Society." Niebuhr distinguished between the ethical norms an individual was bound to follow and those that a group was bound to follow. The latter has the grim and tragic responsibility to protect the people against evil and evildoers--an ethical crisis that individuals rarely, if ever, have to face.

4) In Piper's treatment of 1 Peter, I would again caution him against treating matter-of-fact statements of "what is" in the time of the Biblical authors as normative ethics for Christians today. Just 'cause the writer of 1 Peter wrote to a particular community that they should submit to the authority of the government, I don't see how this becomes a normative prescription for today. The recipients of the Peter letters were an oppressed minority--obedience to authority was a matter of survival. In our contemporary democratic system, our relationship to power is quite different and the permissions necessary for the government to use power are quite different--the entire architecture of authority is different in a democracy than it was living under the Roman empire. How can you take this letter's advice to an oppressed minority on how to survive imperial rule and say that Christians in 2007--living as a majority culture in a nation state--should have the same obedient relationship to the governing authorities as back then?

6) Piper then jumps hastily to the conclusion that he wanted to reach when he started writing this essay: "scriptures teach that it is right for a nation to engage in just war." The miscellaneous texts he's gathered (each of which is of dubious application) don't justify this conclusion. Each of the texts he's cited as evidence is actually talking about something else other than governments engaging in just war. The topic of just war is never addressed directly in the New Testament. The New Testament acknowledges the reality that governments at the time had the power to prosecute evil and Romans and 1 Peter are basically telling people to stay clean and out of trouble so they aren't the ones being prosecuted. I don't see how this translates into a prescriptive statement endorsing state-sponsored violence that is strong enough to act as a counter-balance to the incredibly clear statements prohibiting violence in the Beatitudes and at the end of Matthew 5.

7) The conclusion is where Piper gets totally derailed. Train wreck. How can he read so much INTO a text like John 18:36 (biblical endorsement of state-sponsored violence) and then read so much OUT of a text like Matthew 5:39-41 (peacemaking is only optional)? The sermon on the mount is a "hyperbole?" Huh? The notion that non-violent resistance to evil is a "primary" disposition is a strange bit of fudging. I would say that non-violence should be our "primary disposition" to evil in the same way that it was Jesus' "primary disposition" to evil when he allowed himself to be crucified. It's the first--and only--disposition we are bound to.

And the bit later on about separating out the "spheres" is fine--I get that, to a point. But to dismiss Jesus' instructions to be peacemakers and to meet evil with good--instructions that cut to the heart of every believer--by saying that those are just "individual" instructions is ludicrous! Piper seems to be saying that Christians who happen to live in nation states can and should ignore Jesus and engage in individual ethical behaviors that serve the interest of the nation state. Jesus only means to turn the other cheek when you bump into someone on the sidewalk or at the mall? Can human beings, living in a nuclear age afford to parenthetically cut out relations between nation states as a field in which Jesus' ethics don't apply?

Piper's argument makes a mess of the Bible. He takes a few odd, indirect, and arguable passages about how the early Christians related to the Roman Empire and cobbles together an argument that he wants me to believe stands as a direct counterbalance to the clear and unambiguous teachings of Jesus against meeting violence with more violence?

Piper's notion of a bifurcated individual--acting as both an individual and as an agent of a state--is beautiful on paper, but as Piper himself admits, it blows up when you put a human being behind the barrel of a gun and tell him that someone else has a gun across the way and wants to kill him. There is no space for love of any kind in that place. It is destroyed by fear. All human beings in war, no matter how noble their intentions, are seared and damaged. The kingdom moves farther away.

Listen or read the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen's "Devils and Dust." Read the clips of some of the atrocities commited by Iraqis and by US soldiers in the midst of combat.

Just War theory, in the end, is garbage. It is much too optimistic (odd for a Calvinist like Piper) about the ability of the leaders of nation states to seek the impartial ideal of justice through violent means. Isn't this the one lesson we can agree that we learned from the US plunge into war in Iraq?

Violence corrupts and destroys and begets more violence. Jesus knew this. And in Matthew 5:39-41, he really did mean what he said.On one point I agree with Piper: violence is sometimes necessary as a tool of a democratically governed state to ensure order and counter the effects of sin. But violence is never redemptive. It is never God's will. War is never "just." It is always sinful, always tragic in its application. For anyone who wants to know more about this topic, don't read John Piper: take a look at this piece detailing a conversation about the same topic that the Niebuhr brother had 75 years ago.