Christians and War: A Brief History Of The Church's Teachings And Practices

By A. James Reimer

James Reimer offers a fair presentation of the three classical Christian attitudes toward war: crusading or holy war, just war, and pacifism. His thoughtful survey of Christian teachings and practices on issues of war, violence, and the state takes readers from classical Greco-Roman times to the present. Arguing that the church's responses to war can only be understood through the church's changing relationship to culture, Reimer concludes with an analysis of the contemporary debate and proposes criteria for legitimate and illegitimate use of force by nation-states.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781451403374

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Christians and War

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Christians and War

A Brief History of the Church’s Teachings and Practices

A. James Reimer

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

CHRISTIANS AND WAR

A Brief History of the Church’s Teachings and Practices

Copyright © 2010 Fortress Press, an imprint of Augsburg Fortress. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Visit http://www.augsburgfortress.org/copyright/contact.asp or write to: Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.

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

Cover design: Christy Barker

Cover image: Comstock Images/ Getty Images

This book was set in Rotis Serif and Rotis Sans Serif.

eISBN: 9781451403374

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Reimer, A. James.

Christians and war : a brief history of the church’s teachings and practices / A. James Reimer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-8006-3819-1 (alk. paper)

1. War--Religious aspects--Christianity--History of doctrines. I. Title.

BT736.2.R45 2010

261.8’73--dc22

2010022766

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Definitions and Assumptions

2. Hebrew Scriptures: God of War and God of Peace

3. New Testament: Jesus and Loving the Enemy

4. Early Church: Divided Evidence

5. Constantinian Shift: The Justifiable War

6. Middle Ages: From Just War to Crusade

7. Reformation: The Magisterial Reformers

8. Radical Reformation: From Revolution to Pacifism

9. Enlightenment: Humanism and Peace

10. Twentieth Century I: Age of Realism

11. Twentieth Century II: Nuclear Pacifism

12. Postmodernity: Terror and the War on Terror

13. Policing, Human Security, and the Responsibility to Protect

Conclusion: Some Theological Considerations

Select Bibliography

Notes

Preface

Martin Luther’s dilemma: Can the Christian be a soldier? or, more to the point, Can a person who claims to follow Jesus Christ support and participate in violence even to defend oneself, one’s family, and one’s country? has been a question that has plagued me ever since childhood. I remember carrying on a high school correspondence with a girlfriend half a country away on whether a Christian can go to war. I was unequivocally on the side of Christian pacifism but was unable to persuade her. My theological career has been to a large extent an attempt to answer this question.

This book is the fruit of many years of teaching both undergraduate and graduate students at Conrad Grebel University College (University of Waterloo in Ontario) and at the Toronto School of Theology. I acknowledge here the contribution of these students to making this a better work. I especially thank the students who participated in my course War and Peace in Christian Thought in 2006 and 2007 at the Toronto School of Theology. In those classes I used a rough draft of the manuscript for this book as my primary text, and the students gave me many helpful suggestions.

The purpose of the book is to present in summary, popular fashion a synthesis of materials chronicling the development of the church’s arguments, teachings, and practices concerning Christian participation in violence, war, and peacemaking from the biblical period to the present, in a way that is accessible to nonspecialists. In the process I have been heavily reliant on some of the classic texts in the field, such as Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation (1960); Lisa Sowle Cahill, Love Your Enemies (1994); and John H. Yoder, Nevertheless: Varieties of Religious Pacifism (1971) and The Christian Witness to the State (1964). Yoder’s many writings on the subject have been a most important source in shaping the basic arguments and structure of the book, and my social ethics in general. Although I am not an uncritical Yoderian, his influence is everywhere present, covertly if not explicitly.

I express my appreciation in particular to Fortress Press and editor Michael West for keeping faith with me through many delays and extensions, mostly due to ongoing health issues. I also acknowledge the assistance of a grant from the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada. A special thank you to my wife, Margaret Loewen Reimer, for her collaboration and skillful editing.

The intent was to keep this book as unencumbered as possible by lengthy footnotes, references, and quotations. Consequently, the usual scholarly apparatus has been kept to a minimum. Obvious dependencies have been noted in brief notes after the bibliography. I thank all those who have contributed to my understanding of the subject matter, especially my own Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage, which has highlighted the teachings of Jesus to love the enemy, no matter what the cost.

As will become evident to a careful reader, my own pacifism is a chastened one, one that is only too aware of the ambiguities inherent in the nonresistant, pacifist position, especially when it comes to defending the third party through peacekeeping, peacemaking, and policing, activities to which I turn in the last chapter of the book. Nevertheless, I consider myself a theological pacifist—not a rigid, ideological one but one grounded in the Trinitarian-Christocentric love of God for the other and committed to the divine agenda of reconciling the whole fragmented world.

Introduction

On May 30, 1962, British composer Benjamin Britten conducted the premiere of his own work, the War Requiem, commissioned as part of the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in England. The fourteenth-century cathedral had suffered a direct hit by German bombers on November 15, 1940. The commission’s intent was to recognize the need to end all war and work toward reconciliation among the nations of the world.¹

Britten, a fervent pacifist, welcomed the opportunity to write a musical critique of war and decided to juxtapose nine poems by British poet William Owen with sections of the funeral liturgy (Requiem) of the Roman Catholic Church. Owen was a decorated army officer, awarded the Military Cross for bravery, who lost his life at the age of twenty-five, one week before the end of World War I. In his words, The poetry is in the pity.… All a poet can do today is warn. Britten counterposed the personal anguish and anger of a soldier with the universal and timeless text of the Requiem Mass.

The high point of the Requiem comes with Owen’s own version of the Abraham-Isaac story (based on Genesis 22:1–14), sung by tenor and baritone solo, in which God tests Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first born spoke and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

And builded parapets and trenched there,

And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,—

And half of the seed of Europe, one by one.

In an ironic reversal of the biblical narrative, which reads: And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son (Genesis 22:13), Owen’s poem ends with Europe slaying thousands upon thousands of its precious sons. This, sadly, is the story of the twentieth century, which became one of unprecedented killing on the battlefields, the first century of all-out or total warfare, in which all the major powers were allied against one another, Christians fighting Christians, and Jews fighting Jews, all against all.

It has been estimated that approximately 231 million people died in conflicts and wars in the twentieth century. The outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 has sometimes been called the end of a century of relative peace that began with the signing of the Peace of Vienna in 1815. This picture of the nineteenth century as a time of peace does not do justice to the violence that was perpetrated during this period of history: the revolutions in Europe in 1848; the colonization of vast areas of India, China, Japan, and Africa by imperial powers, especially England, France, and Spain; the Civil War in the United States; the deportation and enslavement of Africans, especially by Americans; the domination of Aboriginal peoples and creation of Indian reservations, and so on.

Nevertheless, it is true that the nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented faith in peace, human progress, missionary fervor, and optimism about the improvability of the world through science, reason, and international peace treaties. This optimism was still evident in the first year of World War I, when soldiers by the tens of thousands volunteered to fight for home and country, all sides under the banner of God’s providential will. Many suffered disillusionment by the end of the year.

The German theologian Paul Tillich, who later emigrated to the United States under the threat of Nazism, experienced just such disillusionment. He too volunteered enthusiastically at the beginning of the Great War to end all wars, to fight for his fatherland. But by the end of the first year, as a chaplain on the Western front, he suffered a nervous breakdown and lost his faith in traditional theism. Although he had been a firm believer in war as a struggle between nations and their right to exist, he soon came under the influence of Marxist thought, interpreting the war as an international class struggle. By war’s end he was an advocate of Religious Socialism, arguing that Christianity and socialism have much more in common than Christianity and capitalism.

It is the role that religion, and particularly Christianity, has played in war and peacemaking throughout history that is the topic of this volume. Particular attention will be given to the theological teachings concerning war, violence, and peace that have motivated clergy, politicians, soldiers, military commanders, and ordinary people in their attitudes to war.

We will follow the career of the Christian church’s attitudes toward war and peace from ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman times, the epoch in which the Jewish and Christian Bibles were written, through the classical period of Christian history (sometimes referred as the age of the fathers), the great Constantinian shift in the fourth century, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the early modern period with its religiously-inspired wars, to the era of modern Enlightenment and various contemporary perspectives. The goal here is not to present an exhaustive treatment of the subject, which one can find in numerous books, but rather to make accessible to the lay reader a sense of the central issues and arguments over the past two thousand years.

I cannot claim to be impartial, since I come from a longstanding pacifist tradition—the Anabaptist-Mennonite one—but I will attempt to be fair to all sides within the Christian tradition. I’ll let the reader judge whether I have managed it. In fact, it will become clear in the following pages, especially in the last chapters, that I am not an absolute pacifist (I do not reject all use of force), for I believe that some forms of peacekeeping and policing (to be distinguished from war) are necessary in the local regional, national, and international arenas.

As mentioned above, this booklet is the product of some twenty years of teaching a course called War and Peace in Christian Thought. I have come to recognize the importance of challenging students to take a personal interest in the topic and to write position papers in which they are required to take sides and to argue a position. This is difficult on any subject, but in the area of war and peace it is particularly onerous for those who have suffered the consequences of war personally or in their families. If I accomplish anything, I hope it is to challenge readers to think consciously about the subject and, theoretically at least, come to hold a position that is philosophically and