There is a turn in human existence when for more than three hundred years the first Christians follow Jesus in the way of peace-without insurgencies, without rebellions, without riots. It is the first such sustained movement of non-violence before or after, and still stands as a witness to the authenticity of the gospel.
The way of self-preservation (as families or communities or cities or nations) has not always been the way of Christians, and as citizens of a world power Americans may not trust Christ enough to make the first Christian path our own.
Millions have perished down the centuries trusting in their crucified God. To suggest that they should have taken a more realistic or utilitarian stance, that they should have taken up arms, is a blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. These followers of Jesus were looking for a transfigured world, had a different country in their hearts.
They trusted that God was on the side of humanity, on the side of his creation, never a God with or for one people or one culture or one land but a God with and for everyone, everywhere.
Is there a final moment in history when instead of fighting, instead of taking up arms against the penultimate Hitler or the final ISIS, or whatever form death's last great tyranny takes, the church again visibly rejects the means and powers of this world, this privilege of self-defence, our idolatry of weapons, and wills instead to beat our swords and spears into farming tools, chooses to trust the humility and weakness of God in Jesus Christ to vindicate us-not our armaments, our anger, our right to stand up for ourselves-in order to manifest an already-accomplished defeat of darkness on Golgotha?
What if the end comes only after an unprecedented and great slaughter of Christians, after a worldwide crucifixion of the body of Christ, in which after great sacrifice in imitation of her Lord she dies and rises from the ashes of her demise by the Spirit, and God is finally all in all because the cruciform pattern of love that governs the universe and holds all things together and gives all living things breath, is confirmed in a peculiar crucified and resurrected people who look like the human God.
The pacifist view you reviewed here is, indeed, frequently argued and has persuasive power with those who are willing to give up agency because the burden of carrying it is too great.
Please exegete for me Luke 22.35-38. DB
I wouldn’t accept the premise of your question: that it’s simply a pacifist position or that it involves giving up agency. I’ll come back to that in a moment. First to your excellent question:
The passage you raised largely exegetes itself with Matthew’s help. Why go buy a couple of swords? He tells us: to fulfill the Scriptures: so that when arrested, “he would be numbered with transgressors.” Note that having the sword identifies them as transgressors. And having fulfilled that prophecy, Jesus immediately rebukes Peter for drawing the sword. “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” The Christians of the first three centuries uniformly received this as a universal prohibition from the use of violence.
Back to your premises. Pacifism is an ideology of peace. One need not be a Christian to be a pacifist. The issue is about following Jesus in voluntarily laying down our lives for the other. One never needs a weapon to lay down one’s own life, but it absolutely requires a voluntary act of cruciform conviction, the very highest use of agency.
Ken, this is brilliant and beautiful. It’s how I have imagined it. This is what it means to truly be in Christ and in one another.