A Continuing Journey
This is a continuation of a series on the scriptural basis of pacifism, that is a normative call on the consciences of the followers of Jesus. The basis for this study is the seminal book on the subject War and the Gospel by Jean Lasserre. In Part II Chapter 4 Lasserre dives into the use of the Old Testament as a justification for Christian support of war. It is a relatively short chapter and jibes with much of my own thinking on the topic. The main points being that either the Old Testament reveals Christ, or it has been superseded by the New. That being the case, I will follow it less closely than in previous installments of this series and offer this essay.
A Shop Worn Tactic
There is a well-worn tactic in the American church. When confronted with Jesus’s command to love enemies, to turn the other cheek, to put away the sword, when cornered, in other words, by the plain teaching of the One Christians claim as Lord, a certain kind of believer will pivot. They will go backwards. They will flee the New Testament for the Old. They will summon Joshua at Jericho, David slaying Goliath, or the conquest narratives of Deuteronomy, and plant their flag there. “See?” they say. “God commanded war. God blessed armies. God is not a pacifist.”
This move deserves a serious, unsparing critique. Not because the Old Testament is unimportant, it is the sacred heritage of our faith and the soil from which Jesus himself grew, but because the use of Hebrew Scripture to authorize Christian participation in war represents one of the most consequential theological errors in the history of the church. It is an error with bodies attached to it. It is an error we cannot afford to keep making.
The Anchor of Christ
Let us begin where every Christian argument must begin, with Jesus. Christians are not simply “people of the book” in a general sense. We are people of a particular person, Jesus the Christ, Risen Lord and Savior. This is not a minor distinction. It is the whole ball game. The question for Christian ethics is never merely “what does Scripture say somewhere?” The question is always “what does Jesus reveal, command, and embody?”
The author of Hebrews understood this completely. In its opening lines, that magnificent letter declares that God, having spoken in many ways through the prophets of old, has now spoken definitively and finally through His Son. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory, the exact representation of His being. This is the theological claim that must govern how Christians read everything else in their Bible, including the war narratives of the Old Testament. Jesus is not one voice among many. He is the final and authoritative word.
When we allow the conquest narratives of Joshua to override the Sermon on the Mount, we have inverted the entire logic of Christian revelation. We have made Moses outrank Jesus. We have, in effect, decided that the old and partial word carries more weight than the complete and perfect word. This is not orthodox Christianity. It is a regression, a theological retreat from the very ground the Incarnation was meant to claim.
Progressive Revelation and Its Discontents
While it is undeniably true that we as Christians believe that God’s revelation via Scripture is complete, it is also true that within Scripture revelation has progressed. Theologians have long recognized that Scripture itself tells a story of progress, that God’s self-disclosure moves, develops, and deepens across time. The God who permits divorce in Deuteronomy is the same God whose Son says that this permission was given only because of the hardness of human hearts, and that the deeper truth points elsewhere. The God who commands an eye for an eye is the same God whose Son says to offer the other cheek. Jesus himself, in the Sermon on the Mount, uses the formula “you have heard it said… but I say to you” no fewer than six times. He is not abolishing the old, he says so explicitly, but he is fulfilling it, completing it, revealing what it was always pointing toward.
The war narratives of the Old Testament belong to an earlier and less complete stage of this revelation. This is not to say they are false or that God was absent from them. It is to say they are not the destination. They are part of a journey whose destination is a man hanging on a cross, praying for the forgiveness of his executioners. Christians who run back to Joshua for their ethics on violence are refusing the destination and camping at a waypoint. They have mistaken the road for the home.
The Deeply Particular and the Universal
There is another, more specific problem with reaching for the Old Testament to bless contemporary warfare. The wars described in Hebrew Scripture are, almost without exception, embedded in a deeply particular narrative, the story of a specific people, in a specific land, at a specific moment, in covenant with God under specific terms. The conquest of Canaan is not presented as a general principle about how nations should behave. It is presented as a unique and bounded event, tied to the covenant with Abraham, the deliverance from Egypt, and the establishment of a particular people in a particular place.
When an American pastor uses these narratives to bless the bombing of a Middle Eastern country, or when a chaplain invokes David’s victory over Goliath to sanctify a modern army’s campaign, they are committing an enormous category error. They are lifting a historically and covenantally particular narrative out of its context and using it as a universal permission slip. The Old Testament itself does not authorize this. The conquest narratives are not templates. They are not instruction manuals. They are the story of one people’s experience of God at one moment in history, and the church has no more business applying them to modern nation-state warfare than it does reinstating the dietary laws of Leviticus.
What the Old Testament Actually Teaches About War
Here is the painful irony: a careful and honest reading of the Old Testament does not, in the end, provide the robust endorsement of war that its Christian champions imagine. Yes, God commands battles and blesses armies in certain passages. But the same Hebrew Scriptures contain Isaiah’s vision of swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, a vision of a world where nations study war no more. The same Psalms that celebrate military victory also cry out from the depths of suffering caused by violence. The wisdom literature counsels humility, patience, and the recognition that human violence is rarely pure. The prophets, again and again, condemn Israel not for insufficient military aggression but for trusting in chariots and horses rather than in God, for building their security on violence rather than on covenant faithfulness.
And then there is the figure of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, the one who is led like a lamb to the slaughter, who does not open his mouth, who bears the sins of the many through non-resistant suffering. Christians have always recognized Jesus in that portrait. The Old Testament itself, at its deepest and most prophetic level, points not toward the warrior king but toward the one who absorbs violence rather than inflicting it. The Old Testament, read honestly and in full, is not the pro-war manifesto its selectors pretend it to be.
The Church’s Bloody Bargain
We should be clear-eyed about how this theological error came to be so entrenched. Before Constantine, the early church was overwhelmingly pacifist. Christian writers from Justin Martyr to Origen to Tertullian rejected military service as incompatible with following Christ. Then the empire converted, or at least the emperor did, and everything changed. Suddenly the church needed to provide theological cover for Christian soldiers serving in Christian armies fighting for a Christian emperor. Augustine developed Just War theory, a serious and not unintelligent attempt to set limits on violence, but it opened a door that has never been closed. Over time, Just War became less a restraint on violence and more a tool for blessing nearly any war that powerful interests wished to pursue.
The Old Testament was indispensable to this project. Once you need to justify Christian soldiers, you need biblical warriors. David and Joshua were drafted into service for Rome, for the Crusades, for the colonization of the Americas, for every subsequent slaughter that needed a scriptural veneer. The choice of the Old Testament over the New Testament in this project was not accidental. It was necessary. The New Testament simply would not cooperate.
Back to Jesus
We are followers of Jesus the Christ. Not followers of Joshua. Not disciples of David. Not adherents of a generalized biblical religion in which every text carries equal weight. We follow the One who said blessed are the peacemakers, who said love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, who said those who live by the sword will die by the sword, who healed the ear of the man come to arrest him, who refused the sword in Gethsemane, who died forgiving his killers.
The use of the Old Testament to justify Christian support for war is not just a hermeneutical mistake. It is a betrayal of the One we claim to follow. It takes the richly complex and ultimately peace-oriented witness of Hebrew Scripture and flattens it into a permission slip for killing. It then uses that permission slip to override the direct and unambiguous teaching of Jesus himself. This is not Christianity. It is a theology of convenience assembled in the service of the empire.
The only battle worth waging, as I have said repeatedly, is the battle for peace. And we cannot wage that battle honestly if we keep allowing the church to reach backward past Jesus for its ethics on violence. Jesus is not silent on this matter. He is, in fact, quite loud. The only question is whether we are willing to listen.
Praise Be to God.
