They Keep Trying
We continue with our exploration of the scriptural basis for pacifism. This, as all in the series does, leans on the seminal work of Jean Lasserre, War and the Gospel. This week I am focusing on Part II chapter 6, which deals with some common objections offered by those who wish to claim a place for war in the Christian conscience. I will take each piece of Lasserre’s section in turn and offer my thoughts on an effective response.
Jesus Was No Moralist
A familiar objection to Christian pacifism runs something like this: “Jesus was not a moralist. He did not come to give us a new ethical code. The Sermon on the Mount is not a rulebook. Therefore, you pacifists, with your insistence on literal nonresistance, have fundamentally misunderstood the gospel. You have turned grace into law.”
Pacifists accept the premise. We deny the conclusion.
Yes, a thousand times yes, Jesus was not a moralist. He did not descend from heaven to add a finer-grained set of prohibitions to the ones Moses had already delivered. He did not come to make us better ethicists. He came announcing a Kingdom, and he came as its King. The whole shape of his ministry is wrong if you read him as Aristotle with a yarmulke.
But notice what this admission does not do. It does not release us from his words. It deepens our bondage to them.
A moralist offers principles you may weigh, balance, and apply with prudential judgment. “Love your enemies” becomes a value to be held in tension with other values, national security, family protection, civic duty, and the wise man finds the mean. This is exactly the move that has been used for sixteen centuries to baptize the sword. It treats Jesus as a contributor to an ethical conversation rather than as Lord.
Pacifists say the opposite. Because Jesus is not a moralist but a King, his words are not advice but command. “Do not resist the one who is evil” is not a maxim entered into deliberation; it is the marching order of the citizen of his Kingdom. “Put away your sword” is not Jesus’s contribution to just-war theory; it is what He actually said, on the actual night, to the actual disciple who actually drew steel to defend him.
The pacifist is not the one clinging to a rule. The pacifist is the one who has heard the King and answered, simply, yes. Those who reach for the sword while calling him Lord have not escaped moralism; they have merely substituted their moral reasoning for his plain instruction.
The Erroneous Charge of Casuistry
The next objection is that the pacifist falls into casuistry. Casuistry is defined as “the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions; sophistry”.
This objection is a serious one: “Your pacifism collapses into the very thing you claim to reject. You insist Jesus is no moralist, no giver of rules, and then you produce rules. May I serve as a policeman? May I pay war taxes? May I restrain a violent man to protect a child? May I strike in self-defense but not in offense? You pacifists end up in endless casuistry, splitting hairs the Pharisees would have envied. You have built a new law on the ruins of the old.”
The charge stings because it is partly true, of some who call themselves pacifists. It is not true of the obedience we are advocating.
Casuistry is what happens when you take a command and ask, “How little of this must I do?” or “Under what conditions am I excused?” It is the lawyer’s question, not the disciple’s. The rich young ruler (Matthew 19:16-26) was a casuist: which commandments, how shall I inherit, what do I still lack? Jesus answered him not with finer distinctions but with a single shattering demand, sell, give, follow. The man went away sorrowful, and Jesus did not chase after him with clarifications.
Pacifists are not casuists because we are not trying to determine the minimum. We are trying to follow. The question “may I use force in this case?” is the wrong question, not because it has no answer, but because it betrays the posture of someone still negotiating with the King. The disciple does not ask permission to draw his sword in unusual circumstances. He has heard “put it away” and put it away.
This is why our position can seem unsatisfying to the ethicist. They want a doctrine that handles every hypothetical, the proverbial intruder, the trolley, the just war. Pacifists have no such doctrine and feel no obligation to produce one. Pacifists are not building a system. Pacifists are following a person, and that person has said quite plainly what He requires of us.
When hard cases come, and they come, pacifists do not consult a table of exceptions. We pray, and we obey, and we accept whatever the cost of obedience turns out to be. That is not casuistry. That is the opposite of casuistry. That is discipleship.
“Everyone Compromises”
When other arguments are exhausted, this one is usually offered as a kind of weary truce: “Look, every Christian compromises. You pacifists drive on roads paved by tax dollars that funded bombs. You call the police when your house is burgled. You eat food shipped under the protection of a navy you disavow. You are no purer than the rest of us. Stop pretending. We are all entangled in the world’s violence; you have simply chosen a more flattering corner of the entanglement.”
The observation is accurate. The conclusion is false.
Yes, we are entangled. Yes, the threads of coercion run through every loaf of bread we eat and every road we walk. We have never claimed otherwise. The disciple is not promised a clean position from which to obey; he is promised only the command and the grace to follow it. That our obedience is partial, embarrassing, and shot through with inconsistency is not news to us, it is the daily condition of our existence.
But notice the move being made. From the true premise we are all compromised, the objector draws the false conclusion therefore compromise is permitted. This does not follow. That the disciple stumbles does not authorize him to walk in the opposite direction. That we cannot extricate ourselves perfectly from violence does not license us to take up the sword ourselves. A man drowning in a flood does not justify pouring himself another glass.
The question is never whether we are pure. We are not. The question is which way we are facing, toward the King’s command or away from it. The pacifist faces toward it and falls short. The justifier of the sword faces away and calls his facing wisdom. We would rather fall short in the right direction.
“You Must Take Your Share of Responsibility”
Here is the objection in its gravest form: “The pacifist wants to keep his hands clean while others do the bloody work of holding the world together. Police, soldiers, magistrates, these bear the sword so that you may sleep. When the tyrant marches and the innocent are slaughtered, you stand aside murmuring about the Sermon on the Mount. This is not holiness. It is freeloading. You enjoy the protection of a violence you refuse to share. Take up your portion of the world’s tragic burden or admit that your purity is purchased by the sins of better men.”
The objection has force. Pacifists feel its weight. And pacifists answer it directly.
It rests on a premise we deny; that the world is held together by the sword. We do not believe this. We confess that the world is held together by Christ, in whom all things consist, and that the powers which imagine themselves to be holding it together are in fact derivative, temporary, and under judgment. The policeman does not sustain creation. The soldier does not uphold the cosmos. God does, and He has told us by what means He is doing it, by the cross, by the gathered church, by the patient witness of a peculiar people who do not return evil for evil.
So, when we are told to “take our share of responsibility,” we want to know: responsibility to whom, and for what? If the assignment comes from the nation, or from the tragic logic of statecraft, or from the perfectly understandable demand that we help carry the burden of keeping the peace by force, we must decline. Not because we are too good for the work, but because we have already been conscripted by another Lord into another work, and a soldier cannot serve two armies.
Our share of responsibility is real, and it is heavy. It is the responsibility to forgive when we are wronged, to feed the enemy who hungers, to suffer rather than to inflict, to tell the truth when lies would be safer, to gather a community where the world’s logic is visibly contradicted. This is not less than the magistrate’s burden. In many ways it is more.
We are not refusing responsibility. We are refusing that responsibility, in order to bear this one. The King has assigned each his post.
“Be Realistic”
The objection comes in many tones, but the substance is constant: “Your pacifism is beautiful in chapel and useless on the street. The world is not a Sunday school. Evil men exist. Aggressors do not pause to read the Sermon on the Mount. If everyone laid down arms tomorrow, the cruel would rule by nightfall. Grow up. Be realistic. Christianity must operate in the world as it is, not the world as you wish it were.”
Pacifists have heard this all our lives. It is, we are told, the voice of maturity. Pacifists believe it is something else. I dealt with the practicality of peace here.
What is called realism is, on inspection, a particular metaphysical claim, that the deepest truth about the world is the truth of force, that history is finally decided by who can outshoot whom, that the cross was a beautiful gesture, but the legions were the real thing. This is not realism. This is a creed. It is, in fact, the oldest creed there is, older than Caesar, and it has been refuted, once, definitively, on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem.
Followers of Jesus believe that the man who rose from the dead is the realist, and that those who killed him were the dreamers. They thought the sword had the last word. It did not. They thought power was what they held. It was not. The whole apparatus of “the world as it is” came down on Him with full weight and broke against Him like a wave against a stone. That is the real world. Anything less is a smaller story told by people who have not yet heard the news.
So, when we are urged to be realistic, we ask gently which reality is meant. The reality in which the tomb is empty, or the reality in which it is not? If the former, then nonresistance is not foolishness; it is the only sane response to what has actually happened. If the latter, the objector is right, and we are, as Paul said, of all men most to be pitied. But we may not be asked to live by Easter on Sunday and by the sword on Monday.
The pacifist is not the unrealistic one. He is the one who has taken the Resurrection seriously enough to live as if it were true.
In the end, this objection falls flat like all the other objections. They are simply rationalizations to get us out of doing what we know Jesus would have us do. It is a vain attempt to wiggle our way out of an uncomfortable situation, to find another option rather than submitting ourselves fully to the command of the Prince of Peace.
Believe him. Obey Him. There is no other option.
Praise Be to God
