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<\/a><\/p>\nBEN: As a Christian pacifist myself, I really resonated with what you say on pp. 172-73, affirming my fellow Methodist Stan Hauerwas\u2019s repeated teachings on such things. I agree that this is the clear thrust of much of the Sermon on the Mount, and the clear witness of the life of Paul who was converted from violence against the church, to the Gospel of non-violence for the sake of Christ. When Jesus said love your enemies he didn\u2019t mean love them to death by killing them! Interestingly, Martin Luther King Jr. was finally convinced of this Gospel by reading E. Stanley Jones\u2019 biography of Gandhi when he was in seminary. Jones was a Methodist missionary to India, and a graduate of Asbury college. Recently there was an excellent movie entitled Hacksaw Ridge, which told the story of a pacifist Seventh Day Adventist who served as a medic in the Pacific WWII, who was the first soldier to be allowed to serve in the U.S. Army without carrying or firing a gun. And he rescued many people in battle at Hacksaw Ridge, both friend and foe. I used to think when I was younger that there\u2019s no way I could serve in the military\u2026 but perhaps I could do that, and still serve my country without violating my conscience or the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. Would you see this as plausible, or as an unhelpful compromise? After all, you could be said to be patching up soldiers so they can go back out and kill some more. <\/p>\n
PATRICK: I really wanted to get over how enemy love is not confined interpreting a line or two from the Sermon on the Mount. What tends to happen then is Jesus\u2019 teaching is reinterpreted as hyperbolic or idealistic. Richard Hays has an excellent discussion in his classic book The Moral Vision of the New Testament of all the attempts made to soften Jesus\u2019 teaching to love our enemies. None of them are convincing. Jesus\u2019 teaching shapes that of the first Christians \u2013 Paul, Peter and the early church. The overwhelming historical evidence is how the pre-Constantinian early Christian movement repudiated killing in all forms \u2013 abortion, war and capital punishment. The shift after Constantine (Augustine especially) to legitimize \u2018just\u2019 violence in order to suppress heresy or expand Christendom was, in my opinion, a disaster to the witness of the church. Similarly in the 20th century for Reinhold Niebuhr\u2019s theory of \u2018just war\u2019. It isn\u2019t a question of whether Christians are to be violent in certain situations, Jesus calls disciples to be non-violent full stop. Of course this seems crazy, but that\u2019s the point \u2013 enemy love is the good itself. It\u2019s the window to life in the upside-down kingdom. I saw Hacksaw Ridge in Dublin a couple of years ago and read up on the story of Desmond Doss on which it was based. While I don\u2019t think I could sign up for the military, his was an inspiring example of how Christian non-violence requires considerable bravery.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BEN: As a Christian pacifist myself, I really resonated with what you say on pp. 172-73, affirming my fellow Methodist Stan Hauerwas\u2019s repeated teachings on such things. I agree that this is the clear thrust of much of the Sermon on the Mount, and the clear witness of the life of Paul who was converted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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