![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2011\/05\/leithart2.jpg\" "\\"leithart\\"")
<\/a>As I begin this particular post,\u00a0 I need to come clean and say,\u00a0 I am in fact a pacifist, and have been all my adult life.\u00a0 But as a responsible historian, I do not think good theology should be based on bad history.\u00a0 John Howard Yoder\u2019s reading of early Christian history is about as flawed as that of\u00a0 George Barna\u2019s in Pagan Christianity, <\/em>though in some different ways.<\/p>\nPart of the problem stems from the exegetical gymnastics required to maintain a Yoderian reading of texts like\u00a0 Romans 13 or\u00a0 1 Peter 2.13-14. \u00a0\u00a0 I think a good positive case can be made for Christians adopting a stance of personal pacifism based on the Sermon on the Mount, and texts like Romans 12. \u00a0 \u00a0 What I do not think is that one can also argue that God and Christians and the kingdom for that matter,\u00a0 has nothing to do with or should have nothing to do with establishing or sustaining governments or rulers or whole cultures or the like.\u00a0 It is possible to be a good citizen of the Kingdom of God and to some extent of some kingdoms in this world without selling one\u2019s soul for a mess of pottage.<\/p>\n
For me where the rubber meets the road is when one asks \u2018what roles can a Christian committed to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount play in governmental affairs?\u2019 \u00a0 I must and do draw the line on any role which potentially requires the use of violence or the taking of human life.\u00a0 I can\u2019t serve as a soldier in the military, but I could serve as a medic or perhaps a chaplain.\u00a0 I can\u2019t serve as the executioner for death row, but I could serve as the prison chaplain, and so on. \u00a0 I can serve in VISTA or the Peace Corps or work for the NIH,\u00a0 or the National Park Service etc. \u00a0 You catch my drift.<\/p>\n
In the end,\u00a0 I don\u2019t think the NT endorses either a radical rejection of human governance nor does it affirm a legitimized\u00a0 ethic of violence for Christians.\u00a0 This makes one\u2019s ethical decision-making more difficult when it comes to parsing out roles in society and roles in the church, than say it might be for an Amish person. \u00a0 What the Book of Acts\u00a0 and the letters of Paul suggest to me is a world transforming religion, and only to a much lesser extent a world negating religion. \u00a0 As one person says of the Christian missionaries\u2014 these are the persons who turned the world upside down,\u00a0 not the person who withdrew from the world and started a separate society.\u00a0 What that meant in the era of Constantine is that eventually the church won the battle with the Empire\u2014 not only did the Empire stop persecuting and make legal room for Christianity, it capitulated to various Christian views and values of things, including about the stopping of pagan sacrifices and coercion when it comes to a person\u2019s religion. \u00a0\u00a0 So back to historical evidence.<\/p>\n
Was it true that pacifism was the universal ethic of Christianity before the time of Constantine? \u00a0 On this issue one needs to consult the work of\u00a0 David G. Hunter \u201d A Decade of Rsearch on Early Christian Military Service,\u201d \u00a0 (Religious Study Review <\/em>18.2\u00a0 (1992), pp. 87-94. \u00a0 What the evidence shows is that there was at least one strain of early Christian pre-Constantinan tradition and thought that reflects the attempts of some Christians to justify participation in warfare, at least for what was deemed a just cause. \u00a0 While I certainly agree that the evidence from important Christian thinkers such as Athenagoras or Tertullian or Origen suggest that a dominant strain of Christian thought was pacifistic in the early church, it was not the only strain.<\/p>\n The truth is, we don\u2019t know whether Christians much served in the military before about the late second century and the time of Marcus Aurelius.\u00a0 The record is silent, and we must be wary of reading too much into silence.\u00a0 I do not agree with Leithart\u2019s rather lame attempt to find Christians in the military in the NT (based on texts like Acts 10-11\u00a0 see pp. 260-61). \u00a0 The Gospel texts are irrelevant because Jesus\u2019 encounters with centurions and the like are silent on the matter, one way or another, and Acts 10-11 presents us with the story of the conversion of a centurion at the point of conversion. We don\u2019t know what he did thereafter,\u00a0 but in any case considering the fact that he has a home and family and is living with them, it suggests he has already mustered out!! \u00a0\u00a0 There is for example the clear story of Christian soldiers in Marcus Aurelius\u2019 army praying for water for the troops a story related by both Tertullian and by Eusebius. \u00a0 Furthermore, there are some pre-Constantinian Christian tomb inscriptions of soldiers\u00a0 which prove not only the existence of such folk, but furthermore that the Christian community did not prohibit their bragging about it on their tombstones!\u00a0 (see Leithart pp. 261-62). \u00a0 Even Tertullian reluctantly must admit some Christians served in fortresses and military camps. \u00a0 One of the reasons for Tertullian\u2019s powerful rhetoric against serving in the military is likely his knowledge that some were definitely doing so, hence the need for the polemic and warning. \u00a0 One of the great historians of my era,\u00a0 Roland Bainton, is perfectly clear that we have clear evidence of Christians serving in the military in the West, in North Africa, and especially on the Eastern frontier where military action was more regularly required to maintain borders\u00a0 (see the full length study of Bainton\u2014 Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace). <\/em> I leave out of account the numerous numerous stories of Christian doing violence to each other, including killing each other in the first four centuries of Christian history. \u00a0 \u00a0 My point is simply this\u2014- the notion of\u00a0 a dramatic Fall precipitated by Constantine (or even his offspring) from aboriginal pacifistic universalism in the early Church is a myth.\u00a0 It is pleasant fiction, but nonetheless a fiction. \u00a0 Yoder\u2019s fall back position with a text like Romans 13 is that we are talking about a dagger for protection by the police perhaps the tax police.\u00a0 Even if that were true,\u00a0 Paul says they do not bear the dagger in vain, and he relates it to the matter of justice.<\/p>\n What Leithart shows quite ably is that after Constantine, there continued to be a strong strain of pacifistic thought in Christian writers\u2013 including writers such as Lactantius,\u00a0 Basil,\u00a0 Ambrose and others.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The summary of Leithart in Chapter 12 bears quoting (p. 278):\u00a0 \u201cWhere Yoder needs an unanimous consensus in the early church, the evidence is indeed small, divided and ambiguous. Where Yoder needs a uniform pro-Constantinian consensus after the fourth century, the evidence continues to be divided and ambiguous. There was certainly a shift., After Constantine, when the Roman emperors began to look to the church for ethical guidance, the church began to be more overt in making discriminating decisions that characterize the \u2018just war\u2019 tradition. But the shift is more plausibly a result of a change in the church\u2019s political position than a result of a fundamental theological modification.\u00a0 Some Christians after Constantine maintained the pacifist views expressed by some of the earlier fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n In short,\u00a0 Christians were divided early, middle, and on to today on this issue, and caricaturing Constantine or painting a picture of a universally pacifistic early church is not good history in either case. \u00a0 Of course we all like to have scapegoats,\u00a0 but when it comes to scapegoating Constantine, as we would say in N.C. and to mix my metaphors\u2014- \u2018that dog won\u2019t hunt\u2019\u00a0 as a historical thesis.\u00a0 Yoder is not Yoda when it comes to a wise and accurate reading of early Christian history. \u00a0 I do think the majority of Christians, and particularly a majority of the early theologians of the church were pacifists.\u00a0 It seems to have been the dominant view.\u00a0 But even church history is messy, and while the old joke is that where you find four rabbis you find five opinions,\u00a0 it could equally well be said that where you find four early Christians, you find at least more than one opinion on military service.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I begin this particular post,\u00a0 I need to come clean and say,\u00a0 I am in fact a pacifist, and have been all my adult life.\u00a0 But as a responsible historian, I do not think good theology should be based on bad history.\u00a0 John Howard Yoder\u2019s reading of early Christian history is about as flawed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n