Partially Settled Vagabonds

A Christian Pacifist?

Niebuhr has often been accused of being too much of one thing or another. Some call him too liberal, some say he was too conservative. Some say he was not a theologian, others write about his theology. The reason for this is that his position on issues is often very confusing, and seemingly contradictory.

So, it is no surprise that an essay entitled “Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist” is one of the more confusing essays to read. Niebuhr began his theological studies at Eden (in Missouri) and then later at Yale, with the decision to be a pacifist. However, the conflict of WWI left him disillusioned with pacifism, as did his time as a pastor to a small evangelical community in Detroit. He came to believe that the Christian church is not pacifist precisely for the reason that such a position renders the church voiceless in the world to which it is a witness of the Gospel of Christ.

And I think he’s right, despite the fact that my wife disagrees with me. However, it’s a tough pill to swallow, especially in light of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

Niebuhr lays out his argument in this essay in five points.

i) “Those who are not pacifists seek to prove that pacifism is a heresy; while the pacifists contend, or at least imply, that the Church’s failure to espouse pacifism unanimously can only be interpreted as apostasy [falling away from the faith], and must be attributed to its lack of courage or to its want of faith.”

Niebuhr goes on to say that it is not a non-pacifist position that is heretical, but that pacifism itself is heretical. (Now that’s pretty brazen!!!) However, he leaves room for the religious traditions of groups like the Mennonites who have historically held to a consistent position of pacifism (click here to read part of the Schleitheim Confession of the Anabaptist tradition dealing with violence). This room is left, though, because these groups have held to a posture of “Protestant sectarian perfectionism” by which they completely withdraw from discussions or actions that have any bearing on how the greater society of this world ought to function. By so doing, their pacifism is acceptable because it is not a partial sectarianism, but a completely imbued way of life in which they do not participate in any discussion about society’s on-goings.

However, the kind of pacifism that is heretical is “most modern forms of Christian pacifism” which are “[p]resumably inspired by the Christian gospel,” but “have really absorbed the Renaissance faith in the goodness of man” and “have rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin as an outmoded bit of pessimism” and “have reinterpreted the Cross so that it is made to stand for the absurd idea that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory over the world…”

ii) This causes problems for those of us who call ourselves Christians and seek to live out the love perfectionism of Christ’s teaching (especially evident in the Sermon on the Mount). Niebuhr is not unmindful of this problem and seeks to answer it by saying that “[i]t is very foolish to deny that the ethic of Jesus is an absolute and uncompromising ethic. It is…an ethic of “love universalism and love perfectionism.””

However, Niebuhr does not accept that the teachings of Christ can be immediately applicable to the modern questions of how nation-states (arising in the last 300 years) can live peacefully with one another. It is not enough to say to the Nazi, “if you strike me on the cheek, I will offer you my other one.” Furthermore, by so doing, we might very well be condemning (as the German “Christian” church did) millions to slaughter at the hands of the very embodiment of evil in Hitler.

Therefore, Niebuhr answers the paradox about Christ’s teaching and the role of the modern citizen by saying, “[t]hose of use who regard the ethic of Jesus as finally and ultimately normative, but as not immediately applicable to the task of securing justice in a sinful world, are very foolish if we try to reduce the ethic so that it will cover and justify our prudential and relative standards and strategies. To do this is to reduce the ethic to a new legalism. The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law. Every law and every standard which falls short of the law of love embodies contingent factors and makes concessions to the fact that sinful man must achieve tentative harmonies of life with life which are less than the best.”

iii) Thirdly, Niebuhr points out that reducing the Christian ethic to a platform of pacifism is to replace the God of our worship with an ideal that we worship instead. “If pacifists were less anxious to dilute the ethic of Christ to make it conform to their particular type of non-violent politics, and if they were less obsessed with the obvious contradiction between the ethic of Christ and the fact of war, they might have noticed that the injunction “resist not evil” is only part and parcel of a total ethic which we violate not only in wartime, but every day of our life, and that overt conflict is but a final and vivid revelation of the character of human existence.”

iv) Fourthly, Niebuhr calls the gospel of Christ more than just a simple appropriation of love. Instead, it is a gospel which seeks to deal with the reality that humans are sinful, or unloving, and called to love. For Niebuhr, there is no getting around the fact of sin, which will always relativize our efforts at total and secure peace. We should seek peace, but remember that even Peter denied Christ, and so do we. Therefore, the “gospel presents Christ as the pledge and revelation of God’s mercy which finds man in his rebellion and overcomes his sin.”

v) Finally, those of us who are not pacifists must also remember that war and sinfulness are not the final law of life. That law has been established by the life of Christ as fully-loving, and will be revealed in the end analysis as the law which is the love that stands over all of our temporal and self-righteous efforts to restore order to an orderless world.

“In its profoundest insights the Christian faith sees the whole of human history as involved in guilt and finds no release from guilt except in the grace of God. The Christian is freed by that grace to act in history; to give his devotion to the highest values he knows; to defend those citadels of civilization of which necessity and historic destiny have made him the defender; and he is persuaded by that grace to remember the ambiguity of even his best actions. If the providence of God does not enter the affairs of men to bring good out of evil, the evil in our good may easily destroy our most ambitious efforts and frustrate our highest hopes.”

So, is the Christian church pacifist? I don’t think it is, nor should it be. If it is, then we’ve already condemned the world with a judgment that doesn’t belong to us. We are to be stewards of this world, and that sometimes requires the tough reality of accepting that violent coercion may be the only way to secure the justice that is final only in Christ.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the church should blindly endorse every war on the assumption that the war is “right” or “just**.” As Karl Barth said, “A Church which knows its business well will, it is true, with a strong hand keep itself free from militarism; but it will also with a friendly gesture rebuff the attentions of pacifism. The earnestness of the command that we should be at peace lies in its capacity to illustrate the first commandment; it directs us, that is, to God. We must, therefore, recognize that the command that we should be at peace is no absolute command; it has no final accuracy. And so, because it is a broken command, it bears witness to the peace of the Coming World.”

**To see a list of the principles that constitute Just War Theory, click here. There are always discussions about whether the principles are outmoded, obsolete, or in need of modification. In fact, in light of 9/11, there has been a lengthy conversation about how the principles need to be modified to include questions about terrorism, because it is difficult to determine who the enemy is, and consequently difficult to wage war against specific persons.

posted by John and Mag @ 4:21 AM