As Mark van Steenwyk and I have prepared to teach both a Masters and a DMin version of our “Resources for Radical Living” course this coming winter, we have reconfigured the course significantly. Among the changes will be the figures and movements we deal with under the heading of “the prophetic life.” There we hope to deal with two public issues that continue to challenge Christians today: the problem of the poor and the problem of war.
Thus it is with interest that I read today George Weigel insisting that for some time now, following the late great Luther scholar Roland Bainton, we have been “Getting History Wrong on Just War”.
Weigel summarizes Bainton’s position, which he understands to be highly influential today, as follows:
According to Bainton, there are “three Christian positions with regard to war,” which evolved in “chronological sequence, moving from pacifism to the just war to the Crusade.” This evolution, Bainton suggested, was really a devolution or deterioration, reflecting an abandonment of primitive Christian purity and an untoward alliance with the state: after Constantine, the Church cut itself off from the moral purity of the evangelical counsels and the Sermon on the Mount and began, in Stanley Hauerwas’s memorable phrase, to “do ethics for Caesar.” A truly reformed Christianity—a Christianity true to its origins and to its Founder—is thus, necessarily, a Christianity that embraces pacifism.
Weigel observes that Bainton’s schema is still in force for many, and that therefore “many Catholics who hold to some version of the just-war tradition now smuggle into it a pacifist premise: the just-war tradition, they argue, begins with a ‘presumption against war,’ a ‘presumption’ that goes far beyond the obvious moral truism that nonviolent problem-solving is preferable to problem-solving through war.”
The problem, says Weigel, is that Bainton’s schema has now been revealed as “simplistic and inaccurate”:
In an important article in the spring 2010 issue of Logos, the quarterly published by the Catholic Studies Program of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., theologian J. Daryl Charles argues that Bainton got it wrong, by failing to give an “accurate accounting of the complexity and diversity of pre-Constantinian Christian attitudes toward the military.” Drawing on the last half-century of historical study of the early Church, Charles reminds us that, while there were indeed early Christian pacifists who took their moral cues for thinking about war and peace from the Sermon on the Mount, there were also Christians in Roman military service long before to the Constantinian settlement in the early fourth century.
Moreover, following the research of James Turner Johnson, Charles suggests that whatever difficulties military service posed for Christians in, say, the second century A.D., had to do with state-enforced idolatry rather than with soldiering per se. The early Church, as Charles puts it, lived with “divergent strands of thinking” on war and peace and the ethics of Christian participation in the military, a plurality of thought that “does not require” the assumption of a “universal or uniform conviction” that pacifism was the only imaginable Christian position, on the Bainton schema. Things were more complicated—and more interesting—than that.
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 
Could it be that the explicit pacifists were outsiders trying to impose a uniform rule of faith on a complex network of believers that largely dealt with the problem via their local rules of faith?
I don’t see why there’d need to be overarching formal statements of what would be generally taken for granted that we all serve earthly masters in potentially ethically-compromising manners and need to work out our salvations (together) with fear and trembling…
dlw
I think that Weigel is overstating the case. There are early Christian texts saying that war is wrong because it involves killing–it wasn’t just idolatry. Origen responds to the objection that if Christians took over the empire the empire wouldn’t be able to defend itself by saying that if the empire became Christian the barbarians would too, so it wouldn’t be a problem. Not very convincing, but clearly implying that he expected a Christian empire would be pacifist.
Certainly there were Christians in the army. There were Christians who did a lot of other things that Christian leaders said they shouldn’t do. Two of the three early Christian writers I can think of who explicitly take a pacifist stance (Tertullian and Hippolytus; the third is Origen) were rigorists, and there’s good reason to think that not everyone agreed with them on a lot of issues. But I have yet to see _any_ pre-Constantinian Christian text that explicitly says Christians _may_ serve in the military. The arguments against early Christian pacifism are based on silence (J. Daryl Charles argues, for instance, that Pliny would have mentioned Christian refusal to serve: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=DqCrSXNfwCYC&pg=PA35#v=onepage&q&f=false) and on the evidence that many people disregarded the teaching if it existed.
I reckon this ambiguity is also displayed with the inclusion of John the Baptist’s suggestion to Roman soldiers that they adopt professional ethics in their soldiering, rather than resign their posts.
There is is a diff between preaching redemption thru violence and including professionalism in the administration of state-based violence as a way of following Christ, albeit not one without significant risks…
dlw
Though there were soldiers in the Roman army, the teaching of church was largely of not being part of it. There were also no teachings that joining the army was alright.
I guess this also gets at the partial ambiguity as to what constitutes the early church. I have little doubt that in the 2nd and 3rd century, there developed more uniformity of Christian views on such questions, as there also developed greater levels of hierarchy among Christians.
What’s at issue is whether there shd be a uniform praxy/teaching on the matter. Or, perhaps, the more important question is to rectify past wrongs that have permitted the use of Christian imagery to justify wars of aggression or what-not, well removed from the notion of a just war.
dlw
I know you’re not an early Church historian, but I’m wondering how you see the issue. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there were diverse views on the matter before Constantine. I don’t think the argument should hinge on the lazy “first dibs” argument folks tend to use…that the earliest doctrine(s) are necessarily truer than later “developments”. Nevertheless, I WOULD be surprised to learn if pacifism wasn’t the dominant view in the first and second centuries of the Church.