Non-Resistance

I actually think that traditional Mennonite theology is that Christians who are soldiers, or people generally who take a life are in fact seriously sinning against God. Mennonites wouldn't have rather died than take a life or defend even their own if they didn't think it was a grave sin.

I don't quite see it that way. I think that there are some things that God didn't expressly forbid, not because they are not wrong, but because of the hardness of our heart, like divorce. I don't think you can look at the Old Testament example of God ordering the Israelites to war and then using that as an example of how we are to behave or as a condoning of war.

God gives a lot of orders in the Old Testament and then goes on to contradict His very own orders. Like He gives the Israelites a very complicated Law, and then goes on in the prophets to insist that He doesn't really want their sacrifices - He wants mercy. That the only sacrifices He requires is is broken and contrite spirit. 'Vengance is mine, saith the Lord.' It is not our right, in my understanding of the entirity of the Bible, Old and New together, to take a life, although God allowed it, as He allowed divorce - even though even in the Old Testament, He says, I hate divorce.

He gives them a list of unclean foods, but then later Peter (or is it Paul?) is given a vision of unclean foods and is told to eat. And in this vision, God says that nothing that he has made is unclean. God tells people to eat with washed hands, and then, in the person of Jesus, He tells us that to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a person - that what defiles a person comes from a contrary heart.

We are told that Jesus was our example of a perfect human man. Not just God made flesh, but that He suffered all the temptations that are common to us and that He still prevailed and did not sin. So when we don't understand what the Bible is telling us, we can still look to Jesus' life and see what He did. He did not take up a sword. He opposed the death penalty in the example given us in how he handled the case of the woman taken in adultery. He showed us how He expects us to follow Him in this example.

He showed us again at Golgotha, when Peter took the sword and cut off the ear of one of the arresting men. Jesus healed the man and told Peter to put away His sword and said that all who live by the sword, will die by the sword. Christ's arrest was a political move, with religious overtones, in the accusation of blasphemy. But it was His political complication that scared them, not His 'blasphemy.' That was the story for the people, one which ordinary religious people would find an acceptable reason for an execution.

When the Roman soldier came to Christ, what Christ admired was that he, a soldier, understood the concept of obeying unquestioningly an order from a superior. The soldier understood, not Jewish theology or perhaps who it was in whose presence he stood - but he understood enough to know that Jesus was someone special - and he responded to Him as a soldier responds to a superior officer.

That is what Jesus was referring to when He said that He had not found so great a faith in all Israel. Jesus was pretty laid back. He judged people on what they had inside them, not on what they didn't have or couldn't know. He left them room to grow. The Jews who were familiar with the scriptures and the prophecies, who should have recognized their Lord, didn't. But this pagan soldier did.

He did not say to him to put away his sword, not because the soldier was right, but because Jesus was about faith. And at that point Jesus' primary ministry was to the Jews, not to the Gentiles. And the soldier, I like to think, grew in his faith because surely he must forever after have been haunted by the man from Galilee, who healed his daughter.

No person comes to a full-fledged and mature faith overnight and it is wrong to expect that. It is wrong to criticize a person who is growing in his understanding of who Jesus is because if one does so, one could totally discourage that person in his journey. This is where 'when I was a child, I thought as a child but when I became a man, I put away childish things' comes in.

Jesus did not give us a list of commandments like Moses gave the Israelites. Moses gave an unruly desert people in a harsh climate, a set of rules, that served to forge them into a people, and to give them self-discipline, and a Law intended to make sure that they at least served the minimum standards of moral behaviour.

Armies do that today in training so that each person knows clearly what is expected of him. That is the way we raise children - by giving them clear guidelines. As they grow older, we entrust them with more responsibilities and we expect them to think about the consequences of things that they do or don't do. In raising children, we do not anticipate every single situation that they will come across in their lives. We really give them an outline from which they are to infer what is proper behaviour.

Paul, in writing about his celibacy, says that he would rather that all men were like him and goes on to give his reasons for saying this. He says that a single person is free to devote his entire life to the cause of the Lord without being distracted by the needs of a family. Paul says that his way of life is a better choice than marriage. This does not mean that marriage is a sin.

It is in that way that I see Christian pacifism - as a better way. It is better to be a pacifist. But that this does not mean, in my understanding, that a Christian solider is a sinner. Here is a good link on non-resistance and it's place in Christian history.

Layla