Is Pacifism an Option?
Christ-followers and Violence
What position should Christ-followers hold with regard to the use of violence in conflict resolution? This question has been contested throughout the history of the church. Passages in the Sermon on the Mount, including the injunctions not to resist evil (e.g., Matt 5:38–39), have led many to conclude that violence isn’t an acceptable instrument for Christ-followers. Yet we read in the Old Testament how God commanded his people to wage war against certain enemies.
What’s a Christian to do? Should we set aside the apparent non-violence of Jesus? Or does Jesus model what faithful engagement with evil and violence looks like?
Note well: This essay is an adaption of an article by my friend and former colleague at Asbury Theological Seminary, Charles E. (Chuck) Gutenson: “Pacifism,” in Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, gen. ed. Joel B. Green (Baker Academic, 2011). While somewhat abbreviated, it follows much of the structure and substance of the original.
What Pacifism Is and Isn’t
At the outset, it’s important to address some potential points of confusion.
Pacifism Isn’t Just One Position. Pacifism refers to a constellation of related but distinct commitments, all of which resist the use of violence while differing in their reasoning, scope, and strategies. Some two dozen forms of religious pacifism have been championed, ranging from absolute non-resistance to principled non-violent activism. Failing to appreciate this variety leads to sometimes significant misrepresentation.
Pacifism Isn’t Passivism. The most common caricature is the conflation of pacifism with passivism. The latter imagines the pacifist as standing idly by while evil runs its course. However, the pacifist’s position is not the absence of response to evil, but the rejection of violence as a means of resolving conflict. It leaves open—even encourages—a generous assortment of creative, courageous, non-violent alternatives.
Pacifism and Just War Theory Are Not Polar Opposites. It’s easy to locate pacifism at one end of a spectrum, just war theory at the other. However, in reality, these two positions share common ground. Both insist on limits for the use of violence even if they disagree on where and how strictly those limits apply. In other words, both pacifism and just war reasoning represent attempts to subject violence to moral judgment rather than allowing it to run unchecked.
The Historical Record
The historical evidence for the early church is striking. Prior to the close of the second century, the church was overwhelmingly pacifist. In fact, records show that some Christ-followers were martyred for their refusal to take up arms. After 200 there was some movement, but the church remained predominantly pacifist until the reign of Emperor Constantine (306–337). Once Christ-followers gained an earthly overlord sympathetic to their movement, together with access to the corridors of imperial power, the calculus changed. A new openness to deploying violence in defense of the state emerged among Christ-followers. Since the Constantinian shift, debate has continued on whether it represented a legitimate (providential?) development or a fundamental betrayal of the church’s calling to embody the peaceable way of Jesus.
The Biblical Arc
Early portions of the Old Testament bear witness to positions that don’t map easily onto the commitments of pacifists today. Is a coherent and normative biblical hermeneutic that leads to non-violence possible? Vernard Eller (1927–2007) addressed this problematic by urging that Scripture tells the story of God’s progressively weaning God’s people away from violence—a process that reached its telos in Jesus, who instructed his followers to embrace the non-violence he taught and modeled. Although this isn’t the only way to hold Old and New Testaments together on this question, it is a creative one that invites serious reflection.
Consider how Eller’s proposal works with reference to a key passage or two. In Gen 10, we encounter Nimrod. He is popularly represented as a mighty warrior before the Lord, with some imagining that God approved or was perhaps indifferent to Nimrod’s violent proclivities. But Eller, following Jacques Ellul, reads the passage differently. He identifies Nimrod as a violent man whose life God monitors closely—thus problematizing violence rather than endorsing it. On this reading, Nimrod isn’t the warrior whom God favors but the one who, precisely because of his propensity for violence, requires special divine scrutiny.
Another instructive passage is the lex talionis: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Read in isolation, this text appears to sanction violent retaliation. Read in its context, though, it limits violence. In the ancient world, injury to one clan member might be answered with retribution against an entire clan. The “eye for an eye” principle constrains this spiral. Repayment may not exceed original injury: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exod 21:23–25 Common English Bible). For Eller, then, God is moving God’s people, step by incremental step, away from unrestrained violence.
Eller traces a progression of moves: God limits the scale of retaliation, then restricts the authorization for war (i.e., war is permissible only when God commands it), then permits war only on terms that demonstrate that it’s God, not God’s people, who fights (e.g., Judg 7). The overall direction is clear, with the crucial transition coming in the later prophets, especially Isa 53. There we read that the Suffering Servant overcomes evil not by matching it in kind but by allowing evil to exhaust itself against him, absorbing it without retaliation.
Of the various strands available to him in the scriptural tradition, Jesus takes up this last one. He models himself on the Suffering Servant who overcomes evil through suffering. As 1 Peter explains, “He committed no sin, nor did he ever speak in ways meant to deceive. When he was insulted, he did not reply with insults. When he suffered, he did not threaten revenge. Instead, he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly” (1 Pet 2:22–23 Common English Bible). This is no coincidence. When Jesus faced the full violence of Roman imperial power, the revolutionary option of armed resistance was a live alternative. Jesus refused it. So the cross demonstrates definitively what God’s response to violence looks like. Jesus embodies the way of peace to the point of death.
Eller’s arc thus reaches its culmination in the cross of Jesus.
What, Then, of Non-Violence?
If God calls God’s people to non-violence, the church must urgently develop, model, and advocate for alternative means of engaging evil.
The pacifist must honestly confront how evil is to be addressed in practice. The most significant pacifist voices of the twentieth century—Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.—did not envision withdrawal from public responsibility. Both believed that the deployment of police power within civil society is a legitimate response to criminality. And neither considered this position as inconsistent with their pacifist commitments. Again, then, non-violence isn’t inaction. It’s a rigorous, demanding, and creative discipline for engaging the structures of injustice without replicating their violence.
Both Gandhi and King also demonstrated the transformative power of non-violent resistance at the societal level. Their movements found powerful symbolic and strategic ways to expose oppression and call for justice, while consistently refusing to retaliate in kind when they and their followers were subjected to abuse.
The questions for Christ-followers is whether and how this ethic might permeate extraordinary moments of political resistance and the ordinary texture of daily life. How might we handle conflict? How might we engage social injustice? How might we resist the temptation to reach for power as a first resort?
Christian pacifists have often pointed out that societies invest enormous resources in the development of military capacity while investing little in the development of non-violent strategies for conflict resolution. This disparity isn’t inevitable, but reflects choices about what we regard as right and realistic. If embodying faith in Jesus requires something like pacifist commitments, then the resources currently devoted to military capacity represent much more than a political or economic choice. It’s a profoundly theological one.
Whether one concludes that pacifism must be normative for all Christ-followers, pacifist arguments and their appeal to Scripture invite and deserve serious engagement. And, clearly, Christ-followers have unfinished business when it comes to developing what it looks like on the ground to be, as Jesus called his followers to be, peacemakers.
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Vernard Eller, War and Peace: From Genesis to Revelation (Wipf and Stock, 2003). Eller traces the redemptive-historical movement from Genesis to the cross, arguing that the biblical narrative as a whole progressively moves God’s people away from violence.
Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). Hauerwas offers the most influential constructive theological account of Christian non-violence in recent decades. Grounded in virtue ethics and ecclesiology, this book urges that the church’s primary political task is to be a community whose life together embodies the peace of Christ.
Lisa Sowle Cahill, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War, and Peacebuilding (Fortress, 2019). Cahill traces Christian thinking on war and peace from Jesus through Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformers, and key modern figures, then argues for a peacebuilding approach that takes non-violent social transformation as the church’s primary calling.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Non-Violence: A Third Way (Augsburg Fortress, 2003). This is a concise and illuminating study of Jesus’s directive to “turn the other cheek,” as well as related sayings. Wink shows that Jesus proposes neither passive submission nor violent resistance, but a creative third way that unmasks the structures of domination while refusing to replicate their logic.
André Trocmé, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution (Orbis Books, 2004). Written by a French pastor whose village famously sheltered Jewish refugees during World War II, this book argues that Jesus’s proclamation of God’s royal rule was a concrete social and economic movement rooted in the Jubilee traditions of Israel’s Scripture—and that non-violence is intrinsic to that movement.
Excellent summary, thanks for this. And for NOT ignoring this very current ethical delimna.
I appreciate the book recommendations.