When I first started
this blog, I posted my “Précis,” a brief summary of my political beliefs which
I intended to defend in this venue. One of my points I listed was “I believe
that the world, in general, is a rough neighborhood, and that it is essential
for peace and prosperity in the world for the American military to be strong.
In fact, humanly speaking, the U.S. military has done more for peace and
prosperity in the world, by fighting and deterring bad guys, than any other
human institution.” Thus I think I made it clear that I don’t believe that the
Bible teaches pacifism. Just to clarify: By “pacifism” I mean the teaching that
all violence is intrinsically
immoral, and for Christian pacifists, that means that they think that violence
is sinful and cannot be justified. It’s sinful for a soldier to take up arms against
other soldiers. It’s sinful for a police officer to draw his weapon and fire it
on another human being. To do so would be incompatible with obedience to our
Savior.
To them, the circumstances don’t matter. It was
immoral for us to fight Hitler with force. It was immoral for us to threaten
the Soviet Union with military force during the Cold War. It doesn’t matter if
the criminal the police officer is about to shoot is in the process of shooting
school children. That’s what pacifism means.
The reason I’m
defining it like this is because people on the Left tend to be experts at bashing
straw-men. They say “I don’t believe in using force as a first resort. Violence
won’t solve our problems. I believe in using diplomacy.” That’s good to hear, since I heartily agree with them. I don’t
ever advocate using force as a first resort. I see violence as our last resort in dealing with bad actors. That’s not pacifism.
The caricature which
Leftists present of those on the Right is that we’re bloodthirsty, or that we
support the “Military Industrial Complex” which makes money off of war. “Another
country doesn’t like us? Bomb them! Another country has a government that we
don’t like? Invade them!” Their picture of the police is often that of
trigger-happy thugs who shoot at the first sign of trouble instead of trying to
reason it out with a suspect.
Now, there are people on the Right like that. With
a population of over 300 million, with a third or more identifying themselves
as conservatives, you can find an example of anything if you look hard enough. But that’s not what I believe,
and it’s certainly not an accurate portrait of any conservatives I’ve ever
known.
The difference between
us and pacifists on the Left is not a reluctance to use physical force. It’s
that we make a distinction between “bad” violence and “good” violence. A U.S. soldier
in World War Two who’s liberating a Death Camp: Good. A Nazi soldier who’s
firing on the U.S. soldier: Bad. Now, we might have a further debate about
whether a certain violent action is a wise idea; for example, there’s a
legitimate debate about whether we should’ve liberated Iraq, and if we did,
what was the best way to accomplish it. Should we have stayed as long as we
did? That’s a reasonable argument we can have.
I’ve planned for some
time to bring up the topic of pacifism and the Bible, but something acted as a
catalyst for this posting. A few months ago, I was waiting to have my car
picked up at an auto-repair place, and they happened to have the latest Christianity Today among their
magazines. I was intrigued by its cover, which blurbed about an article within
which discussed Dr. Preston Sprinkle’s book Fight:
A Christian Case For Non-Violence.
I read the article,
which was pretty short, but which presented a positive review of his book and
outlook. Basically, the author of the article was trying to make the case that
the Right’s stereotypical view of pacifists as “wimps” was very mistaken, at
least in the case of Dr. Sprinkle. He’s very well-built, he likes his guns
(which he only fires on animals and inanimate targets), and he even likes to
watch professional UFC fighters
on TV (which he admits in his book is inconsistent with his
theology/philosophy). The article tries to make the case that although he’s a
pacifist, he’s not a coward. And after reading his book, I agree.
The question—for me—is
not whether or not Liberals or Leftists are cowards or effeminate or wimps. The
question that we’re going to examine is whether or not pacifism is consistent
with Scripture. Are non-pacifists like me being disobedient to our
Savior? Are we correct in our interpretation of the Bible, or is the pacifist?
So I bought and read
the book on Amazon. To be completely fair, I didn’t read the entire
thing: He has a chapter in which he tries to make the case that the post-Apostolic Church fathers (like Origen and Justin
Martyr) agree with his position. I didn’t read it because, quite frankly, it’s
really irrelevant to the question. I agree with Augustine on a lot of things,
but neither he nor any other mere man is my final authority. The Scriptures
are, and I don’t take the fathers as even the final authority on the
Scriptures. And if we’re going to appeal to human interpreters of Scripture, he’d
have to exclude some pretty “big names” of the Protestant Reformation, such as
Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli, and—to my knowledge—most if not all of the Puritan
Reformers. He also parts ways with some pretty big "names" in modern Evangelicalism (which he claims are heavy influences on him), like John Piper, John MacArthur, and R. C. Sproul.
But where he presents
his case from Scripture, I read carefully and prayerfully. I looked at his
arguments and made notes. I then contacted him via email and asked him some
further questions. By examining and then answering the case he makes, I’ll be
pretty much stating my entire case from the Bible against pacifism. And that’s what the next few postings will be
about.
A minor spoiler alert:
Sprinkle presents just about as good a case for his position as I could
imagine. It was a much better case than I thought anyone could muster. With a few
minor exceptions, he doesn’t resort to ad hominem or straw-man arguments. He
takes all of Scripture seriously,
which raises him head and shoulders above the Red-Letter Christian
movement. And he actually deals with arguments against his position, which I
find really admirable. And I actually found myself agreeing with him a lot more
than I anticipated.
Not that he actually
convinced me that pacifism is the way to go, but he did an excellent job of
trying.
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