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From: hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Easter and the Arms Race
Message-ID: <1163@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 10-Apr-85 04:51:55 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.1163
Posted: Wed Apr 10 04:51:55 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Apr-85 01:37:41 EST
References: <135@yetti.UUCP>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 82

In my first response to this I tried to give a brief historical review
of Christian attitudes towards war.  Now I would like to mention a couple
of specific traditions in this area.

First, it seems clear to me that pacifism is the most obvious interpretation
of the New Testament.  Turn the other cheek.  Love your enemy.  It is easy
to support non-violence from the NT.  And indeed there are certainly
Christians who take all of this seriously.  It is my impression that they
are a minority.  But they do interesting work.  There have even been some
discussions of what a non-violent defense would look like.  Apparently it
was tried against the Nazi's in WWII in one place, with some success.
However I have only seen references to this.  I haven't read any details.
(Does anyone know more detail?)  I am not referring to people who let the
Nazis roll over them.  I am talking about a concerted attempt to meet them
with love, and to resist their evil nonviolently.  This is clearly in the
tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  If you take this position with
ultimate seriousness, you would say that we should allow the Russians to
conquer us and then resist nonviolently. (If indeed they would do so -- the
other hope is that it takes two to make a conflict, and if we disarmed, the
Russians would in fact not conquer us.)  The hope is that it would result in
a real victory, i.e. turning evil into good.  This is something that we
can't hope for using violent methods.

I think many people are simply afraid that this is not "practical".  There
is a concern that successful non-violence might require an almost unanimous
commitment by the victims.  Some people also feel that it requires a certain
basic level of humanity on the part of the aggressors.  One often hears the
comment that Gandhi's approach worked because he was dealing with the
British, but that if he had tried it against the Nazis, his group would have
gotten blown away.  However I believe there is a growing realization that
non-violence is a basic Christian position, and even if we can't use it
immediately to solve the arms race, we should be trying to expand the sphere
in which we can apply it.

The mainline Protestant tradition takes a somewhat different approach.
While it is admitted that individuals must turn the other cheek, this may
not apply to officials.  The idea is that there are certain offices what are
ordained by God, such as parent and magistrate.  I don't have here a full
exposition of the Biblical authority behind this, but 1 Pet 2:13-14 and in
some indirect sense Mark 12:17 testify to the legitimacy of the magistrate's
authority.  (Jesus' cleansing of the temple, although not directly relevant
here, can also be cited as justification of the use of force by an
authorized person.) When this is combined with the definite theocratic
ideals of the OT, it is easy to come up with the idea that magistrates are
appointed by God to maintain order.  One of the responsibilities of the
ruler is asserted to be protecting innocent people from being harmed by
aggressors.  So while it might not be acceptable for you to defend yourself,
it is acceptable to defend someone else, particularly when you are acting as
a magistrate.  This concept of the magistrate shows up in both Lutheran and
Reformed theology.  As a typical example, what do you do if your ruler is a
tyrant?  Several of the Reformers would answer that the ruler is ordained by
God, so rebellion is not allowable, at least not when you are acting as a
private person.  However it is the duty of the lesser magistrates to curb
tyranny around them.  So effectively you could still have a revolution, but
it would have to be carried out by some responsible authority.  (There is
something to be said for this historically, by the way.  Revolutions have a
tendency to get out of hand and make things worse.  One reason why the
American revolution seems to have resulted in less chaos than the French one
is because in America what really happened is that the colonial governments
continued to function.  The lesser magistrates simply defended the people
against the greater ones.  We didn't have a total overthrow of the basic
governmental structure.)  

The effect of this point of view is to bifurcate ethics, so that Jesus'
ideals apply only between individuals.  When dealing with governmental
policy, the controlling principle becomes protecting your citizens using the
sword which God has put in your hand.  This seems to have been the
dominant position in the mainstream of the Reformation.  (As I mentioned
before, the Left Wing was pacifist.)

It is clear that there is still an ambivalence in Christianity about the
role of the government and power.  On the one hand, much of the NT and parts
of the OT (particularly the Psalms) take it for granted that the people with
power will always be evil and God's people will always be persecuted.  It is
very easy to derive an ethic of non-power from this.  Indeed some people
question whether we should be thinking of accomplishing goals at all.  The
ultimate in non-power is that we should simply do good, and trust to God to
make things come out right.  On the other hand, there is a strong theocratic
ideal.  Our goal is to bring God's kingdom about on earth.  The Puritans
were one of the stronger representatives of this view.  Their ideas were
quite influential in the early days of the U.S., and continue to be now.
I confess that I see attractions to both of these positions.