This week, Preston Sprinkle and I engaged in a conversation about the Christian position of non-violence (see parts 1 and 2).
Preston is a guy who loves the Lord and wants to be true to His Word (as is evident in his book, Fight). His study of Scripture led him to abandon the position he once held on a Christian’s involvement in warfare. Now, he has moved toward the pacifist position.
I thought it would be interesting to provide a contrast to Preston’s position – to show how someone can move the other way, from embracing pacifism to a variation of the Just War theory.
John Stott the Pacifist
John Stott, perhaps the most important global leader in evangelicalism last century, was once a strong pacifist. He joined the Anglican Pacifist Society at the start of World War II, while he was training to enter the ministry.
Stott’s father, Arnold, was already disappointed in his son’s decision to enter the ministry, but he was devastated to hear about his pacifist views. In response, he promptly cut off any payment for John’s university expenses as long as the war was going on.
Roger Steer tells the story of how Stott wrote a nine-page letter to his father explaining the reasons for his decision:
First, was his sense of obedience to God’s call: ‘I have had a definite and irresistible call from God to serve him in the church.’ Second, there was service to his country: ‘If medicos are exempt for their services in dealing with disease after the war,’ he asked his father, ‘how much more should ordinands for their services in dealing with diseases of the spirit? The country is best served if its citizens are obeying God. I respect you for your service; will you not respect me for mine?’
The rupture in Stott’s relationship with his father was severe. Steer goes on:
For two years, Arnold hardly spoke to John. In the holidays, when John made to embrace his father, Arnold always turned away from him.
Stott and “Just War”
In later years, Stott’s continuing study of Scripture led him to believe that the Bible makes a distinction between killing and murder. In his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Stott wrote:
“Jesus was not prohibiting the administration of justice, but rather forbidding us to take the law into our own hands… The command of Jesus not to resist evil should not properly be used to justify either temperamental weakness or moral compromise or political anarchy or even total pacifism. Instead, what Jesus here demands of his followers is a personal attitude to evildoers which is prompted by mercy not justice, which renounces retaliation so completely as to risk further costly suffering, which is governed never by the desire to cause them harm but always by the determination to serve their highest good.”
Here is Stott’s summary of the “Just War” tradition as he described it in Issues Facing Christians Today:
The just war tradition is usually expressed through seven conditions that have to be met if a war can be just. These are:
- formal declaration
- last resort
- just cause
- right intention
- proportionate means
- non-combatant immunity
- reasonable expectation
Stott then reduces these seven conditions to three:
- Its cause must be righteous.
- Its means must be controlled
- Its outcome must be predictable.
From Scripture, Stott argues for a complementary interpretation of Romans 12 and 13:
Members of God’s new community can be both private individuals and state officials. In the former role we are never to take personal revenge or repay evil for evil, but rather we are to bless our persecutors (12:14), serve our enemies (12:20) and seek to overcome evil with good (12:21). In the latter role, however, if we are called by God to serve as police or prison officers or judges, we are God’s agents in the punishment of evil-doers. True “vengeance” and “wrath” belong to God, but one way in which he executes his judgment on evil-doers today is through the state. To “leave room for God’s wrath” (12:19) means to allow the state to be “an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” (13:4)…
There is nothing anomalous about Christians serving in the police force or the prison service, as politicians or magistrates or town councillors. Christians worship a God who is just and are, therefore, committed to the quest for justice. The Christian community should not stand aloof from the secular community, but should seek to penetrate it for Christ.
Though Stott believed in the legitimacy of war, he applied his biblical wisdom to areas that cut across Right and Left divisions in American politics. (For example, he did not believe the Iraq War met the seven conditions of just war.) He was known more for promoting peace than for advocating violent means:
God is a peacemaker. Jesus Christ is a peacemaker. So, if we want to be God’s children and Christ’s disciples, we must be peacemakers too.
