A lawyer reflects on how his Christian community interacts with government.
Christian Pacifism Is Not Liberal Pacifism
Such a Christian pacifism does not bless government use of lethal force or support just war theory as Catholic or Magisterial Protestant Christians usually have. Neither, though, is it the same as liberal pacifism, which expects the state to be nonviolent – a contradiction in terms. Liberal pacifism is based on an idealistic concept of human goodness and progress rather than a clear reckoning with the reality of sin and evil in an unredeemed world. In opposing these, our approach – because we understand it to be Christ’s – is to reject the use of the sword of state power in favor of the weapons of spiritual warfare, in the confidence that God’s will must prevail in history. Within the church, these weapons are mutual commitment and admonition; in the public realm, they are prayer, critique of the social order, civil disobedience for the sake of conscience, exile, and even martyrdom.
Thus instead of grasping for political control, the church advocates within the state for the most just, least violent action possible. There is no dualism in this outlook – there is not a different standard of justice for the church and the secular world. For example, the church calls on the state to pursue peace to the greatest possible degree, refraining from interventionist wars or capital punishment, though without expecting it to forswear all force; it urges it to care for the poor, the orphan, and the stranger, while acknowledging that the state cannot eliminate every inequity. In such ways, we seek to promote the practical good in both as far as circumstances allow, never losing focus on our most important calling: to follow Christ.
Sometimes the church can promote Christ’s standards within the political sphere through ideas expressed in the terms of secular humanism. Ideas like liberty, equality, democracy, and human rights ring true to our contemporaries because they point, albeit imperfectly, to truths about the human condition; they gesture to the justice of the kingdom. They can, therefore, be useful as the church seeks to critique the world, including abuses of state power.
But as we use such terms, we must not be enchanted by them. The fullness of justice and peace will not be achieved by the progress of a worldly empire, however enlightened, but by the calling together of a new people, which is the church of Christ – and ultimately, by the renewal of all humanity when he comes again in glory. In the meantime, we must not put our trust in the vision of a utopian state, whether of the left or of the right, or in reviving an imagined golden Christendom of the past. [1]
Exerpt from article originally published at Plough, used with permission
For the history of (and an example of) utopian progressivist thought in the United States, see Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press, 1999).