Pacifism
Hello Friends,
A few nights ago, at a friend’s birthday party, the topic of pacifism came up. (I introduce it in this manner so you’ll understand that I’m one of those fun guys who ruins birthday parties with philosophical discussions.) I find pacifism, and especially Christian pacifism, a gripping and fascinating subject for a few reasons: it seems incredibly counter-intuitive, absurdly demanding, calls for a radical upheaval of traditional political thinking, and is possibly true.
There are many different kinds of pacifism: some versions only hold that wars are morally impermissible, but violence in self-defense is OK. Some forms exclude the police-force as a viable career choice, and others don’t. I am most interested in forms of Christian pacifism that forbid all violence for the reasons stated above.
Without fail, the first objection I hear to this hard-line pacifism goes something like this: “But what if someone attacked you? Or if they harmed someone you loved? What would you do?” The thrust of this objection is that some situations require one to respond in violence, and any ethical position which says otherwise should be rejected.
For my part, I think this objection is not without merit. It’s pretty common in contemporary ethics to present a case, either actual or hypothetical, which elicits an intuition opposed to the conclusion that a certain ethical stance must defend. For example, Robert Nozick argued against hedonism (the view that pleasure is the only intrinsic good, and all actions should overall maximize it) with the example of The Experience Machine, a machine which would simulate any experience people chose. If hedonism were true, then Nozick thought that we should all plug into the machine. But since we shouldn’t live all our lives inside a machine which gives us fabricated (but pleasurable) experiences, hedonism is false.
The “but what if” objection to pacifism has the same structure. It also has a perhaps significant advantage over The Experience Machine objection to hedonism: the situations mentioned really do exist. One doesn’t have to postulate hypothetical mechanism in order for the objection to get off the ground; one needs only to point to the daily newspaper for examples of people who are confronted with terrifying violence.
However, I’m not sure how strong of an objection this is against Christian pacifism, which explicitly values sacrificial love. Perhaps in certain situations acting in violence would save one from harm and even death, but Christians follow Jesus, who gave up his life through pain and suffering. Christian pacifism (based on imitating Jesus, especially through his example on the cross), may not be so averse to the demanding consequences of the “but what if” scenarios.
What do you guys think? How good of an objection is this? If you’re not a pacifist, is this the reason why? If you are a pacifist (fight, fight, Mennonite!), how would you respond?
- Toph
I am unsure what the question is. Are you asking if all Christians should be pacifists?
I can’t see if anyone who’s commented above me has brought this up, but I always refer back to Jesus’s instructions to people he healed, when they were living sinful lives. He always told them to go and sin no more, but there was no instruction given to any of the military members he met to not continue their jobs, just not to misuse their power to extort money.
That, and the example of God’s instructions in the Old Testament seem to make it rather clear that he does believe his children should fight for just causes.
Like most things in life I don’t think we can paint the issue of pacifism/violence with a broad brush. Any time someone brings this up I think of the story of Jesus making a whip and running the merchants out of the temple. That seems like “violent” behavior if you want to term it such.
I don’t know what other people consider violence, in my mind I’ve always thought of that term to have traits of aggression and attacking. If you were defending someone else I’m not sure I would call that violence.
What interests me is how the issue of violence relates to sports, be it combat sports like boxing or more mainstream sports like football and hockey. The same goes for movie and video game violence. What are we as Christians supposed to do/think about that?
Hi Jasmine,
My question is not so much whether all Christians should be pacifists, but whether what I call the “But What If” objection is a good one. I hear that objection more often than biblical reasons, but I’m not sure it’s a very good objection. I also think the question of biblical reasons for or against pacifism is interesting. For my part, I don’t find arguments from silence very compelling. Are you referring to Matthew 8 and Luke 7, where Jesus heals a centurion’s servant? While it’s true that Jesus doesn’t tell him to leave the military, it’s not clear to me that Jesus should be promoting pacifism here. The passage is about the faith of the centurion, and I don’t think pacifists are committed to holding that every biblical mention of the military must teach pacifism.
What do you think?
This brings to mind the words “those who live by the sword, die by the sword”, part of Jesus’ explicit instructions to Peter to not use violence to defend him against the Roman soldiers.
There are many ways you can approach this issue. The “but what if”, no matter how plausible, is still actually hypothetical. It can be more or less plausible, but it is still hypothetical. I can tell you what I would like to do, aspire to do, hope that I would do….but I can’t actually give you a true (and by that I mean a record of a past event) answer.
So when faced with these types of hypothetical questions, I can only shape an answer that I hope is congruent with the person and character of Christ.
1)The whip in the temple example is highly problematic to me because, fortunately or unfortunately, it is Jesus carrying the whip – he is not an ordinary guy. Surely there is some sort of righteous anger (the real deal) that I could only dream of possessing. I am not both divine and human. That example doesn’t seem concrete to me then. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was an anomaly (Jesus was angry in other places too), but taking the whole of Jesus’ life and ministry, it seems short-sighted to rest your justification for violence on that one example.
2) Pointing out that there was killing-a-plenty in the old testament just doesn’t hold water if you approach the subject with any sort of sense of covenant theology. From a Christian perspective, our hope for final judgment is surely eschatological, no? That is, shaped by the Christian hope in eternity. Even a cursory understanding of ancient Israelite concepts of life, death, and sheol, will demonstrate that the ancient hope for vindication from God rested in the present life, not in an afterlife (ancient Israelite concepts of afterlife did not comprehend final judgment, and even when they do point to it, they are highly incomplete). Violence and killing fit into ancient cultures much differently then they do today in the 21st century.
Where I side with pacifists for sure is on the subject of killing. Death is the great leveling field, is it not? All people die; rich & poor, elite & bourgeois, white & black, religious & irreligious etc. If you believe that there is any human agency in the process, then there is ALWAYS a choice to act or not to act, to strike or not to strike, to kill or not to kill. So, in exercising my free agency, I choose not to kill. I choose not to be accountable for expediting someone else to eternity and final judgment. Who am I to do that? “Oh, but that person is beyond redemption”……really? What were Jesus miracles about? Why did Christ restore the ear to the servant of Caiaphas? The point of every miracle is to restore those things corrupted to the way they were meant to be. The signs of God’s Kingdom were lepers walking, blind seeing, prisoners set free, etc. Jesus fulfilled all of these prophecies.
A Christian view of final judgment as eschatological makes it very difficult to justify me expediting someone else to final judgment when I believe all things are redeemable.
Great topic to reply to on Gandhi’s birthday! As a Mennonite, I find this whole topic extremely fascinating, but I don’t think I’ll fight anybody over it. ;)
I think one of the problems with the “But what if” example is that it leaves no room for something other than violence. The choice in this situation is between violence and passivity. In other words, choosing peace is fine when there is no potential harm, but in the end, violence still wins. Either you harm someone or someone else is harmed. Pacifism (not passivity) is trying to open up a third space, the possibility that something else can happen and that violence does not have to be the ultimate answer. In this situation, responding in non-violence is a way of confronting the attacker with his or her own humanity and providing a third way out of the sitution. All in the situation can find redemption through self-sacrifice. Even if someone gets hurt, the pacifist still argues that the heart of the perpetrator will or can be changed through a different encounter than the one they were expecting. Instead of encountering violence and automatically responding in kind, the attacker encounters love and must make a choice. This is the principle of suffering injustice rather than causing others to suffer that we believe Jesus demonstrated throughout his life and ultimately in his death.
Check out Christian Peacemaker Teams for more info on people who live this out everyday @ cpt.org. They are amazing!
Hey Colin, thanks for the response. I agree that Jesus with a whip overturning tables, and the OT wars are not satisfactory responses. It would seem that Jesus has different moral obligations to people than we do, and it’s not even clear that Jesus was acting violently. (He turns over tables, but does He actually harm anyone?) I’d never considered the (non)eschatological dimension of the OT wars. Do you think the view of double-predestination would make it easier for people to justify killing? Even if we aren’t the ones who decide who is irredeemable, we might have a pretty good guess in that scenario. (I don’t believe in double predestination, but I wonder if it’s that line of thinking that makes killing easier to justify.)
Anna, I think it’s really important to remember that pacifism is not the same as passivity, and sometimes the But What If objector confuses the two. And I love hearing testimonies of non-violent actions defusing violence-warranting situations. But I think the objector can just restate the situation so there are even fewer possible non-violent actions. Do you think at this point we should abandon hypothetical situations as indicators for whether we should ever use violence?
Yes. Anna is insightful in pointing out how the hypothetical solution always makes violence the answer, but just changes the proponent of it. With this in mind perhaps we can challenge the merit of the question?
As for double predestination, I am not the guy to ask. I see many complications with a view of God, Man, and Eternity that is so neatly packaged and preordained (if you will). I see much of the bible as case study after case study of God calling and people responding – all in very different and very human ways. God is at work, hands in the sandbox – he is a God of people. Perhaps I might take some of the stories of non-violent action you know as case studies in a “third way” of dealing with these scenarios, real or imagined.