Christianity as preached by Jesus Christ and as preached by His followers for centuries after HIs Resurrection and Ascension was fundamentally nonviolent – meaning it rejected the idea that killing another human being was ever justified and was anything other than a grievous sin. Christians were called upon to love and serve their enemies, to submit to death and martyrdom before ever engaging in or retaliating to someone with violence, and to either never join the military or, if a soldier upon conversion, to refuse to ever engage in violence as a soldier. Some Christian leaders even taught that Christians were to never hold political office as the power of the government was based upon it using violence to maintain its power and to force compliance to its orders from the populace.
These are not disputable matters of doctrine, these are historic facts. In the series of articles below I accomplished three things. First, I demonstrated the historic fact of Christian nonviolence by examining the writings of a variety of Christian leaders over a period of 300 years. In all that time not a single Christian leader whose works have survived ever taught anything other than the complete renunciation of violence and war as a central tenet of Christianity, a commandment given by Jesus Christ. Secondly, for my Latter-day Saint readers I showed similar teachings as taught in our modern beliefs and church leaders. The teaching of early Christian leaders on this subject are not simply applicable to our lives today, they directly relate to what we believe in such a way that our modern teaching echo and are elucidated by these ancient writings. Thirdly, and finally, I wrote a short explanation of the loss of the truths as Christianity, in a moment of Great Apostasy, abandoned centuries of Christian truth and teaching in order to construct a false and heretical doctrine that would justify the pursuit of power, prestige, and wealth by those who claimed to be Christian but who, were in reality, Caesaropapists, corrupting Christianity into a tool of the state.
The world is afire with its many problems and people don’t know where to turn for the solutions. Christianity is the answer to the problems of the world because its ideals and teachings come from God as the answers to the problems that are causing so much violence and suffering in the world. But in order to be the powerful force it was designed to be Christians must first reclaim the beating heart of Christian doctrine, its radical and most powerful truth – the total rejection of violence based on the total embracing of universal love and omnipresent service to even to those who hate, persecute, torture, and kill us. If we want to solve the injustices of the world then we must reject the foundation upon which all injustice is based, violence, and embrace the only foundation upon which justice can be built, Christ-like love, service, forgiveness, and peace.