This is the second part in a series about the history of nonviolence in Christianity, the first part of which you can find here. In Part 1 I discussed how the fundamental truth that Jesus Christ’s teachings command His followers to follow a path of what today we call nonviolence and civil disobedience and this truth can be seen starting in the most ancient post-biblical sources and continue being taught for centuries afterwards. As such these ideals and truths have something to teach us no matter what branch of Christianity we belong to, what council we do or do not recognize, or which creed we do or do not profess. They apply to such modern day concerns as tribalism, nationalism, abortion, violence, the role of government, a Christian’s place in government, whether a Christian can hold political office or not, the military – both from the perspective of a soldier who converts to Christianity and a Christian who is thinking about joining the military, justice, political idolatry, the Second Amendment, gun ownership, natural rights, the universal nature of the Church and Christianity, and the hypocrisy of the world’s ideologies. For my Latter-day Saint readers, I have additionally added some insights and applications of these ideals to modern teachings that they should be familiar with. Here I continue this study, picking up where I left off, roughly in the second half of the Second century.
Mid- to – Late Second Century AD/CE
Titus Flavius Clemens, better known as Clement of Alexandria, was another one of these great Christian intellectuals from Northern Africa. Much of his teaching was about how a true Christian lived not only according to the strict letter of the law by obedience to the commandments but also according to the spiritual truths of the Gospel, uniting faith and action in a way that testified of Christ and converted the heathen through the knowledge he had and the works he did. In Section 34 of his work Who is the Rich Man that Shall Be Saved? Clement, in his lecture to the Rich Man, describes Christians, “an army without weapons, without war, without bloodshed, without anger, without defilement.” (Pg. 42) In his work The Protrepticus (pg. 10) Clement teaches:
If a loud trumpet summons soldiers to war, shall not Christ with a strain of peace issued to the ends of the earth gather up his soldiers of peace? By his own blood and by his word he has assembled an army which sheds no blood in order to give them the Kingdom of Heaven. The trumpet of Christ is his Gospel. He has sounded it and we have heard it. Let us then put on the armour of peace . . . The Church is an army of peace which sheds no blood.”
When your Lord is the Prince of Peace then His followers should be the Army of Peace. We conquer, but not by slings and arrows, bullets and bombs. It is “the cross of Jesus/Going on before” our hosts, the symbol of HIs sacrifice and the sign of the Christian’s mission – to lift up our cross and follow Him – that leads our triumphant march. It is through sacrifice and love, through the preaching of the Gospel of Peace and by living it, that we seek to convert men and women to Christ and His boundless salvation. When we choose to act in ways opposite of this, when we act in violence, we are acting in opposition to Christ. And this doesn’t apply merely to the military or police.
Hippolytus of Rome, one of the most influential theologians of the Second Century who, despite his persecution, exile, and enslavement by the Roman Emperor Maximus, never gave up his faith and never backed down from what he believed and knew to be true. The following quotation is from Shane Claiborne and Dr. Chris Haw‘s translation of Hippolytus as found in their Jesus For President:
The professions and trades of those who are going to be accepted into the community must be examined. The nature and type of each must be established… brothel, sculptors of idols, charioteer, athlete, gladiator…give it up or be rejected. A military constable must be forbidden to kill, neither may he swear; if he is not willing to follow these instructions, he must be rejected. A proconsul or magistrate who wears the purple and governs by the sword shall give it up or be rejected. Anyone taking or already baptized who wants to become a soldier shall be sent away, for he has despised God.
Proconsuls were Roman governors. Magistrate was a general term for anyone holding any political office. The Roman government, like almost all modern states, ruled through violence. You do what you were ordered or you were fined, beaten, tortured, and/or murdered (executed.) They ruled by the sword. As such no true Christian could serve in political office or wield political power. Those who were baptized into the Church could not serve in the military. Those already in it must refuse to kill, something that would certainly have them thrown out of it, and those who were already Christians were “sent away,” -excommunicated?- for their crime, hated by God for the evil they had volunteered to do. Christians anciently and modernly recognized that what today we would term the State was evil and that the only form of just government was a voluntaryist one, that is where all loyalties, memberships, and relationships are on a strictly and completely voluntary basis with no compulsion in any form. As for the military, you may be a baptized Christian and be in the military. But as Clement of Alexandria understood, Christianity is not found merely in your confession of faith but in how you live what you profess to believe. One who embraces the military may be a Christian in the technical sense, but he or she is no disciple of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.
Tatian, a disciple of Justin Martyr, is famous for being the first person to arrange the differing accounts of the Gospels into a singular chronological story. I find his denunciations of the State to be thrilling. He to understood Christians could not be involved in the actions of a government which rules through violence:
I do not wish to be a ruler. I do not strive for wealth. I refuse offices connected with military command. Fornication I detest. No insatiable hunger for gold drives me to go to sea. I do not fight for a victor’s laurels. I am free from the mad thirst for fame. I despise death. I stand above every illness. No grief consumes my soul.
Early Christian Pacifism and Nonviolence, pg. 10.
His insight that the truths of the scriptures provides the cure for human politics is incredibly important. Here he recounts how his conversion opened his eyes to the wickedness of the world and its rulers:
I reject your legislation also; for there ought to be one common polity for all; but now there are as many different codes as there are states, so that things held disgraceful in some are honourable in others. The Greeks consider intercourse with a mother as unlawful, but this practice is esteemed most becoming by the Persian Magi; paederasty [sex with male children] is condemned by the Barbarians, but by the Romans, who endeavour to collect herds of boys like grazing horses, it is honoured with certain privileges.
Wherefore, having seen these things, and moreover also having been admitted to the mysteries, and having everywhere examined the religious rites performed by the effeminate and the pathic, and having found among the Romans their Latiarian Jupiter delighting in human gore and the blood of slaughtered men, and Artemis not far from the great city sanctioning acts of the same kind, and one demon here and another there instigating to the perpetration of evil, retiring by myself, I sought how I might be able to discover the truth. And, while I was giving my most earnest attention to the matter, I happened to meet with certain barbaric writings, too old to be compared with the opinions of the Greeks, and too divine to be compared with their errors; and I was led to put faith in these by the unpretending east of the language, the inartificial character of the writers, the foreknowledge displayed of future events, the excellent quality of the precepts, and the declaration of the government of the universe as centred in one Being. And, my soul being taught of God, I discern that the former class of writings lead to condemnation, but that these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue us from a multiplicity of rulers and ten thousand tyrants, while they give us, not indeed what we had not before received, but what we had received but were prevented by error from retaining.
Address to the Greeks, Roberts-Donaldson English Translation
I know exactly how Tatian feels. Having had the scriptures open to me the truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, truths which had been had since Adam but which through error after compounded error had been lost, the wickedness of the ways of the word have become obvious. It is full of contradicting lies, outrageous hypocrisies, and hungry tyrants always grasping for more and more power. They have erected governments in order to perpetuate this process of power grabbing and wealth extorting, to make despotism and theft seem legitimate and moral. If men would but follow the Gospel not only would slavery come to an end, but so would most of the man-made ills of the world. Hence the greatest good I can do is to promote some political party, with is mountains of toxicity mixed with a fraction of Gospel truth, nor get involved in some government program, designed to compel obedience from the halting and questioning through blood and terror in order to achieve some material utopia. The world is sick and only Christ is the cure. Time spent on any other proposed medicine is at best a waste of time and resources, at worst a deadly poison to body and spirit.
Athenagoras of Athens was a Christian philosopher who wrote to the Roman Emperor Hadrian in an effort to demonstrate why Christians should not be subject to violent persecution by the Roman government. The excerpt from his A Plea for the Christians below recounts how even though most Christians are common, uneducated people they exhibit the benefit of their beliefs through their actions:
We have learned, not only not to return blow for blow, nor to go to law with those who plunder and rob us, but to those who smite us on one side of the face to offer the other side also, and to those who take away our coat to give likewise our cloak.
…Among us you will find uneducated persons, and artisans, and old women, who, if they are unable in words to prove the benefit of our doctrine, yet by their deeds exhibit the benefit arising from their persuasion of its truth: they do not rehearse speeches, but exhibit good works; when struck, they do not strike again; when robbed, they do not go to law; they give to those that ask of them, and love their neighbours as themselves.
Roberts-Donaldson English Translation, Chapters 1 and 11
Not only do Christians not return blow for blow, that is they do not engage in violent retaliation for violence done to them, but they do not even go to the law. Why? First he is certainly echoing the Apostle Paul’s commandment in 1 Corinthians 6:1-11 that Christians should not sue each other before the law but should deal with all their problems internally, in the church. In context though, there would seem to be another reason. When the laws of the land function they have but one means of action. They use violence to hurt someone in some way. If someone strikes me and I sue him or her by the law then I am still returning blow for blow, I have just outsourced by blows to a third party on my behalf. That is still violence in retaliation for violence. This is not what a Christian does. A Christian gives to those who ask of them – notice he doesn’t say a Christian gives to those whom the Christian thinks needs it – and love their neighbors as their very own self. A doctrine that can transform someone so completely is powerful indeed as is its own testimony to the rightness and righteousness of its teachings.
Continuing on the idea of Christians not returning violence for violence, Athenagoras says:
It is not enough to be just (and justice is to return like for like), but it is incumbent on us to be good and patient of evil.
What man of sound mind, therefore, will affirm, while such is our character, that we are murderers? …For when they know that we cannot endure even to see a man put to death, though justly; who of them can accuse us of murder or cannibalism? …We, deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him, have abjured such spectacles. How, then, when we do not even look on, lest we should contract guilt and pollution, can we put people to death? And when we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God s for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder? For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it. But we are in all things always alike and the same, submitting ourselves to reason, and not ruling over it.
Roberts-Donaldson English Translation, Chapters 34 and 35
Athenagoras’s statement about justice is incredibly important. Christians do not obsess with justice. We do not want it. Justice is the returning of injury for injury, punishment for punishment, blow for blow. What Christians want is mercy. We want to do good to those who do evil to us, to redeem and save them from punishment, both temporal and spiritual. As such, we cannot bear to see a man put to death, even if that death is just. And I bet that many of us didn’t realize that the abortion argument is this old either. Here Athenagoras eviscerates the Romans. Christians cannot even bear to kill a fetus much less a fully developed human while the Romans, like people today, are hypocrites denouncing the murder of children once born while killing them in the womb. Taken together Athenagoras’s argument rejects capital punishment, war, abortion, and even self-defense as Christians cannot return blow for blow. Nearly 2,000 years ago Christians were promoting what today we call the Consistent Life Ethic.
The Third Century AD/CE
Origen Adamantius is the most important theologian in this era of Christianity. His greatest work, Against Celsus, was designed to confront and destroy all pagan attacks against Christian doctrine and lifestyle. In it Origen picks up the thread that Athenagoras laid out concerning Christians and government service and expounds upon why Christians do not take part in worldly governments:
We recognise in each state the existence of another national organization founded by the Word of God, and we exhort those who are mighty in word and of blameless life to rule over Churches. Those who are ambitious of ruling we reject; but we constrain those who, through excess of modesty, are not easily induced to take a public charge in the Church of God. And those who rule over us well are under the constraining influence of the great King, whom we believe to be the Son of God, God the Word. And if those who govern in the Church, and are called rulers of the divine nation–that is, the Church–rule well, they rule in accordance with the divine commands, and never suffer themselves to be led astray by worldly policy. And it is not for the purpose of escaping public duties that Christians decline public offices, but that they may reserve themselves for a diviner and more necessary service in the Church of God–for the salvation of men.
Against Celsus, Book VII – Chapter 75 Roberts-Donaldson English Translation
As I said before, Christian have better things to do than waste time on worldly governments. As modern church leaders teach we must “embrace God’s children compassionately and eliminate any prejudice, including racism, sexism, and nationalism.” If I wish to do something on a national level or global level to transform the world then there is no other work I can do that will be more fruitful than the work of the Church – spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And unlike the worldly governments, which are under the rule of the Devil, and therefore dependent on violence and compulsion to achieve anything, the government of the Church is under the rule of Jesus Christ and guided by Him, therefore it functions by conversion and convincing without the power to compel obedience by violence.
Origen taught elsewhere (pg. 11), ““You cannot demand military service of Christians any more than you can of priests. We do not go forth as soldiers.” Here he explains what would happen to any country where all people were Christians and refused to fight or kill for the government:
As the question started is, “What would happen if the Romans were persuaded to adopt the principles of the Christians, to despise the duties paid to the recognised gods and to men, and to worship the Most High?” this is my answer to the question. …If all the Romans, according to the supposition of Celsus, embrace the Christian faith, they will, when they pray, overcome their enemies; or rather, they will not war at all, being guarded by that divine power which promised to save five entire cities for the sake of fifty just persons.
Against Celsus, Book VII – Chapters 69-70.
Christians are a nation of priests, and for Latter-day Saints who have been endowed we are a community of priests and priestesses. We are not meant to be soldiers and should refuse to be treated as or to act like soldiers. When Christians refuse to wage war what will happen to them – their homes, their lands, their religious sites, their societies? God will protect them. The power, in the words of President Spencer W. Kimball, which protected Elisha and Enoch will protect us as well. The Lord is the Lord of Hosts as well and His hosts will always protect His followers. In alluding to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah though, where the Lord promised to spare the wickedest of cities if but a small number of righteous people could be found among them, Origen also points out the effect of Christians in any society. For the sake of the righteous Christians the Roman Empire might be spared, not because it in of itself is good but for the good of the faithful. As Christ taught, a little leaven can lift the whole lump.
Cyprian of Carthage was the Bishop of Carthage at the time he was murdered by the Roman government during one of its persecutions of Christians. As Bishop of Carthage he led the Christians of North Africa and thus was one of the most influential men of his era. His writings on the necessity of worthiness of those who administered the sacraments of the faith became some of the most important in history, influencing everything afterwards. He wrote one must renounce all other allegiances for that of Christ and that baptism demanded that a person must entirely abandon the ways and ideologies of the world for the Gospel. On the subject of Christians committing violence and fighting in wars he taught:
For a brief space conceive yourself to be transported to one of the loftiest peaks of some inaccessible mountain, thence gaze on the appearances of things lying below you, and with eyes turned in various directions look upon the eddies of the billowy world, while you yourself are removed from earthly contacts,–you will at once begin to feel compassion for the world, and with self-recollection and increasing gratitude to God, you will rejoice with all the greater joy that you have escaped it. Consider the roads blocked up by robbers, the seas beset with pirates, wars scattered all over the earth with the bloody horror of camps. The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale. Impunity is claimed for the wicked deeds, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but because the cruelty is perpetrated on a grand scale.
To Donatus
Here Cyprian cuts to the bone all the lies and hypocrisies used to sanction war, including so-called “just war theory.” If one man slaughters a child then he is a monster and all of society rises up against him. If a soldier slaughters hundreds then he is a hero. If one man with power orders the slaughter of thousands, of millions, such as political figures do during war time, he is acclaimed a great leader. Just look at the way that American Presidents are loaded with praise even though they’ve all be warmongers and war criminals for decades now. Look at the way soldiers are lionized for either killing or helping to kill more people than all the murders that have ever occurred in American history combined. War is murder. Literally. And no true Christian can be part of it.
On this subject Cyprian further taught:
[Christians] are not allowed to kill, but they must be ready to be put to death themselves. It is not permitted the guiltless to put even the guilty to death. God wished iron to be used for the cultivation of the earth, and therefore it should not be used to take human life.
Mystery and Meaning: Christian Philosophy & Orthodox Meditations, pg. 416
That applies equally to steel. I wonder how well that idea would go over with the the American Evangelicals who treat the Second Amendment as a revelation from God. The point of course is not that the state should regulate gun ownership, which is where so many have been trained to go as soon as you raise this issue. Rather, the point is that God did not give us the great technological gifts that He has so that we could kill each other with them and justifying weapons on that basis is to demonstrate just how unmitigatedly corrupt the hearts and minds of Christians have become. We have become so obsessed over bloodshed as a means of asserting our natural rights that we have forgotten that natural rights are based upon the lifestyle of the Natural Man and that Christ calls us to something more. (See Mos. 3:19) We must leave off the worries and rationalizations of the world if we hope to achieve something more than a telestial reward. Steel was not given to us by God so that we could use it to kill other people.
Lactantius, a Christian writer whose ideas were so influential and moving that later generations called him the Christian Cicero, also wrote on the subject of warfare and the hypocrisy that comes with justifying it. On the habit of Romans declaring their past Emperors as new gods, he writes:
They despise indeed the excellence of the athlete, because there is no harm in it; but royal excellence, because it is wont to do harm extensively, they so admire that they think that brave and warlike generals are placed in the assembly of the gods, and that there is no other way to immortality than by leading armies, devastating foreign (countries), destroying cities, overthrowing towns, (and) either slaughtering or enslaving free peoples. Truly, the more men they have afflicted, despoiled, (and) slain, the more noble and renowned do they think themselves; and, captured by the appearance of empty glory, they give the name of excellence to their crimes. Now I would rather that they should make gods for themselves from the slaughter of wild beasts than that they should approve of an immortality so bloody. If any one has slain a single man, he is regarded as contaminated and wicked, nor do they think it right that he should be admitted to this earthly dwelling of the gods. But he who has slaughtered endless thousands of men, deluged the fields with blood, (and) infected rivers (with it), is admitted not only to a temple, but even to heaven.
The Early Christian Attitude to War, pg. 43.
Are we not the same? How many of our national idols are of men who were generals and leaders during war time, who ordered the slaughter of thousands, if not millions of people? As people in America move to tear down the statues of Confederate leaders as a sign of our so-called social evolution, I can’t help but fail to see anything meaningful in it. When you tear down the idols of one set of old gods but leave up the others because those warmongers better fit the times it only testifies to two truths. The first is that idolatry is a reflection of the society in question, not the will of the supposed gods. The second is that to these people who claim to so evolved there is nothing wrong with engaging in mass slaughter. Owning slaves is horrible but sending thousands of black men to be slaughtered in war or killing thousands of brown and black men, women, or children makes you a hero. Just look at how American children are taught to lionize Barack Obama as a great hero despite his nearly a decade of murdering people of color across the planet and laying waste to entire civilizations. Evolved? No, you really aren’t that different from the Romans, in either slavery or warmongering. The times may necessitate a small change in the gods society worships but warmongers and mass murderers will always be among the idols of the world.
On the subject of what we would today call nationalism and a Christian’s response to it, Lactantius taught:
“It is not virtue either to be the enemy of the bad or the defender of the good, because virtue cannot be subject to uncertain chances. What are the interests of our country, but the inconveniences of another state or nation? — that is, to extend the boundaries which are violently taken from others, to increase the power of the state, to improve the revenues, — all which things are not virtues, but the overthrowing of virtues: for, in the first place, the union of human society is taken away, innocence is taken away, the abstaining from the property of another is taken away; lastly, justice itself is taken away, which is unable to bear the tearing asunder of the human race, and wherever arms have glittered, must be banished and exterminated from thence. How can a man be just who injures, hates, despoils and puts to death? Yet they who strive to be serviceable to their country do all these things: for they are ignorant of what this being serviceable is, who think nothing useful, nothing advantageous, but that which can be held by the hand; and this alone cannot be held, because it may be snatched away.”
Divine Institutes, Book 6, Chapter 6
Such excuses as it being “for the greater good,” or “for the common good,” or “for the good of/in service of the country,” are nothing but deflections, propaganda we endlessly repeat to avoid the truths that Lactantius lays bare here. Humans are all one body, one people, the Children of God. Tribalism then, and Nationalism today, shatters the unity of humanity into hundreds of fictitious and fractious provinces that we label nations, empires, and countries. War is about bloodshed and robbery, mass violence designed to cripple nations and make millions susceptible to mass robbery. Fighting in war is not a virtue. It is a curse, a vice. It perpetuates injustice and evil by violating the minds, bodies, and properties – the basic human rights – of all involved. Christians, who are ever striving to be just men and women, cannot participate in it because it is fundamentally unjust. If one wished to truly be serviceable to society, to do some good for his or her nation and people, then one must renounce war and do something of value. Even something as lowly today as working serving fast food produces more good for society than the soldier.
Marcellus of Tangier is the ultimate example of a Christian soldier. He was raised all his life as a pagan and joined the army. He married a pagan wife and had twelve children with her. During his time in the military he rose to the rank of centurion. Then something happened which he had not expected. After hearing a Christian bishop preaching, Marcellus and his entire family converted to Christianity. This introduced a serious conflict in his life. Christianity, as laid out in the direction of Hippolytus of Rome (see above), taught that soldiers who converted while still soldiers were forbidden from striking anyone for any reason and that he could not make sacrifices to the Emperor, both things demanded of him by his job. The contradiction between these two must have weighed heavily on his mind as it came time to celebrate the birth of Emperor Maximian Herculeus, which included sacrifices to him, because in the middle of the celebration Marcellus stood up, threw away his military insignia, and declared:
I serve Jesus Christ the eternal King! I will no longer serve your emperors and I scorn to worship your gods of wood and stone, which are deaf and dumb idols.
For his breach of discipline, for his refusal to carry out orders, for his refusal to follow protocol, for his impiety, Marcellus was beheaded. Inspired by the testimony of Marcellus at his trial of condemnation, Cassian, the court stenographer for the trial, immediately arose, announced his own faith in Christ, and denounced the order of execution given against Marcellus. The court ordered Marcellus and Cassian to both be put to death.
To all the world this must seem like a failure. He refused to fight or do what he was told, a soldier’s job, and therefore he died. Then his children also died. But to a Christian this is victory. Marcellus knew that no Christian could serve in the military. Even though it meant certain death he still refused, because death held no fear for him. He knew that Jesus Christ had risen from death, that death had been conquered by Him who promised salvation, resurrection, and eternal life to all those who served Him. Marcellus and his family had an eternal perspective and it allowed he and his loved ones to triumph over the world. It is my hope and prayer that I and my family, that all of us who dare to go by the label Christian, will have the faith necessary to be able to do the same, in life and death.
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That is the end of Part 2. In it we have seen how Christian teaching rejected being in the military, rejected tribalism and nationalism, rejected killing, rejected violence, rejected abortion, rejected any and all political offices because they were based on using violence to compel obedience, and rejected the hypocrisy of society that treats murderers as filth but mass murderers – politicians and soldiers – as heroes. Instead, Christians belong to the international, universal organization that is the Church of Jesus Christ. All men and women are their brothers and sisters. Christians reject justice and call for mercy and redemption, giving service and love to all – even those who hate, persecute, and kill Christians. Christians love their enemy as their self and therefore reject all violence and instead actively love their enemies. In doing these things they conquer the world, not just my converting people to the faith but by refusing to bow before the ideologies, philosophies, and demands of the world – no matter how well argued, meaningful, or rational they seem. Death is victory when living necessitates making yourself a slave to evil.
I will put up Part 3 next week, Feb. 16, 2016. It will cover the Fourth Century AD/CE and explore what happened to cause so many Christians to abandon the truth of Christ for the violence of the world.