Defending My Pacifism As Best I Can

Inevitably, when someone finds out that I am a pacifist (whether it be a family member, friend, or someone from church), I immediately get asked these same two questions (one is situational, the other comes from Scripture), usually in the form of something like: (1) Well, what if someone broke into your house and threatened to hurt your kids or rape your wife; and (2) What about the wars in the Old Testament, where God commands his people to wipe out every man, woman, child, and animal?

For the first I have no pat answers for. I don't have some sort of nonviolent "strategy" for these types of situations. But what I think we can do as followers of Jesus is internalize his character and his spirit. We can meditate daily on the fruit of the Spirit and pray that they take root in us. Then we can trust that when we do encounter a bad situation, we will act like Jesus. That's the best I've got there.

The problem with the second question is that it is always asked in a way where the burden of proof is laid at the feet of the pacifist. Even with all the nonviolent passages in the New Testament, we still have to try to explain the obvious texts in the Old Testament that deal with what appears to be almost genocidal in nature. And this, in my opinion, is something that even someone who advocates Just War would have a hard time with.

Throughout history, advocates of nonviolence have came up with various reasons for these narratives we find in the Scriptures. Karl Barth argued that only God reserves the right to order death because only He has ultimate authority. Some others (like the early Patristics) see these texts as allegory, saying we must “completely annihilate all traces of sin from our lives." I think, however, that a good, rigorous biblical theology often leaves you in tension and so I am alright with simply recognizing it. This is difficult for some people who hold to the idea that the Scriptures give us a neat, holistic theological picture where the authors always colored within the lines. Even though this view is both attractive and popular, I believe the Scriptures give us, instead, the written history of certain peoples encountering God and interpreting these events through their texts.

For believers who seek to take some authority from the Bible, a simple hermeneutical rule is that the New Testament interpretation always trumps the Old. Just as the early Christian writers redefined what it meant to be a part of the Kingdom of God, what it meant to be circumcised, who could be a part of the People of God, and how to hope for resurrection; so they also reinterpreted nonviolence. I believe it is absolutely necessary for the Church to recognize and live with tension like this in Scripture.

I am beginning to realize every time I am called to defend my pacifism that for many Christ followers to hold on to this tension is to ask them to take a hermeneutical leap not all are ready (or willing) to take.