A Christian pacifist in the American Empire, part 2: Jesus’s gospel of peace

Ted Grimsrud—September 14, 2023

In reflecting on my journey as a Christian pacifist in the American Empire in a series of blog posts, I began in Part 1: Embedded Theology, by setting the context for my encounter with Jesus’s gospel of peace. An important part of my embedded theology—beliefs about what matters the most that I mostly absorbed from my surroundings without thinking critically about them—was what I call a “blank check” mentality concerning war and the state. I was ready to go to war should I have been drafted. When I became a Christian at the age of 17, that mentality was actually at first only reinforced.

During my first two years of college, I remained pretty unaware of the antiwar sentiment that was growing with the disenchantments with the US war in Vietnam. However, after my second year, I spent the summer working and playing softball with a number of returning Vietnam war vets. Seeing the evidence of their trauma from their war experiences in their lives caught my attention and I began to have some sense of questioning my prowar assumptions.

A new church and the beginnings of a new perspective

I switched colleges between my sophomore and junior years and attended the University of Oregon in Eugene. The UO was a site of plenty of anti-war agitation, but at first, I paid it little attention. The key step after my move to the new town was to find a church. I ended up joining a small, non-denominational congregation, Orchard Street Church—still conservative theologically but socially progressive and lively intellectually.

Much more than in my Baptist congregation, in this new church people were interested in learning more about how to apply the gospel to our current social context. This was an important time in the American evangelical world due to the emergence of groups around the country who espoused “radical Christianity.” These “left evangelicals” challenged evangelicals’ traditional political conservatism. This movement kind of petered out before long, but I happened to be in the right place at the right time as I began to question what I had been taught about war and the blank check. A number of us at Orchard began to be interested in this evangelical left.

During my second year in Eugene, as I finished my degree in journalism, several elements in my life came together with major consequences. First, I joined a reading group that studied the writings of Francis Schaeffer—the so-called pastor to intellectuals. Schaeffer inspired me to want to be an intellectual, to see thinking as an important aspect of faith, to encourage me to ask questions, to cultivate my curiosity, to scrutinize the world around me in light of the gospel. For about a year and a half I dove into Schaeffer’s writings as well as some of his close colleagues, including British Christian philosopher Os Guinness. For the first time, I became excited and energized about my faith. I deeply wanted to understand and follow Jesus, though I didn’t really know how yet.

In my new church, I found a critical mass of friends who shared many of my passions. I crammed four years of talk and argument and thinking and reading and struggling with what it all means into my single senior year. I was growing by leaps and bounds, and it was all pretty intense, but in fun way. I also immersed myself in the thought of radical evangelicalism. Especially important was Sojourners magazine. This was precisely the moment when editor Jim Wallis led the community to relocate from Chicago to inner-city Washington, DC—with the express purpose of witnessing to the gospel of peace in the belly of the Beast, the capital of the American Empire. Through Sojourners I learned of writers such as Jacques Ellul and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—the latter’s book, The Cost of Discipleship truly rocked my world.

I also by chance stumbled onto another book that became important for me. There was a small Christian college next to the UO campus that had a nice library. I enjoyed browsing the shelves and found a little book there by Mennonite theologian, Norman Kraus, called The Community of the Spirit. I had never heard of Mennonites before, but I liked the picture of following Jesus that Kraus painted.

Seeing with new eyes

Partly fueled by my acquaintance with Vietnam war vets and seeing first-hand their pain and learning more how unjust that war was. Partly fueled by the turmoil of the Watergate scandal. And now pushed by what I was learning from the radical Christians, I rapidly approached a kind of epiphany concerning the American Empire.

One other factor I now see as being present as I reflect back was the ever-simmering aspect of my embedded theology that was always in tension with the blank check, pro-Empire aspect. I would call this the think-for-yourself, ask-critical-questions, affirm-a-kindly-and-humane-disposition-toward-others aspect of what I learned from my parents and sisters. My repressed peaceableness seems to have bubbled just under the surface waiting for the intellectual, spiritual, political revolution I was on the brink of.

I can’t tell you the exact date. It was sometime in the Spring of 1976, but I do remember the exact moment. I was reading Os Guinness’s book, The Dust of Death, a critique of Western culture from a Reformed Christian perspective. He had a chapter where he drew heavily on Jacques Ellul and critiqued the tendency toward violence of leftist activists in the 1960s and 1970s. By no means was Guinness a pacifist (though it seems that Ellul mostly was), but something clicked for me (perhaps it was mostly the quotes from Ellul). I realized that indeed I was against all violence, I was against all war; this should be a fundamental ethical commitment. During the years I had worried about the draft, I never imagined choosing not to go if I was called. I had never heard of pacifism as a theological stance. I don’t remember ever talking with my friends about saying no to war in an absolute way. I knew Jesus was peace-oriented but I never really put two-and-two together, even when reading Sojourners and Bonhoeffer.

That all changed in an instant. I began to see everything with new eyes. Right away I started talking about my new pacifist convictions with my friends. Several of them had similar thoughts—a happy surprise. One of these was the woman who I would soon marry, Kathleen Temple. We friends formed a pacifist-inquiring group in our church—and had a number of debates and arguments with others. A few months later I discovered more Mennonite writings—Guy Hershberger and then, most importantly, John Howard Yoder. And through Yoder I learned of Old Testament scholar, Millard Lind, whose doctoral dissertation on war in the Old Testament helped answer many of my questions.

Mennonites and Jesus’s gospel of peace

In due time, Kathleen and I discovered a small Mennonite congregation in Eugene and, inevitably it now seems, we took off to attend Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Indiana a few years later. I enrolled in the Peace Studies program. Our time at AMBS, classes with Yoder and Lind among others, and, of course, much talk inside class and out, was life transforming. We decided we wanted to become Mennonites. My AMBS studies got me going and in time I worked out a theological perspective that helped me better to understand the problems with my earlier belief in the American Empire. In my early years as a Christian, I was taught that the Bible teaches us to obey our government and to understand the US and its wars as especially blessed by God. I came to realize that that teaching was exactly wrong. Let me summarize key affirmations of the Bible-oriented gospel of peace that I developed in the following years of graduate study, preaching, and teaching. I’ll make five points.

(1) From the very start, the Bible actually teaches a deep suspicion of the nations of the world, of the world’s great empires, and, in fact, the nation state in general. Far from teaching a default kind of deference to the state, the Bible instead makes the case for resistance to state power when it is oppressive—as it so often is. Israel was established during the events of the exodus as a countercultural community that recognized in Pharaoh not God’s agent but God’s opponent. Israel was given the vocation to bless all the families of the earth. Marked by the exodus, ancient Israel had at its center a set of teachings, called Torah, that taught of a faith that valued the weak and vulnerable members of the community and recognized that injustice and oppression were signs of idolatry. The community was accountable for how it practiced its vocation of blessing—its existence was never an end in itself, but it was for this vocation.

(2) To keep Torah alive and effective in the community, prophets arose to challenge the people in power. They reminded the people of Israel of their origins as liberated slaves. The prophets critiqued power politics in Israel, where the interests of the wealthy and powerful tended to separate the community from Torah’s message of social justice and the vocation of blessing. The core critique the prophets offered was that Israel tended all too commonly to seek to “be like the nations,” to be like the great empires of the world. In doing so, the nation separated itself from God.

(3) The attempt to create a territorial kingdom to further the message of Torah in time failed. After the exodus, God had given the people the promised land, a home-base for this territorial kingdom where the people could embody the core truths of Torah. Tragically, though perhaps not surprisingly, the prophets were disregarded, Torah and the vocation of blessing were ignored, and injustice reigned—then, as was foretold, the unjust community of faith suffered conquest from the great empires, Assyria first and then Babylon. Just in time, under King Josiah, the teaching of Torah was rediscovered and, amazingly, the non-territorial community of Israel that survived the destruction of its kingship and territorial kingdom continued. The prophet Jeremiah offered a vision where the faith community could continue to be faithful to its vocation of blessing, seeking the peace of the land where they found themselves.

(4) Jesus centered his teaching on the present reality of the “kingdom of God.” He took seriously lessons from ancient Israel and its territoriality. His teaching presented a vision for a concrete, embedded community that witnessed to a way of life that was peaceable, that rejected the power politics of the Roman Empire. That offered a vision for a community embodying a set of political practices characterized by service and compassion. This was a “kingdom” that placed a vocation of blessing that was responsive to God’s will for humanity at the center, not based on coercive control over a particular territory. The New Testament’s finale, the book of Revelation, powerfully takes the challenge directly to the Roman Empire—that Empire, with its violence and injustice, did not represent God on earth as it claimed but in fact was an idol. The vocation of blessing required resistance to the Empire, not acquiescence to it.

(5) Finally, though, I came to understand that the Christian tradition had done a poor job of keeping the biblical anti-Empire vision alive. In fact, within a few centuries Christians embraced the very Empire that had executed Jesus. The struggle for the soul of the faith community, what the New Testament called the ekklesia or assembly or church, has continued ever since. I soon realized that just as I needed to apply my critical, skeptical faculties and question many of the claims by my nation-state for my loyalty, I also needed to apply the faculties and question many of the claims of the powerful within the Christian tradition. It is not a given that organized Christianity simply by its existence is faithful to its vocation of blessing—all too often it has not been.

In the third and final installment of this series on my journey (“The American Empire without blinders”), I will focus on the perspective on the American Empire that I developed as a consequence of embracing Jesus’s gospel of peace.

Part one: Embedded theology//Part three: The American Empire without blinders

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