Ted Grimsrud—November 20, 2023

A big question arises for people who believe that the Bible is a book of peace, especially with how it tells the story of Jesus. The question is this: What about Christianity, which for most of its history in most of its manifestations has scarcely been a religion of peace? This is a complicated question and any possible answer will be contested (as, of course, are my assertions that the Bible is a book of peace, and that Christianity is not a religion of peace). In this post, all I will offer is a sketchy set of over-generalizations! I want to test a few thoughts.

The turns toward doctrine and toward Empire

One obvious place to look is at the changes among the Christian churches in the 4^th and 5^th centuries after Jesus. In a general sense, the early years of Christianity have been seen by many as an era of Christian pacifism (in the sense of non-participation in war). That was drastically transformed in the 4^th and 5^th centuries into an era where Christianity became the official religion of the decidedly non-pacifist Roman Empire. While Christianity’s status as an official state-religion has come and largely gone, the general sensibility where Christians with few dissenters support their own country’s wars seems as strong as ever.

At roughly the same time that Christianity became pro-Empire, it also established authoritative creeds and confessions as the core definers of the faith—bases for determining formal membership in Christian churches. Not coincidentally, these creeds and confessions easily lent themselves to non-pacifist interpretations and essentially sidelined the gospel stories about Jesus’s life and teaching (notoriously, for example, summarizing the story of Jesus as “born of a virgin” and “crucified under Pontius Pilate” without a word about his message in between).

The roughly one thousand years after the establishment of creedal Christianity could be characterized as a long period of churches paying little attention to the peace message of the Bible—or to the Bible at all. We may note the continual emergence of small dissenting Christian groups that did place the story of Jesus at the center (for example, the Waldensians, the Franciscans, and the Hussites and Czech Brethren). However, these groups were often treated as heretics and viciously persecuted—or absorbed into the Catholic Church as monastic orders with little impact on the broader church. This dynamic of marginalizing the Bible did change, though, with the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century. Why, then, didn’t the new churches, as a rule, embrace the peace message of the Bible?

Continue reading “Why isn’t Protestantism’s Bible peaceable? [Peace and the Bible #2]” →