Ted Grimsrud—November 29, 2023
Ever since my “conversion” to pacifist convictions back in 1976, I have closely associated those convictions with my Christian faith. Early on I realized that pacifism was not a common conviction among Christians, but that never made me doubt what I had become convinced was true: The call to love our enemies and reject warfare should be something affirmed as a core and indispensable Christian commitment—for all Christians. I do accept that mine will almost certainly only ever be a viewpoint affirmed by just a tiny percentage of Christians. However, I still keep working at it—and hope for the best.
It took several years after my initial commitment to pacifism as a young adult to clarify the significance of that commitment for how I understood God. The faith community that I in time became a part of, the Mennonites, did not actually make belief in God as a pacifist a necessary part of its peace position. But I became convinced that for me it is. Let me explain why.
I will start with a simple definition for a complicated and contested term—pacifism. By “pacifism” I mean, in brief, the conviction that nothing matters as much as love for all human beings. And this love forbids using death-dealing violence (or supporting it) against anyone. To me, the term pacifism connotes a positive commitment to love, more than simply a tactical commitment to avoid violence. And, I believe, this commitment to love is grounded in a belief that God is love and that love is at the center of the meaning of the universe.
Argument #1: The biblical narrative
Certainly, the Bible gives us many images of God that are far from pacifist—angry, vengeful, even genocidal. However, it also gives us many peaceable images—merciful, forgiving, compassionate, deeply and universally loving. I think it is important to recognize that these various images are not all compatible. They cannot be harmonized. They have to be sorted through and weighed together. To me, the peaceable images are decisive. My first point, about the Bible, is that if we read it in light of its overarching narrative, what I call the Big Story, we will see that it presents God, ultimately, as pacifist.
The basic plot line begins with the story of creation, an act attributed to a loving and peaceable God (this is even more clear when we contrast the creation story in Genesis with other roughly contemporary ancient creation myths that posit violence as inherent in God and thus the created world). Initially, this God seems a bit emotionally unstable as seen in the story of Noah and the Flood. But that story ends with a point of clarity where God resolves (as symbolized by the rainbow) to treat the world with compassion and not destructive violence.
The next step involves God’s commitment to bless all the families of the earth through the establishment of a people that would know God’s mercy and share it with the rest of the world. That is, God’s response to the brokenness portrayed in Genesis 1–11 was to take a patient, winding, vulnerable path of embodied healing love in human communities. The paradigmatic expression of this path was God’s intervention on behalf of the Hebrew people who were enslaved in the Egyptian empire under the thumb of Pharaoh. This intervention showed that God takes the side of vulnerable, oppressed people and brings about their liberation in a way that empowered them to structure themselves around the justice of Torah, God’s revealed blueprint for a peaceable society. Stemming from the dynamics of liberation, this society explicitly did not have a human king or standing army with human generals.
God gave the people a homeland with the stipulation that they could remain in it only if they followed Torah and avoided the types of injustices and idolatries of the nations that God had freed them from. The story continues, though, by honestly portraying the descent of this community into an elite-dominated, hierarchical, oppressive, and exploitative territorial kingdom that was indeed dominated by kings and generals who did gather horses and chariots and oppressed the vulnerable among them. True to God’s promise at the beginning, this descent into injustice resulted in the loss of the territorial kingdom—and, in fact, a recognition that God’s promise of blessing all the families of the earth cannot and will not be channeled through territorial kingdoms.
Somehow, the original blueprint, Torah, though long neglected, is recovered in the nick of time. In the rubble of the destruction of the territorial kingdom, Torah arose with its vision of wholeness and became again the center of the peoplehood. In time, according to the version of the Big Story we find in the Christian Bible, a new prophet arose among the people of God. This prophet reiterated the vision of Torah and the lessons the Hebrew Bible conveyed. This Jewish prophet, Jesus (whose name means “God liberates”) emphasized the peaceable images of God from the tradition and the commitment of God to the path of love and mercy—not vengeful anger and coercive judgment.
The God of the overarching narrative thus is a God who actually intervenes lightly on the paths chosen by the people of the promise. They suffer consequences for their injustices but, in general, are allowed to make their way forward with the main intervention being the words and witness of various prophets along the way. The life of Jesus encapsulates God’s ways with the world in the story as a whole—a peaceable witness; resistance to the way of empire and of centralized, coercive religion; and vulnerability to the violence of the forces of domination. However, just as the witness of Torah survived the destruction of the Hebrew kingdom of Judah at the hands of the Babylonian Empire, so the witness of Jesus and his embodiment of Torah survived his destruction at the hands of the Roman Empire. Jesus’s resurrection may be seen as the quintessential expression of the pacifism of God—the survival of the witness but without coercion or any kind of domination.
The conclusion of the Big Story in the book of Revelation shows that God is most clearly seen in the Lamb who wins the victory against the powers of evil through self-giving love. The Lamb and his comrades “conquer” the Dragon (symbolizing the evil Powers) through their faithful witness that involved persevering love practiced even to the point of deadly violence from those Powers. That love in face of violence (symbolized in Revelation by “blood”) is the very force that takes down the Powers. All this is an expression of God’s pacifism (see my recent book, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation for more on the pacifism of God in Revelation).
Argument #2: The special revelation of Jesus
I don’t believe that the affirmation of Jesus as a truthful and important expression of the character of God should have led to a separation between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus, it seems to me, never intended to create a new and separate religion but only to bring about reform within the faith of his ancestors. The Jewish/Christian schism was and remains a terrible and unnecessary tragedy. To add to the tragedy, the Christian tradition has distinguished itself from Judaism in part by departing from the message of Jesus—making its center doctrines about Jesus rather than the following of Jesus’s own path.
However, that path is still discernable in the biblical story and has remained available to Christians, if rarely followed. Jesus taught quite directly about what he understood God to be like. “Be merciful as God is merciful.” God is caring and compassionate toward the oppressed and vulnerable. Blessed are the peacemakers as they will be God’s children. The gospels (mostly Matthew) do contain images of punitive judgment. I tend to think of those mostly as rhetorical excess on the part of the gospel writers—more than clear teaching about a non-pacifist God.
Even more clear than Jesus’s teachings are Jesus’s practices. The Christian tradition does affirm the divinity of Jesus, though typically in ways that don’t allow Jesus’s actual life to shape our view of God. But that affirmation can be seen to make the point that our best evidence of God’s disposition and character is to be found in Jesus’s disposition and character—and actions. Jesus’s way of life reveals more than anything else God’s ways in the world. Jesus, of course, practiced love for all, sought to bring reconciliation not domination and violent conflict, and embodied transformative compassion that contrasted with the domination systems of Rome and temple-centered institutionalized religion. He did all this, of course, as what he understood to be the fulfillment of Torah, not an alternative to it. Jesus believed that the God of his Bible (our Old Testament) was a God of love who we are to imitate.
Argument #3: Love is central
The Bible, and not only Jesus, convey that love, mercy, compassion, and caring are the highest virtues. We are told a few times explicitly in the Bible that God is love, which is to say that love matters the most. We are also told, many times, how highly valued love, mercy, compassion, and caring are as dispositions to strive for, to honor, and to value. This implies that, since God is the highest reality, that God is loving, merciful, compassionate, and caring. I believe that “pacifism” is simply a term that conveys this affirmation of love, mercy, compassion, and caring as the highest of our commitments that no other loyalty or value or commitment should outrank.
Thus, to say that love is central is, in effect, to affirm that God is love. To say that love is central is, in effect, to affirm that God is pacifist. We are challenged to articulate a way of thinking about God that reflects this affirmation—and to construct an ethical framework that empowers ways of living that also reflect this affirmation. One element of that framework is the task to discern and resist the loyalties or values or commitments that go against pacifism in our lives. If we do think of God as love and as pacifist, this task of discernment may be just about the most important human task that we have.
Argument #4: Belief in a violent God has consequences
Most of the destructive effects of Christianity’s influence on the world over the past 1,600 years may be attributed to the failure to sustain the message of Jesus about God’s pacifism. In the fourth century, Christian elites welcomed the opportunity to affiliate closely with the leaders of the Roman Empire and to end the era of Rome’s persecution of Christians. One of the effects of this affiliation was grafting onto Christian theology other views of God that attributed a will in favor of inter-human violence to God—in part, expressed in the violent persecution of heretics and the waging of war by the “Christian” empire against non-Romans. This change also ushered in the era of vicious persecution against Jews, culminating in the 20th century’s genocidal terrors.
One destructive impact of theology that presents God as violent may be found in the history of atonement theology in western societies. According to the analysis of theologian Timothy Gorringe in his book, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence, and the Rhetoric of Salvation, the belief that Jesus’s death was a necessary violent sacrifice that satisfied God’s just requirements for retaliation against human sin shaped the practices of criminal justice in ways that underwrote tremendous punitive violence against convicted offenders. These retributive practices have remained shaped by such theology. An assumption in this atonement theology is that God does support violence and is definitely not pacifist. A great deal in injustice has resulted from such views of divinely approved retributive justice.
Argument #5: Questions about divine violence
The final argument I will mention raises questions I have when I try to imagine God being violent. One of the main questions is whether God’s violence can be imagined to be fair or just or logical. Is it okay for God to be arbitrary in practicing violence—some terrible people do receive some sort of punitive justice, but many do not, especially those who are humanly powerful. Would it be worthy of God to kill Ananias for lying but to allow King Solomon, who almost systematically violated all of the laws about kingship in Deuteronomy 17, to die of old age in his sleep with his great wealth intact?
And what about the bluntness of violence as an instrument of God? Wouldn’t we imagine that if God were to be just in using violence, God would limit it to people who deserve punishment? However, many of the massive acts of punitive violence that are attributed to God actually result in a great deal of “collateral damage” and deaths of many young children and other seemingly innocent people. For example, think of the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the various plagues in the book of Revelation.
It seems to me that the idea of God being violent requires God to be arbitrary and indiscriminate. God in the stories in the Bible seems to be quite selective in choosing individuals to directly punish, generally avoiding punishment of the worst offenders if they happen to the rich and powerful. And when God practices collective punishment, so many people who are not responsible for the wrongdoing get swept up. If an all-powerful God is going to practice violence, one would expect that such a God would be capable of being discriminant. One would expect such a God to use violent punishment only on those who most deserve it and would leave alone those who don’t deserve it at all. But this is not the case regarding the actually indiscriminate violence attributed to God in the Bible.
Does it not make more sense that the stories of divinely initiated violence are more reflective of the perspectives of the human beings who created them and passed them on? It is a challenge for interpreters who refuse to attribute such violence to God to understand why then the stories were being told and why they were preserved. I think it is a bigger challenge, though, for those who accept those stories as truthful to explain away the message of Jesus and the portrayal of God throughout the Bible as compassionate, merciful, and loving toward all. God in the Bible is intent on influencing human beings to themselves be compassionate, merciful, and loving toward all. We most of all see such an intent in the life and teaching of Jesus, the one we confess to be God’s Son.
Thinking Pacifism 