Category: Christian faith

Fundamentalism and warism

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—September 19, 2025

The connection between American Christianity and the preparing for and fighting wars has been long-standing. In this post, I will recount my own somewhat unusual path in navigating this connection. Growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s, I knew little of the wider world. The social and political currents I described in earlier posts certainly shaped the general sensibility of the world I grew up with. However, the impact on me was at most indirect. A key factor for me, in time, proved to be religious faith. Surprisingly, because my family had little religious involvement and my home community would have been considered largely irreligious. Yet….

On the margins of Christianity

I grew up on the margins of Christianity. In my small hometown, Elkton, Oregon, my family attended a tiny Methodist congregation until I was eight years old, when the congregation closed its doors. Our town hosted only one other congregation at that time, a community church. After our Methodist church closed, we would go to Sunday School at that church most weeks.

As a child, I was on my own in terms of faith convictions. I had a lot of curiosity and talked about religion with friends though I do not know why I was so interested. I don’t remember anything from my experience of going to church that ever piqued my interest. I didn’t get challenged by my parents to think about such things. I suspect I had a natural curiosity about the meaning of life and the religious dimension. My interest in God and the big issues intensified as I got older. I had a self-conscious perspective when I entered my teen years inclined to conclude that God did not exist. But it was an open question that I had a keen interest in.

The first move for me came during the Spring of my sophomore year in high school. A friend of mine died of cancer when he was in his twenties. His death left the community grief-stricken. During his funeral, I felt for the first time a strong sense of the presence of God. From then on, I no longer thought of myself as an atheist. About a year later, I started spending time with a somewhat older friend who had became active in a Baptist congregation that had recently started in town. My friend gently engaged me in conversations about faith. He mainly conveyed a general message of God’s love and a simple process to gain salvation. That process mainly involved the seeker praying to God a prayer of repentance for one’s sinfulness and of a desire to trust in Jesus Christ as the savior whose death on the cross opened the path to God’s forgiveness. Finally, one evening in June 1971, I offered the prayer my friend had described to me. I experienced this as a moment of genuine change.

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Why isn’t Protestantism’s Bible peaceable? [Peace and the Bible #2]

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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 4th and 5th 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 4th and 5th 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 16th century. Why, then, didn’t the new churches, as a rule, embrace the peace message of the Bible?

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Peace and the Bible: How clear is the connection? [Peace and the Bible #1]

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Ted Grimsrud—November 17, 2023

As I have evolved in my thinking, my convictions about the importance of peace—saying yes to social justice and wholeness and no to war and domination—have become ever stronger even as my commitment to self-identifying as a Christian has gotten weaker. As a young adult, I started my intellectual journey first as a Christian first and then as a pacifist. A main part of the Christian part was a strong belief in the truthfulness and centrality of the Bible for my belief system. I had to be convinced that the Bible had a peace agenda.

Once I came to see the Bible as a peace book, though, I threw myself into what has proved to be a lifelong project of trying to construct a strong peace theology based on the Bible. Interestingly, as I have become more and more persuaded of the Bible’s peaceable content over the years, I have become less and less impressed with how Christianity has appropriated that resource. That is, my movement away from self-identifying as a Christian has in part been due to the Bible. If I have to choose between the peaceable message of the Bible and the generally accepting disposition toward war of Christianity and Christian doctrine, I will choose the Bible every time.

I remain as interested as ever in wrestling with the stories in the Bible (and the big, over-arching story that I believe the Bible tells) in relation to our current needs for peace convictions and in relation to the troubling warist legacy of the Christian religion. My energy for putting thoughts that emerge from this wrestling into written words ebbs and flows depending on what else I am focusing on. I seem to be feeling more energized about these issues right now, and so I want to spend some time writing a number of blog posts on “Peace and the Bible” in the weeks to come—maybe to end the year with a small burst of creativity (here is a link to the homepage of the series).

In this first post, I will briefly address several of the general questions I have been thinking about lately. In the posts to come, I plan to range pretty widely. I don’t have an ordered agenda of material I want to discuss so much as simply a variety of ideas that have popped into my mind in recent months. Typically, some thought will get my attention, and I will jot a few notes in hopes that at some point in the future I will devote more reflection to the issue. Sometimes I do that; more often I don’t. Here’s a chance to pick up on some of these brainstorms. I think there will be a general coherence to the set of posts, though: The Bible is peaceable and relevant. These will be some of the reasons why and how.

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What does it mean to be human? [Questioning faith #26]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 25, 2023

One of my favorite theologians, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish thinker who died in 1972, wrote a profound little book called Who is Man? back in the 1960s. In that book, Heschel laments the negative view of humanness in our modern world. The human being, he writes, “is being excessively denounced and condemned by philosophers, theologians, and artists.” Heschel asks, what does the modern worldview say about us? “Humans are beasts. The only difference between humans and other beasts is that humans are beasts that know they will die. …You must cling to life as you can and use it for the pursuit of pleasure and of power.” Heschel concludes that human beings have “very few friends in the world, certainly very few in the contemporary literature about them. The Lord in heaven may prove to be humanity’s last friend on earth.”

While some Christian thinkers do agree with Heschel’s own positive humanism, a great deal of Christian theology—academic and popular—more likely reinforces the problems Heschel laments. In its actual view of humankind, Christian thought often has differed little from secular philosophy in its hostility toward humanity.

Hostility toward humanness

The roots of this hostility toward humanness go back a long way, perhaps at least to the fourth century, to the theology of Augustine and his powerful doctrine of original sin. This doctrine evolved into John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity. Human life, in the immortal words of a later Augustinian, Thomas Hobbes, is inevitably “nasty, brutish, and short.” We are born sinful, rebellious, and basically despicable.

It is highly ironic though, that these views commonly led to strong support for violent governmental control over the general population. I have never understood the logic. Why does belief in human depravity lead to trust in people with power? Why do we think rulers will transcend their own depravity and use their monopoly on violence in undepraved ways? Tying together negative views of humanness with support for domination systems has a long and still vital history. We’re all pretty bad, we’re told. That’s why we need so much military and police violence, to keep our human proclivity toward evil in check. But what about the human proclivity toward evil of those building, buying, and wielding the guns?

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What (if anything) is special about the sacraments? [Questioning faith #25]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 19, 2023

Probably the places in Christianity where the “sacred” and the “mundane” intersect the most directly are the churches’ sacramental rituals, particularly the observance of communion. Views range from the Catholic notion of transubstantiation, where the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Jesus—and where the actual attainment of salvation depends on one’s participation in (and belief in) the miracle of the Eucharist, to some “low church” views wherein the communion ritual is strictly mundane and symbolic. Even more extreme is the Quaker understanding where there is no communion ritual at all.

As one whose views are decidedly low church, I have not experienced the communion ritual as being very important or meaningful. However, I have thought about it quite a bit and have found my general idealism about the importance of the way of Jesus to be something that informs my views of the sacraments (in this post I will only reflect on communion and will not address the practice of baptism).

I do feel reluctant to take up the issue of communion. It’s not so much that I have personally had negative experiences with communion—actually my experiences have mostly been positive. But I do know people who have had hard experiences: the denial of participation in the Lord’s Supper for my friend’s father back in the 1930s for owning life insurance, a trauma that still haunt her; the gay man who was refused communion when he returned to his home congregation hoping to rebuild a sense of connection; the teen-ager who was told she was too young to take communion, making her feel like a second-class Christian even though she deeply desired to follow Jesus….These exclusions have bothered me.

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Is Christianity the only way to God? [Questioning faith #23]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 11, 2023

A number of years ago, my wife Kathleen and I visited a Sunday School class in a large Mennonite congregation. The speaker was a member of the congregation who had just returned from a year in the Far East, and he was reporting on the experience. He talked about how he found the religious beliefs and practices that he had seen so interesting. He then told how he tried to encourage his new friends to be the best Buddhists (or it could have been Hindus) they could be.

I learned later that this comment caused a bit of a furor. People who believed that faith in Jesus as Savior is the only way to find salvation were distressed. The speaker’s embrace of religious pluralism, his implied belief that any number of religions can lead a person to God, raised concerns.

Religious pluralism as a fact of life

This issue of Christian faith in relation to other religions grows ever more challenging for Christians in our globalized world. Here in the United States, we can no longer avoid asking about different religions. Many of us travel around the world, doing business with people from many cultures and religious traditions, and, if nothing else, rub shoulders in grocery stores, ethnic restaurants, and even in our own neighborhoods with other-than-Christian religious folks.

I taught for many years at a tiny Christian college in small, fairly remote town in Virginia’s Shenandoah valley. I had students who were Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist. Our favorite places to eat in town have included restaurants operated by recent immigrants from Nepal, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Germany, Thailand, India, El Salvador, Mexico, and Ethiopia. A few years ago, I heard that our local public high school had students from sixty-four different countries who spoke forty-four different languages—and represented many different faiths. Religious pluralism has become part of our everyday life, like it or not.

So, what do we think of the various religions of the world? How do we relate our own Christian faith to Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and so on? How does our understanding of the religions fit with our broader theological convictions?

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Is there a case for Christian pantheism? [Questioning faith #18]

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Ted Grimsrud—April 4, 2023

When I first heard of pantheism some 50 years ago, I was taught that it was incompatible with Christianity. I was taught a pantheist believes the world is God; a Christian believes the world is separate from God. That was my view until recently when I started to wonder if my emerging convictions about God as reflected in this series of posts on “Questioning Faith” should make me rethink this sense of incompatibility. I will not argue in favor of pantheism here, but rather I will reflect on what it is that I am coming to believe about God and then ask the question if this belief is moving in a pantheist direction.

All God-talk is human talk

One of the first steps in my rethinking my understanding of God was to realize that all of our thinking about God is human thinking. We can talk about what we think God is like, however we can never describe God precisely as God is. Whatever we say is also based on our human perceptions and opinions and expressed in our human languages. I would say now that this insight means that “pantheism” and “Christian theism” are both labels we create as we think about God—useful and appropriate, but still limited since they are human constructs. So, we should recognize that they are at best approximations and not mistake them for simple descriptions of reality.

We, thus, consider what we think God is like based on the various factors that influence us—personal experience, religious teaching (including the Bible and our faith traditions), scientific evidence, and other factors. Ideally, we factor in the evidence carefully and in conversations with others. We hope that our convictions are as well-grounded, evidence based, and coherent as possible. We want our convictions to be truthful (recognizing that they will never be perfectly truthful because they are always going to be human constructs). I would add that I believe all of our theological convictions should also be as life-giving as possible; that is a major test for truthfulness.

So, what does God seem to be like?

Let me mention several of the other ways my thinking about God has changed over the years and then return to the question of pantheism. To signal where this will be going, though, let me state here that after taking inventory of my emerging convictions about God, I realize that once I stop and think about it, my views may be somewhat close to at least some of the elements of what is often considered pantheistic beliefs. To recognize that all of our labels need to be worn lightly and viewed as fallible ways to try to order our thoughts (not as exact statements about reality), may make affirming some pantheistic ideas less “heretical.”

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Is Christian theology war theology? [Question faith #14]

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Ted Grimsrud—January 9, 2023

The kind of theology I believe in is what I call “peace theology.” By “peace theology” I mean the conviction that love of God and of all neighbors are the center of faith. No other conviction or commitment is as important as love. As a result of this conviction, violence, warfare, injustice, and domination are all rejected as acceptable behaviors—that is, I believe we are called to a pacifistic way of life. One of the main emphases of peace theology is to seek to understand all of our key convictions in light of this core conviction of love.

I also recognize that the Christian tradition has not affirmed peace theology. The vast majority of Christian teaching and Christian practice has found war and other forms of violence to be acceptable for most of its history. However, I believe that peace theology is the original Christian theology—it follows directly from the life and teaching of Jesus. So, for me, one of the key questions that arises in relation to Christianity is: Why did things change (see my earlier blog post, “Why did Christianity move so far away from the message of Jesus?”)?

The social context for thinking about peace theology

The question that just now has intrigued me is this: In recognizing that Christian theology (defined here in terms of what most Christians believe) is no longer peace theology, does that mean that Christian theology is “war theology”? In this post, I want to reflect on that question. I will start with an assumption that not everyone will share. I suspect it is impossible to be neutral about war in our current world, at least in the United States. That is, the momentum in our society it towards war. Public spending, policy decisions, and the message of popular culture all are prowar, pro-preparation for war, pro-military response to conflicts. Peace theologian Walter Wink used the term “myth of redemptive violence” to describe the general disposition of American culture (and most other cultures). Americans believe that violence works to solve problems, that often it is the only thing that works. So, we are drawn to orient ourselves toward violence and warfare. Another coined term fits in describing our general disposition in the US: “warism.” By “warism” I have in mind the belief in war, a belief that leads to the acceptance of making preparation for war-making the most important focus of our society (as measured, say, by public expenditures).

In a warist world that is shaped by the myth of redemptive violence, theological neutrality is impossible. To say nothing and to ignore the dominant mythology in our society is actually to offer implicit support and affirmation. To say nothing also seems to be blind to the ways that warism shapes everything about how we perceive the world—including our theology. I tend to think we either self-consciously notice and oppose warism or we, at least implicitly, affirm it. We can’t avoid it.

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Is Jesus God? [Questioning faith #9]

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Ted Grimsrud—December 8, 2022

Many years ago, I had a friend who was probably the most principled person I have ever known. As a young college professor, he was denied tenure in large part because he sided with a student in a dispute with one of the school’s high administrators. My friend and his family then moved to a new town on the other side of the country.

A few years later, he was offered a teaching job at another college. However, he didn’t take the job because he could not sign the school’s doctrinal statement. The school dean argued with my friend—“Nobody takes this statement seriously. Just sign it; we don’t care if you agree with it or not.” What was the issue? The divinity of Jesus Christ. The doctrinal statement said something to the effect that “we believe Jesus Christ is God Incarnate.”

Now, my friend was hardly a liberal. He was kind of a biblical literalist, and he didn’t think the Bible itself taught that Jesus is God. He didn’t give much weight to the later creeds and confessions that make that affirmation. At that point in my life, I hadn’t really questioned the standard “orthodox” view, but my friend’s costly commitment to his belief system impressed me. So, I started thinking about this question, “is Jesus God?” I still haven’t figured it all out, though.

What’s the question?

One of the difficulties I have is that I can’t quite figure out what the statement “Jesus is God” actually means. It seems a bit like saying that in the 4th quarter of a close basketball game, Steph Curry is a cold-blooded killer. You have a sense of what the statement means, but it’s a metaphor. A person playing basketball is not in any literal sense a killer. But Curry can be like a cold-blooded killer when he ignores the pressure and makes a crucial shot that leads to his opponent’s defeat.

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Why did Christianity move so far away from the message of Jesus? [Questioning faith #7]

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Ted Grimsrud—November 21, 2022

From the time I made a commitment to Christian pacifism in the mid-1970s, I have believed that Jesus and the Bible as a whole support that commitment. In the years since, I have learned a lot more about how this “support” is complicated and at time ambiguous. However, I still believe that the general message of the Bible and more clearly the message of Jesus obviously point toward peace, compassion, care for the vulnerable, and what we now refer to as restorative justice—even if some may quibble about whether it explicitly teaches pacifism.

A few years after my turn toward peaceable Christianity, my wife Kathleen and I spent a year at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. We gained a terrific foundation there of biblical peace theology, especially from Old Testament professor Millard Lind and New Testament professor Willard Swartley. I have preached through much of the Bible in the 40 years since attending AMBS, each year during my 20-year teaching career at Eastern Mennonite University I taught a class called “Biblical Theology of Peace and Justice,” and I have written several books on peace based on the Bible. I feel quite established in my sense that the Bible (especially, but not only, Jesus) gives us a strong message of peace.

The difference between the Bible and Christian practice

So, that leads to the obvious question. What happened to Christianity? The history of Christianity is a history full of wars and militarism, conquest and domination, crusades and the embrace of empire. One statistical piece of evidence comes from the United States. In 1940, after several years of intense lobbying by peace advocates, the legislation passed to begin a military draft included allowance for pacifists to be exempt from joining the military. So, this proved to be kind of a test case.

From my analysis, I would estimate that about one out of 1,000 American Christians chose the conscientious objector route. For the vast majority of the young men who were drafted, the option to be a CO—and the sense that Jesus would support such a stance—seemingly never even entered the realm of possibility. Not only have Christians around the world almost always supported their nations’ wars, even when they would be fighting other Christians, it actually seems to be the case at least in the United States that Christians are more likely than non-Christians to support wars and preparation for wars. It doesn’t seem farfetched to call Christianity a pro-war religion—the opposite of Jesus’s message.

So, again, the question: Why the transformation? This is a question that has interested me for a long time, but I have never devoted serious attention to it. I have come up with a preliminary list, though, of what seem to be key elements of the evolution away from Jesus’s teaching.

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