Humanness – Thinking Pacifism

Ted Grimsrud—September 23, 2025

In these posts, I wrestle with why so many Americans, including so many Christians, have such an uncritical attitude about the violent behavior of our country. Uncritical acceptance of a deep-seated warism flies in the face of the peaceable values most Americans and just about all Christians understand themselves to have. How can this be? To address this question, I reflect on my own life, especially my transition from an American patriot to an antiwar pacifist. I have focused on what I call the “embedded theology” of uncritical acceptance that I grew up. As I grew, though, I also absorbed a different kind of embedded theology that made my transition to a pacifist possible. This different embedded theology played an even more decisive role in the evolution of my convictions than the patriotic embedded theology. However, while I find the patriotic embedded theology difficult to name in clear ways, I find this different kind of embedded theology even more difficult to bring to the surface. I attempt to do that in this post.

Looking for a sense of coherence

When I first became a Christian, I sought to make sense of life. The Christianity I initially embraced offered a coherent worldview but ended up being at odds with what I actually sought. I took several years to figure that out. Even as I realized I needed a different kind of Christianity; I still needed more time to put the pieces together. The catalyst for the shift had to do with war and peace. However, that I could make the shift and that I make it quickly and free from trauma had mostly to do with the general orientation toward life provided by what I will call my familial embedded theology (distinct from the societal embedded theology I discussed in previous posts).

My new orientation became quite distinct from and, in time, antagonistic toward my old one. The way the transition happened—and its continued viability for me—makes me believe that all along I did not actually care that much about the certainty offered by fundamentalist Christianity. Rather, I sought the coherence that only an embrace of our essential human connectedness and love-centeredness offers. It just took some time for me to figure this out.

Growing up in the US during the 1950s and 1960s, I experienced the embedded theology of uncritical nationalism as pervasive. However, when it hit turbulence during the Vietnam War era, I readily replaced it. Something more basic to the way of being in the world that I got from my family took its place. As revised and applied through my new learnings and experiences, this different embedded theology actually provided the kind of coherence I sought.

Continue reading “Competing embedded theologies” →

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?

Continue reading “What does it mean to be human? [Questioning faith #26]” →