Tag: Christian faith

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

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

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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How does Christian pacifism work? [Questioning faith #15]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—January 29, 2023

My definition of pacifism starts with the conviction that no belief or commitment or loyalty matters more than loving all others. It follows from such a conviction that participating in or preparing for or supporting warfare would never be acceptable. A key element, then, of this kind of conviction is that it requires a break from the widely held assumption that we should allow our nation to decide for us when war is okay. This assumption I call the “blank check”—the willingness (generally simply assumed more than self-consciously chosen) to do what our nation calls upon us to do, to give it—in effect—a blank check.

I have studied the responses American citizens had to their nation’s all-in call for fighting World War II. Only a tiny handful refused to take up arms, and I would say that almost universally those “conscientious objectors” shared a sense of loyalty to some higher moral conviction than accepting the blank check—and those who weren’t COs did not share that loyalty. Those who went to war did accept that their highest loyalty was owed to their nation.

If I add the modifier “Christian” to the term pacifism, the basic definition remains the same, but it adds the source of the conviction about the centrality of love. “Christian pacifism,” I would say, is the conviction that loving others is our never to be subordinated moral commitment, and this is due to the message of Jesus. Christians who aspire to have love be their central moral conviction (that is, “Christian pacifists”) look especially to Jesus’s teaching that love of God and neighbor is the heart of God’s will for human beings.

Why self-consciousness about pacifism matters

The two main inter-related reasons for why it is so important actually to understand Christian pacifism are: (1) in the long history of Christianity, hardly any Christian groups have in fact been committed to pacifism despite it being so central to Jesus’s message and (2) in the long history of human civilization hardly any Christians seem to have seriously questioned the validity of giving the state a blank check when it comes to warfare despite war being so obviously a violation of Jesus’s core message.

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Questioning faith: Blogging through key convictions [Questioning faith #1]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 8 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—November 2, 2022

I will be posting a series of short essays where I will reflect on some of the main questions I have had about the world I live in and Christian faith’s relationship to it. These questions indeed are concerned with “the faith”—that is, the Christianity I have been immersed in for my entire adult life. They reflect a great deal of the doubt and critical stance I now have toward my received Christianity. So, they are about “questioning the faith.” Ultimately, though, my reflections will be more affirmative than simply challenging things. These questions, and my reflections on them, my attempts to answer them, are expressions of a faith that sees questioning as a core component. That is, I will present the fruit of living with a “questioning faith.” The reflections are from a standpoint of a person with faith. Going back to when I was 17 years old, I have never actually questioned whether to have faith or not; it is always about the shape of that faith.  

Somehow, for my entire life I have always loved to ask questions, to try to understand. My initial attraction to Christianity arose out a desire to understand life, to try to find the truth. I have come to think of “understanding” and “truth” quite differently than I did when I was a teen-ager. Still, that quest I embarked on over 50 years ago remains at the center of my life. I expect my forthcoming blog posts to be elements of the ongoing journey.

Liberated by Francis Schaeffer

A turning point in my faith—and my life—came when I was 21 years old. At that moment (Summer 1975), I started attending a new church. I still accepted most of what I had been taught in the theologically very conservative Baptist church I had joined after my conversion four years earlier. In my new church, I almost immediately joined a book study group engaging Francis Schaeffer, an American living in Europe who was becoming known as “the evangelist for intellectuals.” Like many others, I found Schaeffer to be a formative influence in moving away from fundamentalism.

In my case, I rather quickly moved past Schaeffer and have never really stopped moving. As I learned later, Schaffer had been deeply immersed in the world of fundamentalism during the heyday of the famous fundamentalist/modernist conflicts that were probably their most bitter and consequential in Schaeffer’s own Presbyterian tradition. He ultimately became a victim of the battle himself and moved to Europe in part to separate himself from the faith-traumatizing struggles. But he never actually moved much in his own theology and ended his life as a key player in the emergence of the politically focused Christian Right in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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