Ted Grimsrud—October 14, 2025
Christian pacifism challenges mainstream Christianity by arguing that Jesus’s life and teaching actually do provide direct guidance for politics. Jesus, like the rest of the Bible, offers a direct alternative to the politics of empire and domination. Christians have misrepresented the Bible insofar as they have embraced uncritical nationalism. My realization that Jesus does give us a realistic peaceable direction caused me to turn away from my nationalistic embedded theology and never look back. In this post I will offer a summary of that peaceable direction.
Jesus affirmed that Torah and the prophets reveal God’s will for the world. When he taught with authority, showed love with his healing, and called together a community to embody the justice of God in the world, he fulfilled the Old Testament. Jesus’s life incurred the deadly wrath of the religious and political leaders. God raising Jesus from the dead in defiance of the leaders’ verdict of condemnation vindicated Jesus’s message. Jesus culminates the political message of the Old Testament when he critiques empire, rejects territorial kingdom as the channel for God’s promise to bless all the families of the earth, and the embodies Torah as the alternative to the ways of the nations. Like Torah and the prophets, Jesus practices power as service, offers compassion and justice for the vulnerable, and resists the powers of domination.
Politics and the gospels
The gospels present Jesus as a king. The gospel of Matthew begins with “an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). Christians tend to think of “Christ” as a religious term having to do with the divine identity of Jesus Christ, the savior. However, it literally means “king,” a political leader. The descriptor of Jesus that follows in Matthew 1:1, “son of David” confirms the political sense of “Messiah.” David stands as the paradigmatic king in ancient Israel, a kind of ideal king.
The rejection of the OT territorial kingdom points ahead to an alternative way to imagine the peoplehood. God never revoked Abraham’s vocation to bless all the families of the earth. If not as a territorial kingdom, then how will the promise be embodied? Jesus will be in continuity with David’s role in carrying on the promise (a great leader for the peoplehood). However, he will be in discontinuity in that his political path will not be to lead a territorial kingdom like David. The gospels provide an account for this alternative political path.
Thinking Pacifism 