Holy War and Christian Pacifism: Christian Responses to the Death of Bin Laden

By Greg Garrett

As we think of [Jesus] we can achieve the difficult and unnatural: we can love those that hate us, give good for evil, and blessing for cursing (Matt. 5:44), remembering that we are not to dwell on the evil in men, but look to the image of God in them. This image covers and obliterates their faults, and by its beauty and dignity draws us to love and embrace them. (John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion 3.7.6.)

Last week we explored the Christian Realist tradition out of which President Barack Obama made peace with the decision to eliminate Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Christian Realism, as we observed, represents a pragmatic faith that notes the presence of evil in the world and suggests that Christians can and must sometimes do things that the tradition teaches against—killing others of God's children in warfare, for example—in order to safeguard our families and our nation.

This week we're going to look at other theologies that have shown their faces: the American Christian notion of Holy War, which accounted for some of last week's celebration and grim pronouncements of satisfaction, and also the tradition of Christian Pacifism, which argues that we have an absolute call to peace, no matter what the circumstances.

Holy War

I'm not saying I like it, but the Christian tradition does contain a Holy War strand. Some readers of the Hebrew Testament have always pulled forward the holy wars in the book of Joshua for the conquest of the Holy Land. For these readers, God is on one side, the enemies of God on the other. It can be hard—particularly for people who read the Bible literally—to imagine that any part of the Bible is not directly applicable to our lives, so I've seen a number of folks justifying our wars in the Middle East, and our mission against bin Laden, in terms of a theology based on the warfare of the Children of Israel to take possession of the land God had given them.

That theology got carried over into the Middle Ages. Ambrose of Milan argued that when Rome's military stood up against the menacing barbarians, the legionaries represented God's hand at work. Bernard of Clairvaux, in a tract on the duties of the militant Knights Templar, delineated Holy War in a way we may recognize in our own thinking about warfare:

"The soldier of Christ kills safely; he dies the more safely. He serves his own interests in dying, and Christ's interests in killing. . . . He is the instrument of God for the punishment of malefactors and for the defense of the just. Indeed, when he kills a malefactor this is not homicide, but malicide, and he is accounted Christ's legal executor against evildoers."

It was pretty clear to Christians who the enemies of God were: God hated the Muslim invaders, God hated the Muslim occupiers of the holy sites in Palestine, and Christian leaders all the way up to the top affirmed this. Pope Urban II, in his Crusade sermon of 1095, preached that the Franks were a race beloved by God, and the Muslims a race wholly alienated from God. They were not Children of God; they were not made in the Image of God.

They were Children of the Devil.

Read the rest of this article at Patheos here.