Thoughts from a troubled pacifist by Geoff Ryan

Last
week a story appeared in one of our national papers about renewed
fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a conflict that has
claimed an estimated five million lives in the past five years.
Specifically profiled was rebel leader General Laurent
Nkunda, a “tall, urbane and charming” warlord who in the photo that
accompanied the article, looks more like the former university student
he is, than the “Butcher of Kisangani”, as he is also referred to.
Nkunda is also a “self-described devout Pentecostal Christian”. The
incongruity of this particular piece of information, tucked amid a
fairly detailed description of some of Nkunda’s murderous military
exploits, startled me.  How can someone be “a devout Pentecostal
Christian” and also a warlord of the ilk described in this article? How
can such a person be a Christian of any stripe, for that matter?

Christianity and war have been linked for a long time, from the
moment the Roman Emperor Constantine co-opted Christianity. Replacing
the Roman eagle with the cross, he marched his troops into battle,
embraced Christianity as the state religion…and the church abandoned
the pacifist stance. A little known detail about Constantine’s
conversion is that on the eve of his battle of the Milvian bridge
(against his brother-in-law and co-emperor…a family feud), having been
given a sign by God and painted the cross on the shields of his
soldiers, he ordered them all into the water to get baptized before
sallying forth to engage the enemy. As they headed into the water, he
instructed them to keep their sword arms above the waterline, so the
warring parts of their bodies would not be sanctified. I guess that
Constantine was a pragmatist, but still – that should have been a red
flag to somebody.

This
unlikely marriage of sword and scripture continued after Rome fell,
through the Dark Ages, into the Crusades and the age of empire, through
two world wars and innumerable localized “people’s wars”, into 9/11 and
beyond.

But it was not always so and there is little doubt among Church
historians that the early church took an avowedly pacifist position.

Tony Campolo, an American sociologist and well-known Christian
author and speaker, describes the incident with Constantine and the
baptism of his troops in his book Speaking my Mind. In the
same book he describes himself as a “troubled pacifist”, by which he
means that while temperamentally combative and aggressive, he
understands that to be a follower of Jesus means at some fundamental
level to eschew violence, possibly at all costs. I understand him
completely.

Tempermentally I can also be considered combative and, at times,
somewhat aggressive. I enjoy watching action movies. I like the sport
of boxing. My historical heroes are almost always military figures of
some sort.  As a teenager I spent more time scrapping at school than I
did studying and I named my youngest son after Alexander the Great.  So
I have bona fides in the war and violence department. And yet, as a
follower of Jesus, something niggles.

The thought of becoming one of the “peace crowd”, however is more
than I can bear. I recently spent a morning in a room with a number of
church bureaucrats, several of whom represent a denomination whose main
concerns are peacemaking, banning anything remotely nuclear and weapons
disarmament, starting with slingshots. They are sincere, earnest and
honest followers of Jesus, just like me (all right, not really just
like me). I could never march in the streets with them. I can barely
sit in a room with them without fighting an urge to start laughing, or
in some way harm them. I understand that these are my issues and not
theirs. Worse yet, I know they have a point.

Unloading baby food in Nazran, Ingushetia during The Salvation Army’s relief effort to Chechnya, January, 2000

But I struggle to turn the other cheek, I find it hard to love my
enemies, and the Lion of Judah is somehow more appealing than a
bleeding Lamb on an altar. Yet the example of Jesus haunts me. If any
of us were ever truly serious about asking the question: What would
Jesus do?” then we have to admit to ourselves that whatever else he
would do, Jesus would not drop bombs or shoot anyone.

My own personal experience of war, comparatively minor to many in
the world, started me thinking differently. The year I spent running a
relief effort for The Salvation Army in the Republic of Chechnya
shifted my considerations of war and violence from the realm of
theoretical musings into the actuality of raw reality. The jarring
paradox of being a Salvation Army in the middle of an actual
shooting war created a dissonance in me. The appropriateness of
co-opting imagery of war and metaphors of violence as a cradle for my
Christianity produced a disconnect that even now I am not able to
adequately reconcile.

Following a recent visit to Atlanta, which included my second visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. museum,  I again  picked up  Strength to Love, a slim volume of King’s early sermons. Reading through the final chapter, Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, I came across these thoughts of Doctor King, written in the context of the civil rights struggle:

“I would not wish to give the impression that
nonviolence will accomplish miracles overnight. Men are not easily
moved from their mental ruts or purged of their prejudiced and
irrational feelings. When the underprivileged demand freedom, the
privileged at first react with bitterness and resistance. Even when the
demands are couched in nonviolent terms, the initial response is
substantially the same. I am sure that many of our white brothers in
Montgomery and throughout the South are still bitter toward the Negro
leaders, even though these leaders have sought to follow a way of love
and nonviolence. But the nonviolent approach does something to the
hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new
self-respect. It calls up resources of strength and courage that they
did not know they had. Finally, it so stirs the conscience of the
opponent that reconciliation becomes a reality.”

Speaking to the bigger context of global conflict and nuclear non-proliferation, King continued:

“More recently I have come to see the need for
the method of nonviolence in international relations. Although I was
not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations, I felt
that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a
negative force by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force.
War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a
totalitarian system. But I now believe that the potential
destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of
war ever again achieving a negative good. If we assume that mankind has
right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and
destruction. In our day…the choice is either nonviolence or
nonexistence.”

“I am no doctrinaire pacifist, but I have tried
to embrace a realistic pacifism which finds the pacifist position as
the lesser evil in the circumstances. I do not claim to be free from
the moral dilemmas that the Christian non pacifist confronts, but I am
convinced that the Church cannot be silent while mankind faces the
threat of nuclear annihilation. If the Church is true to her mission,
she must call for an end to the arms race.”

For some reason it is harder for me to argue with Dr. King than it is to ignore the wishes of Jesus.

But this wasn’t intended to be an article of about the military
metaphor employed by The Salvation Army. It was supposed to be a timely
piece on Remembrance Day – a day set aside to intentionally remember
those fallen in the First and Second World Wars, the enormous sacrifice
made by uncounted families in a relatively black and white struggle
against an obvious evil. The consensus on who the bad guys were was
virtually unanimous, back in that day. Few will argue that a nonviolent
answer would have sufficed, and so with heavy hearts Christians of all
persuasions marched to battle with the conviction that this time there
was a peace that could only be achieved on the other side of war.

It’s a little trickier now, more confused, the lines are not as
clearly drawn. God apparently has endorsement contracts with most
armies in the field these days, and the pretext for strapping on
armour, covering our cheeks, letting hate for our neighbours burn and
roaring like lions – well it seems that any old pretext will do.

On this Remembrance day do I buy Nkunda’s “devout Pentecostalism”?
No – not really. It’s too much of a stretch for me and too obvious a
contradiction. And what of the war veterans whom I will remember today
at 11a.m? How about their Christianity?  Yes – I buy it. The
contradictions are only on the surface and do not go deep, they are not
terminal and the tension of holding these convictions together is
bearable. We live in a fallen world in which some courses of action are
out of our hands. But in thinking about today’s wars (pick one: Iraq,
Afghanistan, the Congo, Chechnya, etc…) I struggle.

Most Christians regularly enact Remembrance services. They observe
solemn acts of silence in memory of an act of sacrifice made in the
face of profound violence and perpetrated as part of a larger war
against the whole of mankind. This is war each of us was born into, and
have little choice about participating in. Just like the wars of our
fathers and grandfathers.

But the world has changed and we now have a choice.  To echo Dr.
King: If the Church is true to her mission, she must call for an end to
the arms race. In our day… the choice is either nonviolence or
nonexistence.”

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder and publisher of theRubicon, co-ordinator of the 614 Network and organizes the bi-annual Urban Forum.
His interests include writing, politics, coffee and his children. Geoff
and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project
in downtown Toronto, Canada.

Posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008.