Was Jesus a Pacifist?

PRESIDENT COOLIDGE’S Armistice Day speech, the proposed cruiser increase in our navy, the Kellogg Peace Pact and our growing commercial rivalry with England have, in the last few months, focused the attention of our citizens upon international relations. In less pleasant phraseology, this means that the attention of the public is being turned toward the age-old crime of war. On the one hand we have preparation for it as seen in the cruiser bill, and on the other a move to abolish it, as seen in the Kellogg Treaty. It is inevitable under such circumstances that the churches should be aroused.

This was quite in evidence at the recent Rochester Convention of the Federal Council of Churches. It is inevitable, too, that the old, old question of Christ’s teaching upon this subject should again be debated. Was Jesus a pacifist? Must a true follower of His refuse to bear arms even in wars of defense? It is such questions as these which are discussed by the Very Reverend Harold S. Brewster, D. D., Dean of Gethsemane Cathedral in Fargo, North Dakota in a vigorous, challenging book, “Madness of War.”

Superpatriotic Americans will not relish Dean Brewster’s discussion, for he traces much of our foreign policy to the desire for gain on the part of powerful self-seeking groups. American wars, as well as European, have been waged for base motives. There was the Mexican War to increase slave territory, and our war with Spain to make Cuba safe for American sugar interests.

But super-Marxian economists will not be much more favorably impressed for the author does not advocate social revolution as the only or final solution. What he does do is to face realistically the fact that deep down in human nature there is the desire for revenge, there is blood lust and other unseemly survivals of our animal inheritance. Deep down within us there lurk those evil spirits, always waiting and ready to be called up by the war mongers.

The heart of his attack is found in his insistence that Jesus was utterly and completely opposed to all war. Dean Brewster believes that one of the two outstanding teachings of Jesus is the sinfulness of using physical compulsion to accomplish moral ends. Here, he asserts, the real meaing of the cross is to be found. Only through love and self-sacrifice can moral gains come. No matter how good and righteous the cause, methods of physical compulsion will bring but husks of achievement. Dean Brewster would call the Church to repudiate war and all its works. He minces no words: “Failure to accept the peace of God as Jesus taught it, therefore, is a collapse of faith. A Church that encourages or even condones war under any circumstances is an apostate Church. It has repudiated the Faith.” And he would call the individual followers of the Prince of Peace to refuse to bear arms for any earthly consideration whatsoever.

Now, of course, this is radical teaching. Not all scholars would agree that this was the teaching of Jesus. But enough evidence can be marshaled for it to make it necessary for men and women prefessing to follow the Nazarene to weigh that evidence most carefully. The American citizen who is neither a jingo nor a Communist may well read and ponder. The old book of “Diamond on War” gives the argument for Christian pacifism in more detail, but Brewster’s book is more effective in its appeal to our generation.

Madness of War, by Harold S. Brewster: Harper.

Source: Outlook, 2 January 1929