Christian Nonresistance

History

Roots

Jesus’ words “do not resist the one who is evil” and “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:38–48), his rebuke of Peter’s sword (Matthew 26:52), and Paul’s “never avenge yourselves” (Romans 12:17–21) are the texts every later nonresistant writer starts from. The King James Version renders Matthew 5:39 “resist not evil,” the phrase behind the English name.

Several pre-Constantinian writers in the Early Church argued that Christians should not kill. Tertullian, around 200, asked: “Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword?” (The Chaplet, ch. 11). In On Idolatry he wrote that “the Lord afterward, in disarming Peter,” disarmed every soldier (ch. 19). Origen answered the pagan Celsus that Christians serve the emperor by prayer, as priests who keep their hands “free from blood,” and do not enlist (Against Celsus VIII.73). The same Tertullian also says that Christians “sail with you, and fight with you” (Apology 42) and repeats the story of Christians praying for rain while “fighting under” Marcus Aurelius (Apology 5). So Christians were already in the army, and how representative the rigorist writers were is still argued.

After Constantine the church’s majority answer changed. Augustine defended war waged by lawful authority to restrain wrongdoing: “The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity” (Reply to Faustus XXII.74), and “war is waged in order that peace may be obtained” (Letter 189).

Causes

The position took its classic form in the Reformation. The Swiss Brethren who broke from Huldrych Zwingli in 1525 applied the Scripture principle to the Sermon on the Mount and found no exemption for magistrates or soldiers. In February 1527, meeting at Schleitheim under Michael Sattler, they agreed seven articles. The sixth calls the sword “an ordinance of God outside the perfection of Christ” (ein Gottes ordnung / ausserhalb der volkomenheit Christi, 1527 text, Museum Schleitheim). God uses it to punish the wicked through rulers, but within the church only the ban applies, and a Christian may not serve as magistrate. The seventh article rejects the oath because Christ, who fulfilled the law, forbade swearing (1527 text; English summary, secondary). Sattler was burned at Rottenburg that May.

Not every early Anabaptist agreed. Balthasar Hubmaier held that a Christian ruler may bear the sword, and the Münster rising of 1534–35 showed an armed apocalyptic strand (see Anabaptist). Nonresistance became the mark of the surviving movement after Münster, largely through Menno Simons. He wrote that the rightly baptized disciples of Christ “know of no weapons other than patience, hope, quiet, and God’s word” (“A Christian and Affectionate Exhortation to All in Authority”). In the same appeal he told rulers that their calling was to punish open evildoers, so Menno addressed magistrates as ordained by God while denying that the sword belonged to the church.

The magisterial reformers rejected the position at once. The Augsburg Confession (1530) said it is right for Christians “to engage in just wars, to serve as soldiers… to make oath when required by the magistrates,” and condemned “the Anabaptists who forbid these civil offices to Christians” (art. XVI). Martin Luther’s Two Kingdoms Doctrine gave the theory behind that answer: the Sermon governs the Christian as a person, while the office of ruler or soldier serves God’s left-hand kingdom. John Calvin opened his chapter on civil government in the Institutes by opposing “the frantic proceedings of the Anabaptists” (IV.20).

Influence

The Dutch Mennonite Dordrecht Confession (1632) restated nonresistance and the refusal of oaths, and it is still used by Amish and Old Order groups (summary, secondary). Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish negotiated exemptions from military service as they moved east to Prussia and Russia and west to Pennsylvania, and they often moved again when the exemptions were withdrawn. The Schwarzenau Brethren (1708), the later Church of the Brethren, took the teaching from the Anabaptists through Radical Pietism.

The Quakers reached a similar conclusion by another route. Their 1660 declaration to Charles II denied “all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever” (Peace Testimony, secondary). Their witness rests on the inner light and tends toward active peacemaking rather than withdrawal from government. Together, Mennonites, Brethren and Friends became known as the historic peace churches.

The modern practice of conscientious objection grew largely from these churches. In the United States, Civilian Public Service let nearly 12,000 draftees do “work of national importance” instead of military service from 1941 to 1947, and the Mennonite, Friends and Brethren service committees ran almost all of its camps (Civilian Public Service, secondary).

In the twentieth century the idea moved outside the peace churches. Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894, Project Gutenberg) made nonresistance a universal ethic detached from church membership. John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (1972, Eerdmans) argued that Jesus’ rejection of violence is a social ethic binding on all Christians, not a private counsel for a few. Stanley Hauerwas, influenced by Yoder, made a similar case from outside the Mennonite world in The Peaceable Kingdom (1983, Notre Dame Press).

Key ideas and contributors

The Sermon binds every disciple. Nonresistant churches deny that Jesus’ commands are counsels for monks, ideals for the millennium, or law meant to drive the sinner to grace. They are rules for the church now. The Sermon on the Mount does not exempt the believer when acting as a judge or soldier.

Two orders, one ordained by God. Schleitheim does not say the sword is evil in itself. It is God’s ordinance for the world, used to restrain the wicked (Romans 13:1–4), but it stands “outside the perfection of Christ.” The church has its own discipline, the ban, which excludes but never kills. This makes nonresistance a doctrine of the church as much as of ethics: Christians may pray for rulers, pay taxes and obey laws, but not hold the offices that wield lethal force.

No oaths. Jesus said “do not take an oath at all” (Matthew 5:33–37; James 5:12). The Anabaptists read this literally, against a society where oaths bound citizens to the town and soldiers to their lord. Refusing the oath was therefore also refusing a political bond.

Suffering instead of resisting. The model is the cross. Christ “did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:21–23), and the disciple follows him into suffering. The Martyrs Mirror (1660) taught generations of Mennonites to see the sixteenth-century martyrs as the pattern of faithfulness.

Nonresistance is not nonviolent resistance. Guy F. Hershberger, in War, Peace, and Nonresistance (1944), distinguished biblical nonresistance from nonviolent resistance. He rejected violence but was also skeptical of coercion, and judged that strikes, boycotts and similar pressure went too far (Guy F. Hershberger, secondary). Conservative Anabaptists still speak of nonresistance in his sense. Yoder, Hauerwas and many Mennonites since speak instead of “nonviolence” or “peacemaking” and accept protest and active conflict resolution, which is the main internal division in the tradition today.

The church as a political alternative. Yoder’s distinctive claim was that the church itself is Jesus’ politics. Christians do not withdraw from society; they show it a community that lives without violence.

Key controversies

Was the early church pacifist? Peace-church writers argue that the pre-Constantinian writers who discuss killing oppose it, and Ronald Sider’s The Early Church on Killing (2012) collected the texts behind that case. Others point to Christian soldiers already in the army in Tertullian’s day, to his own Apology, and to the fact that the objections of Tertullian and Origen often concern idolatry in camp religion as much as bloodshed. The evidence is real on both sides; what it proves is disputed.

The just-war answer. Augustine gave the classic reply: love of neighbor can require force to protect the innocent, and the evil in war lies in hatred and cruelty, not in killing as such. Thomas Aquinas systematized it, listing as an objection the very text nonresistance relies on, “I say to you not to resist evil,” and answering that just war needs sovereign authority, a just cause and a right intention (Summa II-II q.40 a.1). On the Sermon he replied, following Augustine, that such precepts “should always be borne in readiness of mind,” while force is still sometimes necessary for the common good. Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed teaching followed this line, and Augsburg XVI made it confessional.

Abandoning the neighbor. The sharpest objection, from Luther and Calvin to modern critics, is that refusing the magistrate’s office leaves the weak to be protected by others’ sword while the nonresistant enjoy that protection. Reinhold Niebuhr, once a pacifist, made the twentieth-century version in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist” (1940). He argued that sin makes pure love impossible in politics, that justice must sometimes take precedence over love, and that pacifism is a symbol of absolute love that cannot prevent sin (Reinhold Niebuhr, secondary). Yoder replied that the cross, not effectiveness, is the Christian measure, and that Niebuhr assumed Christians must take responsibility for running history.

Romans 13 and the Old Testament. Critics ask why God would ordain an office no Christian may hold, and point to wars God commanded in Israel. Nonresistant writers answer that Romans 13 describes God’s use of pagan powers, as Assyria and Babylon were used, without approving the believer’s part in them. They also hold that Christ’s fulfillment of the law changes what the people of God may do.

Nonresistance or nonviolence? Conservative Anabaptists charge that the newer peace theology has turned a doctrine of the cross into a political program with its own coercive tactics. Its advocates answer that refusing to act against injustice is its own complicity. A related charge, from Niebuhr and also some Mennonites, is that strict nonresistance survives only by depending on states it will not serve.

The Yoder scandal. In 1992 reports emerged that Yoder had sexually abused many women over decades, and his former seminary acknowledged in 2014 that the abuse had been tolerated (John Howard Yoder, secondary). Since then Mennonite writers have argued over whether his theology of nonviolence can be read apart from his conduct, and whether its focus on the church’s public witness neglected power within the church.

What remains unresolved

The argument has not moved far since Schleitheim and Augsburg. Both sides read the same Sermon. One takes it as the church’s law now and accepts that Christians will leave the sword to others. The other takes it as binding on the heart and holds that love sometimes requires bearing the sword. Within the peace tradition the live question is whether Hershberger’s quiet nonresistance or Yoder’s active nonviolence better keeps faith with the martyrs. Outside it, the question is whether the just-war tradition still restrains Christians’ wars or mostly blesses them.