In this last episode of a three-part series, pastors Derek and Cliff discuss whether Christians can serve in combatant roles in the military.
Transcript
Derek: Welcome to the With All Wisdom podcast where we are applying biblical truths to everyday life. My name is Derek Brown, and guess what? I’m here today with Cliff McManis. We are both pastors and elders at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California, and we are professors of theology at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary in the North Bay. And you know what, Cliff? I think I can speak for you. We love our jobs. We are thankful for our work that we get to do, both as pastors and then training pastors. And we are going to come back now with part three. This is part three of our discussion of war and the Christian. Please go back and listen to the previous two episodes if you haven’t already, so you can get caught up. And today we want to ask specifically, is pacifism a legitimate Christian position? And then we’re also going to ask in relation to that, can Christians serve in the military, specifically in a combatant role where they will be fighting against other people with lethal force? And then also the last question, which is a controversial question but we have to ask it, should women serve in those combatant roles? So here we go, Cliff. Let’s talk about pacifism. Let me just give a definition and I’ll hand it over to you. Again, I mentioned Wayne Grudem’s ethics book, which is a really good book. [It has] a helpful definition for pacifism. He says, “The pacifist view holds that it is always wrong for Christians to use military force against others, and thus it is wrong for Christians to participate in military combat, even to defend their own nation. A related but somewhat different pacifist view holds that it is wrong for anyone to participate in military combat, and that such violence is always morally wrong.” I think that’s a helpful definition, both of Christian pacifism and then a more broad definition. Cliff, what are your first thoughts in terms of definitions or just pacifism in general?
Cliff: Yeah, if someone were to ask me, hey, Pastor Cliff, are you a pacifist with respect to war? I would say, well, it depends.
Derek: Yeah.
Cliff: Or I would say, sometimes.
Derek: Okay.
Cliff: So sometimes I’m a pacifist, sometimes I’m not. It depends on the context. And I believe this is rooted in, again, my view of the Bible. As a Christian, I believe the Bible teaches that all Christians have dual citizenship. We are citizens of this earthly temporal world and its system. God wants us to be good citizens of where we live. And then when you become born again, you’re adopted into God’s family. And then you enter in the spiritual realm of the kingdom of God and of Christ. And that’s a different domain, actually. It intersects with the world, but it’s not the same thing. Someday it will be. Revelation 11:15 says, in the future, when Christ returns, that God will make the kingdoms of this world his, and he will reign forever. So that day is coming. But in the meantime, they not synonymous—the kingdom of this world, this earthly temporal domain, and then the spiritual domain of the kingdom of God. So every Christian has dual citizenship. Citizenship on earth, and citizenship in heaven with the heavenly king. And we have responsibilities towards both. We have allegiance towards both. So while we’re here on earth, we’ve got to be good citizens. That’s why we have Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2. We’ve got to follow the laws and obey the rules and submit to earthly authorities like the policeman and whoever it is, and our government leaders, and be good citizens, and pay your taxes.
When Jesus said that in the Gospels, he was talking about your citizenship here on earth, because Caesar has domain or he has delegated authority over this domain, and we live in that domain. So we’ve got to be good citizens. So I see myself as being a dual citizen of the invisible spiritual kingdom of Christ—the church, namely—its manifestation through the church and then also here on earth, in this case being an American citizen and in the state of California and in Santa Clara County, in the city of Cupertino. I could abide by all of those. And so then there’s, on a personal level, there’s the Christian ethic. The church is not Israel. And so the church is not a theocracy on Earth. It’s not an earthly, temporal theocracy. There will be a theocracy again, like there was in the Old Testament. And that’s when Jesus comes at the Second Coming. He will establish a theocracy on earth, but we’re not there yet. So in the meantime, the church is to follow Christ and the apostles and their teaching. We put an emphasis as citizens of the kingdom in the spiritual realm.
So on a personal level, I’m abiding by those rules. And so I don’t usurp or step over the boundaries of the authority that God has given to the state—the secular state. So on a personal level, I don’t retaliate. I love my enemies. I pray for my enemies, I exercise patience, and those kind of things. And I turn the other cheek when I’m slapped. And again, this is all on a personal level. I don’t retaliate, right? I don’t take the laws of the policeman into my own hands. I don’t usurp the authority of the local government as a vigilante and seek physical violence and retaliation beyond what I should be doing, as Romans says. Or God says that vengeance is mine; I will repay. Leave that in my hands, Christian. So on a personal level, yes, as a Christian, I’m a pacifist. On a corporate, legal level, in light of the authority that God has given the state and government rulers, I’m not a pacifist. I support their right to wield the sword. I don’t have the right to wield the sword, right? But they do. And I support that when it’s for a just cause. So if America is going to go to war to kill evildoers and to protect innocent people, I’m all for it. So that’s when I would support war.
If it’s a legitimate means of Romans 13 being implemented. So it’s a both/and. Yes, I’m a pacifist, and there are times I’m not a pacifist, and it depends upon the context. And as far as the church goes, the church, the entity of the body of Christ that God created on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter two—it is not the role of the church to usurp the role of the state in terms of wielding the sword in this life. And that’s why Jesus never exerted any violence. He never killed anybody. He never hurt anybody physically, because that was not his role. He was to die as the humble Savior, to forgive spiritual sin. He even said that to Pilate. Yes, I am a king. You’ve said correctly, but my kingdom is not of this realm or this world, yet it will be in the future when I return again, but not right now. Because if my kingdom was of this world, then I’d call my servants, and my servants literally would fight on my behalf. And he said the same thing to Peter in Matthew 26, when he was being arrested. And you know, Peter—here I am to save the day. And he whips out this hidden sword and flails it around and chops off the soldier’s ear. And Jesus said, put your sword back. If you live by the sword, you’ll die by the sword, basically, is what he said. Jesus was authorizing the use of the Roman soldier to kill Peter on the spot, or whatever soldier that was, for illegitimately wielding a sword, taking vengeance in his own hands. So Jesus basically was saying, capital punishment is legit. These soldiers have the right to imprison you, and to kill you if it’s warranted. Peter, what are you thinking? We don’t do that. So there has to be a clear line of demarcation between the role of the church and the role of the state with respect to war, vengeance, and the sword. And so as a Christian, in terms of all of my responsibilities, duties and commands as a Christian, I am never to cross that line of usurping the role and the tools and the warfare of this world. We are soldiers in God’s army, but it’s spiritual, right? We have weapons that we are supposed to use, but they’re not of this world. Ephesians 6 and others are weapons. Our prayer, the fruits of the spirit, biblical truth, godly living—those are spiritual. And that’s how Christians are supposed to live. And then unfortunately, through 2000 years of history, Christians have confused that, muddled that, and the church has usurped the right of the state too many times.
The Catholic Church is a perfect example. The early church was at one extreme because they were pure pacifists, which was completely unbiblical. And then Constantine takes over, gets saved, and then he melds the church and the state together, and convolutes everything and messes it all up. And from there, you’ve got the church usurping the right of the state, including capital punishment. So during the Middle Ages, you’ve got Roman Catholic knights, guys that go around on horses with swords, killing people, and there are actually bishops and churches doing that, and monks doing the same thing. Getting violent, going into heathen lands, you know, believe or die. Even Thomas Aquinas wrote some things to that end, which was not good, in the 1200s. Convoluting or conflating the state and the church. The Crusades are the worst example of that—people going in military warfare in the name of Jesus, slaughtering people. Completely unbiblical, completely illegitimate. So you’ve got the Catholic Church early on at its beginning, being pure pacifist, then going the other way to the other extreme of pure militant, and then swinging back to where Pope Francis is today, of pure pacifism once again. They just can’t get it right.
Derek: Yeah. And that’s helpful to point out, Cliff, because you made a distinction, as you talked about that, between personal Christian obligations, to what you would call a certain kind of pacifism. But then when it comes to the state, you can’t bring that principle. For example, Matthew 5:39—turn the other cheek. You can’t take that principle—that’s a personal discipleship principle—and then bring it over to the area of the state when it comes to the state defending itself from evildoers. That’s where the muddled thinking has happened. So pacifists, they’re taking these texts—love your neighbor, love your enemy, turn the other cheek—and they’re taking what are meant to be personal discipleship obligations and commandments, and now applying them to the state. And it’s not good. It removes the way in which evil can be thwarted and people can be defended and good can be upheld within a society.
Cliff: Yes, you called it. You said earlier, the pope’s view regarding Israel and Hamas was evil. Because if Hamas, these evil terrorists, go unchecked, then evil reigns supreme.
Derek: Right. And so that’s what we wanted to address, is the pacifist position is built upon a few—I mean, I don’t want to make a caricature of anyone here—but they are built upon certain texts in the New Testament that are wrongly applied to the state when they’re intended to be for the personal Christian. And another one that gets brought up is that some pacifists will suggest that going to war indicates a lack of faith for Christians—that you need to trust God to preserve and save you and guard you and protect you. And Wayne Grudem points out that “Christians have no right to tell others to trust in God for things that are different from what the Bible teaches.” Romans 13:1-4 teaches that God authorizes governments to use deadly force if necessary, to oppose evil. So you can’t tell someone to trust God and to not use this kind of force, when in fact God has said, no, you trust me in using this force. And so that’s just not a useful argument. And I’m glad we’re talking about this, Cliff, because the more I study this, and the more I came to grips with the pacifist position, the more convinced I was that it is not merely a difference of opinion here. I would even say that this is not merely a thing where we can agree to disagree that the pacifist position when it comes to a state or a nation or a country having the right to defend itself with military force in a just cause—that Christians cannot be saying that that is wrong or that Christians cannot engage in that, or that it’s sinful for them to engage in that. I don’t think that’s a mere difference of opinion. I think we have to call that out as no, that’s just the wrong position. The Bible doesn’t allow for that kind of position.
Cliff: Yeah, it’s a dangerous position.
Derek: So let me ask you this then, Cliff: can a Christian serve in the military in a combatant role? The pacifist position would say it’s wrong for Christians to participate in military combat. So that’s binding the conscience. So you could turn to the Old Testament and say, well, yeah, believers have engaged in military battle for a long time, but pacifists would probably say, well, no, things have changed now that we’re in the New Testament or New Covenant. We would agree. Yes, things have changed, but the question of whether or not a Christian can serve in the military in a combatant role, I don’t think it’s taught in the New Testament that that is wrong. And let me tell you specifically why you probably would point to the same text, Cliff. In Luke 3:14 as an example here, the Roman soldiers are coming to John the Baptist and asking, what should I do? What does repentance look like? What are the fruits in keeping with repentance? And he says, you need to quit the military because it’s evil. No, he doesn’t say that. Actually, he doesn’t say that. He says, don’t extort and be content with your wages. And I think that’s an important passage, because what he is not saying is that it was inherently wrong for them to be soldiers, and to be a Roman soldier was to be someone who would use military force. I mean, you carried the sword around for that reason. And those men may have done that in the past or would anticipate doing that in the future. And John the Baptist never said that that was wrong. What he did say was wrong was extortion, and to combat that is to be content with your wages. So that’s an important text, I think, in the New Testament that gives credence to the idea that it is fine to serve in the military in a combatant role.
Cliff: John the Baptist. Wow. That’s huge because he was the greatest of the Old Testament prophets. He was the bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament. He was the forerunner of Christ. He fulfilled the prophecy of the coming Elijah when he was speaking those words in Luke three. He was speaking those words led by the Spirit of God. So what he said was true. And basically, in a nutshell, as you just read, what was he telling that Roman soldier carrying a sword? It was, be a good soldier.
Derek: Yeah.
Cliff: Be good. What do I need to do? Be a good soldier. Wow.
Derek: Yeah, yeah. So nothing inherently wrong with serving as a combatant, right? The centurion. When Jesus heals the centurion, he does not say anything about it being wrong for him to serve as a soldier. He says, actually, that he was a man of great faith. Jesus commends him for his faith. I think you have an implicit endorsement of him being a centurion, a leader of military men, someone who would go to battle or someone who would command battle. And so here you have Jesus commending someone like that for their faith. Well, let me go ahead.
Cliff: Just to accentuate what you’re saying there…so in Matthew eight, there’s a parallel passage in Luke, with this centurion. So that’s a Roman soldier in charge of at least 100 soldiers, who works for the pagan Caesar, is involved in warfare as a way of occupation. Carries a sword. Probably has some blood on his hands. Comes to Jesus. And again, like you said, Jesus commends him and doesn’t say, quit the army, right? Get rid of your sword. How dare you? What are you thinking? And then at the end of that story, he literally says that Roman centurion had greater faith than anybody I’ve met so far in Israel.
Derek: Yeah. So what you don’t have in the New Testament, when there was opportunity to make it clear that fighting in battle is wrong, it’s not said. In fact, it’s not addressed at all. You actually have a tacit or implied endorsement of that career as a military person by Jesus, by John the Baptist, by Peter, when he goes and speaks to Cornelius. He does not address or say anything about his situation or the need to divest himself of his position. Let’s see if there’s anything. He was a centurion. And when people were telling Peter about Cornelius, they said, Cornelius is a centurion. He’s an upright and God-fearing man who is well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation. And when Peter goes to him and preaches the gospel to him, Cornelius gets saved. At no point does Peter deride him or tell him to repent from his military position. So there you have another example when the opportunity was there for Peter to address that. So you have John the Baptist, you have Jesus, and you have Peter, who are tacitly endorsing the role of a centurion or a soldier. So just in terms of that and the fact that we have this conflating of the personal discipleship responsibility and the state’s responsibility, I think you can see that the pacifist position does not hold water and should not be endorsed.
Cliff: And you could add Paul to that, too. You had you mentioned John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, and Paul, because in the book of Acts, he hides in the shadows of the protection of the Roman soldiers. More than once. From the Jews who want to kill him. Appealing to Caesar. So he’s using the law of the land in his favor.
Derek: Now, let me ask you this, Cliff. What about a Christian in a country where they are going to be forced or required to engage in what they know to be an unjust war. Does a Christian then object and say, no, I can’t engage in a clearly unjust war.
Cliff: That’s a hard question. I’m trying to think of modern day parallel. Well, actually, this is probably going on. You’ve got some true Christian young men over in Russia who are conscripted by Putin to go in and slaughter the Ukrainians. And they don’t want to do it. And so they flee and they come to California and Sacramento, and I learn about them at the Cornerstone Seminary. That’s actually happened.
Derek: Okay.
Cliff: And it was a violation of their conscience. So I think this could be a Romans 14 issue, where it’s case by case. And going back to Wayne Gruden’s excellent principles there, who’s the source? What’s the authority? What is the cause? What’s the motive? Does this all coincide with the Bible? That’s the way you’ve got to think it through. And it may be that the nation you’re in is involved in initiating as an aggressor or an evil. And you cannot condone that as a Christian. You can’t be a part of it.
Derek: So just to be clear, when we talk about the illegitimacy of the pacifist position as such, what we’re not saying is that a Christian who potentially would be engaging in an unjust war can’t step back and say, no, I’m not going to do that. You can do that. We would say that that is legitimate. But that’s not the pacifist position. The pacifist position is saying that, all things being equal, if the Christian were in a just land and they were conducting a just war, even then he can’t engage in that war. So we’re just trying to make it clear that the pacifist position is illegitimate because of how it understands the state and its role. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a Christian in a situation like these brothers. Wow. I didn’t know that story that these brothers could flee from Russia and say, I can’t fight this war. It’s not legit.
Cliff: It would be like in the days of Hitler. I would imagine that there were some Christians there in Germany that are being called into war and to serve for Hitler and slaughter Jews, who are just utterly opposed to doing that. Sorry, I can’t do that.
Derek: Yep, yep. All right, Cliff, in order to end on a controversial note—we don’t try to be controversial for the sake of controversy. We don’t think that’s legitimate. We don’t just try to poke the beehive, as it were. But we do need to ask this question, regardless of how controversial it is. Should women serve in combatant roles? And what I mean is, should women be brought to the front lines? Should they be serving in roles where they will be required to kill enemy combatants, either with weapons or their hands? Should they be serving in front lines where there will most likely be death and a high possibility of being captured by the enemy? Is that a role for women? Is it right for our modern-day society to push for equality in this area, or is this only a place for men? Do we have any biblical principles that we can point to at this point? Or is this kind of just a hangover from a strongly patriarchal page of history?
Cliff: Yeah. So say your exact question again.
Derek: Can women or should women serve in combatant roles in the military?
Cliff: I wanted you to say that again, because the key word there is combatant roles. Because I don’t want people to misunderstand what the question is or what we’re saying. That’s different than the question, can women serve in the military? That is a different question. Absolutely. Can women serve in the military? Absolutely. Yes, I would say, yeah. This is a different question. Should women be serving in combatant roles in the military on the front lines, in war behind a machine gun, blowing people’s heads off? And are there biblical principles? So here’s just some thoughts. I’ll throw them out. Again, just from Scripture, I think by design, God has made the man the leader and the protector by virtue of his constitution, which plays out in marriage, the family and in the church. And clearly those aren’t to be violated. So women aren’t supposed to be leading, usurping that authority, teaching, etc. in the church. Nor is the wife to usurp that role from the man, and that just transcends all time and situations. That’s always true. In the Old Testament, under the Mosaic theocracy and the rules of war in the army, clearly, the only legitimate candidates for the army of Israel were men, right? Not women. Men between the ages of 20 and whatever it was—55. That was in the Old Testament. Although God raised up judges, and one of those judges in Judges chapter four and five was Deborah. She was a woman. She was a military leader. She was a commander. She told people what to do. She led people in war.
But nowhere in that passage does it say that, “go ye and do likewise” to women. But that’s just a historical figure that God raised up in his sovereign decision. But we have to acknowledge she was there. I said that under the Mosaic law, only men could go into war. But there was a change with the church in terms of because the Mosaic law, which also said that only men could be priests in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, women can be priests. So there is a change there. So there’s continuity and discontinuity in some respects. So that’s just something to be aware of. And then in Romans 13 and other places, God raises up rulers, kings and leaders and governors, and at times those can be females. God raises them up. God raised up Margaret Thatcher in the UK, who was actually, I think, an excellent Prime Minister. God raised up Queen Elizabeth II, who was actually, technically, the commander in chief of the armies. So even though she wasn’t involved in hand-to-hand combat, she can call the shots of how you kill people. You have the Queen of Sheba in the Old Testament during the days of Solomon. She had a country. She was a ruler. She was a woman. She commanded in Scripture. I don’t know what her involvement was in her military, but she was definitely the top authority. And then lastly, you’ve got revelation chapter two, verses 26 and 27, where Jesus gives the promise to the overcomers of everybody who’s a Christian.
And he says, in the future, if you overcome, someday you will rule with a rod of iron, and you will use that rod of iron in war to smash pottery to pieces. And female Christians are going to inherit that just as much as guys. So in the Millennial Kingdom, you may have females going around whacking heads around and smashing pottery. So in warfare, whatever that looks like. So that’s kind of just clear things that are talked about in Scripture. Trying to glean principles from that, that’s the challenge. And then you ask, well, can a woman serve as a police officer, you know, going around carrying a gun, right? Grace Community Church, when I was there, they had police officers that were members of their church that were women. And you’ve got a police officer that’s a woman with a man, and they’re partners together. And sometimes that woman police officer carrying a gun is helpful in dealing with some dangerous woman on the street they’ve got to deal with. And the lady cop takes care of her. So I’ve seen firsthand how that can work. But I guess if I had to land on the scales that I think, by way of God’s roles from the very beginning of man and woman, what they’re designed to do, women are supposed to be protected in the shadow of the man. That would be the general principle where I would land.
Derek: Yeah, and that’s where I would land, too. And I think, broadly speaking, I don’t think you’re going to have a predominance of women. I mean, you do see more women now wanting to serve in those roles, but I don’t think you will ever see a flood of women wanting to go run into those roles, like men. There’s this drive in men to want to be soldiers, to pursue military careers, to fight. And there may be some women who do that and have done that and want to do that and may continue to do that, but it will never be the majority and will never be predominant, I don’t think, precisely because of the way God has designed us. Just going back to creation. God has designed us differently.
Cliff: And what is categorically wrong that feeds into that in our culture and has been going on since the 60s, is the mantra by women in the world saying, well, women can do everything a man can do. That’s actually evil, right? That’s obliterating the lines that God has laid down from Adam and Eve. And we’re seeing the fruits of some of that. That’s the reason why some women are in the military in the front lines doing what they’re doing, because they have the worldview and mindset that, oh, no, women can do everything a man can do. No they can’t. They’re not supposed to.
Derek: Right. Exactly. And those differences are good. God put them in place. They’re beautiful. They should be protected and honored. And that’s probably a whole other podcast we could do. But we hope this has been helpful for you. This has been a three-part series. Go back and listen to the other two if you haven’t already. I also want to encourage you to check out our articles. Cliff has already mentioned the conflicts in Israel and in Ukraine, and actually Cliff has written articles about those on our website, withallwisdom.org. So you should go in, type on the search bar “Israel” or “Ukraine” and you’ll find his articles. We’ve also done some podcasts on these, so you can go back and check those out. I recently published an article called “A Few Essential Reflections on Manhood.” And so you can check that out. Cliff mentioned what men are made to do: lead, protect, provide. I talked about that in that article. So go check out those resources as well. We appreciate you listening. And until next time, keep seeking the Lord in His word.
