What does it mean to be a Christian soldier?
Some consider Christian and soldier to be nearly
synonymous. Insofar as both the church and the military are engaged in
bringing good news, justice, and democracy to the farthest reaches of
the globe, the distinction between the two is permeable.
To others, “Christian soldier” is an oxymoron. To be one is to violate
the requirements of the other. To be a good Christian, I must cease
being a soldier; to become a soldier is to betray my Christian faith.
I came across both of these views repeatedly over several months in
2005, when, as a soldier on active duty, I prepared for my baptism.
Those who identify as patriots told me that, since Israel was commanded
to commit violence against her enemies, God clearly condones the use of
violence to carry out his will today. Meanwhile, pacifists claimed that
Jesus warned that those who lived by the sword would die by the sword;
therefore soldiers like the Centurion of Great Faith (Matthew 8, Luke 7)
are scriptural anomalies and not models for Christian behavior.
It seemed that to choose pacifism would be to abandon military service.
To choose military service would be the betray all that Jesus stood
for. In my memoir,
I describe being subjected to such polarizing tales about Christian
faith and military service, and how, as a result, the Christian story of
God seemed fragmented and at odds with itself.
War Is Irreducibly Personal
In the 10 years since my baptism, I’ve been searching for a perspective
that makes sense, for one that reflects God’s story of Christian
soldiers. And despite the implicit message I received—that the balance
between faith and service is a zero-sum game—I believe that written in
the pages of the Bible and across church history is indeed a story about
Christian soldiers that transcends our polarized traditions.
While researching my second book,
I found that both camps ignore significant aspects of the history of
Christian soldiers. Pacifists, one the one hand, deny or downplay the
impact that military service had on King David, Francis of Assisi, Joan
of Arc, and John Perkins. Patriots, on the other hand, often overlook
the concrete lessons about the church’s relationship with state power
offered by military martyrs like Saint George, Franz Jagerstatter, the
Hofer Brothers, and Tom Fox. Both ends of this theological spectrum have
a selective interpretation of the faith that can leave Christian
soldiers alienated from worship and from participating in the local
church. Holding too closely to the ideas we have about war creates a stranglehold around the people for whom war is irreducibly personal.
The world God made is full of color; thus, our black-and-white thinking
about Christian soldiers will fail to appreciate the complexity of
military experience. Progressives are concerned that to value military
service is to condone violence. But in reality, only a small portion of
today’s force is directly responsible for committing martial violence.
Meanwhile, conservatives worry that to reject violence per se is to
reject the virtues and values made visible by the martial fraternity,
such as courage, sacrifice, and conscientious obedience. Each side of
the spectrum relies on caricatures, shorthand, and clichés instead of
examining actual lives and experience.
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