War and the Early Church

Abstract

We have seen that the idea of war as the instrument of God’s judgment permeates the Bible from Genesis to the Apocalypse. It is the ruling idea which gives unity and consistency to the most ‘militarist’ as well as to the most ‘pacifist’ passages of Scripture, diverse historical situations and epochs calling forth diverse applications of that dominant conception. It now remains to suggest that this same idea has dominated the authentic Christian idea of war and attitude towards war throughout the changing circumstances of the situation of the Christian Church in the world. For just as this conception dominates the Scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse, so it has ever been uppermost in the authentic mind of the Church from the Apocalypse—which foresees wars as the outcome of the outpouring of the ‘vials full of the wrath of God’—to Benedict XV—who, in September, 1914, cried, ‘We beg and implore ... all the sons of the Church ... to beg that God, mindful of His mercy, may lay aside this scourge of anger with which He inflicts on the people the penalty of their sins.’But just as, as we have previously said, we must avoid expecting to find in the Scriptures ready-made solutions to our present problems, so, if we would scan the pages of Christian history for light in our present perplexities, we must beware of expecting to find in them exact precedents for our present attitudes and conduct.