Twin, I think you've been exposed to some pretty twisted teaching. Nobody carefully teaching the doctrine of the historical peace churches would have reached the conclusion your pastor did.
TwinCrier said:
Not at all. It has been said that being a soldier is a sin.
True. Sort of. There is evidence that in the early church, at least in some times and places, soldier was among the occupations forbidden to Christians, along with actor, thief, prostitute, etc. If someone became a Christian in one of these professions, they could become a catecumen, and part of their preparation for baptism included the church helping them get out of that occupation and into a more ethical one.
The early Anabaptists wrote more about whether a Christian could be a magistrate - an office that seems to have had both police functions and judicial functions in Europe at that time. They concluded that a Christian's citizenship in the Kingdom of God precluded taking an official position in an earthly kingdom that would compromise the demands of the Christian's primary citizenship.
However, they did not call soldiers sinners. I can't recall ever reading that. Yes, soldiers are sinners in the same way all humans are sinners. No more and no less.
The pastor of my husband's church seemed quick to forgive me my divorce since my ex-husband was an enlisted soldier. Not that he ever fought in a war, but the pastor quickly labeled him a sinner for this transgression.
This doesn't even come close to Anabaptist teaching. It is wrong on so many levels I'm afraid I wouldn't even be able to list them.
First of all, the primary teachings of Jesus on which the Anabaptists base their teaching of nonresistance are found in the Sermon on the Mount right next to teachings against divorce. To excuse one easily on the basis of violation of the other makes no sense at all. I realize you used the word, "forgive," not "excuse," but since the divorce was not an offense against your pastor, and since you said the forgiveness was quick, I think it sounds more like an excuse than forgiveness. Forgiveness names the thing as wrong, and then releases it.
Yes, I think forgiveness may be granted more easily when unbearable circumstances led to the sin. Compassion for the sinner is a component in forgiveness. So you may have abbreviated a story with more details in your post. Yet from the tone of your post, it doesn't sound like you divorced your husband because you found marriage to a soldier to be unbearable. So I don't see how to connect his sin (if it was sin) to your divorce in any way that relates either to excuse or forgiveness.
I personally belive that soldiers, like executioners, aren't guilty of the blood of those they kill because it's not murder.
Not guilty of blood and not murder are not exactly the same, in my mind. For example, the OT talks about treating manslaughter different from murder. There is guilt associated with manslaughter, even though it is not murder. Again, war and capital punishment may not be in the same category as manslaughter, either. I just wanted to point out that there are more categories WRT killing than murder or innocence.
Is there any other verse, other than the one about being slapped, that pacifists use to prove that serving in the armed forces is a sin?
I actually don't think the historical peace churches look at it so much as a sin, but rather as a failure to follow the high calling of our citizenship. IOW, rather than using the word "sin" they would look at the problem in terms of a conflict of interests. Being a soldier before one became a Christian was perhaps the right thing to do because of one's earthly citizenship. But now that one has been granted heavenly citizenship, can one still exercise the power of one's earthly citizenship? To what degree? In what manners?
This is where the Anabaptists in teaching nonresistance differ somewhat from both the pacifists and the Lutherans. All three see war, killing and strife as being against God's eternal will. War and killing are not part of the practices of the Kingdom of Heaven, where we have our citizenship. Those who take a position of nonresistance also see the need for a second level of protection from violence in this fallen world. We call everyone to join the Kingdom of God and leave behind the use of violence, even to the point of giving up our earthly rights to self-defense as a prophetic statement about our true citizenship. But we do not call people sinners and condemn them for protecting themselves or others against violence or for administering lawful punishment. When one does that, one is exercising earthly citizenship, not heavenly citizenship. We do not condemn earthly citizenship, but for ourselves, we renounce it when its obligations or privileges conflict with the obligations of our heavenly citizenship.
Does the bible truly advocate non-resistence?
Yes. See above.
Did Gideon get the wrong message?
No. God directed Gideon WRT his earthly citizenship. Also, in that event, most (perhaps all?) the killing was done by the Midianites killing each other. I'm not quite sure whether that fact can be argued as paradigmatic, though, since there were many other instances where the Israelites themselves did the killing.
Like I sidestepped the question of divorce above, I will also mention, but not discuss, the question of Israel as both an earthly nation and a holy nation, with both citizenships unified, vs. the church being not an earthly kingdom.
I don't think so. I also don't know how long he continued in the office of centurion after he and his household came to faith.
What about David and his tens of thousands? How to you reconcile pasifism to the warmongering God of the old testament?
That's the question I mentioned above but left unanswered. One of the main ways Christians have dealt with this problem and its application for Christians today (since we're not part of the nation of Israel, which may be a special case) is the theory of two kingdoms. We each, by accident of birth, belong to an earthly kingdom. The jurisdiction of earthly governments extends only to the limits of their earthly nation. We are also citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Luther and the Anabaptists resolved the conflicting demands of these two kingdoms in different ways. Luther saw Christians as having citizenship in both kingdoms, and counseled Christians to exercise both responsibly. The Anabaptists, OTOH, said our only citizenship is in heaven, and we live on this earth as pilgrims and strangers - "resident aliens," as one American theologian has phrased it.
These two views of the two kingdoms lead to different conclusions about the Christian's relationship with earthly governments, one of the major implications being participation in functions of the government that are lawful, but violent. If one's basis for claiming a position of nonresistance is their view of the two kingdoms, then one would not condemn the good soldier, judge or police officer as a sinner. One would simply acknowledge that they are fulfilling a role in the earthly kingdom, which God ordained to mitigate the effects of the Fall (Plan B, as I called it in the other thread), but has called us out of it.
Centurions weren't even usually volunteers, they were impressed into service against their will. What would have been the use of Christ telling the centurion that it was sin to be in the military when he would have known the man had no choice but to serve? Especially since the man wasn't even questioning the rightness of being in the service? There is no record that Christ talked to each and every person about every sin they were committing. The fact that he didn't condemn military service doesn't imply that he APPROVED of or sanctioned service.
