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To serve Caesar or Christ


 

 For a long time I've thought that all Christians should be pacifists.  I've thought it was very clear from the teachings of Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, that a Christian could not participate in a war for any reason.  This seems blindingly obvious to me.  Yet almost all Christians hold the opposite view, that it is a "Good Thing" to serve ones country as a soldier.  How can this be?  Is it because, as I've heard some pacifist Christians say, that once Christianity was entangled with the Imperial Government, beginning under Constantine, that it compromised on war and government in order to better serve the Emperor's needs?  

I have been reading, slowly and painfully, through some of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, painfully because the version I have available on Kindle is from the 1800's and is translated in a pretty archaic form of English, but then again I read a LOT of 19th century stuff so I'm pretty used to it.  I'm hoping that eventually when I have gone through all 5 volumes and the many thousands of pages of the writings I'll be able to get a better feel for what the early, pre-Constantine, church actually thought and taught about participating in the wars of the various governments of the world.   

I suppose it is possible that I'm wrong on this issue and that Christ didn't really mean what he said in Matthew 5 at all.  Maybe that was only for our personal lives and serving the government is a whole different matter, as I've heard said by pro-war apologists before.  Maybe Jesus really meant to say, "turn the other cheek, unless the Emperor wants you to go to war, then go ahead and hack the limbs off of your brother Christian who just happens to live in a different country with a different king."  Maybe Jesus is really OK with Christian brothers dismembering each other in the service of a worldly ruler who is fighting his Christian neighbor.  Maybe "Just Wars" are really a thing and not just a pathetic justification of sin.  To bring this up to today's situation, maybe it's OK to slaughter men, women and children by dropping bombs from the sky on their cities and villages in the service of the American and Multinational Corporate Oligarchs who have sent soldiers all over the planet in the interests of greed.  Maybe.  But I sort of doubt it.

 

 

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