Ted Grimsrud—VMRC Voices of Peace Symposium—1/30/26

(1) The meaning of pacifism and its biblical origins

I first met Mennonites about 50 years ago due to what they called “the peace position.” By that they meant a commitment to love, a commitment to care for all others, a belief in the preciousness of life—under all conditions. This commitment meant, among other things, an opposition to war in all its forms. Kathleen and I were looking for Christians like that.

I like “pacifism” as shorthand for all these commitments. “Pacifism” is to me an approach to life and to faith with love always at the center. I soon learned as I started to hang around with Mennonites that the term “pacifism” was complicated. Other terms (all also complicated) I first learned included “nonresistance,” “defenselessness,” and “the love ethic.” Terms I learned later include “nonviolence” and “peacebuilding.” The simple point I would like to make here is that I don’t think the specific term we use is what matters. What matters is the content: the commitment to love under all conditions. That is what I will talk about here when I say “pacifism.”

When I talk about pacifism, I start with the Bible. Perhaps surprisingly, though, I start with the Old Testament. At the beginning of the book of Exodus, the children of Israel are a chaotic mess. They have little memory of their identity, enslaved in Egypt, ceaselessly ground down in a violent world of top-down power. All that seems to matter is the wealth and power of the people at the top. The enslaved Hebrews, in their trauma and despair, cry out to the heavens. And they are heard. The God of Abraham, as if awoken from slumber, hears the people’s cries. God remembers the promises made of old that these would be a people who would bless all the families of the earth. God finally intervenes and sends the people a prophet, Moses, who brings together the Hebrew community. God gets them out of Egypt and gives them the law (“Torah”), a blueprint for healthy, just, humane living. We could call this a counter-empire vision.

There are two key moves. First, a breakthrough in consciousness—no more consent to Egypt. Pharaoh is not God; the Empire’s story is not true. The people may—indeed they must—reject that story. No longer submit to Pharaoh. This exodus story establishes a new truth that the rest of the Bible confirms. People continually are called in the world to submit to empires and states and other forms of top-down power. The last book in the Bible, Revelation, makes clear that the power of nation states tends to be idolatrous power. Its origin is in Satan, not in God. Don’t trust in them!

The second key move is God’s gift to the people of Torah, the commandments, the Law. Torah tells what is possible when people’s moral world is not determined by the state. What is possible is a society shaped by a vision for compassion and generosity, care for vulnerable people, social health for everyone. This is a social order based on cooperation and generosity, not coercion on and an economics of exploitation. A Torah-shaped society takes its moral guidance from God’s directives, not the social elite. So, these are the two foundational moves for Christian pacifism: step away from the power elite and embrace Torah-justice.

The Old Testament goes on to tell a complicated story—many powerful peace moves and, admittedly, quite a few prowar moves. It is not obvious that it supports a pacifist sensibility. But we end with a key point—the vocation of Abraham’s descendants to bless all the families of the earth remains. It was a struggle. The Hebrews attempted to live as God’s people in their own territorial kingdom. They had a standing army and centralized religion centered in its temple. This kingdom ended up all too much like the idolatrous corruption of Egypt. It inevitably fell, crushed by a bigger and more ruthless empire. Out of that rubble though, came a crucial message from the prophets. The kingdom’s fall was not evidence of God’s failure but rather evidence of the faithfulness of God to the message of Torah. The people were warned that should they not embody Torah their territorial kingdom would fall. This fall, though, meant that the promise to bless the families of the earth remained intact. Now, though, it will find expression independent of the dominance of nation-states. Thus, the story sets us up for the message of Jesus—disbelieve in state ideology, embrace the prophetic alternative.

Jesus affirmed that Torah remains central. He insists on reading Torah in the same way the prophets did—its central meaning is a call to love. He brought a deeply peaceable message. Some of his key points, a quick list, include: (1) His followers are to give their loyalty to God alone and not give competing loyalties to Caesar or any other leaders of religious or political institutions. (2) The meaning of Torah, of the law and prophets, is summarized as loving our neighbors. This matters most. (3) This call to neighbor love, as seen in Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan, includes the call to love enemies. (4) Jesus’s followers practice a politics of servanthood that focuses on care for the vulnerable. This contrasts with the politics of the leaders of the nations, who Jesus calls “tyrants.” (5) Jesus warns against another idol, what he calls “mammon” —greed, the lust for wealth, the insatiable desire for accumulating possessions, the root of war. (6) Jesus expected be in conflict with the powers of the world. When he insisted that his followers must “take up the cross” he meant they must imitate his way of life (unlimited compassion, generosity, care for the vulnerable, and sharp critiques of the elite)—a way life that could lead to crucifixion (the empire’s method of executing rebels).

The Apostle Paul and the book of Revelation have been read to be in tension with Jesus, but they need not be—I’d say should not be. For Paul, the key point at the heart of the gospel, as it was for Jesus, is the reconciliation of various peoples, Jews and Greeks, slave and free, male and female. For Revelation one of the key points is that the Lamb and his followers defeat the evil Powers (Empire) by following a path of love and compassion and refusing to worship (to accommodate to) the Empire.

The limited evidence that we have suggests that for several generations after Jesus’s death, his followers embodied his peace message—and paid a significant price in persecution as a consequence. On this foundation, the early church grew. But in time it adapted more to life in the Empire. When Emperor Constantine ended the persecution and embraced the formal church early in the fourth century, most Christians embraced back. Jesus’s life and teaching became marginalized. Christianity became so accepting of war that by the end of the 300s only Christians could be part of the Roman army.

What changed, I suggest, is that the two key moves from the Exodus story—to reject the Empire’s version of reality and to embrace the counter-Empire vision of Torah—were reversed. These moves were the center of Jesus’s vision for peace—his life and teaching (most obviously the Sermon on the Mount) updated Torah. When the formal Christian church embraced the Empire, it de-centered Jesus’s life and teaching, made creeds and doctrines central, and, inevitably, rejected pacifism.

(2) Christian pacifism in history

When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, it almost immediately became acceptable for Christians to fight in wars. At the beginning of the 4^th century, virtually no Christians were in the military—forbidden both by the churches and the Empire. By the end of the 4^th century, only Christians were allowed in the military. The immensely influential theologian, Augustine, bishop in the Catholic church in northern Africa, became known as the father of the just war theory—an ethical method for determining whether wars are justifiable or not. As a loyal citizen of the Roman Empire, Augustine rejected pacifism and marginalized Jesus from the processes of Christian moral discernment.

What Augustine provided, actually, were a series of ad hoc writings in various contexts that addressed questions such as just cause for war, who makes the decisions, how to limit the damage of the war, the need to protect non-combatants, among others. The just war guidelines, though, were never gathered into a formal framework for over 1,000 years. The reality was that almost all Christians simply did what their governments told them to do. The key point that Augustine made, though, encouraged what I would call a “blank check” approach where Christian citizens turn over all moral discernment about war to the state. There were no debates about the justness of wars among common people.

Augustine insisted that Christians could with clear consciences fight in wars because their rulers bore the moral responsibility for discerning whether the war was just or not, not the soldiers. This “blank check” theory meant that the citizen’s responsibility is to obey the state, not to engage in moral discernment about the moral validity of any particular war. This approach has been definitive for Christianity ever since—except for a tiny minority that has believed that their responsibility is to allow Jesus to be their moral guide, not the state.

We don’t have a ton of information about the views of general Christians in the hundreds of years between Augustine and the 16^th century Reformation. Wars tended to be small and localized. We do know of a few faith communities that emerged on the margins of mainstream Christendom and explicitly opposed war. Such communities expressed Jesus-centered pacifist convictions. They generally suffered great persecution, even to the point of some being essentially wiped out. As a rule, official Christianity assumed an inextricable link between the church and the state that meant that Christians did not question the blank check.

The story of the big schism in the 16^th century between the Roman Catholic Church and the new Protestant movement is complicated and multifaceted. All I have time to say today is that there are two points about the Reformation that are especially relevant to my story. First, the main part of the Reformation has been called the “magisterial Reformation.” This title alludes to the fact that the Reformation remained committed to the Catholic practice of the church/state affiliation. Thus, for the first 130 years after Martin Luther broke with Catholicism and started the Lutheran Church in 1517, Europe experienced almost continual war between Catholic states and Lutheran states and Calvinist states. Each group believed that each state had to be 100% one religion with no tolerance for anyone else—and that war was how you settled which group would be the sole state church. There was no room for pacifism in either Catholicism or Protestantism (nor had there ever been in Eastern Orthodoxy, which had affirmed Constantine, the first Christian emperor as a saint).

A second point follows from the Reformation being chaotic and spontaneous. A third way, neither Catholic nor Protestant (that is, non-magisterial), emerged beginning in 1525. I refer to the Anabaptist movement, out of which our Mennonite tradition emerged. The Anabaptists were always diverse, disorganized, and subject to persecution. From the start, many were pacifists. Most Anabaptists had a suspicion of the state and sympathized with the antipathy toward the social elite seen in the Peasants Revolt in the early 1520s. Those who survived the intense violence visited on the rebels when they were crushed by Europe’s elites easily found it imaginable in the years to come to reject directives of political and religious leaders. The Anabaptists learned the futility of challenging the system with the sword, but they remained very much in the disbelief mode concerning the state and state church.

The Anabaptists’ core distinctive characteristic was theological. Behind their no to the state and the state church stood the Anabaptists’ embrace of Jesus’s life and teaching as central to their entire approach to life. They were “Biblicist” in the sense that they placed the Bible at the top of their sources for guidance—definitely above what the state church told them. They read the Bible together in their communities, and they placed their highest priority on living out its message, even when it got them in trouble with the state and the state church. The Anabaptists, then, (1) decentered the state, denying its ultimate authority and (2) tried to make Jesus’s way central to everything.

The early Anabaptists were decentralized, diverse, disorganized, and disruptive. Not all were pacifists in the early years. Most notably some Anabaptists led the takeover of the Dutch city of Muenster. They were attacked by forces from neighboring cities and engaged in desperate warfare before being crushed. Out of that turmoil, a former Catholic priest named Menno Simons emerged as a leader. Menno was strongly committed to pacifism and helped the movement as a whole find clarity on the issue of taking up the sword. By the end of the 16^th century, a major group of Anabaptists influenced by Menno took on the name, Mennonites.

Like all the other Anabaptists, Mennonites were severely persecuted. They sought places of safety and toleration and curbed their confrontive dynamics. They eventually did find a tolerated home in the Netherlands and various locales in Switzerland, present-day Germany, Russia, and beginning in the late 1600s, the British colonies in North America. They continued to be suspicious of whatever state they lived under and to read the Bible with Jesus’s life and teaching at the center.

Mennonites over the centuries, as a rule, retained their sense of distance from the governments of the various states they settled in. They also retained their convictions about the importance of the life and teaching of Jesus. Thus, they also sustained a strong commitment to pacifism. In the United States, they continued as distinct communities living apart from their surrounding societies. In this way, they kept their pacifist ideals alive.

(3) Mennonites and 20^th century Christian pacifism

In seeking to find safe spaces in Europe to live out their faith, Mennonites found several different locations for stable communities. The Netherlands was probably the safest in the 16^th century. Switzerland, home of the first Anabaptist baptisms, remained home for many, but for a long time it was an unsettled home due to persecution and discrimination. By the late 17^th century, many Swiss Mennonites (and their cousins, the Amish) decided to take the step of migrating to North America. A major reason for doing so was the emergence of a new safe place, the Quaker-led colony of Pennsylvania.

In the late 1600s, the British colonies in North America became home for many Christian pacifists due to the Pennsylvania colony established under the leadership of William Penn. The king of England granted Penn a charter for the colony due to a debt the king owed Penn’s father. Fatefully, Penn, as a young man in England, joined community of Christian pacifists, the Quakers. The Quakers had emerged in the second half of the 17^th century in England under the leadership of a remarkable Christian prophet, George Fox. The Quakers, like the Anabaptists 130 or so years earlier, came to be in the context of great social and religious strife—a voice for peace in a context where most Christians were all too warlike,

Early Quakers shared many beliefs with Mennonites. Jesus’s life and teaching are central, and state power is suspect. Quakers were persecuted in their early days, but not as severely. Quakers were thus more optimistic than Anabaptists about how their convictions might impact society. Part of Penn’s vision was to establish a Quaker stronghold in Pennsylvania that would try to approximate the ideals of the gospel. This meant to seek peaceable relations with the indigenous peoples of the colony, to be less dependent on weapons of war, and to tolerate different religious convictions. This vision was far from realized, but for a crucial period of time, Pennsylvania was unusually safe for Native Americans and for religious minorities.

Thus, Pennsylvania became a relatively safe haven for Christian pacifists—not only Quakers but Mennonites and Amish, Moravians, Brethren, and other related groups. Largely because of Pennsylvania, the United States became one of the first places in the world where pacifists could live out their faith in safety.

The US war for independence created difficulties for pacifists due to prowar public sentiment. But as there was no highly organized process of conscription, most pacifists managed to get through the war intact. The only real hard time for American pacifists in the 19^th century came with the Civil War. There were difficulties, as Ruth Stoltzfus Jost will describe in our next session, but again most pacifists got through it okay. The next half century was safe for American pacifists and not a lot of energy was put into thinking about how pacifism would inform their citizenship if trouble arose.

Trouble did arise in the 20^th century, the century of war. With the world wars a much more effective conscription process meant that American pacifists had to figure out how to respond. I studied World War II conscientious objectors for my doctoral thesis and found a great laboratory, as it were, for analyzing American pacifism. To be a CO, one had to convince one’s draft board that one sincerely opposed participating in war in all its forms—that is, a genuine pacifist. And the draft included all Americans. Everyone was liable. So, we see the spectrum of pacifist convictions in practice.

I found a lot of diversity. We may loosely group COs into four tendencies. The 1^st tendency I call the “resister”—the CO most famous in the popular mind, a man whose conscience forbade him from participating in the war system in any way, not even performing alternative service. Many resisters went to prison as draft resisters. The 2^nd tendency, the “transformer,” sought to transform American society into a peaceable, just, democratic place. They adhered to the social gospel, a theology for social change. The 3^rd tendency, the “servant,” sought less to oppose all war and seek social change (and was less critical of America’s government)—and sought more to simply find ways to meet human need in the broken world. The fourth tendency, the “separatist,” wanted mostly to be left alone and allowed to practice their faith in their own communities.

By far the largest of these four—surprising me when I first studied it—was the servant tendency. The typical resister was on the edge of or outside Christianity, the strong individual, the freethinker. The typical transformer was part of mainstream Protestant Christianity, say a Methodist, or part of the Quaker community. The typical separatist was either a Jehovah’s Witness or Amish. And the typical servant was a Mennonite. About 40% of the COs who were recognized as such by the government and performed alternative service through the Civilian Public Service program were Mennonites—a group who made up perhaps 0.1% (zero point one percent) of American Christians.

The Mennonite experience in World War II transformed the Mennonite churches. Mennonites were crucial for the CPS program which was open to all COs. This provided the template for the CO experience following World War II—which included many more people from the broader Christian community and beyond and ultimately played a major role in the end of the draft in 1973. All pacifists in the US owe Mennonites a major debt.  As a consequent of the World War II experience, Mennonites became more socially engaged and more interested in applying their peace theology to the wider world—both in the sense of writings about peace and in the sense of putting their peace convictions into practice. We may see this in wide-ranging and exemplary peacemaking and service work through agencies such as Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite Disaster Service. MCC was started in the 1920s for Mennonites in North America to assist suffering Mennonites in Russia and elsewhere. After the war, MCC transformed into a worldwide effort to help all people in need. MDS, begun by several people who had been COs during the war, offered assistance to those across the country and beyond who had suffered from natural disasters and become widely renowned.

Since the draft ended in 1973, Mennonites have not had the direct challenge to put their pacifist convictions to the test. The voluntary service programs that provided contexts for alternative service during the years of the draft grew much smaller. Other expressions of peace work have emerged—such as restorative justice and mediation. More Mennonites have engaged in political activism. It is also true, surely that a lot of Mennonites have become less affirming of the peace position. The arena where I was most involved, Mennonite higher education, has always had the vocation to cultivate the peace tradition. However, total enrollment in Mennonite colleges has shrunk and the enrollment of Mennonite students in those colleges has cratered. The colleges still highly value peace, but it is a challenge, a challenge the colleges try to meet. Our world certainly still needs peace workers.