Gordon L. Heath (McMaster Divinity College) offers an impressive survey of the extensive historical and secondary literature on Christian attitudes towards violence, the state, and war. Heath notes that many earlier discussions treat the issue of war as a binary one between pacifism and the just war position. Taking as his departure point a statement by St. Vincent of Lérins that there was a common tradition in the pre-Constantinian church “believed everywhere, always and by all,” Heath offers a more nuanced and detailed treatment of the subject by proposing “five interrelated and intertwined constitutive areas of consensus” among early Christians which collectively formed a universal tradition that remained resilient in later centuries (4). These five points of consensus are:
1) The state is God-ordained to use the sword for justice
2) Supreme loyalty is to Jesus, not Caesar
3) All human life is valuable
4) Creation is fallen, but not forever
5) Christians are to engage the state to ensure a just use of the sword.
The text is organized so as to present the essential arguments of the work in a logical and systematic manner with chapter 1 serving as an introduction to the entire subject while chapter 2 describes the development of the early church tradition by surveying the views of pre-Constantinian authors. Chapters 3 through 7 consecutively offer a detailed discussion of each one of the five points of consensus. The concluding chapter (8) is an overall assessment of the experience of Christian history in which Heath restates his contention that “the best of the church's response to issues of violence were when it remained faithful to the early church consensus, and the worst was when it drifted far afield from it” (40) and proposes that contemporary Christians return to the early church consensus which “offers a more useful way of evaluating the just use of violence given the realities of human nature and the world we inhabit” (209).
Throughout his discussion of the five areas of consensus, Heath is very careful to take into account various factors and pitfalls that historically have steered believers away from strict adherence to the early church consensus. One problem is the nature of our evidence which depends on surviving Christian literature that is incomplete and encompasses a diversity of views on the subject. In addition, the writings of the church fathers mostly reflect elite opinion which sometimes diverged from what individual Christians were actually doing. While no Christian writer advocated killing as a profession for co-religionists, all Christians accepted the existence of war and violence as an embedded reality for all human societies on this earth, and that all states, of whatever religious persuasion, were empowered by God to use violence to preserve justice. The dispute then arose as to which specific instances of state violence were appropriate and just, and to what extent were Christians to involve themselves in state-sanctioned killing.
It is not surprising that early Christian authors took a variety of positions on this last issue with some, such as Origen (Contra Celsum), advocating a strictly priestly role for the faithful while others, such as Tertullian (Apologeticum), spoke approvingly of Christian participation in the Roman military. Tertullian, however, did later reverse himself on this topic (De Corona; De Idololatria) and opposed military service mostly on the grounds of idolatry and not violence. Another complication was the difficulty of reconciling the church's peaceable message with the sometimes favorable portrayal of soldiers in the New Testament. In fact, Roman soldiers are even depicted as models of faith, such as the centurion at Capernaum (Matthew 8:5–13) or Cornelius, the first gentile convert (Acts 10). In no case do the Gospels offer any direct condemnation of military service, nor are Roman soldier converts encouraged to abandon their profession. In the end it did not matter what the church fathers thought as it is what people actually did that mattered the most, and so Christians throughout history have willingly served in the military, and Christian states have continuously waged war with one another (26).
Heath also notes that the church fathers accepted that God had granted the state the right to use the sword for justice and that Christians were enjoined to obey the political leadership of their state for they were placed over them under God's approval. This issue became even more salient in the period following Constantine which caused bishops to take a more activist role in secular government, leading to a fusion of church and state that required a rethinking of the consensus (47). The result was a more militant form of Christianity as the state could now be used to bolster Christian orthodoxy (50).
Chapter 4 is the most interesting part of the book as it delves into the issue of just war and the practical problem of determining what is the proper use of violence. Heath lists twelve issues that hamper the ability of Christians to make such a determination, such as propaganda, national chauvinism, the fusion of national and religious motivations, and so on. This is made even more problematic when Christian denominations endorse their respective national government's war policies, which serves to allay the consciences of the faithful. Ultimately the church is very much a part of the culture in which it participates and is often a reflection of societal views rather than a voice of conscience.
Ultimately the book speaks to an ideal which few Christian individuals or institutions ever lived up to, and such an enormous survey covering so many centuries of Christian history leaves itself open to the criticism of too little focus on a particular issue. What I would like to have seen is more discussion of the historical tendency of establishment churches to use state power to secure a dominant position for their own particular denomination at the expense of competing Christian movements. There is much food for thought here and each one of the five points of consensus documented by the author could lead to a book length study in its own right.
