Early church pacifism

Stephenson’s discussion of the “pacifism” of the early church is balanced. “One cannot overstate,” he begins, “the essential messiness of early Christianity, which was not a monolithic set of beliefs but countless local sets of ideas and practices. Moreover, we know primarily the views of an elite group of scholars whose writings have been preserved, most frequently because they suited later tastes for reasons of style and theology. Therefore, to attempt to discern one coherent Christian attitude to warfare in the centuries before Constantine is wrongheaded.”

Of Tertullian, he rightly notes that his “disapproval of Christian participation in military matters is not principally provoked by the potential for violence occasioned by army life. Rather, his particular distaste is for the requirement for all soldiers in the Roman army to participate fully and regularly, without fail or resistance, in the state religio , according to the dictates of the religious calendar, the feriale .”

After a summary of the evidence, he concludes “no Christian writer in the religion’s first three centuries formulated a fully developed ethical theory of pacifism . . . . But it is clear that most who were later considered orthodox found the notion of killing repugnant, and to heretics like Marcion it was abhorrent.” He goes on to suggest that “orthodoxy” was much more flexible and diverse in the early centuries, and could only be determined strictly after Constantine, when the decisions of synods and councils were buttressed by state power.