Gospel peace, heretical pacifism, and holy violence
Issue #146
You may never have heard a sermon on it, but peace is a central and foundational doctrine in scripture.
It is, in an important sense, the central and foundational element of the gospel itself. Far from being an element of the gospel, it is foundational to its telos.
This is easy to see when we examine how scripture uses the word peace. The amount of meaning bundled into this word is far greater than what it generally denotes in English. For instance, when James describes a common farewell, “Go in peace,” (Jas 2:16) it should be obvious that he does not mean, “Leave this place in the absence of war or other hostilities.”
Peace is intimately connected to wholeness and health in scripture. For instance, consider Jephthah’s words as he made his vow:
whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the sons of Ammon, it shall be Yahweh’s (Jdg 11:31)
We might emphasize Jephthah’s full meaning with a play on words: “when I return in one piece from the sons of Ammon.”
Similarly, when Jesus heals the woman with the issue of blood, he says to her, “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.”
Think also of the peace-offering of Leviticus: a meal with God, the point of which was to physically confess wholeness with God. The meal symbolically joins God and man as one body. The same symbolism is now gathered into the Lord’s Supper, where the point is to image us as one body: we take the bread into ourselves, so that our bodies will be built up from one substance, thus expressing our oneness together; Christ’s body is a whole body, not a divided one.
Since wholeness and communion are central to biblical peace, we should also expect the doctrine of peace to fit seamlessly into the larger framework of God’s law. The law, remember, is summed up in:– love God and love your neighbor. Love is about unity, onetogetherness, communion, fellowship — wholeness, in other words. This means that biblical peace has to connect with all the other ideas that go along with love, like chesed (covenant loyalty, loving kindness, steadfast love); and with emmet, that goes along with it — truth, firmness, trustworthiness. It must fit in with loving your neighbor, and thus with the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have done unto you. So biblically speaking, when you make peace with someone, you are entering into a relationship not merely of “unhostility” but of wholeness — a relationship knit together by all of these key concepts. To make peace is not merely to agree to stop fighting. It is to establish a positive relationship involving a commitment to the wholeness and good of the one who was previously your enemy — a commitment informed by the rules of covenant, and underwritten by the bond of love. It is alliance, not truce.
When we make peace, in other words, we are making fellowship — not merely removing war. Remember what Jesus says: “he who is not with me is against me” — but it follows, then, that he who is not against me is with me. To be with Jesus is not neutral. It is positive.
This leads into another connection. If to be at peace with Jesus is to be with Jesus, then peace is also intimately connected to righteousness — and lack of peace is unrighteous. As Psalm 34:14 says:
Depart from evil, and do good;
Seek peace, and pursue it. (Ps 34:14)
Because peace is righteous and “unpeace” is evil, peace and abundance are also connected: God blesses those who are righteous, but punishes the unrighteous by taking peace from them. Psalm 37 says:
But the meek shall inherit the land,
And shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. (Ps 37:11)
Psalm 85 connects all of these ideas together very directly:
8 I hear what God Yahweh speaketh,
For he speaketh peace unto his people,
And unto his holy ones, and they turn not back to folly.
9 Surely, near to those fearing him is his salvation,
That glory may dwell in our land.
10 Kindness [chesed] and truth [emmet] have met,
Righteousness and peace have kissed,
11 Truth from the earth springeth up,
And righteousness from heaven looketh out,
12 Yahweh also giveth that which is good,
And our land doth give its increase. (Ps 85:8–12)
Peace is also connected to wisdom:
Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
And all her paths are peace.
A tree of life she is to those laying hold on her,
And whoso is retaining her is happy. (Pr 3:17–18)
With even this cursory study, then, we find an enormous number of concepts bundled up into peace. Wisdom…lovingkindness and loyalty…truth and trustworthiness…righteousness…abundance…happiness, goodness, pleasantness…glory, and life. We can also add strength, since scripture rhymes those two ideas in Psalm 29:
Yahweh will give strength unto his people;
Yahweh will bless his people with peace. (Ps 29:11)
And strength in turn leads to confidence and security; when there is peace, there is nothing to threaten or to make us afraid. So Isaiah says:
the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness, quietness and confidence for ever. (Is 32:17)
In English we talk about peace and quiet. In the same way, when Jesus was in the boat during the storm, he awoke, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, “Peace, be still.” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm (Mt 4:39). So peace certainly also includes tranquility, quietness, stillness, calm.
In fact, there is so much bundled up into the definition of peace in scripture that it is essentially a shorthand for a heavenly state.
When you desire peace, when you wish peace upon someone, you are really claiming this whole nexus of biblical blessings — and you are, in a genuine sense, aiming at a state of being, a state of society, that is heavenly. The presence of God is peace. Think of the Aaronic blessing that God commands the priests to pray over Israel:
The Lord bless thee and guard thee; the Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be gracious to thee; the Lord lift up his face upon thee and set unto thee peace. (Nu 6:26)
The word face in scripture is often translated presence, for obvious reasons. God’s favorable presence is what brings peace. By the same token, the Lord Jesus himself, as he sends out his disciples as angels to the cities of Israel, says:
And into whatever city or village ye may enter, inquire ye who in it is worthy, and there abide, till ye may go forth. And coming to the house, greet it, and if indeed the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it; and if it be not worthy, let your peace turn back to you. And whoever may not receive you nor hear your words, coming forth from that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet; amen I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city. (Mt 10:11–15)
Just as peace is the favorable presence of God — which is to say, heaven — so the withholding of peace is the unfavorable presence of God — which is to say, hell.
Jesus, of course, is the prince of peace (Is 9:6). That title makes a great deal more sense, and carries a great deal more weight, when we understand biblical peace holistically. In fact, it is in a real sense a claim to deity, for peace is what issues from the presence of God. And so when God is incarnated, the angels sing:
Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace among men in whom he is well pleased. (Lk 2:14)
The promise of peace is central to the gospel story, which not only begins here with peace, but culminates in it also. Jesus promises this peace, his peace — the very presence of God — to his disciples before he is crucified. He tells them:
These things I have spoken to you while remaining with you, and the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and remind you of all things that I said to you. (Jn 14:25–26)
And then the very next thing he says, directly connecting it with the promise of the Holy Spirit, is:
Peace I leave to you; my peace I give to you, not according as the world doth give do I give to you; let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be afraid. (Jn 14:27)
Not according to the world indeed, for we have not received a spirit of slavery, but the spirit of adoption! We see the fulfillment of this promise when he comes to the twelve after he is raised from the dead, saying:
Peace unto you; according as the Father hath sent me, I also send you — and this having said, he breathed on them, and saith to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. (Jn 20:21–22)
Christ gives us his peace, and sends us out with it. That’s not something we typically think of with respect to the gospel, but this sending language should sound familiar, for it dovetails with the Great Commission itself.
This is why Peter bundles peace into the heart of the gospel itself, speaking of,
the word that he sent to the sons of Israel, proclaiming good news—peace through Jesus Christ (this one is Lord of all) (Acts 10:36)
The chief way that the gospel is described in scripture is as the “gospel of the kingdom,” or alternatively, the gospel of Jesus, its king. But if the gospel is about the kingdom of Jesus, then it is necessarily, as Paul calls it, “the gospel of peace” (Eph 6:15). Is Jesus not the prince of peace? Is his kingdom not a kingdom of peace? Has he not made peace through the blood of his cross, whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens (Col 1:20)? Having been therefore justified by faith, do we not have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Ro 5:1)? And after summarizing the gospel in Romans 1, how does Paul then immediately go on to greet those who have received it?
Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ! (Ro 1:1–7)
In fact, Paul greets the saints this way in every letter. Peter, too. And John (2 Jn 3; 3 Jn 14; Re 1:4).
So what?
The gospel is about peace — and as the leaven of the gospel works in men and society, it establishes peace between them — in their own hearts, in the church, in the family, and in the civil realm.
the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7 Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end (Isa 9:6–7)
The peace of Christ begins in the spiritual realm, but it works out into the whole world. Yet we do not see that peace fully manifested today. We do not yet see all things subjected to him, as Hebrews 2:8 says. Rather, he must reign till he hath put all his enemies under his feet (1 Co 15:25). That today we see the ascent of fragmentation, confusion, hostility, folly, should amply illustrate that the gospel is not at work in our society any more.
Which is to say, the church is not at work in our society any more.
Reform is needed.
This is not a black pill. In fact, there is vastly more peace today than there ever has been before. Just in terms of the most basic definition of peace, if you think of how many people live today, and how much war there is between them — then compare that to a thousand years ago, or two thousand, it is remarkable how peaceful the world is now in the regions where the gospel took root. The West still benefits from its Christian heritage. Violence is becoming an increasing concern — but as a rule, we still do not solve our problems that way. You can still walk down the street in most places at night without fear. We generally believe in the equal dignity of all people. We believe that we should care for victims, and stop oppression. We believe that exploitation is bad, and that might does not make right. We believe it is better to work out our differences than to fight over them. We believe in human rights.
If you ask the average person about these things, these are the kinds of values they will express — and these values can only be found in the Bible. They are unique to scripture. No other religion has ever produced a society with such values. Pick any country in the world. Pick any time in history. If you find a society that has these values, it will only be because Christianity had already come there. Tom Holland — the historian Tom Holland, not Spider-man — talks about this, when he describes how he used to think very highly of the freethinkers of the Enlightenment, and how they were returning to the intellectual purity of the Greco-Roman world over the benighted superstitions of Christianity. And then as he studied the Greco-Roman world more and more, to learn about what he thought were his intellectual forebears, he came to realize how utterly foreign their culture and their values and their ideals really were; how utterly unlike ours — and not just foreign, but abhorrent and detestable and disgusting. Their values were satanic values. And he realized that the things he took for granted as someone with a very low view of Christianity — things like human rights and showing favor to the weak and upholding justice for those who couldn’t defend themselves — these were values that only came from Christianity.
And of course. We know the Romans and the Greeks were ruled by angelic powers that were evil. In Daniel 10:20, the angel tells Daniel that not only will he be fighting the prince of Persia when he leaves again, but the prince of Greece as well — and that the only one standing with him against these angelic powers is Michael, the prince of Israel. And in Psalm 82, God stands in the midst of these princes and says:
2 Until when will ye judge unjustly,
And lift up the face of the wicked?
3 Judge for the small and the orphan;
To the wretched and poor do righteousness.
4 Deliver the poor and wanting
From of the hand of the wicked pull them.
5 They know not, nor perceive;
In darkness they go about:
Shaken are all the foundations of the earth.
This is what characterized pre-Christian societies. The face of the wicked was lifted up, the small and the orphan were neglected, the wretched and poor were downtrodden, the poor and the wanting were exploited by the wealthy and the wicked. And so the world was in darkness and its foundations were shaken.
Darkness and instability are biblical images of a lack of peace. A chaotic, disharmonious state where there is no firm footing. By contrast, the Lord is a solid rock, and in him is no darkness at all — and of the church, Psalm 46 says, “God is in the midst of her; she is not moved” (Ps 46:5).
Since the Lord Jesus rose up and judged the earth and inherited the nations, as per the ending of Psalm 82, he has been gently correcting these problems. And so the world is not nearly as dark and unstable a place as it was two thousand years ago. It is important to say this because of the tendency modern men have to turn the red pill black. However…there is still plenty of darkness and instability left to conquer. The spiritual forces of darkness in the heavenly places have become extremely cunning at producing new kinds of instability, of destroying peace in new ways that would have been impossible before the reign of Christ and the rise of Christianity.
Evil has matured. The tares have grown up with the wheat. Think of feminism, for example. If you had suggested something like feminism in the world of the old gods, people would have thought you were insane. Why would you try to empower those who are weak, like women? They’re weak! They’re lesser. The very concept is a contradiction in terms to the natural pagan mind. Empowering the weak like this can only seem plausible in a Christian worldview, where people already have ideas about upholding the cause of the weak and the small, which in turn is based on the idea that all people, including women and children, are made in the image of God, and are therefore of equal worth. Which of course they are, and so feminism twists that truth to its own ends.
Much of the lack of peace in the world today is no longer a natural fruit of straightforward pagan thinking — that has been put down by Christ — but rather a rotten fruit of twisted Christian thinking. Feminism is a Christian heresy. In the same way, Islam, the most violent religion that still has power in the world today, is not pagan; it is a Christian heresy.
Other forms of peacelessness or unpeace — I don’t have a good word for it, sorry — are still very pagan in their nature, but have been driven underground. They are still there and they are still powerful, but their power relies on remaining hidden. Think of abortion. We will not tolerate the murder of innocent children any more…as long as we can see it. We know that is horrible, an abomination. We know that God will judge a nation that offers up its babies as blood sacrifices. We know this because peace is a Christian virtue. We cannot stomach violence as the pagans could, because the shedding of blood is so utterly contrary to the good news that all bloodshed has been ended and fulfilled in the cross of Christ. So the forces of darkness took the technology that the Christian age produced, and turned it to the purpose of concealing the bloodshed, so that we couldn’t see it any more. They knew that a society influenced by Christian values would need their child sacrifices to seem bloodless, in order to maintain the illusion of peace. The sacrifice must take place before the child is born.
That is starting to unravel, as Christianity loses its sway over our nations; as the church itself loses her voice.
But why is that happening?
It is because the church itself has less and less peace. The peace, the wholeness, the health and strength and blessedness of Christ’s body depends on it not being at war with itself.
“Every kingdom divided against itself is desolated; and house against house doth fall” (Lk 11:17). This is why the chief strategy of the enemy against the church is not to destroy it from without. He learned in the first couple of centuries that doesn’t work. Trying to crush the church through violence just makes it grow faster. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Rather, he tries to destroy it from within, with false teachers. He knows that a body with cancer is not long for this world, and so he has been infecting the church with cancer from the beginning. In the past few generations, he has found some especially effective forms of it.
The modern church is absolutely riddled with tumors — which is why we are so weak and dying. We are a body set against itself.
Think about how false teachers work. They don’t deny the key tenets of orthodoxy. Not any more — the church has grown up too much for that to work. So the most effective false teachers don’t deny things like the virgin birth or the deity of Christ or the Trinity. They make up other false doctrines that are aimed at the peace of Christ in one way or another. In the middle ages, it was indulgences, which claimed that you could buy peace with God for yourself or for someone you loved. Which in turn meant that you were not at peace with God through faith alone. That is what started the Reformation — is it true that having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; or do we only have peace with God through the sacraments and the mediation of the church’s priestly work? Well, we answered that question. The church overcame that challenge — and we aren’t going to be taken in by those false teachings again.
So today, the errors which most threaten us are aimed at peace with each other, rather than with God. How can we have peace with other people? How can we establish peace? This is an attack that is being waged on the church; it is a war within the church — but it has certainly spilled out into our culture as well, as you would expect. The culture is the report card of the church: religion externalized. So today the issue is: we are all one in Christ Jesus, which means that we are all equal in Christ Jesus…therefore, we must treat everyone the same. That is supposedly the basis of our peace. If we’re not treating everyone the same, then there cannot be peace. Therefore, we must give everyone the same opportunities.
To take an obvious example, if we aren’t allowing women to preach, we are oppressing them. That’s not fair. That’s a breach of peace. True peace requires that women have the same opportunities.
Then we take it further. True peace requires not just giving people the same opportunities, but trying to ensure they get the same outcomes. If someone is falling behind, that is a breach of peace. We have to try to bring them forward and raise them up. So if you have an Anglo 8 and an African-American 7, I want the African-American 7.
Then we take it further. True peace is based on equality right? So all people must be equal in every way. If two women want to get married, we must affirm them. We can’t have peace by condemning them. Love is love. A man thinks he is a woman? Well, maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, but we must show pronoun hospitality by pretending that he is. Call her Caitlyn. That’s the loving thing to do.
Now, the logical end of this in the church is complete collapse into meaninglessness and irrelevance. And the logical end of it as it works out in society is perfectly captured in a recent headline:
Toronto police advise locals to leave car keys near front doors to avoid confrontations with violent thieves.
In other words, the logical end of this kind of peace, so-called, is that the violent completely dominate those who thought they were being peaceful.
The peacelessness of pacifism
Feminism, wokeism, social justice, transgenderism, side B Christianity — these are all just pacifism applied to various kinds of sins.
It is not true peace, but rather disobedience to God’s commands about particular issues. For example, feminism is a refusal to fight for gendered piety.
Feminists are pacifists who saw a guy about to murder the glory of woman, and said, “Hey, I can’t shoot him, that wouldn’t be very peaceful.”
The attraction of this method is that it seems very safe. There’s no confrontation. At least not to begin with. You feel very virtuous and loving. You let those poor entirely-male-fighting-age refugees into your country and give them homes. Look how generous you are being. Look how magnanimous you are.
But what is the result? Is our society more or less fractured than it was 50 years ago? A hundred? Are people more or less envious of each other? Is there greater or less divide between different classes? Are we more or less whole and one-minded with each other, and especially with the people who rule over us — the inaptly-named “elites”?
To ask the question is to answer it.
The same is true, of course, within the church. And we don’t just have to ask about division, but about strength. Is the church stronger or weaker now than it was several generations ago? Well, why is that? There are many reasons, of course, but one of the huge ones, the central ones, is that someone managed to convince all our shepherds that peace can only be achieved by pacifism. If we are to follow the example of the Prince of Peace, we must be accommodating, obliging, always asking how our actions will be perceived by those who hate us, always judging our success by whether we are liked by our enemies.
This is in marked contrast to God’s own description of how the Prince of Peace goes out to establish his peace in the world:
And I saw the heaven opened, and look, a white horse, and he who is sitting upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth he judge and war, and his eyes are as a flame of fire, and upon his head are many diadems—having a name written that no one hath known, except himself, and he is arrayed with a garment dipped in blood, and his name is called, The Word of God. And the armies in heaven were following him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen—white and pure; and out of his mouth proceedeth a sharp sword, that with it he may smite the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, and he doth tread the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of God the Almighty, and he hath upon his garment and upon his thigh the name written, King of kings, and Lord of lords.
Whereas the church is now trying to establish peace by avoiding confrontation, the Lord Jesus establishes peace through superior firepower. He goes out to war against everything that stands between him and peace.
And how does he war within the world? The same way any man does: using his body. It is the church which is the instrument of Christ’s spiritual violence. Who are the armies of heaven that follow him on white horses? They are us. Everything that would destroy peace must be in turn destroyed, and he sends us out to destroy them. He knows that the only way to ensure peace is to destroy those who don’t want it. The primary means by which he destroys them is by transforming them into those who do want it. His main attack is through the gospel itself.
But even this transformation is itself violent. Think of the images that scripture uses as it speaks of the life of repentance, the life of mind-change, the life of spiritual renewal after the image of Christ. They are violent images. We struggle within ourselves; we beat down our bodies to bring them into subjection lest we be disqualified; we wage war against the sin in our flesh. “Be killing sin,” John Owen rightly said, “or sin will be killing you.”
God requires holy violence of his people — against their own flesh; against the rulers in the heavenly realms against whom we wrestle for dominion over the world (Eph 6:12); and against their allies here on earth.
Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus says — and then, just a few chapters later, he tells us that violent men take the kingdom of heaven by force (Mt 11:12). The world would have us be peacekeepers, protecting the perceived peace that they think already exists, by avoiding confrontation and letting everyone just do whatever they want. But this only lets sin continue to grow and spread. Jesus wants us to be peacemakers, who create peace through confronting and destroying everything that opposes it.
If you want peace, prepare for war
Now this sounds harsh and difficult. It is especially easy for sin within us to twist this doctrine into a spirit of fault-finding and division, where we’re constantly looking for something to fight about. But that is the opposite of a peaceful spirit. Peacemakers fight not because they are factious or jealous, but because they love peace and righteousness. They aren’t trying to make war — they are trying to make peace, and they know that this requires destroying wickedness everywhere they find it. Their goal is not to beat people down with legalistic requirements; it is to conform their own lives, and the lives of those under their care, to Christ.
Think of how you disciple your own children. In my own house, I am afraid, sometimes there is very little peace. All of my children take after me in various ways that make peace…difficult…for them. I have many qualities that cause me to rub people the wrong way, or have conflict with them, and my children are made in my image. Some of these qualities are sinful, and some are not, although they can be used sinfully — but all of them require sanctification to use righteously. They require maturity and wisdom, which children do not famously have. So it is not uncommon for our household to feel like a place that is not peaceful at all — and this can be very discouraging. Should our houses not be places where the peace of Christ is most manifest? Certainly they should — but because of sin, that peace does not necessarily arise spontaneously. Some children naturally get on with each other; others naturally don’t. Some households find peace easy. Others must take it by force. And this applies just as much to relations between husbands and wives as between siblings and parents. Some couples find it easy to get on with each other; others have stormy marriages. Some are naturally peaceful. Others must fight for peace. We should no less expect to have to fight for peace between ourselves at times, than we should expect to have to fight for peace within ourselves. If we must wage war against sin in our own flesh, certainly we will have to wage war against the sin in the flesh of others as we seek peace with them.
It can be easy to feel discouraged in these situations. You feel caught between a rock and a hard place. You know you cannot do nothing about the situation, or it will get even worse. There is a lack of peace because there is a lack of obedience to God. You can’t solve that problem by being disobedient to God yourself, going along with the disobedience. You can’t let your kids fight with each other. You can’t let your wife become a shrew. You can’t let your husband become overbearing. But…if you try to do something, if you try to be obedient yourself by seeking to bring the other person into obedience as well, you know it is likely to escalate the situation, at least for a time. If my kids are fighting, re-establishing peace between them means coming in and applying more force than they’re currently putting into the situation. I must apply the rod to enforce obedience. It will be noisy. Cacophonous even.
To achieve peace and unity, you have to make war. Peace is a rightly ordered world. But rightly ordering the world is not itself going to be a peaceful process. The Lord Jesus smites the nations. He rules them with a rod of iron. Things get less peaceful before they get more peaceful. And this is a fractal pattern that applies at every level, from nations to families to individuals.
It is right to sometimes feel grieved at the process of making peace. It is normal to sometimes feel discouraged that the process is slow. But God bids us to make peace. He does not bid us to appease or to coddle or to look the other way or to pretend everything is fine. He bids us gird up our loins, and with both meekness and firmness, to apply the necessary force that, in wisdom, we can discern is required to destroy whatever is preventing peace.
For where jealousy and faction are, there is confusion and every vile deed. But the wisdom from above, first, indeed, is pure, then peaceable, equanimous, easily entreated, full of kindness and good fruits, uncontentious, and unhypocritical. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for them that make peace. (Jas 3:13–18)
Making peace requires a devotion to purity above all. It is purity that makes peace possible, for purity means unmixed, unadulterated, uncorrupted — whole. Though for a little while this seems sorrowful, it yields a fruit of righteousness in the long run. When we make war on wickedness, we plant the seeds of peace.
Notable
Until next month,
Bnonn