Category: Politics
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The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 4
The insinuation of many evangelicals is that the martyr has no place in the 21st-century church; that the martyr is simply a fool without a gun whose life has been cut short for lack of firearms training. There seems to be no place in the modern church for the one who utterly refuses to kill, the one who believes that there are things far worse than death…
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The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 3
The word pacifism is often confused with the idea of pacifying or letting the enemy have what they want. However, the actual meaning is found in the root Latin word pax (peace), and it means peace-making. According to Commodianus (250), the call of the Christian is to “make thyself a peace-maker to all men.”
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The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 2
The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 2 The inconvenient fact for Western Christians is that, for Tertullian and the church fathers of the first 3 centuries … “a Christian could not serve in the military because the Christian cannot bear the sword … Jesus is the full expression of God, and he has revealed God to be non-violent, choosing to go to the cross rather than to wield the sword … And if the church’s answer to evil is war, bloodshed, and violence, then our king is not unique, and our kingdom is just as “of this world” as any other.”
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The Peace-makers: Exploring war, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 1
The Same Way, or a New Way? The response to evil in the world is something that the church claims to possess above all other claims. The church claims that the cross of Christ is the answer to those prone to violence, those quick to use the threat of physical violence to coerce, and to […]
Tommy Preson Phillips 