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[Expositions 15.1 (2021) 25–49]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

“You say Tertullian, I say Augustine”: 
An Essay on Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace 
 

 

ROGER BERGMAN 

Creighton University 

 

 

“The Lord, by taking away Peter’s sword, disarmed every soldier thereafter.” 

(Tertullian)1 

 

“Do not believe that it is impossible for anyone to serve God while on active duty 

in the army.” (Augustine)2 

 

 

1. Introduction 

For decades Catholic Worker houses of hospitality have held Friday night meetings “in keeping 

with Peter Maurin’s recognition of the need for ongoing clarification of thought,” as announced 

in every issue of The Catholic Worker, the organ of the founding community in New York City. 

I undertake this essay in that spirit of like-minded partners in social ministry seeking intellectual 

integrity in their engagement with the wider world, and with one another. 

Theologian David G. Hunter has observed that  

 

In the Twelfth Century, when Peter Abelard wished to exercise the theological 

ingenuity of his students, he presented them with a series of conflicting 

“authorities,” the famous treatise Sic et Non. Included among the theses and 

antitheses was the proposition that “Christians are not allowed for any reason to kill 

anyone, and the contrary [view].” Abelard knew, of course, that opinions could be 

adduced from Christian tradition to support both sides of the argument, and he set 

before his students the task of resolving, if possible, the contradictions.3  

 

You say Tertullian, I say Augustine. 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  26 
 

Two recent issues of Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities take up Abelard’s 

professorial challenge. Volume 12, Number 1 (2018)4 presented nine essays on “The Future of 

Just War Theory in Catholic Social Thought,” organized, edited, and introduced by Bernard G. 

Prusak. One of the authors, Eli S. McCarthy, subsequently organized, edited, and introduced nine 

essays on “The Future of Nonviolence in Catholic Social Teaching,” which appeared as Volume 

13, Number 2 (2019).5 The argument, sic et non, was provoked by a conference held in 2016 at 

the Vatican, sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi 

International, on the theme “Nonviolence and Just Peace.” Out of that assembly came a short 

document titled “An Appeal to the Catholic Church to Re-Commit to the Centrality of Gospel 

Nonviolence.”6 A much longer statement produced by the newly formed Catholic Nonviolence 

Initiative, “Advancing Nonviolence and Just Peace in the Church and the World: Biblical, 

Theological, Ethical, Pastoral and Strategic Dimensions of Nonviolence,” is at the time of this 

writing unpublished but is summarized in the essay by Ken Butigan in Expositions 13.2.7 

 

2. A Personal Perspective: Preventing Unjust War 

The crux of the argument is not the centrality of nonviolence to the Gospel but the Appeal’s call 

to the Church to “no longer use or teach ‘just war theory,’” in keeping with three assertions: (1) 

“there is no ‘just war.’ (2) Too often the ‘just war theory’ has been used to endorse rather than 

prevent or limit war. (3) Suggesting that a just war is possible also undermines the moral 

imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.”8 I can 

lamentedly affirm (2) while suggesting that (1) is a matter of historical investigation, not simply a 

truism, and that even one counterexample invalidates the absoluteness of the claim, and that (3) 

might be but is not necessarily so. I was a contributor to Expositions 12.1 with my essay 

“Preventing Unjust War: The Role of the Catholic Church,”9 which appears as a chapter in my 

recently published book, Preventing Unjust War: A Catholic Argument for Selective Conscientious 

Objection (Cascade Books, 2020). My response to the essays of Expositions 13.2 is informed by 

the argument of the book. Here is a précis: 

 

Why does humankind continue to be plagued by war? Catholic pacifists blame the 

just war tradition of their Church. That tradition, they say, can be invoked to justify 

any war, and so it must be jettisoned. This book argues that the problem is not the 



27  Bergman 
 

just war tradition but the unjust war tradition. Ambitious rulers start wars that 

cannot be justified, and yet warriors continue to fight them. The problem is that 

warriors are believed not to hold any responsibility for judging the justice of the 

wars they are ordered to fight. However unjust, a command renders any war “just” 

for the obedient warrior. This book argues that selective conscientious objection, 

the right and duty to refuse to fight unjust wars, is the solution. Strengthening the 

just war tradition depends on a heightened role for the personal conscience of the 

warrior. That in turn depends on a heightened role for the Churches in forming and 

supporting consciences and publicly judging the justice of particular wars. As 

Augustine wrote, “The wise man will wage just wars […]. For, unless the wars 

were just, he would not have to wage them, and in such circumstances he would 

not be involved in war at all.”10  

 

Although my book was not directly inspired by John Howard Yoder’s When War Is Unjust: 

Being Honest in Just-War Thinking (Wipf & Stock, 2001), I hope readers will agree that it is a 

substantial proposal that if implemented would put “teeth” in the just war tradition. It is a just war 

argument for the prevention of unjust war, and therefore of war at all. Like the Catholic 

Nonviolence Initiative, I also have an appeal to make to the Catholic Church: to strengthen 

substantially its commitment to “Avoiding war,” the heading of the Catechism’s discussion of 

war.11 As the subtitle of the book indicates, I believe it is the currently untapped, even repressed, 

power of the conscience of the individual warrior, especially but not only Catholics, formed and 

supported substantially by the global Church, that offers an alternative to an often abused and 

seldom legitimately used just war tradition, but also an alternative to abandoning it outright. The 

Church, as indicated in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), has already 

endorsed selective conscientious objection (SCO):  

 

Conscientious objectors who, out of principle, refuse military service in those cases 

where it is obligatory because their conscience rejects any kind of recourse to the 

use of force or because they are opposed to the participation in a particular 

conflict, must be open to accepting alternative forms of service. “It seems just that 

laws should make humane provision for the case of conscientious objectors who 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  28 
 

refuse to carry arms, provided they accept some other form of community 

service.”12  

 

It seems that in the eyes of the magisterium, conscience unites those who refuse to serve in the 

military in all circumstances and those who serve willingly in the military but refuse to serve in 

unjust wars.13 In good conscience you say Tertullian, and in good conscience I say Augustine. 

I argue, to borrow from G.K. Chesterton, that the just war tradition has not been tried and found 

wanting. It has not been tried. That is, it has not been tried in its 1600-year history in the manner I 

propose in my book—with teeth. It is a bold proposal, at least as bold as that of the Catholic 

Nonviolence Initiative, but I acknowledge there is no Catholic Selective Conscientious Objection 

Initiative. It hardly rolls off the tongue. I also acknowledge that my proposal will face two staunch 

opponents: Catholic pacifists who can envision no accommodation with any form of just war 

theory (JWT)—teeth or not, and a deep-seated tradition outside the Church that places the highest 

military value on obedience to the chain of command, except in cases of manifestly illegal orders 

on the battlefield (such as targeting civilians, as in the infamous My Lai massacre).14 I confess it 

has been a bewildering experience to find myself arguing against the pacifists when I have been 

mistaken for one throughout my adult life, having opposed most U.S. military interventions from 

Vietnam to the Iraq War of 2003, there being one notable exception. 

In early 1991, shortly after the landslide election (over a field of eleven opponents) of Rev. 

Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency of Haiti, I visited Chere Ayiti for the first of six times 

over the next 25 years. The mood on the streets was festive, even joyful, as Aristide was immensely 

popular as the candidate of the poor and a real alternative to corrupt politics as usual. Seven months 

later Aristide was ousted by a military coup supported by Haiti’s wealthy elites, and a period of 

bloody repression began. I returned to Haiti in late 1992 with a U.S. human rights group to 

investigate up close and personal the state of the people and then to tell their story back in the U.S. 

Eventually some 8,000 citizens were killed by the Haitian military, who often left beheaded 

victims on city streets as a warning to others not to oppose the regime. It was unbearable to read 

news reports coming out of Haiti as one protester after another was viciously silenced by the coup 

government. It was unbearable to realize, against such entrenched brutality, how little difference 

local nonviolent resistance or international diplomacy was making. I twice fasted for a week on 

juices only in response to the call of human rights organizations for a show of support for the 



29  Bergman 
 

suffering Haitian people, some of whom I had met and come to admire deeply. Finally, in 1994 

the Clinton administration staged a military intervention, with very little bloodshed, and restored 

Aristide to the Presidency to serve the remainder of his term, after which he was reelected, however 

tenuous his hold on constitutional power would prove to be.15  

I had been an active member of the Pax Christi USA group in Omaha during that time. When 

PCUSA came out against the U.S. intervention as a matter of pacifist principle, I had to part 

company—out of solidarity with the Haitian people. It was hardly a full-blown war, but it was a 

use of military force to achieve justice and peace for a terribly beleaguered people. It was a 

humanitarian intervention by military means that met all the criteria of the JWT. Some might call 

it “just policing.”16 But as I used to tell my students: Be careful in your papers with words like 

“always” or “never,” “all” or “none.” Just one exception undermines your argument. There is no 

just war? I beg to differ. I’ll offer another exception later. 

 

3. The Scriptural Background 

“In reviewing the articles in Expositions [12.1],” Sr. Anne McCarthy, O.S.B. “noticed a surprising 

dearth of scriptural references for Jesus and nonviolence.”17 I would refer Sr. McCarthy to §§27–

55 of the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter of 1983, The Challenge of Peace, for a substantive discussion 

of the relationship of scripture, both Old and New Testaments, to questions of war and peace, 

including “The Value of Nonviolence” in §§111–121.18 I don’t think any of the essayists in 

Expositions 12.1 thought it necessary to rehearse this well-informed and theologically grounded 

argument. In my own teaching, in both the university classroom and the parish hall, I have often 

engaged my students or parishioners on the scriptural theme of “Jesus the Peacemaker.”19  

I would start with the well-known story from chapter 8 of the Gospel of John of Jesus and the 

woman caught in adultery. I would point out that Jesus defended the woman against a potentially 

violent mob without resorting to violence himself, but with wit, word, and gesture—human 

capacities any of us can employ if we keep ourselves “in readiness of mind,” in Augustine’s words. 

No miracle here, no divine intervention, no supernatural powers on display.  

Then I would turn to the equally famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount in the fifth 

chapter of the Gospel of Matthew about not resisting evil, turning the other cheek, giving your inner 

garment as well, and going the extra mile. Acknowledging my indebtedness to biblical scholar 

Walter Wink,20 I would raise questions about the appropriateness of the standard translation of 5:39: 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  30 
 

“But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.” Haven’t we just seen in chapter 4 that 

Jesus himself resisted Satan in the desert? If Jesus does not resist and overcome evil, how can he 

be considered a savior? If he doesn’t save us from evil, what is it he saves us from? Wink offers a 

better translation, based on the deep biblical background of the key word antistenai, usually 

translated “resist.” Wink points out that throughout the Bible it usually refers to violent resistance 

and that therefore Jesus’s saying is better rendered “Do not return violence for violence.”  

Then follows Wink’s insightful analysis of three examples of how to resist violence without 

violence. All are addressed to a person of lower social status when confronted by a person of higher 

social status, as represented by the insult of a back-handed slap, demand for a cloak that had been 

offered in collateral for a loan, temporary conscription to carry a Roman centurion’s heavy pack. In 

each case Jesus offers counsel on how to resist such indignities without violence, which would have 

been foolhardy. In each case the target of the oppression seizes the occasion and asserts his dignity 

by surprising nonviolent action that exposes the oppression for what it is. Jesus teaches neither fight 

nor flight but a third way, the way of creative nonviolence. 

Finally, I turn to the most famous of Jesus’s parables, the Good Samaritan, but with a twist 

famously suggested by ethicist Paul Ramsey:21 what would the Samaritan do if he arrived on the 

scene when the beating was still going on? In the scores of times I have posed this question to 

students or parishioners, primed by our previous consideration of Jesus’s nonviolent tactics in 

defending the woman caught in adultery and Wink’s revisionist exegesis of Matthew 5:38–42, the 

immediate answers always suggest nonviolent means to intervene: try to talk the bandit out of it, 

distract him, scream in the hope that potential allies are near. Good, I’d say, but what if none of 

these tactics work? After some more imaginative proposals for action, someone will usually 

volunteer that if none of these efforts succeed, in imitation of Jesus the Samaritan ought to throw 

himself between the bandit and his victim. That is noble, I’d say, even saintly, but what if the bandit 

is a sociopath and a behemoth and would gladly leave two corpses by the side of the road instead 

of one? 

At this point, the participant/observers imagining this moral dilemma with three lives at stake 

will squirm in their seats. Someone will eventually but timidly suggest that stronger measures are 

called for: reach for a rock or a big stick with which to strike the bandit on the head to prevent him 

from continuing the beating and potential murder. Do you intend to kill the bandit, I would ask? 

No, but I might, and I still think that’s what I’d do, what the Samarian should do, to save his own 



31  Bergman 
 

soul and the life of his innocent neighbor attacked viciously by “an evil one.” Much more than a 

backhanded slap is in play here. I’d conclude by saying that it’s one thing to sacrifice your own life 

out of love for the enemy when attacked but quite a different thing to suggest someone else do the 

same when you could come to her aid and resist the attacker.  

How would Jesus have resolved the story if he had taken up Paul Ramsey’s challenge? I don’t 

think we can answer that question definitively one way or the other. I don’t think any other scene 

in the Gospels gives us a clear answer. You say Tertullian, I say Augustine. 

 

4. Bilateral or Multilateral? 

Biblical scholar Stephen Mott22 provides a simple analytic framework in which to think about this 

moral dilemma, how to love my neighbor and her enemy at the same time: “Does the injunction 

against resistance in self-defense cover the question of resistance to injustice done to a third party?” 

Mott’s own answer is that “bilateral nonresistance does not extend to one’s responsibilities for 

others, but we do not have instructions [from Jesus] as to whether resistance to the injustice suffered 

by others is or is not to include the use of arms.”23 Or, “The mere absence of the use of force by 

Jesus [in self-defense: bilateral] does not necessarily mean that force [in defense of others: 

multilateral] is disapproved of in principle.”24 And as if speaking to the current debate exhibited in 

Expositions 12.1 and 13.2, Mott concludes that “Nonviolence might prove to be the only legitimate 

Christian position […]. But this must be established through other means than exegesis and 

exposition of particular passages […]. It is not enough merely to point to the teaching and life of 

Jesus or to call for obedience to canonical Scripture.”25 His further conclusion is that “The just war 

theory […] takes cognizance of the tension between the obligation to do no harm to one’s neighbor 

on the one hand, and the obligation to protect and lay down one’s life for one’s neighbor on the 

other…Under exceptional circumstances it justifies the use of force to protect the innocent.”26 

A dearth of scriptural references to Jesus and nonviolence in the essays of Expositions 12.1 does 

not mean that such matters have not been taken seriously by those authors, or 37 years ago by the 

bishop-authors of The Challenge of Peace. 

To his credit, Kyle T. Lambelet, writing in Expositions 13.2 on “Nonviolence as a Tradition of 

Moral Praxis” as an alternative to the just war tradition, acknowledges that “Just war remains a part 

of Catholic social teaching because it allows us to demonstrate our love of neighbor by protecting 

the innocent from unjust harm by all the means at our disposal, including the use of violent force 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  32 
 

[…]. [This] remains, in my judgment, one of the most compelling justifications for considering 

the ongoing relevance of the just war tradition.”27 I’d say, the only compelling justification. It 

should be remembered that the just war tradition begins, in Augustine, not with the idea of self-

defense, which he thought inappropriate to the Christian, but the defense of others. 

 

5. Love Your Enemies 

The argument is not about the centrality of nonviolence in the Gospel, but what the injunction to 

love one’s enemies means in the confounding parabolic dilemma investigated above. But perhaps 

we have not thought hard enough about who the enemies were that Jesus enjoined his followers to 

love. The classic source for scholarly reflection on the question is the collection of essays edited 

by Willard M. Swartley, The Love of Enemy and Nonretaliation in the New Testament 

(Westminster/John Knox, 1992). Surprisingly, the opening essay by William Klassen, “‘Love 

Your Enemies’: Some Reflections on the Current Status of Research,” begins with the statement 

that love of enemies “has never been considered a basic part of Christian theology and never seen 

as belonging to the kernel of the New Testament kerygma.”28 Please note that this is in reference 

not to the just war tradition beginning with Ambrose and Augustine but to Christian thought and 

proclamation as a whole. Klassen’s own book, Love of Enemies: The Way to Peace (Fortress, 

1984), was the first monograph in English on the topic.29 But Klassen notes that “In few areas of 

academic research has the situation changed so radically.”30 In 1992 he has much to report on. 

Was the idea unique to Jesus? Probably not, but “Even if the identical words were to appear in 

earlier sources, the manner in which Jesus laid down his life for his enemies in order to enable 

them also to partake in the love of God, and the way in which the words were used by the early 

Christian community, make them unique.”31 Klassen also observes that “Although the command 

to love enemies is found only twice in the Gospels[32], seldom has its authenticity been questioned. 

Furthermore, it is recognized that the idea is found in the epistles without the precise 

commandment.”33 Two seemingly contrary tendencies occur in the Second Century. On the one 

hand, “It was the most frequently cited saying of Jesus […] especially by the Apologists as 

evidence that the early Christians were not haters of humankind.”34 But beginning in that same 

century (long before the beginnings of Christian just war thinking), “the idea has been either 

relegated to the personal realm or more frequently totally confined to a select group of Christians 



33  Bergman 
 

in religious communities, either in monastic orders or, since the Reformation, to people generally 

dismissed as ‘enthusiasts.’”35  

The identity of the enemies has been disputed as well by modern scholars. “Some have argued 

that the illustrations [of Matthew 5:28–42] point to personal life and therefore one should not think 

of international or civic enemies.”36 The prolific New Testament scholar Richard Horsely seems 

to be the primary exponent of the view that Jesus was thinking of “’village squabbles’” and not 

“‘foreign enemies’ or even outsiders as referents.”37 Horsely’s analysis of the question, “Ethics 

and Exegesis: ‘Love Your Enemies’ and the Doctrine of Nonviolence,”38 is included in the 

Swartley collection, as is Walter Wink’s article on Matthew 5:28–32,39 Horsely’s response to 

Wink,40 and Wink’s vigorous rebuttal.41 It’s a heady parley.42 Swartley’s own conclusion is that 

“An increasing number of scholars take echthros [enemies] in its broadest sense.”43  

But Klassen has the courage to ask, “Did Jesus love his enemies? Matthew 23 seems to suggest 

he did not, and other events of his life are often cited.”44 Matthew 23 is almost completely taken 

up with seven “woes” directed at the scribes and Pharisees, each time described as “you 

hypocrites.” These prophetic denunciations are followed by this: 

 

Therefore, behold, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them 

you will kill and crucify, some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and 

pursue from town to town, so that there may come upon you all the righteous blood 

of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered 

between the sanctuary and the altar. Amen, I say to you, all these things will come 

upon this generation.45  

 

I presume these woes, which seem to be out of keeping with the love of enemies, are no doubt 

sometimes rationalized as intending to bring the scribes and Pharisees to a recognition of their 

sinfulness, to repentance, and to conversion. But I am not aware that such an outcome is anywhere 

recorded in the New Testament. 

David Rensberger, in his essay in Swartley, “Love for One Another and Love for Enemies in 

the Gospel of John,” is even more direct: “there is general agreement [among scholars] that [the 

command to love] ‘one another’ in John 13:34–35; 15:12, 7 refers to other members of the 

Johannine Christian community, not to humanity in general.”46 The relations of that community to 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  34 
 

“the Jews” further complicates the issue. Rensberger notes that “when we consider the actual 

theological, social, and linguistic characteristics of the Gospel that contains this commandment, 

we find that in practice love for enemies is not in evidence. John does have enemies, and they are 

spoken of anything but lovingly […]. We cannot simply assume that the possibility of loving one’s 

enemies remained open, or even that of hating them was closed off, for the Johannine 

community.”47 

I take no pleasure in passing on these darker sides of the Gospels as explicated by somber 

scholars of the text and context. But it does not seem appropriate to ignore them, as they are also 

part of our Christian history. They make easy reference to love of enemies as clear and 

unambiguous in its meaning today seem untenable. That hardly means giving up the imperative to 

continue to test Jesus’s commandment’s meaning in all our affairs, from our neighbor across the 

fence to international enemies across an ocean. To give a more positive perspective, let’s turn to 

Rev. John Donahue’s essay in Swartley on “Who Is My Enemy? The Parable of the Good 

Samaritan and the Love of Enemies.” Donahue, by the way, was largely responsible for the 

treatment of scripture in Economic Justice for All, the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter of 1986.  

Donahue explicates the historical-cultural context in which to understand how the audience of 

the Gospels would have looked upon Samaritans: in brief, “For first-century Jews, the ‘Samaritan’ 

was both foreigner and enemy.”48 But “the antipathy between Jew and Samaritan arose as much 

out of their shared heritage as from their differences.”49 That intimacy accounts for the intensity 

of the hostility. Donahue then exegetes the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke; the story of the 

ten lepers, only one of whom, a Samaritan, praises Jesus for his healing, also in Luke; and the 

account of the successful mission to the Samaritans, in Acts, Luke’s second volume. The only 

other New Testament book to provide a positive view of the Samaritans is the Gospel of John, in 

the well-known incident of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. The parable 

demonstrates the shocking news that (in the words of Bernard Brandon Scott), “‘The world with 

its sure arrangement of insiders and outsiders is no longer an adequate model for predicting the 

kingdom.’”50 In his portrayal of a doubly-disparaged Samaritan leper, “Luke forcefully says that 

those who are called enemy and scorned as outsiders are fulfilling fundamental religious attitudes 

expected of Jews and of followers of Jesus.”51 “The acceptance of Christianity by the Samaritans 

is the counterpart in the Acts of the Apostles to the favorable picture of the Good Samaritan and 

the story of the ten lepers […]. This vision of Acts is to lead the church to break through those 



35  Bergman 
 

ethnic and religious boundaries which divide the world into friend and enemy.”52 “For the audience 

of John, [the woman at the well] is triply disenfranchised: she is Samaritan, a woman who 

converses freely with a man in public, and she is living […] in an adulterous relationship […]. By 

his dialogue with and acceptance of the Samaritan woman, Jesus shocks even his own disciples.”53  

Donahue concludes that “One lasting value […] of the Samaritan stories of the New Testament 

is that they challenge continually the tendency to dehumanize people by classifying them as 

enemies.”54 Furthermore (quoting Robert W. Rieber and Robert J. Kelly), “‘those qualities which 

people attribute to enemies […] become the presupposition of violent action toward them.’”55 The 

Samaritan stories in Luke, Acts, and John of Jesus and his disciples befriending the long-time 

enemies of the Jews can be said to offer a prophylactic against the initiation of violence against 

“the other.” They do not, however, tell us how to respond when the other initiates violence against 

us. No doubt we are called to continue to “love” them, which surely means not to hate and 

dehumanize them, who have made themselves our enemy, by hating and dehumanizing and 

attacking us. Jesus left us no explicit instructions for that challenge considered in its multilateral 

dimensions. 

 

6. The Early Church 

Do we get any closer to an answer to this conundrum when we move from the witness of the New 

Testament to that of the early Church? We have already quoted William Klassen on love of 

enemies in the Second Century: “It was the most frequently cited saying of Jesus.”56 The church 

historian Ronald J. Sider enriches this statement considerably in his edited volume, The Early 

Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment 

(Baker Academic, 2012). Sider claims “to provide in English translation all extant data directly 

relevant to the witness of the early church on killing [… and to] have tried to be as objective as 

possible.” 57 In full transparency he acknowledges that he “grew up in the Anabaptist tradition, 

which is pacifist. As a Christian, ethicist, and theologian, I remain committed to that tradition. But 

I think it would be fundamentally immoral to choose to slant the historical data to support my 

ethics and theology.”58 He agrees with Klassen that “Matthew 5:38–48 is probably the most 

frequently cited biblical text in the writings collected here,”59 which extend from the Didache, c. 

80–120, to Eusebius’s famous Ecclesiastical History, probably first published before 300—so the 

second and third centuries of the Common Era. 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  36 
 

Sider surprisingly notes that citations of the Matthean passage on love of enemies “Occasionally 

[…] link this passage to a rejection of killing and war, but in most instances they do not.”60 More 

particularly, 

 

in spite of Tertullian’s very strong views against Christians using the sword or 

joining the army, he hardly ever connects those views with Jesus’s command to 

love enemies, which he often cites elsewhere. So too Origen (d. 254), who refers to 

Jesus’s command to love enemies at least four times but never connects it to his 

strongly held views that Christians dare not kill. Nor does Cyprian (d. 258) make 

that connection in his two references to Jesus’s teaching about enemies. In his 

Divine Institutes, Lactantius once alludes to being friendly to enemies in a passage 

where he says Christians are ignorant of wars. But even he does not use Jesus’s 

command to love enemies in his more extensive, uncompromising statements 

against killing and war. It seems surprising that in more than two dozen references 

to loving enemies, only Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and (very briefly) 

Irenaeus and Lactantius draw any explicit connection between loving enemies and 

war. On the other hand, neither is there any hint in all these passages that killing 

and war are compatible with loving enemies.61 

 

Indeed, according to Sider, “No extant Christian writing before Constantine argues that there is 

any circumstance under which a Christian can kill.”62 

Another pacifist historian, George Kalantzis, edited an anthology similar to Sider’s: Caesar and 

the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service (Cascade Books), also published 

in 2012. Like Sider, Kalantzis takes partial issue with the often-cited article by David Hunter63 in 

which he reviews recent research (as of 1992) on early Christian attitudes toward war and military 

service and proposes a “new consensus” of scholarly opinion. Both Sider and Kalantzis take 

exception to the first of Hunter’s three points: “The most vigorous opponents (e.g., Tertullian and 

Origen) of Christian military service grounded their opposition at least as much on the pervasive 

idolatry in military life as on opposition to killing.”64 In Sider’s words, “Our authors cite both 

idolatry and Christian ethical demands to love enemies and not kill as their reasons for opposing 

Christian participation in the military. But the latter, not the former, is the more frequently cited 



37  Bergman 
 

reason.”65 So it was with particular surprise that I noted in Kalantzis’s chapter on the “Acts of the 

Military Martyrs (ca. 260–303 CE)”66 that in several pages of primary texts relating the 

martyrdoms of St. Marinus, Maximilian, Marcellus, Julius the Veteran, and the Saintly Dasius, 

every account speaks of aversion to idolatry and not one speaks of aversion to bloodshed or love 

of enemies. You say Sider/Kalantzis, I say Hunter.  

But does it really matter in what proportion to one another these two aversions to service in the 

Roman military accounted for motivation for refusal to serve? For the sake of argument—and 

clarification of thought—let us grant that aversion to bloodshed was paramount and that the early 

Church from Pentecost to the Thundering Legion incident in 173 CE (explored below) was pacifist, 

and that its extant writing continued this ethic until Constantine and Theodosius, Ambrose and 

Augustine muddied the waters in the Fourth Century. Should the belief and practice of the small 

but rapidly growing early Church be definitive for the global Catholic Church in the 21st Century? 

As there was no just war tradition then, should there be none now? Sider makes the case that it 

should: “it seems plausible to suppose that Christians much closer to the time of Jesus, who lived 

in a (pre-Constantinian) sociopolitical setting more similar to that of Jesus than Christians living 

after the reign of Constantine, would be more likely to understand Jesus’s teaching on loving 

enemies than those who lived centuries later.”67 If this is true for love of enemies then by analogy 

and for the sake of consistency, it must be true for other ethical issues as well. Take, for example, 

slavery.68 

 

7. Jesus, Slavery and War 

Jesus did not explicitly renounce slaveholding nor believing slaveholders (such as the Centurion) 

but in preaching that his followers become “slaves to all,” and in suffering crucifixion like a slave, 

he emptied slavery of its shameful status. But that left the violent institution of slavery in place. 

Neither did his followers in the early Church challenge slavery as incompatible with the Gospel.69 

Christians were both slaves and slaveholders. That does not mean his later followers should not 

work to abolish slavery as incompatible with human dignity. But striving to be a “slave to all” does 

not by itself abolish the practice of slavery. Christians might legitimately, conscientiously, 

faithfully disagree on the best way to do that. 

Jesus did not explicitly renounce war-making nor believing warriors (such as the Centurion) 

but in preaching that his followers “love their enemies” and in forgiving his enemies from the 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  38 
 

Cross he emptied enmity of its hold on our consciousness and conduct. But that leaves the 

institution of war in place. Nor did his followers in the early Church before Constantine 

unanimously renounce war; from 173 CE on some served in the Roman military. That does not 

mean his followers should not work to abolish war as incompatible with the right to life. But loving 

one’s enemies does not by itself abolish the practice of war. Christians might legitimately, 

conscientiously, faithfully disagree on the best way to do that. 

Catholic pacifists, such as those represented in Expositions 13.2, argue that since Jesus taught 

love of enemies and the early Church was consistently pacifist in preaching if not in practice, the 

current Church should abandon the just war tradition and embrace nonviolence as the only 

legitimate response to oppression and repression, especially since nonviolence has a better record 

of achieving its aims than does violence, a claim that JWT adherents might well support and even 

celebrate. Such an absolutist pacifist perspective, however, does not allow other Catholics to argue 

that the just war tradition itself is potentially the best remedy to the problem of war. The pacifist 

argument misidentifies the just war tradition, not the unjust war tradition, as the problem. The 

pacifists seem to reject the idea that Christians might legitimately, conscientiously, faithfully 

disagree on the best way to respond to the problem of war.  

In providing background to his report on recent research, David Hunter discusses some of the 

major publications of earlier decades. He describes a major pacifist argument, Jean-Michel 

Hornus’s It Is Not Lawful for Me to Fight (originally published in 1960), as a  

 

sustained attempt to prove, first, that “from the very beginning and throughout the 

first three centuries of the primitive Church, its teaching […] was constantly and 

rigorously opposed to Christian participation in military service.” Second, he 

wishes to show that this opposition was based not on the danger of the imperial 

cult, but “on a fundamental decision: to reject violence and to respect life.” Hornus 

knows, of course, that idolatry was a major problem for Christians, especially those 

in the army. Even in this case, he argues, Christians were objecting not merely to a 

religious, but also to a political ritual: “The rite showed that a particular power was 

totalitarian. Its absolute claim was the real idolatry, and it was this the faithful were 

refusing.”70 

 



39  Bergman 
 

Hunter’s comment is very much to the point in the current dialogue within the Church as 

represented by Expositions 12.1 and Expositions 13.2:  

 

The uncompromising terms of Hornus’s statement of purpose should alert the 

reader to the book’s primary weakness: it assumes that there is one Christian 

position that was held always, everywhere, and by all (faithful) Christians. The 

notion that there might be some degree of legitimate pluralism in Christian belief 

is apparently anathema…My problem with Hornus is that he seems to be utterly 

resistant to the notion that there might be a form of witness which, although 

different from his own, nevertheless saw itself as faithful to Christ, the scriptures, 

and tradition.”71 

 

Hornus is the anti-Abelard. You say Hornus, I say Abelard. 

 

8. Christian Soldiers 

Recent research demonstrates that this monolithic view is untenable as there is growing evidence 

from the late Second Century on that Christians served in the Roman army. In Sider’s account, 

 

In approximately AD173, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor from 161–

180, and his troops experienced a “miraculous” victory over a vastly larger army of 

German invaders near the Danube River. Much about the incident is uncertain. But 

credible Christian and Roman sources tell of an unexpected rainstorm and 

thunderstorm that saved the exhausted, thirst-stricken, vastly outnumbered Roman 

army […]. Whereas the Roman sources attribute the miracle to pagan gods, almost 

all Christian writers say the miracle was the result of the prayers of Christian 

soldiers in the emperor’s army.72 

 

Not only were there a noticeable number of Christians serving in the emperor’s “Thundering 

Legion” (the name predated the incident),73 but Christian writers appropriated the story to portray 

the victory as won by their prayers to the Christian God. It might have been an occasion for those 

Christian writers to denounce those Christian warriors, but they did not. Attitudes toward military 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  40 
 

service were changing. The same attitudinal shift can be seen from the prohibition against 

soldiering in the Apostolic Tradition (probably early Third Century) to the lifting of the prohibition 

in the Apostolic Constitutions (375–380), which echoes John the Baptist’s instruction to inquiring 

soldiers in Luke 3:14: “Let a soldier who comes be taught to do no injustice or to extort money, 

but to be content with his wages. Let the one who objects be rejected.”74 You say Traditions, I say 

Constitutions.  

I would have a hard time thinking any person of moral independence and integrity, least of all 

a Christian, should volunteer to serve in an imperial army, at least to the extent that the army was 

used for conquest. That would not be just, so I do not celebrate the fact that Christians are known 

to have served in the Roman military from at least 173 CE—a century-and-a-half before 

Constantine.  

 

9. Favorite Expositions 13.2 Sources 

The drive toward a monolithic view in the current debate is exemplified in the presentation in 

Expositions 13.2 of Pope Francis’s World Day of Peace Message for 2017, “Nonviolence: A New 

Style of Politics.” I celebrate this most vigorous to date affirmation of the power of nonviolence 

by a pope, but I cannot help but notice how the total message has been misrepresented in several 

of the essays of Expositions 13.2. Eight of the nine authors cite the Pope’s endorsement of 

nonviolence, but only two tell the whole story. Eli McCarthy, Butigan, Cochrane, Guardado, 

Lambelet, and Sr. McCarthy reference the Pope’s main message, but none mentions this crucial 

qualification: “6. Peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary 

complement to the Church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral 

norms.”75 Schlabach acknowledges this slightly veiled reference to just war canons but tries to 

minimize it: “Pope Francis thus exercises an appropriate Vatican savvy as he alludes to the possible 

uses of ‘just war’ criteria in his 2017 WDP message, but leaves the theory unnamed—for now, 

neither rejected outright nor defended.”76 It’s almost as if the Pope doesn’t mean what he plainly 

says: nonviolence and just war moral norms are complementary, not contradictory. Sniegocki 

doesn’t cite the passage, but does acknowledge that Francis’s predecessor John Paul II “did not 

consider himself a pacifist, but rather understood himself as adhering to a strict interpretation of 

just war criteria.”77 Sniegocki also (unknowingly) gives a nod to the project of my book: “support 

for refusal to participate [in unjust wars], however, must be an integral part of any serious 



41  Bergman 
 

application of just war principles, which include the firm moral obligation not to serve in wars that 

do not meet strict just war criteria.”78 

The other favored source in Expositions 13.2 is Erica Chenoweth’s and Maria J. Stephan’s Why 

Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 

2011). It is a sophisticated, groundbreaking, data-driven argument for the superior effectiveness 

of nonviolence over violence in 323 resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006: “The most 

striking finding is that…nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve 

full or partial success as their nonviolent counterparts.”79 This is good news indeed. “However, we 

also know that resistance campaigns are not guaranteed to succeed simply because they are 

nonviolent. One in four nonviolent campaigns since 1900 was a total failure […]. Moreover, more 

than one in four violent campaigns has succeeded.”80 The focus is on “three specific, intense, and 

extreme forms of resistance: antiregime, antioccupation, and secession campaigns.”81 Not included 

are responses to military invasion or severe humanitarian crises such as genocide.82 Perhaps the 

closest the authors come to treating invasion is in considering its aftermath in occupation, such as 

the nonviolent Greek resistance against the Nazis: “Although effective in many respects, the Greek 

resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of Nazi influence over 

Greece since the Nazi withdrawal was the result of Allied military victory rather than solely Greek 

resistance.”83 The same point is made about “the Danish people’s resistance to German occupation 

[… which …] occurred in the context of an Allied military campaign against the Axis powers, 

which was ultimately decisive in defeating Hitler.”84  

Eli McCarthy in Expositions 12.1 and six of the Expositions 13.2 authors—Butigan, Cochrane, 

Lambelet, Sr. McCarthy, Schlabach, and Sniegocki—cite Chenoweth’s and Stephan’s majority 

report (as it were) on the successes of nonviolence but not their minority report on its sometime 

failure and the success of the necessary military resistance that stopped the Nazis during World 

War II. Chenoweth and Stephan address “The claim that nonviolent resistance could never work 

against genocidal foes like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.”85 They describe this as “the classic 

straw man” argument which “is not backed by any strong empirical evidence.”86 Furthermore, 

“Collective nonviolent struggle was not used with any strategic forethought during World War II, 

nor was it ever contemplated as an overall strategy for resisting the Nazis.”87 A straw man 

argument attempts to deflect attention from a strong argument to a weak one more easily defeated. 

It boggles my mind to think that anyone would seek to diminish the existential threat posed by 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  42 
 

these two totalitarian rulers, who between them were responsible for the deaths of perhaps 

40,000,000 people. There is strong empirical evidence for that, but none for the counterfactual 

fantasy of defeating Nazism nonviolently. This is the one but astonishingly false note in 

Chenoweth’s and Stephan’s brilliant and welcome book. 

 

10. Clarification of Thought as Graced Discernment 

As frequently argued in Expositions 12.1, all the popes from John XXIII to Francis have at least 

questioned whether a war fought with weapons of mass destruction can be just; all have decried 

the horrible destruction and suffering of modern war, with its savage disregard for the principle of 

discrimination (noncombatant immunity); all have called for a strengthening of international 

institutions to make war increasingly an outlawed enterprise; all have exhorted for the respect for 

universal human rights which would make war unthinkable. But none have renounced the just war 

tradition. It does seem like debate within the Catholic Church ought to allow room for the recent 

popes’ consistent message that an increasing commitment to nonviolence is complementary to an 

increasingly strict understanding and application of the moral norms of the just war tradition.88 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that “I am no doctrinaire pacifist. I have tried to embrace a 

realistic pacifism. Moreover, I see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the 

circumstances. Therefore I do not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian 

nonpacifist confronts.”89 Similarly, Fr. William O’Neill, S.J., writing in Expositions 12.1, 

confesses that “I remain a pacifist, in part as a consecrated religious Jesuit. But I am not prepared 

to condemn those who think otherwise, e.g., troops who would defend the innocent.”90 In the spirit 

of Dr, King, he asks us, the Expositions 12.1 and Expositions 13.2 authors and the constituencies 

we represent, “might not our differences emerge not in deliberation over whether just war or 

pacifism is more consistent with the Gospel, but rather in discernment of what the particular 

moment calls for?”91 That is an irenic invitation which I am happy to accept. 

 

11. A Final Note 

This essay was substantially completed on March 24, 2020, the fortieth anniversary of the murder 

of Archbishop Oscar Romero. In his third pastoral letter, “The Church and Popular Political 

Organizations,” Saint Romero offers “The Judgment of the Church on Violence.”92 Crucially, 

Romero delineates five types:  



43  Bergman 
 

(1) “Institutionalized Violence” exploits through economic and political structures 

the impoverished majority by the privileged minority; (2) “The Repressive 

Violence of the State” attempts to crush the legitimate aspirations of the people by 

unleashing the violence of the state security forces against them; (3) “Seditious or 

Terrorist Violence” in response to exploitation and repression itself becomes 

indiscriminate and shuts off alternative means of structural change; (4) 

“Spontaneous Violence” occurs when attacks on protests, for example, provoke 

desperate reactions that offer no hope of meaningful change; (5) “Violence in 

Legitimate Self-Defense” seeks to neutralize unjust aggression.”93  

 

“The church makes a different judgment on different types of violence.” Romero offers a précis of 

the just war criteria regarding legitimate self-defense and the Church’s condemnation of 

“institutionalized violence, repressive violence by governments, terrorist violence, and any form 

of violence that is likely to provoke further violence in legitimate self-defense.”94 The Archbishop 

also briefly praises “The Power of Nonviolence”95 and its “constructive dynamism.”96 I close by 

offering a vigorous Amen! to these irenic words from Saint Romero, to whom, along with Blessed 

Franz Jägerstätter, my book is dedicated: 

 

Even in legitimate cases, violence ought to be the last resort. All peaceful means 

must first be tried. We are living in explosive times and there is a great need for 

wisdom and serenity. We extend a fraternal invitation to all, but especially to those 

organizations that are committed to the struggle for justice, to proceed courageously 

and honorably, always to maintain just objectives, and to make use of nonviolent 

means of persuasion rather than put all their trust in violence.97 

 

 

Notes 

1. Louis J. Swift, ed., The Early Fathers on War and Military Service (Wilmington, DE: 

Michael Glazier, 1983), 41–42. 

2. Ibid., 126. 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  44 
 

3. David G. Hunter, “A Decade of Research on Early Christians and Military Service,” 

Religious Studies Review 18.2 (April 1992): 87. For a description of a course on Christian 

Ethics of War and Peace inspired by Abelard’s challenge to his students, see chapter 6 of 

Roger Bergman, Preventing Unjust War: A Catholic Argument for Selective Conscientious 

Objection (Wipf & Stock, 2020), henceforth abbreviated as Preventing Unjust War. 

4. https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/159.  

5. https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/182. 

6. https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papa-francesco_ 

20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 

7. Ken Butigan, “Renewing Catholicism: Toward Recommitting to Gospel Nonviolence 

throughout the Roman Catholic Church,” Expositions 13.2 (2019): 7–26. 

8. Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, “An Appeal to the Catholic Church to Re-Commit to the 

Centrality of Gospel Nonviolence,” 2016: https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-

statement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-

nonviolence/. 

9. Roger Bergman, “Preventing Unjust War: The Role of the Catholic Church,” Expositions: 

Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 12.1 (2018): 27–44, https://expositions. 

journals.villanova.edu/index.php/expositions/article/view/2317/2221.  

10. City of God 19.7, in Swift, ed., Early Fathers 116. 

11. Catechism of the Catholic Church §§2307–2317.  

12. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church 

§503, quoting Gaudium et Spes §79; italics in original, emphasis added. 

13. The second chapter of Preventing Unjust War traces the development of Catholic thinking 

on SCO from Augustine through Aquinas, Vitoria and Suarez, Grotius, the U.S. bishops 

during the Vietnam War, and finally to the Compendium, published during the tenure of 

Pope John Paul II. 

14. But see the Appendix to chapter 5 of Preventing Unjust War: “Innere Fuhring in the Post-

War German Military.” See also Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of 

Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven: 

Yale University Press, 1989) for an in-depth investigation of the My Lai Massacre, 

including widespread public support for its main protagonist, Lieutenant William Calley.  



45  Bergman 
 

15. See Roger Bergman, “Recent U.S. Perceptions of Haiti and Haitians,” Journal for Peace 

and Justice Studies 5.2 (1993): 133–144, for an analysis of how U.S. news media, including 

The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Miami Herald, grossly mispresented the 

contrasting human rights records of Aristide’s brief tenure before the coup and of the coup 

regime itself.  

16. See Gerald W. Schlabach, ed., Just Policing, Not War (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 

2007). Schlabach authored one of the essays in Expositions 13.2.  

17. Sr. Anne McCarthy, O.S.B., “Nonviolence: Building Gospel-based Communities 

Addressing Situations of Violence Today,” Expositions 13.2 (2019): 96. 

18. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and 

Our Response, May 3, 1983, https://www.usccb.org/upload/challenge-peace-gods-

promise-our-response-1983.pdf.  

19. For a judicious, comprehensive review of the entire scriptural canon, see John. A. Wood, 

Perspectives on War in the Bible (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998). 

20. Wink’s most accessible presentation of his exegesis of Matthew 5:38–42 is in chapter 5, 

“Jesus’ Third Way,” in The Powers That Be: Theology for A New Millennium (New York: 

Doubleday, 1998). His most scholarly presentation is “Beyond Just War and Pacifism: 

Jesus’ Nonviolent Way,” Review and Expositor 89 (1992): 197–214. A version of this 

article appears in Willard M. Swartley, ed., The Love of Enemy and Nonretaliation in the 

New Testament (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992); see note 36. 

21. Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (New York: Scribner’s, 

1968), 142–143. 

22. Stephen C. Mott, “After All Else—Then Arms?,” chapter 9 in Biblical Ethics and Social 

Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). A revised edition was published in 2011.  

23. Ibid., 173. 

24. Ibid., 179. 

25. Ibid., 183. 

26. Ibid., 188. 

27. Kyle T. Lambelet, “Nonviolence as a Tradition of Moral Praxis,” Expositions 13.2 (2019): 

76–77. 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  46 
 

28. William Klassen, “’Love Your Enemies’: Some Reflections on the Current Status of 

Research,” in Swartley, ed., Love of Enemy 1. 

29. Ibid. 

30. Ibid., 2. 

31. Ibid., 7. 

32. In Matthew and Luke, which points to a common origin in the Q-source. It does not appear 

in Mark or John. 

33. Klassen, “Current Research” 8. 

34. Ibid. 

35. Ibid. 

36. Ibid., 10. 

37. Ibid., 11. 

38. Richard A. Horsely, “Ethics and Exegesis: ‘Love Your Enemies’ and the Doctrine of 

Nonviolence,” in Swartley, ed., Love of Enemy 72–101. 

39. Walter Wink, “Neither Passivity nor Violence: Jesus Third Way (Matt. 5:38–42 par.),” in 

Swartley, ed., Love of Enemy 102–125. 

40. Richard A. Horsely, “Response to Walter Wink,” in Swartley, ed., Love of Enemy 126–

132. 

41. Walter Wink, “Counterresponse to Richard Horsely,” in Swartley, ed., Love of Enemy 133–

136. 

42. Although he argues against a universalist interpretation of love of enemies in the New 

Testament, Horsely notes at the conclusion of his article as originally published that “By 

religious disposition and conviction I too have been a pacifist and a practitioner of non-

violence since my mid-teens” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54.1 (Spring, 

1986): 27). This seems to me to strengthen the credibility of his scholarly perspective, 

although it doesn’t make it unassailable, as demonstrated by Wink’s critique. 

43. Klassen, “Current Research” 11. 

44. Ibid., 13. 

45. Matthew 23: 34–36 (New American Bible). 

46. David Rensberger, “Love for One Another and Love for Enemies in the Gospel of John,” 

in Swartley, ed., Love of Enemy 304. 



47  Bergman 
 

47. Ibid., 307. 

48. John R. Donahue, “Who Is My Enemy? The Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Love 

of Enemies,” in Swartley, ed., Love of Enemy 138. 

49. Ibid., 142. 

50. Ibid., 144. 

51. Ibid., 147. 

52. Ibid., 148–149. 

53. Ibid., 149. 

54. Ibid., 151. 

55. Ibid., 150. 

56. Klassen, “Current Research” 8. Klassen’s source is a work in German by Helmut Koester. 

57. Ronald J. Sider, The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, 

Abortion, and Capital Punishment (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 14. 

58. Ibid. 

59. Ibid., 171. 

60. Ibid. 

61. Ibid., 173. 

62. Ibid., 168. 

63. Hunter, “Decade of Research” 93. 

64. Sider, Early Church 169. 

65. Ibid., 177; but remember Sider’s comments on the infrequent junction between military 

service and the love of enemies in these same authors. 

66. George Kalantzis, Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military 

Service (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books), 154–169. 

67. Sider, Early Church 13. 

68. The following section is based on and inspired by the enlightening little book by Jennifer 

A. Glancy, Slavery as Moral Problem: In the Early Church and Today (Minneapolis: 

Fortress, 2011). The argument by analogy is entirely my own. 

69. The one notable exception is Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–c.395), who “composed what is 

probably the most scathing critique of slaveholding in all of antiquity,” and did so as a 

result of meditating on Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his image.” This is a 



Intra-Catholic Dialogue on War, Justice, and Peace  48 
 

sad commentary on the power of culture to defeat the most basic tenets of biblical 

revelation (Glancy, Moral Problem 96–100). 

70. Hunter, “Decade of Research” 92. 

71. Ibid., 92–93. 

72. Sider, Early Church 137. 

73. Ibid., 139; quoting John Helgeland, Christians and the Roman Army from Marcus Aurelius 

to Constantine (New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1979), 771. 

74. Ibid., 123. 

75. Pope Francis, “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace”: https://www.vatican.va/ 

content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papa-francesco_20161208_messaggio-l-

giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html; emphasis added. See John Paul II, “We Are Not 

Pacifists,” Origins 20.36 (1991): 625. 

76. Gerald W. Schlabach, “What It Will Take: Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding 

Pedagogy,” Expositions 13.2 (2019): 138.  

77. John Sniegocki, “Pope Francis: Nonviolence, and Catholic Teaching on War,” Expositions 

13.2 (2019): 157. 

78. Ibid., 162. 

79. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic 

of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 6–7. 

80. Ibid., 11. 

81. Ibid., 13. 

82. I once served as facilitator for a national conference in Pasadena, CA, of the Civilian-Based 

Defense Association. Sadly, it was poorly attended. I regret that I am not aware of any 

successful example of CBD resisting a military invasion. In his essay in Expositions 12.1 

William O’Neill writes movingly, even as a pacifist, of how the use of armed U.N. 

peacekeepers might have greatly limited the Rwandan genocide: O’Neill, “Restorative 

Critique,” Expositions 12.1 (2018): 116. 

83. Chenoweth and Stephan, Civil Resistance 14. 

84. Ibid., 20. Not mentioned is the fact that Danish resistance included sabotage. 

85. Ibid. 

86. Ibid. 



49  Bergman 
 

87. Ibid. 

88. The essays by Powers and Winright in Expositions 12.1 are particularly persuasive about 

the complementary relationship of nonviolence and JWT.  

89. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage, to Nonviolence,” in A Testament of Hope: The 

Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” ed. James M. Washington 

(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1986), 39. 

90. O’Neill, “Restorative Critique” 116. 

91. Ibid. 

92. Archbishop Oscar Romero, Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other 

Statements (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis), 105. 

93. Ibid., 106–107. 

94. Ibid., 106–108. 

95. Ibid., 107. 

96. Ibid., 109. 

97. Ibid., 110. Chapter 1 of Preventing Unjust War presents the story of Jägerstätter as a 

selective conscientious objector—he was not a pacifist—and martyr of the just war 

tradition, as well as Gordon Zahn’s powerful sociological analysis of what made that 

possible—in contradistinction to the total capitulation of the German Catholic bishops to 

Hitler’s unjust wars. 


