Simple Pimple

I have finished Rodney Clapp’s book, and enjoyed it a good deal. This post will be on his penultimate chapter — on violence and peace, and my last post, following shortly thereafter, will be on the central contradiction that has plagued Clapp’s attempt to work through these issues.

This post will be fairly short because I don’t have a lot of patience with pacifism, or even with sympathizing with pacifism, which Clapp does here.

Of course, every true Christian longs of the days of peace foretold by the prophets, and yet around us we see violence on every hand. What do we do? As C.S. Lewis pointed out somewhere (one of my favorite phrases), the Christian Church has produced two responses to the practical and ethical problems of war — chivalry and pacifism. He says, and I agree, that whatever the imperfections of chivalry have been, it has had far greater success in pushing us down the right road than has had its high-sounding, low-performance cousin, pacifism. Whenever pacifistic idealists try to immanentize the eschaton, stand by for a blood bath.

“Yet is is very difficult for any thoughtful Christian to get around the biblical depiction of Jesus and his work on the cross as fundamentally nonviolent” (p. 104).

Clapp then quotes John Howard Yoder, who said that in the New Testament exhortations to follow Jesus, to imitate Him, this is what we are called to imitate. Paul doesn’t use Christ’s unmarried status in order to buttress his argument for celibacy, and when he tells us to work with our hands, he doesn’t use Christ’s time as a carpenter. The one place where we are told to follow is where “servanthood replaces dominion, forgiveness absorbs hostility. Thus — and only thus — are we bound by New Testament thought to ‘be like Jesus'” (p. 105).

Right. And this call to radical discipleship goes out to all followers of Christ in all lawful vocations, which happens to include “centurion.” Well, back to the drawing board.

Clapp also quotes a non-pacifist theologian, William Placher, who grants (in my view) far too much to the pacifist position. He says that we sometimes have to have recourse to violence, but to do so is “always to admit a failure of imagination” (p. 105). Actually, the reverse is more like the truth. The warmonger has no imagination, and neither does the pacifist. Life has to be simple, straightforward, and monochrome. If you fight all the time, or if you refuse to fight at any time, ethical choices simply have an on/off switch. Simple pimple. But the chivalric knight has decisions to make, and he has to have the imagination to make them.