I was reading this article recently, and it got me thinking.

First of all, it got me thinking that the guy in the photo at the top of the article looks as though his face has been ‘photoshopped’ on, but I don’t know why that would be the case. Perhaps he’s a really effective special forces type, and needs to disguise his identity so that terrorists don’t come and assassinate him. That would be a bit of a bummer for the guy whose face they used to cover him up though. The poor bloke would be wandering around the shops one day, and BANG… they’d have got him. Before that though, it might be kind of cool. People (who had seen the article) would always be coming up to him and asking him what it was like being a soldier and things like that, and he’d have to just say “oh, it’s nothing, really”, so that he didn’t give away any secret information, like the fact that he’s actually not a soldier at all.

Anyway, once I’d finished thinking about that (it took a while, actually), I got thinking about a conversation I’d had recently about whether war was ever justified, and if so, how ‘much’.

I know that there are loads of wars in the Old Testament, and that God seems to be quite pleased when His people fight various other nations that aren’t doing what He wants them to. I’m never quite certain whether He’d told them specifically that He wasn’t happy with their actions, or whether they were just supposed to get the message when all those Jewish people started chucking spears at them. If someone threw a spear at me, I think that I’d deduce fairly quickly that they weren’t too fond of me.

Then in the New Testament, Jesus says that he’s fulfilled the law (that the Old Testament revolves around), and then most of the things he teaches about are to do with being peaceful, and gentle, and things like that. I’d say that it’s fairly hard to be gentle when you’re shoving a sword into someone, but perhaps if you’re aiming at them with a rifle from a distance, you could say nice things about them while you pull the trigger.

In any case, there are fairly horrible things happening around the world most of the time, often involving people who are fairly determined to kill, maim, or otherwise negatively affect the people around them. As 21st century Western Christians we’re usually told to pray for the situation, and we (I?) tend to just offer up a couple of mumbled phrases which usually involve asking God to ‘intervene’ or ‘let His will be done’. Once I’ve ‘discharged my responsibility’ in this way, I move on to the really important things happening, like working out what I want for dinner, or finding a certain song on iTunes.

Obviously if I’m not actually in the same area as the horrible violence I can’t do anything about it, other than to pray that God would stop it somehow. But what if I was?

What if I saw a person beating a helpless child, and couldn’t restrain them, so had to punch them, and they ended up badly hurt?

Would that be Christlike?

What if I was standing around, and suddenly a whole group of people started attacking another group of people right in front of me? And what if I had a weapon of some sort, and (after yelling, and trying to verbally convince them, but failing) was actually able to use it to injure the ‘aggressors’, so that they would have to stop their attack?

Would that be Christlike?

If we pray that genocide in Africa would end, what if the way that God answered that prayer was to send in an army of ‘peacekeepers’, who ended up fighting with, and killing many of the people who had committed the genocide? Would we prefer that none of the peacekeepers were Christians, so that they wouldn’t have to break any of Jesus’ commands, but that the result would be the same anyway?

Should a Christian person join the military, knowing that (either directly, or indirectly) they might potentially be involved in the deaths of other people?

If a person in the military needs to find out information from a person on the opposing side, and that the information might potentially save hundreds of lives, would it justified to harm the prisoner in any way to find that information out? Would it be worse for one person to be harmed to save a much larger group, or to sit back and pretend it wasn’t happening?

Basically, I haven’t made my mind up about all of this. I tend to drift from one end of the ‘pacifism spectrum’ to the other, often propelled by events that have occurred around me. I know that Jesus told Peter to put his sword away when he tried stopping his arrest in Gethsemene, but that was specifically related to Jesus’ mission and the cross. What if saving your own life isn’t your motivation, but saving the life of an innocent? Or (because of ‘original sin’, or anything else) is no one ever innocent, and therefore, no one is ever worth fighting to save?