But Reformed Christians could use more skepticism about the wisdom and value of war, and about the aims of the nation in which they live. We should pray for leaders’ wisdom, and regretfully support wars when they meet standards of just conflicts (they should be limited, defensive, and so on). Instead, Reformed Christians, and American evangelicals generally, have sometimes seemed like zealous warmongers, believing their nation was seamlessly carrying forward the purposes of the kingdom of God.

Why have so few Reformed Christians been pacifists? A plain reading of Jesus’s teachings would seem to commend a pacifist interpretation, at least at the individual Christian’s personal level. As he famously instructs us, “Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5:39). Yet Christian pacifism has gained much more traction among Anabaptists, and among liberal Catholics and Protestants, than among Reformed believers.

If the Word of God is our final authority for faith and practice, we should be willing to ask why Reformed Protestants have tended not to be pacifists. While I can only offer tentative answers to this enormous topic, I suspect there are two major explanations: one admirable, and the other problematic.

Approach to Scripture

The first reason is that Reformed Christians have traditionally been hesitant to prioritize any particular parts of Scripture, and have tended to read (however imperfectly) the Bible as a whole. Pacifist Christians are sometimes, by their own confession, “red-letter Christians” who give Jesus’s teachings on ethics top biblical billing. At times they imply, perhaps unwittingly, that other parts of Scripture—such as the accounts of the Israelites’ wars against the Canaanites—do not carry the same authority as the teachings of Jesus.

While Reformed Christians would never advise neglecting Jesus’s teachings, they balk at suggestions that some sections of Scripture take precedence over others, or that certain passages contradict. Therefore, as difficult as it may be to explain, Reformed Christians begin with the assumption that Jesus’s teachings on non-retaliation somehow mesh with the Israelites putting men, women, and children to the sword. Since we believe in the perfection and inspiration of Scripture, and its sufficiency as a guide to the ways of God, this correct assumption that should indeed undergird our interpretation.

Reformed Christians have similarly tended to see certain continuity between the Old and New Testaments. Although Israel and the church are distinct entities, they contend, there are similarities between the way that God related to Israel and the way he relates to the church. Thus, if God at times commanded Israel to take on military assignments and conquer territory, it isn’t a stretch to think he might ask Christians to do the same things through the agency of the governments under which they live.

Checkered Past

Herein lies the more problematic factor in the relative absence of a Reformed pacifist tradition: Reformed Christians have often been too comfortable with state-sanctioned violence. Since the Reformation, many Protestants have seen an important role for nations, kings, and militaries in advancing the ends of the kingdom. If one believes in providence, then of course the acts of nations do somehow fulfill God’s plans for humanity. But Reformed Christians could borrow a dash of pessimism from Christians such as Anabaptists (Mennonites and others), and theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, who are inherently skeptical about the agenda of any nation-state and its military pursuits.

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