Did Jesus actually mean 'turn the other cheek' in every situation — or have pacifist Christians been using the Sermon on the Mount to dress up moral cowardice as faithfulness?

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  Alex L.3w ago

  I served two tours in Iraq as a Christian. I prayed before missions. I came home carrying things I'll never fully put down. If pacifism is the biblical mandate, someone needs to explain to me what I was supposed to do when a man was pointing a rifle at my translator's twelve-year-old son. I don't want a theology class. I want an answer.

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• P

  Priya3w ago

  My grandmother hid Jewish families in Poland during the war. She was a devout Catholic. She also owned a shotgun and made very clear she intended to use it. Was she sinning? I genuinely cannot believe the God she prayed to every single morning of her life thinks she was. I refuse that conclusion.

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• P

  Priya3w ago

  been reading this whole thread and nobody has mentioned that Jesus himself was killed nonviolently and called it a victory. the entire Christian claim is that the cross — not the sword — is what changed the world. if we actually believe that, shouldn't it reshape how we think about power and force? or do we only believe it on Easter Sunday when it doesn't cost us anything?

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• LL

  Liam L.3w ago

  I was a pacifist for about twelve years. Read John Howard Yoder, read Hauerwas, believed it fully. Then my daughter was threatened. And I realized in about four seconds flat that my pacifism had never actually been tested. I'm not saying I abandoned the ideal. I'm saying I understand now that it costs something real and most of us have never paid that price so we don't actually know what we believe.

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• A

  Alex3w ago

  The answer to the Holocaust question, from someone who has actually read the pacifist theologians seriously: they would say the failure wasn't that Christians didn't pick up guns fast enough. It was that the church spent decades failing to resist nazism non-violently — failing to shelter, failing to protest, failing to refuse to cooperate — long before violence became the only option. The question is always about what was done or not done before it got to that point. That doesn't fully satisfy me either but it's not the naive non-answer people assume it is.

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• ET

  Elena T.3w ago

  turn the other cheek was a specific social context about honor culture insults in first century palestine. it was not jesus writing a foreign policy doctrine. the greek word for 'strike' there literally describes a backhanded slap — a social humiliation, not mortal combat. people who use this verse to argue against all violence in every context haven't actually read the commentaries on it.

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• L

  Leo3w ago

  Just want to drop in and say that the just war tradition — Augustine, Aquinas, the whole framework — is not some invention designed to give Christians permission to be violent. It's a serious moral attempt to constrain violence, limit it, and make war the absolute last resort with strict conditions. It's actually more demanding than 'shoot first and pray later' which seems to be the functional theology of a lot of American gun-culture Christianity.

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• A

  Alex3w ago

  Can we please distinguish between personal ethics and state action? Romans 13 is talking about the state bearing the sword, not individual Christians hunting each other down. The early church fathers were overwhelmingly pacifist for the first three centuries. It wasn't until Constantine got baptized and suddenly war became holy that the theology shifted. That shift should bother you.

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• E

  Elena3w ago

  What frustrates me is that American Christianity somehow married itself to militarism so completely that questioning war feels like questioning the faith itself in some circles. That's not biblical. That's cultural capture. The church should always be able to ask hard questions about state violence without people treating it as unpatriotic heresy.

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• M

  Morgan3w ago

  Can someone explain to me how a theology of absolute nonviolence survives contact with something like the Holocaust? Like actually — what is the pacifist Christian response to Auschwitz in real time, not in retrospect? I'm not being rhetorical. I genuinely want to hear the answer because I cannot get there on my own.

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  Nina3w ago

  Okay but Dietrich Bonhoeffer literally joined a plot to assassinate Hitler and we basically canonized him for it. The man was a pacifist theologian! If even Bonhoeffer broke under those conditions maybe we should stop pretending the absolute pacifist position is clearly correct even to the people who most believed it.

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• AT

  Alex T.3w ago

  grew up Mennonite. we weren't cowards. my great uncles did alternative service in ww2. hard labor in camps while other men got glory. nobody called them heroes. they went anyway because they believed something. disagree with them if you want but at least understand what you're actually disagreeing with before you call it cowardice.

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• Z

  Zara3w ago

  Mennonites and Quakers have held consistently to pacifism for centuries, not as cowardice but as witness. They've also served in wars as medics and conscientious objectors and taken bullets doing it. The caricature of the pacifist hiding while others die is lazy and dishonest. Some of the bravest people in WWII were COs.

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  Feli3w ago

  Pacifism isn't cowardice. It is arguably the hardest thing Jesus ever asked. Anybody can shoot back. Turning the other cheek when someone genuinely harms you or yours — that costs you something. That is the narrow road. That is the cross. Military Christianity is comfortable Christianity dressed up in camouflage.

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• I_

  Iris _x3w ago

  The just war tradition also gave theological cover for the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and about a thousand colonial conquests. I am not saying Augustine was wrong in principle. I am saying the tradition has been catastrophically abused and maybe that should make us more cautious about how quickly we reach for it.

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• J

  Jamie3w ago

  The Roman soldiers who came to John the Baptist — he didn't tell them to quit. He told them not to extort people and to be content with their wages. That's pretty significant. The first Gentile convert in Acts is a Roman soldier and the text treats that as a beautiful thing, not a complicated ethical problem that needed resolving. The New Testament is just not a pacifist document front to back.

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• P

  Priya3w ago

  the confidently wrong takes in this thread are wild. the Luke 22 sword passage — Jesus literally says 'it is enough' when they show him two swords. TWO swords for twelve disciples is not an armament policy. most serious scholars read that as Jesus signaling fulfillment of a prophecy, not issuing a concealed carry permit.

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• M

  Marco3w ago

  There's a word for a theology that works perfectly in seminaries and utterly collapses the second it touches actual human suffering. It's called irrelevant. Abstract pacifism is a luxury of the safe and the comfortable. Come preach it in a place where Christians are being executed for their faith and see how that goes over.

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• E

  Elena3w ago

  Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, not the peacekeepers. There is a difference. Peacekeeping can require force. Peacemaking always requires sacrifice. The cross was not passive — it was the most active, costly, world-changing thing that ever happened. Pacifism at its best isn't doing nothing, it's doing the harder thing.

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• ZS

  Zara S.3w ago

  If you disagree with Christian pacifism, please tell me which part of 'love your enemies' you find confusing. I'll wait.

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• N

  Noah3w ago

  The whip thing. Every time. Look — Jesus making a whip to drive animals out of the temple courts is not the same as Jesus endorsing warfare. That is such a tortured reading. He didn't beat anyone with it. It was crowd control for livestock. Using that to justify military force is genuinely embarrassing exegesis.

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• C9

  Casey 923w ago

  Hard no on the pacifism angle. Luke 22:36 — Jesus tells the disciples to sell their cloaks and BUY SWORDS. You can argue about what that means but you cannot argue he was a pure pacifist. The text doesn't support it.

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  Maya3w ago

  Loving your enemy does not mean allowing your enemy to murder your family while you quote scripture at them. You can love someone and stop them from doing evil. A parent loves a toddler and still physically stops them from running into traffic. This isn't complicated.

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• LL

  Liam L.3w ago

  if you're using the sermon on the mount to tell a mother she can't protect her children from an attacker you have completely lost the plot of what Christianity is even supposed to be about. God is not asking us to be doormats. He is asking us to love. sometimes love looks like stopping the person causing harm.

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• ES

  Elena S.3w ago

  Honestly the problem is that 'pacifism' covers too much ground. Refusing to personally join a military is one thing. Telling the government it can never use force to stop genocide is a completely different claim. I know Christians who hold the first and not the second. That seems internally consistent to me and I wish we'd stop treating the question as binary.

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  Diego3w ago

  Nope. Hard disagree with the pacifism crowd. Jesus flipped tables and drove people out with a whip. Stop pretending he was docile.

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• CL

  Casey L.3w ago

  I want to push back on the framing of this whole question. The early church didn't have armies. They were a minority living under Roman rule. The question of state violence and individual violence are just different questions and we keep smashing them together like they're the same thing. They aren't.

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  Jordan3w ago

  ok but cornelius having a conversion experience doesn't mean god endorsed the roman imperial war machine. it means god loved cornelius. those are different statements. by this logic the tax collector's conversion endorses the entire roman taxation system.

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