For years, it was a cliché to remark that President Donald Trump was an isolationist who “hates war.” For Christians, this would seem to be an unambiguously positive description of the president’s motives. After all, Jesus said, “[A]ll who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matt 26:52) and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matt 5:9). While a good instinct in many ways, it’s also true that Christianity has a long history of thought related to the ethics of when and how war can be waged. The Old Testament in particular has a rich tradition of realist statecraft, where the use of force is an inescapable element of political leadership in ancient Israel. Yet, especially in combination with a postnationalism that questions nations as worth preserving, the tendency to read Christ’s words as an exhortation to pacifism or effectively pacifism reflects a kind of functional Marcionism.
Marcion was a second-century heretic who believed that the God of the Old Testament was of a fundamentally different and lesser kind than the God of the New. Rather than understanding the New Testament as hidden in the Old and the Old as revealed in the New (Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 2.73), Marcion sought to sever the two, believing that the New Testament abolished rather than fulfilled the Old. Though this perspective was condemned by the early Church, when Christians today attempt to extract ethical precepts from the New Testament absent the context of the Old, the inevitable result is a deracinated analysis informed more by current trends than centuries of theological reflection.
Perhaps the worst manifestation of this hermeneutical framework is the failure to grasp the tension between Christianity as a religion whose admonitions apply both at the universal level and the particular. “Love thy neighbor” means that all persons everywhere are of equal moral worth, even as we are called to exhibit this love through the ordered loves (ordo amoris), progressing from family to local community to nation to all of humanity. It is the story of Israel, as the first nation to covenant with God, that provides the prototype for the ordered loves Christians are called to pursue.
The Old Testament offers a political and moral world far less abstract than modern Christian discourse often allows for. Israel’s history contains not only prophetic denunciation of injustice within its own borders, but also the story of rulers charged with protecting their people in a dangerous, fallen world. After being anointed king, David repelled Philistine invasions, exercising force in defense of the people whose well-being was entrusted to him. Likewise, in response to an Assyrian invasion, Hezekiah fortified Jerusalem, secured its water supply, appointed commanders, and secured weapons to defend Judah. Nehemiah, serving as the Persian-appointed governor of Judah, stationed armed defenders around Jerusalem and required its builders to work with weapons at hand, demonstrating that the preservation of civic and religious order can require readiness to defend it. Yet the Old Testament also places moral limits upon such force. When an Aramean army was delivered into Israel’s hands, Elisha prevented the king from killing the captives and instructed him to feed them and send them home, after which the Aramean raids ceased.
The kings of Israel were not permitted the luxury of thinking that leadership under God meant the renunciation of power. Rather, they were judged by how faithfully they exercised authority on behalf of the nation entrusted to their care. This realism forms the soil from which later just war reasoning would grow, as articulated by theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas. Christianity is universal in its call for every tribe and tongue to confess that Christ is Lord. At the same time, persons must exist as members of particular tribes and speakers of particular tongues prior to receiving the Gospel—there is no neutral Christianity floating around apart from the particular cultures through which it is expressed. That men cannot truly know God, each other, or themselves apart from particularities of nationhood suggests that moral responsibility begins with the welfare of one’s own community—not at the expense of others, but in accordance with principles of fairness in international relations articulated by Christian thinkers such as Hugo Grotius in On the Law of War and Peace (1625).
The same exegesis that can cause pacifism to appear as the most consistent application of Christian ethics can also lead to an abstract universalism detached from particularized love for our own communities. This recognition of morally ordered obligation is not unique to Christian theology but finds echoes in modern communitarian thought that likewise resists ethical reasoning detached from embodied social particularity. Michael Walzer, for example, is a communitarian political theorist and scholar of just war known for his seminal text Just and Unjust Wars, assigned at military academies like West Point. He premises his account of just war on the idea that moral judgments can only arise from within “thick” political communities. Walzer does believe in universal principles of justice and fairness, but denies that the application of those principles erases our responsibility to the particular people and institutions proximate to us. More poetically, Faramir in Tolkien’s The Two Towers states similarly that:
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
Having a thick community and way of life worth preserving, even unto death, is antecedent to our engagement with the broader world because only through our thick, life-giving communities do we arrive at our conception of the Good—an argument famously articulated by Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral discourse underscores that ethical reasoning is intelligible only within traditions, practices, and narratives that form persons capable of moral judgment in the first place. Detached from these inherited frameworks, appeals to universal moral principles—like pacifism, which posits that violence is at all times, without reference to context, unacceptable—risk becoming emotivist assertions rather than reasoned deliberation. This insight reinforces the Augustinian intuition that our ordered loves arise from concrete membership within communities that shape both identity and obligation.
Christ died not to dissolve human particularity into an amorphous, postnational humanity but to ransom for God a people from every tribe, language, and nation. Every political community stands under divine judgment, and every ruler bears moral responsibility for the people entrusted to his care. Acknowledging and affirming our dependency on particular cultural and national contexts is not an embrace of chauvinism but a proper orientation towards individuals and institutions that shape us.
Romans 13, in which Paul exhorts Christians to submit to the ruling authorities as having been instituted by God, is often treated as the cornerstone of Christian political theology. It is better understood, however, as a summary of a much longer biblical conversation about creation, sin, and authority. There is no contradiction between Jesus’s admonitions to “turn the other cheek” and the righteous example of Old Testament rulers who utilized hard power to protect those under their care. Bearing in mind that God-honoring statecraft entails the application of the whole of Scripture, we would do well to abandon such simplistic platitudes as “he hates war.”