If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

by Ronald J. Sider

But once the Bible is read as testimony to the risen Christ, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Christ has made it possible for a people to exist who can and have survived without killing.

Before I die I have given myself the modest task of convincing the Christians in America that as Christians we have a problem with war. I am not expecting the vast majority of Christians to be pacifists or even just warriors. I simply want them to see that there is a profound tension between our worship of a crucified messiah and the support of war.

From Stanley Hauerwas' introduction.

The widespread (heretical) idea in many evangelical circles that the only important reason Jesus came was to die for our sins is one of the most glaring examples of failure to embrace the full biblical Christ. Tragically, other Christians seem to affirm the (equally heretical) idea that it is only Jesus’s teaching (especially his call to love enemies) that is finally important. If we believe with the church through two millennia that the teacher from Nazareth is God incarnate, then we must embrace the full biblical Christ.

In every single instance where pre-Constantinian Christian writers mention the topic of killing, they say that Christians do not do that, whether in abortion, capital punishment, or war.76 And Jesus’s statement about loving enemies is one of the reasons cited.