Wheaton Scholar Argues the Early Church Was Pacifist

on September 21, 2012
Roman centurions, Italy
Were early Christians really pacifists? (Photo credit: Blogspot)

By Matthew Tuininga

According to George Kalantzis, an associate professor of theology at Wheaton College and a scholar of early Christianity, the church of the first three centuries after Christ was resoundingly pacifist. Presenting some of the arguments from his forthcoming book, Kalantzis defended this claim on September 19 in a lecture at United Methodism’s Candler School of Theology (Emory University) entitled “There Will (Not) Be Blood! Early Christian Attitudes Toward War and Military Service.”

At the heart of Kalantzis’s lecture was his argument that Christianity and Rome embodied two radically clashing worldviews – worldviews involving not only contrary practices of religion and piety but contrary ethical commitments as well. Indeed, “the conflict between Rome and the Church was ultimately the collision of sacrificial systems.”

Read more here.

  1. Comment by Dan Trabue on September 21, 2012 at 3:00 pm

    ? I didn’t know this was seriously in doubt.

  2. Comment by J S Lang on September 22, 2012 at 11:17 am

    Back around 2000, Wheaton changed its teams’ names from Crusaders to Thunder, ostensibly because “some people” found Crusaders “offensive,” though Wheaton has very few Muslim students (as in NONE). Christian colleges aren’t hermetically sealed against this goofball culture, so inevitably they move left over time.

  3. Comment by Dan Trabue on September 22, 2012 at 2:43 pm

    One needn’t be a Muslim to find “crusader” a questionable team name choice.

  4. Comment by Dan (not Taube) on September 22, 2012 at 10:39 pm

    Too bad the Professor doesn’t appear to have more grounding in the classics. As Sarah Ruden, a classics scholar who made her bones doing things like translating Vergil before she turned her hand to Paul, has observed, almost every author of the first century had a very high view of the Roman army– which Paul’s letters clearly display. See her “Paul Among the People..”

    Historians of the pre-Constantine Roman Empire have long known that periods of Christian persecution came and went, and that during periods of relative tolerance, significant numbers of Christians penetrated to very high levels of all institutions of Roman society including the army. I have little doubt that the Professor’s sources say what he says they say, but unless he has come up with something new, they largely reflect the atmosphere of the (relatively infrequent) periods of persecution and need to be handled carefully and more critically than he appears to have done.

    None of this SHOULD be controversial, but unless your discipline is classics, you don’t have to know any. And vice versa. Ruden trained at Yale and during her time in the Classics department she never even met anyone in the Divinity School.

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