Paul Ramsey, the Good Samaritan, and Christian Pacifism

Keith Pavlischek
November 16, 2012

UN Peacekeepers, seen here in Kigali, Rwanda, are the pacifists answer to violence. (Photo credit: HR Brief)

When Paul Ramsey retold the parable of the Good Samaritan asking, “What do you imagine Jesus would have had the Samaritan do if in the story he had come upon the scene when the robbers had just begun their attack and while they were still at their fell work?,” he was not merely concerned with asking what Christian love required of the individual, but what the implications were for the responsible political use of force.

As we saw in my last post, Ramsey rejected the notion that “nonviolent direct action” of some sort was always “qualitatively more righteous than the use of force.” Once you decide that you would be complicit in the evil if you were entirely passive, and once you decide that charity requires action, it is difficult to see how it is more charitable to the victim to pursue an ineffective nonviolent strategy than an effective violent strategy. As Ramsey says, “if one judges that not to resist is to have complicity in the evil he will fail to prevent, then the choice between violent and non-violent means is a question of economy and in the effective force to use.”

Now, many pacifists, despite attempts–and I would say delusional attempts- to pay homage to the notion that “nonviolent” action is always effective or would be more effective if we just tried harder, have become sufficiently realist to recognize that nonviolent direct action just isn’t that effective in the face of great evil.  That’s why you will find many pacifists retreating from their pacifism to support, or at least not object, to things like armed “peacekeeping missions,” as long as they are run by the United Nations.

That’s why it has become fashionable of late for pacifists to make a distinction between the use of force or violence by a police force, which they say is permissible, and the use of force and violence by a military force, which is not. The former, we are told may be something the Christian can and should support, and perhaps even participate in, while the latter is impermissible for the Christian.

Ramsey anticipated this trend in his re-telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan and in so doing helped illuminate the internal theological and moral logic supporting the Christian just war tradition. If a purely ambulatory theory of Christian charity was inadequate, then maybe police and other preventive actions are needed in response to situations in which innocent travelers are subject to assault. Would it not be an act of charity and not only of justice for a Christian to serve in and support a police force to protect travelers on the road to Jericho?  If so, what other protective and preventive actions be required?

Ramsey noted that some Christians may only go so far as to insist that a Christian may serve or pursue a vocation in the military forces of the UN on a peace keeping mission to secure the road to Jericho. Alright, then, but  in the absence of an effective UN peacekeeping or other international force, Ramsey asked, might it also be  a work of charity “to resist by force of arms any aggression upon the ordering power or nation that maintains a police patrol along the road to Jericho? Ought a Christian to serve in the military forces of a nation in an international system where there is no effective presence of a superior authority but mainly a ‘state of nature’ between the nations.”

Through this line of questioning Ramsey was merely illustrating the Christian just war tradition’s insistence that there simply is no hard and fast moral distinction between the use of force by police forces to protect against robbers and thieves and other threats to the internal peace and security and external threats to that peace and security. For example, Aquinas wrote:

And as the care of the common weal is committed to those who are in authority, it is their business to watch over the common weal of the city, kingdom or province subject to them. And just as it is lawful for them to have recourse to the sword in defending that common weal against internal disturbances, when they punish evil-doers, according to the words of the Apostle (Rm. 13:4)….so too, it is their business to have recourse to the sword of war in defending the common weal against external enemies.

Calvin echoed the same thing:

For if power has been given them [civil authority] to maintain the tranquility of their subjects, repress the seditious movements of the turbulent, assist those who are violently oppressed, and animadvert on crimes, can they rise it more opportunely than in repressing the fury of him who disturbs both the ease of individuals and the common tranquility of all…; Natural equity and duty, therefore, demand that princes be armed not only to repress private crimes by judicial inflictions, but to defend the subjects committed to their guardianship whenever they are hostilely assailed. Such even the Holy Spirit, in many passages of Scripture, declares to be lawful.

Christian pacifists, at least those who base their pacifism on the Gospel teachings of Jesus, claiming that Jesus’ suffering non-resistance on the cross is the model for all Christian action, cannot consistently appeal only to nonviolent action as the only just recourse in the face of grave evil. That’s not only because Jesus sacrifice on the Cross was not an example of nonviolent direct action in the first place, but because it is simply not effective in the face of great evil. Nor can they reasonably draw a categorical distinction between police and military use of force, for the simple reason that the difference between them is merely a difference in degree not in kind.