Baptists and War

Essays on Baptists and Military Conflict, 1640s–1990s

Heath, Haykin

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879457
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

While Baptists through the years have been certain that "war is hell," they have not always been able to agree on how to respond to it. This book traces much of this troubled relationship from the days of Baptist origins with close ties to pacifist Anabaptists to the responses of Baptists in America to the war in Vietnam. Essays also include discussions of the English Baptist Andrew Fuller's response to the threat of Napoleon, how Baptists in America dealt with the War of 1812, the support of Canadian Baptists for Britain's war in Sudan and Abyssinia in the 1880s, the decisive effect of the First World War on Canada's T. T. Shields, the response of Australian Baptists to the Second World War, and how Russian Baptists dealt with the Cold War. These chapters provide important analyses of Baptist reactions to one of society's most intractable problems.

1

Baptists, Peace, and War: The Seventeenth-Century British Foundations

Anthony R. Cross

Introduction

As a tradition we should rightly be proud of the fact that there have been two1 Baptist Nobel Peace Prize winners—Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964,2 and Jimmy Carter in 2002.3 That said, however, we have had comparatively little to say on the issue of peace, and, all too often, have been all but silent at times when a prophetic voice has been required. None of this is to our credit.

H. F. Lorkin’s 1969 booklet examining Baptists and the issues of war and peace opens with the question, “What do Baptists teach about war?” The author’s answer is that this is “impossible to answer” because Baptists do not have a denominational structure that works out answers to moral questions for its members. Rather, “we are expected to find the answers for ourselves,” and he ties this in with the Baptist principle of liberty of conscience,4 a note that Timothy George also strikes in his 1984 article, “Between Pacifism and Coercion: The English Baptist Doctrine of Religious Toleration.”5 Lorkin maintains that:

One of the consequences of such liberty is the variety of individual views on the same matter of Christian concern, even though the Scriptures are the same for all. Baptist views on war are a notable example of this. On the one hand, Baptist chaplains, officers and men have served with distinction in the armed forces since the days of the Civil War. On the other hand, in the last two centuries Baptists have been imprisoned as conscientious objectors, following a pacifist tradition which can be traced at intervals since the sixteenth century. And in between these extremes, there have been many who have preferred to have no pronounced views on the subject, but to withdraw from such controversial matters, to pray and practise simple virtue. These varied views have existed side by side, and only very occasionally have they been openly and publicly debated.

What is needed, then, is dialogue, and Lorkin offers his booklet “in support of such dialogue, on a matter increasingly vital to the world and to the Christian, a matter in which the agonies of personal choice are linked with a complex pattern of racial and international relations.”6 Written at the height of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, his words read as strikingly contemporary, not least when he speaks of “high explosives, remote-control weapons and the mushroom cloud of nuclear bombs,” though now the conflicts are the Second Gulf War, the war on terror, and a time of revolutions in the Middle East and North and West Africa, and when talk is not just of conventional warfare, but also dirty bombs and biological weapons.

Twenty-four years after Lorkin, Paul Dekar published his For the Healing of the Nations: Baptist Peacemakers, which offers a helpful Baptist discussion of the various nuances of the word “peace,” and he bases his book around three concepts. First, there is “negative peace,” which he understands “as opposition to war.” Second, there is “positive peace,” which is the “effort to eliminate the causes of war.” Third, there is “prophecy,” which is a “critique of religion and wider society based on a biblical vision of a better world.”7 He then draws two further helpful distinctions.

First, there is “pacifism,” for which he adopts as his working definition “principled opposition to all war,”8 while recognizing that it can mean different things to different people:

It can mean conscientious objection, or refusal to bear arms and, in some cases, to pay for the preparation of war. It can refer to love of enemy. Some pacifists withdraw from society. Others engage in active politics. Some devote themselves to “life service for the enthronement of love in personal, social, commercial and national life.” Others pledge to resist war. Some equate pacifism with weakness or appeasement. Others identify pacifism with nonviolent struggle. Some regard pacifism as a faith. Others see it as ideology. Many pacifists eschew use of the word altogether. Others think they ought to.9

Second, a cognate to pacifism is “pacificism,” “the advocacy of peaceful processes such as arbitration and conciliation.”10 All these nuances have found expression in Baptist life and thought. The present chapter does not set out to distinguish these different understandings or their expression by individual Baptists and by various Baptist bodies, because they are not mutually exclusive; rather they often overlap in the thought of various Baptists as they have sought to respond to changing circumstances.

What is particularly useful is Lorkin’s classification of three views held by Baptists throughout their 400-year histor...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Baptists, Peace, and War: The Seventeenth-Century British Foundations
• Chapter 2: Andrew Fuller and the War against Napoleon
• Chapter 3: A House Uniting: Americans, Baptists, and the War of 1812
• Chapter 4: The Nile Expedition, New Imperialism, and Canadian Baptists, 1884–1885
• Chapter 5: The Call to Arms: The Reverend Thomas Todhunter Shields, World War One, and the Shaping of a Militant Fundamentalist
• Chapter 6: Reluctant Warriors: Australian Baptists in World War Two
• CHapter 7: Soviet Baptists and the Cold War
• Chapter 8: Baptists and the War in Vietnam: Responses to “America’s Longest War”