In the church's earliest centuries, government officials who wanted to be baptized first had to relinquish their offices...As counterintuitive as all of this might seem, there are serious Christian thinkers (not just Anabaptists) who argue that it is impossible for a Christian to be at one and the same a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ and a responsible president of the United States, for example.* This is not a question of arguing about whether or not Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush were sincere in their claims of being born again; it is the simple assertion that there are inherent irreconcilable contradictions between honoring the Sermon on the Mount and being the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in all of history.
* Clarence Jordan surmised that being President is completely incompatible with being a Christian.
Arthur Paul Boers, Servants and Fools, pp.143-144
Even a good man can be wrong.
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ReplyDeleteNot about being right or wrong, the author is just pointing out how far we are from Jesus' own teachings and the teaching of the earliest Christians on waging war. The pre-Constantine Christians were basically pacifists, following Jesus' own example
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