The future cannot be the place where our obedience happens.

A plowshare is not an abstraction. It is a particular piece of iron, shaped for a particular task, used by a particular person in a particular field. It is heavy. It gets dull and must be sharpened. It turns the ground in a certain way, and the farmer knows the feel of it as he knows the handle of his own front door. The prophet’s hearers knew this. They lived close to the ground, and when they heard the word “plowshare,” they did not think of a symbol. They thought of a tool they or their farming neighbors held in their hands.

When Isaiah says that the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks,” and that “neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isa. 2:4, KJV), I don’t think he was writing poetry for its own sake or proposing an unrealistic ideal to be placed on a high shelf beyond the hearer’s reach. He was describing iron put to a different use, which meant hands put to a different work, which meant lives lived differently.

That is why I can’t be satisfied with any reading of the passage that indefinitely postpones it, as if it were a check to be cashed only when the world becomes something other and better than this one. I want to take the prophecy as a word addressed to the present and as something that concerns me now. 

As I understand it, Christians have tended to read these words in three ways. The first holds that they are purely about the future. God will one day judge the nations and bring peace, and until then we are free, or perhaps obliged, to continue making swords. The second holds that the peace of that kingdom has already begun in Christ, and that those who follow him are to live by it now, however imperfectly and however foolish it may look to the world. The third tries to hold the two together, treating the vision as a goal that ought to guide us while allowing that, in the meantime, the sword is sometimes necessary and sometimes even righteous.

I have respect for the people who hold the first and third views. Many of them are serious and decent, and many are undoubtedly braver than I am. They have not reached their conclusions lightly. But I think both views share a habit of mind that I have learned to distrust: the habit of deferring to some later, larger scale what can only be done here, now, and on a small scale. And I think, too, that the people who stood nearest to Jesus in time, who learned his words from those who had heard them, did not read the prophecy as something to be postponed. They read it as having arrived.

Consider first how the future-only reading works in practice. It says, in effect, that peace is God’s business and war is ours. It hands the great hope over to the end of history and reserves the present for the old arrangements. It is a comfortable division of labor, and like most such arrangements, it asks very little of the one who makes it.

The difficulty is that the present is the only time any of us will ever live. A farmer who says he will care for his soil once the market rewards him for it will have no soil left by then. The gullies will have opened, the topsoil will have washed down the creek, and the field will be a lesson in what waiting costs. A people who say they will love their enemies once God has removed all enemies have, without quite saying so, agreed never to do it at all. The future cannot be the place where our obedience happens, because we will never arrive there as the people we are now. Whatever we will be in that kingdom, we are becoming today through what we practice.

There is also something odd about the idea that a command could be given for a time when it would no longer be needed. If the prophecy describes a world where no nation lifts a sword against another nation, then in that world nobody will need to be told not to lift one. Instructions are for the time of temptation. A fence is built while there is still livestock to keep in and a road to keep them off. Nobody builds a fence around an empty field in a country with no roads.

The third view is more careful and, for that reason, harder to answer. It keeps the vision in sight while making allowances. It reasonably enough holds that the world is fallen, that the innocent must sometimes be defended, and that a ruler who will not restrain a murderer has failed the people in his care. I do not dismiss any of this. I have family and friends, and, like you, I would not want to see them harmed.

But I have noticed that allowances tend to become the main thing. Once we grant that the sword is sometimes necessary, we must appoint someone to decide when, and those who make that decision are rarely the ones who will bleed for it. The decision passes upward and outward, away from the household and the neighborhood, into offices and capitals where the dead are counted but not known or grieved. The exception grows by the same pattern that turns a small clearing in the woods into a pasture, the pasture into a subdivision, and the subdivision into a shopping center with a parking lot where the creek used to be. Each step can be defended as “necessary.” But, at the end of it, the woods are gone, and nobody can quite recall when it happened.

Christian history, it seems to me, has followed this pattern. The careful doctrine of the just war was intended as a restraint but has seldom, if ever, served that purpose. I cannot think of a war that Christian nations declined to fight because the doctrine forbade them. The allowance was meant to limit war, and it has mostly served to bless it.

And there is Jesus, who, it seems to me, leaves little room for allowances. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matt. 5:43–44, KJV). He said this to people living under a foreign occupying army, among whom were men who dreamed of taking up the sword against Rome and who, a generation later, did so, to the ruin of their city. He did not say it to people living in some sheltered time of peace. He said it to people with real enemies and real swords.

I have read many learned explanations for why these words do not quite mean what they say. I have been told they govern private conduct, not public duty; that they describe an ideal, not a rule; that they were meant for a short interval before an expected end. I confess that none of these explanations has persuaded me. The words are not complicated. Love, whatever else it is, wishes the other to go on living. I do not know how I can love a man while reserving the right to kill him. I can imagine hating him and refraining from killing him, which is a lesser but still admirable thing. But I cannot imagine loving him and killing him unless the meaning of the word “love” has come to mean so little that it is no longer worth saying.

If the command to love our enemies applies only in the age to come, it is indeed an odd command, because, according to the same prophecy, there will be no enemies left to love in that age. A teaching about enemies can only apply when enemies exist. 

That time is now.

When Peter drew his sword in the garden to defend the one person on earth most worth defending, Jesus told him to put it away (Matt. 26:51–52; John 18:10–11). If ever there were a just cause, that was it. If ever the defense of the innocent could justify the use of a sword, it was then. Yet the answer was a hard no.  

Now I want to take up a question that seems to me to settle a good deal of the matter, and that is not asked as often as it ought to be. When we are trying to understand what a man meant by his words, who should we ask?

In ordinary, everyday life, we know the answer. If I want to know what my grandfather meant by one of his sayings, whether hard counsel about horses, debt, or the weather, I do not go to a stranger who lived three hundred years after him. I go to the people who knew him, or to those who knew the people who knew him. They heard his voice. They saw what he did after he said it. They know which of his sayings he meant as jokes and which as law. Meaning lives in a community of memory, and it is freshest nearest its source, like water nearest the spring.

The same holds, I think, for the words of Jesus. We are separated from him by twenty centuries, by translations, commentaries, and councils, and by the long history of Christendom and its alliances with thrones and armies. Those who lived in the first centuries after him were separated from him by only a generation or two. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, heard Polycarp preach when he was young, and Polycarp had known the apostle John. That is a short chain, about the distance between my great-grandfather and me. If we want to know how the earliest Christians understood the command to love enemies, and whether they thought Isaiah’s plowshares were for their own time or for some later one, we can ask them. They left a record, and it is remarkably consistent.

Justin, called the Martyr because he was beheaded in Rome around 165, wrote a defense of the Christians addressed to the emperor himself. He was not writing a sermon for believers. He was telling the most powerful man in the world what Christians were actually like, and he had every reason to make them sound as harmless to the empire as possible. He told the emperor that the prophecy had already come true among them. In his Dialogue with Trypho, he put it this way:

“We who were filled with war, mutual slaughter, and every wickedness have each, throughout the whole earth, changed our warlike weapons, our swords into plowshares and our spears into implements of tillage, and we cultivate piety, righteousness, philanthropy, faith, and hope, which we have from the Father Himself through Him who was crucified.”¹

Notice the verbs. He does not say, “we shall change.” He says, “we have changed.” Justin did not place Isaiah’s vision at the end of time. He placed it in the ordinary lives of the people he worshiped with, many of whom had once been soldiers, brawlers, and men of violence, and who had put all that away. In his First Apology, he told the emperor that Christians who had once hated one another and would not even live among people of another tribe now lived alongside them and prayed for their enemies. He went further still. Those who had once killed one another, he said, not only refused to make war on their enemies but would rather die confessing Christ than save themselves by lying to their examiners.²

That last claim is worth pondering. It places refusing war and refusing to lie side by side as parts of one faithfulness. For Justin, the Christian would not kill his enemy or deceive his judge, even if the lie would save his life. These were not two different kinds of obligation, one strict and the other flexible. They were the same obedience.

Irenaeus, writing a few decades later, made the same argument against those who claimed the prophecy had not yet been fulfilled. He used simple logic: look at what has happened in the lives of believers. The word of God went out from Jerusalem, carried by the apostles, and changed people. The proof of the prophecy was in the people it had changed. In his great work Against Heresies, he wrote that the apostles’ preaching had so altered the nations that they had turned their swords and war-lances into plowshares and pruning-hooks, and that they were “now unaccustomed to fighting, but when smitten, offer also the other cheek.”³

I love the phrase “unaccustomed to fighting.” It is the language of habit, of what a person gets used to. It fits the prophet’s words exactly: they shall not learn war anymore. Irenaeus understood that peace is not only a decision made once but a way of life learned over time, as a man becomes accustomed to early rising or a farmer learns the patience that his crops require. Irenaeus connected it, as Jesus did, to the turned cheek. For him, the plowshare and the other cheek were the same thing seen from two sides: one the prophet’s imagery, the other the Lord’s clear command.

Tertullian of Carthage, the brightest and most quarrelsome of these early writers, took up the same prophecy in his treatise An Answer to the Jews. After quoting Isaiah on swords and plows, he asked whom the prophet could have meant but the Christians themselves, who had been taught by the new law and were already living that way. Again, the present tense. Again, the plain claim that the prophecy described the Christians of his day.

Tertullian was a lawyer by training and knew how to press an argument. He knew that some Christians served in the army, and he knew the stories of soldiers who came to John the Baptist and of the centurion whose faith Jesus praised (Luke 3:14; Matt. 8:5–13). He did not pretend these things were not in the scriptures. But he pointed to the garden and to Peter’s sword, and drew his conclusion in On Idolatry: “How will a Christian man war, nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away? For albeit soldiers had come unto John and had received the formula of their rule; albeit, likewise, a centurion had believed; still the Lord afterward, in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier.”

“Unbelted every soldier.” A soldier’s belt was his badge of service. To take it off was to leave the army. Tertullian read the command to Peter not as a private word to one impetuous disciple but as a word to the whole church. In The Chaplet, he pressed the point further. The Lord had said that whoever takes the sword will perish by it, and Paul had told believers not even to take one another to court (1 Cor. 6:1–7). How, Tertullian asked, ‘Could a son of peace go into battle when it was not fitting for him even to go to a court of law?”⁴

That argument strikes me as especially sound because it reasons from the small to the large, as good sense usually does. If the lesser force was forbidden, how could the greater be allowed?

And in his Apology, responding to the charge that Christians were enemies of Rome, Tertullian noted that there were by then so many of them that they could have been a real danger if they had wished. “For what wars should we not be fit, not eager, even with unequal forces, we who so willingly yield ourselves to the sword, if in our religion it were not counted better to be slain than to slay?”⁵

Better to be slain than to slay. That sums up the whole matter in seven words. It is not the principle of a people who thought the kingdom’s way of peace was postponed to some future time.

The witness does not stop with these three. Origen of Alexandria, the greatest scholar of the early church, answered the pagan critic Celsus by saying that Christians no longer took up the sword against a nation or learned war, “having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus, who is our leader.” When Celsus accused Christians of failing their duty to the emperor, Origen did not deny that they refused to fight. Instead, he answered that they served the empire in another way, as an army of piety that fought on the emperor’s behalf through prayer.⁶

Others said the same. Athenagoras of Athens, writing to the emperor Marcus Aurelius around 177, said Christians would not even watch the gladiatorial games because they could not bear to see a man put to death, even if it were legally sanctioned. Cyprian of Carthage, a bishop who died a martyr in 258, observed that the whole world was soaked in blood and that murder, a crime when one man commits it, was praised as a virtue when committed on a grand scale. Lactantius, writing at the very beginning of the fourth century, just before everything changed under Constantine, held that God’s command against killing forbids even what human law permits, so that a Christian may not go to war at all. And the church order known as the Apostolic Tradition, commonly attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, instructed that a soldier seeking baptism must refuse to kill even under orders, and that a believer who wished to enlist was to be turned away.⁷ 

I do not want to oversimplify the record. Christians served in the Roman army in the second and third centuries, and their numbers grew. Tertullian himself mentions them and argues against them precisely because they existed. The early church was not a single voice.

But it matters a great deal which way the voices leaned and whose voices they were. The teachers of the church, the bishops, apologists, and martyrs whose writings survived because the church valued them, spoke with near unanimity for the first three centuries.⁸ Those who argued for Christian soldiering left very little in writing, because the church did not regard the argument favorably. Christians in the army were a fact the teachers struggled with, not a practice they defended. It is one thing to say that people fell short of a teaching. It is another to say the teaching was never given.

And then consider what changed it. It was not a new reading of the Gospels. It was not the discovery of some overlooked saying of Jesus. It was the emperor’s conversion. When Constantine took up the cross as a battle standard in 312, the church, for the first time, had a stake in the success of Roman arms. Within a century, Christians were fighting under that standard, and within a little more than a century after that, only Christians were allowed to serve. Augustine, a brilliant and troubled man, reconciled the Gospel to the needs of an empire that was now Christian and under attack, and the just war tradition grew from his thought.⁹

I do not doubt Augustine’s sincerity. But I notice that his reading came after the church had acquired a throne, whereas the earlier reading came when it had nothing to protect but its faithfulness. If I want to know what Jesus meant, I would rather ask those who had nothing to gain by misunderstanding him. The earliest Christians had every worldly reason to find a way around the command to love their enemies. Their enemies were killing them. They did not look for a way around. The later church had every worldly reason to find one, and it did.

This is the same principle any sensible person uses when evaluating advice. You tend to trust the counsel of the man who gives it when it goes against his own interest. When a car dealer tells you not to buy his most expensive model, you listen. When a man who is being persecuted tells you that his Lord forbade him to strike back, and he continues not to strike back as they lead him to the lions, you have strong evidence that he understood the Lord’s instruction correctly.

I am not so foolish as to think the kingdom has fully come. I read the newspapers and watch the evening news. I know what nations are doing to one another, and I know that Christians are among those doing it. The second view, as I hold it, is not naive. It acknowledges that we live between the promise and its fulfillment, that the world remains arranged for war, and that we ourselves are compromised by that arrangement in more ways than we can count. We pay taxes that fund weapons. We buy goods whose low prices depend on violence done somewhere out of our sight, to land, water, and people we will never meet. Our economy is, in many ways, a war economy, even in peacetime, because it treats the earth and its creatures as enemies to be subdued and used up.

We are not asked to be successful. We are asked to begin and to keep beginning. The early Christians who refused the sword did not bring peace to the Roman Empire. They did not end war. They simply declined to lend their hands to it, and in doing so they made small places in the world where Isaiah’s prophecy was already partly true. That is all Justin Martyr was claiming. He was not saying the world had changed. He was saying that he and his neighbors had changed, and that this was what the prophet had foreseen.

That is how I have come to think of the kingdom: not as a vast program imposed from above, nor as a scene painted on the far wall of history, but as a work of many small fidelities, like the slow formation of topsoil. No single season makes a field fertile. Years of returning what was taken, keeping the ground covered, and refusing the quick gain that ruins the land for the children who will farm it next make it fertile. Topsoil is the accumulated kindness of generations. So is peace. People make it by refusing to learn war in their own households and communities, even at a personal cost.

The prophet did not say the nations would be forced to stop going to war. He said they would stop learning how. We learn through teachers, habits, and practice. Every generation is taught war or something else. Schools, games, and the stories we tell our children about who the heroes were teach it. If we are waiting for God to unteach war all at once at the end of time, we should at least be honest that, in the meantime, we are teaching or supporting the teaching of war. And doing it well.

The earliest Christians understood that the Lord who told them to love their enemies meant for them to do so while their enemies were still alive and hostile, because no other time could make such a command meaningful. They understood that the plowshares Isaiah saw were not only in heaven. They were in the hands of converted soldiers who had gone home to work the ground. They staked their lives on that reading, and many lost their lives for it. The church honored them above all others for a long time.

I would rather, however clumsily, stand with them. The iron is already in our hands. It only needs reshaping, and the work of reshaping it is not reserved for some future age. It belongs to this one, the only one we have been given.

Notes

1. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 110, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, rev. A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885), hereafter cited as ANF.
2. Justin Martyr, First Apology 14, 39, in ANF 1.
3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.34.4, in ANF 1.
4. Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 3; On Idolatry 19; The Chaplet, or De Corona 11, all trans. S. Thelwall, in ANF3.
5. Tertullian, Apology 37, trans. S. Thelwall, in ANF 3.
6. Origen, Against Celsus 5.33, 8.73, trans. Frederick Crombie, in ANF 4.
7. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 35, in ANF 2; Cyprian, To Donatus 6, in ANF 5; Lactantius, The Divine Institutes 6.20, in ANF 7; Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 16, in Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).
8. Tertullian, Apology 42 and De Corona 1, in ANF 3. For collected texts and a historical survey, see Ronald J. Sider, ed., The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012); and Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960).
9. Theodosian Code 16.10.21, in The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions, trans. Clyde Pharr (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952); Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 22.74–75, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 4 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing, 1887).