When Swords Are Beaten Into Plowshares (Some thoughts on "War")

Have you ever watched two children arguing, and one of them shouts, “But he hit me first!”? It’s the oldest justification in the world. Someone else started it, so my violence is permitted. I deal with this with my boys on a weekly basis. When one boy cranks back and slugs his brother, he almost always has a justification for it: "But he called me stupid" or "He wouldn't give me my toy back!"

We are patient with children who reason this way, we discipline them recognizing that resorting to "violence" isn't the answer, and we're take time to teach them this lesson, but we rarely notice when nations, and even people of faith, make the same argument on a much grander and more devastating scale.

This instinct runs deep. When we feel threatened, when our way of life seems under siege, when enemies appear to gather at the gates, something primal rises within us.

And in those moments, it is tempting to reach for Scripture itself as a weapon, to flip open the Book of Joshua and point to the walls of Jericho, to cite the Maccabean revolt and its holy warriors, and to declare: See? God is on our side. God sanctions this.

But does He?

Addressing this question today is a delicate task. We find ourselves in a politically sensitive moment as Pope Leo XIV speaks out regarding the escalating war in Iran. We see a President who is posting some rather offensive things, frankly, blasphemous things, and also attacking the Pope on social media. I realize that not all my readers are Catholic, so defending the Pope might not even be on your radar.

I'm also not historically anti-Trump. I don't have a lot of particularly strong political opinions. As I've said here before, I find myself regularly split between the "political divide," sometimes agreeing with one side, sometimes the other, never finding a home in our bifurcated political system. So don't take this as a political commentary.

But I think, no matter if you're Catholic or Protestant, no matter if you tend to vote Republican or Democrat (or otherwise), we need a deeper look at the substance of this exchange between the Pope and the President. In times like these, the line between theological conviction and political allegiance becomes blurred, making it even more vital to ground our understanding in the full witness of the Word.

 

The Wars of the Old Covenant

Let us be honest about what the Old Testament contains. The conquest narratives in Joshua are startling in their violence. Cities are put under the herem, the ban of total destruction. In 1 Maccabees, Judas Maccabeus leads an armed revolt against the Seleucid Empire and reconsecrates the Temple by force. These are not peripheral texts. They are woven into the fabric of salvation history.

But here is the question we must ask: Why did God permit Israel to wage war?

The answer lies partly in the unique vocation of Israel as a nation among nations. During the time of Joshua, Israel was a theocracy in the most literal sense. God was their king. The land was not merely territory; it was sacramental space, the geographical location where God’s presence would dwell and from which His light would shine to all peoples. “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6, NRSV).

Crucially, the wars of the Old Testament were also an expression of divine judgment.

These were "just" wars because they were directed against peoples who had committed grave, abominable evils that God could no longer tolerate. This was not a knee-jerk reaction; God is remarkably patient. We see this when God tells Abraham that his descendants would wait 400 years before claiming the land, “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16, NRSV).

The inhabitants were given centuries to repent, yet they continued in horrific practices, including the ritual sacrifice of their own children.

The wars in the Old Testament were not only about establishing a “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6, NRSV) to intercede for the world; they were the actions of a holy God who stood against such extreme cruelty. While some people today look at the evil in our world and ask, “How could God allow this to continue?”, it is a profound irony that many of the same people point to these biblical narratives as a reason to criticize God when He actually did take action against such evil.

In that specific covenantal arrangement, the defense and establishment of the land had theological meaning. The wars of Joshua were not models for all future warfare.

They were part of a particular, unrepeatable moment in the drama of redemption.

God was carving out a space in history, a womb, if you will, in which the Messiah would eventually be born.

Even within the Old Testament itself, the prophets began to strain against the logic of war.

Isaiah dreamed of a day when nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4, NRSV). Zechariah proclaimed a king who would come “triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey” and who would “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem” and “command peace to the nations” (Zechariah 9:9-10, NRSV).

The trajectory of the Old Testament itself bends toward peace.

 

The New Covenant Changes Everything

Then Jesus arrived, and everything shifted.

He did not ride into Jerusalem on a war horse. He rode on a donkey. He did not raise an army, despite many who followed Him hoping He'd do so. He raised the dead.

He did not conquer Rome. He conquered death.

And in doing so, He fundamentally altered the relationship between God’s people and the use of force.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matthew 5:38-39, NRSV). These are not the words of a military strategist. They are the words of the One who is the fulfillment of everything Israel was meant to become.

In the Old Covenant, a nation bore God’s light. That nation needed borders, armies, and physical survival. In the New Covenant, a Church bears God’s light, and that Church is not a nation. It has no borders to defend with swords.

Its weapon is the Gospel. Its strategy is love. Its power is the Cross.

When Peter drew his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus rebuked him: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52, NRSV).

This was not a tactical suggestion. It was a revelation of the nature of the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God does not advance by violence. It advances through self-sacrificing love, through martyrdom, through the foolishness of the Cross that is wiser than human wisdom.

The early Christians understood this. For roughly the first three centuries, the predominant witness of the Church was one of profound suspicion toward military service and violence. They were not naive. They lived under an empire that fed them to lions. But they believed, with a conviction that cost many of them their lives, that the Gospel conquers differently than Caesar does.

 

What the Pope Is Actually Saying

This brings us to the present moment.

When Pope Leo XIV speaks against the war in Iran and says that God does not hear the prayers of warmongers, he is not inventing a new theology. He is not importing secular pacifism into the Church. He is standing in a tradition that stretches back through centuries of Christian moral reasoning.

The Church has long held what is known as “just war” theory, a framework developed most rigorously by Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth. I'd argue, likewise, that this tradition is thoroughly rooted in Scripture as well.

This framework does not celebrate war. It reluctantly permits it under extraordinarily narrow conditions: the cause must be just, the intention must be right, it must be a last resort, there must be a reasonable chance of success, and the violence used must be proportionate to the threat.

Crucially, the goal must always be the restoration of peace.

Just war theory is not a permission slip. It is a set of brakes. It exists not to justify war but to limit it, to hold it under the most severe moral scrutiny, and to remind us that the burden of proof always falls on those who would take up arms, never on those who would lay them down.

When a pope examines a specific conflict and concludes that it does not meet these criteria, he is not being a pacifist. He is being a just war theorist. He is applying the tradition with precision.

And when he says that God does not hear the prayers of warmongers, he is echoing the prophets. Listen to Isaiah: “When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15, NRSV).

These are not the words of a political commentator. It's not that he's somehow stepped outside of his wheelhouse of "morals" and "theology," and into politics. These are the words of God spoken through His prophet to a people who confused religious devotion with divine endorsement of their violence.

There is a profound difference between a nation that reluctantly takes up arms in genuine defense of the innocent after every other option has been exhausted, and a nation that wraps its geopolitical ambitions in the language of prayer and divine mandate.

The former may, under agonizing circumstances, be morally permissible. The latter is idolatry.

 

The Temptation We All Face

This is not merely a question for presidents and popes.

It reaches into our living rooms, our workplaces, our families.

How often do we baptize our aggression with the language of righteousness? How often do we convince ourselves that our anger is holy, that our desire to crush an opponent is really about justice, that God is surely on our side in this argument, this lawsuit, this grudge?

The human heart is endlessly creative in its ability to dress up violence as virtue. We do it in marriages when we use words like weapons and call it “honesty.” We do it in churches when we destroy someone’s reputation and call it “accountability.” We do it in politics (and sadly, even in theological debates) when we dehumanize our opponents and call it “defending the faith.”

Jesus offers a different way. Not a weak way. Not a passive way. The Cross is the most powerful act in the history of the universe, and it was an act of total nonviolence.

It absorbed evil rather than returning it. It answered hatred with love.

It met the worst that human beings could do with the best that God could give.

 

A Practice for Today

Here is something practical. You and I have very little power to impact the decisions of political leaders and presidents. But we can exhibit these principles in our daily lives on a microcosmic scale that has macroscopic implications.

The next time you feel the surge of righteous anger, the next time you are certain that someone deserves your wrath, pause. Take a breath. And ask yourself a single question: Am I trying to conquer, or am I trying to love?

Then pray for them. If you ever feel moved by outrage, by a sense of "holy justice," and a need to criticize, I'm not saying you must always remain silent. But consider: is it compassion that's really motivating me, or is it my fear, my psychological felt-need (not a real need) to be right and prove someone else wrong? Have I spent more time praying for them than I've spent denouncing them, criticizing them, or arguing with (or against) them?

If you are trying to conquer, you are operating under the old logic, the logic of empire, the logic of Jericho’s walls.

But if you are trying to love, even when love requires firmness, even when love requires truth-telling, even when love requires standing in the way of injustice, then you are operating under the logic of the Cross.

Pray for peace. Not the shallow peace that simply means the absence of conflict, but the deep peace that the Hebrew Scriptures call shalom, the flourishing of all things, the wholeness of creation, the world as God intended it to be.

Pray for your enemies. Jesus was not being poetic when He commanded this. He was being utterly serious. Prayer for your enemy is the act that breaks the cycle of violence at its root, in the human heart.

And when you hear the drums of war, whether between nations or within your own soul, remember the donkey that Jesus rode on as he entered Jerusalem, how he'd come on a beast of burden, not a warhorse. Remember the King who chose humility over power, love over domination, a cross over a sword. Remember that the Kingdom of God has never advanced by force, and it never will.

The light that was once carried by a single nation is now carried by a people scattered across every nation on earth. And that light shines brightest not when we raise our fists, not when we unleash our power and might, but when we open our hands.