GruntGod 2.9.2: Tertullian's Pacifism Problem
This is drawn from the revision of the Martin chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
If you want to claim early Christianity was pacifist, Tertullian is your guy. He wrote a whole treatise (“Against the Military Crown,” sometimes De Corona Milites) criticizing a Christian soldier who refused to wear the laurel crown distributed by his unit in a donative ceremony. The soldier considered the crown idolatrous. His fellow soldiers (most of whom were also Christian) thought he was being dramatic.
Tertullian agreed with the objector, expanded the argument, and produced what many cite as evidence that early Christianity opposed military service categorically.
The problem is that Tertullian's actual argument does not say that. He argues against specific acts — taking the crown, performing certain oaths, participating in cultic ceremonies attached to military ritual. He is not arguing that Christians cannot be soldiers. He is arguing that Christian soldiers should be willing to refuse orders that violate their conscience, and that they should be prepared to accept the consequences. That is a different argument, and a much more interesting one.
The soldier at the center of his treatise is not a conscientious objector to military service. He is a conscientious objector to a specific ceremonial requirement. He kept serving after the incident. Tertullian uses the paganus/miles contrast throughout the text — non-believers are the pagani (civilians), believers are the milites (soldiers). This framing would be extraordinarily strange if Tertullian thought Christians shouldn't be soldiers.
Here's the second problem: Tertullian went on to embrace Montanism, a charismatic renewal movement the main church eventually declared heretical. He is a fascinating and important theologian, but treating him as representative of mainstream early Christian thought is selective. The early church was massively decentralized before Nicaea in 325. Tertullian promoted the doctrine of the Trinity before it was consensus. His antimilitary treatise is no less contested than his Trinitarian theology — and arguably less central to what the church finally settled on.
I am not arguing that early Christianity was militarist. I am arguing that the evidence for early Christian pacifism is thinner and more complicated than its contemporary advocates admit — and that using Tertullian as a proof text requires ignoring inconvenient context.
Psaul's letter to Timothy is the more honest starting point. "Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ" (2 Tim. 2:3) — the Greek stratiotes (G4757) is an ordinary word for a frontline soldier. Psaul is not using a soft metaphor. He is invoking the cultural weight of military service — the suffering, the commitment, the subordination to a larger mission — and applying it to discipleship. He is not doing this in spite of military service being morally suspect. He is doing it because military service was understood as a mark of full participation in the common life.
The question the early church was actually wrestling with was not "can Christians be soldiers?" but "what kind of soldiers are Christians called to be?" Martin's proclamation at Worms, "I am a soldier of Christ; it is not lawful for me to fight," is not a rejection of the milites Christi tradition. It's an application of it. He is distinguishing between serving (miles) and fighting (pugnare), and claiming that his service to Christ takes priority over this specific act of violence in this specific context.
That's a much more precise and useful framework than "Christians are pacifists" or "Christians support whatever their government does." It requires the soldier to think, to discern, to maintain a conscience active enough to know when a line has been crossed. Martin thought that line was there. He was willing to die for that assessment. He was also willing to keep wearing the uniform until that moment arrived.
