Holy War
July 20th, 2025 “Holy War?” Rev. Heather Jepsen
Summer Sermon Series: Stump the Pastor
Matthew 26:36-56 and Joshua 6:1-21
This morning, we continue with our summer sermon series “Stump the Pastor” where you ask difficult questions and I try to answer them. Today, we are wondering about so called holy wars. The person who asked the question was asking about the crusades and the holy wars of year’s past, but it also got me thinking about the current situation in our world and whether Christians should support war in general. As we will find today, the Bible offers us very conflicting messages on the subject.
Our reading from Joshua seems to embrace an unambiguous lethality in the name of God. The book of Joshua is the narrative of the Israelites moving into the promised land and it is full of extreme violence and warfare. We like to imagine the promised land as an empty space, but it was already inhabited by the Canaanites. They had cities, homes, farms, and families, all of which the Israelites vow to destroy and take as their own.
You probably remember the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho with its miracle of the walls falling down. We tend to forget the part where the people of God rush into the vulnerable city and literally kill everything that moves. Women and men, children and the elderly, all the animals, everything that breathes in the city dies at the hands of the people of God according to God’s command. It is not much different then modern-day Gaza, same bit of land, same level of destruction and death.
Obviously, God sanctioning genocide is not a pretty picture, and if you are a Biblical literalist, I have nothing here to make you feel better. We might say the Canaannites are all bad people, but we know that’s not true. We might say the Old Testament God is different then the New Testament God but that’s not true either. This is one of those places where I choose to read against the text itself, I believe this story is shameful and wrong and I don’t want to worship a God who kills people indiscriminately for material gain. Where do I get the right to say these things? Jesus Christ.
Throughout the gospel of Matthew, from which Marjorie read, Jesus rejects violence. In the sermon on the mount Jesus teaches that peacemakers are blessed, that we should love our enemies, and that when faced with violence and threats we should turn the other cheek. In the garden of gethsemane, Jesus even rejects the violence of self-defense. When they come to arrest him in the garden, they bring weapons in preparation for a fight. As Jesus is approached and grabbed, one of his own people lashes out to defend him. Amazingly Jesus chastises his own man saying that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Violence always leads to more violence. This was true of the Israelites under Joshua, Jesus in his own time, and in our world today.
So how did we ever come up with the idea of a Holy War? Originally Christianity was an entirely pacifistic religion. Unfortunately, that did not last long. When Constantine embraced the faith, and the Christian religion was married with empire, then opinions on state sanctioned violence began to change. When I mention Holy War, we often think of the crusades of which there were many. From 1095-1291 there were lots of crusades which were state and church sanctioned efforts to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Lands from the Muslims. Mostly poor people from Europe would head into the middle east in an attempt to take the land from Muslims and Jews. If you lived, you would be given land of your own and if you died you would get salvation and go to heaven, so it was an attractive offer for someone who was down on their luck.
These efforts all failed of course, and just as Jesus declares, they brought more violence home to Europe as well. The idea of killing people of other faiths spread beyond the battles of the middle east and in European countries there was a rise of violence against anyone who wasn’t the right kind of Christian. It was a big mess at home and abroad and I would imagine that many Christians today would agree that it was violent foolishness. It’s been a thousand years, and the Holy Land is still owned by Muslims and Jews and is still full of violence.
Some of you might be wondering about just war theory and doesn’t that say that state sanctioned violence is OK, if it meets the requirements of a just war. Just war theory argues that if a war meets certain requirements, then we don’t need to feel bad about it. A just war requires a competent political authority not a dictatorship, a high probability of success, all non-violent options must first be exhausted, and the reason needs to just. The war itself must also follow just war conduct including distinction between combatants and civilians, proportional violence, fair treatment of prisoners of war, and no evil methods of warfare including rape and biological or nuclear weapons.
Many Christians struggle with the idea of a just war, and we keep bumping up against this marriage of church and state. Jesus would never have sanctioned any war because Jesus would never have tolerated an empire that was wedded to religion. But of course, without the holy roman empire we probably wouldn’t be Christians today. So, what are we to do. We have just war theory on the one hand and extreme pacifism on the other. We have a Bible that supports genocide, and a Lord and Savior who tells us to put down the sword. Which is it?
This really is a stump the pastor question, and I can only tell you what I personally think, and you are free to disagree. I am not a pacifist. I wish I could say I was because I believe that peace is the only correct response to violence, but I know if someone is coming for my children I will not react kindly. As a child of a Vietnam veteran, I do not support war. But I also know that I am a hypocrite to say so because I live in peace and safety here in the United States.
While I am conflicted in some areas, in other ways I have deep and profound beliefs. I do not think that the church should ever be aligned with empire. I am a strong believer in the separation of church and state. And I believe that in line with the Biblical prophetic tradition the church should call out unjust acts by the government. It is not the role of religion to sanction the violence of our country. My loyalty is always to Jesus Christ above all else.
My personal response to war is sorrow and heartbreak, both for lives lost in death as well as the loss that happens when we command people to kill. After the bombing of Iran in June, I came upon an opinion piece by Andrew Doyle and Stanley Hauerwas which argued that Christianity supporting wars of the state is idolatry. I would like to read to you a bit from their article because I agree with what they say. They write,
“War does not merely take lives; it reshapes communities. For Christians, formed by the Gospel of peace, the refusal to kill is not a sign of weakness but a witness. Yet war demands that we abandon this witness, that we exchange enemy-love for obedience. It trains us to believe that killing can be virtuous, that moral formation must bend to national survival. In doing so, war exacts a deeper cost than death – it asks us to surrender a central claim of our discipleship. The most considerable sacrifice war demands is not the loss of life, but the loss of our reluctance to kill.”
“That moral break – the one that trains people to quiet their conscience, override their mercy, kill without hesitation – damages the soul. And those wounds don’t stay on the battlefield. They come home with soldiers. They sit next to us in the pews. They show up in stories of moral injury and spiritual fatigue. When we honor soldiers for taking life and expect silence for the toll it takes, we reinforce the lie that violence can be holy and has no individual or corporate spiritual costs. We sin against the Gospel.”
In conclusion, I believe that the crusades were fruitless efforts that led to the deaths of many people. I believe that no war can ever be “holy” because Jesus Christ would never support war for any reason. I lament what war does to our soldiers when we ask them to kill other people, in both close quarters of combat and from a distance with bombs and drones.
And yet, I recognize that violence has been a part of humanity as long as we have existed. I am torn on the issue of war, and I struggle to believe that any war could ever be just. I firmly believe that violence is wrong, and that even my own inclination toward self-defensive violence is a sin. I believe that God would never want war for God’s people, and when we worship a God of war, then we are guilty of creating God in our own image. I believe that the idea of holy war is an oxymoron. Amen.
