I have been reading old books lately, and one of the unsettling things about them is how little they sometimes feel like old books.

I have been reading about America when Black men and women could be lynched while authorities looked away, when racial terror could become public spectacle and respectable people could convince themselves that the social order was basically sound. I have been reading about corruption, propaganda, nationalism, the fusion of Christianity with political power, and the gradual accommodation of churches to things they once might have recognized as evil.

I have been reading Bonhoeffer and Barth, Ellul and Stringfellow. Different countries. Different crises. Different decades.

And sometimes I have to remind myself that these words were not written yesterday afternoon.

They warned about the seduction of power, the sacralization of nations, the corruption of language, the manufacture of enemies, the ability of propaganda to make lies feel obvious, and the peculiar vulnerability of religious people to political idolatry. They warned about what happens when Christianity becomes useful to power and when the church becomes more concerned with preserving its place in society than bearing witness to Jesus.

And still we seem surprised.

Perhaps we misunderstand judgment because we expect it to arrive suddenly.

We imagine thunderbolts.

We imagine some unmistakable moment when God finally says, “Enough.”

But when I read the prophets, judgment often looks less like a lightning strike than a long, slow unraveling.

The warnings begin generations before the catastrophe.

Amos cries out against those who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 2:6). Isaiah condemns those who “make iniquitous decrees” and “rob the poor of my people of their right” (Isa. 10:1–2). Micah speaks against rulers who “hate the good and love the evil” (Mic. 3:2). Jeremiah stands at the temple itself and tells religious people that their confidence in their sacred institutions will not save them while they practice injustice (Jer. 7).

The warnings continue.

Years pass.

Then decades.

Prophets come and go.

And still the people continue.

That may be one of the most frightening things about judgment: life can continue normally while a society is unraveling.

People still go to work. Markets open. Religious services continue. Politicians give speeches. Priests conduct worship. Families celebrate weddings. Children are born. People buy houses and plant vineyards.

The absence of immediate consequences is easily mistaken for vindication.

See? The prophets were wrong.

But perhaps judgment has already begun.

When Warning Hardens Rather Than Softens

There is another pattern in Scripture that troubles me even more.

Warnings do not necessarily produce repentance.

Sometimes they produce hardness.

The prophet speaks, and instead of asking, Could this be true?, people become angry at the prophet. They dismiss him. Mock him. Question his motives. Find another prophet who will tell them what they want to hear.

Jeremiah experienced this repeatedly. His message became so offensive that the king literally cut up the scroll containing his words and threw the pieces into the fire (Jer. 36:23).

The warning itself became intolerable.

And I wonder whether something similar happens to societies.

At first we are capable of being shocked.

Then we explain.

Then we rationalize.

Then we defend.

Then we celebrate.

What once would have troubled our conscience becomes normal. What once required an apology becomes a talking point. What once had to be hidden can eventually be done publicly and applauded.

The conscience does not usually disappear overnight.

It is worn down.

And perhaps this is why old books can be so disturbing. They prevent us from pretending nobody warned us.

They remind us that people saw these things coming.

The Watchmen Were Already Speaking

Bonhoeffer watched German Christianity accommodate itself to nationalism and racial ideology.

Barth recognized that when the church allows another authority to stand alongside the Word of God, something fundamental has already been surrendered.

Ellul spent decades warning that propaganda works most effectively not simply upon ignorant people but upon people embedded in technological societies who consume enormous quantities of information and desperately need narratives that make the world manageable.

Stringfellow wrote about the “principalities and powers”—institutions, ideologies, nations, systems, and structures that promise life while becoming servants of death.

Their circumstances were different from ours, and we should resist simplistic historical analogies.

But that almost makes their warnings more disturbing.

Because they were identifying patterns.

And patterns recur.

The names change. The technologies change. The parties change. The slogans change.

Human beings do not change very much.

Neither does the temptation of power.

Perhaps This Is What Judgment Looks Like

Paul gives us a terrifying description of divine judgment in Romans 1.

Three times he says essentially the same thing:

“God gave them up.”

God gives them over to the desires they have chosen (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28).

That changes how I think about judgment.

Perhaps the most terrible judgment of God is not always that God sends us something we do not want.

Perhaps sometimes God gives us what we want.

We want power.

God gives us over to power.

We want enemies.

God gives us a world filled with enemies.

We want propaganda that confirms what we already believe.

God allows us to lose the ability to distinguish truth from lies.

We want leaders who tell us that we are righteous and everyone else is responsible for our problems.

God gives us the leaders we demand.

We want Christianity to bless our tribe, our nation, our grievances, and our ambitions.

Eventually we may be left with a Christianity that does exactly that—and can no longer recognize Jesus.

This is not God arbitrarily punishing people for breaking rules.

It is something far more frightening.

It is God allowing our choices to become our character and our character to become our destiny.

The punishment for worshiping power is eventually becoming a people ruled by power.

The punishment for embracing lies is eventually losing the capacity to recognize truth.

The punishment for cultivating hatred is eventually inhabiting a world in which everyone becomes an enemy.

The punishment for sacrificing conscience for victory is eventually discovering that we no longer have a conscience capable of telling us what victory has cost.

Judgment is the harvest of what we have planted.

The Long Mercy Before Judgment

But there is something else we should notice about the prophets.

The long delay of judgment is also mercy.

For generations God sends voices saying:

Turn around.

Remember who you are.

Do justice.

Stop exploiting the poor.

Stop shedding innocent blood.

Stop trusting in military power.

Stop confusing religious ritual with faithfulness.

Stop assuming that possessing God’s name means God endorses everything you do.

Return to me.

The fact that the warnings continue means the door has not yet closed.

Perhaps that is how we should read the voices that have warned us across our own history as well.

The abolitionists.

Those who confronted lynching and segregation while respectable Christianity defended or tolerated them.

Those who warned against nationalism and war.

Those who exposed corruption.

Those who warned the church about racism, propaganda, authoritarianism, consumerism, violence, and political idolatry.

Bonhoeffer.

Barth.

Ellul.

Stringfellow.

And many others.

We can argue with them. They were not infallible. They disagreed among themselves. Their historical circumstances were not ours.

But we should at least have the humility to listen.

Because one of the lessons of the prophets is that being warned does not mean we will listen.

Sometimes warning produces repentance.

Sometimes warning produces anger.

Sometimes the prophetic voice becomes one more thing we learn to explain away.

And eventually God says:

Very well.

Not because God has ceased to love.

Not because God delights in destruction.

But because love that never permits us to experience the consequences of our choices would cease to take our freedom seriously.

God gives us over.

And then what appeared to be a sudden collapse turns out not to have been sudden at all.

The foundations had been eroding for generations.

The warnings had been sounding for decades.

The compromises had accumulated one by one.

The things that once horrified us had become things we defended.

Then things we normalized.

Then things we celebrated.

And all along we mistook God’s patience for God’s approval.

Perhaps that is the question these old books are forcing me to ask.

Not, When will judgment come?

But:

What if the long, slow unraveling has already begun?

And perhaps the more important question is not whether we can predict where it ends.

It is whether, while there is still time to hear the warning, we are willing to turn around.

Introducing the Nonpower Project

For several years, I have been wrestling with a question:

What if our deepest problem is not simply that power is sometimes misused, but that we have misunderstood power itself?

We live in a world organized around the pursuit of power. Nations compete for it. Political movements promise to reclaim it. Institutions protect it. Leaders accumulate it. Even churches—often with the best intentions—can begin to measure faithfulness by influence, access, visibility, growth, and control.

We assume that power is necessary to accomplish anything meaningful. We tell ourselves that if the right people can acquire enough power, they can finally make the world right.

But Jesus reveals another way.

He enters the world not as a conqueror but as an infant. He refuses the kingdoms offered to him in the wilderness. He touches lepers, welcomes children, eats with sinners, washes feet, and gives himself for his enemies. He reigns from a cross and rises without seeking revenge against those who crucified him.

Jesus does not merely use power more benevolently than others. He reveals a different understanding of power altogether.

This is the beginning of the Nonpower Project.

What Is Nonpower?

Nonpower is not passivity, weakness, withdrawal, or the refusal to act. It is not powerlessness, nor is it indifference toward injustice.

Nonpower is the deliberate refusal to dominate, control, coerce, exploit, or diminish others. It is the freedom to act without needing to rule. It is strength expressed through self-giving love, authority exercised through service, and leadership that enables others to flourish rather than making them dependent.

Nonpower is not the absence of agency. It is agency freed from the desire to dominate.

The word may initially sound strange, but the reality lies near the center of the gospel:

“You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you.”
—Matthew 20:25–26

“It will not be so among you.”

Those words are not a minor adjustment to conventional leadership. They are a radical reordering of human relationships. Jesus identifies domination as the way the nations organize the world—and then forbids his disciples from reproducing that pattern within his community.

The church is meant to embody another kind of kingdom because it follows another kind of king.

Why This Project?

The Nonpower Project has grown out of my work on a forthcoming book, It Will Not Be So Among You: A Theology of Nonpower. But the project is larger than a single book.

It is an ongoing exploration of the life, teachings, and kingdom of Jesus through the lens of nonpower.

Together, we will consider questions such as:

• What does Jesus reveal about the character of God?
• How does God’s power differ from domination?
• Why are human beings so easily seduced by control?
• How do fear and the threat of death teach us to dominate one another?
• What does the cross reveal about the way God overcomes evil?
• How should Christians understand authority and leadership?
• How can churches resist authoritarianism, celebrity culture, coercion, and spiritual abuse?
• What would it mean for Christian communities to distribute power rather than accumulate it?
• How can we confront injustice without becoming captive to the same logic of domination we oppose?
• What practices can form us into people who no longer need to control others?

These are not merely theoretical questions. They reach into our churches, families, workplaces, political lives, and spiritual communities. They shape how we lead, how we disagree, how we respond to enemies, how we treat vulnerable people, and how we imagine the kingdom of God.

A Pilgrimage of Seeing

At its heart, the Nonpower Project is a pilgrimage of seeing.

It begins with the conviction that Jesus is not simply one source of information about God among many. Jesus is the decisive revelation of who God is and what God is like.

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” Jesus tells Philip.

If this is true, then Jesus must reshape our understanding of everything—including power.

We must learn to see God in the child of Bethlehem, the teacher on the mountain, the servant kneeling with a towel, the condemned man on the cross, and the risen Christ offering peace rather than vengeance. We must allow Jesus—not empire, hierarchy, fear, violence, or cultural assumptions—to define what divine power looks like.

This pilgrimage also teaches us to see ourselves more truthfully. The desire to dominate does not belong only to tyrants, abusive leaders, or political extremists. It runs through every human heart. We can denounce domination in others while remaining blind to the quieter ways we control, manipulate, intimidate, exclude, or protect our own importance.

Nonpower therefore begins not with accusation but with repentance.

An Invitation

In the months ahead, I will use the Nonpower Project to share essays, theological reflections, excerpts from the book, conversations with important thinkers, historical studies, and practical explorations of leadership, discipleship, community, and the church.

We will examine both the beauty of the way of Jesus and the many ways Christianity has been tempted to exchange the cross for the throne. We will explore the damage caused when the church seeks to possess the kingdoms Jesus refused—and the possibilities that emerge when Christians recover the courage to follow the Lamb.

My hope is to create more than an audience for a book. I hope to cultivate a community of people who want to think deeply, live faithfully, and learn together.

If you have ever wondered whether there is another way to lead, another way to confront evil, another way to organize Christian community, or another way to be present in the world, I invite you to join me.

Sign up for the Nonpower Project to receive new essays, project updates, selected book excerpts, reading recommendations, and opportunities to participate in the conversation.

Join the Nonpower Project

We do not need a more religious version of the world’s struggle for power. We need a renewed vision of Jesus.

The one who did not dominate.

The king who served.

The Lamb who was slain.

The Lord who said:

“It will not be so among you.”

I have a confession to make.

For years I wondered why the French seem to talk in circles. I would feel this way in conversations as well as when reading French authors. 

I would pick up a book by Jacques Ellul, René Girard, or Gabriel Vahanian and find myself thinking, Didn’t he already say this? Just when I thought we were moving on to a new topic, the author would circle back to an earlier theme, approaching it from another angle, adding another layer, making another connection. As an American reader shaped by a culture that prizes efficiency, outlines, bullet points, and direct conclusions, I found the experience frustrating.

Why not just get to the point?

It turns out they do it on purpose!

I did not realize this until after I had spent a great deal of time reading French authors. What felt repetitive gradually revealed itself to be something else entirely. These writers were not merely repeating themselves. They were revisiting realities too large, too complex, and too deeply embedded in human life to be captured from a single perspective. Rather than advancing in a straight line, they moved like explorers circling a mountain, viewing the same landscape from different angles until its full shape became visible.

No three writers taught me this lesson more than Jacques Ellul, René Girard, and Gabriel Vahanian.

The twentieth century produced many influential Christian thinkers, but few have proven as enduringly challenging—and rewarding—as Ellul, Girard, and Vahanian. Though they worked in different disciplines, all three wrestled with the crisis of modernity, the seductions of power, and the place of Christian faith in a rapidly secularizing world. Together they offer some of the most penetrating critiques of contemporary culture available to Christian readers.

There is also a reason they are not as widely read in the United States as some of their contemporaries. Reading Ellul, Girard, and Vahanian often feels less like following a straight-line argument and more like entering a spiral. They return again and again to the same themes, revisiting them from different angles, adding nuance, expanding implications, and deepening insights. American readers, accustomed to linear arguments, practical applications, and books that promise “five steps to success,” can find their writing frustratingly recursive.

Ellul rarely presents an idea once and moves on. Whether discussing technique, propaganda, the state, money, or power, he circles repeatedly around the same central concerns. One encounters familiar arguments in book after book, yet each iteration reveals a different dimension of the problem. His work resembles a prophet walking around a city wall, pointing to cracks that others refuse to see. The repetition is intentional. Ellul understood that the forces shaping modern society are so pervasive that they cannot be grasped from a single perspective.

Girard employs a similar pattern. His great insight concerning mimetic desire—the idea that humans learn what to desire by imitating others—appears throughout his corpus. So do his analyses of rivalry, scapegoating, violence, and the biblical revelation that exposes these mechanisms. Readers sometimes wonder why he keeps returning to the same themes. The answer is that Girard believed these patterns lie beneath nearly every aspect of human culture. One cannot simply explain them once and move on. They must be examined through literature, mythology, history, psychology, politics, and theology until their implications become visible.

Vahanian, perhaps the least known of the three, displays the same tendency. His reflections on secularization, the death of cultural Christianity, and the captivity of the church to modern assumptions unfold through a series of recurring themes. He repeatedly challenges readers to distinguish between faith and religion, between the living God and the cultural systems that claim to represent God. His arguments often feel circular until one realizes he is not merely making a point; he is exposing an entire worldview.

For American readers, this recursive style can feel inefficient. We often want authors to get to the point. We prefer conclusions before contemplation, applications before reflection. But these French thinkers are attempting something different. They are not merely conveying information; they are trying to reshape perception. They want readers to see the world differently.

In this sense, reading Ellul, Girard, and Vahanian is less like attending a lecture and more like learning a new language. At first the repetition feels excessive. Over time one discovers that each return to a familiar theme reveals another layer of meaning. What initially appeared redundant becomes cumulative. The insights begin to interconnect. Patterns emerge. Blind spots become visible.

The effort is well worth it.

Ellul helps us understand why technological societies increasingly subordinate human beings to systems. Girard helps us recognize the rivalries and scapegoating mechanisms that continue to fuel conflict, politics, and even religion. Vahanian helps us see how easily Christianity can become domesticated by culture and lose its prophetic voice. Together they offer a profound diagnosis of many of the crises facing the contemporary church and society.

Their books demand patience. They require slow reading, rereading, note-taking, and reflection. Yet perhaps that difficulty is part of their gift. In an age dominated by speed, distraction, and superficial analysis, Ellul, Girard, and Vahanian teach us how to think deeply. They invite us not merely to consume ideas but to inhabit them long enough for them to transform the way we see.

The reader who perseveres will often discover that what first appeared repetitive was actually a form of intellectual and spiritual formation. Like the prophets they admired, these scholars return again and again to the same truths because the human tendency to forget them is just as persistent.

So here is my challenge for the summer.

Put down one of the endless leadership books. Skip one more volume promising success, influence, growth, or the latest technique for navigating a rapidly changing world. Instead, spend a few months in the company of three French thinkers who will almost certainly frustrate you before they enlighten you.

Pick up Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda. Read slowly. Resist the temptation to skim. Allow Ellul to help you see the invisible forces that shape opinions, loyalties, fears, and desires in modern society. You may never watch the news, scroll social media, or listen to political rhetoric in quite the same way again.

Or spend the summer with René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. It is not an easy book, but few works offer a deeper exploration of rivalry, scapegoating, and the hidden mechanisms that drive human conflict. Girard has a remarkable ability to reveal things that, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Or perhaps take up Gabriel Vahanian’s The Death of God. Long before the phrase became a cultural slogan, Vahanian was wrestling with a profound question: What happens when Christianity becomes so domesticated by culture that it loses its capacity to speak prophetically? His questions are, if anything, even more relevant today than when he first posed them.

Do not expect quick answers. Do not expect a five-point action plan. These books are not designed to be consumed; they are meant to be inhabited. Read them with a pencil in hand. Underline. Argue. Take notes. Read sections twice. When you find yourself thinking, Didn’t he already say this?, keep going. The authors are probably circling back because there is still something important left to see.

The rewards are considerable. In an age of sound bites, outrage cycles, and intellectual shortcuts, these writers teach patience. They teach attentiveness. They teach us to look beneath the surface of things. Most importantly, they help us recognize forces at work in ourselves, our churches, and our societies that often remain hidden in plain sight.

You may not agree with everything Ellul, Girard, or Vahanian wrote. I certainly do not. But I am convinced that anyone who spends a summer wrestling with these three thinkers will emerge with a deeper understanding of the modern world, a sharper awareness of the temptations of power, and perhaps a renewed appreciation for the subversive wisdom of the gospel.

And who knows? By the end of the summer, you may even find yourself talking in circles a little more often—not because you have become French, but because you have learned that some truths are too important, too deep, and too easily forgotten to be stated only once.

So here is my challenge for the summer.

Put down one of the endless leadership books. Skip one more volume promising success, influence, growth, or the latest technique for navigating a rapidly changing world. Instead, spend a few months in the company of three French thinkers who will almost certainly frustrate you before they enlighten you.

Pick up Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda. Read slowly. Resist the temptation to skim. Allow Ellul to help you see the invisible forces that shape opinions, loyalties, fears, and desires in modern society. You may never watch the news, scroll social media, or listen to political rhetoric in quite the same way again.

Or spend the summer with René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. It is not an easy book, but few works offer a deeper exploration of rivalry, scapegoating, and the hidden mechanisms that drive human conflict. Girard has a remarkable ability to reveal things that, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Or perhaps take up Gabriel Vahanian’s The Death of God. Long before the phrase became a cultural slogan, Vahanian was wrestling with a profound question: What happens when Christianity becomes so domesticated by culture that it loses its capacity to speak prophetically? His questions are, if anything, even more relevant today than when he first posed them.

Do not expect quick answers. Do not expect a five-point action plan. These books are not designed to be consumed; they are meant to be inhabited. Read them with a pencil in hand. Underline. Argue. Take notes. Read sections twice. When you find yourself thinking, Didn’t he already say this?, keep going. The authors are probably circling back because there is still something important left to see.

The rewards are considerable. In an age of sound bites, outrage cycles, and intellectual shortcuts, these writers teach patience. They teach attentiveness. They teach us to look beneath the surface of things. Most importantly, they help us recognize forces at work in ourselves, our churches, and our societies that often remain hidden in plain sight.

You may not agree with everything Ellul, Girard, or Vahanian wrote. I certainly do not. But I am convinced that anyone who spends a summer wrestling with these three thinkers will emerge with a deeper understanding of the modern world, a sharper awareness of the temptations of power, and perhaps a renewed appreciation for the subversive wisdom of the gospel.

And who knows? By the end of the summer, you may even find yourself talking in circles a little more often—not because you have become French, but because you have learned that some truths are too important, too deep, and too easily forgotten to be stated only once.

In Matthew 25:31–46, Jesus tells a sobering parable about the final judgment. The nations are gathered before the Son of Man, and they are separated as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The criterion for judgment is not doctrinal accuracy or religious affiliation, but practical compassion: “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink… Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

This is not a peripheral teaching—it is the culminating vision of divine justice in Matthew’s Gospel. It places care for the vulnerable at the very heart of righteousness. And yet, in today’s world—particularly in affluent nations—this teaching is often ignored, spiritualized, or twisted to sanctify systems of neglect.

Over the last forty years, the middle class has seen its purchasing power stagnate, while the upper class has experienced an explosion of wealth. In the 1960s, the average CEO earned about 20 times the wage of a typical worker. Today, that ratio has grown to more than 320 times. This is not simply a sign of economic growth—it is evidence of systemic unrighteousness.

The structure of the current economy increasingly resembles a modern parable of injustice: the upper class profits, hoarding wealth and resources; the middle class is given just enough cake to be numb, distracted by consumer comforts and indebted into silence; and the poor are exploited, their labor undervalued, their dignity overlooked. This isn’t just unfortunate—it’s immoral and evil.

And the moral indictment runs deeper still. In Matthew 25, the condemnation comes not for active malice, but for passive neglect. The damned are stunned—not because they persecuted the poor, but because they simply didn’t see them. They stepped over Christ in the street and never noticed.

This blindness is not accidental. It is cultivated. Our economic systems are built on the myth of meritocracy, suggesting that the rich are deserving, the middle are secure, and the poor are responsible for their condition. This narrative serves to protect those at the top, pacify those in the middle, and shame those at the bottom. It flies in the face of every prophetic word from Scripture.

The Bible speaks of justice not as abstract fairness, but as concrete equity: a world where the hungry are fed, the workers paid, the land rested, the debts forgiven. In the words of the prophets, justice rolls down like waters. In the words of Jesus, the Kingdom of God belongs to the poor.

We do not need the world’s richest men to starve the world’s poorest children. We do not need those in power to exploit their privilege while warning us about the dangers of others. We do not need another sermon from the powerful justifying their own excesses—we need to return to the Gospel that names such excess as sin.

And this must become our ethical compass. Every act of legislation—every budget, tax policy, healthcare law, and immigration reform—must be judged by this same standard: What does it do to the least of these? If it harms the vulnerable, it cannot be righteous, no matter how eloquently the pundits spin it or how loudly the thought police insist that good is evil and evil is good.

A moral economy would not tolerate billionaires who accumulate fortunes on the backs of underpaid labor. It would not justify exploitation as innovation. It would not allow a society to sleep soundly while children go to bed hungry. It would ask, as Matthew 25 does: Do we see Christ in the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the imprisoned? 

We are not waiting for judgment. We are living in its shadow. The only question is whether we will awaken to mercy in time.

We do not need a new Gospel. We need the courage to live the one we already have.

Throughout history, war has been cloaked in moral language—righteous causes, just retribution, national defense. Yet under the scrutiny of Christian ethics and historic theological reflection, most wars are exceedingly difficult to justify. They are tragic collisions of ambition, fear, and broken humanity. Despite the attempts to cast them as struggles between good and evil, most wars unfold in shades of gray, their moral lines smudged by propaganda, power, and sin. From Augustine to Karl Barth to the radical witness of pacifist traditions, the Church has consistently warned that violence is never righteous, even when necessary.

Augustine of Hippo, living amid the collapse of the Roman Empire, developed the earliest Christian articulation of just war theory. For Augustine, peace was always the ideal; war could only be justified if it met strict moral conditions—declared by legitimate authority, pursued for a just cause, and waged with right intention. Even then, it was always a tragic concession to a fallen world, and Christians were to love their enemies even on the battlefield. War was never to be celebrated, only endured with grief and restraint.

Centuries later, Karl Barth would echo Augustine’s caution with even greater skepticism. Writing in the wake of World War I and the rise of Hitler, Barth denounced the fusion of nationalism and theology that had led churches to bless the machinery of death. For Barth, the Church’s first loyalty must be to the crucified Christ, whose self-giving love unmasked all claims to moral purity in war. While Barth was not a pacifist in the strict sense, he warned that Christians must never speak of war with moral ease or patriotic pride. The cross exposes all violence as a sign of human sin, not divine favor.

And yet, there is a third voice—the radical witness of Christian pacifism—that insists the Church should never condone violence at all. Figures like Menno Simons and Stanley Hauerwas have argued that Jesus’ call to love enemies, turn the other cheek, and lay down one’s life must be taken not just spiritually, but politically and socially. From this perspective, the early Church’s refusal to participate in military service was not naiveté—it was a declaration that the reign of God had come, and it would not be defended with swords.

Taken together, these theological perspectives converge on one central point: war, at best, is a concession to the brokenness of the world; at worst, it is an outright betrayal of the gospel. Most wars, when viewed honestly, are morally ambiguous. They are driven by human pride, institutional fear, and nationalistic fervor. But there are rare, horrifying exceptions—moments in history when evil reveals itself with terrible clarity. Nazi Germany’s invasion of Europe. The genocide in Rwanda. The Ottoman extermination of the Armenians. And now, Russia’s war against Ukraine.

This is not merely a conflict over territory or political alliances. It is a genocidal campaign, marked by ethnic cleansing, the erasure of national identity, and crimes against humanity. Russian state propaganda openly denies Ukraine’s right to exist. It targets civilians, abducts children, bombs hospitals and power plants, and systematically terrorizes entire cities. The goal is not peace but subjugation; not unity but annihilation. This is not the fog of war. This is the fire of evil.

From a Christian ethical standpoint—Augustinian, Barthian, and pacifist alike—this war is morally indefensible. It violates every criterion of just war theory. It mocks the cruciform love of Christ. And it demands that the Church speak with prophetic clarity. Neutrality is not an option. Silence is complicity. The call of the gospel is to stand with the victims, not the victors; to bless the peacemakers, not the war-makers.

But even here—especially here—the gospel must have the final word. The Christian story does not end in war, but in resurrection. Russia’s war against Ukraine will end. Tyrants will fall. The machinery of death will rust. And when that day comes, the Church must be ready. Ready not only to rebuild what has been destroyed, but to proclaim what cannot be destroyed: that Christ is risen, that forgiveness is possible, and that even out of ashes, new life can emerge.

Already, amid the suffering, there are signs of openness to the gospel. In trauma, people ask eternal questions. In displacement, they cry out for a home not made with human hands. And in the face of evil, many are turning toward the only light that the darkness cannot overcome. Let the Church be prepared to meet them—not with slogans, but with presence; not with conquest, but with compassion.

The ethics of war must never be separated from the hope of redemption. And so we affirm: most wars are hard to justify. But some evils are unmistakable. And beyond even the clearest evil, the Church must hold fast to the clearest truth—Christ crucified and risen, the Prince of Peace who will one day end all war.