The Church, the Gospel and War

The Church, the Gospel and War is a 1948 collection of essays edited by Rufus M. Jones, the Quaker philosopher and mystic who taught at Haverford College and helped found the American Friends Service Committee. It appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when the atomic bombings, the revelation of the death camps, and the hardening lines of the emerging Cold War had left Christians on every side asking what the churches had said and done, and what they ought to say and do next. The volume gathers voices from several Christian traditions to press a single question: whether the gospel of Christ can be reconciled with participation in war, and what responsibility the church bears for the answer.

Jones does not offer a treatise from one pen. His method is to assemble contributors who examine the problem from different angles, among them the New Testament witness, the early church's attitude toward military service, the later development of just-war reasoning, and the practical witness of the historic peace churches. Running through the essays is the conviction, deeply Quaker in character, that Christ's teaching on love and forgiveness is not a private ideal to be suspended whenever nations feel threatened but a standard that judges the church's conduct in public life. The book asks whether the churches blessed wars they should have refused, and whether a faith that depends on an inward encounter with the living Christ can consistently take up the sword. Jones's own convictions, shaped by decades of relief work and his writing on the spiritual life, give the collection its steady center: the claim that the inner life and the outer witness cannot be pulled apart.

The book has continued to matter as a record of how one strand of Christian conscience wrestled with the moral aftermath of total war, at a moment when the pacifist position had been tested by a conflict many regarded as unavoidable. It rewards readers who want to see the argument for Christian nonviolence made by people who had worked in the wreckage of Europe and not merely in the study. It also shows the breadth of ecumenical conversation on war in the late 1940s, before the questions had hardened into the debates that followed.

Who should read this: Readers drawn to the peace tradition, to Quaker thought, or to the history of Christian ethics will find it a rich primary document. Pastors and students working through what the church owes the world in times of violence will benefit from its range of voices. It is not for readers seeking a single systematic argument or a balanced defense of just-war theory, since the volume is written from a committed peace perspective and does not pretend otherwise.