Specify and distinguish! Interpreting the New Testament on 'non-violence'

Widely showered with superlatives when it was first published in 1996, and now commonly regarded as a masterpiece, Richard Hay's The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) constructs a pacifist reading of the New Testament. To date, Hay's reading has provoked no systematic refutation from proponents of the doctrine of just war. This essay hopes to offer such a refutation. Its argument has three main planks. First, that Hay's reading of the New Testament stories about god-fearing soldiers, who persist in their profession, is not compelling; second, that he fails to specify sufficiently the meaning of Jesus' teaching and conduct in terms of Jesus' own context (particularly the option of armed violence in the service of religiously inspired nationalism); and third, that Hay's normative moral concepts are often too crude, suffering from a failure to employ valid moral distinctions. The essay concludes by arguing that the doctrine of just war is better able than pacifism to make adequate sense of all the relevant New Testament data.The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Studies in Christian Ethics, 23(2), May 2009 by SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. © 2009 Nigel Biggar