WhatAboutUS 1: The Soldiers Nobody Asked About
For a hundred years, scholars have argued about whether the earliest Christians would have let soldiers into the church. The New Testament answers in plain sight: soldiers walk up to John the Baptist, to Joshua+, to Peter and to Psaul, and not one of them is told to desert. What the scholars rarely asked is who those soldiers were, what their jobs were like, and what quitting would have cost them. This book asks.
Start at the river
Luke 3 may be the oldest scene we have of soldiers asking a Christian preacher what to do. John is at the Jordan, calling the crowds a brood of vipers. They ask what they should do. Tax collectors ask. Then soldiers ask: “And we, what should we do?”
John doesn’t tell them to desert. He doesn’t tell them the uniform damns them. He says: don’t extort money, don’t make false accusations, be content with your pay. That’s an NCO talking about the actual abuses of the job, not a prophet condemning the job itself. “Be content with your pay” only makes sense if the pay was thin and the temptation to supplement it was constant.
Luke also puts them in the water. John tells the crowd, “I baptize you with water” (3:16). Four chapters later Luke reminds us that “all the people who heard this, including the tax collectors,” had been baptized (7:29). The soldiers aren’t bystanders at the edge of the story. They’re in it.
How the debate went
Adolf von Harnack, a Berlin church historian, published the big German study of early Christians and soldiers in 1905. C. John Cadoux, an English Congregationalist and pacifist, answered with the big English one in 1919. They disagreed about plenty. They agreed on the question: did the early church bless soldiering or condemn it?
Under that question, the soldiers in Scripture became exhibits. Harnack argued that the Gospel stories weren’t told to praise soldiers, and that the man being a soldier was “of subordinate importance to the [evangelists].” Cadoux took the centurion at Capernaum, whom Jesus praises for faith he hasn’t found in Israel, and called Jesus’ silence about his profession “at best an argument from silence.” Richard Hays, in his widely read Moral Vision of the New Testament, wrote that the soldier’s place in the church “can only be seen as anomalous.”
Neither Harnack nor Cadoux asks what rank the Capernaum centurion held, how he got the job, or what the job was like. The soldier is either incidental or anomalous. In neither case is he a human being worth addressing.
Why it matters outside the library
If you’ve ever sat in a pew while someone explained that your military service is a regrettable exception to Christian life, you’ve met this debate in the wild. It has a long paper trail, and the paper trail treats you as a data point.
What a soldier’s eye catches
Greek evangelizers describing Roman-era armies were civilians flattening a rank structure they didn’t live inside. “Centurion” gets applied to anyone leading a hundred men, the way “sergeant” gets applied to a dozen different jobs. In Capernaum, I argued in God Is a Grunt, that matters. The man owns a slave, built the local synagogue, and commands about a hundred soldiers in a client king’s army. That’s closer to a captain than to a grunt.
The enlisted men at the Jordan, who I call "rakes," are the opposite case. They’re the low end of the formation, and John names the abuse they were tempted into, not the job. Most of a soldier’s days, then and now, go to policing, paperwork and waiting. Nobody at the river was asking John to bless a war. They were asking what to do on Tuesday.
A hermeneutic, not a verdict
Of the five authors I lined up in God Is a Grunt, only two served in war, and both in ambulance units. I don’t say that to score points. Ambulance drivers and professors earned their views honestly. I say it because evidence has a location. Soldiers know things about rank, pay, and coercion that don’t survive in a library.
I call it a martial hermeneutic: reading Scripture, and the history of reading Scripture, from where the soldier stands. It doesn’t claim the soldier’s view settles anything, a 13F like me doesn’t get a vote on Greek grammar, I'm just exploring questions there. But what I am claiming is that the view from where someone like me stands is primary source material, and almost nobody has been collecting the evidence.
What about us?
That’s the question the soldiers asked John at the river, and it’s the title of this season. A century of scholarship argued about them and never quite answered it. If you wear the uniform, or love someone who does, it’s your question too.
Start asking it.
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