Tertullian’s “Pacifism”

Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan pithily sum up Tertullian’s argument in De corona militis ( From Irenaeus to Grotius , 24):

“By concentrating on the particular issue of whether a Christian should wear the military chaplet on ceremonial occasions, it manages to take for granted the more fundamental case against military service. . . . Yet what was the case? Was it to do with the impossibility of shedding blood, even in the service of magistrates whom God had authorized to bear the sword? At the very moment that Tertullian seems about to tell us, he turns aside. We never actually hear the case Tertullian’s church might have made in answer to the post-Nicene view that a Christian may shed blood in the moderate exercise of lawful authority.”

Thje O’Donovans suggest that “the association of civil society and its institutions with idolatry was so much the fundamental reality for the pre-Nicene church, that it swallowed up all other reasons.”