Around the world, tens of thousands of JWs have refused military service. These witnesses have had their lives disrupted, by imprisonment, violence in some cases and execution in a few.
The following article steps aside from the usual theological argument and asks the question, is there evidence of early Christians (pre Constantinian) serving in Roman Armies? If there is evidence of Christian military service before the Constantinian era, I suggest that it would undermine the witness arguments against Christians serving in military forces.
For the record, I only suffered minor inconvenience for my refusal.
The author of this article, written three years ago, is Christopher Jones.
He is a Ph.D student in ancient Near Eastern history at Columbia University in New York. His primary research interests focus on the Neo-Assyrian Empire, especially the organization and structure of the Assyrian government and military. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011 with a B.A. in Peace, War & Defense and Ancient & Medieval History, and a minor in Archaeology and then graduated from Wheaton College in 2014 with an M.A. in Biblical Archaeology.
In the introduction he writes:
Christian pacifism has raised its profile in recent years, likely prompted by dissatisfaction with increasing political polarization, and promoted by some influential writers. Ideas promoted in the past century by Cecil John Cadoux and John Howard Yoder with little headway have found a modern defender in Stanley Hauerwas and a popularizer in Shane Claiborne, whose books, speaking tours and radical lifestyle have attracted many admirers if few followers.
Central to all of these authors’ ideas is the concept of the “fall of the church.” They hold that early Christianity was pacifist and anarchist in character, and rejected the ideas of military service and loyalty to the state. As Christianity came to be accepted by the Roman government at around the time of Constantine, the church became corrupted by its relationship with state power. After Constantine the church became willing to acquiesce to state power and wage war, execute people in the name of the state, force conversions, and recognize the authority of rulers other than Jesus. According to Yoder, the behavior of the early church is important because the early Christians “read the Bible in a first-century context. They read the New Testament in the same world in which it was written, in the same language in which it was written. They probably read it, therefore, with more understanding than we do. Hence, how they read the New Testament is helpful to us in our reading of the New Testament, whatever the limits of their faithfulness.
If the question interests you read on in the author's personal blog at: