The Sword and the Lamb

The idea of a war “in the name of Jesus” does not rest on any explicit mandate in the New Testament, but on an operation of interpretation. The texts do not offer a coherent doctrine of violence; rather, they configure a field of tensions in which the language of conflict appears only to be almost immediately interrupted.

“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:36). Taken in isolation, these statements seem to authorize an ethics of confrontation. Yet their force depends on a precise act of extraction. Within the same narrative sequence, the sword is neutralized: Jesus halts the violence and asserts that those who take the sword will perish by it. War emerges as a discursive possibility, but never stabilizes into a principle.

This instability is not a weakness of the text, but its structural condition. Even in its most extreme passages—such as the militant figure of Christ in the Book of Revelation—violence does not appear as an ethical norm but as a scene of judgment. The Christ who “judges and makes war” coexists with the image of the slain Lamb: a form of power grounded not in conquest, but in exposure and sacrifice. Sovereignty does not disappear; it shifts regimes.

The intervention of Paul the Apostle introduces a decisive displacement by legitimizing the authority that “bears the sword.” Violence is not eliminated; it is redistributed. It no longer belongs to the believing subject but to the political apparatus. This division becomes foundational: it allows Christianity to condemn violence at the ethical level while simultaneously tolerating—and even administering—it at the institutional level.

It is within this gap that its history unfolds. From Augustine of Hippo to Thomas Aquinas, violence ceases to be an anomaly and becomes a regulated exception. This theological architecture makes possible phenomena such as the Crusades, in which war is not only justified but sacralized.

In the present, this logic has not disappeared; it has become more abstract—and therefore more effective. Within contemporary evangelical Christianity—particularly in its articulation with American nationalism—figures such as Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, and John Hagee reinscribe geopolitical conflicts within a theological narrative that frames them as necessary moments within a moral or even eschatological order.

Crucially, this reading no longer remains confined to the religious sphere. At its most intensified point, it projects itself onto the apparatus of the state. Government officials in the United States—including figures associated with the defense sector, such as Pete Hegseth—have mobilized discursive frameworks in which war is interpreted as part of a higher design. In such cases, religious rhetoric does not function as symbolic ornament but as a mechanism of legitimation, displacing political decision into a horizon of moral or even divine necessity.

At its extreme, this interpretation ceases to be merely discursive and becomes operational. There have been documented instances in which military commanders frame war as part of God’s plan, with explicit references to Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. Interpretation becomes motivation. Theology enters the chain of command.

What is decisive, then, is not the content of the text, but its capture. Where the Gospel introduces interruptions—the suspension of violence, the command to love one’s enemy, the renunciation of vengeance—institutional power produces continuity. War “in the name of Jesus” is not a derivation, but a construction: the result of isolating fragments, neutralizing their limits, and reinscribing them within an economy of sovereignty.

Today, war is no longer declared in the name of Jesus.It is legitimized through a reading that renders his name unnecessary.

Footnote

Fourteenth-century fresco located in the Visoki Dečani Monastery, founded by King Stefan Dečanski and constructed between 1327 and 1335. The interior pictorial cycle was executed ca. 1335–1350 within the late Byzantine tradition. The image, circulated in recent years as a depiction of Christ holding a sword, has been subject to various contemporary interpretations.