God’s law is to be applied and upheld in every sphere of man’s endeavor. It is not meant to convert but to control the lawless and when necessary remove them from society. The state wields the sword and enforces the law but it must do so in submission to Christ the King.
The failure of the church to operate as described above is testimony to effeminacy. It is anti Christ.”
To the contrary CN can and should use force upon people in order to be installed. People have to realize that the force that CN must and should us is not intended to convert people, but rather force is intended to make the lawless respect the King’s law. Whether they will convert or not is the work of the Holy Spirit in the context of the preaching of the Gospel. That people will be forced to obey is the work of the Christian magistrates sword.
They may secretly desire to disobey that which they are being forced to obey but they don’t and they don’t for the fear of force used against them if they do. That is a good thing.
The usage of force in the rise of CN is no different than the usage of force in a Christian family. 12 y/o Johnny may not like any number of the family rules but force will make sure that Johnny complies. Now, to be sure, the hope is that Johnny will one day enjoy and own the family rules but until that day arrives little Johnny is kept in line by the promises of consequences (force) if he does not comply.
“Christians” who bring up the canard about how the prospect of force in CN make CN a non-starter are not really complaining about the prospect of force. What they are complaining about are laws in God’s gracious Law-Word that they don’t want enforced. If they could force their law on the world (whatever that might be) they would be perfectly fine with force.
Think about it a second…. the Baptists are some of the Christians who are screaming the loudest about how the usage of force is not consistent with Christianity. These Baptists are therefore against CN. However, keep in mind that the pluralism that we have now that is kept as expressive of our social order by force is a pluralism that is an expression of Baptist theology. Pluralism is the child of Anabaptist thinking, so naturally many Baptists oppose a CN coupled with the usage of force because that would mean the end of their preferred social order (pluralism) which is maintained by force.
In the end, force is an inescapable concept when it comes to how social orders operation. That force will either be put into the service of God’s law or it will be put into the service of some other god’s law (like polytheistic pluralism).
When their backs are put against the wall, the pacifist convictions of even many dedicated Anabaptists will wither. Take, for example, the German Mennonites who lived in Ukraine (in the Zaporozhian areas where warfare is raging at this very moment), when the Russian Civil War started. A Leftist source narrates:
https://libcom.org/article/makhnovists-and-mennonites-war-and-peace-ukrainian-revolution
“Many Mennonite landlords practised collective punishment; when theft was suspected ‘all the potential suspects were flogged, so as to teach a lesson to both the guilty and the innocent’ (Loewen, p-53). The principle of pacifism had therefore been abandoned by wealthy Mennonites long before the Russian Revolution.
From the spring of 1918, Mennonite colonies (though not all individual believers) abandoned any pretence of pacifism and began to establish an armed force, which they refer to as the Selbstschutz. For those who participated and their descendants, this resort to violence presents a problem of conscience: for four hundred years, through various persecutions and martyrdoms, Mennonites had – to an extent, at least – renounced the sword; now, gangs of men armed themselves in zealous support of the invading Austro-German armies. It is worth observing the sort of logical contortions that were necessary to defend this course of action: ‘It was thus argued by Heinrich Janz and Aron Toews, for example, that one must differentiate between the principles of the Kingdom of God and the principles of this worldly kingdom. In matters of the former one must remain nonresistant, of course, but with respect to the latter one is also obligated to support law and order’ (Klippenstein, p-4).
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If the Selbstschutz was not born to defend Mennonites from ‘unprecedented terror’, how did it originate? Its initial role was to enable landlords to violently reclaim land and property from those who had (in most instances, peacefully) collectivised it. B.J. Dick acknowledges that ‘Not always and not in all cases was the conduct of (…) German soldiers commendable and inoffensive,’ but he describes the Austro-German occupation as ‘a breathing space sent by God’ – the Old Testament God, presumably.
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Needless to say, it was the prosperous Mennonites who pushed for the Selbstschutz, not their landless and poor employees (Klippenstein, p-2). As B.J. Dick recalls, ‘the more prosperous farmers were generally more in favour of the Selbstschutz than the landless and the poor’ (p-138). This was reflected in the demographic of the initial Selbstschutz units, which, as John Urry notes, ‘consisted of young Mennonites from wealthy backgrounds’ (Wiens, p-40). The aim of these landlords’ militias was to ‘restore the pre-Revolution community patterns as completely as possible’ (Klippenstein, p-2). Thus the Selbstschutz did not start as a defensive organisation but as a militia that aimed to use violence to restore the inequalities of Tsarist Russia. The hawks in the Mennonite camp coerced, intimidated, and assaulted the doves: those many Mennonites who opposed the Selbstschutz, whether for reasons theological or economic or both, were subject to scorn and derision and in some cases were beaten by their Christian brethren (Klippenstein, p-8; see also, Dick, p-136).”