All right, so we're going to start off with a question by Trey Brickley. Thanks for sending us in, Trey. I'm going to direct this towards David, but Dean, you are more than welcome to jump on this as well. It was asked specifically to David. The question is, I currently serve in the Army. I am a conservative who takes the founding philosophy of our country seriously and votes accordingly.
According to a JW friend of mine, the early Christians were not involved at all in politics, but refused to serve in the army or even vote. I've yet to do my own research on this. Can you speak to your understanding of the early Christian attitude towards serving in the army and voting from your knowledge, both as a prior JW and a scholar of early Christian writings? OK, and this will be a really brief answer, because both those questions, we could easily spend an hour just on that.
Of course, we're going to be talking about voting during this hour. Basically, what your Jehovah's Witness friend is saying is correct, although not maybe to the degree that he has said. The early Christians, as far as the army, they definitely did not participate in war. And if you were to join the army as a Christian, you would have been put out of the church. They had a lot of soldiers who converted, and there was no way to get out of the army back in those days.
So they had to agree to never use the sword or to take an oath, which often meant they were the ones who got martyred the first, because that was difficult to do, although it was the Pax Romana. And so a soldier could serve his whole life and do nothing but build walls or build roads, et cetera. But that was as far as the army. But of course, today we have the option, so we're in a different position.
Voting didn't occur in the early church, so that's why it's not quite correct to say they were against voting because that wasn't an option. It wasn't a democracy. You had the Roman Empire and Caesars were appointed or followed their father, something like that. They stayed out of politics. I think we can definitely say that. The quote I like I've used often from Tertullian. He said," All zeal in the pursuit of glory and honor is dead in us.
So we have no pressing inducement to take part in your public meetings, nor is anything more entirely foreign to us than the affairs of state. We acknowledge one all embracing commonwealth, the world. So yeah, Christians stayed out of the political issues of their day, even though they didn't have voting. They definitely had politics involved in who would be the next Caesar, who would be the governor of this province, who would be the king here and there. And yeah, as you said, that was entirely foreign to them.
They were citizens of another kingdom. And so they stayed away from all of that. So that just as a brief introduction, the early Christian position on both of those. And they came from being citizens of another kingdom. Thanks for that. Dean, did you have anything you want to speak to that? Yeah, excuse me, I like it. And I love that Tertullian quote that's excellent to look at the whole world as this Commonwealth was that the word used. Yeah. That's excellent.
I also think it's right, since we're just framing sort of a big thing from the beginning, to look at the fact, and this is a really important part, is that there was not just a negative sense of not being involved in the politics of the world. But there was a positive creating of the kingdom of Christ through the church. And so, you know, if we can look at this strictly as a not involvement or non-conformity type of an issue or something like that.
But it does miss a really important element that I think is missing today and that's missing or that people can miss out in the early church. It was a great quote by John Howard Yoder, for what it's worth. And he talks about the word non-resistance, for instance. It kind of applies to some of these things. And he said, using the word non-resistance can oftentimes be like, it's like, it'd be like calling marriage non-adultery.
You know, that you're just looking at it from its things you're not involved with, but the love and the proactive parts of that are missing and using the term non-resistance. I thought that was a great quote. And it's a great way to look at the early church. They were incredibly involved with world change, helping the social structure, helping to change the world and plant the kingdom of Christ, and just didn't have time for the politics of this world. So it's both of those back and forth. I really like that.
In fact, I think David, you speak to that in your lesson of, I forget who it was, but the quote included something like," Those who have the ability to speak well, to act well, or great orators that their service is needed in the church, not in the world." I'm butchering that, but. Yeah, no, as far as leading, yeah. That was Origen. And it's exactly as Dean said, it wasn't so much a teaching in a negative sense. It was there just as a default. We've already got our kingdom. We're involved in that.
That's our concern. Why would we get involved in the affairs of this world? That's a different kingdom. It's not the kingdom that our citizenship lies in. And yeah, we have our hands and our minds focused and our hearts focused on a different kingdom. Yeah, I like that. Thank you both for that. I think we'll go ahead and move on to some more specific questions.
I wanted to open up with that because I felt like it was a good broad question, but I would encourage anyone that hasn't listened to either the Christian citizenship course or the change of allegiance course that we have on the platform to go through those. David and Dean dig into a lot of the background into why they hold to these views grounded in really grounded in Christ in His view of the world, but then inspired by early Christians.
So we had a lot of questions referring to, okay, if not high political office, high political power, maybe positions of commanders in chief or declaring war or various forms of coercion and force that maybe aren't appropriate for Christians to be voting for. What about lower offices of state? I'll read a question here from, I'm not going to read all of these because there's a lot of similar ones, but I'm going to read a question here by Ernest Evee.
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