October 9, 2025 • 60 mins
Vince Lewis was an officer in the United States Air Force, and flew multiple combat missions. After leaving the Air Force, he found the Anabaptists and came to believe in nonresistance. In this episode, Vince explains what nonresistance is and why this doctrine is so important to all Christians.
Christianity, War, and America’s Salvation Story
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
If I could put it in my own military terminology,
the commander says, "There's the enemy,
there's the direction of the fight."
But a different commander,
Jesus Christ, comes along
and said, "No, that's not the battle.
The battle's over here.
You're fighting a carnal war over here,
but we're fighting a spiritual war.
(00:21):
So I'm fighting the wrong
war with the wrong weapons,
looking for the wrong objectives."
(gentle music)
Vince Lewis, welcome to
the Anabaptist Perspectives podcast.
Thank you, Reagan.
So you had a career in
the Air Force for 24 years.
You had top level security clearance,
(00:43):
you did multiple combat tours.
You were not raised in the Anabaptist world,
and the topic of non-resistance, I think,
was a bit of a challenge for you
as you were joining this way of doing things.
So you're coming from an
environment that is unfamiliar,
I think, to a lot of us
within the Anabaptist world.
(01:04):
And for us, when it comes to
something like non-resistance,
it can be more theory sometimes than reality.
And that's what we wanna get
into today in this episode.
But before we jump into
non-resistance specifically,
is there more context you wanna lay for us
as we get into the topic?
Well, coming from that background,
(01:24):
it's really ingrained in you.
This is the way of life, tradition,
personal experience, training, of course.
The way your thought instructed to think,
all those things are making you a professional,
especially in the pilot corps,
(01:45):
where, as we say, the
whole Air Force that I was in
is there for the pilots.
The maintenance guys,
even the bakers and the cooks
in the kitchen, all over the base,
everybody's there for this handful of pilots.
And so you really get this big ego
and they just keep feeding that
and you're just ready,
(02:06):
you've got this killer instinct
that I'm ready to go when I'm called
and I have this so ingrained in me
that I'm not gonna question these things.
I'm gonna go into this with my full force,
with the training I've had,
and just expend everything I know
in a particular objective with no holds barred.
So I don't say you don't think,
(02:29):
but you have a basis for your thinking
that's gonna probably give you known outcomes
to what someone asks you
to do or tells you to do.
Yeah, and I think that was the piece
that as we were going back and forth,
getting ready for these interviews,
this, like you were really
in this world for a while.
Like you were a commander of a B-52 bomber,
(02:51):
for example, a nuclear capable aircraft
during the Cold War and all of those things.
And again, it's easy to think of non-resistance
as well, that's kind of a theory out there.
Well, we don't go to war and this, that, okay.
But in this, we wanna dig deeper
because you didn't just
wake up one day and be like,
"Oh, I guess I don't really wanna do
(03:12):
this military thing anymore.
I'm sure this was quite a process for you."
So that's what we want to get some of that.
Some of those pieces that had you change
your belief system on this.
So let's start with definitions.
When we say something like non-resistance,
what are we even talking about?
So first, what is it?
But then what is it not as well?
(03:34):
Let's turn that around the other way if we could.
What it's not is it's not peaceful living,
just a life of ease and nobody's bothering me.
And I'm just happy as a clam the way I am.
And it's also, the 1970s really pushed
in what was called the love generation
(03:56):
and the peace movement.
There was a lot of demonstrations going on.
And so you had a huge non-resistance saying,
"I'm not going to cooperate with the government,
whatever they tell me to do.
I'm a rebellious one.
I wanna let you know what I feel.
And if even if my peace movement gets violent,
(04:19):
I'm gonna claim that I'm a peacenik or whatever
the current label is for people."
So it's kind of an
ingrained contradiction of itself
is that people using violence
to bring about a peace movement.
But on the other hand, we have to say,
(04:42):
what does God's word say?
We start there.
Because we're not trying to win an argument
and win over people with, "I can out debate you
and therefore come to a logical conclusion
and convince you that you believe the same way."
And so I have to have more than just feelings.
(05:04):
I can't say, well, in a church environment,
I believe this way because my parents did.
No, this has to be your belief,
not your mom and dad's beliefs,
not your church's belief, but it has to be yours.
And the military uses that same principle,
fighting and combat, that has to be you.
That's your environment,
(05:24):
that's your basis for thinking.
And you go into that thinking you're doing good.
And that is a problem there
and you're taught retaliation
in every way and form.
I'm gonna outthink the enemy.
I've got larger weapons.
I've got better tactics, better training,
better troops and might
(05:45):
makes right is the concept.
America is the big gorilla in the room
ready to make the world right for our cause.
But the other people see it differently.
And maybe we'll go into that a little,
how the different worldviews affect
(06:06):
what we're talking about.
So that's some pieces of like what it isn't,
like what not resistance isn't.
Could you give us
definition of what is non-resistance?
And then I'm gonna add a piece there too.
What do you see as the current thinking
on the topic of non-resistance
within the Anabaptist community?
Kind of bring that into this as well.
(06:27):
Yeah, first of all, non-resistance.
And we look at Scripture for that first of all,
that's obedience to God.
And we're just not cherry
picking a couple of scriptures
out of the Bible as our source,
but we're actually have a
whole compendium of Scripture
that agrees and builds a
(06:49):
structure, not one or two.
Well, we wanna see this
concept throughout Scripture.
So I've really got some truth
that is supporting my position.
So first of all, it's belief in God.
It's also conscientious objection.
That word conscientious means deep thinking
(07:10):
or con- means with, with science.
So I reached this thought
through deliberate thinking
and it's not just my father's religion.
So I have decided this on my
own to conscientiously object.
And one of the things that I, the beauties
that I think comes out of this
(07:32):
is what we call alternative service
where you're actually- hurricanes, tornadoes,
natural disasters and other similar things,
hospital support, those
things are incredibly good.
And I think there's universal agreement on that.
So I say rather than
going out and killing people,
(07:53):
I'm gonna do this
alternative service, which we call it.
And I think you would find
pretty universal agreement
within the Anabaptist community without taking,
they see the logic, the truth behind that,
but you're not walking them through this argument
to get them to believe that.
It's just obvious you go in a hospital
(08:13):
and help someone you're doing good.
You kill them, now that's
a whole different question.
So yeah.
Okay, so we're laying some
groundwork on non-resistance.
I'm gonna throw in an
interesting question for you here.
Why do you find it so difficult
to promote the principle of non-resistance?
(08:36):
Excellent question because it involves,
it could involve a complex answer,
but the military that I was coming from,
I am coming from, that became a culture.
So within the Anabaptist community also,
there is a culture, but now
we have this other culture,
as long as we don't get
(08:57):
involved in other culture,
it's not impacting us so much.
But now we're seeing people sometimes
using computers in ways they didn't use,
watching YouTube videos,
maybe not watching full-length movies,
but the stuff is out there to view.
A totally new thing in the
(09:18):
last 20 years in particular,
that's increasing is social media,
where you're just bombarded with information,
sometimes without choice,
and sometimes without rationalization,
where there's people that are deliberately
putting that forth.
You get children's toys that are war-related,
(09:41):
you get games where you're
just bopping the other enemy
and knocking them into
eternity and those sorts of things
and bashing everything that comes after you.
And so that starts bleeding
into the Anabaptist community,
as it always has, but not with the intensity
that we see today with electronics, with games,
(10:04):
with others, and so the Anabaptist,
you can't plug your ears for that, it's there,
and you've got to consciously deal with it,
or especially the young
people who may not be established
in this, they're more vulnerable to this.
Looking for recognition and acceptance
was a common goal of all of us.
(10:25):
They want that acceptance too.
I've even know of, this second hand really,
a couple of friends know of Anabaptists
that have concealed carry permits
to carry a handgun concealed.
I don't think you've ever
seen anything like that before,
(10:47):
but what caused them to bring that?
You look at the number of gun sales in America,
it's just exploded.
There's videos that give you the belief
that this handgun, this is power.
You feel the weight of that and it feels good,
and someday, somebody,
you're gonna need this thing.
(11:08):
Well, no, you're not gonna need it,
because when you look at statistics,
the people even that carry concealed weapons,
and I used to carry a concealed weapon,
they never end up using it,
but they always have this mindset
that there's just threat out there
that means I may use this weapon.
And where did that mindset come from?
They didn't get it from
(11:29):
within the Anabaptist community,
which is to see how it's
bleeding in and affecting,
especially the vulnerable youth.
Yeah, I think that's one
that's kind of blown my mind.
I've started hearing about
that in the last couple years.
It's like, yeah, like,
"Mennonite young guys,"
or whatever, going and
getting their concealed carry,
(11:49):
or keeping a loaded handgun in their truck,
well, just in case, you never know.
I'm like, "What are you
gonna use that for exactly?"
Well, and then you just kind of smile,
and then I'm like, "Wait a minute.
I thought you're part of a church
that doesn't believe in killing people.
I mean, that seems pretty clear to me."
Well, and just this kind of thing,
I just can't really get my head around that.
(12:10):
And I think you're onto something there
that it didn't come from
inside the churches necessarily.
And there has to be
culture influencing coming in.
Right, right.
So you get to a position,
and we may go into this looking at some
of the Scriptural support.
I say, either you've got
(12:30):
three avenues in general.
Either don't believe the Bible,
you make your own interpretation,
and pick out favorite Scriptures.
So you're making your own interpretation,
or you believe the Bible.
And since I believe it, and I know you do too,
it's not just established
(12:51):
on some ethereal beliefs,
but it's actually built on a
book that is so intertwined,
and a book- there isn't
anything like it on earth-
that you can go in and find
multiple agreeing Sriptures
on non-resistance, for example.
And you're pulling from a
(13:11):
book where it's the entire Bible,
66 books, and the amazing thing
is every one of those 66 books agrees
with the other 65 books
in an intertwined message.
It's very difficult to defeat that
if you're willing to look at it and study it.
(13:33):
Even on your own, you're
gonna find some of these things.
So that gets me to the next question I had then,
because obviously you took a huge leap
from where you used to be,
as commander of the B-52,
and a bunch of other stuff
you did in the Air Force,
to this belief system.
(13:53):
Now you were an officer,
and I can imagine being an Air Force officer
if you read something like,
"Turn the other cheek," or "Love your enemies."
I can imagine that wasn't
very easy for you to accept
while you were in the Air Force.
Talk to me about that.
You're getting down to a
very serious point in my life,
(14:14):
a pivotal point where I
either had to turn away from it,
just passively agree with it, or buy into it.
My wife will tell you that I examine everything.
I wanna know where its
boundaries, its definitions are.
I wanna research a concept deeply,
almost like a mathematical concept.
(14:35):
I wanna know what's behind this thing.
And then once I do, I buy into it.
So I faced a real problem with this.
It's a very difficult problem.
You've got 40 years of Department of Defense
and active duty military,
and even a couple of years as a cadet.
All that two thirds of my
(14:55):
adult life is absorbing this.
And now I'm accustomed to,
if you tell me to turn the other cheek,
I said, "Well, if you slap me,
I'm slapping you back twice as hard."
Because that retaliation,
get back at the bad guy or
the guy that's oppressing you.
So retaliate, and you're faced with that.
(15:18):
And so that commonly used term
of retaliation versus non-resistance
is that's just a contradiction.
So I needed something to really buy,
I won't say buy into that,
that's cheap term perhaps,
but really grab this
(15:39):
concept to where it's part of me.
So through a set of circumstances,
I met a man who's Anabaptist like I am,
and it was kind of by accident.
I was looking for somebody else,
and he could tell I was kind of down,
and he says, "What's going on?"
I said, "Well, I was supposed to find Kenneth,
(16:03):
and he was gonna talk about non-resistance,
but Kenneth isn't here.
He had some kind of a medical problem."
They took him, and Todd Boone said,
"Well, what did you want to talk to him about?"
I said, "About non-resistance."
I said, "You know, I can't get past this point.
We're looking at membership.
We really like what we see,
(16:23):
Scripturally with fellowship,
with the family concept of a community
working together for a common purpose.
And yet, I'm up against this wall."
And really, it was a wall.
And so Todd says,
"Well, sit down, let's go through some things."
And in my words,
(16:45):
I believe that God through the Holy Spirit
was guiding Todd into something.
So the first thing he picked was a concept
that isn't talked about much,
and a lot of Christians
maybe even haven't heard of,
that is based on Scripture captured by Colossians 1:13
(17:07):
He's translated me,
and God has translated me
out of the kingdom of darkness
into the kingdom of God's dear Son.
So, wait a minute, you know what I'm saying?
There's two kingdoms.
There's a kingdom of darkness.
I know there's a devil, and I know there's God,
but God has set up two kingdoms.
And when you begin to look
(17:29):
at Scripture through that,
in particular in the New Testament,
Romans 8:1, "For the law of the spirit of life
made me free from the law of sin and death."
So there's governing laws within,
and that's just one example
of this dual kingdom concept.
So I went into that,
and it was really enforced
(17:51):
by the Scripture that said,
"We wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers,
the rulers of the darkness of this world,
and spiritual wickedness in high places."
And that Scripture basically says to me,
if I could put it in my own military terminology,
(18:12):
the commander says, "There's the enemy.
There's the direction of the fight."
But a different commander, Jesus Christ,
comes along and said, "No, that's not the battle.
The battle's over here.
You're fighting a carnal war over here,
but we're fighting a spiritual war.
And I see that now we've got two kingdoms
(18:32):
that are really opposed to each other.
One's gonna end up with God.
One's gonna end up in the kingdom of darkness,
which is based on demonic, the devil himself,
and all that rebellious concept
ending up in different eternities.
And so we say even the weapons of our warfare
(18:53):
are not carnal.
And I've flown B-52s in particular
with nuclear weapons on board thinking,
this is the ultimate weapon.
And yet Scripture says the weapons of our warfare
are not carnal, any earthly, but mighty.
They're mightier than those things.
So I'm fighting the wrong
(19:13):
war with the wrong weapons,
looking for the wrong objectives.
And Todd went through this
and other Scriptures too,
too many to bring in here, but it said,
wow, this is not how I was raised.
I was raised, all my toys
had to do with military.
When I built plastic airplane models,
(19:36):
they weren't models of airlines,
they were models of combat aircraft.
And so you're just feeding on this stuff
and it just becomes part of you.
Patriotism was a wonderful thing
and military people were
just edified throughout society
as they still are today.
And they were the heroes of the day.
(19:57):
They rescued us from evil
as we saw in our approach.
If you look at it from American perspective is,
we're always right and the enemy is the guy
that's always wrong.
But I'd say from a world perspective,
what then is the enemy's view of us?
(20:19):
The enemy is gonna think they're right
and we're the ones that are wrong.
So you have this natural
opposition of who's right
and who's wrong and you get into doctrines
that'll support that belief, making,
hey, it's all right to go to war.
And some of those things maybe we can get into.
(20:40):
I don't know if you wanna discuss those now, but.
Well, I was gonna say, you talk about Scripture
and supporting
non-resistance and all of these things,
but I'm sure there are
people listening or whatever
that would very much disagree with this.
Like, what do you say to those people
(21:01):
that dispute what you're saying?
Here's as far as this is the case of S cripture.
Yeah, dig into a little bit of that
because I'm sure you had
to wrestle with that too.
I'm sure you heard the argument,
so, oh no, this is the right thing to do.
The war machine, whatever
is the right thing to do.
Yeah, talk to me about that.
So if my beliefs are based
(21:21):
on God and God's morality,
then you have to know what he says.
And so if I'm dealing with someone
that has no knowledge of the Bible,
I have to take a different approach to them.
The starting point is totally different.
If I'm talking to a believer in Jesus Christ,
what we call a Christian, a true Christian,
(21:43):
I've got a basis, a common basis
to now go into Scripture and
show them particular passages.
But a totally non-Christian is
not gonna buy into this thing
because this country is about patriotism.
And I've tell you, even the churches in America
support patriotism.
(22:05):
On Memorial Day, I've gone into
conservative Christian churches, even.
The guests, the veterans, put on your uniform
from when you were in the service.
And we'll have a ceremony where we're bringing
the American flag up the center aisle
and posting it on the
stand with the Christian flag
(22:26):
on one side and the
American flag on the other side.
And we might even stand there and say,
I pledge allegiance to the
flag of the United States
and to the Republic for which it stands.
You could tell I've been through this a few times
and might even sing some songs from those things,
the national anthem, songs
(22:48):
like that, patriotic songs.
And so the two are so intertwined
that even if the person is a Christian,
they're gonna have a problem with that
because their churches talk like that.
But you ask the church people,
they don't usually face the dual kingdom,
they don't usually face questioning that.
And so you come from a whole
(23:09):
different decision-making basis.
You've got to overcome.
They have their culture.
And I had to make my
transition out of that culture
into what I know to be scriptural culture.
And I can prove it.
And I have support and I
don't have to question it
because it's not my opinion, it's God's opinion
(23:30):
which comes to me through my-
my belief in Jesus Christ,
my belief in the Scriptures
that God brought us through the Holy Spirit
inspiring great writers of the world
over the thousands of years,
writing a common theme, a common message
pointing to just one God.
(23:50):
And so you have a different basis of thinking
that I'm coming from.
So yeah, it's a lot to overcome in some cases
where that's the way we grew up.
And so that you're overcoming.
When I was talking to your wife yesterday,
she mentioned how y'all
were at a Christian conference
(24:12):
and how you were sitting there just like,
oh, things were starting to click
and something to the effect of the Bible
is almost like a flight manual or something.
You're like, this is God's instructions
on how we should live and things.
Do you wanna get into that example?
And we have some of your old flight manuals here.
And I'm curious,
because I think that's
relevant to what you've been saying
(24:32):
about the scriptural support of these things.
How does that affect how we live and so forth?
Yeah, you wanna get into that a bit.
Yeah, I do.
I brought these for that specific purpose.
There's three of the four
different aircraft I flew have.
I brought their flight crew checklist.
It's called the
abbreviated flight crew checklist.
(24:54):
And they're all common throughout every airplane
in the Air Force.
They have these black bordered pages like this
that have a little E and a border.
Those are emergency procedures.
And this is what you had to know.
Even to the point, these are
(25:14):
supported by volumes of things,
some of which we carried
around in a big, heavy bag.
But it comes down to this.
And this even has things
that had to be memorized.
And it's like S cripture.
And you would look at a big airplane.
Here's a one from a B-52G, a
(25:36):
massive airplane that I flew.
Has that same thing, the hatched pages.
And these had to be ready
because when the emergency arose,
you don't get out these big manuals
to start paging through them.
And where is that thing, that procedure,
on how to put out an engine fire?
Now this thing came out of you.
(25:57):
It was second nature.
And that's God's word.
You have this not just,
well, let me go look it up
and I'll get back with you.
At least the initial top level comes out of you.
And so you have that same
pillars, that similar structure.
I've got a pillar that supports my belief,
(26:18):
just like I've got volumes of books
that bring it down to this.
When I'm operating that
aircraft and I have an emergency,
these things better come out of me.
And I was thrown in simulators, tested with this.
Sometimes you would get
these no-notice on-the-spot
(26:39):
questions from the commander, hey Vince,
tell me what you would do in this situation.
Even to the point when we were students,
they would maybe walk up
to you, a commander says,
you know, I wanna ask you a question.
You know that the emergency procedures
for a canopy blows off in flight
or emergency blow down and landing gear,
(27:02):
which don't come down when you go to land
and you run into that emergency.
He was expecting you to know that
and that was part of your job.
Just like a mechanic knows
how to take a part of carburetor
on a car or various parts of it.
I had to know how to do this so much
that it just came out of me naturally.
(27:22):
Hmm, that goes back to when Peter is writing
in the New Testament and
says, be ready to give an answer
or basically it's the sense of,
you should know what you
believe and like understand it
and be able to explain it to someone else
when people ask you
questions so that you can give them,
here's the reason for the hope that's in you
as he writes and there's
(27:43):
other things in that passage.
Seems like that's what you're getting at here.
Right, right.
Be ready always.
It's nice if you got a Bible with you
and you got someone that is
patiently dialoguing with you
with an open mind, listening to what you have.
(28:03):
But there's those people almost say,
you just run into on the
street that'll challenge you.
They may see the way you're dressed
or my wife wears a cap, a
head covering all the time.
And people will ask her,
well, what is that for?
And why do you believe in that?
(28:24):
And what's that symbolized?
And I'm expected to at least have,
we don't all wear beards,
but people will quickly pick up
on you're not like everybody else.
So expect you to be able
to walk them through that.
And like I said, it's gotta be ingrained in you.
The hope that's within me,
(28:44):
the hope in Jesus Christ.
So I'm gonna pivot a bit
because when we're talking about non-resistance,
one thing people seem to default to a lot
is hypothetical scenarios
or they'll give these challenges of well,
but what about this?
(29:04):
What about that?
And so far you've been saying,
hey, this is how you came to this belief.
Here's some Scripture, here's the framework.
But then people would be like, well, yeah, but,
let me try to poke a hole in
that by giving this situation.
Talk me through those.
Because that's a different type of approach.
That's a common attack against this theology
(29:25):
by taking a common situation
and making it a question which is almost
getting down to a yes, no question.
And I would say anytime you see a yes, no,
an either or question,
either you choose this path or this path.
(29:46):
It's like saying, I don't wanna sound too crude,
but have you stopped kicking your dog yet?
Well, there's no right answer to that question.
Either way, you're wrong or you're guilty.
So someone presents a scenario,
the most I've ever heard
of either to me or others,
is someone kicks in your front door
(30:07):
and starts attacking your wife.
What are you gonna do?
And my first question is, is this a scenario
you actually know of or is this
something you've just made up?
And my first answer, which I certainly
am not going to have time
to give in a real situation,
(30:28):
but in this hypothetical situation,
it's gonna have to be, what does the Bible say?
And let's even take what the Bible says
and put it in practical application
because I know you're trying to trap me
with these either or questions,
which undeniably, it keeps
the person asking the question.
(30:49):
It keeps them in control of the discussion.
So you're already at a disadvantage.
And you just go on and on that these are not
logical questions.
They're actually illogical if
you look at them objectively
and they're a trap and they're trying to get you
(31:09):
to agree with them.
And what are they after ultimately?
Not just disproving you, but to disparage God
through you and through
winning an argument with you.
And you go, I don't know what to say.
Well, maybe I'll have to agree with you.
Yeah, some of these things,
(31:30):
but there's a lot of things that you can do.
And if I could just take a
moment to go into some of those.
Yeah, yeah, I'd like you to do that
because this is first thing typically
when my militaristic friends or whatever,
you'd find out, oh, you
don't believe in war well then.
What about this?
And they'll use some example from whatever.
(31:51):
And it can shut down the
conversation pretty quick
because it's like, well, oh boy.
So if you go down that street,
yeah, you do end up in a corner someplace.
But like you said,
I'm thinking of one scenario that happened to me.
I was like, the situation he was outlining
based on a past experience I had
was so ridiculously illogical that it was just,
I mean, there's no way that would ever happen.
(32:12):
But he just kept pushing it in a certain way
to try to get me to say,
oh yeah, that's right,
non-resistance wouldn't work
in that situation or whatever.
It's like, well, the
reality is that would never happen
in real life.
It's just totally ridiculous situation.
So what are alternatives
when people do bring these
kinds of things up and says,
well, you believe in non-resistance?
(32:32):
Well, what about this?
What are some alternative
responses you can give them?
Well, I might start first with saying,
all these situations are different
and you put me in a situation like this.
I don't know all the information there.
You just said there's an attacker and a victim.
Well, is it day?
Is it night?
Is there a policeman standing behind you?
(32:55):
Or are you out in a farm environment?
Or are there houses all around you
where you know that this guy's
not gonna maybe risk too much?
But initially, my first thought is to flee
the environment, run away.
I've told my wife, if
somebody were to do something,
(33:16):
here's the door to get out and
here's where you're gonna go.
I'm running away from the
situation in a way to react that.
So another thing is
somebody in a situation like that
is usually after something.
There's no purpose to them in just coming,
kicking in the door and beating up someone
(33:39):
and they're after something.
Maybe your wallet, maybe you've got money
somewhere in the house.
I say, give it to them.
Your life is not worth your wallet, men,
or your purse women.
And that money you may have
stashed in a drawer somewhere,
let them have it.
(33:59):
And yet, you may get,
through satisfaction through that,
you may have to go beyond that.
Not only what are you looking for,
but offer them something else.
My wife's sick, you're
really doing something wrong.
How about, what are you after here?
(34:19):
And not maybe that clean.
Think of it, you're trying to
say, is there something else?
You're really after, what can I give you
to solve your basic need?
So I'm presenting him with an alternative.
And maybe too, I would
jump in between the attacker
and the victim.
So he's attacking me instead of someone weaker
(34:42):
than I am to protect them.
And this way, I'm not
attacking him with resistance
the way he's attacking me or someone that I love.
I'm blocking what he's
doing, just standing there,
giving the other person
protection or a chance to flee
while I'm engaging the enemy,
(35:02):
almost like a military thing where I'm doing
a strategic withdrawal to avoid,
to get out of the range of your horrible guns.
I'm getting back from the threat really.
And if we look at many others that we say,
(35:23):
if I think this through,
I know what I'm gonna do,
like an emergency procedure.
But if I wait for the situation to arise,
I may not know what to do.
In fact, in some situations,
the answer to a question
like that is, I don't know.
I don't know what I would do.
The body in all of us has
(35:44):
a natural reflex action.
Somebody throws a ball at you or a rock.
You just unconsciously put
your hand up to block that.
That's an instinct in your body.
You didn't get that instinct by deciding on that,
but it's a natural instinct.
And you may flinch, you may trigger some emotion
(36:06):
in the attacker by
flinching, but there are things
we're just not sure what we're gonna do.
But in general, what's the real environment?
What's the truth of the situation?
And taking some of this other alternatives.
And you have to admit, it may not work.
There are times where it's gonna break down.
You're not gonna succeed,
(36:27):
but there are alternatives
other than attack the attacker or get killed.
Those aren't the alternatives.
So yeah, complex question- answer-
to a simple question,
you might say.
But it's really real,
because I think in the
conversations I've had at least,
that tends to be the one challenge for people.
(36:48):
It's like, but what about if
I get attacked or something,
and that can be a real struggle point.
Yeah, I think you had a good piece there.
It may not always like, quote unquote, work,
or it might, these things are messy,
and but still have to come
back to what is the flight manual,
so to speak, like what does scripture tell us?
(37:08):
Like what does Jesus want us to do?
Bring it back to that.
Okay, so we were just
talking about really zoomed in
on hypothetical situations
and in our individual lives.
I wanna zoom it out now really wide.
History is full of a lot of famous warriors.
What are some thoughts
(37:29):
that they've had about war?
People that have experienced
this, lead armies, et cetera.
Give us some quotes.
I know you've done some digging on this.
Yeah, tell us about some of that.
I took some notes that really,
I was prepared to give some of these.
And let me draw on some of these specifically,
because in a few cases,
the quotes are really
lengthy and well thought out
(37:51):
by some members of history
that I think everyone looks on.
There was a British writer called Sidney Smith.
He said, "God is forgotten in war.
"Every principle of
Christianity is trampled upon."
And I think if you look at
that closely, yeah, it is.
And I've had experience in war.
I've actually, looking at my past,
(38:14):
and we didn't go into that,
but I've dropped bombs that killed people.
And they didn't just kill enemy soldiers.
They killed non-combatants or civilians.
Let's personalize this.
There were babies.
There were somebody's
aunt or uncle or grandfather.
(38:34):
There was maybe an invalid or something.
"I'm sorry, that's just part of war.
And they shouldn't have
been there in the first place.
Too bad for them.
The mindset is, we're killing enemy soldiers
for the cause of good."
And that's my mindset.
And I may even joke about some of this.
(38:55):
After dropping bombs on a particular target,
I remember many situations,
we turned back to the home base.
And I would say something like,
"I wonder what they're having for dinner
"at the officers club."
And yet, those bombs are still on the way down
for a number of seconds in the time of fall.
And you see the contradiction
(39:17):
of what's happening for real on the ground
as a 750-pound bomb is just
obliterating a certain radius.
And I'm telling you, killing
grass and trees and animals
and people no doubt,
and destruction just raining within that.
Yet I have no conscience towards that
because I'm winning the war for good
(39:38):
and they're the bad guys.
And so deal with that and take care of them
so we lose more of them than we lose.
And that's that mindset.
So you look at some of these things--
A numbing to the effects almost, right?
That's exactly right.
You're flying at, what, 20,000 feet
and it's just a bunch of jungle down there.
And in reality, the concept
(40:02):
is the end justifies the means.
So the end objective is victory.
How I get there doesn't matter.
Where in fact, it ought
to be the other way around.
The means of getting there justifies the end.
So that I don't just see this concept
(40:22):
that there's no morality
when you're going at the enemy
because, and you know, I hate to admit it,
but clear evidence that we've
done some of the same things
to the enemy that he's done to us.
You mean like the American
military machine, essentially?
And there's clear evidence.
(40:42):
And you see some of that
in a lot of famous quotes.
Yeah, continue on that, yeah.
So this is William Tecumseh Sherman.
He was one of the main generals in the Civil War
and he was given orders to
take out a particular route
(41:02):
from the South in the Civil War.
And that was between Atlanta and Savannah.
And it was called Sherman's March to the Sea.
And he used a concept called scorched earth
where you have the enemy in front of you
and you're knocking them
out, you're killing them.
(41:23):
But as you pass through his territory,
you're obliterating everything behind you.
His, maybe even the people, women, children,
the infirm, those behind you.
You're burning their houses,
you're burning their crops,
you're killing their cows and their horses,
the chickens, you name it.
(41:45):
And that's called scorched earth.
There's nothing usable and Sherman did this.
And the Library of Congress contains documents,
two letters from Lincoln
that told Sherman to do that.
Let me tell you what he
says after all this career
that he's had.
He says, "I confess without shame
that I am tired and sick of war.
(42:07):
It is only those who have neither heard a shot
nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded.
It is only they who cry for more blood,
who cry for more vengeance and more desolation."
And he ends up with this
famous little three word concept
that I've heard so many times, war is hell.
(42:30):
And here's a man that went through all this.
He gets to the conclusion.
He looks back on what he
did to the tens of thousands
of people that the most
costly war in our history,
about 610,000 men of our own
country killed in that war.
And he looks back on
those, this with those words,
Napoleon famous historical figure, French,
(42:52):
the emperor of France, he says,
"The more I study war,
the more I study the world,
the more I am convinced of the inability
or brute force to create anything durable."
And here he was a master of brute force.
And he's admitting in his summation that,
"You know, when you put it all together,
(43:15):
we're really unable to reach our objective."
And we say, we could maybe
go into some combat theory
and things of that nature.
And he basically says,
"Taking everything that I have
and looking at all the
kinds of warfare I've been,
(43:36):
there is no way to bring
about any durable objective.
War begets war."
As we look back on history,
one war doesn't solve anything.
We've looked at the war to end all wars.
That was World War I.
And what did World War II follow 10 years later
(43:57):
than World War I?
Here's World War II, right
back doing the same thing
with some of the same enemies
using more cruel tactics and
everything, since this is it.
And we get through this
and Hitler and all his armies
are done for, and we will be victorious
marching through Europe, proclaiming our might
(44:20):
and our right, and that's it.
But then you look at the wars that follow,
the regional wars, all the
wars of areas surrounding that.
It's estimated, for example, 20 million people,
mostly civilians, about two to one ratio,
sometimes three to one ratio of civilians
over military combatants died through things
(44:42):
like forced migrations,
direct killing by the weapons
intended for soldiers that actually brought into
or spilled over into the
homes and the civilian communities
and took a lot of them out to forced migration,
starvation, sickness and disease,
(45:04):
and all those things that
some of our people even did.
You get angry at a soldier
and just summarily shoot him.
I'm so angry at this guy.
I'm not gonna let him just be hauled off
into a prison or war camp.
I'm gonna take care of this guy right now.
(45:24):
They did that to us, and many times
we had angry men that saw
their buddy next to him shot,
and I'm just gonna get you in anger
and summarily shoot the man and take out his life
because of anger and the venom that's within us
to retaliate, to deal with that.
(45:46):
And we have names for these people.
I won't even repeat derogatory names, ugly names,
because that's how we envision these guys,
almost as venomous snakes ready to attack us,
and we've got to deal with
those guys in any way we can,
so we take them out.
Let me hear British Duke of Wellington.
(46:07):
He was Napoleon's arch enemy.
He said, "War is the most detestable thing
"if you had seen but one day of war,
"you would pray, God, that
you might never see another."
And so here's the men that led the armies
that did these things, and
then they're coming to the end,
(46:28):
and in summation they're saying,
"This isn't what I thought it was.
"War is hell," like Tecumseh said.
And these are guys that are proving
those concepts in reality.
That's kind of wild.
I mean, you have Napoleon and
Wellington both saying that.
If I remember my history right,
those were the two that
(46:48):
fought at the Battle of Waterloo.
And they both come away
from their military careers
saying things like that.
That's kind of, that makes you think.
Napoleon is regarded as one of the greatest,
perhaps the greatest general of all time,
and he gets to the end of all this and says,
"Didn't really accomplish much,"
(47:09):
which is kind of mind blowing to me.
And if anybody would be
qualified to make a declaration
like that, it seems like someone like him
would have seen enough to know, yeah, wow.
Okay, so I'm gonna bring this
back down to you and your life.
What is the personal benefit
to a stand on non-resistance?
(47:30):
Well, first of all, I'm pleasing God
because I'm following his word.
There is joy that comes through pleasing God
and knowing that you're doing,
and knowing that you're
doing an alternative service.
And amongst so many things,
there's a clear conscience.
(47:51):
I don't have this thing.
Many, many men after war have committed suicide
because they couldn't bring themselves,
or post-traumatic stress disorder,
as we're seeing so much today in war,
shell shock, injuries and
things that are horrible.
And this says, "I don't want that.
(48:11):
"I have a better way.
"I will serve you.
"I won't just ignore you and be a peacenick.
I will actually support your
being and your position in God
with a Christian approach that says,
"I'm out to benefit you, not to kill you.
"So I've got this whole
mindset that's different."
(48:31):
If I can bring him to understand that,
I think I could win over a friend
or whatever attack I'm getting.
Let me show you an alternative.
What do you think about going in a hospital
and helping sick and the injured and the infirm,
giving food, digging water wells
in third-world countries that don't have access
(48:53):
to clean water?
Let me demonstrate to you a different way.
I think that's how you win hearts of people
as they begin to see there's a better way
than just wiping out your enemy.
And we justify these things.
There's some macro theories that we talk about
like Augustine, who is a great philosopher
(49:14):
and church member, one of the early men
in some of the churches
right after Christ's death
on the cross, about 300 or 400 AD,
he said, he presented a concept called just war,
just warfare, justified warfare,
meaning if the outcome is good,
(49:37):
if that's an enemy in that enemy,
as we've seen in many of our years in the back,
communism, we gotta defeat
communism because this is evil.
So that's what we call wars of liberation.
We're freeing those that are oppressed.
Certainly that is good.
But what you define or someone defines
(49:58):
as a war of liberation to
you is not a war of liberation.
Their definition of war of liberation
is defeating this evil America
who's imposing their beliefs on us.
And we wanted to just live
in our religious mentality
and in our country and be free.
(50:18):
So we're gonna take out Americans.
So you've got these opposing
what we would call worldviews.
What is the definition of right?
In fact, who is right in this scenario?
In World War II, the
Japanese said, they're right.
And then we said, we're right.
Even to the point where we killed thousands
(50:42):
and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.
And on the other hand, we virtually wasted
some of our own young men's lives
and a couple hundred thousand.
Really when you look at some of the wars
after World War II in particular,
(51:02):
but we even had cases where we sent,
we lost 5,000 young men attacking an island
in the North Pacific that there were Japanese on.
It was up a slanted beach.
The Japanese were entrenched
and they were just mowing down our men.
And the commanders were sending wave upon wave
(51:24):
thinking we're softening the enemy,
we're getting objective, yet we lost 5,000.
You know that that island
that we lost 5,000 young men on,
that was not even in the path
of the battle coming
across from the United States
over towards Japan.
We just wasted, wasted young men's lives.
(51:47):
And that was somebody's point bringing that home.
And if that person knew
their son's life was just wasted
and terrible things like that are happening
that maybe you've seen the ugly side of war.
Maybe it's not so clean and sterile and surgical.
(52:08):
See surgical strikes as they call them,
go in and just pinpoint this target
and just kill these couple of people.
And don't worry about the
others that get killed around them.
But they have sons and
daughters too, as we do too.
So you get this justifying these wars.
We're liberating people.
We're doing right and some people are saying
(52:31):
and some of these crusades in history,
we're doing right by God's will.
We're glorifying God by
slaughtering these whole nations
and justifying that as good in this,
maybe even religious
mentality that supports this belief.
(52:52):
So back in 1973, you were deployed
to do those bombing missions over Cambodia
during the Vietnam war.
If you could go back in time and say something
to a young Vince Lewis,
who was doing those missions at the time,
is there anything you'd say to him?
(53:12):
I think you're gonna be
surprised at the answer to this.
My answer is I would say nothing to him
because I'm not gonna defeat him.
He's a warrior.
He's a man that he bleeds combat.
I'm not gonna walk up to him
and I'm not even gonna win a logical argument.
(53:34):
Without a basis of God and Christianity,
you're almost wasting your time.
If you'd have brought any
of these concepts to me,
I'd have laughed at you
saying, this is a nutcase.
Get him out of here
because I had the wrong mindset.
So no matter what I'm telling this guy,
if somebody had brought that to Vince Lewis,
(53:56):
I'd have just said, what's wrong with this guy?
Get him out of here.
He's destroying the morale of our troops
or he's trying to take away my position
as a warrior for good.
And people might say, oh,
that wasn't what I was expecting
in an answer to a question like that.
(54:18):
It may have even surprised you,
but I'd say I'm not gonna say anything to him.
I think that shows though,
how much of a change has happened in your life
since that time?
I was the guy on the other end,
looking at that person, that insane person
with these strange ideas.
(54:39):
Yeah, I was that person.
Wow, makes you think.
It does.
It does.
So as we wrap this up and
bring this episode to a close,
I'm guessing there are people listening to this
that are struggling with this.
Perhaps they're active
members in one of the armed forces
(55:00):
or something else,
and they're struggling with this non-resistance.
And maybe something else you shared.
What would you like to leave with those people?
We get people in situations like this
where you're witnessing to someone
and you present this gospel message to them.
(55:22):
What is their basis of thinking?
What is their mindset?
I would say, what am I gonna say to them?
I'm not gonna talk to them about non-resistance.
There's another answer that
maybe someone doesn't expect.
I'm gonna talk to them about Jesus Christ,
because if they don't have that mindset,
no matter what I'm telling them is,
they're gonna, where did you get that?
(55:43):
That's contrary to the American way.
I wasn't raised with that kind of thinking.
So I'm almost wasting my time.
I'm not really wasting my time,
but I'm using a very ineffective.
I need to get this man or this woman
to the knowledge of Jesus Christ,
because they don't have that.
Non-resistance means nothing.
(56:04):
I've just won a logical argument with these facts
that don't approach and don't
deal with the heart condition.
So that's almost an irrelevant question
at this point in someone's life.
If they don't have the background
that's ready to accept some of these things,
(56:24):
I shouldn't be talking about this.
I should be talking about Jesus Christ.
Starting with that foundation
and building from there.
Yeah, I think of men of Simon's,
every, everything he wrote
always started with that verse.
There's no other
foundation laid except Jesus Christ.
And he was always saying,
(56:44):
it has to come back to there.
Christ is the foundation
of who we are as Christians
and building from there.
And I was like, it's pretty beautiful.
I think that's Paul and 1
Corinthians writing that.
Yeah, we had this when these last moments,
I wanna bring something home personally.
Here I was almost 50 years ago,
(57:05):
killing people in Cambodia,
taking their lives.
President Nixon at the time saw the opportunity
perhaps for a strategic change in the targeting.
He sent in the B-52s.
I killed the people all in the country of Cambodia.
And then 50 years later,
I see an opportunity through a program,
(57:27):
Christian Aid Ministries,
a program to teach
financial principles to people,
teach them to save money.
And this program also promotes the gospel.
And 50 years after some of
these activities of my own,
I had the opportunity to go into Cambodia,
again, with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Instead of bringing death,
(57:49):
I'm bringing the life-giving truth of the gospel.
And I said to those people,
"Would you forgive me for
what I did to your country?"
And they knew what I was talking about,
most of them, not all of them,
but they said, "Yes, we will."
These are people that knew Jesus Christ.
They said, "Yeah, we know what
you did, but we forgive you."
(58:09):
And to this day, there are still active,
explosives in the ground in their country,
total areas that they don't go in.
Those bombs will be active for 10, 20, 30,
who knows how long, more years,
because they're designed to be that way,
(58:29):
to lay under the surfaces and explode,
anti-personell mines explode when you step on them.
One man there,
tremendous impact on my own life,
with no left arm, no left eye,
and his left leg blown off,
because he stepped on one of these landmines
20 years after the war was over.
And I just had the
(58:49):
opportunity to go hug this man.
He was in shorts with no shirt on,
a poor man, not the same skin color as me,
certainly not the same background.
And I just momentarily hugged that guy.
And I felt this release that,
I'm finally in the right
battle, bringing the gospel.
(59:12):
And there was truth relevant in me,
and I was just so grateful.
I felt, I'm doing what God wants me to do now,
not what the military taught me to kill people,
but to give them life.
Circles back to one of the things you said
towards the beginning of this,
where the world, or the US military, whatever,
(59:33):
you're saying that's the battle right there.
And then Jesus gets ahold of you and says,
"You're fighting the wrong war, it's over here."
I think that story with
Cambodia really illustrates that.
That's powerful.
Wow, thanks for-
Even in here.
Yeah, like, thanks for
sharing that with us today, Vince.
I think that's a powerful
story to leave with our listeners.
(59:54):
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode with Vince.
As mentioned several
times throughout this interview,
he has quite the story of how he was an officer
in the Air Force for 24 years,
and how he ultimately came to Christ
and to the position of non-resistance,
and is now part of the Anabaptists.
We got that whole story in a separate episode,
which you can find linked in
(01:00:14):
the description down below.
I really encourage you to check that out
as it gives a lot more context
for some of the things he said in this episode.
And of course, all our
content is over on our website
at anabaptistperspectives.org.
Thanks again for listening,
and we'll catch you in the next episode.
If I could put it in my own military terminology,
the commander says, "There's the enemy,
there's the direction of the fight."
But a different commander,
Jesus Christ, comes along
and said, "No, that's not the battle.
The battle's over here.
You're fighting a carnal war over here,
but we're fighting a spiritual war.
(00:21):
So I'm fighting the wrong
war with the wrong weapons,
looking for the wrong objectives."
(gentle music)
Vince Lewis, welcome to
the Anabaptist Perspectives podcast.
Thank you, Reagan.
So you had a career in
the Air Force for 24 years.
You had top level security clearance,
(00:43):
you did multiple combat tours.
You were not raised in the Anabaptist world,
and the topic of non-resistance, I think,
was a bit of a challenge for you
as you were joining this way of doing things.
So you're coming from an
environment that is unfamiliar,
I think, to a lot of us
within the Anabaptist world.
(01:04):
And for us, when it comes to
something like non-resistance,
it can be more theory sometimes than reality.
And that's what we wanna get
into today in this episode.
But before we jump into
non-resistance specifically,
is there more context you wanna lay for us
as we get into the topic?
Well, coming from that background,
(01:24):
it's really ingrained in you.
This is the way of life, tradition,
personal experience, training, of course.
The way your thought instructed to think,
all those things are making you a professional,
especially in the pilot corps,
(01:45):
where, as we say, the
whole Air Force that I was in
is there for the pilots.
The maintenance guys,
even the bakers and the cooks
in the kitchen, all over the base,
everybody's there for this handful of pilots.
And so you really get this big ego
and they just keep feeding that
and you're just ready,
(02:06):
you've got this killer instinct
that I'm ready to go when I'm called
and I have this so ingrained in me
that I'm not gonna question these things.
I'm gonna go into this with my full force,
with the training I've had,
and just expend everything I know
in a particular objective with no holds barred.
So I don't say you don't think,
(02:29):
but you have a basis for your thinking
that's gonna probably give you known outcomes
to what someone asks you
to do or tells you to do.
Yeah, and I think that was the piece
that as we were going back and forth,
getting ready for these interviews,
this, like you were really
in this world for a while.
Like you were a commander of a B-52 bomber,
(02:51):
for example, a nuclear capable aircraft
during the Cold War and all of those things.
And again, it's easy to think of non-resistance
as well, that's kind of a theory out there.
Well, we don't go to war and this, that, okay.
But in this, we wanna dig deeper
because you didn't just
wake up one day and be like,
"Oh, I guess I don't really wanna do
(03:12):
this military thing anymore.
I'm sure this was quite a process for you."
So that's what we want to get some of that.
Some of those pieces that had you change
your belief system on this.
So let's start with definitions.
When we say something like non-resistance,
what are we even talking about?
So first, what is it?
But then what is it not as well?
(03:34):
Let's turn that around the other way if we could.
What it's not is it's not peaceful living,
just a life of ease and nobody's bothering me.
And I'm just happy as a clam the way I am.
And it's also, the 1970s really pushed
in what was called the love generation
(03:56):
and the peace movement.
There was a lot of demonstrations going on.
And so you had a huge non-resistance saying,
"I'm not going to cooperate with the government,
whatever they tell me to do.
I'm a rebellious one.
I wanna let you know what I feel.
And if even if my peace movement gets violent,
(04:19):
I'm gonna claim that I'm a peacenik or whatever
the current label is for people."
So it's kind of an
ingrained contradiction of itself
is that people using violence
to bring about a peace movement.
But on the other hand, we have to say,
(04:42):
what does God's word say?
We start there.
Because we're not trying to win an argument
and win over people with, "I can out debate you
and therefore come to a logical conclusion
and convince you that you believe the same way."
And so I have to have more than just feelings.
(05:04):
I can't say, well, in a church environment,
I believe this way because my parents did.
No, this has to be your belief,
not your mom and dad's beliefs,
not your church's belief, but it has to be yours.
And the military uses that same principle,
fighting and combat, that has to be you.
That's your environment,
(05:24):
that's your basis for thinking.
And you go into that thinking you're doing good.
And that is a problem there
and you're taught retaliation
in every way and form.
I'm gonna outthink the enemy.
I've got larger weapons.
I've got better tactics, better training,
better troops and might
(05:45):
makes right is the concept.
America is the big gorilla in the room
ready to make the world right for our cause.
But the other people see it differently.
And maybe we'll go into that a little,
how the different worldviews affect
(06:06):
what we're talking about.
So that's some pieces of like what it isn't,
like what not resistance isn't.
Could you give us
definition of what is non-resistance?
And then I'm gonna add a piece there too.
What do you see as the current thinking
on the topic of non-resistance
within the Anabaptist community?
Kind of bring that into this as well.
(06:27):
Yeah, first of all, non-resistance.
And we look at Scripture for that first of all,
that's obedience to God.
And we're just not cherry
picking a couple of scriptures
out of the Bible as our source,
but we're actually have a
whole compendium of Scripture
that agrees and builds a
(06:49):
structure, not one or two.
Well, we wanna see this
concept throughout Scripture.
So I've really got some truth
that is supporting my position.
So first of all, it's belief in God.
It's also conscientious objection.
That word conscientious means deep thinking
(07:10):
or con- means with, with science.
So I reached this thought
through deliberate thinking
and it's not just my father's religion.
So I have decided this on my
own to conscientiously object.
And one of the things that I, the beauties
that I think comes out of this
(07:32):
is what we call alternative service
where you're actually- hurricanes, tornadoes,
natural disasters and other similar things,
hospital support, those
things are incredibly good.
And I think there's universal agreement on that.
So I say rather than
going out and killing people,
(07:53):
I'm gonna do this
alternative service, which we call it.
And I think you would find
pretty universal agreement
within the Anabaptist community without taking,
they see the logic, the truth behind that,
but you're not walking them through this argument
to get them to believe that.
It's just obvious you go in a hospital
(08:13):
and help someone you're doing good.
You kill them, now that's
a whole different question.
So yeah.
Okay, so we're laying some
groundwork on non-resistance.
I'm gonna throw in an
interesting question for you here.
Why do you find it so difficult
to promote the principle of non-resistance?
(08:36):
Excellent question because it involves,
it could involve a complex answer,
but the military that I was coming from,
I am coming from, that became a culture.
So within the Anabaptist community also,
there is a culture, but now
we have this other culture,
as long as we don't get
(08:57):
involved in other culture,
it's not impacting us so much.
But now we're seeing people sometimes
using computers in ways they didn't use,
watching YouTube videos,
maybe not watching full-length movies,
but the stuff is out there to view.
A totally new thing in the
(09:18):
last 20 years in particular,
that's increasing is social media,
where you're just bombarded with information,
sometimes without choice,
and sometimes without rationalization,
where there's people that are deliberately
putting that forth.
You get children's toys that are war-related,
(09:41):
you get games where you're
just bopping the other enemy
and knocking them into
eternity and those sorts of things
and bashing everything that comes after you.
And so that starts bleeding
into the Anabaptist community,
as it always has, but not with the intensity
that we see today with electronics, with games,
(10:04):
with others, and so the Anabaptist,
you can't plug your ears for that, it's there,
and you've got to consciously deal with it,
or especially the young
people who may not be established
in this, they're more vulnerable to this.
Looking for recognition and acceptance
was a common goal of all of us.
(10:25):
They want that acceptance too.
I've even know of, this second hand really,
a couple of friends know of Anabaptists
that have concealed carry permits
to carry a handgun concealed.
I don't think you've ever
seen anything like that before,
(10:47):
but what caused them to bring that?
You look at the number of gun sales in America,
it's just exploded.
There's videos that give you the belief
that this handgun, this is power.
You feel the weight of that and it feels good,
and someday, somebody,
you're gonna need this thing.
(11:08):
Well, no, you're not gonna need it,
because when you look at statistics,
the people even that carry concealed weapons,
and I used to carry a concealed weapon,
they never end up using it,
but they always have this mindset
that there's just threat out there
that means I may use this weapon.
And where did that mindset come from?
They didn't get it from
(11:29):
within the Anabaptist community,
which is to see how it's
bleeding in and affecting,
especially the vulnerable youth.
Yeah, I think that's one
that's kind of blown my mind.
I've started hearing about
that in the last couple years.
It's like, yeah, like,
"Mennonite young guys,"
or whatever, going and
getting their concealed carry,
(11:49):
or keeping a loaded handgun in their truck,
well, just in case, you never know.
I'm like, "What are you
gonna use that for exactly?"
Well, and then you just kind of smile,
and then I'm like, "Wait a minute.
I thought you're part of a church
that doesn't believe in killing people.
I mean, that seems pretty clear to me."
Well, and just this kind of thing,
I just can't really get my head around that.
(12:10):
And I think you're onto something there
that it didn't come from
inside the churches necessarily.
And there has to be
culture influencing coming in.
Right, right.
So you get to a position,
and we may go into this looking at some
of the Scriptural support.
I say, either you've got
(12:30):
three avenues in general.
Either don't believe the Bible,
you make your own interpretation,
and pick out favorite Scriptures.
So you're making your own interpretation,
or you believe the Bible.
And since I believe it, and I know you do too,
it's not just established
(12:51):
on some ethereal beliefs,
but it's actually built on a
book that is so intertwined,
and a book- there isn't
anything like it on earth-
that you can go in and find
multiple agreeing Sriptures
on non-resistance, for example.
And you're pulling from a
(13:11):
book where it's the entire Bible,
66 books, and the amazing thing
is every one of those 66 books agrees
with the other 65 books
in an intertwined message.
It's very difficult to defeat that
if you're willing to look at it and study it.
(13:33):
Even on your own, you're
gonna find some of these things.
So that gets me to the next question I had then,
because obviously you took a huge leap
from where you used to be,
as commander of the B-52,
and a bunch of other stuff
you did in the Air Force,
to this belief system.
(13:53):
Now you were an officer,
and I can imagine being an Air Force officer
if you read something like,
"Turn the other cheek," or "Love your enemies."
I can imagine that wasn't
very easy for you to accept
while you were in the Air Force.
Talk to me about that.
You're getting down to a
very serious point in my life,
(14:14):
a pivotal point where I
either had to turn away from it,
just passively agree with it, or buy into it.
My wife will tell you that I examine everything.
I wanna know where its
boundaries, its definitions are.
I wanna research a concept deeply,
almost like a mathematical concept.
(14:35):
I wanna know what's behind this thing.
And then once I do, I buy into it.
So I faced a real problem with this.
It's a very difficult problem.
You've got 40 years of Department of Defense
and active duty military,
and even a couple of years as a cadet.
All that two thirds of my
(14:55):
adult life is absorbing this.
And now I'm accustomed to,
if you tell me to turn the other cheek,
I said, "Well, if you slap me,
I'm slapping you back twice as hard."
Because that retaliation,
get back at the bad guy or
the guy that's oppressing you.
So retaliate, and you're faced with that.
(15:18):
And so that commonly used term
of retaliation versus non-resistance
is that's just a contradiction.
So I needed something to really buy,
I won't say buy into that,
that's cheap term perhaps,
but really grab this
(15:39):
concept to where it's part of me.
So through a set of circumstances,
I met a man who's Anabaptist like I am,
and it was kind of by accident.
I was looking for somebody else,
and he could tell I was kind of down,
and he says, "What's going on?"
I said, "Well, I was supposed to find Kenneth,
(16:03):
and he was gonna talk about non-resistance,
but Kenneth isn't here.
He had some kind of a medical problem."
They took him, and Todd Boone said,
"Well, what did you want to talk to him about?"
I said, "About non-resistance."
I said, "You know, I can't get past this point.
We're looking at membership.
We really like what we see,
(16:23):
Scripturally with fellowship,
with the family concept of a community
working together for a common purpose.
And yet, I'm up against this wall."
And really, it was a wall.
And so Todd says,
"Well, sit down, let's go through some things."
And in my words,
(16:45):
I believe that God through the Holy Spirit
was guiding Todd into something.
So the first thing he picked was a concept
that isn't talked about much,
and a lot of Christians
maybe even haven't heard of,
that is based on Scripture captured by Colossians 1:13
(17:07):
He's translated me,
and God has translated me
out of the kingdom of darkness
into the kingdom of God's dear Son.
So, wait a minute, you know what I'm saying?
There's two kingdoms.
There's a kingdom of darkness.
I know there's a devil, and I know there's God,
but God has set up two kingdoms.
And when you begin to look
(17:29):
at Scripture through that,
in particular in the New Testament,
Romans 8:1, "For the law of the spirit of life
made me free from the law of sin and death."
So there's governing laws within,
and that's just one example
of this dual kingdom concept.
So I went into that,
and it was really enforced
(17:51):
by the Scripture that said,
"We wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers,
the rulers of the darkness of this world,
and spiritual wickedness in high places."
And that Scripture basically says to me,
if I could put it in my own military terminology,
(18:12):
the commander says, "There's the enemy.
There's the direction of the fight."
But a different commander, Jesus Christ,
comes along and said, "No, that's not the battle.
The battle's over here.
You're fighting a carnal war over here,
but we're fighting a spiritual war.
And I see that now we've got two kingdoms
(18:32):
that are really opposed to each other.
One's gonna end up with God.
One's gonna end up in the kingdom of darkness,
which is based on demonic, the devil himself,
and all that rebellious concept
ending up in different eternities.
And so we say even the weapons of our warfare
(18:53):
are not carnal.
And I've flown B-52s in particular
with nuclear weapons on board thinking,
this is the ultimate weapon.
And yet Scripture says the weapons of our warfare
are not carnal, any earthly, but mighty.
They're mightier than those things.
So I'm fighting the wrong
(19:13):
war with the wrong weapons,
looking for the wrong objectives.
And Todd went through this
and other Scriptures too,
too many to bring in here, but it said,
wow, this is not how I was raised.
I was raised, all my toys
had to do with military.
When I built plastic airplane models,
(19:36):
they weren't models of airlines,
they were models of combat aircraft.
And so you're just feeding on this stuff
and it just becomes part of you.
Patriotism was a wonderful thing
and military people were
just edified throughout society
as they still are today.
And they were the heroes of the day.
(19:57):
They rescued us from evil
as we saw in our approach.
If you look at it from American perspective is,
we're always right and the enemy is the guy
that's always wrong.
But I'd say from a world perspective,
what then is the enemy's view of us?
(20:19):
The enemy is gonna think they're right
and we're the ones that are wrong.
So you have this natural
opposition of who's right
and who's wrong and you get into doctrines
that'll support that belief, making,
hey, it's all right to go to war.
And some of those things maybe we can get into.
(20:40):
I don't know if you wanna discuss those now, but.
Well, I was gonna say, you talk about Scripture
and supporting
non-resistance and all of these things,
but I'm sure there are
people listening or whatever
that would very much disagree with this.
Like, what do you say to those people
(21:01):
that dispute what you're saying?
Here's as far as this is the case of S cripture.
Yeah, dig into a little bit of that
because I'm sure you had
to wrestle with that too.
I'm sure you heard the argument,
so, oh no, this is the right thing to do.
The war machine, whatever
is the right thing to do.
Yeah, talk to me about that.
So if my beliefs are based
(21:21):
on God and God's morality,
then you have to know what he says.
And so if I'm dealing with someone
that has no knowledge of the Bible,
I have to take a different approach to them.
The starting point is totally different.
If I'm talking to a believer in Jesus Christ,
what we call a Christian, a true Christian,
(21:43):
I've got a basis, a common basis
to now go into Scripture and
show them particular passages.
But a totally non-Christian is
not gonna buy into this thing
because this country is about patriotism.
And I've tell you, even the churches in America
support patriotism.
(22:05):
On Memorial Day, I've gone into
conservative Christian churches, even.
The guests, the veterans, put on your uniform
from when you were in the service.
And we'll have a ceremony where we're bringing
the American flag up the center aisle
and posting it on the
stand with the Christian flag
(22:26):
on one side and the
American flag on the other side.
And we might even stand there and say,
I pledge allegiance to the
flag of the United States
and to the Republic for which it stands.
You could tell I've been through this a few times
and might even sing some songs from those things,
the national anthem, songs
(22:48):
like that, patriotic songs.
And so the two are so intertwined
that even if the person is a Christian,
they're gonna have a problem with that
because their churches talk like that.
But you ask the church people,
they don't usually face the dual kingdom,
they don't usually face questioning that.
And so you come from a whole
(23:09):
different decision-making basis.
You've got to overcome.
They have their culture.
And I had to make my
transition out of that culture
into what I know to be scriptural culture.
And I can prove it.
And I have support and I
don't have to question it
because it's not my opinion, it's God's opinion
(23:30):
which comes to me through my-
my belief in Jesus Christ,
my belief in the Scriptures
that God brought us through the Holy Spirit
inspiring great writers of the world
over the thousands of years,
writing a common theme, a common message
pointing to just one God.
(23:50):
And so you have a different basis of thinking
that I'm coming from.
So yeah, it's a lot to overcome in some cases
where that's the way we grew up.
And so that you're overcoming.
When I was talking to your wife yesterday,
she mentioned how y'all
were at a Christian conference
(24:12):
and how you were sitting there just like,
oh, things were starting to click
and something to the effect of the Bible
is almost like a flight manual or something.
You're like, this is God's instructions
on how we should live and things.
Do you wanna get into that example?
And we have some of your old flight manuals here.
And I'm curious,
because I think that's
relevant to what you've been saying
(24:32):
about the scriptural support of these things.
How does that affect how we live and so forth?
Yeah, you wanna get into that a bit.
Yeah, I do.
I brought these for that specific purpose.
There's three of the four
different aircraft I flew have.
I brought their flight crew checklist.
It's called the
abbreviated flight crew checklist.
(24:54):
And they're all common throughout every airplane
in the Air Force.
They have these black bordered pages like this
that have a little E and a border.
Those are emergency procedures.
And this is what you had to know.
Even to the point, these are
(25:14):
supported by volumes of things,
some of which we carried
around in a big, heavy bag.
But it comes down to this.
And this even has things
that had to be memorized.
And it's like S cripture.
And you would look at a big airplane.
Here's a one from a B-52G, a
(25:36):
massive airplane that I flew.
Has that same thing, the hatched pages.
And these had to be ready
because when the emergency arose,
you don't get out these big manuals
to start paging through them.
And where is that thing, that procedure,
on how to put out an engine fire?
Now this thing came out of you.
(25:57):
It was second nature.
And that's God's word.
You have this not just,
well, let me go look it up
and I'll get back with you.
At least the initial top level comes out of you.
And so you have that same
pillars, that similar structure.
I've got a pillar that supports my belief,
(26:18):
just like I've got volumes of books
that bring it down to this.
When I'm operating that
aircraft and I have an emergency,
these things better come out of me.
And I was thrown in simulators, tested with this.
Sometimes you would get
these no-notice on-the-spot
(26:39):
questions from the commander, hey Vince,
tell me what you would do in this situation.
Even to the point when we were students,
they would maybe walk up
to you, a commander says,
you know, I wanna ask you a question.
You know that the emergency procedures
for a canopy blows off in flight
or emergency blow down and landing gear,
(27:02):
which don't come down when you go to land
and you run into that emergency.
He was expecting you to know that
and that was part of your job.
Just like a mechanic knows
how to take a part of carburetor
on a car or various parts of it.
I had to know how to do this so much
that it just came out of me naturally.
(27:22):
Hmm, that goes back to when Peter is writing
in the New Testament and
says, be ready to give an answer
or basically it's the sense of,
you should know what you
believe and like understand it
and be able to explain it to someone else
when people ask you
questions so that you can give them,
here's the reason for the hope that's in you
as he writes and there's
(27:43):
other things in that passage.
Seems like that's what you're getting at here.
Right, right.
Be ready always.
It's nice if you got a Bible with you
and you got someone that is
patiently dialoguing with you
with an open mind, listening to what you have.
(28:03):
But there's those people almost say,
you just run into on the
street that'll challenge you.
They may see the way you're dressed
or my wife wears a cap, a
head covering all the time.
And people will ask her,
well, what is that for?
And why do you believe in that?
(28:24):
And what's that symbolized?
And I'm expected to at least have,
we don't all wear beards,
but people will quickly pick up
on you're not like everybody else.
So expect you to be able
to walk them through that.
And like I said, it's gotta be ingrained in you.
The hope that's within me,
(28:44):
the hope in Jesus Christ.
So I'm gonna pivot a bit
because when we're talking about non-resistance,
one thing people seem to default to a lot
is hypothetical scenarios
or they'll give these challenges of well,
but what about this?
(29:04):
What about that?
And so far you've been saying,
hey, this is how you came to this belief.
Here's some Scripture, here's the framework.
But then people would be like, well, yeah, but,
let me try to poke a hole in
that by giving this situation.
Talk me through those.
Because that's a different type of approach.
That's a common attack against this theology
(29:25):
by taking a common situation
and making it a question which is almost
getting down to a yes, no question.
And I would say anytime you see a yes, no,
an either or question,
either you choose this path or this path.
(29:46):
It's like saying, I don't wanna sound too crude,
but have you stopped kicking your dog yet?
Well, there's no right answer to that question.
Either way, you're wrong or you're guilty.
So someone presents a scenario,
the most I've ever heard
of either to me or others,
is someone kicks in your front door
(30:07):
and starts attacking your wife.
What are you gonna do?
And my first question is, is this a scenario
you actually know of or is this
something you've just made up?
And my first answer, which I certainly
am not going to have time
to give in a real situation,
(30:28):
but in this hypothetical situation,
it's gonna have to be, what does the Bible say?
And let's even take what the Bible says
and put it in practical application
because I know you're trying to trap me
with these either or questions,
which undeniably, it keeps
the person asking the question.
(30:49):
It keeps them in control of the discussion.
So you're already at a disadvantage.
And you just go on and on that these are not
logical questions.
They're actually illogical if
you look at them objectively
and they're a trap and they're trying to get you
(31:09):
to agree with them.
And what are they after ultimately?
Not just disproving you, but to disparage God
through you and through
winning an argument with you.
And you go, I don't know what to say.
Well, maybe I'll have to agree with you.
Yeah, some of these things,
(31:30):
but there's a lot of things that you can do.
And if I could just take a
moment to go into some of those.
Yeah, yeah, I'd like you to do that
because this is first thing typically
when my militaristic friends or whatever,
you'd find out, oh, you
don't believe in war well then.
What about this?
And they'll use some example from whatever.
(31:51):
And it can shut down the
conversation pretty quick
because it's like, well, oh boy.
So if you go down that street,
yeah, you do end up in a corner someplace.
But like you said,
I'm thinking of one scenario that happened to me.
I was like, the situation he was outlining
based on a past experience I had
was so ridiculously illogical that it was just,
I mean, there's no way that would ever happen.
(32:12):
But he just kept pushing it in a certain way
to try to get me to say,
oh yeah, that's right,
non-resistance wouldn't work
in that situation or whatever.
It's like, well, the
reality is that would never happen
in real life.
It's just totally ridiculous situation.
So what are alternatives
when people do bring these
kinds of things up and says,
well, you believe in non-resistance?
(32:32):
Well, what about this?
What are some alternative
responses you can give them?
Well, I might start first with saying,
all these situations are different
and you put me in a situation like this.
I don't know all the information there.
You just said there's an attacker and a victim.
Well, is it day?
Is it night?
Is there a policeman standing behind you?
(32:55):
Or are you out in a farm environment?
Or are there houses all around you
where you know that this guy's
not gonna maybe risk too much?
But initially, my first thought is to flee
the environment, run away.
I've told my wife, if
somebody were to do something,
(33:16):
here's the door to get out and
here's where you're gonna go.
I'm running away from the
situation in a way to react that.
So another thing is
somebody in a situation like that
is usually after something.
There's no purpose to them in just coming,
kicking in the door and beating up someone
(33:39):
and they're after something.
Maybe your wallet, maybe you've got money
somewhere in the house.
I say, give it to them.
Your life is not worth your wallet, men,
or your purse women.
And that money you may have
stashed in a drawer somewhere,
let them have it.
(33:59):
And yet, you may get,
through satisfaction through that,
you may have to go beyond that.
Not only what are you looking for,
but offer them something else.
My wife's sick, you're
really doing something wrong.
How about, what are you after here?
(34:19):
And not maybe that clean.
Think of it, you're trying to
say, is there something else?
You're really after, what can I give you
to solve your basic need?
So I'm presenting him with an alternative.
And maybe too, I would
jump in between the attacker
and the victim.
So he's attacking me instead of someone weaker
(34:42):
than I am to protect them.
And this way, I'm not
attacking him with resistance
the way he's attacking me or someone that I love.
I'm blocking what he's
doing, just standing there,
giving the other person
protection or a chance to flee
while I'm engaging the enemy,
(35:02):
almost like a military thing where I'm doing
a strategic withdrawal to avoid,
to get out of the range of your horrible guns.
I'm getting back from the threat really.
And if we look at many others that we say,
(35:23):
if I think this through,
I know what I'm gonna do,
like an emergency procedure.
But if I wait for the situation to arise,
I may not know what to do.
In fact, in some situations,
the answer to a question
like that is, I don't know.
I don't know what I would do.
The body in all of us has
(35:44):
a natural reflex action.
Somebody throws a ball at you or a rock.
You just unconsciously put
your hand up to block that.
That's an instinct in your body.
You didn't get that instinct by deciding on that,
but it's a natural instinct.
And you may flinch, you may trigger some emotion
(36:06):
in the attacker by
flinching, but there are things
we're just not sure what we're gonna do.
But in general, what's the real environment?
What's the truth of the situation?
And taking some of this other alternatives.
And you have to admit, it may not work.
There are times where it's gonna break down.
You're not gonna succeed,
(36:27):
but there are alternatives
other than attack the attacker or get killed.
Those aren't the alternatives.
So yeah, complex question- answer-
to a simple question,
you might say.
But it's really real,
because I think in the
conversations I've had at least,
that tends to be the one challenge for people.
(36:48):
It's like, but what about if
I get attacked or something,
and that can be a real struggle point.
Yeah, I think you had a good piece there.
It may not always like, quote unquote, work,
or it might, these things are messy,
and but still have to come
back to what is the flight manual,
so to speak, like what does scripture tell us?
(37:08):
Like what does Jesus want us to do?
Bring it back to that.
Okay, so we were just
talking about really zoomed in
on hypothetical situations
and in our individual lives.
I wanna zoom it out now really wide.
History is full of a lot of famous warriors.
What are some thoughts
(37:29):
that they've had about war?
People that have experienced
this, lead armies, et cetera.
Give us some quotes.
I know you've done some digging on this.
Yeah, tell us about some of that.
I took some notes that really,
I was prepared to give some of these.
And let me draw on some of these specifically,
because in a few cases,
the quotes are really
lengthy and well thought out
(37:51):
by some members of history
that I think everyone looks on.
There was a British writer called Sidney Smith.
He said, "God is forgotten in war.
"Every principle of
Christianity is trampled upon."
And I think if you look at
that closely, yeah, it is.
And I've had experience in war.
I've actually, looking at my past,
(38:14):
and we didn't go into that,
but I've dropped bombs that killed people.
And they didn't just kill enemy soldiers.
They killed non-combatants or civilians.
Let's personalize this.
There were babies.
There were somebody's
aunt or uncle or grandfather.
(38:34):
There was maybe an invalid or something.
"I'm sorry, that's just part of war.
And they shouldn't have
been there in the first place.
Too bad for them.
The mindset is, we're killing enemy soldiers
for the cause of good."
And that's my mindset.
And I may even joke about some of this.
(38:55):
After dropping bombs on a particular target,
I remember many situations,
we turned back to the home base.
And I would say something like,
"I wonder what they're having for dinner
"at the officers club."
And yet, those bombs are still on the way down
for a number of seconds in the time of fall.
And you see the contradiction
(39:17):
of what's happening for real on the ground
as a 750-pound bomb is just
obliterating a certain radius.
And I'm telling you, killing
grass and trees and animals
and people no doubt,
and destruction just raining within that.
Yet I have no conscience towards that
because I'm winning the war for good
(39:38):
and they're the bad guys.
And so deal with that and take care of them
so we lose more of them than we lose.
And that's that mindset.
So you look at some of these things--
A numbing to the effects almost, right?
That's exactly right.
You're flying at, what, 20,000 feet
and it's just a bunch of jungle down there.
And in reality, the concept
(40:02):
is the end justifies the means.
So the end objective is victory.
How I get there doesn't matter.
Where in fact, it ought
to be the other way around.
The means of getting there justifies the end.
So that I don't just see this concept
(40:22):
that there's no morality
when you're going at the enemy
because, and you know, I hate to admit it,
but clear evidence that we've
done some of the same things
to the enemy that he's done to us.
You mean like the American
military machine, essentially?
And there's clear evidence.
(40:42):
And you see some of that
in a lot of famous quotes.
Yeah, continue on that, yeah.
So this is William Tecumseh Sherman.
He was one of the main generals in the Civil War
and he was given orders to
take out a particular route
(41:02):
from the South in the Civil War.
And that was between Atlanta and Savannah.
And it was called Sherman's March to the Sea.
And he used a concept called scorched earth
where you have the enemy in front of you
and you're knocking them
out, you're killing them.
(41:23):
But as you pass through his territory,
you're obliterating everything behind you.
His, maybe even the people, women, children,
the infirm, those behind you.
You're burning their houses,
you're burning their crops,
you're killing their cows and their horses,
the chickens, you name it.
(41:45):
And that's called scorched earth.
There's nothing usable and Sherman did this.
And the Library of Congress contains documents,
two letters from Lincoln
that told Sherman to do that.
Let me tell you what he
says after all this career
that he's had.
He says, "I confess without shame
that I am tired and sick of war.
(42:07):
It is only those who have neither heard a shot
nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded.
It is only they who cry for more blood,
who cry for more vengeance and more desolation."
And he ends up with this
famous little three word concept
that I've heard so many times, war is hell.
(42:30):
And here's a man that went through all this.
He gets to the conclusion.
He looks back on what he
did to the tens of thousands
of people that the most
costly war in our history,
about 610,000 men of our own
country killed in that war.
And he looks back on
those, this with those words,
Napoleon famous historical figure, French,
(42:52):
the emperor of France, he says,
"The more I study war,
the more I study the world,
the more I am convinced of the inability
or brute force to create anything durable."
And here he was a master of brute force.
And he's admitting in his summation that,
"You know, when you put it all together,
(43:15):
we're really unable to reach our objective."
And we say, we could maybe
go into some combat theory
and things of that nature.
And he basically says,
"Taking everything that I have
and looking at all the
kinds of warfare I've been,
(43:36):
there is no way to bring
about any durable objective.
War begets war."
As we look back on history,
one war doesn't solve anything.
We've looked at the war to end all wars.
That was World War I.
And what did World War II follow 10 years later
(43:57):
than World War I?
Here's World War II, right
back doing the same thing
with some of the same enemies
using more cruel tactics and
everything, since this is it.
And we get through this
and Hitler and all his armies
are done for, and we will be victorious
marching through Europe, proclaiming our might
(44:20):
and our right, and that's it.
But then you look at the wars that follow,
the regional wars, all the
wars of areas surrounding that.
It's estimated, for example, 20 million people,
mostly civilians, about two to one ratio,
sometimes three to one ratio of civilians
over military combatants died through things
(44:42):
like forced migrations,
direct killing by the weapons
intended for soldiers that actually brought into
or spilled over into the
homes and the civilian communities
and took a lot of them out to forced migration,
starvation, sickness and disease,
(45:04):
and all those things that
some of our people even did.
You get angry at a soldier
and just summarily shoot him.
I'm so angry at this guy.
I'm not gonna let him just be hauled off
into a prison or war camp.
I'm gonna take care of this guy right now.
(45:24):
They did that to us, and many times
we had angry men that saw
their buddy next to him shot,
and I'm just gonna get you in anger
and summarily shoot the man and take out his life
because of anger and the venom that's within us
to retaliate, to deal with that.
(45:46):
And we have names for these people.
I won't even repeat derogatory names, ugly names,
because that's how we envision these guys,
almost as venomous snakes ready to attack us,
and we've got to deal with
those guys in any way we can,
so we take them out.
Let me hear British Duke of Wellington.
(46:07):
He was Napoleon's arch enemy.
He said, "War is the most detestable thing
"if you had seen but one day of war,
"you would pray, God, that
you might never see another."
And so here's the men that led the armies
that did these things, and
then they're coming to the end,
(46:28):
and in summation they're saying,
"This isn't what I thought it was.
"War is hell," like Tecumseh said.
And these are guys that are proving
those concepts in reality.
That's kind of wild.
I mean, you have Napoleon and
Wellington both saying that.
If I remember my history right,
those were the two that
(46:48):
fought at the Battle of Waterloo.
And they both come away
from their military careers
saying things like that.
That's kind of, that makes you think.
Napoleon is regarded as one of the greatest,
perhaps the greatest general of all time,
and he gets to the end of all this and says,
"Didn't really accomplish much,"
(47:09):
which is kind of mind blowing to me.
And if anybody would be
qualified to make a declaration
like that, it seems like someone like him
would have seen enough to know, yeah, wow.
Okay, so I'm gonna bring this
back down to you and your life.
What is the personal benefit
to a stand on non-resistance?
(47:30):
Well, first of all, I'm pleasing God
because I'm following his word.
There is joy that comes through pleasing God
and knowing that you're doing,
and knowing that you're
doing an alternative service.
And amongst so many things,
there's a clear conscience.
(47:51):
I don't have this thing.
Many, many men after war have committed suicide
because they couldn't bring themselves,
or post-traumatic stress disorder,
as we're seeing so much today in war,
shell shock, injuries and
things that are horrible.
And this says, "I don't want that.
(48:11):
"I have a better way.
"I will serve you.
"I won't just ignore you and be a peacenick.
I will actually support your
being and your position in God
with a Christian approach that says,
"I'm out to benefit you, not to kill you.
"So I've got this whole
mindset that's different."
(48:31):
If I can bring him to understand that,
I think I could win over a friend
or whatever attack I'm getting.
Let me show you an alternative.
What do you think about going in a hospital
and helping sick and the injured and the infirm,
giving food, digging water wells
in third-world countries that don't have access
(48:53):
to clean water?
Let me demonstrate to you a different way.
I think that's how you win hearts of people
as they begin to see there's a better way
than just wiping out your enemy.
And we justify these things.
There's some macro theories that we talk about
like Augustine, who is a great philosopher
(49:14):
and church member, one of the early men
in some of the churches
right after Christ's death
on the cross, about 300 or 400 AD,
he said, he presented a concept called just war,
just warfare, justified warfare,
meaning if the outcome is good,
(49:37):
if that's an enemy in that enemy,
as we've seen in many of our years in the back,
communism, we gotta defeat
communism because this is evil.
So that's what we call wars of liberation.
We're freeing those that are oppressed.
Certainly that is good.
But what you define or someone defines
(49:58):
as a war of liberation to
you is not a war of liberation.
Their definition of war of liberation
is defeating this evil America
who's imposing their beliefs on us.
And we wanted to just live
in our religious mentality
and in our country and be free.
(50:18):
So we're gonna take out Americans.
So you've got these opposing
what we would call worldviews.
What is the definition of right?
In fact, who is right in this scenario?
In World War II, the
Japanese said, they're right.
And then we said, we're right.
Even to the point where we killed thousands
(50:42):
and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.
And on the other hand, we virtually wasted
some of our own young men's lives
and a couple hundred thousand.
Really when you look at some of the wars
after World War II in particular,
(51:02):
but we even had cases where we sent,
we lost 5,000 young men attacking an island
in the North Pacific that there were Japanese on.
It was up a slanted beach.
The Japanese were entrenched
and they were just mowing down our men.
And the commanders were sending wave upon wave
(51:24):
thinking we're softening the enemy,
we're getting objective, yet we lost 5,000.
You know that that island
that we lost 5,000 young men on,
that was not even in the path
of the battle coming
across from the United States
over towards Japan.
We just wasted, wasted young men's lives.
(51:47):
And that was somebody's point bringing that home.
And if that person knew
their son's life was just wasted
and terrible things like that are happening
that maybe you've seen the ugly side of war.
Maybe it's not so clean and sterile and surgical.
(52:08):
See surgical strikes as they call them,
go in and just pinpoint this target
and just kill these couple of people.
And don't worry about the
others that get killed around them.
But they have sons and
daughters too, as we do too.
So you get this justifying these wars.
We're liberating people.
We're doing right and some people are saying
(52:31):
and some of these crusades in history,
we're doing right by God's will.
We're glorifying God by
slaughtering these whole nations
and justifying that as good in this,
maybe even religious
mentality that supports this belief.
(52:52):
So back in 1973, you were deployed
to do those bombing missions over Cambodia
during the Vietnam war.
If you could go back in time and say something
to a young Vince Lewis,
who was doing those missions at the time,
is there anything you'd say to him?
(53:12):
I think you're gonna be
surprised at the answer to this.
My answer is I would say nothing to him
because I'm not gonna defeat him.
He's a warrior.
He's a man that he bleeds combat.
I'm not gonna walk up to him
and I'm not even gonna win a logical argument.
(53:34):
Without a basis of God and Christianity,
you're almost wasting your time.
If you'd have brought any
of these concepts to me,
I'd have laughed at you
saying, this is a nutcase.
Get him out of here
because I had the wrong mindset.
So no matter what I'm telling this guy,
if somebody had brought that to Vince Lewis,
(53:56):
I'd have just said, what's wrong with this guy?
Get him out of here.
He's destroying the morale of our troops
or he's trying to take away my position
as a warrior for good.
And people might say, oh,
that wasn't what I was expecting
in an answer to a question like that.
(54:18):
It may have even surprised you,
but I'd say I'm not gonna say anything to him.
I think that shows though,
how much of a change has happened in your life
since that time?
I was the guy on the other end,
looking at that person, that insane person
with these strange ideas.
(54:39):
Yeah, I was that person.
Wow, makes you think.
It does.
It does.
So as we wrap this up and
bring this episode to a close,
I'm guessing there are people listening to this
that are struggling with this.
Perhaps they're active
members in one of the armed forces
(55:00):
or something else,
and they're struggling with this non-resistance.
And maybe something else you shared.
What would you like to leave with those people?
We get people in situations like this
where you're witnessing to someone
and you present this gospel message to them.
(55:22):
What is their basis of thinking?
What is their mindset?
I would say, what am I gonna say to them?
I'm not gonna talk to them about non-resistance.
There's another answer that
maybe someone doesn't expect.
I'm gonna talk to them about Jesus Christ,
because if they don't have that mindset,
no matter what I'm telling them is,
they're gonna, where did you get that?
(55:43):
That's contrary to the American way.
I wasn't raised with that kind of thinking.
So I'm almost wasting my time.
I'm not really wasting my time,
but I'm using a very ineffective.
I need to get this man or this woman
to the knowledge of Jesus Christ,
because they don't have that.
Non-resistance means nothing.
(56:04):
I've just won a logical argument with these facts
that don't approach and don't
deal with the heart condition.
So that's almost an irrelevant question
at this point in someone's life.
If they don't have the background
that's ready to accept some of these things,
(56:24):
I shouldn't be talking about this.
I should be talking about Jesus Christ.
Starting with that foundation
and building from there.
Yeah, I think of men of Simon's,
every, everything he wrote
always started with that verse.
There's no other
foundation laid except Jesus Christ.
And he was always saying,
(56:44):
it has to come back to there.
Christ is the foundation
of who we are as Christians
and building from there.
And I was like, it's pretty beautiful.
I think that's Paul and 1
Corinthians writing that.
Yeah, we had this when these last moments,
I wanna bring something home personally.
Here I was almost 50 years ago,
(57:05):
killing people in Cambodia,
taking their lives.
President Nixon at the time saw the opportunity
perhaps for a strategic change in the targeting.
He sent in the B-52s.
I killed the people all in the country of Cambodia.
And then 50 years later,
I see an opportunity through a program,
(57:27):
Christian Aid Ministries,
a program to teach
financial principles to people,
teach them to save money.
And this program also promotes the gospel.
And 50 years after some of
these activities of my own,
I had the opportunity to go into Cambodia,
again, with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Instead of bringing death,
(57:49):
I'm bringing the life-giving truth of the gospel.
And I said to those people,
"Would you forgive me for
what I did to your country?"
And they knew what I was talking about,
most of them, not all of them,
but they said, "Yes, we will."
These are people that knew Jesus Christ.
They said, "Yeah, we know what
you did, but we forgive you."
(58:09):
And to this day, there are still active,
explosives in the ground in their country,
total areas that they don't go in.
Those bombs will be active for 10, 20, 30,
who knows how long, more years,
because they're designed to be that way,
(58:29):
to lay under the surfaces and explode,
anti-personell mines explode when you step on them.
One man there,
tremendous impact on my own life,
with no left arm, no left eye,
and his left leg blown off,
because he stepped on one of these landmines
20 years after the war was over.
And I just had the
(58:49):
opportunity to go hug this man.
He was in shorts with no shirt on,
a poor man, not the same skin color as me,
certainly not the same background.
And I just momentarily hugged that guy.
And I felt this release that,
I'm finally in the right
battle, bringing the gospel.
(59:12):
And there was truth relevant in me,
and I was just so grateful.
I felt, I'm doing what God wants me to do now,
not what the military taught me to kill people,
but to give them life.
Circles back to one of the things you said
towards the beginning of this,
where the world, or the US military, whatever,
(59:33):
you're saying that's the battle right there.
And then Jesus gets ahold of you and says,
"You're fighting the wrong war, it's over here."
I think that story with
Cambodia really illustrates that.
That's powerful.
Wow, thanks for-
Even in here.
Yeah, like, thanks for
sharing that with us today, Vince.
I think that's a powerful
story to leave with our listeners.
(59:54):
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode with Vince.
As mentioned several
times throughout this interview,
he has quite the story of how he was an officer
in the Air Force for 24 years,
and how he ultimately came to Christ
and to the position of non-resistance,
and is now part of the Anabaptists.
We got that whole story in a separate episode,
which you can find linked in
(01:00:14):
the description down below.
I really encourage you to check that out
as it gives a lot more context
for some of the things he said in this episode.
And of course, all our
content is over on our website
at anabaptistperspectives.org.
Thanks again for listening,
and we'll catch you in the next episode.
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