Adam W. Miller Speaks on PEACE

If the Church of God has anything like an elder statesman these days, Adam W. Miller would be it. Dr. Miller is now retired from the more active phases of a ministry that took him to Japan as a missionary, to Washington, DC, and Baltimore as a pastor, into college and seminary teaching, into writing and editing, and into church administrative work with the Missionary Board, Anderson College, and the School of Theology. He is widely influential.

Dr. Miller was my academic adviser and major professor in college, and I have worked with him closely across the years since then. So I have been aware of peace as one of his major concerns. But I was never aware of just how deeply intertwined into his whole life fabric was this concern until we talked the other day.
Peace became a personal issue with him, he told me, when he was a young man in his first pastorate at Baltimore. He was 21 then, with only the equivalent of a high school education. He was working full-time in an office and also serving the church as pastor. In August, 1918, the World War I draft caught him. He had registered as a conscientious objector. There were no provisions for alternative service or official church-related channels to aid objectors as in the country's later wars.

Adam Miller's stand as a conscientious objector grew out of his personal study of the Bible and the high place given to the sacredness of life found there. The whole direction of the New Testament, it seemed to him, was to move away from violence and toward more caring, more sensitive, more peaceful relationships. He found there principles of love, forgiveness, and obedience to divine law above civil law. He was supported in this by what he was reading in The Gospel Trumpet.

Consistent support appeared in The Gospel Trumpet for the consciences of those who would choose not to join in military efforts. For example, E. E. Byrum, editor of the Trumpet, wrote an answer to a reader's question: "If I were called to war, should I go and at the officer's command shoot down my brothers or friends?" Byrum answered, "I should refuse to go to war or to obey an officer's order to shoot anyone. We are followers of the Prince of Peace and the weapons of our warfare are not carnal."

Then in 1916, with the war spreading through Europe, editor F. G. Smith wrote a reply to this question: "Is it wrong to be a soldier?" Smith answered, "It is wrong to kill people… War is cruel, and devastation, with foul murder, disease, destruction of property, breaking of homes, follows its tracks, leaving the land strewn with dead bodies of the best talent the country can afford; and starving widows and fatherless children continue to partake of the miseries that follow in the wake of war. There are no humane bullets. Jesus Christ said, 'Love your enemies.' He did not say shoot them. He set forth the spirit of arbitration in Matthew 5:23-26, which principle will apply to nations as well as to individuals."

A printed statement had been issued as a religious war-exemption claim on behalf of the Church of God by the Missionary Board when the wartime draft was initiated. It stated that the standard literature of the Church of God had for many years emphasized the sacredness of human life and that participation in war was inconsistent with the principles of the church. This was signed by the Board's executive committee-F. G. Smith, E. E. Byrum and J. W. Phelps.

So it was that the young Adam Miller registered as a conscientious objector. His congregation sought to keep him out of the army because he was the pastor of their church. The draft board, however, noted that he was also employed full-time in an office, and so refused to grant him a pastoral exemption.

The draftee was assigned to a unit preparing to go overseas. The 21-year-old captain called Adam in to interview him regarding his pacifist views. As a result, he was assigned to a post as company clerk. "I felt that I gained the captain's respect," said Dr. Miller, "as well as the respect of the men in my company, who knew my views and who knew that I was a preacher."

After the war, incidentally, that captain wrote to Adam from Oklahoma where he was establishing an automobile agency and asked him to join him in the business. Adam, of course, had other commitments to the church, but he felt the invitation underlined the respect and friendship he earned during his brief time as a conscientious objector in the army. He was mustered out of the service in December, following the November, 1918 armistice.
Across the following years Dr. Miller found his peace views being strengthened by various experiences and contacts. In Japan in the 1920s he came in contact with pacifist groups such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His missionary work taught him from that world view that nations out of fear, ambitions, and self-deception often lash out in ways that at the moment seem justified to them but are horrible acts of war. He watched that pervading ambition rise in Japan, for instance. And he came to realize that in the name of self-defense nations often build war machines that eventually lead them into aggressive acts of war.

Much of Dr. Miller's peace concern came to focus during the years 1936-1948 when he was president of the National Youth Fellowship of the Church of God. The biennial national conventions at which he presided regularly issued statements against bearing arms in any war of aggression and against intervention in foreign conflicts. As World War II storm clouds grew, the church's national youth leaders worked with the established peace churches to provide support for Church of God conscientious objectors and to obtain deferment. Dean Russell Olt, Elver Adcock, Ida Byrd Rowe, and Adam W. Miller were names prominently associated with these efforts.

Dr. Miller feels that in recent years we have not given enough visibility to our peace concerns before young people of the Church of God. "We need," he said to me, "more than an occasional conference now and then. We need more than having a few materials in an office for those who go to the trouble to write in."

He would like to see vigorous peace groups operating on all our campuses. He would like to see strong links for united action and for the exchange of resource material with the peace churches. He would like to see us working with vigilance against the peace-time draft, which stands ominously in the wings. He would like all of our national church agencies to be taking appropriate public stands in this area, working at peace from their perspectives and with the full support of their budgets.

On the current world scene Dr. Miller is particularly vexed at the tendency of leading nations to build up their arms position and to take military action in the name of defense. Such action, he feels, is in fact aggression carried out under false pretenses. He is particularly critical of the United States in its role as supplier of arms. Possession of armed might leads almost inevitably to its use aggressively, particularly in the misleading guise of police action, defense and prevention of enemy build ups.

Many actions and views in the area of pacifism are admittedly controversial. The principles are clear, but the precise action that grows out of the principle may be disputed by conscientious Christians. Dr. Miller would come at this in a way that coincides with his teaching and writing style across the years. He would seek to make the principles clear. He would live out in his own life his views and solutions. In classes and resource materials he would present the alternatives and seek to help learners carefully explore the possibilities for their own lives. Eventually, the personal decision must be left to the individual after he or she has had a chance to weigh all the possible courses of action in light of basic principles.

More than six decades have rolled around since that day in 1918 when Adam Miller registered as a conscientious objector. Many aspects of our world have changed. But the basic Christian principles that find human life sacred, that point to the way of love and forgiveness and obedience to God above all else, have not changed. Dr. Miller, minister and educator and missionary and Bible student and now elder statesman, still regards the way of peace as a basic concern for Christians in our time.