Military Service

The Westminster Confession (Chapter XXIII) addresses the civil magistrate and teaches that 'it is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate when called thereunto: in the managing whereof, as they ought especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace... so, for that end, they may lawfully, now under the New Testament, wage war upon just and necessary occasion.' This confessional endorsement of just war and military service is explicit and binding in Presbyterian theology.

Presbyterianism has historically engaged with political theory through the lens of God's sovereignty over all of life and the legitimate authority of civil government. Knox himself and subsequent Reformed thinkers developed theories of legitimate resistance to tyranny (the right of lesser magistrates), which influenced political thought in Scotland, England, and the American colonies. The just war tradition governs the ethics of particular wars; blanket pacifism is not the Presbyterian confessional position, though individual conscientious objection is respected.