The soldier who refused to fight

Maximilian is twenty-one years old, the son of a Roman soldier, and he has been brought before the proconsul Dion at Tebessa for military induction. This is routine. His father Fabius Victor is there, probably proud, probably expecting his son to take the oath and enter the service that has defined the family.

Maximilian refuses.

I cannot serve, he says. I am a Christian.

The proconsul is not immediately hostile. He points out that there are Christian soldiers in the imperial guard — presumably, if being a soldier were incompatible with Christianity, they would not be there. Maximilian is unmoved. I cannot serve. I cannot do evil. I am a Christian.

The proconsul orders him measured for the military bracelet that would mark him as a soldier. Maximilian refuses to wear it. The proconsul reminds him that refusal means death. Maximilian says: I shall not perish. If I go from this world, my soul will live with Christ.

His father watches. The account does not record what Fabius Victor says or does. It records only that after Maximilian is executed — beheaded at twenty-one — an older Christian woman named Pompeiana buys the body from the executioner and buries it near the grave of Cyprian.

Maximilian is the first documented conscientious objector in Western history. The church that produced him was divided on the question: Tertullian held that no Christian should serve in the military, while others served without apparent conflict. The debate about Christians and violence is as old as the church itself.

Maximilian had a theological conviction that cost him everything at twenty-one. His father was present and could not save him. An older woman he had never met bought his body.

The church has never fully resolved the question he died for. Christians have served in armies and refused to serve in armies, have blessed weapons and refused to bless them, have found in the same scripture both the call to peacemaking and the responsibility to protect the innocent.

What Maximilian's story preserves is not a settled answer but a witness: that some Christians in every era have decided that the way of Jesus required them to lay down what the empire demanded they pick up.

The question is not whether Maximilian was right in every particular. The question is whether you have ever asked yourself what you would lay down — and what you would not.