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16 January 1893—7 January 1974

Christian Peace without Compromise

In 1923, four years after the end of the “war to end all wars,” Ormond Burton addressed a conference of the New Zealand Student Christian movement. He called his listeners to lives of radical discipleship. For Burton, such devotion required a commitment to the nonviolence preached and practiced by Christ, and he urged the students to put their faith into practice by refusing to join or serve in the military.

No stranger to combat, Burton served as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli, one of the bloodiest and most wasteful standoffs of World War I. When his best friend was killed in action, he volunteered to replace him. Commissioned a lieutenant in the infantry, Burton was decorated for gallantry several times. But the harsh Treaty of Versailles that the Allies forced upon a defeated Germany convinced him that genuine peace could never be won by military conflict. The victors, he concluded, would always demand concessions from the losers that inevitably stirred up resentments and kept old wounds fresh, thereby preparing the way for the next war. As he sadly noted at the end of World War I, “Victory had not brought a new world, and we saw in a flash of illumination that it never could. War is just waste and destruction, solving no problems and creating new and terrible ones.” By the time he spoke to the New Zealand Student Christian organization in 1923, he was a committed pacifist.

After the war, Burton was barred for a time from teaching because he refused to sign an oath to the Crown that would have obliged him to fight if war broke out again. He finally secured a job in a remote district of New Zealand. In the 1930s, he began training for ordination in the Methodist Church. Upon completion, he took a run-down church in one of Wellington’s worst slums and quickly revitalized it by dint of hard and dedicated work. He also cofounded the Christian Pacifist Society of New Zealand. When war erupted again in 1939, he spoke out against it and was promptly arrested, released, and arrested again. Sentenced to a year in prison, he spent his time behind bars writing an anti-war tract, Testament of Peace, for which the Methodist Church expelled him. He would not be reinstated or given another church until 1952.

Although Burton continued as a peace activist for the rest of his life, he steadfastly refused to cooperate with non-Christian peacemakers. When the Christian Pacifist Society he helped found voted to offer membership to non-Christians, he resigned in protest. He justified his position by arguing that without a strong commitment to the Prince of Peace, pacifism was merely an abstract philosophy. Of course he was mistaken. But he can be forgiven for the sake of his lifelong dedication to nonviolence.