I am grateful for Gordon Matthews’ comments on my “Thought For The Week” of November 18, but I believe he is mistaken.

For a Christian to entirely reject violence in his own defence is honourable and legitimate.

But Christians do not live as isolated units. Christianity is a corporate reality or it is nothing, that is why we meet together in worship, not as a group of like-minded individuals who enjoy getting together, but to express the reality of the Church as the Body of Christ and that we are all, as human beings, members one of another, both those of us who acknowledge that reality and those who do not.

A Christian, even an entire Christian community, may honourably choose to eschew violence in its own defence.

But its primary purpose is not its own defence but the showing forth of the indiscriminate love of God, a love which cannot be experienced devoid of justice.

So the Church as a corporate reality cannot eschew violence in the defence of and insistence on the defence of those beyond its boundaries to whom it has a responsibility to ‘body’ forth the love of God.

Thus it is entirely consistent with the Christian Gospel to allow myself to be crucified, but not to allow the crucifixion of someone else who is not willing and who I am in a position to defend. I can offer to take their place or to join them in their immolation, but I cannot refuse to defend them, if I am in a position to do so, in order to keep a personal ethic intact.

Pacifism is a prophetic sign, not a programme; it’s a bit like the monastic vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience.Such things witness to the life of the Kingdom when God has made all things new. Gandhi said that his friends occasionally reminded him of how much it cost them to enable him to live in poverty. That’s fine, but I cannot buy my pacifism at someone else’s cost, only at my own.

Barry Collins, Vicar of St. Peter, Bengeworth.