Matthew Henry John Bartlett

From a CPX interview [21mb mp3]

Interviewer: Being a Christian in the army… Doesn’t Jesus tell us to turn the other cheek? How do you match those two things up?
Jim Wallace: It’s a question I’m asked often, you know, and I personally have no problem with it. One, because I actually became a Christian in my first year in the army, and certainly as Christians we believe you stay where God calls you, where he’s called you to himself, unless he calls you out of that. And he didn’t call me out of it for 32 years, very clearly. But the other thing was, I had a friend of mine, actually, who was a Christian, and became a Christian about the same time I did, in Duntroon.
Interviewer: And you were very young then.
Jim Wallace: That’s right, I was in my second year at Duntroon – 19. And he was a very good soldier, this feller, an army corps officer, and decided about two years after graduation that he had to get out of the army because he was pacifist. He stayed on though, funnily enough, in our Military Christian Fellowship Bible study. He used to give me heaps because I was in the army, and I was a Christian, and of course I was in the worst part of the army as far as he was concerned. So I said to him one night, I said, well Bob, you know the enemy is coming down through Indonesia, are you going to join the army now to defend the country? And he said no. And I said well they’re now coming down through Queensland are you going to join the army now – and I knew he wouldn’t because he was a New South Wales man; he wasn’t going to defend Queensland! But then I said OK, they’re now at the end of the street (we were in the ACT), they’re going to kill your wife, have their way with your daughters – are you going to join now? Now to stay true to a pacifist ideology, he had to say no. Now, I couldn’t do that. I don’t know, I honestly don’t know whether that makes me a better man, worse man, a better Christian or a worse Christian, but I couldn’t do that. So I’m quite happy in the resolve that I join the army now, and stop them out there, rather than at the end of the street.

I think it makes him a worse Christian (though I expect in many respects he’s a better person than I – braver, clever, more disciplined etc.).