Jean Lasserre (1908-1983) was an internationally renowned pastor and peace theologian. He studied at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris before studying at Union Theology Seminary in New York. It is here he met Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who came to share in Lasserre's ardent pacifist beliefs. They continued to communicate through illegal letters during the Second World War. After the war, Lasserre set up his pastoral ministry in working class communities, where the main cause of his life was the fight for peace. His book The War and the Gospel (1953) laid the foundations of a theology of nonviolence.

Frédéric Rognon is Professor of the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Strasbourg, France. He was the editor of the revised 1999 French edition of Jean Lassere's Christians and Violence (1965, also written in French) .