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-- A
Brief Survey of What the Bible Says About War
Introduction
One of the tenets of my Christian understanding is that we do not live together the way God intended from the beginning. As families, as churches, as small towns or large cities, as states and as countries we live together in ways that are at best just a pale shadow of the community of love that God intended.
Jesus made this point when he was approached by some Pharisees asking about divorce. They correctly pointed out that the Law of Moses, given to the Jews by God, allowed men to divorce their wives. Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning" (Matt 19:8).
Jesus was pointing out that God never intended divorce in God's creative acts which are so wonderfully symbolized in the story of creation and the Garden in Genesis. But because human hearts are hard, God permitted Moses to include provisions for divorce in the Law.
Jesus challenged the Pharisees and challenges us to break through our sinfulness to live in God's grace the way that God intended from the beginning. And not just in divorce, but in every sort of relationship. But it is often difficult to discern how to do it and what actions to take to do it, and is easier said than done - especially in matters of war or peace.
Contrary to what many people probably believe, the idea that warfare is in itself contrary to the will of God is a fairly recent theological development. While I agree that God's intention for human life is for peace, it also seems clear from the biblical record that God's will is related to the particulars of the moment. In other words, God is not oblivious to what is going on now, and his will takes the present circumstances and potentialities into account. (This is a central feature of process theology.)
The early church did eschew military service, and in some times and places soldiers, judges, law-enforcement officials and executioners could not receive the Eucharist. Such restrictions are understandable considering that in those days Christians were persecuted, imprisoned and killed because of their religion.
Yet through almost all the history of Christian theology, tolerating unjust peace was held to be more ethically unacceptable than battle. That is to say, an unjust peace could be so corrupt that not even war was worse. You didn't have to a Christian to think that, but Christianity, like Judaism, placed a particular emphasis on justice as God's will for human society. Moreover, establishing justice among human communities was a persistent theme of the Hebrew prophets and has always been understood by Christians as a positive duty of discipleship.
Thomas Aquinas, considered by the Roman Catholic Church as its most prominent theologian, specifically allowed for the use of military force in certain situations. The modern understanding of just war theory really begins with his work. In Protestant history, both John Calvin and Martin Luther believed that use of force was justified in some conditions. Aquinas and Calvin both held that to decline to fight a just war was to fail in virtue, actually to fail in charity.
The western theory of just war derives from Christian theologians beginning with Augustine in the fourth century, considerably expanded later by Thomas Aquinas. There are three basic tenets of just war from which all other qualifications of just war theory arise. They are just cause, just conduct, and right intention.
Just cause means that war may be undertaken for only the most serious reasons. War must be the last resort. Self defense against actual attack has always been recognized as a just cause. Self defense is explicitly recognized in Article 51 of the United Nations charter as a just cause for a nation to resort to violence.
Right intention means that a nation should not wage war for
self-interest or self-aggrandizement, but for the cause of greater
justice. The tension between a nation's self interests and greater
justice are illustrated by the debates about America's opposition to
Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and its threat to invade Saudi Arabia.
On the one hand, protecting Saudi Arabia's sovereignty and restoring
Kuwait's sovereignty were clearly causes of restorative justice. On the
other hand, America's self interest was
intimately related to oil supplies of the nations concerned. It is
historically very unusual for nations to wage war for purely altruistic
reasons, although extreme self interest has often been the intention of
aggressor nations.
Just conduct means that only the force required to attain an objective is permitted. Deliberately brutal acts against enemy military forces is not justified, even in pursuit of just ends. Destruction of non-combatants is not justified as an end in itself. We are required to discriminate who and what are legitimate targets of war, and we are required not to use more force than is needed to achieve the just end desired.
An excellent online overview of the theologies of war was written by Darrell Cole, who teaches religion at The College of William and Mary. You can read his article here.
Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor of Christian ethics, was one of the most influential theologians of the last century. In his work, Moral Man in Immoral Society, Niebuhr explained that while individual persons live generally moral lives, high morality is difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups as a whole. Very rarely does a group of persons comport itself better than individuals do in personal relationships. When human beings engage in collective activity, Niebuhr said, they are overwhelmed by an inability to be moral. The larger the group, the greater this inability is.
Therefore, Niebuhr concluded [in "Must We Do Nothing?" in The Christian Century, 3-30-1932], "The hope of attaining an ethical goal for society by purely ethical means, without coercion . . . is an illusion" of the "comfortable classes" of society. There never will be enough love and unselfishness among nations to resolve the conflicts of history only by ethical means, even though there may be occasional successes now and then. It is part of humanity's "moral conceit" to think that human sin will not overwhelm individual morality when persons act as a collective.
Until the return of Christ, human societies will never be able to conform purely to the ethic of Christian love. In the interim, we must structure our world based on justice, as best we can, even though communities of justice are inferior to communities of love. The best justice human societies can attain will only roughly correspond to divine justice. Human justice will always involve contests of power because different groups make opposing claims that they consider rightful. However, "no contending group can have all it wants . . . and hence must [sometimes] be restrained by force."
This state of affairs is not God's ideal for human community; it is simply the best we can do until the Kingdom of God comes in power. Hence, Niebuhr concluded that coercion is not to be automatically avoided to achieve justice. The ethical goals of human society must not be sacrificed "simply because we are afraid to use any but purely ethical means. To say all this is to confess that the history of mankind is a perennial tragedy, for the highest ideals" that we can imagine are exactly ones which we "can never realize in social and collective terms."
American liberationist theologian James Cone agreed that in the fallen world we inhabit, justice is sometimes tragic, prevailing only because of deadly coercion. He pointed out that for Christians opposing oppression, the choice is not between violence and non-violence because violence is already present. The Christian must decide whether violence to overcome the oppression is a greater evil than the violence of the oppression itself. Unfortunately, Cone says, there are no absolute rules to decide the answer with certainty. Therefore, each case must be decided on its own merits. Christian ethics has no standard template that can be overlaid on every issue.
If we accept this reasoning, then the problem before us now is not whether America is ever justified to use military force. The problem is specifically whether America may justifiably include force in responding to the deadly attacks on September 11. That means that to be informed enough to decide, we need to deal with worldly issues such as the nature of our enemy, his motivation and capabilities and the possible responses we can make. (That is the chief reason we are holding our panel discussion on October 9.)
Pacifism is the claim that using military force is fundamentally wrong in itself and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Pacifists generally propose peaceful resistance and peaceful means for confronting violence. However, historians have pointed out that successful peaceful resistance movements always took advantage of the virtues of their opponents. Martin Luther King appealed directly to America's Christian conscience and constitutional traditions. Mahatma Gandhi successfully took on the power of the British Empire by appealing to hundreds of years of British liberal tradition, political freedom, rule of law and respect for personal rights.
But suppose Gandhi had been opposing the Nazi SS? They simply would have shot him and that would have been the end of it.
Pacifism may prevail against some evil, but not all. Imagine asking Adolf Hitler what was his objective in killing millions of Jews. He would have answered nothing except that he wanted to destroy Jews. There is a nihilistic evil sometimes loose in the world that beggars comprehension. Nihilistic evil seeks to destroy for destruction's own sake. There is no virtue in nihilistic evil that can be appealed to.
Pacifism is conscience without power.
Nihilistic evil is power without conscience.
One of the tragic aspects of this world is that when conscience without power encounters power without conscience, conscience loses. The best that people of conscience can claim before they are annihilated is a moral victory, but in the final analysis, moral victories mean exactly squat.
Comparisons of present figures to Hitler are usually simplistic and overdrawn, including the way Bush the elder characterized Saddam Hussein as another Hitler. But consider this: after the end of World War Two, the people of the Allied nations discovered that in 1925 Hitler had laid out his plans in detail in his book, Mein Kampf. Hitler's hatred of Jews and his murderous plans for them, his war against France, his plan to invade the east and destroy the populations there - all had literally been an open book for fourteen years before he began the war.
The aims of Osama bin Laden and his allies are also an open book. They have made their objectives explicitly clear, over and over, in their interviews with western journalists, their writings and their clerics' announcements: they want to kill all the Americans they can. That is their goal. It is their only goal. Their violence is not a means to another end. Destruction is itself their end. They have said so themselves. Faced with such nihilistic evil, is force on our part justified?
Thomas Jeavons, a leader of The Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer Sept. 25 that force is not justified. "We can seek the prosecution of the terrorists through appropriate international channels and institutions," he said. "In seeking justice, we can choose actions that show we do respect the sovereignty of . . . other peoples and nations."
This seems a noble ideal, but in the face of nihilistic evil, it is at best appeasement. And appeasement, Winston Churchill noted, is bargaining with crocodiles over when they will eat you.
A colleague of mine, a United Methodist minister and a Vietnam veteran, asked how justice could be achieved without using force. "Are we going to persuade" Osama bin Laden to submit to justice? "Accept him? Bribe him? Pray for him? Get him in a hug circle and ‘love bomb' him? . . . Use moral [reasoning]? . . . If we say that a nation cannot use any form of force to compel it - then it isn't going to happen, is it?"
And I would add that if it does not happen, we will certainly see more of American men, women and children die violently.
Niebuhr wrote that we resolve the tragic character of our world by religious faith and by experiencing grace which leads us to anticipate God's perfection of human community in love. But we can never resolve in purely ethical terms the disconnection between the way things are and the way they ought to be.
In America today the polar extremes of opinion about the use of force are easy to identify. At one end are militarists who never met a problem they didn't want to bomb. They call for an overwhelming military response by America against Afghanistan and any other country that supports Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohort. These voices say that the Sept. 11 attacks were such raw, naked acts of aggression that the harshest lethal reply by America is called for. Absolute militarists believe that the aggression against us justifies an overwhelming destructive response.
At the other end (as I have noted), pacifists insist that not even the Sept. 11 attacks justify America's use of military force. Absolute pacifists claim that military force is in itself impermissible, no matter why exercised, no matter what the provocation.
Most Americans are neither absolute pacifists nor militarists. They are somewhere in the middle. Most Americans do support the selective bombing missions America began Oct. 7 but do not think that we should carpet bomb Kabul. Some people with pacifist leanings have told me they are in the middle, too. They renounce military force in principle but recognize that this crisis is so severe that force seems justified, at least in in the short term. Some people with militarist leanings recognize that America's arsenal of mass destruction and its mechanized divisions seem unsuitable for fighting a ghostly enemy who has no battle lines or massed armies.
But many Americans are uneasy with the middle position because the middle often seems a muddle. The voices of militarism or pacifism on either end claim a certain clarity that many find attractive. Furthermore, pacifists stake out a certain moral position that might seem to reflect the best virtues of Christian faith that lots of people would like to embody.
I do not accept absolute positions offered by either militarists or pacifists. Proponents of the extremes seem to do all their thinking in slogans or platitudes such as, "Bomb them back to the stone age," on the one hand or, "Violence never solves anything, we should just love one another," on the other.
To people who say we should not go to war and should avoid violence, I reply that such a choice is no longer available. We found ourselves at war on Sept. 11, a day that it became tragically apparent that violence was already present.
We may reasonably conclude theologically or politically that America is justified to use force. But we do not thereby conclude that America must use or should use force. Obviously, the United States has already chosen to use force, but it is significant that the Bush administration does not define the nation's total response to the attacks in purely or even mostly military terms. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has compared this campaign to the Cold War, which lasted half a century. The potential of military conflict in the Cold War was always present, but the Soviet empire sputtered away without warfare against the NATO nations.
Because of the nature of our present enemy and the nature of this campaign, there is a broad recognition among members of the Congress and the administration that the campaign against terrorism will encompass arenas of diplomacy, politics, economics, law and law enforcement, technology, intelligence gathering and analysis and commerce. Military operations are prominent now but over the longer term will likely be relatively small in scale, limited in time and geography and less frequent.
I am much influenced by the work of John Paul Lederach, a pacifist who is a Mennonite professor at Eastern Mennonite University. Lederach spent many years mediating conflicts in Latin America and nearly died more than once doing so. I also think we can learn lessons from America's policies after World War II in Europe and Japan.
For this campaign to succeed, we must understand the true sources of the conflict. In responding to the attacks, we should minimize taking actions that reinforce hatred of us among other peoples, even though their motivations seem bizarre and their facts are twisted. That doesn't mean that we must conform our policies only to those approved by Muslim governments or peoples. It does mean we should take care whenever possible not to provide nutrients for soils from which future generations grow to despise us. We should therefore respond strategically in unexpected ways, designed to make it more difficult for hostile states and peoples to sustain their view of us as threatening.
We need to understand how the terrorists operate and sustain themselves. Al Qaeda is not like any enemy we have ever faced and therefore our national responses will be unlike any we have ever given. While Al Qaeda is obviously capable of great violence, it may be likened to a virus that has already infected the world's systems of commerce, travel, finances, politics and communications. Our countermeasures must be specific to those environments. We should consider that we are healing the world of terrorism rather than simply destroying terrorism, lest our actions perversely sustain the environment in which viral terrorism reproduces and flourishes.
This means that while current members of terrorist networks must be brought to justice -- or justice brought to them, as President Bush put it -- we need to find ways to make Al Qaeda's recruitment of replacements unsuccessful. But this will be a very long process.
Finally, we may learn from the outstanding successes of the Marshall Plan in post-World War II Europe and the pacification of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur. Billions of dollars of US aid and work in Europe halted the westward march of communism by rebuilding the infrastructure and providing direct aid in the form of fuels, foodstuffs and other goods.
In Japan, MacArthur eliminated Japanese militarism first by emplacing a democratically-based constitution and second by liberating Japanese women from centuries of patriarchal oppression. He gave women the rights to vote and to serve in democratic assemblies and government offices, steps MacArthur saw as essential to ending Japanese military aggressiveness. America also bore the brunt of rebuilding Japan's economy and infrastructure.
Almost everywhere in the world where international terrorism grows we find poverty and human oppression, especially toward women. Tribalism and ethnic hatred also remain strong. We Americans are more free of these oppressions than almost any other people. We and our western allies must lead the way out for those people. It will take a new kind of national commitment. It will cost a fortune. It will require new kinds of armies, armies not of soldiers but of engineers, agriculturalists, financiers, administrators and educators.
It will take decades and there are no guarantees. But the alternative is to fight culture and religious wars generation after generation.
With tears falling instead of flags flying I conclude that America can justifiably use force to achieve its aims in the present situation. That does not mean that we must or even should use force. It does not mean that there are no limits of what kind and how much force may be used. Whether you agree with this conclusion is a matter for your own conscience.
But let us agree that we will be united in desiring God's will to illuminate and inform our decisions and the actions of every national leader. Let us agree to pray for God's wisdom to prevail and God's justice to be obtained. Let us give thanks that God is one who, in times and places he chooses, can indeed break the bow and shatter the spear asunder (Ps. 46).
Dear Lord of grace and love,
we ask for you to open our minds to your wisdom
. . . . and our hearts to your
mercies.
You are a God who judges the nations with justice and righteousness.
You are a God who breaks the weapons of war
. . . . and shatters the spirit of
hostility.
We pray for your spirit to inform the actions of our leaders.
We pray for your spirit to guide the affairs of nations.
We pray for every our nations leaders. Fill them, O Lord,
. . . . with godly purpose and
intentions.
Let their decisions be those you inspire
. . . . and their words be those of
your own mouth.
We pray, O Lord, for those who attacked us.
Turn their hearts from hardness
. . . . and their minds from evil.
Fill them, O God, with the Holy Love
. . . . of a righteous God.
Bring them to knowledge of Christ
. . . . and overcome their hatred
with love.
Make them our brother in Christ.
We pray, O Lord, for the Afghan people
. . . . and all who suffer under
tyranny.
Hear their cries of oppression
. . . . and deliver them to freedom.
Give us wisdom O God, to know your will.
Give us courage, O God, to do your bidding.
Let your justice and peace be established among all peoples;
. . . . let your kingdom embrace
every person.
In the saving name of your Son, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.