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War is hell. We know that. What is probably foreign to most of us, however, is the "moral reasoning" of the just war tradition. We stand at such a vast emotional distance today from this kind of thinking, that I would like to try to work backwards, starting from where I think most of us are today, and delve back into the conditions that let us here. My hope is that this may open some doors, possibly, to a clearer understanding of what is involved in the kind of moral reasoning that we find in what we call the just war tradition.

By "moral reasoning," we mean something quite simple and obvious. For starters, we can probably all agree that a war fought in self-defense is probably not as bad as an aggressive one; that a limited war (like the Gulf War) is not as bad as total war (like the two World Wars); that a war that achieves a lasting and just peace is not as bad as one that doesn't; or that a war in which prisoners are taken alive is better than one in which they are indiscriminately killed; or that one in which prisoners are treated humanely is better than one in which they are treated like animals, or worse; or that one in which civilians are not deliberately targeted is better than one in which they are, and so on. This kind of analysis, as well as thinking about the principles underlying it, is what I mean by moral reasoning.

I. The Shock of Incomprehension. But we may wonder: What does any of this have to do with Christianity? Isn't Christianity about beating swords into plowshares, about loving our enemies, about the peace of Christ and the Kingdom of God? What has the Gospel of God's grace to do with the analysis of the "discriminate use of lethal force" and "collateral damage" in warfare?

Something strikes us as bizarre about this juxtaposition. And probably nothing highlights so well the vast distance between just war reasoning and the outlook of most Christians today as the utter shock often felt when confronted by a sampling of such reasoning. Martin Luther wrote that slaying and despoiling the enemy "can be considered works of love. More recently, John Langan, professor at Georgetown University, writes about developing "an understanding and a practice of warfare that is in accord with the sanctity of life." (Langan, 7). But probably the most jarring remarks are those of the well-known author, C.S. Lewis:

What I cannot understand is [the] sort of semipacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage--a kind of gaity and wholeheartedness. (Mere Christianity, 107)

Why is there such a disconnection, a chasm, between just war reasoning and the outlook of our own times? There are probably many reasons, both religious and secular, but I would start by talking about the aftermath of WWII, the Cold War and Vietnam. Especially Vietnam. Vietnam was more than a war. It changed us as a culture and a people. We lost our innocence. It represented a shift in consciousness, a loss of certainty in ourselves, in our increasingly confused national cause, even in the possibility of our being right at all. The trajectory of this shift can be traced by comparing films about WWII, like "The Longest Day," to post-Vietnam films like "Apocalypse Now," "Platoon," "Full Metal Jacket," in which there are no good guys or bad guys, let alone winners. It was a time of assassinations--the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and betrayals--like the Watergate scandal and cover-up under the Nixon administration, and the national guard shootings of student protesters at Kent State. Then, like a parting eulogy to the decades that gave us the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, there was John Lennon's wistful ballad "Imagine," and "all we are saying is give peace a chance."

A lot of this rubbed off on the churches, of course; and not least the Catholic Church, which concluded the Second Vatican Council in the middle of all this in 1965, provoking a great deal of unintended silliness that left observers wondering whether American Catholics were going through some sort of New World adolescence. There were stories of priests elevating pizzas at the consecration during Mass. Nuns and monks fled their religious orders in droves, and seminaries looked like they would be emptied. Dorothy Day proclaimed a vision of apocalyptic nonviolent anarchism. Thomas Merton recommended Ghandian nonviolence and turned to Zen Buddhism. The Jesuit Berrigan brothers dismissed the Catholic just war tradition as worthless, broke into government offices, poured blood on draft files, climbed over fences of defense facilities and smashed the nose cones of missiles. Prophetic drama and posturing were in; carefully reasoned policy recommendations were out.

These sorts of changes in attitude-- particularly the abandonment of moral reasoning about war-- almost all took place during two critical decades from 1965 to 1985. The rapidity of this shift is staggering. In 1965 Commonweal columnist William V. Shannon defended the idea of "preemptive use of military force to preclude the People's Republic of China from gaining a nuclear capability." (Ibid., 193) But just sixteen years later, no "progressive" Catholic would have been caught dead defending such an interventionist position when Israel made a preemptive strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor being built in Baghdad by a notoriously hostile regime. These changes in attitude found their way into diocesan programs, seminaries (where the just war reasoning, along with Aquinas, vanished from curricula), and even into the statements of US Catholic bishops, such as the 1983 document, "The Challenge of Peace," in which hardly a trace can be found of the of rich tradition of Catholic moral reasoning so evident in thinkers of just a generation ago, like John Courtney Murray.

Again, this shift was related to the aftermath of the Cold War and Vietnam. It may be that the anti-establishment, anti-traditional attitudes associated with the counter culture and protests against Vietnam helped foster a culture of mutiny against unquestioning acceptance of the classic Catholic authorities (like Aquinas) and traditions (like the just war theory). It may be that hostility toward our Vietnam policies helped gain a new hearing for the views of the "historic peace churches" (Mennonite, Brethren, Quakers) and their pacifism. It may be also that the historically uncritical manner in which many Catholics undertook to implement Vatican II's call for a renewed focus on Scripture opened the door to naively simplistic views about the way in which Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount about loving one's enemies and turning the other cheek were taken to be directly applicable to foreign policy. But there also had to be some "trickle down" effect from the general skepticism stemming from the loss of foundational certainties in science and philosophy, culminating in Princeton Professor Richard Rorty's definition of "truth" as "that which your peers let you get away with saying."

Such were the changes that were overtaking us everywhere, of course, and not merely in the Catholic Church. I found it significant that Time magazine named Stanley Hauerwas "America's best theolgian" two days before the terrorists struck on 9/11/01, which in itself may be a commentary on the ambivalence of the responses emanating from the various Christian communities in the weeks and months that followed. In 1970, Hauerwas, who was then teaching at Notre Dame in Southbend, IN, discovered the writings of Mennonite pacifist theologian, John Howard Yoder, who was then teaching at the Mennonite Seminary in Elkhart. They met, Hauerwas became a pacifist, and the rest is history. That same year, Hauerwas was asked to represent Notre Dame and present a paper at a colloquium with the theology department at Valparaiso University. Hauerwas introduced his remarks by saying that here he was, "a Methodist of doubtful theological background (Methodists by definition have a doubtful theological background), representing a Catholic department of theology speaking to a bunch of Lutherans to say that the Mennonites had been right all along" ("When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference," 6). This is almost as telling, in my opinion, as the subsequent appointment of John Howard Yoder to the theology faculty at Notre Dame. Was Yoder the revenge of the 16^th century Anabaptist peasants upon their Lutheran and Catholic oppressors? It looked like Mennonite pacifism was getting the upper hand against classic just war reasoning.

A friend of mine recently emailed me a joke, about that well-known nation in the news lately, notoriously armed with weapons of mass destruction, which threatens the world with the terror of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, led by an irrational maniac named George Bush. The remarkable thing about this joke is that, even if we may not like it, its humor is readily accessible to us. No vast distance separates our outlook from the set of assumptions animating it. The sentiment is similar to that of the oft-quoted remark: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Or the comment of Duke University's Stanley Fish on the events of 9/11--that "there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one." (57)

What these statements all have in common is the outlook of postmodern skepticism and relativism, which, according to Allan Bloom, is the most predictable fact about university and college students across our nation today--an outlook he characterized significantly, in the words of his erstwhile bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind (1988). Considered on its own terms philosophically, it is an embarrassingly weak position, and no different from the relativism rejected by Plato and almost every serious thinker since. Not only is such relativism self-refuting (for if nothing is certain, then neither is relativism), but it is blind-sighted about the most elementary steps in moral reasoning. As William Bennett observed: "Last time I looked, there was a crystal-clear distinction between a terrorist and a freedom fighter, and it had to do with the morality of means: a freedom fighter doesn't massacre innocent civilians in pursuit of his ends." (Bennett, 46)

II. Analysis of Attitudes Toward War. Having examined some of the history behind what I have called the "eclipse of moral reasoning," what I would like to do now is to briefly situate the alternative positions on war as they exist today within a larger historical framework, sketch their background, then critically examine the underlying assumptions of those that constitute the greatest challenge to the just war tradition.

From a bird's eye view of history, the basic attitudes that human beings have taken toward war fall into three large groups: the view that war is (1) normal, (2) abnormal, or (3) fallen.

The view that war is a normal fact of life found widespread acceptance among the ancient Greeks, like Heraclitus and Plato, and later in Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche Von Treitschke, Von Bernhardi, Vn Clausewitz, and in Naziism.

The view that war is abnormal and eradicable found support among the ancient Stoics, in modern writers who argued for a particular European peace, such as William Penn and abbe Saint-Pierre; and, still others argued for the international abolition of war, like the Enlightenment thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, and, later, Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell; others argued for a single world government, like Emeric Cruce.

A third view was taken by those who regarded war as neither "normal" nor "abnormal," but as fallen, in the sense of resulting from our fallen or sinful nature, as Christians have generally believed. "We are mistaken," wrote C.S. Lewis, "when we compare war with 'normal life.' Life has never been normal." ("Learning in Wartime," 22) And that is because life itself, even at its most tranquil, is fallen. This is why "war creates no absolutely new situation," he wrote; "it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself." (Ibid., 21) In view of eternity, Lewis could even suggest that "the questions raised by . . . war are relatively unimportant." (Ibid.)

This view of war as fallen, subdivides again into two subsidiary views: the view (1) that warfare, though an effect of sin, may, under certain conditions, be practiced in a manner that is sinless (in the sense of involving no actual, as opposed to original, sin), and (2) that warfare itself is always and everywhere inherently sinful.

The first of these views, of course, is the position taken by classic just war reasoning, such as found in Catholics like Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, and developed more systematically by Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez in the 16^th and 17^th centuries; and Protestants such as Luther (with qualifications), Calvin, Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter. But it is also the view found in varieties of just war pacificism that object to unjust wars but see nothing wrong about engaging in wars that are just.

The second view, that war is inherently sinful, again subdivides into two more views--(a) that war, though sinful, must sometimes be accepted as the only responsible alternative in a fallen world, and (b) that war must always and everywhere be utterly renounced. The first of these is a view found among many mainline Christian groups, but one that comes to particularly clear expression in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and the mainline Lutheran tradition, and finds some antecedent support in various remarks by Luther (particularly in reference to his view of the "two kingdoms." The second view, that war must be utterly renounced, represents the position of "absolute pacifism" found classically in the writings of Anabaptists (Mennonites, Brethren, etc.) such as Guy F. Hershberger, John C. Wenger, and, preeminently, John Howard Yoder; as well as various contemporary variations, such as the late Cardinal Bernadin's "seamless" or consistent life ethic (opposing abortion, euthanasia, death penalty, and all war), and Dorothy Day's and the Catholic Worker's indiscriminate condemnation and renunciation of all killing, even in defense of oneself or others.

The greatest challenge to the tradition of just war reasoning historically came from the side of Machiavellian realism, which views war as natural and subject to no moral constraints. In recent decades, however, the primary challenge has come from the other views--on the religious front (which we are focusing on here), from the view that war is fallen and inherently sinful, and must be either renounced completely (the "absolute pacifist" view), or accepted some cases as the only responsible alternative, although unavoidably sinful (the "dirty hands" view). These views have made significant inroads among Catholic thinkers in recent decades, even though they represent a radical break with the mainstream of Catholic tradition. Here I will examine only the last two religious views, which have posed the most serious challenges to just war reasoning, especially the pacifist view.

III. Critical Examination of 'Absolute Pacifist' and 'Dirty Hands' Views. First, classic 'absolute pacifism' finds its most authentic expression in Mennonite theology, which traces its ancestry to the Anabapatists of the Reformation era, who articulated the position of Christan pacifism in Article 6 of the Schleitheim Articles of 1527. Concerning the power of the "sword" mentioned by Paul in Rm. 13, these articles declared that it had been ordained by God "outside the perfection of Christ." The idea was that God may use that sword to accomplish His purposes, just as He may use the wrath of heathen nations like Assyria to visit His judgment upon the Children of Israel when they turn away from Him, but that doesn't mean we'd want to be caught dead fighting in the Assyrian army! Christians, according to the Mennonite tradition, are called to a higher, NT ethic of love and nonresistance. They are called to work for the establishment of the "Peace of Christ" (Pax Christi), not the "Peace of Rome" (Pax Romana).

By way of historical support, Mennonites note that the earliest Christians were pacifists and shunned military service, that certain bishops, like Basil of Caesarea, may have imposed a penance upon soldiers for killing even in a just cause (Yoder, 25; this claim is debated, FT, 1/02). When the Roman Emperor, Constantine, was converted to Christianity and legalized the Faith, of course, all this changed. Christianity became a state religion, which meant armies were then enlisted to defend a Christian empire. In keeping with the classic Protestant textbook tradition, of course, this is all viewed as part of the corruption and 'fall' of the Church from its early purity; and the subsequent Catholic tradition is viewed as representing a profoundly corrupted and tainted form of Christianity, not merely with respect to its development of a just war theory.

Yoder does not see this NT ethics as apolitical (his magnum opus is entitled, The Politics of Jesus). In fact, he chides the just war tradition for de-politicizing the Gospel, by which he means interpreting the ethics that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as socially inapplicable or politically irrelevant. Yet the fact remains that when proponents of this sort of pacifism are called upon to articulate their response to 9/11 or the war against terrorism, they often come off sounding rather implausible. Hence Stanley Hauerwas worries that pacifists, such as he, look like they just "have nothing to say." They're "not going to have an immediate policy response." "So that means that we must go on, as [Karl] Barth said in 1933, as if nothing has happened" ("Interview," 1). On the other hand, the temptation to be politically relevant keeps tugging in the direction of suggesting policy recommendations. But to the degree that they remain faithful to their pacifism, their policy recommendations come off sounding silly. For example, Hauerwas asks about the possibility of apprehending terrorists nonviolently, or of an international police force that would never have to kill anyone. In an interview with Jim Wallis in Sojourners, Hauerwas agonized over the palpable political impotence of his pacifist position, and finally suggested that ground troops in Afghanistan would be better than bombing, in order to avoid civilian deaths. But at that point he's no longer reasoning as a pacifist, but engaging in classical just war reasoning. Even Yoder himself, apparently, was not immune to this temptation, and was speculating about the possibility of a global police force near the end of his life.

H. Richard Niebuhr, in his book, Christ and Culture, characterized the Anabaptist position as a "Christ against Culture" stance, pitting the Church against the world, in a posture of prophetic witness. Despite Yoder's claims to the contrary, this characterization seems to accurately define the Mennonite position. It is even echoed in the title of one of Yoder's own books, The Christian Witness to the State. Note: the Christian stands outside of and over against the state as witness to it concerning the demands of the Gospel of love and peace. There is no question of the state's being "Christian" in any sense of the word, or conforming to the NT demands of Christ's ethic.

A problem here is with the way in which Christ's ethic of love is assumed to apply directly to foreign policy and the exigencies of warfare. What did Jesus mean by his command to "turn the other check"? The Mennonite assumption is that Jesus imposes a duty of nonresistance on everyone in every circumstance. Yet without in the least minimizing the demand Jesus places on his hearers to mortify their anger and shun revenge, one can ask whether the statement does not imply a reservation in favor of obviously exceptional cases. Accordingly, C.S. Lewis asks: Does anyone suppose that Our Lord's hearers understood Him to mean that if a homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party, tried to knock me out of the way, I must stand aside and let him get his victim? I at any rate think it impossible they could have so understood Him. I think it equally impossible that they supposed Him to mean that the best way of bringing up a child was to let it hit its parents whenever it was in a temper, or, when it had grabbed at the jam, to give it the honey also? I think the meaning of the words is perfectly clear--'Insofar as you are simply an angry man who has been hurt, mortify your anger and do not hit back.'" (Lewis, "Why I Am Not a Pacifist," 49f.)

To put the matter in contemporary terms, this view asks: "What would Jesus do?" The problem with this is that there are some basic ways in which we can't take Jesus as our example, because He came to do for us what we could not for ourselves, namely to die for our sins. The real question, rather, is "What would Jesus have us do?" And He says to love our neighbor, and leaves it to us to think through what that means. Moralism provides no resources for moral judgment amidst the complexities of world affairs, because it denigrates the peace of a rightly ordered political community as something sub-Christian and unworthy of the Christian calling to a higher peace, the Shalom of the eschatological Kingdom. There is also a similar confusion here involving the concept of "love." The diverse demands of love in the manifold relationships of temporal existence--love of parents, children, spouse, community, co-workers, church, country, each with its unique and particular demands--are eclipsed by the unconditional and absolute meaning of love expressed in the command of Christ to love God with your whole heart and mind and your neighbor as yourself.

Second, the 'Dirty Hands' position finds its clearest expression in classic Lutheranism, which, according to H. Richard Niebuhr, represents a "Christ and culture in paradox" view. This position is clearly expressed in Reinhold Niebuhr's significant title Moral Man and Immoral Society. The Christian stands simultaneously as a member of two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Christ, in which he stands under the high demands of Christ's Sermon on the Mount, and the Kingdom of this World, in which he stands under the demands of civic responsibility, which inevitably fall short of those high demands. Again, in a letter to a pacifist who was reluctant to favor the Allied war effort against Hitler, Niebuhr wrote: "Your difficulty is that you want to live in history without sinning . . . our effort to set up the Kingdom of God on earth ends in a perverse preference for tyranny, simply because the peace of tyranny means, at least, the absence of war." (Love and Justice)

Antecedents to this view can be found in Luther, although he was by no means a systematic or consistent writer--particularly in the contrast between his Treatise on Christian Liberty and his pamphlet, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. As H. Richard Niebuhr notes, "it is a far cry from Luther's celebration of the faith that works by love, suffering all things in serving the neighbor [in the former], to his injunction to the rulers to 'stab, smite, slay, whoever can [in the latter]." (H.R. Niebuhr, 170f.) In the former, he talks about a Christ-like joyful love of neighbor that "takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss," just as the Father causes His sun "to shine upon the good and upon the evil." But in his pamphlet against the peasants, we read: "There are two kingdoms, one the kingdom of God, the other the kingdom of the world. . . . God's kingdom is a kingdom of grace and mercy . . . but the kingdom of the world is a kingdom of wrath and severity. . . . Now he who would confuse these two kingdoms--as our false fanatics do--would put wrath into God's kingdom and mercy into the world's kingdom; and that is the same as putting the devil in heaven and God in hell." (Ibid., 171f.) But it is the single individual, according to Luther, who lives simultaneously in both kingdoms, much as it is the same individual who is simultaneously justified and sinner, simul justus et peccator.

Practically, this position does not differ from the Catholic tradition insofar as it accepts the responsibility of civic duty. Where it does differ is in its frequent assumption that such responsibility unavoidably involves one in sin. Luther himself is ambivalent on this point. But others, like Reinhold Niebuhr, are not. This assumption often plays out in a tension between the competing demands of love and justice, Gospel and Law, internal and external, the private and public. On this view, justice represents something less than love, since the ideal of justice resides in the domain of Law and sin. The root of the problem, here, it seems to me, is a failure to see that justice itself is an expression of love. This is preeminently evident in the Cross of Christ in which the fullness of God's love coincides with the fullness of His justice. But what prevents this from being apparent in the justice of a just war, for example, is the same thing that prevents the "absolute pacifist" from seeing that love of a well-ordered political community is not a rival to the love of God and Shalom of His Kingdom, but a distinctively political, temporal expression of God's love a fallen world. As Aristotle shows us, the general concept of justice is refracted as if by a prism into a diversity of particular kinds of justice--commercial justice, remedial justice, and distributive justice. Each of these has, for the Christian, its proper place in life--even the remedial justice that sometimes imposes fines for misdemeanors and severer penalties for severer crimes. The fact that certain forms of remedial justice are made necessary by our fallen nature does not, of itself, make such justice anything less than an expression of divine love and grace.

IV. The Tradition of Moral Reasoning. There is a reason why some early Christians may have been pacifists. They were not in charge in the world. They represented a minor sect. They were often persecuted. They celebrated Mass in the catacombs. And during most of the period in which the New Testament was composed, they lived in expectation of the imminent return of Christ. This expectation colors much of the outlook of the Gospels. It would be anachronistic, therefore, to expect the New Testament to include a systematic articulation of moral reasoning about problems that emerged only when the expectation of an imminent return of Christ was transformed by the realization that His second coming would not occur in the foreseeable future. The beginnings of this transformation can be seen already in the arguments in the Book of Acts and Paul's Epistles about whether gentile Christians should observe Mosaic laws on circumcision and diet. These arguments, though not about war, reflect an understanding that a detailed set of rules for public Christian life in the interim between the Resurrection and Second Coming are not to be found directly in the sayings of Jesus.

When Constantine dropped the Imperial Roman prescriptions against the Christian religion in the Edict of Milan in AD 313, Christians abruptly found themselves in a very different world--one where they were no longer marginalized and persecuted, but where their religion was suddenly the state religion of Rome and their emperor himself was a Christian. It was a world where they found themselves having to take responsibility for society, and think--as Christians--about questions of political order and foreign policy. Augustine's rejection of early Christian pacifism and his articulation of a theory of justifiable war must be seen as a necessary part of this development in Christian self-understanding, once the decision had been made to leave the catacombs and undertake a transforming mission in the world. This transforming mission involved the development, following Augustine, of a tradition of moral reasoning.

George Weigel is explicit about seeing this emergent Catholic tradition of moral reasoning as "conversionst" or "transformationalist," that is, in terms of H. Richard Niebuhr's category of "Christ the Transformer of Culture." It was not possible in this ethos for the Church to think of itself as "over against" the world, since it had to be responsible for transforming the world. This is when it became clear to Christians that it was not enough to ask "What would Jesus do?"--but rather, "What would Jesus have us do?" And over the centuries, Christians concluded that what Jesus wanted them to do was not only to mortify their anger by turning the other cheeks, but also to build cathedrals, hospitals, and universities; not only to write commentaries on scripture, but also to compose treatises on medicine, philosophy, law, political and constitutional theory--like Aquinas, who wrote that a just government required the concent of the governed, and that the role of government is not merely remedial--to restrain sin--but a natural good and gift from God. (Copleston, 419, 168f.) Among the other things Christians concluded, over the years, was that they had to ask what Jesus required of them when turning the other cheek would mean failing to defend one's neighbor or capitulating to the "evil peace" of a repressive aggressor. This was the beginning of the tradition of moral reasoning that began the arduous work of formulating the conditions under which war came to be regarded as sometimes justifiable, sometimes even a duty of love to neighbor and God, as a means of defending or restoring the just peace of a rightly ordered political community. The task of establishing and preserving such a peace was understood, not as a sinful undertaking to sully one's hands, but as a vocation eminently worthy of the Christian in the interim between Christ's Resurrection and Second Advent.

I would like to close with a remark made by James H. Toner, Professor of International Relations and Military Ethics at the U.S. Air War College, in a letter to First Things. A number of years ago, he said, while teaching in Vermont, I was on a public affairs panel discussing just war issues. He soon discovered that he was the sole supporter of that notion and was feeling considerable hostility from his audience. An elderly man in the rear stood and said that he wanted to support his views on just war, adding that he was a classical musician. Great, thought Toner: there's one person in the room who agreed with me, and he's probably a nut. "I want to tell you," the man continued, "what is the sweetest music I have ever heard." Toner cringed while the man spoke. "Although I have heard wonderful music thousands of times, the most beautiful was the sound of U.S. Army tanks. You see, they were coming to [the death camp where I was being held as a young man], and that sound meant that I would be able to grow up." (FT, 5/02, 6)

©Philip Blesser 2002 .