War and Peace

Matthew 5:9 is the only place in the New Testament where the word peacemaker appears, and it is worth hearing what kind of word it is. It is not peace-lover or peace-keeper. It is a maker, someone who produces peace where there was none. The only related verb in the New Testament is used of Christ, who made peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20), and Paul says that Christ himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has torn down the dividing wall of hostility (Ephesians 2:14). Peace in scripture is not the absence of fighting but shalom, wholeness and right relationship, the condition in which righteousness and peace have kissed (Psalm 85:10). The prophets condemned those who say 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace at all (Jeremiah 6:14), the leaders who cover over injustice and call it calm.

So every Christian is called to be a peacemaker, and no Christian position on war denies it. The disagreement is not about whether peace is good. It is about whether, in a world where some people will kill the innocent unless they are stopped, making peace can ever require force, and if it can, whether a Christian may be the one who uses it. Roland Bainton, in Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace (1960), identified three historic Christian answers: pacifism, the just war and the crusade. The crusade, holy war fought for the faith itself, is the one no major Christian tradition now defends, and its history is a warning to all three that remain. In the twentieth century a third living position emerged, Christian realism. The next three sections set out pacifism, just war and realism, each at its strongest.

Before you read them, one thing should be said about the people this lesson is about. Some who read it are soldiers, police officers or former fighters. Some have killed. Some were children when they were made to fight. Some have lost family to soldiers, or to rebels, or to neighbours. Some are pacifists who have been called cowards. Every one of them is made in God's image and none of them is to be mocked. This is an argument between Christians who love Jesus and have read the same Bible, and it should be conducted as one.

Christian pacifism holds that followers of Jesus may not take human life, even in war or in defence of others, because Jesus forbade it by word and by example. Its texts are the Sermon on the Mount: do not resist an evil person, turn the other cheek, love your enemies (Matthew 5:39, 5:44). It points to Jesus' command to Peter to put away his sword (Matthew 26:52), to his healing of the man Peter wounded (Luke 22:51), to his refusal to call on legions of angels (Matthew 26:53), and above all to the cross itself, where Jesus did not retaliate but entrusted himself to him who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23), and Peter says that Christ suffered leaving an example for us to follow in his steps (2:21). Romans 12 forbids Christians to repay evil for evil and tells them to overcome evil with good (12:17, 12:21). For the pacifist the question is not first whether violence works but who Jesus is: if the Lord of history conquered by dying rather than killing, his followers cannot conquer any other way.

Pacifists also appeal to the early church. Tertullian, in On Idolatry, written early in the third century, said that in disarming Peter the Lord disarmed every soldier. Origen, in Against Celsus around 248, answered the charge that Christians were bad citizens by saying that they fought for the emperor by their prayers, as an army of piety, rather than with weapons. The Apostolic Tradition, a church order traditionally attributed to Hippolytus of Rome though its author and date are now disputed, says that a soldier who becomes a Christian must not kill, and that a believer who wants to become a soldier is to be rejected. In 295, a young man named Maximilian was executed in North Africa for refusing military service on the ground that he was a Christian. Historians debate how widespread this view was: Tertullian himself, in his Apology, mentions Christians serving in the army, and there is other evidence of Christian soldiers before Constantine. Writers such as Peter Leithart, in Defending Constantine (2010), argue that the early evidence is more mixed than pacifists claim. But the early church's leading writers did not, before the fourth century, defend Christian participation in war, and many opposed it.

The Anabaptists of the Reformation revived the view. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, drawn up largely by Michael Sattler, said that the sword is ordained by God but outside the perfection of Christ, and that Christians should not use it. The Mennonites, the Amish and the Hutterites have kept that witness, and so have the Church of the Brethren and the Quakers, whose declaration to King Charles II in 1660 became the root of their peace testimony. In the twentieth century the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, in The Politics of Jesus (1972), argued that Jesus offered not a private spirituality but a social ethic, a new community that refuses violence, and Stanley Hauerwas, a Methodist, made the case in The Peaceable Kingdom (1983) that the church's first task is to be a community of peace in a violent world. Yoder's arguments remain widely taught, and they must be judged on their merits; but it must also be said that he abused women over many years, a record his church examined and acknowledged in a process concluded in 2015. A movement's best writer can betray its own teaching, and that is a warning to every tradition, not only his.

Pacifism is not passivity. Its best practitioners have been active peacemakers, mediators and protectors, and many have risked their lives in nonviolent resistance. Mennonite and Quaker workers have accompanied threatened villagers in war zones, and Christians in many countries have stood between armed men and their targets with nothing in their hands. The critics' charge is still a serious one, and pacifists must answer it: if a Christian refuses to use force to stop a man killing children, is he not leaving the children to die? Pacifists reply that Jesus never promised that obedience would always protect the innocent from suffering, that the church's calling is faithfulness and not control of history, and that non-violent action has stopped more violence than its critics admit. Their critics reply that faithfulness cannot mean leaving the neighbour to the murderer. That exchange is the heart of the debate.

The just war tradition holds that war is always a tragedy and usually a sin, but that it can be justified, as a last resort, under strict conditions, and that a Christian may take part. Its root is Augustine. In Against Faustus, he argued that what is evil in war is not the death of men who will die anyway, but the love of violence, revengeful cruelty, the lust for power and similar things, and that rulers may rightly use force to punish such evils. In a letter to Boniface, a Roman general, he told him to be a peacemaker even in fighting, so that by conquering he might bring those he fought to the benefits of peace. And in The City of God he said that the wise man will wage just wars, but will lament the necessity of them. For Augustine, the love that forbids a Christian to defend himself by killing may oblige him to defend his neighbour.

Thomas Aquinas gave the tradition its classic form in the Summa Theologiae (second part of the second part, question 40). A war is just, he said, only if three things are true: it is waged by legitimate authority, not by private persons; it has a just cause, such as defending the innocent or righting a grave wrong; and those who wage it have a right intention, seeking good and avoiding evil. Later writers, among them the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria in the sixteenth century and the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in The Law of War and Peace (1625), added further conditions and gave birth to modern international law. The criteria are now usually set out in two groups. Before going to war: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, a reasonable probability of success, and proportionality, meaning that the good hoped for must outweigh the harm. In the conduct of war: discrimination, meaning that civilians must never be deliberately targeted, and proportionality in each action. Some now add a third group, justice after the war.

The texts of the just war tradition are Romans 13:4, where the ruler does not carry the sword in vain and is God's servant to punish wrongdoers; John the Baptist's words to soldiers in Luke 3:14, which reform their conduct without telling them to leave; Jesus' praise of the centurion's faith (Matthew 8:10); the conversion of Cornelius without any call to give up his post (Acts 10); and the law of Deuteronomy 20, which already restrains war by requiring an offer of peace before a siege (20:10) and forbidding the destruction of fruit trees (20:19). Just war thinkers read the Sermon on the Mount as forbidding personal revenge and retaliation, not as forbidding the protection of the innocent by legitimate authority. In the twentieth century Paul Ramsey, in War and the Christian Conscience (1961), argued that the principle of discrimination flows from Christian love for every person, including the enemy, and Oliver O'Donovan, in The Just War Revisited (2003), described just war not as a theory that permits war but as a practice of judgment that restrains it. The Catholic Church holds the tradition, as do most Protestant churches. The Orthodox churches have usually spoken differently, treating war at best as a tragic necessity rather than a just act, and Basil of Caesarea, while saying that the fathers had not counted killing in war as murder, suggested that soldiers who had killed might do well to abstain from communion for three years.

Its strongest argument is moral seriousness about the neighbour. If a village is about to be massacred and a lawful force can stop it, the just war thinker asks how love can refuse. Its critics' charge is also serious: that in practice the criteria have rarely stopped any nation from going to war, that almost every war has been declared just by the churches of the side fighting it, and that the conditions are so flexible that they can be made to bless anything. Just war thinkers reply that the criteria have often been used to condemn wars and particular acts in war, such as the bombing of cities, and that the failure of Christians to apply a teaching honestly is a reason to apply it better, not to abandon it. The United States Catholic bishops, in The Challenge of Peace (1983), used just war reasoning to raise grave objections to the use of nuclear weapons. Its defenders say that a tradition able to say no to its own government is not merely a blessing on whatever is done. Its critics answer that such refusals are rare exceptions, and that criteria which almost never stop a war have not yet shown that they can.

The third position was given its classic form by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the years before the Second World War. In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) he argued that groups and nations behave far worse than individuals, because collective selfishness is stronger and less restrained than personal selfishness. In an essay of 1940, Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist, written in the first year of the war in Europe, he argued that pacifists misunderstood the depth of sin. The love of the Sermon on the Mount, he said, is the true law of human life, and it judges every use of force. But in a sinful world, refusing to use force can mean leaving the weak to the strong. Political responsibility sometimes requires a Christian to choose the lesser evil, and to do so knowing that it is still evil and needs forgiveness. He respected the pacifism of those, like the Mennonites, who withdrew from political power as a witness to the kingdom, but he argued that a pacifism claiming that love could govern the relations of nations misunderstood both sin and the gospel.

Christian realism differs from the just war tradition in tone more than in its conclusions. Just war thinkers tend to say that a war fought under the right conditions is a just act. Realists tend to say that even a necessary war is a tragic choice in which the Christian is implicated in sin and must repent. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who joined the resistance to Hitler and was executed in April 1945, is often cited here. In his Ethics, written during those years, he spoke of the responsible person who is willing to take on guilt for the sake of others. Exactly what part he played in the plots against Hitler has been debated; Mark Thiessen Nation and his co-authors, in Bonhoeffer the Assassin? (2013), argued that his role has been exaggerated and that he remained closer to his earlier pacifism than is usually claimed. Whatever his exact role, his life has become a test case for all three positions.

Realism's strength is its honesty about sin and its refusal to pretend that any choice in a violent world is clean. Its critics, especially Yoder and Hauerwas, charge that it makes the Sermon on the Mount irrelevant to actual life and treats the cross as an ideal rather than a way, so that the church ends up taking its ethics from the nation's needs rather than from Jesus. Realists reply that a church that refuses all responsibility for the use of force keeps its hands clean only because others do the work it will not do. Both sides accuse the other of not taking Jesus seriously, in different ways, and that is a sign of how deep the question goes.

Most of the classic literature on war was written in Europe and North America about wars between states. Many students of this course live in places where the violence is different: civil wars, ethnic and religious fighting, armed groups attacking villages, cattle raids that turn into massacres, and governments that turn their soldiers on their own people. The just war criterion of legitimate authority is hard to apply when the government is itself the attacker. The pacifist call to non-violence is hard to hear when a village has no army to protect it. And all three positions are tested by the plain fact that the killers are often baptised.

Rwanda is the case every Christian should study. Between April and July 1994, in about a hundred days, somewhere between half a million and a million people were killed, most of them Tutsi, along with Hutu who opposed the killing. Rwanda was one of the most Christian countries in Africa, and decades earlier it had been one of the birthplaces of the East African Revival. Many of the killings took place in churches, where people had fled for refuge; the church buildings at Ntarama and Nyamata are now memorials, with the victims' clothes and bones still there. Some clergy were complicit. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted an Adventist pastor, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, in 2003 for his part in killings at a church and hospital complex, and a Catholic priest, Athanase Seromba, who was sentenced on appeal in 2008 to life imprisonment for his part in the destruction of his own church with the people inside. Rwanda's Catholic bishops apologised in 2016 for the wrongs of church members, and Pope Francis asked forgiveness in 2017 for the sins of the church and its members. Other Christians hid their neighbours at the risk of their lives, and some died with those they hid.

What does Rwanda teach? First, that no doctrine of war will help a church whose members have learned to see another tribe as less than human. Before the genocide, Hutu extremists called Tutsi cockroaches on the radio, and the killers had already been taught to think of their neighbours that way before they picked up machetes. The first lesson of this module, on the image of God, is the first defence. Second, that baptism had not reached far enough into some Christians' loyalties: tribe and party had a deeper claim on them than Christ. And third, that the courage to refuse to kill, and to protect the hunted, was shown by ordinary believers of every background, which is a witness all three positions can honour.

There are other examples, of both failure and faithfulness. In Liberia, Leymah Gbowee, a Lutheran social worker, organised Christian and Muslim women in a non-violent movement for peace in 2003 that helped bring the civil war to an end, and she shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. In northern Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army, led by a man who claimed a spiritual mission, abducted tens of thousands of children and forced them to fight, and Christian and Muslim leaders in the north worked together for peace and for the return of the abducted. In parts of Nigeria, South Sudan and eastern Congo, Christians today face these questions under attack. Should a village organise its young men to defend it? Should a Christian join a militia, or the army, or refuse? Should a church accept a ceasefire with those who killed its members? Pacifists, just war thinkers and realists will answer differently, and each answer has a cost.

One more group must be named. Soldiers who come home often carry what the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, in Achilles in Vietnam (1994), called moral injury: the deep wound of having done, or failed to prevent, or witnessed something that violates their own conscience. Former child soldiers carry it too, often without anyone to talk to. Whatever a church believes about war, it must make room for these people to confess, to grieve and to be forgiven and restored, and it must never treat them as monsters or as heroes beyond question. They are image-bearers who have been where the rest of the church sent them, or where no one could protect them.

Head a new page in your casebook Violence and peace in my setting. Using the page from the inquiry, write a short account, in general terms and without naming anyone, of the violence your community has known and what Christians did in it.

Then draw three columns, headed Pacifism, Just war and Christian realism. Take one real kind of situation from your setting, for example a village that has been attacked by an armed group, or a young man in your church who wants to join the army or a local defence force. Under each heading, write in two or three sentences what that position would say to him or to the village, with the text it would rely on most. Write each column as someone who holds that view would write it. Then write, under the columns, which position your own church holds, if it has one, and one question you would want to ask a holder of each of the other two.

Finally, write one practical thing your church could do to make peace in your setting this year, whatever its view of war: a meeting between two communities, care for a family that has lost someone to violence, a welcome for a former soldier or fighter, or teaching that names and rejects the language that makes neighbours into enemies. Write who would lead it, by role, and when you will raise it.