Pacifism and Just War: Finding Common Ground

I recently checked out The Ethics of War and Peace from a local library primarily interested in reading Theodore J. Koontz's article, "Christian Nonviolence: An Interpretation." Like most people, I typically enjoy reading authors who I already agree with. There's nothing quite so satisfying as spending an hour reading someone say what you'd like to say if you had the clout to find your thoughts in print. Unfortunately, I found very little in Koontz's thought that impressed and instead found myself drawn to the critical response of Michael G. Cartwright to Koontz in "Conflicting Interpretations of Christian Pacifism."

Cartwright offers a number of probing critiques of Koontz, as well as an interesting engagement with the ethical dualism often inherent to Christian anarchism (which I will treat later), but what struck me most of all was his re-drawing of the lines of conflict. Cartwright admits that there is substantial disagreement between the way Christian pacifists and just war theorists approach the problem of war and the ideal of peace, but suggests, compellingly, that by marking the primary distinction as one between Christians who live in "the house of love" and those that live in the "house of fear" (to borrow Koontz's terms for describing pacifists and just war theorists), Christians necessarily mute what could be a common, if narrow, witness about war to the rest of the world.

If the conversation is framed as one between just war thinking and Christian pacifism, it is likely to proceed with advocates for just war focusing attention on Christian pacifists--as if they were the problem--while neglecting the challenge posed by other kinds of thinking about war and peace, such as "holy war" thinking, political realism, and Rambo-style militarism.

Borrowing Koontz's imagery, Cartwright later suggests,

It may be true that "fearful questions never lead to love-filled answers," but there are many kind of "fearful questions," and not all such questions are necessarily prompted by the same kinds of fear. To refine the image of the two houses, then, we might agree that not all the rooms in the house of fear are equally well-furnished, morally speaking.

More important than making allowances for a moral continuum, however, Cartwright stresses that the commonalities between the pacifists and just war theorists have something to offer as a witness to the global community, a message both parties are interested in propagating. He offers two specific examples. First, both, in contrast with realpolitik, agree that the burden of proof for justification is for those who choose war. Both ideologies represent a voice in the world, when they aren't too busy with internecine squabbling, that insists on "why go to war" as the dominant question rather than "why not?" Additionally, both ideologies reject consequentialist reasoning as primary in making personal or political decisions. The ends, in other words, do not necessarily justify the means for either group, and this is particularly true where war is concerned. Cartwright hints at other areas of potential common witness throughout, but these suffice to point out some of the deep ideological commonalities between the two groups.

Unfortunately, the possibility of a shared witness is, as is so often the case, destroyed precisely because of this common ground. As has been seen in countless times and in countless circumstances--for example the denominational struggles between the Baptists and the Restorationists in the 19th century South--it is when groups are most alike that their differences seem most important. Pacifists, and I am no exception, spend an inordinate amount of time assaulting just war thought. Even more incomprehensibly, just war advocates spend a disgusting amount energy trying to undermine pacifism, as if the real problem were Christians who do not go to war rather than Christians who go for sinister reasons to commit unspeakable atrocities.

This is not to say that debate should not continue or that--as Cartwright, with his professional ecumenical bent would seem to suggest--both positions are legitimate expressions of a common set of truths in Christ. It merely admits that war is evil, both in an absolute moral sense and in a utilitarian sense, and that as Christians we have a common duty to "speak the truth to power" against these evils. Where the alliance between Christians modes of thinking is possible it should be embraced rather than rejected because it is incomplete. At the end of the day, a just war theorist and I can sit down and lament the dropping of the bomb and, with any luck, convince the world that the consequentialist logic Harry Truman used and defended throughout his life fails to live up to the highest impulses of our created nature and, more importantly, with the divine expectations God expressed for us in Christ.

Answering Allison: Pacifism and the Law

As part of my research for the Anarchy in May series, I was lured in by the title of Dale Allison’s The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination. Hoping to have my moral imagination inspired, I cracked the spine only to find that I still feel more invigorated by the old familiar text of Matthew 5 than by Allison’s exposition of its meaning. More than anything, his attempt to take to task the pacifist interpretation of the command to “resist not the evildoer” stirred the polemicist in me, unsurprisingly. In fact, quite contrary to the very limited homiletics training I had many years ago, I managed a list of five distinct problems with his critique that can be answered with relative ease.

The first, perhaps most absurd and opportunistic, of the arguments pertains to the role of the Law in the New Covenant. Allison writes, “There is force in Calvin’s [just war] view. For if indeed Matthew understood 5:38-42 to enjoin an absolute pacifism and so to outlaw participation in all wars, it is very difficult to see how he could have included in his Gospel 5:17-20, with its strong affirmation that Jesus did not come to abolish the Law.” With no further explanation, Allison marshals to his cause the verse which has been the source of so much confusion and debate throughout the course of Christian history since, after all, Jesus seems to be immediately in tension with his own words as he juxtaposes his teachings with those of traditional Jewish wisdom and jurisprudence. The standard line is, of course, that Jesus is not erasing the Law so much as getting to the root of what it was trying to achieve, in a partial and anticipatory way, for human ethics. This is, of course, entirely consonant with a pacifist reading which sees in the Law, relative to alternative legal codes, an attempt to ameliorate violence and enshrine love and mercy in its place.

But Allison’s argument doesn’t even require so sophisticated of a refutation. It is enough that he offers no further explanation of the ongoing influence of the Law to demonstrate just how facile the attempt to unseat pacifism is. After all, all Christians throughout Christian history have agreed both that Jesus did not abolish the Law and that the Law no longer as legal force in Christianity. Allison might just as easily have argued that Jesus did not come to abolish the law and therefore the Sabbath or ritual sacrifice must be enforced on Christians. Admittedly, at least one of those positions has manifest itself on occasion historically, but Allison will have trouble pressing it now in a world of workaholics. In the absence of a more comprehensive hermeneutic of the Law in light of the New Covenant, the reader is left to curiously wonder just how much Allison thinks has gone unabolished. Frighteningly, he seems repeatedly to recommend lex talionis as an eternally valid legal principle, which would give the Sermon on the Mount all the restraining force of Shari’ah (if I can sound momentarily like an alarmist Oklahoman) and would seem to directly contradict Jesus’ monumental transition from a justice that springs from superficial fairness to one that is born out of love.

In other words, a blind appeal to the Law—even to the “spirit” of the Law, which Jesus makes plain is love and not violence—has no force in determining an interpretation of the command to “resist not the evildoer.” Unless Allison would have us return to Israelite jurisprudence for ruling the world, something which I doubt he or, especially, Jesus wanted, then shallowly claiming that the Law is not abolished and therefore violence is somehow ethical is insufficient on its face. More importantly, it makes the fatal error of assuming that violence was ever considered virtuous, even in the Old Covenant. One need only look at the numerous denunciations of violence—the violence which precipitated the flood, the violence which precluded David from building the temple, the violence which God “hates” in Malachi—to understand that Jesus’ command, if a truly pacifist one, would be more consistent with the Law than Calvin’s just war understanding (which, curiously, finds not clear foundation in the Law).

The Wisdom of John Howard Yoder

The following are merely three of what could have been numerous insightful quotes from John Howard Yoder's essay "War as a Moral Problem in the Early Church: The Historian's Hermeneutical Assumptions," in The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective:

God, the all-wise and all-powerful, is in charge of the world. We are not in charge of the course of events, responsible (as in most settings we are not able) to prevent atrocities or vindicate justice. WE need not defend ourselves; God has always protected his own, and will protect us in the future if that is his will. If it is not his will, our mobilizing for our own defense may be against his providential purpose. He may want to chastise us for our sins. Or He may want to use our suffering to 'sanctify his name,' that is, through martyrdom, the opposite of chastisement. If evil has its way, it is under God's permission and will not last. When he does triumph it will not be our doing and will not depend on our providing His troops. This is the explicit instruction of Rom. 12:19, leaving vengeance to God. This vision undercuts without needing to say so the consequentialism that is indispensable to the case for war in the name of social 'responsibility.'

Were Christians before Constantine pacifist? Certainly not, if we give the term an ahistorically modern definition. They did not advocate arms reduction negotiations nor an alternate world order that would do away with the occasion for war. The pax Romana in fact claimed already to be that. They were not consulted by Caesar about how to run the empire, since neither he nor they knew about 'the consent of the governed.' Thus, they neither asked Caesar to implement the non-violent Christian ethic from his throne nor measured the Christian ethic consequentially by whether it could be suited to run an empire. They did not refuse to serve when subject to universal conscription, since there was none. They accepted non-lethal work in the service of the peacetime military bureaucracy. Their clash with the military establishment was no rooted only in abhorrence of killing. Nor was it limited only to their abhorrence of idolatry. It was rooted in a fundamentally anti-tyrannical and anti-provincial vision of who God is and of God's saving purposes in the world.

Augustine's argument [for just war] is negative legalism, not a clear imperative. War cannot be forbidden, he argues, because John the Baptist did not forbid it, Jesus did not scold the centurion, Peter did not tell Cornelius to resign, God may have providentially subjected you to an ungodly king, Christian emperors have conquered pagan nations, and the world is miserable anyway. There is Augustine never a joyful Gospel confidence that bloodshed pleases or praises God...Augustine's mood was a 'mournful' pastoral adjustment to a world of which we cannot in any case ask that God's will be done. What has changed is not one ruling on what God's will is, but the entire setting in which doing God's will can be thought about. The Neoplatonic grid, according to which God's will cannot really be done, and the sociology of the imperial Church, according to which 'Christian' means everybody, have defined a whole different world.

Thanksgiving Family Forum

I track American politics in part because I think they are the most entertaining form of reality television and in part because, as someone who happens to live on American soil, they have a certain pragmatic relevance for me. Naturally, I have been watching the bevy of Republican debates and can honestly say that the Thanksgiving Family Forum, held in a church by a Christian organization, was by far the most painful to watch. For me, at least, the worst part isn't even difficult to isolate. It wasn't Rick Perry talking about the values "this country was based upon in Judeo-Christian founding fathers" (you remember, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Rabbi Goldberg). It wasn't even the extremely unsettling attempt by Rick Santorum to convert his infant daughter's struggle with almost certainly terminal Edwards Syndrome into politcal currency. It was this theologically disasterous thought by Michelle Bachmann:

I have a biblical worldview. And I think, going back to the Declaration of Independence, the fact that it’s God who created us—if He created us, He created government.

Let's forget for a moment that she claims a "biblical worldview" and immediately directs us to the Declaration of Independence and not the Bible and focus on what it means for theology to suggest that if God created us then He necessarily created human government. There are certainly theological systems (dreary, Calvinistic systems) which insist that it is appropriate to speak of God as the creator of everything we create because He created us. I wonder if Bachmann would be ready to endorse the implications of that theology (as so many of its more honest adherents are), that this makes God not only the author of civil government but also the author of various other sins like abortion, rape, nuclear war, and any other human malevolance imaginable. That logic paints a very scary picture, which is why so many of the rest of us are willing to accept a moral disconnect between what God has created and what we create as His creations.

The one bright moment in the whole affair is when Ron Paul contrasted the decentralized post-Exodus Israel and the centralized Israel of the kings, with the shift to the latter being (consistent with explicit biblical statements) perhaps the most destructive turn in Israelite history. His point, of course, was that human governments are nasty things that should be limited or avoided altogether when possible. The whole hermeneutical exercise had profound Lipscomb overtones--as Lipscomb would make a similar point in his works with the story of Samuel and Saul about the folly of civil government--though the two men arrive at very different ultimate conclusions. Delightfully, though Paul also endorsed the Augustinian view of just war (citing the saint by name), he admitted that just war theory is in tension with the experience of the early church and Christ's own emphasis on peace. For his own betterment (though perhaps not that of the American political landscape), I cannot help but hope that Paul will take that final ideological step and realize that government is so nasty that, as a Christian, he ought to just wash his hands of the whole endeavor.

Of course, then what would everyone be left with? Newt Gingrich and his profound answer to the worldwide Occupy Movement: "Go get a job, right after you take a bath."

Just War: The Pride of Catholicism

Rarely will you see me endorse just war theory or any of its principles and consequences, so enjoy this while you can.

Stacy Trasancos, a self-described scientist turned Catholic homemaker, has been in the "news" for the past few days because of a moral musing that she made the mistake of taking public. In this offensive diatribe, she calmly expresses her trepidation about taking her children out in public in Massachusetts for fear that they will encounter openly homosexual activity and have questions that she didn't think she would need to answer yet. One of the incidents that she cites as sparking concern happened while at the public pool:

When there were two men relaxing at the side of the pool unnaturally close to each other, effeminately rubbing elbows and exchanging doe-eyes, I was again anxiously watching my children hoping they wouldn't ask questions. They don't see Daddy do that with anyone but Mommy.

She follows up with this comment, which has been quoted the most in reports about the incident:

This is my community. I find myself unable to even leave the house anymore without worrying about what in tarnation we are going to encounter. We are responsible citizens. We live by the rules, we pay our taxes, we take care of our things. I'm supposed to be able to influence what goes on in my community, and as a voter I do exercise that right. But I'm outnumbered. I can't even go to normal places without having to sit silently and tolerate immorality. We all know what would happen if I asked two men or two women to stop displaying, right in front of me and my children, that they live in sodomy.

These incendiary remarks have sparked a swarm of outrage as the blog post went viral. Trasancos rightly highlighted this first comment:

I said...
What a c*nt.

I hope her children are kidnapped, raped, and murdered.

It would be better than having them grow up with such a twisted f**k for a mother!

Others were better only by comparison to that. Consider these gems:

Look in the Mirror !

You're the reason you can't go out, no one else.

Probably the stupidest cunt I've ever had the misfortune of reading about. You are a selfish slut. So you can go to the park, and perhaps kiss your husband/boyfriend, but a gay couple has no right to do such a thing? Oh wait! They were actually LOOKING at one another. Oh no! OH NO NOT ELBOWS TOO!? You are a dumb piece of shit. I'd tell you not to breed, but it looks like it is too late for that. I suggest moving to outer space, because gays exist, and will not cease to exist because you aren't bold enough woman to explain to your fucking children that gay people exist. You are pathetic, petty, and an absolute moron. Hopefully your kids grow up will, they certainly won't being brought up by you.

Here is my personal favorite:

SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT...

It goes on like that for a while, but I think you get the drift. My point in sharing this is not to bring your attention to a plighted Christian or even to express my unqualified support for her position. (After all, I certainly don't think paying taxes should give her the political right to legislate morality, and, for my part, I think the wanton immodesty is the more obvious and pernicious problem at public pools.) I actually want to draw attention toward another post that Trasancos made in the aftermath of this debacle.

Some two weeks after the original post and as part of the ongoing response to her post, Trasancos shared an attempt at parody posted by one of her critics. In it, the author attempts to show Trasancos the logical flaw in her argument by recasting her thoughts into the person of an atheist upset by the unchecked presence of Catholicism in the public square. He proceeds thus:

When there was a priest and a boy relaxing at the side of the pool unnaturally close to each other, effeminately rubbing elbows and exchanging doe-eyes, I was again anxiously watching my children hoping they wouldn't ask questions. They don't see Daddy do that with anyone but Mommy.

While I agree with the basic sentiment of the author who tries to show the absurdity of transporting particular moral expectations into the public square of a pluralistic society, I was actually more impressed by the way Trasancos responded to this criticism. Here is what she had to say:

Round of applause for Mr. Kaz! You didn't finish though. You forgot how it ends.

See, while Catholics will read this, I can promise you with 100% certainty that there will be no herds of Christians following each other over to find you and tell you that you are a hateful, bigoted, Catholic-o-phobe. Absolutely no one would even consider telling you anonymously that they hope your children are "kidnapped, raped and murdered." There probably won't even be any more emotional reaction than a shrug because we've heard it all before, and we realize we stand among a rich history of saints and martyrs far better than us who have suffered for the preservation of our Faith. We don't demand that you approve of us.

In this response is seen that cherished Catholic just war principle of proportionality that the outraged atheists or liberals or homosexuals or whoever they may have been seem to have missed in their responses to Trasancos. It is a sick, sad world in which the appropriate response to differing opinions in a society--and especially in a vocal subset of that society--which prides itself on pluralism and liberty is personal attacks and dreams of rape and murder (particularly against those who are "guilty" only by association). It is the old cherished but self-defeating adage that we should be tolerant of everything but intolerance. We can welcome with open arms the man whose sexual proclivities tend toward dressing as a unicorn and urinating on a paraplegic but not the person who thinks that strange.

Trasancos made perhaps the greatest rhetorical move possible in responding the way she did, not with logic but with virtue. The latter, we should have long ago learned, has more sway than the former over the human heart. The true response of the Christian heart is not contention but peace, and peace in adversity especially. I hope that she proved to be right, that no Christians went and responded with the kind of disproportionate vitriol that characterized responses to Trasancos's thoughts. Regardless, her final stance is the right one. Speak boldly; live timidly.