Is America
Justified to Use Force?
copyright 2001 Donald Sensing
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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.
An Historical Overview of Christian Thought on Waging War
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.
Just War Theory in the Western Tradition
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.
Two Christian Ethicists' Views
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.
No Absolute Rule?
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.)
What About Pacifism?
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?
Is Force 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.
A Look at the Particulars of the Here and Now
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.
An Integrated Response and Campaign Plan
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.
My Prayer
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.
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