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Just War

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of war and forgiveness in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library


The subject before us frequently raises a lot of very strong feelings. The only thing I ask is, if I trample on yours at any given point, be patient; I’ll trample on somebody else’s a few minutes later. I suppose 20 years ago the most commonly known Bible verse in this country was John 3:16. That is no longer the case.

The best known verse of the Bible in this country now is Matthew 7:1, although very few people know where it is found. “Judge not, that you be not judged.” Whenever any Christian says anybody is wrong about anything, there will be somebody who stands up and says, “You’re being judgmental. You’re not being a Christian.”

This is part of a larger piece in which somehow we have abstracted that one text out of its context and made of pop media Christianity a kind of vapid, spineless, cowardly, morally bankrupt indifference to questions of evil. Tolerance becomes the new god and tolerance itself has been redefined.

What I want to do before we plunge into our topic is to nail down two or three theological points that are part of being a Christian which, it seems to me, we Christians need to remind ourselves of.

1. God is angry with us, and yet, he forgives.

From the Bible’s perspective, the heart of the human dilemma is not social pathology but the just wrath of God upon us because of our vaunted self-love, our vaunted independence, our vaunted de-Godding of God. Nevertheless, this God, though he stands over against us in genuine righteous indignation, provides for our forgiveness by bearing in the person of Christ Jesus himself the judgment that should come upon us. That lies at the heart of biblical Christianity. In this connection, it is important to see a couple of things.

A. It is only the offended party that can forgive.

Supposing you were gang-raped or brutally mugged and I stumbled across your attackers and said, “I forgive you,” what would you say to me? Wouldn’t you be outraged? I don’t have the right to forgive an offense that has not been done against me.

That is the heart of Simon Wiesenthal’s very moving book, The Sunflower, written in the wake of the Holocaust. He survived the Holocaust, and toward the end of the war he was brought into a dying German soldier. This German soldier begged for his forgiveness, and Wiesenthal walked out of the room. His reasoning was, “Only the people who have been offended have the right to forgive. Most of the Nazi victims have died. Therefore, there is no forgiveness.”

That’s almost right. Yet, there is another whole dimension in the Christian way of looking at things that changes that. It is in every offense … in every offense … the primarily offended person is God himself, which means ultimately it is only God himself who can forgive. Thus, David, after he has committed murder and adultery, after he has lied and broken the covenant and deceived his generals, actually has the cheek to address God in contrition and say, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”

At one level that just wasn’t true. At one level he had sinned against Bathsheba, sinned against her husband, sinned against his general, sinned against the covenant, and sinned against the nation. There weren’t many people he hadn’t sinned against. Yet, in the deepest sense, he did understand from the perspective of both Old and New Testaments his deepest offense was in defying his Maker, his own covenant God. Thus, it must be God who forgives sin.

That, of course, from a Christian perspective has particular piquant force when you come to the Lord Jesus himself. Do you recall how the paralytic is lowered before him in the crowded house when his bearers cannot get through the crowds? They lower him on ropes, and Jesus looks at him and says, “My son, your sins are forgiven you.” The authorities catch on immediately. “Who can forgive sin but God alone?” they said. Just so. Jesus was, in fact, insisting, assuming the prerogatives of God were his in the forgiveness of sin. God forgives sins.

Thoughtful Christians can never forget Jesus’ haunting prayer on the cross offered up with respect to the very men who were torturing him in crucifixion, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” The prayer is often used as a kind of generalized incentive to Christians to forgive everyone under every circumstance. Thus, we return to a kind of milksop-ish view of Christianity, but that’s not what the point of that prayer was at all.

First, when Jesus says they do not know what they are doing, he does not mean their ignorance is so absolute that they are innocent, for if they were innocent there would be nothing to forgive. He still says, “Father, forgive them.” He means, rather, that they are relatively ignorant and, therefore, relatively innocent.

That is to say, they really do not know who it is they are crucifying. They have acted barbarically. Undoubtedly, they may have heard the court proceedings were a farce, but that is still different from engineering the rigged trial. It is vastly different from knowing exactly who it was they were executing, and Jesus asks for mercy.

Secondly, Jesus does not say or pray this with respect to everyone who was involved in the betrayal and execution. Regarding Judas Iscariot, for instance, Jesus gave him various warnings but finally pronounced it would be better for him if he had not been born. He is called the son of perdition. There is not a universal forgiveness.

B. We must remind ourselves that Christians must forgive.

Perhaps the most important evidence that Jesus’ followers must forgive is found in the prayer he himself taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors,” where sin is seen as a debt, or in Luke, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.”

This is expanded upon in Matthew. “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins either.” The parable of the unmerciful servant makes exactly the same point.

These passages must neither be explained away nor misinterpreted. On the one hand, they must be left with all of their stark demand. There is no forgiveness for those who do not forgive. On the other hand, in the light of all the New Testament writers say about grace and in light of all that Jesus himself teaches, it would be obtuse to understand these passages as if they were suggesting a person earns forgiveness by forgiving others. That’s not the point at all.

Rather, the point is more subtle. It is that people disqualify themselves from being forgiven if they are so hardened in their own bitterness that they cannot or will not forgive others. In such cases, they display no brokenness, no contrition, no recognition of the great value of forgiveness, no understanding of their own complicity in sin, and no repentance.

A great deal of contemporary study of forgiveness emphasizes the psychological benefits of this virtue. Not for a moment would I suggest that such studies are valueless, but they often lead us slightly astray. Let me deal with the measure of truth in what they say. A woman, let us say, in her 30s who is freezing up in her relationship with her husband may need to forgive the father who repeatedly abused her when she was a teenager.

Part of getting to that point may be tied up with looking the evil straight in the face, seeing it for what it is, and forgiving the man who did it, lest she herself be devoured by ongoing nurtured bitterness, but the fact remains the psychological benefits of forgiveness, from a Christian perspective, do not receive the primary stress in Scripture. There, the primary emphasis is on the eternal benefits of being right with God.

C. There are different emphases on forgiveness, different flavors, if you like, depending on the passage.

First, there are different motives that go into the act of forgiving. We are not only called to forgive as a sign that we are broken and, thus, invite forgiveness also from God, but we are also as Christians commanded to forgive because we have been forgiven. It is merely a response of gratitude, recognizing our own deep-stained guilt.

But there are other motives, and none is more important than love. Forgiveness moves over into the domain of forbearance. “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you.” Forgiveness and love are linked in several crucial passages: Colossians 3; 1 Corinthians 13; and many other passages.

Secondly, sometimes the forgiveness of which the New Testament speaks presupposes repentance on the part of the offender and sometimes not. Where two parties are estranged and A has offended B, for reconciliation to take place, there must be forgiveness from B and repentance from A, but even where there is no repentance from A there may be a forgiving stance toward that unrepentant partner. There may not be reconciliation, but there must still be that.

Otherwise, what can you make of the prayer of Stephen? “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,” he says. Certainly not because they’ve already repented. In fact, had I time, I would take you through a number of passages in which forgiveness is dependent upon repentance and a number of passages in which it is not, but I don’t have time to unpack that here.

Thirdly, despite all the emphasis on personal forgiveness, the Bible reserves an important place for punishment without forgiveness. Not only the ultimate punishment, but also sometimes discipline of various sorts in the family and in the church and, in particular, the punishment reserved for the state. The Lord gives the state, we’re told, as an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Romans 13:4. I’m going to pass up on further exploration of this theme, although it is important.

2. Two other texts that are crucial in our understanding of the setting of Christianity.

The first is found in Romans 12 and 13. The end of Romans 12 ends this way: “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.” Skipping on, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

When we Christians read our Bibles, we so often finish our devotional times at the end of a chapter and pick up the next chapter the next day. We, then, sometimes miss obvious connections, for when the Bible was first written, of course, there were no chapter and verse breaks. Thus, when the first readers read this, they didn’t stop there. They read right into the next section.

“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good.”

Then a little further on, “He does not bear the sword in vain.” In other words, the first part seems to be saying, in effect, “Don’t bear personal malice.” God is the One who finally exercised justice, and in fact, one of the ways in which he exercises justice in this broken and fallen world is precisely through the instrument of the state. That leads to all kinds of very complicated questions.

Supposing the state runs amuck and is profoundly unjust or supposing the demands of the state begin to compete with the demands of what God has revealed in Christ Jesus, what do you do there? For, you see, underlying what Paul says here is something that goes back to the Lord Jesus himself. You cannot even begin to think about just war theory until you see this one. He says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

That, in the history of Western thought, is astonishingly influential, for you see, the locus of the people of God in the Old Testament is a nation, and ideally, Israel is a theocracy. The Davidic king was to be a reflection of God himself. It was not a democracy; it was a theocracy, often corrupted to some sort of privileged oligarchy.

Yet, at least in theory, when it wasn’t corrupted, people were supposed to follow what God himself had decreed by law in a covenantal relationship with him ruled over by God’s son, where the Davidide was considered the son of God reflecting something of the attributes of God, a common Near Eastern appellation at the time. Now Jesus comes along and says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

That is the fountain of almost all Western thought on the separation of church and state. America prides itself in a particularly sophisticated form of this. In fact, it is only one form of many. There are some that are better and some that are worse. France has another form. Germany has another form. Britain has another form. Despite a state church, all Western nations have struggled with this one in whole or in part.

Even when the distinction was more observed in the breach as for periods, for example, when popes took on astonishingly powerful secular authority, nevertheless, the tension was there constantly, constantly in the Western tradition, and it breeds many, many questions. Interestingly enough, the first generation of Christians faced the entailment. The point is now the locus of the people of God was not considered a nation but a transnational group that did not strictly belong to any state and the state could not be identified with the church, either.

Inevitably, this sooner or later led to tensions between the claims of Christ and the claims of the state, and at that point, the response of the Christians was, rightly, “We must obey God rather than man.” At that point, they were willing to be persecuted and killed for conscience sake in bowing to the lordship of Christ which is something that has been repeated again and again and again.

It calls Christians to recognize, on the one hand, government is a God-sanctioned activity which rightly punishes evil, which rightly promotes the public good, which rightly prevents anarchy, but like all institutions in this fallen and broken world, which is easily corrupted, and when it usurps power to itself that actually defies what Christians must hold if they confess Jesus as Lord, then Christians will bow to Christ’s lordship and take the consequences.

In other words, Christians see themselves in a kind of tension between the demands of their citizenship in heaven and their demands as citizens here, and one must not forget the government Paul has in mind when he writes such words is not a democratically elected government in Washington but the Roman Empire, and this at a pretty corrupt period of its existence.

It is within that framework that Christians have developed just war theory. It needs to be stated, first of all, Christians are not the first people in the history of the world to talk about just war theory. The Romans had just war theory. Cicero, for example, insisted the two conditions that had to be met for just war were, first, defense, and second, honor.

Christians never bought into the second one. They never did, for the simple reason that they followed a Master who was prepared to be dishonored, so the matter of saving face by going to war is not a Christian perspective at all. It is, in fact, part and parcel of ancient Roman paganism, but Christians, nevertheless, did develop just war theory and insisted eventually it be tied to the question of love.

3. Six points of various length or brevity that will organize now the rest of my address.

A. It may be helpful, first of all, to reflect on passivism and just war theory in the light of the biblical commands to love and forgive.

Let me begin by distinguishing three positions.

First, sentimental passivism. More disrespectfully, squishy passivism. It’s a kind of passivism that is really fantastically naÔve. It’s naÔve about evil. It really does think a good conversation will sort it all out. I recall speaking to some graduate students on this theme in Britain a number of years ago, and one of the students there in conversation who was apparently brilliant in his field but transparently knew nothing about history insisted if only the various parties before World War II had gotten together and had a good chat they would have sorted it out.

One wonders if he had ever heard of Chamberlain or Munich. We have to face the fact that evil can be notoriously wrong-headed, stubborn, and purposeful, and from the Bible’s perspective, we are not surprised at the outbreaks of evil. We are a cursed brood, and evil lurks deeply in all of our hearts given the right incentives. In my judgment, sentimental passivism is not a position to be respected. It is to be refuted by the simple facts of history.

Secondly, rigorous passivism. There is a more rigorous passivism which has captured various elements of the Christian church. It is historically grounded. It is often tied historically to Anabaptist and related traditions, and it is a position I deeply respect, even though at the end of the day, I judge it to be mistaken. This inheritance runs in two or three different directions.

At its best, however, it recognizes full well what the apostle says about the sword being given to the state. It does not deny there is evil and there must be powers that stand against it, but it insists this is the function of the state and Christians must not participate in it. Therefore, they must withdraw from the state. Christians should not participate in the state except at low levels of organization where they don’t have to make any of the hard decisions. The most rigorous of these will do the same thing with respect to courts.

Others will say they may participate in justice at the internal level but not at the level of war, even though they would say the state does have the sword and sometimes it should be exercised. It’s just that Christians themselves, out of matter of conscience because they belong to another citizenship, must not participate along these lines.

I’m not going to interact with that opinion here. In my view, it is mistaken. I don’t think that is the direction in which the New Testament texts run, but I don’t have time to undertake a systematic critique of the position. If you want to bring it up in Question and Answer later, we’ll mention at least a few things.

Thirdly, just war theory. By far, the overwhelming inheritance in the Western world is just war theory which has come down to us through Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and most, in fact, serious theological thinkers in the West. It has been formulated in a number of different ways, but this is at the heart of it.

Just war theory out of love, if you please, insists in this broken world war under restricted conditions may be the loving option, but those two restrictions fall under two heads: the reasons for resorting to war and the actual conduct of war. Each head has four points, so there are a total of eight.

a. The strict rules that govern going to war, followed by the four rules regarding the conduct of war.

i. The only just cause for going to war is defense against violent aggression.

ii. The only just intention is to restore a just peace to friend and foe alike.

iii. Military force must be the last resort after negotiations and other efforts have been tried and have failed.

iv. The decision to engage in such a just war must be made by the highest governmental authority; it is not a private matter.

v. The war must be for limited ends. In other words, to repel aggression, to redress injustice, not in order to exploit or colonialize.

vi. The means of just war must be limited by proportionality to the offense. In other words, if someone comes and bombs one of your cities, you don’t nuke the nation.

vii. There must be no intentional and direct attack on noncombatants.

viii. War should not be prolonged where there is no reasonable hope of success within these limits.

One may well begin to wonder at this point what any of this has to do with love and forgiveness. Isn’t this nothing more than a lot of casuistry to defend the violence of war in the first place? Not really, for the best defenses of just war theory argue that many of these rules are, in fact, the outworking of love.

Let’s take an easy case before we get into hard cases. Where an enemy is perpetrating its horrible holocaust and there is massive genocide, is it not love which intervenes to stop it even at the cost of the lives of many of your citizens in order to stop it, or so long as it is happening to somebody else, it doesn’t matter? Which is more loving? Is not restraint in such cases a display not of loving passivism but lack of love, of the unwillingness to sacrifice anything for the sake of others?

In fact, one author.… I gather his book is in your bookshop here. Darrell Cole. He writes these lines: “The most noteworthy aspect of the moral approach to warfare in Aquinas and Calvin …” And they would argue out of reflection of the New Testament. “… is that it teaches “contrary to today’s prevailing views” that a failure to engage in a just war is a failure of virtue, a failure to act well.

An odd corollary of this conclusion is that it is a greater evil for Christians to fail to wage a just war than it is for unbelievers. When an unbeliever fails to go to war, the cause may be a lack of courage or prudence or justice. He may be a coward or simply indifferent to evil. These are failures of natural moral virtue.

When Christians (at least in the tradition of Aquinas and Calvin), fail to engage in just war, it may involve all of these natural failures as well, but it will also and more significantly involve a failure of love. The Christian who fails to use force to aid his neighbor when prudence dictates that force is the only way to render that aid is an uncharitable Christian. Hence, Christians who willingly and knowingly refuse to engage in a just war do a vicious thing: they fail to show love toward their neighbor as well as toward God.”

In other words, we have, I think, out of a lot of sentiment been conned into the view that just war theory is always second best. Rightly articulated and with all kinds of other things that must yet be said, in a fallen and broken world the argument of just war theory is, granted the right conditions, it is the morally right thing to do.

Moreover, note how many of the rules of a just war presuppose the love mandate. For example, in the second, the only just intention aims at restoring just peace to friend and foe alike. Have you noticed that? Not triumphalism. Force is a last resort. Force must not be deployed out of a demand for mere revenge and much more.

Indeed, if someone says, “Well, well, fair enough, but how does the Allied response in World War II show love for Hitler?” The first answer must be, “Do we not, first of all, have an obligation to show love for Hitler’s victims present and, potentially, future?” In principle, may not the Allied response show love for Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Jews, gypsies, and so forth?

There are still some things to be said about love for Hitler (we’ll come to that right at the end). Similarly, with Osama bin Laden. If someone were to ask, “How are you showing love for Osama bin Laden if you go after him?” you must also ask, “How do you show love for the victims in the World Trade Center and for those who are bereaved by their deaths and by those who are targeted by those who have avowed that they will use weapons of mass destruction?” These are not easy questions.

B. On the other hand, all war, even just war, is never more than rough justice.

Even the just war is prosecuted by sinners, and sinners fail and are inconsistent. Injustices occur. Even in World War II, perhaps the clearest example in the last century of a large-scale good versus evil conflict, the Allies committed some dreadful evils that break the boundaries set by just war theory.

In response to the destruction of Coventry, we took out cities like Dresden. In response to the bombing of London, we firebombed Tokyo. These were not instances of going after military targets while regretting the collateral damage, an awful expression. They were attacks aimed at destroying the lives and homes and wellbeing of noncombatants. In terms of just war theory, such actions were utterly without excuse.

The Western Allies were far more restrained in victory than were the Russians on the eastern front. Read the recent book, for example, not only on Stalingrad but on Berlin. There was systematic rape and pillage, gang-rape of virtually every woman in their path. On the western front, there was much, much, much less, which is why so many Germans tried to flee to the West, but it did happen. Don’t kid yourself.

Yes, it’s true the West financed the martial plan, but inevitably some American troops engaged in rape and pillage. Certainly, Americans treated captured Japanese troops much better than Japanese troops treated captured Americans. After all, the Japanese hadn’t signed the Geneva Conventions and felt no obligations to bow to them, but there are many known instances of Americans slaughtering Japanese soldiers who had surrendered.

When the assaults on Afghanistan in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden were first announced, the mission was given the name Infinite Justice. This was more than a little worrisome, for it sounded a bit like mean-spirited revenge. By the time President Bush addressed both houses of Congress, he used the expression Patient Justice. Today, the mission is called Enduring Freedom.

I am thankful beyond words for these changes because if we appeal to infinite justice we are all damned, for war, even a just war, even a good war in which the rules of just war theory are as scrupulously observed as can reasonably be expected, it will never bring about more than rough justice simply because sinners are involved.

Yet, it does not follow that the notion of just war theory is thereby vitiated as if all sides in every conflict are equally guilty and equally innocent, and, therefore, the only moral stance is passivism. Hitler, in my judgment, had to be stopped. Pol Pot should have been stopped. Idi Amin should have been stopped.

On the principle that unless something is done perfectly it should not be done at all, you would then have to extend this to the view that we should not allow teaching because some teachers are child abusers and no teacher is perfect. Therefore, let us abolish teaching. We should not give to the poor because mixed motives may be involved and sometimes honest giving is corrupted by politics. In other words, you cannot judge from the abuse of principle to the abolition of principle.

If I had time, I would at this point explore two further views that are sometimes advanced here: the position taken by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and so on. Again, if you want to raise questions about this later, we’ll take them, but I’m going to press on now for want of time. Perhaps this point will be the most contentious, and then we’ll come to some broader factors that will perhaps be less contentious.

C. Several other factors are often thrown into the debate about how we should respond to terrorist forms of violence.

I will argue these are not well conceived, but even if they were, I shall also argue they are almost irrelevant to the moral issues. Let me explain. Most of the additional factors surrounding the current concerns about terrorism in the West turn on three points.

First, many Europeans, though not all, charge the United States lacks sophistication in its foreign policy, and if it would listen a little more closely to the accumulated wisdom of centuries of European statesmanship, this horrible eruption might not have happened.

Secondly, by its multinational corporations, the United States has long exploited the poor, and by its long military arm, it has reigned down terror on people no less innocent than those in the World Trade Center, such as the people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Thirdly, the United States has long embraced a foreign policy that is tilted so one-sidedly toward Israel and has been so insensitive to the world of Islam that it has brought this terror on itself, or at the very least the terror attack would have been much less likely if the United States had been a little more evenhanded.

Those points are made very broadly in the press at home and overseas. I want to suggest the charges are not well-conceived. They’re not all wrong (don’t misunderstand me), but they’re not well-conceived. They’re not well articulated. In any case, to the moral question to the nature of just war, I think they are almost irrelevant. Let me try to explain.

On the first charge that America is naÔve, so trust the Europeans, I am not persuaded the sophistication in foreign policy is something that can be passed on from generation to generation like genes. Just because European civilization is older than its American counterpart does not mean it is wiser.

Do we have to remind ourselves, for instance, of the Anglo-French fiasco in the Suez Canal half a century ago? Do we remember the two twentieth-century world wars were not caused by failures in American statesmanship? Do we recall the French and English ran through the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I against the will of President Wilson and, thus, constructed one of the major grievances that made Germany more open to Hitler?

Not for a moment am I suggesting American policy is always wise. We have our great shames. Who is proud of Vietnam, regardless of your stance on all of those issues? The point, rather, is there is plenty of praise and plenty of blame for both sides of the Atlantic and neither side should get up and point fingers at the other as if in principle we are automatically wiser.

We should also recall the European stance toward the United States, often now condescending, has become more condescending than ever now that Europe relies less heavily on the United States for protection against the Russian Bear. When Europe was squeezed between two superpowers, it opted for the West.

Now there’s only one superpower, and we’re the target of jealousy. It’s inevitable. With the progress of the European Union, one understands how many in Europe tried to forge their continental identity by contrasting themselves with the only remaining superpower. That is understandable, too.

The second charge is not much better conceived. It maintains that by its giant multinational corporations the United States has long exploited the poor and by its long military aim it has reigned down terror on people no less innocent than those in the World Trade Center. The implication is that in some respects America is simply getting what it deserves.

On the other hand, others would argue that multinational corporations, at the end of the day, provide a lot of jobs and raise economies, even if some of them are exploitative. As with people, so with corporations. Some have excellent track records and some are pretty vicious. As for the so-called terrorist bombing of Afghanistan, a staple of the Muslim press, just war theory in the Christian tradition makes two crucial distinctions which, from our perspective, must be reiterated.

First, it does not deny that innocent noncombatants may be killed in a war but forbids that they should ever be targeted. That is a fundamental distinction between the bombing of the World Trade Center with aircraft and attempts to go after military targets. Second, just war theory, you will recall, distinguishes between authority for war from the highest governmental authority and forbids all other form of declaration of war.

In other words, most Western uses of terrorists and terrorism presuppose a certain kind of stealth warrior with either no connection or only loose connection between alleged terrorists and any government. By contrast, dominant Muslim usage of terrorists and terrorism is narrowly psychological. Where terror has been induced, there is terrorism. In that sense, all war is terrorism inevitably.

By this standard, then, all acts of war without exception are acts of terrorism. Psychologically, that may be so, but it does not help us to think clearly about one of the distinctions on which just war theory insists. Any war to be just must not be the action of independence but of highest government authority.

By itself, that doesn’t make any action right, for then the Holocaust would have been judged right for no other reason than that it was put into effect by the decision of the highest government, but the Holocaust, however abominable, is not usefully labeled an act of terrorism or a series of acts of terrorism for precisely the same reason.

The third charge, that the United States has long embraced a foreign policy tilted so one-sidedly toward Israel and has been so insensitive to the world of Islam that it has brought this terror on itself, is, however justified in part, also in my judgment, badly conceived. The most virulent opponents such as Hezbollah, Islamic jihad, and Al Qaeda have gone on record saying they do want the obliteration of Israel and as long as that is still on record any defense of Israel will be seen as tilting in the wrong direction.

Nor will it do to say the chief problem is that America has propped up oppressive Muslim regimes and now is reaping the wrath of disgruntled Muslim citizens. That theory is nothing but the mythmaking of Western liberalism, for the current terrorists think most Muslim regimes, including the most despotic of them, are themselves too liberal.

Saudi Arabia is not trusted by them because the Saudis want American bases on their soil. The former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was not brought down by proto-democrats but by Muslim fundamentalists. President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt was assassinated in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group.

Moreover, there is a huge difference in perspective. There is no heritage in Islam of the distinction between church and state. One respects the reasons. They take the word of Allah seriously, and it must govern everything, but the notion of a state different from the locus of the people of God is simply not in view.

Of the 38 countries in which most Muslims live, not one permits utterly free and open religious conversion. Not simply religious exercise but conversion. No less importantly, when matters of history are brought to bear, there is a fundamental difference toward antecedent violence. For example, Christians are often reminded of the appalling violence by the Crusaders. True. During the first Crusade, the slaughter in Jerusalem was abominable, ruthless genocide, utterly indefensible in any biblical terms.

It was also nicely matched by the Saracen violence at Antioch and Acre. Before the First Crusade began, Palestine had been the scene of savage conflict between the Turkish Seljuks (Sunni Muslim) and the Arab Fatimid Dynasty (Shiite Muslim), with massacres committed by both sides. Still earlier, the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim, from 996 to 1021 in the Christian calendar, persecuted both Jews and Christians with appalling violence.

I’m not suggesting this is typical. Don’t misunderstand me. Many Islamic scholars today, not least the intellectuals who interact with the Western tradition, insist that the Qur’an’s references to jihad are properly understood metaphorically. That may or may not be the case. I leave that one to Islamic scholars to sort out.

What cannot be denied, however, is that the expansion by conquest and retention by totalitarian control have, with few exceptions, characterized Islam across the centuries, and the one state which is closest to separation of church and state in the Muslim world (Turkey) has been most secularized owing to the heritage of Atat¸rk.

Numerous commentators, not just the well-known ones like Samuel Huntington, are now pointing out what they call a clash of civilizations. It’s not an entirely happy term, but there are huge differences in perspective, and some of it owes much less to religion than to fears of globalization and Western secularism.

This side of the Cold War, many Western commentators, themselves deeply secular in their outlook, have promised peace, prosperity, multiplying democracies, and more and more market economies, precisely because this is what people around the world, we were told, really want.

Doubtless, some do, not least the partially secularized cultural elites of many countries, but countless millions utterly reject the American form of freedom of religion because it is perceived to elevate materialism and immorality above God, while most Muslims insist the demands of Islam go beyond and often against the goals of mere nationalism and certainly beyond and against the goals of any state that threatens Islam’s insistence that there must never be a separation between government and confessional Islam. These are massive worldview clashes.

From this perspective, the movement of globalization is often seen by Muslims as another ploy to extend Western secularism whose long-term effect will be to rob Islam of its vitality, but my argument with respect to these charges against the West, in any case, is finally deeper. Even if all of them are in some measure true, and in some measure they are, they are largely irrelevant to the issues of just war.

The way to show this, I think, is by an analogy. Let us concede that one of the great contributing factors in the rise of Hitler and, therefore, of World War II and the Holocaust, was the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. I don’t think any historian would doubt that. Let us also imagine if Britain and France had stepped in when Hitler took over the Rhineland in 1935 and 1936, they might well have prevented World War II.

Does that mean the rise of Hitler was fundamentally the fault of the nations who became the Allies, or more to the point, does it mean because the Allied nations were culpably responsible for these bad decisions that contributed to the rise of Hitler and all that followed, therefore, those same Western nations had no justification for taking up arms against Hitler?

Most of us, I think, would disown such inferences because Hitler had to be stopped regardless of the influences that contributed to his rise. Even if maximum weight is assigned to each of those maligned decisions, Hitler did not have to take the path he did, and even if we infer after the fact this path, once those and similar decisions had been taken, was inevitable, which is not the standard view anyway, it still would not mitigate the impregnable fact he had to be stopped.

Perhaps I should say this in passing, too. When one starts thinking of alternative worlds, sometimes one looks at the present world and all of its negative implications and connotations and then looks at an alternative world at all the positive outcomes that would flow from these without thinking things through evenhandedly.

Suppose Britain and France had gone into the Rhineland when Hitler took it over in 1935 or 1936, and supposing that without too much bloodshed they actually stopped him (left him in power but stopped him) so there was no World War II and no Holocaust, what then? Well, I don’t know, but it might have meant that he wouldn’t have gotten rid of all of his scientists who fled, especially the Jewish ones.

It might have meant he would have developed the atomic bomb with no pressure on the West for a Roosevelt to develop the Manhattan Project because this would not have been seen as a threat. It might have been, then, that Hitler would have gotten the atomic bomb before he went to war with anybody and nobody else would have had it.

What would that have done to world history? I don’t know. All I’m saying is there is something corrupt and ineffective, unjust, about speculating with alternative worlds when you only think of the alternates as good and the present world as bad. In any case, the crude fact of the matter was Hitler had to be stopped.

D. Historically, wars have changed their form from time to time generating fresh discussion about just war theory, and I think it is time to begin this process again.

Let me explain. All wars have commonalities and differences, of course, but it is fairly easy to spot some of the big distinctive turning points.

The Boer War at the end of the nineteenth century and, on a larger scale, World War I marked the onset of truly mechanized war. You have this long trench across Europe, and you set up machine guns and artillery, and you simply mow down the other side. Ten million on each side for the gaining of a few yards. That was inconceivable half a century earlier.

Then, of course, the most single important advance (if advance it be) in war technology was the atomic bomb followed by the hydrogen bomb. The debate will go on about whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more lives, both Japanese and American, than they destroyed, but there is little doubt on just war premises, taking Hiroshima with a single bomb was no more justified than the firebombing of Tokyo, both of which targeted noncombatants predominately.

Whether the dropping of an atomic bomb or two on some remote area or on some more narrowly military target would have had adequate psychological impact to win the war is a question that cannot easily be answered, but from the perspective of just war theory that is certainly what should have been done.

To reply, “There wouldn’t have been a Hiroshima if there hadn’t been a Pearl Harbor,” is undoubtedly true, and it is more than a little disappointing to visit the Hiroshima Memorial and see this elementary point is persistently skirted (I’ve been there), but that truth does not affect what we should have done had we been committed to just war theory and not only to crushing the enemy as quickly as possible.

The massive and indiscriminate slot of the nuclear weapons can effect introduced new factors that made just war theory extremely difficult to apply. The theory of MAD (mutual assured destruction) offered only the most fragile of securities. To look back and say rather smugly, “Well, it worked,” is to forget how breathtakingly close we were to nuclear holocaust at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. But the fact is the genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

Christian commitments, not to say mere sanity, demand we try to limit such armaments, reduce their number, try to put in place measures such as assured verification that will enhance mutual security, but now that more and more countries are gaining access to these weapons, the world is becoming less secure than it was when weapons were largely restricted to two superpowers and their allies. It is not clear to me that just war theory ever coped with such realities or, more precisely, various just war modifications were proposed but none captured wide assent.

Now come to September 11. For our immediate purposes, we must identify some of the features that presage a new kind of war.

First, from the side of the attack, the right term to use, I think, is genocide. Small-time guerrillas and terrorists have often targeted noncombatants (nothing new about that), but these men used technology (jet aircraft) to kill thousands. We cannot say the terrorists used weapons of mass destruction. Rather, they turned a modern invention into a genocidal weapon in a manner not done before. Moreover, by both their private and public pronouncements, these are clearly trying to obtain or manufacture weapons with much greater sweep and power.

Secondly, and still more to the point, these terrorists represent no nation. They are a multinational group drawn from one religious civilizational entity. One may reasonably hold certain nations responsible for aiding, abetting, and harboring them, but that alone will not stop them. That’s for sure.

In the past, weapons of mass destruction and, therefore, the possibility of genocide, were beyond the reach of small groups of determined fighters, but now with the rise of the technology of the past 100 years plus the money provided by oil wealth, not to mention the donations through masked charities, relatively small groups whose organization is shadowy now are capable of committing genocide to literally thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of noncombatants. That’s new.

Thirdly, the technology of response has also changed the possibilities of the conflict. Electronic surveillance, cameras orbiting in space, and unmanned drones make it possible to target small groups more effectively than ever before. Despite the widely publicized instances of smart bombs or cruise missiles that go astray, the vast majority of Western ordinance today can be dropped with astonishing accuracy. There has been no talk of firebombing Kabul the way we firebombed Tokyo. For that I am grateful.

Fourthly, the global communications network generates what sociologists call instant reflexivity. If something happens, whether the destruction of the World Trade Center at the hand of suicide fanatics using hijacked planes or the destruction of a Red Cross depot in Afghanistan, the information is widely disseminated almost instantaneously and people are pontificating about it.

This, in turns, elicits instant responses, many of them not thought through, not necessarily a reflection of well-developed policy. All of these instant responses, in turn, forth call responses to the responses and so forth. Instant reflexivity. In the light of all these developments, I suggest to you the just war theory needs some tweaking.

Let me simply hint at a couple of things. This is not exhaustive. To my mind, people who are far more capable than I are going to have to work on these things. Let me suggest some areas, nevertheless, in which these things need working out.

For instance, under sub-point number ii, we may be satisfied that we are engaged in a just war, but what shall we do with the just peace clause when the opponents want nothing less than your destruction? If this conflict is not being fought over territory or trade or slavery or the like but over fundamental and civilizational differences, what precisely does a just peace look like? These are astonishingly complex issues.

Moreover, what does a defensive posture mean against a weapon that could be smuggled on board a carrier ship into New York Harbor and detonated and take out 100,000 people? What does a defensive posture mean against that? For better and for worse, defensive postures inevitably mean some kind of dependence on intelligence, which is not always that intelligent.

These are extraordinarily difficult things in this broken and fallen world. Under sub-point number viii, for example, doubtless it is true that just war is not to be prolonged beyond a reasonable hope of success within these limits, but what a reasonable hope is in this new kind of war is a bit squishy, and success itself will be hard to measure.

The obvious fact is if it’s prosecuted in the wrong sort of way it may simply invite more attacks. On the other hand, it may repel the most virulent aggression even out of fear, but success cannot refer to the destruction of every person who has the potential for constituting this sort of global reached terrorist cell, and even if it did, new generations of such persons would quickly come forward. What does success mean?

I am suggesting, then, in all of these matters Christians are going to have to rethink the heritage of just war in order to preserve its valid insights and have a reasoned, moral stance that is mature and faithful to Scripture.

E. There is a sense in which nothing has changed.

The media tells us pretty frequently that 9/11 changed everything. Certainly, for those who lost loved ones at the World Trade Center or at the Pentagon or in the airplane that came down in a field in Pennsylvania an enormous amount has changed. Certainly, the nation has a heightened security awareness. Some of the deepest changes are psychological; it’s on the mainland, and so on.

Nevertheless, though it may at first seem sacrilegious to say it, from a Christian perspective, little has changed. One recalls the challenge faced by C.S. Lewis in the autumn of 1939. On September 1 of that year, German forces surged across the Polish border and World War II began. In Oxford, the minister of the University Church of St. Mary wondered what should be said to undergraduates for whom studying would surely seem irrelevant in the light of the impending cataclysm.

He invited Lewis, then at Magdalen College, and himself a veteran of the trenches of World War I to give a lecture that has since been published many times called Learning in War-Time. On October 22, Lewis climbed into the high pulpit and spoke to the students. He began by subverting his theme.

How can anyone study when countless thousands are dying? But surely, at all times and in every place, Christians must ask a still more fundamental question: “How is it right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed to them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology?”

Lewis’ profound point exposes the shallowness of contemporary analysis. The war creates no absolutely new situation. It simply aggravates the human permanent situation this side of the fall so that we can no longer ignore it. You see, within that framework, too, still looking at things from a Christian point of view, we must see in the events of September 11 a strong call to the church and to the nation to repent.

You may recall without my naming them two prominent religious figures right after September 11 who publicly blamed this attack, this act of judgment, and its destruction on homosexuals, abortionists, and feminists. The public clamor soon drove them to apologize, but they almost got it right. The problem was they pointed to two or three sins they particularly disliked which were the sins of other people. It was a divisive thing to do at a time that demanded national unity. It was theologically inept and pastorally stupid.

When Isaiah sees the exalted Lord, he begins by confessing his own sins within the context of the national sins. “I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips.” By pointing fingers to other people and their sins, these two prominent preachers simultaneously managed to be divisive and to project an image of self-righteousness, but from a biblical perspective, September 11 was, among other things, an act of judgment and a call to repentance. Let me be careful how this is worded.

We should make it very clear what we are not saying. We are certainly not saying those who died on September 11 were in any sense any more wicked than those who did not die, but when Jesus himself in his day was confronted with a disaster and was asked if the people who had recently been murdered in the temple or who had perished when a tower collapsed were somehow more wicked than others, he did not reply with either a stern, “Of course,” which at least would have explained why they died and not others, nor did he reply with a dismissive, “Of course not,” which might have comforted those who mourned their loss but explained nothing.

Instead what he said was, “Unless you repent, you, too, will all perish.” What that means is all of us deserve to die. It is of the Lord’s mercy that we are not consumed. Repentance is urgent for all of us and large numbers of deaths, even when they are brought about by evil men, remind all of us that we live and die under the curse and we will one day give an account to God.

Serious Christian engagement must surely decry evil wherever it is found: in our own hearts, in our own culture, and amongst those who fly passenger jets into buildings and threaten nuclear holocaust. Understand, then, in the Western world, much of what is most loathed elsewhere is not Christianity biblically defined but the rising secularization, its triumphalism.

At the very least, we should precipitate large scale debates about whether the peculiar relationships that are developing between Christianity and civil society in various Western countries are the best that can be devised. Certainly, recent judgments in the United States regarding the wall of separation are far removed from the assumptions of the founding fathers. Should those be revisited not least in the light of international matters?

F. Complex issues about justice, forgiveness, enemies, and just war theory may entice us to forget they were all precipitated by the effort to think about love.

I return to Cicero. He wanted just war to be defended as an act of defense or an avenging of dishonor. Christians must not think in those terms. They must not.

Love demands we do not demonize Osama bin Laden. He is a man made in the image of God. Vengeance is finally the Lord’s alone. If we are asked, “Should we weep for Osama bin Laden or hold him to account for his genocide and prevent him from carrying out his violent intentions?” the answer is yes.

Similarly, even if there are very good reasons for not according the status of POW to those detained at Guant·namo Bay or in Afghanistan, America had better be clean and be seen to be clean. Finally, while it is important for Christians to think through the issues discussed in this talk, none of what I have said should lessen our passionate commitment to herald the good news. This is a second-stream discussion.

Both Christianity and Islam are monotheistic missionary religions. Their means of expansion historically have been fairly different most of the time, but each side is convinced what it holds to be the truth is so important and precious that others should enjoy it, too, so while we may find it necessary to make war against some Muslims who are intent on bringing death and destruction to untold thousands, we had better not demonize Muslims generally, because you cannot ever, ever evangelize those whom you hate. Not ever.

Here, too, Christian love must prevail. Otherwise, evangelism of Muslims from a Christian perspective, already challenging and now made so much more difficult by 9/11 and its aftermath, will tragically dissolve in the acidic hates of war. Do not let even the most disciplined thinking about just war theory ever darken your vision of the ultimate hope, which is a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, and the triumph of King Jesus.