Hart’s War

Eastern Orthodox theologian David B. Hart has a review of The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East and West by Alexander F. C. Webster and Darrell Cole in the November issue of Touchstone.

The book, according to Hart, is an attempt to show two things. First, that the Eastern and Western churches speak with one voice in commending just war thinking as opposed to either pacifism or the brand of “realism” associated with Reinhold Niebuhr. In this they succeed admirably:

The greatest virtue of this book is that it does not advance its case only over against Christian pacifism of the sort one associates with, say, John Howard Yoder, but also over against the “Christian realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr and his disciples. It has long been one of the more irksome oddities of American Christian ethics that—in matters pertaining to war—the pacifist and realist positions have been treated as the only available options for Christian moralists.

And yet pacifism and realism are mere inversions of one another, inasmuch as they share more or less the same view of what warfare is. Both accept the premise that war is by its nature evil, while only peace is an unqualified good. The pacifist may believe that peace (understood simply as the absence of strife) is best achieved by refusing to participate in war, and the realist that peace (understood as a secure and just social order) is best achieved by answering violence with violence, but both then accept that the Christian never has any choice in times of war but to collaborate with evil: He must either allow the violence of an aggressor to prevail or employ inherently wicked methods to assure that it does not.

Webster and Cole will have none of this. The bracingly unsentimental argument that they want to make is that war in fact is not intrinsically evil, however tragic it may be, but is a neutral instrument that may be used towards ends either moral or immoral; and, when it is waged on behalf of justice and by just means, it is a positive good, a work of virtue, and an act of charity. Simply said, for Christians, to go to war should never be a tragic choice of the lesser of two evils, for we are forbidden as Christians to do evil at all.

The second claim advanced by Webster and Cole is that the churches can and should support America’s “war on terror” as substantially in accord with just war principles. This, Hart says, is considerably more problematic:

[T]he greatest problem with this book is that it never succeeds in providing truly compelling arguments regarding how just war principles can be applied by Christians in the age of the secular state. Christians ought not to support or participate in any unjust war, says Cole; but then, also, Christians must not make war except under the authority of a state’s duly constituted military. But, surely, if there is no established Church, there is no way of knowing whether any given government will make even a show of limiting its belligerences to causes or practices condoned by Christian moral law….

…It seems to me to be a difficulty that is inescapable whenever one attempts to use a moral grammar suited to an age of Christian princes and Christian cultures as a guide to our relations with the post-Christian political order. Webster is almost strident in his assertion that we can credit ourselves with virtuous warmaking in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and pray God he is right. But I cannot imagine anyone not disposed to approve of the invasion of Iraq (in particular) being convinced by any argument this book advances.

What exactly, he might ask, are we fighting for? Democracy? Freedom of religion? But these are not demonstrably biblical values. Did Iraq constitute a threat to us? Perhaps, but not a threat that can ever definitively be shown to have been more than suppositious. And even if this were not so, is this a war waged to defend the people of God? Is ours really a Christian culture—our culture of abortion, pornography, and polymorphous perversity—worthy of defending?

The issue here, for Hart, is the Christian’s relation to the essentially non-Christian modern secular state (a preoccupation of this blog as you may have noticed). If the state doesn’t see itself as under the authority of Christian morality, can Christians support the wars it carries out?

Hart offers a qualified answer:

I am not urging any particular view of the matter, as it happens; I am only calling attention to how complicated the issue becomes when the Christian just war theorist can no longer claim that we are fighting to defend or restore a Christian order. It may well be that the only Christian argument for the war in Iraq that will not inevitably become at best equivocal when subjected to a sufficiently unyielding moral skepticism is that the suffering of the Iraqis under Saddam’s regime was sufficiently monstrous that no Christian conscience could possibly be content to leave that regime in place.

But if this is so, we may have to draw a firm demarcation between the aims of Christians in this conflict and the aims of the secular state. Perhaps we should cease to imagine that we can simply translate the principles of just war from the age of Christendom to the age of “the rights of man.” If we make war justly as Christians, we do so “alongside” the state perhaps, but surely not under its moral or (God forbid) spiritual authority.