A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Gushee on Christian support for war

Southern Baptist theologian David Gushee, who’s written some good stuff about torture, has now published an interesting article called “The Church as a Community of Peace” (via). He all but renounces his former support for just-war theory, asking whether “as a Christian moral thinker, it is my place to offer support for war”:

Unlike some Christians whose thinking runs along the lines I suggest here, I am not saying that the state can never justifiably employ coercion or violence. Nor am I saying that Christians, in their loyalty to Jesus Christ our Lord, have no stake in their national life.

But what I am saying is that the state really does not need more people urging our nation or other nations on to more killing. And that is not what God needs from the church.

Precisely as Christians, we need a distinctively Christian witness that calls followers of Jesus back to faithful obedience to the teachings of the Bible. We need to analyze dismal human realities, such as war, in light of what Jesus said about them, rather than using merely worldly categories of thought.

I take it that what Gushee is saying here is that, given the nature of states and politics, it will be a rare case indeed where the government needs to be urged to be more violent. And the church, as a community of reconciliation, should certainly be among the last to do so.

Even as a non-pacifist (though one with sympathy for pacifism) I’m really uneasy with the idea of the church formally “blessing” or publicly supporting a war. If nothing else, even wars undertaken for a just cause frequently end up using unjust means.

Maybe there’s a distinction to be drawn between what the church should corporately endorse and what individual Christians may do in making judgments about what policies to support.

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4 responses to “Gushee on Christian support for war”

  1. Gaius

    Just War theory, though developed principally by Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages and later, adverts to a fundamental view of morality that sees it as universal and binding in reason on all rational creatures.

    This, too, is in continuity with pagan thought as well as the earliest Christian authority.

    And, at the same time, though the discussion proceeds in terms of law emanating ultimately from God, the main line of this tradition has insisted that the natural law (= the moral law) is founded not in God’s arbitrary will but in the nature of creation and creatures, and so denies that the requirements of morality could and would have been otherwise, had God chosen to make them otherwise, though our natures and those of all other creatures were unchanged.

    On the other hand, from the earliest times but most markedly since the Reformation and among Protestants, there has been the competing tendency to accept a divine command theory of morals that denies the essential universality of morals, denies the essential tie between the content of morality and creaturely natures, and makes room for the idea that individuals or peoples or all Christians can or do have special moral duties, different from those of others otherwise in like circumstances, based on commands uttered by God Himself (think of the story of Abraham and Isaac, essentially affirming that human sacrifice is not required by the God of Israel of the people of Israel) or, more commonly, by Jesus.

    Christian pacifists tend to appeal to this theological voluntarism as their underlying view of morality when they reject Just War theory as a correct account of the duties of Christians, specifically.

    Some go further and think of Jesus’ commands as enjoining pacifism on all mankind.

    In contrast, people who accept the more traditional, universalist, anti-voluntarist view of the moral law think of God’s or Jesus’ commands in the Bible either as revealing parts of the natural law, binding on all in reason but not previously recognized due to the weakness of human reason, or alternatively otherwise than as expounding or enjoining morals.

    Of course, even people accepting the universalist view also generally accept that, as our Creator, God has a right to command us and we have a duty to obey – much as we have a duty to obey our lawful earthly rulers.

    And here, too, there could be room for commands of God or Jesus creating obligations specifically for Christians, if God or Jesus so wished.

    But then we enter a really messy area of inquiry, whether God could or would command what is according to natural law a crime, whether His command would make it not-crime, whether his command could deny us a natural right, and the like.

    Very sticky, very soon, with the more traditional view answering such questions in the negative, besides labeling them as insulting to God and the suggestion he might do such as thing as sinfully defamatory.

    The universalist view, I think, would want to insist that what God, being Just, Wise, Good, etc., would do in this area is within the range of what a legitimate earthly ruler could legitimately do.

    Note that this most certainly does not include commanding what is contrary to the natural law, nor denying subjects their natural rights. Tough to square such an outlook with the notion that Christians are constrained to pacifism, eh?

    So I speculate that this Baptist writer is adverting to the competing, voluntarist tradition so widespread among Protestant theologians, and even among the Protestant laity; in contrast (if I am not misreading him, or you, or both of you) with the non-pacifist reasons that you allude to for discomfort with the idea of urging or endorsing war.

    On the other hand, for partisans of that voluntarist tradition Just War theory, based so squarely as it is on the universalism of the natural law outlook inherited from the pagans, has never looked all that good, anyway, if I recall correctly. Not a lot of Biblical text to support it, after all. The OT is much more fierce than that, and the NT too pacifist.

    (Think of how common is the view among Protestant laymen that people of different religions have different moral duties, and that at least some of the most important duties for Christians have no basis at all but specific and clear commands of Jesus, such as the strictures against divorce.)

    Lurking behind this debate, then, is a fundamental cleavage between those who approach the Bible and interpret it with a universalist conception of morals grounded in nature that God follows, endorses, fulfills, and requires because, being necessarily everything it is best to be, he is necessarily Just, Wise, Good, and the like; and those for whom the Bible is our sole, or at least by far most reliable, clue to the nature of God, of morals, and of creation.

    A multitude of passages get interpreted away or simply denied as lacking authority by people who take the former tack.

    And while the latter approach may seem more attractive when considering whether Christianity requires pacifism, that is far from all that is at stake, and people who accept it are left with all the horrors of Biblical fundamentalism, often putting the shoe on the other foot.

    It is the traditionalists, after all, who would have the easier time taking a more realistic view of divorce and a more tolerant view of homosexuality, as well as of sexual morality in general.

    Hmm. I do go on. Too long away from a computer. Sorry.

    But when you come right down to it, do you really want to commit yourself to the idea that the Bible is trumps over natural human moral insight in questions of morality?

    Not wise, I think.

    Reply
  2. Lee

    I think you’ve put your finger on it. I’d like to think about it a bit more before responding.

    (p.s. I take it “traditionalists” in your fourth to last para. refers to proponents of the universalist/natural law view of morality?)

    Reply
  3. Gaius

    Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry to change labels in mid-stream.

    Reply
  4. Lee

    Thinking about this some more, here are some distinctions that occurred to me:

    First, you can be a voluntarist and a universalist. That is, you can consistently say that morality is determined by God’s commands and what God commands is right and binding on everyone. No problem there, right?

    Secondly, you can be a voluntarist and a particularist (different duties for different people), since if morality is a matter of God’s commands, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why God couldn’t command different things for different people.

    So, I take it there are two questions here: does Christian pacifism entail particularism (special duties for certain people)? And does particularism entail voluntarism?

    Regarding the first question I might make a further distinction: absolute vs. epistemological particularism. In other words, you might say that it really is wrong for Christians to use violence, but not wrong for other people to do so (absolute particularism). It’s hard to say if anyone actually holds this view in all its starkness.

    Alternatively, you might say it’s wrong for Christians to use violence given what they know about God revealed in Jesus. This seems to be compatible with the view that it is wrong for anyone to use violence, but that people who don’t accept the Christian revelation perhaps can’t be expected to know this.

    This second view seems to me consistent with the view that morality is rooted in the nature of things, if you allow that it’s nevertheless possible for people to not know what morality requires (at least not entirely) solely by the unaided use of human reason. (A story about the “noetic” effects of sin might be relevant here.) So, I think that what I’m calling epistemic particularism doesn’t necessarily entail voluntarism.

    Of course, I’m not satisfied with a kind of “revelational positivism” about morality. I do think we can know at least some moral truths by rational reflection and observation. On the other hand, there is a strong sense in the NT that Christians are called to a “higher righteousness” than that which is practiced even by virtuous pagans.

    Maybe this can be accounted for in terms of certain factual beliefs not shared by Christians and non-Christians. For instance, given Christian beliefs about the afterlife it might make more sense to forgo violence in self-defense. This wouldn’t mean that morality is arbitrary, but that different beliefs about the way the world is will affect our moral judgments.

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