Paul Ramsey, Warfare and the Good Samaritan

Thoughts on Jesus, justice and the use of force:

One of the most important Christian ethicists of the previous century (at least of the Protestant variety) was Paul Ramsey (1913-1988). Although he covered a lot of ground, medical ethics and just war theory were his two main areas of concentration. He spent the bulk of his career lecturing in Christian ethics at Princeton University.

I own five of his works, which give you a feel for the sorts of things he covered:

Ethics at the Edges of Life: Medical and Legal Intersections (Yale University Press, 1978, 1980)
Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control (Yale University Press, 1970)
The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (Rowman & Littlefield, 1968, 2002)
War and Christian Conscience (Duke University Press, 1961, 1976)
Who Speaks for the Church? (Abingdon Press, 1967)

Here I will just make use of his 1968 volume, and examine how he ties in just war theory with the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan. Let me begin with a few general remarks. Pacifism has been held by some Christians over the centuries, but it has always been a minority position.

Concerns about protecting human life always have to be balanced with concerns about maintaining order in a fallen world and confronting evil. The need for peace needs to be balanced with the need for justice in other words. Or to put it another way, love of your enemy must be balanced with love of your neighbour and yourself.

Thus most believers have held to a form of just war theory in which an attempt is made to balance these various concerns. That was certainly a long-standing aim of Ramsey. And he was eager to draw upon basic biblical principles as he sought to make his case.

That is where the story about the Good Samaritan comes in. It is found in Luke 10:25-37. Ramsey famously spoke to it, and an extended quote from his book is worth featuring here:

The western theory of just war originated, not primarily from considerations of abstract or “natural” justice, but from the interior of the ethics of Christian love, or what John XXIII termed “social charity.” It was a work of charity for the Good Samaritan to give help to the man who fell among thieves. But one step more, it may have been a work of charity for the inn-keeper to hold himself ready to receive beaten and wounded men, and for him to conduct his business so that he was solvent enough to extend credit to the Good Samaritan. By another step it would have been a work of charity, and not of justice alone, to maintain and serve in a police patrol on the Jericho road to prevent such things from happening. By yet another step, it might well be work of charity to resist, by force of arms, any external aggression against the social order that maintains the police patrol along the road to Jericho. This means that, where an enforcement of an ordered community is not effectively present, it may be a work of justice and a work of social charity to resort to other available and effective means of resisting injustice: what do you think Jesus would have made the Samaritan do if he had come upon the scene while the robbers were still at their fell work?

 

Now, I am aware that this is no proper way to interpret a parable of Jesus. Yet, these several ways of retelling the parable of the Good Samaritan quickly exhibit something that is generally true about the teachings of Jesus—namely, that by deed and word he showed the individual the meaning of being perfectly ready to have the will of God reign and God’s mercy shed abroad by his life and actions. These versions quickly exhibit how a social ethic emerged from Christian conscience formed by this revelation, and what the early Christians carried with them when they went out into the world to borrow, and subsequently to elevate and refine, Stoic concepts of natural justice.

 

While Jesus taught that a disciple in his own case should turn the other cheek, he did not enjoin that his disciples should lift up the face of another oppressed man for him to be struck again on his other cheek. It is no part of the work of charity to allow this to continue to happen. Instead, it is the work of love and mercy to deliver as many as possible of God’s children from tyranny, and to protect from oppression, if one can, as many of those for whom Christ died as it may be possible to save. When choice must be made between the perpetrator of injustice and the many victims of it, the latter may and should be preferred—even if effectively to do so would require the use of armed force against some evil power. This is what I mean by saying that the justice of sometimes resorting to armed conflict originated in the interior ethics of Christian love.

 

Thus Christian conscience shaped itself for effective action. It allowed even the enemy to be killed only because military personnel and targets stood objectively there at the point where intersect the needs and claims of many more of our fellow men. For their sakes the bearer of hostile force may and should be repressed. Thus, participation in war (and before that, the use of any form of force or resistance) was justified as, in this world to date, an unavoidable necessity if we are not to omit to serve the needs of men in the only concrete way possible, and to maintain a just endurable order in which they may live.

 

There was another side to this coin. The justification of participation in conflict at the same time severely limited war’s conduct. What justified also limited! Since it was for the sake of the innocent and helpless of earth that the Christian first thought himself obliged to make war against an enemy whose objective deeds had to be stopped, since only for their sakes does a Christian justify himself in resisting by any means even an enemy-neighbor, he could never proceed to kill equally innocent people as a means of getting at the enemy’s forces. Thus was twin-born the justification of war and the limitation which surrounded noncombatants with moral immunity from direct attack. Thus was twin-born the distinction between combatant and noncombatant in all Christian reflection about the morality of warfare. This is the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate military objectives. The same considerations which justify killing the bearer of hostile force by the same stroke prohibit noncombatants from ever being directly attacked with deliberate intent.

 

This understanding of the moral economy in the just use of political violence contains, then, two elements: (i) a specific justification for sometimes killing another human being; and (2) severe and specific restrictions upon anyone who is under the hard necessity of doing so….

 

To summarize the theory of just or civilized conduct in war as this was developed within Christendom: love for neighbors threatened by violence, by aggression, or tyranny, provided the grounds for admitting the legitimacy of the use of military force. Love for neighbors at the same time required that such force should be limited. The Christian is commanded to do anything a realistic love commands (and so sometimes he must fight). But this also prohibits him from doing anything for which such love can find no justification (and so he can never approve of unlimited attack upon any human life not closely cooperating in or directly engaged in the force that ought to be repelled). (pp. 142-145)

This take on the parable is helpful for various reasons, and one can see how someone like Bonhoeffer also thought along these lines. On the one hand, he did value and promote pacifism, but with the murderous reign of Hitler and the Nazis, and the ongoing destruction of the Jews, he also knew that both love and justice demanded that he take action – thus his willingness to join in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

I put it this way in a piece a few years ago:

As the evils of Hitler and the Nazis grew ever more apparent, and the decimation of the Jews increased, Bonhoeffer knew he had to take a stand. He did not just seek to wake up morally comatose Christian leaders – he knew he had to be willing to ‘throw a spoke in the wheel’ of this great evil. He had to become personally involved.

 

As he famously put it, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” If doing this meant living with contradictions and paradox, then so be it. His belief in nonviolence was matched by his belief in acting against evil and acting as Christ for the world. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/10/02/bonhoeffer-faith-and-resistance/

Let me finish with one more quote from Ramsey:

If the just war theory did not already exist, Christians would have to invent it. If in the fullness of God’s time and the emptiness of ours, Christ came into our present world (instead of when he did), then would the just war theory still have to be produced. Then would Christian thought bring together the notions of justice lying around in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (if you can imagine these periods without their Christian background), as St. Augustine and other great Christian thinkers brought together the notions of justice lying around in the Graeco-Roman world, galvanized them into action, elevated and firmed them up, illumined and sensitized the justices of men to produce severer restrictions upon the forms of human conflict which the Christian or any truly just man can ever believe justified. Had I the space I could derive the same moral restrictions upon the use of force from the ethical perspectives of the Old Testament. These would have been productive of a remarkably similar just war theory, had Judaism been the predominant influence in western civilization. (p. 145)

Those believers who feel they must remain committed pacifists are free to do so. But I prefer the biblical realism of an Augustine, a Bonhoeffer, and a Ramsey. And if my readers are wanting to explore these matters further they might want to look at the 143 articles on these matters that I have penned over the years: https://billmuehlenberg.com/category/war-and-peace/

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