I have been having a lot of flashbacks of late – not drug-related, but due to hearing the same reckless inanities that I and other radicals and Marxists were throwing around some 50 years ago: “War doesn’t solve anything.” “We shouldn’t get involved.” “Israel and the West are warmongers.” “Make love, not war.”
The problem is, I am now hearing this not just from the usual secular left suspects, but from those who call themselves conservatives and Christians. Long ago I traded my leftist ideology for biblical Christianity, but some of these folks almost seem to be going in the reverse direction.
The truth is, pacifism has never been other than a minority position within Jewish and Christian teaching. Now, being a minority position does not necessarily mean it is incorrect, but it does mean that the great bulk of Christian thinkers over the ages have taken a much different view of what Scripture teaches. And I agree with them.
After becoming a Christian in 1971 I put away this foolishness and became a realist, knowing that in a fallen, sin-soaked world the use of force is essential – even God-ordained. The state exists to use the sword to deal with evildoers and evil-doing and to maintain justice (see Romans 14). That includes the use of police at home and armies abroad.
But today’s woke right is right back to the 60s hippy scene. And sadly, much of this is part of an ugly and irrational demonisation of all things Jewish and Israeli. So if Israel is seeking to denuclearise the Iran regime and render the bloodthirsty theocratic regime there much less of a threat, then these woke Christians get all bent out of shape.
I have already penned hundreds of articles on these issues, and I once was involved in doing a PhD on this matter. Just some of my earlier articles that are worth being aware of include:
Some great quotes by both Christians and non-Christians. Further details on most of these can be found in the book list above.
Augustine
“[T]rue religion looks upon those wars that are waged, not for motives of aggrandizement or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.”
Nigel Biggar
“As I believe in the fact of gross and intractable wickedness, so I believe that punishment is necessary and that it has a basic, broadly retributive dimension. . . . Retribution is important because wrongdoing needs to be contradicted, fended off, and reversed. Not to contradict it and fend it off and try to reverse it is to imply that it does not matter, and, therefore, that its victims do not matter. Just war is an extreme form of retributive punishment.”
J. Daryl Charles and Timothy Demy
“The just-war position commits itself to restoring justice to people and contexts in which evil and injustice would otherwise prevail. It thereby aims to achieve a greater good than otherwise would exist. Concomitantly, it refuses to acquiesce to the counsels of skepticism and cynicism that would have us believe that measured and guided coercive force cannot proceed under a moral imperative. While it shares with pacifism the ultimate objective of peace, unlike pacifism it understands, as does Aquinas, that ‘peace is not a virtue, but the fruit of virtue.’ Therefore, peace must be highly qualified and justly ordered. The Mafia and tyrannical dictators, after all, know and impose a peace that is illicit.”
“Not to intervene when we know, via diplomacy, political relations, and intelligence, that mass murder is imminent would be irresponsible. But it is more; it is to be an accomplice to that mass murder. How we think about—indeed, how we prepare for—such scenarios is not hypothetical; rather, it describes the world in which we live. What is our ethical duty to our neighbor, or a neighbor nation? If we suggest that all war is always and inevitably immoral, we turn our backs on those who might, on some rare occasion, need our intervention.”
War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspectiveby Charles, J. Daryl (Author), Demy, Timothy J. (Author)
G. K. Chesterton
“I do not know whether Martin Luther invented mustard gas, or George Fox manufactured tear-shells, or St. Thomas Aquinas devised a stink-bomb producing suffocation. If wars are the horrid fruits of a thing called Christianity, they are also the horrid fruits of everything called citizenship and democracy and liberty and national independence, and are we to judge all these and condemn them by their fruits? Anyhow such a modern war is much greater than any of the wars that can be referred to religious motives, or even religious epochs. The broad truth about the matter is that wars have become more organised, and more ghastly in the particular period of Materialism.”
“While a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace.”
Winston Churchill
“England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.”
“Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear greatly that the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar ever more loudly, ever more widely.”
James Turner Johnson
“Just war tradition has to do with defining the possible good use of force, not finding exceptional cases when it is possible to use something inherently evil (force) for the purposes of good.”
C. S. Lewis
“The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil. … Of course war is a very great evil. But that is not the question. The question is whether war is the greatest evil in the world, so that any state of affairs which might result from submission is certainly preferable. And I do not see any really cogent arguments for that view.”
John Stuart Mill
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
Reinhold Niebuhr
“[P]acifism either tempts us to make no judgements at all, or to give an undue preference to tyranny.”
“If we believe that if Britain had only been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent of conscientious objectors to military service, Hitler’s heart would have been softened and he would not have dared attack Poland, we hold a faith which no historic reality justifies.”
George Orwell
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”
“Turn-the-other-cheek pacifism only flourishes among the more prosperous classes, or among workers who have in some way escaped from their own class. The real working class . . . are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it.”
Dennis Prager
“Slogan: ‘War is not the answer.’ ‘War is not the answer’ if the question is, let us say, ‘What is the square root of eleven?’ But if the question is, ‘How do we stop enormous evils in the world?’ the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently, ‘War.’ Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed ‘war is not the answer’.”
Paul Ramsey
“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?”
“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.”
Thomas Sowell
“The fact that the Reagan approach, which many among the intelligentsia saw as likely to lead to war, led instead to the end of the Cold War, while the Chamberlain approach that was supposed to lead to peace led instead to the biggest war in history, has made no dent in the vision of the anointed.”
“Those who think ‘negotiations’ are a magic answer seem not to understand that when A wants to annihilate B, this is not an ‘issue’ that can be resolved amicably around a conference table.”
J. R. R. Tolkien (from The Lord of the Rings)
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
“Sam: Those were the stories that stayed with you – that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr Frodo that I do understand. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there is some good in this world. And it’s worth fighting for.”
“Treebeard: The Ents cannot hold back this storm. We must weather such things as we have always done.
Merry: How can that be your decision?!
Treebeard: This is not our war.
Merry: But you’re part of this world, aren’t you? You must help! Please! You must do something.
Treebeard: You are young and brave, Master Merry. But your part in this tale is over. Go back to your home.
Pippin: Maybe Treebeard’s right. We don’t belong here, Merry. It’s too big for us. What can we do in the end? We’ve got the Shire. Maybe we should go home.
Merry: The fires of Isengard will spread. And the woods of Tuckborough and Buckland will burn. And all that was once green and good in this world will be gone. There won’t be a Shire, Pippin.”
“Theoden: I will not risk open war!
Aragorn: Open war is upon you whether you risk it or not.”
Frank Turek
“One thing is for certain: Christians contradict scripture and common sense when they say no war or use of force can ever be justified. As terrible as it is, war is sometimes the least bad choice available. In other words, it’s not that Christians are for war; it’s that we’re against the alternative – the oppression and death of the innocent. And in a fallen world like this, sometimes the use of force is necessary to protect the innocent. Without it, we wouldn’t even be able to love our friends.”
One Reply to “Clear Thinking on War, Peace and Justice”
Chapter 30: Defense
The Mosaic law made it difficult for the nation to go to war. There was no king initially. The tribal leaders had to call a war. Their decision had to be supported by the priests in order to be valid. Second, other tribes were not required by law to join the ones that wanted war. This is clear from the account of Deborah’s war against the Canaanites. Some tribes refused to join her. She criticized them in her song (Judges 5:15–17). But she did not attempt to impose negative sanctions. There were none to impose. The Mosaic law was silent on this.
In addition, there were exemptions from a compulsory draft.
The officers shall say to the army: “Has anyone built a new house and not yet begun to live in it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else may begin to live in it. Has anyone planted a vineyard and not begun to enjoy it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else enjoy it. Has anyone become pledged to a woman and not married her? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else marry her.” Then the officers shall add, “Is anyone afraid or fainthearted? Let him go home so that his fellow soldiers will not become disheartened too” (Deuteronomy 20:5–8).
The soldiers who went into battle were committed to the war. It had been authorized by both the civil government and the priesthood. This was not some foolhardy war started by a king on his own authority.
The biblical doctrine of war is based on the need for defense against invasion.
Chapter 30: Defense
The Mosaic law made it difficult for the nation to go to war. There was no king initially. The tribal leaders had to call a war. Their decision had to be supported by the priests in order to be valid. Second, other tribes were not required by law to join the ones that wanted war. This is clear from the account of Deborah’s war against the Canaanites. Some tribes refused to join her. She criticized them in her song (Judges 5:15–17). But she did not attempt to impose negative sanctions. There were none to impose. The Mosaic law was silent on this.
In addition, there were exemptions from a compulsory draft.
The officers shall say to the army: “Has anyone built a new house and not yet begun to live in it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else may begin to live in it. Has anyone planted a vineyard and not begun to enjoy it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else enjoy it. Has anyone become pledged to a woman and not married her? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else marry her.” Then the officers shall add, “Is anyone afraid or fainthearted? Let him go home so that his fellow soldiers will not become disheartened too” (Deuteronomy 20:5–8).
The soldiers who went into battle were committed to the war. It had been authorized by both the civil government and the priesthood. This was not some foolhardy war started by a king on his own authority.
The biblical doctrine of war is based on the need for defense against invasion.
https://www.garynorth.com/public/16754.cfm