Can a Christian fight?

Revisiting an old debate

The issue of Christian faith and warfare is one concerning which I have perpetrated 1.25 books — that is to say, one of which I am the sole author, and a second volume in which four contributors (including Yours Truly) present widely differing views, and respond to one another's arguments. This essay both summarises and adds to a chapter from the first of those volumes.

These arguments have been rehearsed endlessly, and our purpose here is to look at what has actually been done, both in the past and in the present, in order to draw conclusions from that historical experience. How have Christians, in practice, answered the question of whether or not a Christian can fight? And what have been the consequences (not just in theory, but in actual fact) of those answers?

Back in the fourth century, Christianity became allied to particular states. In consequence, the church began to justify warfare, most famously in Augustine’s version of the ‘just war’ theory, thereby creating the possibility of ‘Christian’ wars. However lamentable that fact may be, there is a certain inevitability about it. For once Christianity — or any religion or philosophy — is used to legitimise a state or states, then that religion or philosophy is absolutely bound to produce a theory of warfare, if it does not already possess one. And the reason for that is extraordinarily simple: there cannot be such a thing as a pacifist state.

The security of tiny states

Really? Surely a state could renounce force, declare itself no threat to its neighbours and a neutral in any future conflicts, and others would then leave it alone?

True — but only for about twenty minutes. History knows no example of a state that renounced force — but it knows of many (indeed most) that were too weak to resist aggressors at some point, and so have not endured down to the present. There is no sign that this fundamental reality is about to change.

Yet what about the continuing existence of Liechtenstein? Of San Marino? Of the Vatican City, Monaco, or Andorra? It is inconceivable that they could defend themselves against the forces of Mali on a bad day — let alone against a reasonably well-armed and well-led aggressor. Surely their continued existence demonstrates that states can renounce force and survive?

However, every one of those states exists on the sufferance or goodwill of its neighbours who, from a strictly military standpoint, are in a position to extinguish it or protect it at their pleasure. If Switzerland were to invade Liechtenstein, then Austria would be extremely angry — and in a position to do something about it. Conversely, if Austria were to invade Liechtenstein, then Switzerland would know how to respond. And that’s without even taking account of other powers, in Europe and elsewhere, who would react very negatively to such a development. So of course, neither Austria nor Switzerland is in any danger of being tempted to act in such a foolish manner.

The protection of tiny or weak lies, not in their actual ability to stand up to an aggressor, but in ensuring the solicitousness of larger powers for their welfare — say, by making themselves important in trade or other ties. And this, of course, has been true also of middle-sized, or even of quite serious military powers; during the Cold War, even France and Britain needed America to underwrite their security against the Soviet Union.

At the lower end of the ‘power scale’, this protection by others is the only reality that counts. Andorra and Monaco continue to exist in the same way and for the same reason that a baby, an invalid, an old person — or, indeed, a pacifist — does within civil society: they are recipients of the protection that is exerted by those who are both willing and able to do so; that is, by adults generally and by the forces of law and order in particular.

The case of the Vatican City illustrates this fact very clearly. Not only does it exist entirely by permission of Italy, but its territory is exactly as large as Italy allows it to be. During the Middle Ages and right down to the nineteenth century, the papal dominions extended to a wide belt of territory across the center of the peninsula. Nor were they in the least defenceless then; indeed, some popes led their troops into battle personally! During the nineteenth century, however, the existence of the papal states — and of all the other small territories in the Italian peninsula — came under threat from the rising tide of Italian nationalism.

Finally, the Italian nationalists succeeded. The small states were all swept away and replaced by a united Italy. But an exception was made: the papal states were kept in existence — though only as a few acres in the centre of Rome. There, in the Vatican City today, the papal writ still runs, symbolically guarded by a few men in picturesque uniforms, carrying mediæval weaponry. The tourists and pilgrims generate huge economic benefits for the powerful neighbour beyond its walls, thereby giving Italy a vested interest in leaving the frontiers just exactly where they are. And the quixotic and picturesque Swiss Guards who patrol them are a ceremonial reminder of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when popes fielded real armies of Swiss mercenaries.

The Vatican’s history illustrates perfectly the hard truth that there can be no such thing as a pacifist state — and what is the real significance of the continuing existence of small polities that cannot, realistically, defend themselves.

‘Just War’ theory and its problems

We have already observed that, once Christianity became entangled with secular government, and the fourth-century Roman Empire gradually began to enforce Christian profession upon their populations, then it became inevitable that a Christian legitimisation of warfare (under some circumstances, at least) would eventually be produced.

Augustine Christianised the ‘just war’ theory of the pagan Roman orator, Cicero. According to Augustine, a particular conflict might be considered morally defensible if it was declared for a just cause (ius ad bellum) and conducted in a just fashion (ius in bello). Under the first category:

• the war must be fought to secure justice (i.e., there must be no aggression, revenge, conquest etc.);

• it must be a last resort after peaceful attempts to resolve a conflict have failed;

• there must be a realistic opportunity of achieving the aims of the war (so — no desperate or pointlessly bloody last stands); and

• the war must be conducted under direction of the ruler, in an attitude of love for the enemy.

It is doubtful whether any of these stipulations could always be met. The first — a prohibition on conquest and revenge — is perhaps the most straightforward. But, as anyone who has attempted to mediate in even a personal quarrel knows all too well, the ability of human beings to insist that “he started it!” is almost limitless.

As for last resorts, it is usually very difficult to determine whether every peaceful attempt at resolution has been tried to exhaustion. Protagonists of war will declare “enough!” at a very early point in negotiations; supporters of the enemy (or self-loathers in ‘our’ camp) will never be satisfied that ‘we’ tried hard enough. In any case, such a doctrine has always run into the severest difficulties in practice. As R.H. Bainton has observed, attempts at mediation presuppose “a relative equality of power; the lion does not arbitrate with the lamb. ... Rome would not submit her own disputes to arbitration, though willing to enforce it upon her subjects.”

Neither is a realistic opportunity of success always discernible before battle is joined; history has produced some surprising outcomes of military confrontations. The Battle of Marathon comes to mind. Augustine’s doctrine would presumably have ruled out the defense of the Alamo — yet its bold defenders are generally considered heroes today. Perhaps an undue adherence to the same precept should have induced the British to surrender to Hitler in the late summer of 1940 — but it is just as well they didn’t!

The final stipulation, of course, would rule out all rebellions — a point with which all pre-moderns would have agreed. Even a Nero or an Ivan the Terrible seemed preferable to the anarchy that would ensue if every person arrogated to himself the right to invoke military force. (This is a sentiment still appreciated by many Iraqis who were but recently under the rule of Saddam Hussein; or of Libyans under Gaddafi — and now have yet worse horrors to contend with.) Yet the prohibition offends those of us who think that Bonhoeffer and other Germans involved in the plot to kill Hitler had right on their side.

And what if, like Bonhoeffer and his fellows, one lives under a ruler who commands an unjust war? Must Christians obey the call to arms? Augustine’s statements on such questions do not entirely reassure:

“A righteous man, who happens to be serving under an ungodly sovereign, can rightfully protect the public peace by engaging in combat at the latter’s command when he receives an order that is either not contrary to God’s law or is a matter of doubt (in which case it may be that the sinful command involves the sovereign in guilt, whereas the soldier’s subordinate rôle makes him innocent)....”

Again:

“Christian soldiers obeyed their emperor despite his lack of belief, but when it came to the issue of Christ, they acknowledged only Him who was in heaven. If Julian wanted them to honor idols or throw incense on the altar, they put God before him. But whenever he said ‘Form a battle line’ or ‘Attack that nation,’ they obeyed instantly. They distinguished between an eternal and a temporal master, but at the same time they were subject to their temporal master for the sake of their eternal one.”

The exercise of a Christian conscience about matters of warfare, it seems, is the prerogative of the ruler — even if the ruler isn’t a Christian. As for “sinful commands” embroiling only the giver in guilt, “whereas the soldier’s subordinate rôle makes him innocent”, this is the plea of the concentration camp guard: he was only following orders.

Already, then, we are encroaching into Augustine’s second category of stipulations: the requirement that war be fought in a just fashion. This is even more problematic than the first. Ius in bello requires:

• that a conflict must be fought to reestablish peace (i.e. that it does not encompass the total destruction of the enemy);

• that promises to the enemy must be kept;

• that the force used must be proportionate to the cause of its being invoked; and

• that noncombatants must be respected, that clergy were not to fight, and that there were to be no atrocities.

The terrible truth, however, is that virtually all wars encompass unspeakable acts. Whenever I taught on this subject in theological seminary, I used to ask my class to give me an example of a war which they considered would be justified by Augustine’s ‘just war’ criteria. It was a low and dirty trick on my part. I knew in advance to which example they would point; the combination of national myopia and historical ignorance did the work for me every time. They pointed, of course, to the Second World War. A collection of far-from-perfect, but at least acceptable democracies had confronted the utter evil of Nazi Germany.

In response, I used to point out that by far the largest portion of the fighting — and the dying — took place on the Eastern front, where horrifying evil (Nazi Germany) confronted horrifying evil (Stalin’s Soviet Union). But, even if we discount that rather large point, and address ourselves exclusively to the conflict which my students had had in mind — that is, between the Western allies, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and Japan, on the other — there remained serious difficulties.

I would list for them the serious war crimes perpetrated by the Western Allies: the carpet-bombing of cities; the deliberate creation of firestorms in Hamburg and Dresden (with effects similar to, and death-tolls that outstripped, those of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki); the forcible handing over to Soviet (and to Yugoslav Partisan) custody of hundreds of thousands of prisoners who, the British and Americans — and the prisoners themselves — knew full well, would be shot by the communists.

Ius ad bellum could not deliver ius in bello. “And this”, I would conclude, “is our best case of a ‘just war’. So what is the theory worth?” And it probably was the best case. That was the point. So what of the rest?

The fact is that war has an appalling dynamic of its own: it drags down the participants, swiftly and surely, into ever more savage actions. The side that is losing will frequently resort to some tactic that had hitherto been ‘out of bounds’ or ‘off limits’, in order to put itself back into contention, or to damage its enemy in a way that that enemy could never have anticipated.

Indeed, many recent conflicts have consisted of what military theorists now call ‘asymmetric warfare’ — that is, where one side is far weaker, in conventional military terms, than the other. That side will frequently use tactics that dare the other to use its military might:

• taking hostages and keeping them at known military targets;

• hiding missile batteries and artillery in heavily populated areas;

• using human shields;

• threatening the use of poison gas;

• sponsoring terrorist cells in the enemy’s home countries.

Indeed, at the moment of writing, Hamas is using at least some of precisely these strategems against Israel. (And Ukraine, notably, is not using them against Russia.)

The only effective response, in strictly military terms, to such tactics is for the stronger side to push the boundaries yet further: to bomb targets anyway; to threaten a nuclear first strike; to kill terrorist suspects before they can attack — and so before they can (always) be proven to be plotting terror. Generally speaking, Israel proves willing to take further steps of this kind in confronting its enemies; the British and Americans are mostly, though not always, more restrained. But the degree of restraint tends to vary inversely with the level of threat. Israel is perpetually under grave threat; after 9/11, the Western powers — and especially the Americans — showed signs of losing some of their inhibitions.

If such tactics are at all successful, then the enemy will respond with something yet more harsh. War, it has to be said, is war. Though individuals may act morally or heroically within it, there is nothing moral or heroic about war itself. That is precisely why statesmen and individuals of sense and morality do everything in their power to avert it.

And it is this reality that gives the pacifist argument real force. The ‘just war’ theory is so general in its strictures as to be almost worthless. Most states in most wars have claimed to be justified by it. So what is the use of a theory that can so repeatedly and so easily be pressed into service for mutually contradictory causes?

The problem with pacifism

The failure to frame a moral theory sufficiently practical to encompass warfare might be held to imply that pacifism is the most moral recourse in the face of violence. And perhaps it is. However, for reasons that we pointed out a moment ago, there cannot be a pacifist state — merely a state which depends upon others, possessed of more force. So a consistent pacifism, exercised by a private individual located somewhere in the world that is not, say, Andorra, demands also the retreat from politics into private life.

Certainly, that view is consistent with early Christianity. It is consistent, too, with the stance taken by sixteenth-century evangelical Anabaptism. The Anabaptists called for believers’ churches which were entirely unconnected with the state and its necessary concomitant, the use of force. The claims of Christian discipleship were directed to individuals; the faith and its various moral and spiritual demands had no place, therefore, in the public realm. Pacifism was part-and-parcel of a retreat into the private sphere.

But a lot of more recent religious pacifism does not observe this rather drastic self-denying clause. Indeed, much pacifism is to be found in churches that are not at all anabaptistic in either theology or historic roots. It tends instead to be correlated with the prevalence of an outlook borrowed from secular liberalism: human beings are essentially good and amenable to reason; if there is a conflict that threatens or occasions violence, it must be because of misunderstanding between the parties, or else because of some structural injustice. The solutions are therefore twofold: ‘multicultural’ engagement, to increase ‘understanding’ (and particularly to eradicate real, nonnegotiable cultural differences that might occasion conflict); and political agitation for an ever more egalitarian world, in which no one can feel hard done by, or nurse grievances that might give rise to violence. Convictions of this kind, rooted in romanticism about human nature and presented in a rhetoric of Christian benevolence, are a long way from historic Christian pacifism.

Indeed, rather than demanding a retreat into the private sphere, the new pacifism is itself a political stance — though one which, for reasons we have rehearsed, cannot finally succeed. Secular liberalism does not need to ‘succeed’ in any traditional sense, however; it is enough for it to generate sufficient self-loathing within the wider society against that society’s institutions, and particularly its defense mechanisms. Almost no one seriously believes, as a theoretical proposition, that if we cease to defend ourselves, everyone will be nice to us and all will be well. But, by talking about each and every conflict in which we are (potentially or actually) engaged as if sweet reason could somehow make it go away, we defend ourselves without conviction, undermine our security, despise those whose job it is to defend us, and tie them up in ceaseless government inquiries and red tape. And so on.

This rather distasteful aspect of some modern pacifism is merely circumstantial, however. For many convinced pacifists are fine — and indeed brave — people who are very obviously not afraid to dirty their hands or put themselves in harm’s way in their attempts to minister to the injured and dying. They do as Jesus would do.

The core difficulty of a consistent pacifism, even of this admirable kind, is the danger of elevating personal moral purity of the self above the sometimes desperately urgent need of the weak for protection. In civil society, where a madman is on the rampage with a gun, then a principled unwillingness to use lethal force to stop him is not moral purity, but moral narcissism. It is to place the self (or a view of the self) above the lives of those who could have been saved by determined (violent) action to defend them.

A repudiation of force in all circumstances is an actual abandonment of victims — real people — to their fate. And in exactly the same way, a refusal to use force to stop the soldiers of Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot from wreaking what carnage they will is, to put no finer point upon it, not necessarily the optimal moral stance. As George Orwell insisted in 1942, during the Second World War, “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist”.

That is, perhaps, a harsh way of putting the matter, but Orwell was insisting that the entirely foreseeable consequences of an action (or decision for inaction) are an inseparable part of the moral choice itself. Without millions of people willing to use countervailing force against monstrous violence and injustice, the entire human race (or those, at any rate, who survived) would be forever condemned to inhabit the nightmare worlds those monsters sought to create.

The irresistible force and the immovable object

Where does all this leave us? When we’re all done second-guessing our parents and grandparents — exactly what should they have done in World War II?

If this issue seems hard enough, our problems are only just beginning. Modern technologies have generated weapons capable of destruction so fearful that the dilemmas become yet worse. Paradoxically, nuclear arms kept the peace during the Cold War; the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (rightly called simply M.A.D.) concentrated minds wonderfully.

These weapons violate virtually every principle of the ‘just war’ theory: that war be fought to secure justice; that there be a realistic opportunity of achieving war aims and an attitude of love for the enemy; that a party that is at war use proportionate force and not encompass the total destruction of an enemy; that noncombatants be respected. For this reason, John Stott, that most influential of Christian teachers, was a ‘nuclear pacifist’ during the Cold War, even as he subscribed to traditional ‘just war’ theory. It was, in his view, precisely the Augustinian doctrine that rendered any use of nuclear weapons utterly impermissible.

And yet. In the terrifying new world ushered in after August 1945, the state that does not have nuclear weapons is effectively disarmed when locked in serious confrontation with the state that does possess them. No one seriously doubts that, had the Western states of the Cold War era renounced the use of nuclear weapons, then they would eventually — nay, very rapidly — have succumbed to communism. Furthermore, had Ukraine not surrendered its nuclear weapons in the 1990s, it would hardly now be fighting Russia for its existence. And the régimes in North Korea and Iran have learned all too well the object lessons of Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi: fail to obtain, and keep, nuclear force — and your tyranny will be brought down.

What can the Christian conscience say in the face of this awesome dilemma? For the logic is at one with the principle of warfare itself: a refusal to use violence hands the world over to the person who will. If those with moral consciences make such a renunciation, the world will be run by those with no moral conscience. And so with nuclear weapons. Yet how is the use of nuclear weapons — the incineration alive of countless men, women and children — compatible with a moral conscience? Of course, it is not.

The Cold War passed off without the use of these fearful weapons, thanks to their powerful deterrent effect. But deterrence cannot work (that is, it cannot deter) unless each side is quite certain that the other really, really would, in extremis, use the dreaded weapons. The claimed willingness cannot be a mere bluff.

And therein again lies the insoluble dilemma for Christians. We are called to live by the Sermon on the Mount, in the midst of a world whose operating principles were correctly identified by Machiavelli. No wonder that the apostle Paul cried out “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom.7:24) Even the person who desires to escape from sin finds that warfare’s logic of evil is inescapable.

Now communism is (North Korea and Cuba aside) little more than a memory. Yet the danger is not diminished, but rather increased. The end of the Cold War has produced greater instability, and generated the frightening likelihood that Weapons of Mass Destruction (W.M.D.) — nuclear, chemical or biological — will indeed be used, somewhere, sometime. The logic of deterrence needs now to operate, not just between two sides, but between many. Even here, however, it will probably work — for to risk attack would be, in every sense, MAD.

The real problem now is not that a nuclear warhead may come via ICBM over the polar ice caps; it is far likelier to be smuggled into an elevator in Manhattan by suitcase, delivered by a suicide bomber who cannot even be identified, far less deterred, and whose organisation is but a proxy of a proxy of a proxy (and probably, therefore, not under the final control) of the weapon’s originator. What measures might be justified — or even possible — in fending off such a threat? How and against whom would one legitimately and proportionately strike back in the event of a failure to do so?

And even now we are not done. If these terrible dilemmas are the new reality at the ‘top’ end of warfare (that is, at the level of weapons of mass destruction), the new realities at the bottom end are almost as ugly.

The developing world is awash with cheap weaponry; a Kalashnikov can be bought for just a few dollars in many conflict-prone countries. Land mines are a cheap and moderately reliable defence of a front line in a poor country — yet their effects linger for decades, killing and maiming people long after the conflict is over.

Perhaps worst of all, many armies in sub-Saharan Africa use child soldiers — youngsters who have been kidnapped and brutalized at a young age by forced participation in extreme violence. Though their deeds are often despicable, they might be viewed as victims as much as those who are killed as a result of the violence they inflict. What does, say, a Christian African do when child soldiers swoop on a village to gouge, maim and murder women and children? If one shoots them down, one is killing children who have been stolen from their parents and brutalised. If one holds fire, one is yielding up more women and children to be put to death in an unspeakable fashion. Does Augustinian theory have an answer to this?

This is what is meant when we say that warfare has its own dynamic of evil, dragging its participants ever downward — that war is war. We can — and should — try to regulate it, to humanise it by treaties like the Geneva Convention. This has been attempted in different ways over the centuries:

• traditional codes of honour among warriors;

• quasi-legal systems like the Kanun of Lek Dukagjin which limit in scale (whilst simultaneously permitting) blood revenge in tribal and clan societies;

• the ideal of knightly chivalry;

• pagan and Christian ideals of ‘just war’;

• religious and other taboos like places of sanctuary or against fighting on certain days or in certain seasons;

• modern technocratic mechanisms like the Geneva Convention or international war crimes courts.

But we can never hope to be more than partially or temporarily successful. Local, religious and international attempts at containing the worst aspects of warfare are no more than mitigations — but they are all we have.

Just as criminals will always possess at least one advantage over the forces of law and order — that of holding the initiative — so the appalling dynamic of warfare will always eat away at the conventions, treaties, codes and law courts designed to limit and constrain it, leaving attempts at regulation one step behind. It is not that the attempt to hold it within bounds is a waste of time, but rather, that war can never be sanitised; it is the most fearful of human activities. And no system can take away from individuals, Christian or otherwise, the responsibility for what they, in their own persons, will do, which orders they will obey, and which disobey — even at the cost of their own lives.

Seeing the dilemma: Luther King and Bonhoeffer

Having seen the impasses to which both pacifist and non-pacifist arguments lead us, where might we go from here? Certainly, I have no easy answers in my pocket. But we might pause to consider the thoughts and actions of two thinkers who have attempted, with no small degree of persuasiveness, to take account of the weaknesses of the traditional positions, and to cast around for a basis upon which Christians might act.

Martin Luther King (1929-1968) was essentially a pacifist, but urged that this was not equivalent to a passive stance in the face of evil. Inspired by the example of Gandhi in British India (“Christ gave us the goals, and Mahatma Gandhi provided the tactics”), he took the view that reform could be attained by black American Christians, as they outmatched the capacity of their oppressor — white America — to inflict suffering by their own ability to absorb it. This would happen until a large enough body of opinion among white Americans was shamed into abandoning the mistreatment of black people.

“But be Ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

At a cost that included Luther King’s own death by assassination, the strategy worked (at least insofar as the state of the law was concerned) and reform was achieved.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) was a minister in the Protestant state church in Germany, and a committed opponent of Nazism, who was involved on the periphery of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler.

Bonhoeffer’s initial thoughts seem to have been similar to those held later by Luther King. However, as World War II proceeded, Bonhoeffer came to the conclusion that the Nazi leadership could not be shamed into abandoning its ways — that Hitler and his henchmen had consciously and irrevocably chosen to pursue the path of evil to its end. That being so, Bonhoeffer reluctantly came to the conclusion that, in order to save life, Hitler must be killed. Alas, the plot misfired, and Bonhoeffer and most of his co-conspirators were arrested and, eventually, executed.

Why were Gandhi and Luther King largely correct in their calculations about the capacity for change among, respectively, the British colonialists and white Americans, whilst Bonhoeffer (also correctly) despaired of any such change among the Nazi leadership? It is strongly arguable that the former two groups were largely affected by a Christian-informed conscience, whilst the latter group was inured against it. That is not to say that the British ruling classes in the 1920s to 1940s or white Americans in the 1960s were all actively committed Christians — far from it. But those groups had been brought up and educated, and continued to be surrounded, by environments in which Christian ideals were highly influential. And, in consequence, they were susceptible of having their consciences pricked. Religious influence, once again, acted as a force for the disarming of conflict.

All three men (and it must be remembered that Gandhi was not himself a Christian) eventually died for their beliefs. Gandhi was assassinated, after independence for India had been achieved, by a hardline Hindu who was outraged at the concessions made to Muslims. Bonhoeffer was hanged, just days before the end of World War II, by the Nazis. And Luther King was shot dead (at the same age as Bonhoeffer — thirty-nine) by a white racist who was determined to stop the reforms which the Baptist preacher was in the process of achieving.

It is significant that neither Bonhoeffer nor Luther King was martyred specifically on account of his Christian faith. And Bonhoeffer had actually been engaged in a plot to kill someone: the Führer. If Christians can, in certain circumstances, legitimately fight (and I think they can), then that fighting clearly cannot be ‘for the faith’. It can only be for ‘secular’ causes: to defend the weak from slaughter; to fend off an imminent attack; and perhaps, even, in very limited circumstances, to right a grotesque wrong.

And this is so, not merely because ‘fighting for Christianity’ would leave us guilty-as-charged by the secularists, but because — as the teaching of Jesus, the doctrine of the early Christian Fathers, the Anabaptist insights about the church, Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, and Luther King’s Strength to Loveall testify — faith in Christ is something for which we can only die, not kill. To fight under the delusion that one is thereby promoting Christianity is to lose sight of what Christianity actually is — just as to fight a war under the delusion that the conflict can be ‘covered’ and sanitised by some ethical system is to lose sight of what war is.

As Jesus told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest” (Jn.18:36). It is arguable that soldiers were numbered among the wider circle of Jesus’ disciples — and undeniable that even his inner circle possessed swords (Lk.22:38). But his servants did not fight because, as we all know, to have ‘fought for Jesus’ by releasing him would have undone the central purpose for which he had come. The Kingdom of God is not something for which we can fight; to attempt to do so is, by definition, to undo it.

Christians may fight to save or protect others, but not to secure the promotion (or even the protection) of their faith by the public authorities. Even then, as we noticed with the case of World War II which my students understandably (but wrongly) considered to be so cut-and dried, wrong actions — even war crimes — are likely to be committed by the ‘right’ side, and it may be the duty of Christian combatants to refuse to participate in them, even at the cost of being arrested or executed by their own side.

For the Christian must always insist upon doing the one thing that no sensible military policy can possibly countenance: keeping his conscience in his own hands. Armies depend upon the automatic, prompt and wholehearted carrying out of orders — a reality which, as we have seen, Augustine well understood. The soldier, in both normal military practice and in Augustinian theory, hands over his conscience to the commanding officer upon enlistment. No armed forces can be organized around the principle that the individual combatant can select which orders to obey.

Yet, I would contend, it is precisely this which a Christian may not do; the obedience and willingness of the Christian to follow orders must always be more provisional and tentative — or at any rate, less absolute — than traditional theories allow. And this, of course, is no different to the age-old problem for Christians when confronted by state power, and identified by the apostle Peter in Acts 4:19 and 5:29: “We must obey God rather than men.”

As we have seen, the objections to pacifism are overwhelming in the face of radical evil in the world, whilst theories insisting that war can be ‘just’ simply do not stack up. Furthermore, Christian attempts to steer between the difficulties of pacifism and those of ‘just war’ theory break down into implausibility. Warfare destroys and breaks down, not only human lives and bodies, human relationships and communities, but all of the moral and theological categories by which we ordinarily attempt to codify, measure and regulate those things.

It is an evil so radical that it does not even give us the option of washing our hands of it and walking away. For the weak and defenseless cry out for protection. Warfare, let it be said once and for all, is the most intractable of problems to which, neither in theory nor in practice, is there any convincing moral solution. “War”, as the great American General William Sherman, commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, aptly reflected in old age, “is hell”. And let none of us pretend otherwise.