Just War Principles and Counterterrorism

The atrocities of September 11 and the subsequent public response should force Christians of all denominations and theological persuasions to return once again to the fundamentals of moral reflection on the use of military force. The first fundamental that they ought to consider is this: There are two, and only two, responsible ways for Christians to think about the use of military force. For shorthand, I'll call this classic pacifism and classic just war.

The classic just war position needs no extended exposition for this gathering. It was clearly summarized and articulated by Thomas Aquinas, and for all intents and purposes was adopted by the Reformers as well as the early modern Protestant and Catholic natural law theorists. Thomas held that three requirements are necessary to morally justify the resort to force: legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. By legitimate authority he insisted, in line with the Biblical witness (citing Romans 13:1-6) and medieval thought, that force was to be employed as a public act by a sovereign political authority. Sovereign political authority means that there is no superior political authority to which aggrieved citizens can appeal. This means that the resort to war is normatively part and parcel of the coercive power of the law itself in its capacity to act on behalf of a political community that has been seriously wronged. In short, the political decisions on whether to resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the art of war itself (jus in bello) were a part of the art of statecraft. This, as we shall see, is most relevant to the current situation.

The criterion of just cause classically and explicitly included one or more of three possibilities: defense against wrongful attack, retaking something wrongly taken, or punishment of evil. (Following the Westphalian settlement the classic possibilities were reduced almost entirely in international law to defense against wrongful attack. But that is a long story that need not detain us here.) Right intention negatively meant that war should not be undertaken with a lust for battle, personal glory, bloodlust etc. Positively, right intention insists that the aim is to bring about peace, not a utopian peace but a tranquility of order.

As the tradition developed, other "criteria" (if that is the right word) were added to the jus ad bellum as prudential considerations to guide statesmen when they considered the use of force: Is there a reasonable chance for success? Will the overall good exceed the harm done (proportionality)? Have other means to redress a harm been attempted or are they possible (last resort)?

The classic pacifist position is, I think, best expressed in the Schleitheim Articles of 1527, widely regarded as the theological consolidation of Anabaptism. The sixth article articulates and summarizes this pacifism:

...It is asked about the sword, whether a Christian may hold a position of governmental authority if he is chosen for it. This is our reply: Christ should have been made a king, but he rejected this (John 6:15) and did not view it as ordained by his father. We should do likewise and follow him. In this way we will not walk into the snares of darkness. . . .Also, Christ himself forbids the violence of the sword and says, 'Worldly princes rule,' etc, 'but not you.' (Matt. 20:25)

Nor, they continued, is it

"fitting for a Christian to be a magistrate" because the authorities' governance is according to the flesh, but the Christian's is according to the spirit. Their houses and dwellings remain in this world, but the Christian's is in heaven. Their weapons of conflict and war are carnal and only directed against the fortifications of the devil. Wordly people are armed with spikes and iron, but Christians are armed with the armor of God."

It is worth noting, first, that the prohibition against Christians wielding the sword was part and parcel of the prohibition against holding political office. However, secondly, this prohibition was accompanied, indeed it was preceded by, a recognition that public authorities had a mandate from God to do what they as Christians were prohibited from doing:

Concerning the sword we have reached the following agreement: The sword is ordained by God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and kills people and protects and defends the good. In the law the sword is established to punish and to kill the wicked, and secular authorities are established to use it.

When is the last time you heard a modern pacifist, say, from the Mennonite Central Committee, talk like that? (They don't make pacifists like they used to.)

Now, this position was a distinctly minority view among the reformers, for very good and compelling theological reasons, I might add. (I don't have the time to bore you with the details.) The point I want to make is that the fundamental distinction between classic pacifism and classic just war thought was not over whether or not public authorities were authorized to punish evildoers by death and waging war if necessary. The Biblical witness was simply too perspicuous for them to doubt this. The issue between them and both the magisterial Reformers and Roman Catholicism was more precisely over whether Christians may legitimately hold a political office. That political authority could legitimately employ lethal force and coercion was simply acknowledged and accepted.

The second fundamental point to be considered concerns the assertions made by contemporary academic guild "ethicists" and some ecclesiastical authorities. They assert that the just war tradition is really a form of "crypto-pacifism" (Philip Wogaman), or that it shares with pacifism a "prima-facie" opposition to the use of force (James Childress), or that it shares with pacifism a common presumption against force or violence (The Challenge of Peace). These assertions should be rejected root and branch, along with academic fads such as "just peacemaking." Such attempts at synthesis must of logical necessity fundamentally distort both traditions and render them logically, morally, and theologically incoherent.

Practically speaking, these hybrids cannot do the work that the just war tradition is precisely designed to do: to provide moral guidance to political leaders as they consider the resort to force, and provide guidance to military planners as they plan the conduct of the war and prosecute it. Nor can it provide guidance for responsible Christian citizenship. As a result, church leaders and theologians, those whose very office is to provide moral clarity in times such as these, do more to contribute to the moral obtuseness among Christian citizens than to relieve it.

Here, let me relate to you the following sent to a colleague by a senior justice department lawyer.

I was listening to Don Kroah on [radio station] WAVA yesterday and heard his interview with Keith Pavlischek about just war principles. I appreciated the discussion because I have been participating in a lot of meetings and religious services recently where some have asserted that the command to turn the other cheek precludes Christians from supporting a war against those who attacked us. At a family retreat last weekend one woman almost walked out when I said I didn't think Jesus had a terrorist attack in mind when he preached the Sermon on the Mount. That's why I especially appreciated Keith's succinct application of just war principles to the evil of terrorism.

This woman's reaction is increasingly common. Why is this so common? Contemporary moral reflection by "ethicists" and church leaders has failed to clarify and outline the normative duty and responsibility of public officials who are, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "God's servant[s], agent[s] of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (Rom.13:4b NIV)

Again, recall that the classic pacifists did not deny this was the duty of political authorities. It is precisely on this point, that one finds the "point of contact" between the two classic traditions, and it is most relevant to the war against terrorism. The point of contact cannot be located in a purported common agreement about a "presumption against war" or the claim that the just war tradition is really "crypto-pacifist," or that they share a "prima facie" opposition to force (as if Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Suarez need to be tutored by the moral philosophy of W.D. Ross.) Rather, the similarity lies in the fact that for both the classic pacifist and classic just warrior, political authorities are not only permitted by God to wield the sword for the sake of justice, order and peace, but are required to do so by God Himself, whether or not they personally acknowledge God as the ultimate source of their authority to do so.

It is, in fact, the near emasculation of the criteria of legitimate authority in contemporary ethical reflection on the use of force that renders so many Christian citizens incapable of serious and sustained moral reflection in response to a terrorist threat. As I've suggested elsewhere, the profound evil in terrorism is not to be located merely in the fact that so many innocent noncombatants were killed. In fact, to locate that as the sole evil is to make a fatal concession. After all, the notion of noncombatant immunity is a part of the jus in bello and the notion of guilt and innocence is a legal one that holds in a state of war between two political communities. To fully understand the evil of terrorism we must consider it in the context of the very point which classic pacifism and classic just warriors most profoundly agree---only legitimate public authority has the right to wage war.

It is not insignificant that in addressing whether war could be waged justly, Aquinas began with the issue of legitimate authority, citing as Biblical support Romans 13:1-6. Thomas was articulating nothing new here. Beginning with Augustine, and throughout the Middle Ages, Christians sought to curb violence by emphasizing that only sovereign political authority could wage war. They thereby declared illegitimate any use of force by subordinate nobles, private soldiers, criminals and even the Church. Eventually, when confronted with a militaristic Germanic culture in which princes frequently engaged and glorified in combat for private ends, Christian thinkers repeatedly insisted that warfare was a public issue. War could not merely be an extreme tool of private parties but had to be a legal instrument, a part of the coercive power of law itself. Historically and theoretically, securing the public monopoly on the use of force was a necessary (albeit not sufficient) precondition for a peaceful and civilized society. Even the pacifists of the radical Reformation recognized this.

The freelance terrorism of the late twentieth and now the twenty-first century is nothing less than a direct assault on this Christian achievement. Left unchallenged, the rise of terrorism may foreshadow a return to the barbarism of private war. But a return to private warfare in the twenty-first century is even more ominous since vengeance is no longer fueled by distorted notions of private glory and honor. Now the motive is ideological, ethnic and religious fanaticism, which knows no bounds. In fact as James Turner Johnson has observed in a remarkably prescient article in First Things (1999), terrorism by its nature aims to undermine and erode the political goods of justice, order and peace, which is secured by political authority, and thus attacks all people who benefit from them.

While the tradition has allowed for the possibility of a war between two states both seeming, because of the complexity of the issues involved, to be just, the kind of violence we today call terrorism is evil in its very nature, because it attacks the foundations of political community itself. The authority to use force to curb and punish terrorism is thus the same authority that seeks to protect the goods of the political order as such. There is no justice in terrorism, only injustice.

Classical pacifists and classical just warriors recognized this. It remains to be seen whether contemporary pacifists and "modern" just war advocates will come to recognize it as well. I have my doubts. And it will be most instructive to see how far the Vatican and the U.S. Bishops have traveled down the path away from the classic just war tradition.

-- "Keith Pavlischek"

Paper delivered 24 September, 2001, at a panel discussion in Washington, DC, at the Faith and Reason Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture