MTS-07: Hauerwas on Bell

Discussed on May 6, 2013, with Stanley Hauerwas as part of my MTS Thesis Proposal.

Source: Daniel Bell, Just War as Christian Discipleship (Brazos, 2009)

Discussion Prompt

Daniel Bell's book[1] is an important work that attempts to re-center the tradition of just war on the church instead of the state. To make his case, Bell distinguishes Just War as Christian Discipleship (CD) from Public Policy Checklist (PPC).[2] He leverages Augustine primarily in his effort to show that just war as a form of discipleship is essentially an act of love, that just war cannot be seen as a lesser evil but is in itself a working out of the entire life of faith in reference to the particularities of battle. Indeed, he reminds us that if just war is really a manifestation of Christian love, one specific expression of the broader moral life for Christians, it is made possible only through the entire character of one's life. After all, "Discipleship is the sum total of our lives as Christians."[3] He wisely reflects that just war (PPC) is less holistically focused, for it "does not concern itself with daily life outside of war" and "has as its starting point ... modern nation-states and international law."[4] Because just war PPC is so limited in scope, and because Bell does such a superb job of deconstructing some of its faulty assumptions, I will focus more on Bell's development of just war CD in the interest of brevity.

"No church has produced a single, definitive 'doctrine' of just war."[5] Instead, just war is simply the name for that set of virtues and habits called for in direct response to the particular circumstances that war and violence entail. In other words, just war is no different from the suffering love expected of Christians who encounter a freezing beggar or wounded traveller. Christians necessarily clothe the former and provide aid to the latter. When Christians are confronted by similar injustices that expect violence, the response is unique but cannot be divorced from the same love that motivates the earlier situations. Just war criteria therefore include things like proportionality, the requirement of legitimate authority, etc. Particular injunctions emerge from the context in which a Christian finds herself. For example, a Christian who encounters a wounded traveller would clean their wounds and prevent further bleeding. There would be specific guidance formulated by experts in medicine that she could leverage to provide a loving response appropriate to the situation. Likewise, "faithful just warriors may be morally obligated in certain circumstances not to fight in the first place or to surrender once the fighting is underway."[6] All of this describes how the church can look to pagan philosophers like Cicero or Aristotle to come to certain conclusions about the justice in war apart from explicitly Biblical considerations. Indeed, "Christians adopted a rudimentary vision of just war from the Romans," it is therefore "a living tradition that more closely resembles an ongoing conversation."[7]

But Bell is right to point out that Christian discipleship is a form of life inseparable from the habits that disciples cultivate within the church with the help of the living and the dead amongst us. "In the midst of the Christian community... we have the gracious opportunity to learn from the lives of the saints around us as well as from the lifetimes of the saints who have gone before us."[8] For this reason, Augustine holds as much influence as does Paul Ramsey or John Yoder, though they may disagree heartily. Bell emphasizes over and over again the necessity of learning the virtues within the church so that we might be a just people capable of waging war in such a manner. One point in particular I had not come across before is Bell's insistence that "Individuals cannot be just warriors... Just War (CD) is the practice of a community or it is not practiced at all."[9] Not only significant for its import in relation to the centrality of community for Christians, but also for its parallels to military culture, in which there are no lone rangers on the battlefield, a form of life that emphasizes the necessity of camaraderie and never leaving a buddy behind. The implications of this claim are impressive for its scope in challenging the notions of individuality so prevalent in America, and increasingly in the Army, whose marketing ploy includes phrases like "An Army of One."

However, this very idea of being formed by experts and mentors in the field begs the question of who it is the church looks to for martial formation. Modern notions of propositional theology make the criteria for just war more central than the character necessary therefore. Augustine is a formidable thinker, but he reflected to people like Boniface without personal experience in war. This is less a dig against Augustine as it is what moderns have done with him, for he never espoused a formulaic understanding of criteria-based expectations about war. Instead, he responded pastorally to a fellow Christian in search of answers to incredibly vexing questions of profound significance. Likewise, we must be careful to turn as well to those who know war in a deeper sense than abstract theologizing can attain. Augustine wielded theology deftly in his reflections on war, but we must be careful to turn to saints with particular virtues and experience for questions of particular scope like just war, like Martin. In all, Bell does a wonderful job of outlining the significance of just war as Christian discipleship made possible only by being a just people that does not merely "hold a presumption for justice"[10] but are ourselves just. The church holds no such presumption in the same way it does not contain a social ethic. We are, after all, just. We are a social ethic.

Questions

Why does Bell begin his exploration of discipleship and war with Augustine? As Yoder and Bainton show, the propositions that emerge as major tenets of just war have their origins in Aristotle and Cicero, so beginning with Augustine seems to make him a middleman, as though the church's discernment about soldiering and the virtues erupted spontaneously in the 4th century, which ignores many of the soldier saints that went before the African bishop. How might incorporating the passion of military martyrs and the lives of the soldier saints challenge and enrich Bell's account of war as discipleship?

If it is true that Ambrose (and Augustine?) believed "war was a deeply religious undertaking," (27) where did they develop this understanding if they borrowed its structure from the pagan jurist Cicero? Can this impulse be traced to similar ways in which Gentile Christians adopted Roman structures and symbolism (ex. basilicas, magisterium, etc.) at times above those that might have been inherited from Judaisms?

Footnotes

[1] Bell, Daniel. Just War as Christian Discipleship; Recentering the Tradition in the Church Rather Than the State (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009)

[2] Ibid., 73. Throughout his book, Bell uses upper case in reference to just war. I cannot be sure exactly why, but I am inclined to defer to Yoder's impulse against granting it the esteem of a proper noun.

[3] Ibid., 20

[4] Ibid., 74

[5] Ibid., 71

[6] Ibid., 241

[7] Ibid., 71. Bell adopts a Yoderian emphasis on "tradition" over and above "doctrine" or "theory" for the same reasons Andy Alexis Baker and Ted Koontz outline in their Note 1 on page 75 of Yoder's Attitudes.

[8] Ibid., 83

[9] Ibid., 239

[10] Ibid., 87

Discussion

Discussion Transcript

Logan: Yeah — I spoke with him, we had an email exchange.

Stanley Hauerwas: Oh, did you? Good.

Logan: His response was difficult to read at first — he was challenging me on, well, why isn't Augustine's a narrative? We had a series of emails, it was really helpful — we're trying to do the same thing. I think I'm just pointing back to some concrete examples and wondering why we haven't done this already, or whether we already have — using McClendon's methodology to look at soldier saints, military martyrs, and think of it virtue-wise that way. He uses this baseball example — you eventually learn that on a pop fly, the outfielder always takes priority. So in my mind, Augustine acts as a good middleman, but he's leveraging pagan philosophers to do work the church needed done — work that had already been done in the persons of Martin of Tours, Maximilian, Victricius, and figures like that. But anyway, he agrees, and I was really interested to hear him say he actually wants to discredit propositional just-war-as-public-policy-checklist.

Hauerwas: Right — obviously.

Logan: I had no idea that was his aim.

Hauerwas: Uh-huh.

Logan: Good to know. I do too, but I keep that more in the background — I don't want everyone to know.

Hauerwas: Do you want to discuss those questions?

Logan: I do.

Hauerwas: Okay, good. Why not.

Logan: Let me pull this up... I didn't read his sections on the actual criteria — I wanted to get to the core of his argument, so I read the first three chapters and the conclusion, which was really helpful.

Hauerwas: I know Augustine picks up some from Aristotle and Cicero, but I'm not so sure about Aristotle — he didn't know Aristotle. And Aristotle doesn't have that much to say about just war as such.

Logan: I think I may have inserted that improperly — not as though Augustine was saying it, I was thinking of Bainton. Yoder says Aristotle was concerned with making sure slaves stay slaves — I think Cicero was the Roman who actually gave it something like the name "just war."

Hauerwas: Cicero certainly did. But coming out of the Greeks, I don't know that they had much of a sense of just war as such — they had a sense of what war might do, what you might want to prosecute, but not what later became identified as just war theory.

Logan: If I'm reading Yoder right, he uses "just war" as one of four strands.

Hauerwas: Okay.

Logan: He traces just war specifically to Cicero and the Greek city-states, and pacifism maybe grows out of Christianity. I don't know if Bell is doing that distinction explicitly, or just using "just war" more broadly.

Hauerwas: More broadly, I think. About the virtues erupting spontaneously in the fourth century — which of course sidesteps the soldier saints who came before the African bishop—

Logan: Yeah, I think Daniel didn't like that — I probably shouldn't have put it that way. But especially when he's talking about it as Christian discipleship — to me discipleship carries a distinctly embodied connotation. Augustine's a great theologian, but I wouldn't go to Augustine to learn baseball. I'd go to Martin to learn baseball — to learn just war as Christian discipleship. And he agreed with me.

Hauerwas: Yeah, I can see that. Where you talk about Ambrose and Augustine believing war was a "deeply religious undertaking" — the word "religious" is ambiguous there. For the Romans, war provided the possibility of glory, which was almost religious in that sense — but you have to be careful with that word. The whole point of just war for theorists like Ramsey is to make war not religious — to make it thoroughly political. You don't fight for glory, you fight for the enemy to retreat behind the [38th] parallel. You want war to have a mundane political purpose, because that way you can keep it controlled — it doesn't become a war against evil.

Logan: I had a question about Yoder on that — you and Yoder both talk about making war a moral and/or political endeavor. Is that what you're alluding to?

Hauerwas: Yes — we're describing what just war is actually about.

Logan: Which seems in keeping with Yoder's understanding of just war as its own thing, precisely because it's strictly legal, devoid of crusading or Roman religio.

Hauerwas: Right, right. I don't know about the question of whether this impulse can be traced to the way Gentile Christians adopted Roman structures and symbolism — basilicas and so on. I just don't know.

Logan: That was my next question — does Augustine do that? Because it sounds like Ramsey, Yoder, and you are doing that — and the danger, or maybe not danger, is that it's distinctively modern.

Hauerwas: Yes.

Logan: Maybe not Enlightenment-liberal modern, but relatively new.

Hauerwas: Right.

Logan: Okay — so Augustine really seems to be an enigma, then.

Hauerwas: I think the whole business of calling Augustine a "just warrior" is a designation he'd hardly recognize. I think he was just trying to work out a pastoral response to what he thought was a difficult challenge, when you had people like Marcellinus trying to figure out how to do things.

Logan: Is this the end of it? It doesn't keep my notes when I display them on my iPad, but—

Hauerwas: I've always thought it was problematic to begin "the just war tradition" with Augustine. There's no question he provides a justification for war, but it was more ad hoc than an attempt to develop some kind of generalized theory. I've been deeply suspicious of that framing.

Logan: If we think of figures like Martin — there's one book I haven't read yet, apparently quite bad, called The Virtue of War — written by an Orthodox guy and maybe a Catholic guy, Kinghorn found it — basically arguing these are the virtues you learn in war. One thing Bell said in his email was, "someone would have to come up with these examples" — and I bit my tongue rather than saying, "I'm trying to do that, with this book I'm writing now, with all these individual people." But what would McClendon's methodology actually look like here — the governing images thing?

Hauerwas: Mm-hmm, yes.

Logan: I don't know that that's even all that—

Hauerwas: No — it's not helpful. I was never really taken with that part of the book. He gives the image at home, but in terms of some of them—

Logan: Yeah.

Hauerwas: Yeah.

Logan: But something he's getting at is helpful — I just don't know how, say, Aristotle extracts things like fortitudo, prudentia — how does he identify these?

Hauerwas: From examples. He's always thinking of the Odyssey.

Logan: Really?

Hauerwas: Oh, yeah. In some ways it's a mistake to read the Nicomachean Ethics separate from Homer — he's giving exemplifications, what courage looks like, from the great poetic forms of Homer. Think of the great Hopkins line — "the just man justices." You need the exemplification of justice in a particular person to have the conceptual resources to name what justice even is. That's completely Aristotelian — you have to have the exemplification to know what you're talking about.

Logan: When you say "justices" — is that as a verb?

Hauerwas: Yes.

Logan: That's incredibly confusing, but I can kind of see where it's going.

Hauerwas: Right — that's a Hopkins kind of poetic movement, very characteristic of him.

Logan: Hopkins — what was his first name?

Hauerwas: Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet. "The just man justices." So — working from an Aristotelian framework, you can't do the kind of moral reflection you want done separate from exemplification.

Logan: Huh.

Hauerwas: So you need Martins of Tours.

Logan: Right. So then — what's your ultimate sense of Bell's book, given he doesn't start from the same place?

Hauerwas: No. I think what Dan's done is show how it makes all the difference in the world what sociology you presuppose in just war reflection — and that if you separate just war from its ecclesial function of helping us be more faithful disciples, you fundamentally distort what it is by turning it into a checklist. I find that very persuasive.

Logan: The paper I wrote for philosophical theology—

Hauerwas: That was really good.

Logan: I felt like I'd only just started it, but I had to give myself permission not to keep writing forever and actually graduate.

Hauerwas: I thought focusing on the letters was really very good — the rhetorical strategy of letters is a subject unto itself.

Logan: I was surprised — I don't think Augustine actually tells Boniface he can't become a monk. My reading of Bell, and a couple others, was that Augustine's nervous that if Rome falls, so does the church — but I didn't read it that way. I read it as, "Look, you're married, so of course you can't become a monk — you might as well keep doing what you've been doing." I wanted to ask — I'm trying to get back to the thesis, going to take my time with it, but I don't want to believe I can't do as much as I really want to. I'm trying to think through whether I want to do the work of extracting the actual virtues from Martin's life, or make the case that this work needs to be done. I had an outline—

Hauerwas: Well — what is the fundamental virtue of Martin of Tours? Courage, isn't it?

Logan: I think it's humility.

Hauerwas: Well — it took courage to say "I am a Christian." It's a courage that's formed by humility — the virtues bleed into one another. And what that does is, rather than courage being shaped by your willingness to be in battle, it's shaped by your willingness not to be in battle. That's the kind of exemplification you'd want to pursue as part of the display — courage is a word used in both contexts, but you want to show Martin's account of courage as a form of humility, more an expression of the narrative of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. I'm just trying to suggest to you, Logan, what seems to me to be the project.

Logan: Yeah — I was in the UK, listening to Giles—

Hauerwas: Fraser?

Logan: Is it? Yeah.

Hauerwas: I know Giles well.

Logan: He was giving a talk on the military and ethics, and I asked a question — I think I only got to ask one, he said he could only take one — but it struck me that there are at least two kinds of courage on the battlefield. One is to pull the trigger and suffer the moral consequences — closer to how I'd read Bonhoeffer: he knew it was wrong and did it anyway, because Christ wasn't immune either, he took on the world's sin.

Hauerwas: I think that account of Bonhoeffer is wrong.

Logan: Really?

Hauerwas: I do. There's a new book, not out yet, by Mark Nation — I just wrote the foreword — arguing, I think very persuasively, that there's no evidence Bonhoeffer was ever actually willing to kill Hitler.

Logan: Okay. Well, I want to be sympathetic — one of the reasons I really wrestle with whether I want to do away with just war entirely is the therapeutic effect it can have on people who've done what they've done, which I think is part of what Augustine was doing — if it's proportional, if it's done for peace. But the other kind of courage is not pulling the trigger, and either being shot, or being disowned by your unit.

Hauerwas: The latter strikes me as the most challenging.

Logan: Yeah — there's a parallel to the whole chivalric thing, wanting to suffer to earn God's favor but also wanting to kill. I'm trying to think how to narrate the difference between willingness to suffer and readiness to kill. It's like — not Camilo Mejía, someone else — Aidan Delgado, this Buddhist guy who came to a point of conscientious objection mid-deployment, applied while still in country, and started emptying his magazine before going out on patrol. So he went out with no bullets, waiting for the CO paperwork to go through. It's not the same thing exactly, but it's still courage — people with bullets are still courageous too, but there's something there I don't quite know how to narrate. That's what strikes me about Martin — a lot of pacifists, including his own biographer, gloss over the fact that he served for twenty-some-odd years.

Hauerwas: Yeah, it's — I mean, right.

Logan: It was a good biography, and this French historian was apparently a little embarrassed Martin stayed in that long, so he fudged the numbers — but he couldn't get around the fact that Julian didn't begin his reign until 350 or so. Anyway—

Hauerwas: I want to put this in front of you — it's a book proposal I was asked to review for Yale University Press. The author, Robert Meagher — you'll find him rather self-involved—

Logan: Oh, dear.

Hauerwas: But I was a colleague of his early on, at Hampshire College. I think his account of how the killer is wounded by the killing is really good, and then he wants to associate that with just war, and how just war tries to explain it away. I think his account of just war is insufficiently historically nuanced, but I thought you'd find it an interesting read.

Logan: Moral injury — oh, yeah, people are really getting into that. That's why I'm hoping to write with Kinghorn, sooner rather than later.

Hauerwas: Yeah.

Logan: I don't know if the publisher sent you a copy, but I wanted to make sure you had one — I gave you an unsolicited inscription too, like you did for me.

Hauerwas: Aren't you sweet.

Logan: They didn't send you one, I don't think?

Hauerwas: No — I would've recognized it. I think you've made terrific progress.

Logan: I hope so.

Hauerwas: I think so. What are you going to do next year?

Logan: I'll apply in the fall — didn't want to do it while taking classes. Shortlist includes Duke, UVA, probably Fuller since a friend's out there, Marquette since Steve's there. I want to take it slow — looking at teaching positions too, asked about precepting. There's a possibility I might teach biblical lit down at Methodist in Fayetteville.

Hauerwas: Oh, really?

Logan: And a couple of loose possibilities — a lot of vets have talked about wanting an advanced spiritual formation track for veterans. I talked to Sally about whether it might make sense for me to lead something like that, or whether other people should. That would be wonderful — but if you ever need a research assistant, or know someone who does—

Hauerwas: Okay, I'll call on you. I don't think I have any money, though.

Logan: Figured — you're a fellow.

Hauerwas: Right, but I'll certainly keep it in mind.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: It's great.

Logan: Yeah.

Hauerwas: Well — take care.

Logan: You too. Thanks so much for—

Hauerwas: Yeah.

Logan: You'll see me Saturday.

Hauerwas: I'll be there.

Logan: I was going to mention to the professors — if it's not raining and there's a crowd, I might want to take pictures with folks.

Hauerwas: Oh, I'll be there.

Logan: I can't really be in the center of it, in the crowd, but if I find you I'll drag you to the margins and you can say hi to my folks, take a picture — I'll talk to—

Hauerwas: I'll always be there.

Logan: Okay — I'll see you Saturday, then.