MTS-06: Smith on Attitudes
Discussed on March 28, 2013, with Warren Smith as part of my MTS Thesis Proposal.
Sources:
- Roland Bainton, Christian Attitudes to War and Peace (Wipf and Stock, 2008)
- John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (Brazos, 2009)
Discussion Prompt
Roland Bainton, the son and husband of Quakers, himself a Congregationalist minister, writes that, originally, "limited war presupposed … conditions which were fulfilled by the Greek city-states;" "independent sovereign states of approximately equal strength" "with forces so well matched that… wisdom pointed to mediation rather than to the arbitration of a long and indecisive conflict"[1] Plato was the forerunner to just war, but never called it that, since conflict amongst the city- states he would not call "war." Aristotle, in his Politics (I, 1256, B., 23-26), asserted that a just war was one to enslave people to their proper status in the face of resistance.[2] The Roman jurist Cicero adjusted it in his De Officiis (I, 34-40, 83; II, 27; III, 46, 107) for use by states as they existed during his time.[3] He laid the foundation for such tenets as "formal declaration by an authority" based on the Roman practice of Pater Patratus, the 'father of fathers' of the Fetiales in the Fecial College (not unlike the bishop of bishops in contemporary Roman Catholic tradition). Bainton leaves unclear whether and to what extent this practice of the Fetiales derived from Deuteronomy, in which Israel appeals for peace and provides a time for response before waging war.[4] However, given the sacred nature of both war and peace in ancient era, it may simply be that it was common practice to avoid conflict at all costs, even up to the last. Cicero also insisted upon an "adherence to oaths" between enemies and friendlies. He maintained no protection of noncombatants, but the vanquished were spared humiliation and guaranteed full citizenship. Bainton recalls concrete examples of this occurring.
Many centuries after Cicero, Bainton recounts the first Christian account of justified war to be by Ambrose. The bishop of Milan's position as a praetorian prefect would have inclined him against the instinct to exclude soldiers in the same vein as Tertullian or Origen. He revived what Cicero advocated for and added that the "conduct of war should be just and that monks and priests should abstain."[5] Mentored by Ambrose, Augustine watched as the Roman Empire began to collapse. His view of human nature allowed him to make a distinction between act and attitude, giving space for an ethic that "served to justify outward violence."[6] In writing to Boniface, he pleaded with the Roman general to put off interest in monasticism in order to help in protecting the empire, which Augustine all too quickly equated with the faith. [Here one could draw direct parallels with Niebuhr, who too appealed to the state for preservation of culture, including religion] Bainton cites that for Augustine, war's intent was to be just, its disposition love, and its auspices just.[7] With Cicero, Augustine insisted, "Faith must be kept with the enemy."[8] The authority bestowed upon soldiers under oath ensured moral sterility; meaning private citizens could not take life, for to do so would be a product of the passions and self-assertion. Finally, and this final point is taken up in the modern era quite robustly, justice rested upon one side of the conflict only.[9] Bainton reflects that with the modern world's attention to the margins and its inherent liberative instincts, the suggestion that justice can be on both sides of the war is valid (however much that throws off our moral considerations).
At the outset of the second millennia, Bainton describes just war as having faded while a kind of anarchy prevailed in the church, which gave way eventually to the phenomenon of the crusade. Bainton recounts numerous episodes in which clergy took up arms even while the just war shifted focus from protection of life and honor to the protection of property. Rebellions were forbidden in the increasingly feudal society by the determination that "an inferior ruler could not make war upon a superior ruler,"[10] though such a leveling would be hard to determine without question given the agrarian nature of society compared to the relatively unified pluralism of Rome. Aquinas, therefore, was a product of his time in focusing on the issue of property in his deliberations on war, based upon natural law and the relationship between land, harvest, and feudal survival. He introduced the tenet of proportionality; that a just war may not "destroy more property than it recovered."[11] Abelard was the first to confront the issue of conscience, finding that the "conscience is obligatory though not exempt from the consequences."[12]
~
Yoder did not publish his book on Christian attitudes during his life because he did not want to detract from Roland Bainton's work by the same name. Instead, he described his lectures on the topic as a supplement to Bainton's book and required it for use in the course.[13] Yoder does not use the language of "theory" in relation to just war, as he identifies that it has evolved over time and that there are varying schools of thought. Therefore, he prefers the phrase "just war tradition," and he distinguishes it with the "crusade" and "blank check" tradition. When he uses the word "theory," he seems to use it as a pejorative term, as a way of highlighting its inconcreteness and permeability. He critiques the just war theory for having "a bias in favor of the civil order."[14] But having a robust doctrine of sin, as Christians are called to, and Niebuhr was right to articulate, means "then the system would not work."[15] His work in describing justifiable war, then, is done mostly tongue in cheek, which he would say is proper given the circumstances in which we find ourselves. After all, he agrees with the early philosophers at least in that justifying war requires equally yoked rulers. Instead, we live in a world that lacks "a wider network with mutual recognition among rulers."[16] The United Nations, Yoder might suggest, is dominated by the superpower status of the United States. When a single state has unequal power, evidenced by the language of responsibility to protect, war cannot so easily be justified, if at all. However, Yoder's history is astute and worthy of careful consideration.
Unlike Bainton, Yoder relies heavily on this distinction between the three strands of war traditions that he relates to law, justice, and holiness. The first strand is traceable to Cicero (the jurist), and it works in the arena of law and explicit agreements between equal states. The second is more fluid across time and was founded by Aristotle, which defined justice as relating to a nature (fought to restore slaves to their lowly status). Holy wars and crusades, the third tradition, found its source in sacred texts and the book of Joshua in particular for Jews and Christians. Yoder claims that the strands were generally distinct before the Middle Ages, when each was relied upon in some extent to justify wars not of necessity but of convenience. He traces the history of war traditions with each strand in mind, articulating how various theorists and theologians relied upon them to provide revisionist accounts thereof to suit a changing world and evolving state interests.
One particular point of interest Yoder draws into discussion is the issue of defeat and martyrdom, which ties into earlier readings. Yoder claims that the crusade paradigm has left modern western Christians with two peculiar elements. First, because the command to and justification of war comes from God, such transcendence "justifies downgrading the rights of the enemy."[17] In fact this is a convention of perhaps even post-modern thought, as numerous accounts exist during even the nefarious Second World War in which enemy combatants conducted themselves with surprising dignity. More poignantly, Yoder says the second element left with the contemporary world by the crusade mentality is the equation of martyrdom with something like holy defeat. Martyrdom in our age has taken on a very different shape than it had for the early church, evidenced by the veneration of such conquered heroes like Che Guevara or the liberationist priest Camilo Torres. While I take issue with Yoder's claim that the soldier "went out to kill," I would agree that "The legendary quality of defeat"... "is a mark of the crusade, not the just war."
Here, Yoder returns to the three strands to clarify that even the "nature" language of Aristotle was present as late as the 15th century, with the colonialist presumption that uncivilized, indigenous peoples had no souls[18] and therefore were subject to slavery, or worse. The work of the humanists, therefore, did much more than Aquinas in legitimating just war as an authoritative set of propositions,[19] causing "people to believe that the doctrine had some integrity."[20] Even the legal strand of war gained increasing prominence in the modern discussion of human rights and succeeded in delegitimizing the crusade mentality (at least on the surface). Finally, Yoder carries his three strands further forward in time, past the Middle Ages, through theorists like Machiavelli and Hobbes, who inaugurated the blank check strand of war. He and Bainton both cite the Reformation as problematizing the relationship between church and state insofar as it reinforced assumptions about the legitimacy of war making. Yoder brings the just war tradition into line with the popularly construed creedal nature of the current Just War Doctrine only through his critique of the Reformation as "the beginning of nationalism in the modern sense."[21] He cites everything from the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England to the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions as being inherently invested in securing the irrevocable right of the state to wage war without significant objection; in fact many of the documents are overt in their anti-Anabaptist screeds, who famously refused to assent to the nationalizing of war. The central effect of these documents for Protestants was to compel individual Christians that to disobey the prince was to be insubordinate to God, therefore compelling them to intellectual assent to justified war. The issue of individual conscience is left out of these pre-enlightenment documents, though in contrast to Protestant texts, Catholic doctrine does not compel its adherence because no such conscientious acquiescence is expected. Indeed, just war "has never been promulgated by a pope speaking ex cathedra,"[22] no Catholic is bound by doctrine to assent thereto. Put another way, a Catholic "can deny the whole"[23] idea of justified war and not be called a heretic. Though they might be called an Anabaptist. After all, it is a title Bainton and Yoder share.
Questions
If indeed the theologians effectively said, "that the justifiable war criteria are political, and not religious, not transcendental" and that even their cause is "political rather than religious," (Yoder, 113) is there really anything theological at all about ancient or modern war? Is the just warrior really anything other than a good citizen?
Yoder has an incredible insight about how defeat operates in the modern imaginary How is our Christology affected by labeling as martyrs those people who were "defeated," at Little Big Horn or the Alamo, or people like Tomas Young, Camilo Torres or... Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Footnotes
[1] Bainton, Roland H. Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace; A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 33
[2] Ibid., 37
[3] Ibid., 39
[4] Deuteronomy 20:10
[5] Bainton, 91
[6] Ibid., 92
[7] Ibid., 95-96
[8] Ibid., 96
[9] Ibid., 106
[10] Ibid., 105
[11] Ibid., 106
[12] Ibid., 107
[13] Yoder, John Howard. Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009), Chapter 2, especially page 37.
[14] Ibid., 80
[15] Ibid., 80
[16] Ibid., 81
[17] Ibid., 111
[18] Which may have had more to do with the color of their skin than the strength of their characters
[19] Yoder does not use this word, though he might not object to it
[20] Yoder, 112
[21] Ibid., 112
[22] Ibid., 121
[23] Ibid., 123
[24] Ibid., 123
Discussion
Discussion transcript
Logan: I opted against reading Augustine right now for time, but also because I want to try and probably read him before I write.
Warren Smith: Yeah.
Logan: I also wanted to treat just war more broadly, and I didn't want to lose sight of the forest for the trees by reading Augustine — since Bainton and Yoder are both pretty clear that Augustine was just one of many.
Smith: Yeah, yeah, that sounds sensible.
Logan: All right, you want to just go ahead and start reading, and then we can stop and talk?
Smith: Sure.
Logan: Um, so basically I went through Bainton's — and Yoder refused to publish his book, I can't remember where I read this, wasn't just in the foreword — but he refused to publish until Bainton's went out of vogue, and it never did. So apparently that's why he never published it. These are actually lectures, and I have a friend with a first edition where they were still sorting through the questions students were asking. I'd love to get a copy of that.
Smith: Oh, that's funny.
Logan: So, Roland Bainton is the son and husband of Quakers, himself a Congregationalist minister — I got the sense somewhere that he was a pacifist, but he's pretty well respected as a historian. And he reaches back to Plato, who says — Bainton says — "Limited war presupposed conditions which were fulfilled by the Greek city-states: independent sovereign states of approximately equal strength, with forces so well-matched that wisdom pointed to mediation rather than arbitration of a long and indecisive conflict." Plato was the forerunner to just war, but never called it that, since he didn't want to call what happened between city-states "war" — he preferred "conflict." Aristotle, in his Politics, asserted that a just war was one to enslave people to their proper status in the face of resistance. And the Roman jurist Cicero adjusted it in De Officiis, for use by states as they existed in his time. He laid the foundation — I try to track where these tenets emerge. Yoder has this really good chapter where he lines up all the criteria for just war as historically understood, really intriguing, so I try to — I think I put them in quotes, that may not be helpful, but — Cicero was the first to use the language of formal declaration by an authority, based on the Roman practice of Pater Patratus, which I thought was a title, but as far as I could tell it was used as a guy's name. You may have to correct me, but it sounded like it means "father of fathers."
Smith: Yeah, it does.
Logan: It does? Or you just don't know?
Smith: No, it does — well, it's clearly derivative of the word "pater," father. So "pater," fathers — Patratus, I have some questions about.
Logan: Okay — well, apparently it's a guy's name who was—
Smith: Hold on, let me check something. What page number do you have?
Logan: Oh, I forgot to even put them in. Page 39.
Smith: Let's see if our pages overlap.
Logan: Bainton says he's the head of the Fetiales, the fecial college.
Smith: Here we go, it's on 41. Yeah, here we go — if the notes line up, it looks like it's Cicero's De Officiis, and also De Republica and De Legibus.
Logan: Note 24 — the sense is these fetiales presided over truces and treaties too, and he cites, I'm pretty sure, Cicero, De Officiis, De Republica, and De Legibus.
Smith: I'm just trying to find where he gives the title.
Logan: Oh, I found that in Wikipedia, I think — which at least has a citation, but I can look it up... Livy? No — [reading] Titus Livius Patavinus mentions the Fetiales — the Wikipedia article cites Livy. And I'm pretty sure I spelled it right, Pater Patratus.
Smith: Yeah, it's an office.
Logan: Okay, I'm just going to write that down — a fetial priest who ratified a treaty with religious rites. So it's an office, not a person's name?
Smith: Correct. My sense would be — the thing that's curious is that a declaration of war was usually given by the consul and the Senate, in the period of the Republic.
Logan: When was Cicero writing?
Smith: At the end of the Republic — Mark Antony has him proscribed and killed. So it sounds like there's also a religious component to the declaration of war — I'll look that up.
Logan: One question that leaves us with is whether the fetial college survived into the empire, or whether the emperor just declared war unilaterally. Interesting. It also drew a parallel in my mind to Deuteronomy — I thought it was a high priest there too. Deuteronomy 20:10 says before you go to war, send a peace message, and if they respond favorably, enslave them all; if they don't, you wage war. But it doesn't say high priest — it's vague, you just offer peace, and if they reject it, you kill every breathing animal and every non-fruit tree.
Smith: There are times you understand why Marcion got a following.
Logan: Yeah. However, given the sacred nature of both war and peace in the ancient era, it may simply be that it was common practice to avoid conflict at all costs, even to the last. Cicero also insisted on adherence to oaths between enemies and friendlies — no protection of noncombatants, but the vanquished were spared humiliation and guaranteed full citizenship. Bainton recalls concrete examples, particularly in Carthage — there's an instance of an enemy given leave to return to his own country to plead for peace.
Smith: Oh.
Logan: He fails, returns anyway, and is killed, or kept in prison.
Smith: Yeah — this is major. Why am I blanking on his name — Cicero tells the story, it's about a Roman, during one of the Punic Wars, I forget whether the first or second — but his men have been defeated, maybe after Cannae, and he's sent back to the Senate on condition that he return. He does return, and is put to death — but he becomes an exemplar of honor. Augustine talks about him in Book One of City of God, dealing with the issue of suicides.
Logan: Interesting — that reminds me of Irenaeus having the ability to flee and not doing it, or Dirk Willems, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century — pursued, his pursuer falls through the ice on a lake, in the Martyrs Mirror — he rescues his pursuer, and then he's caught and killed. Which is just intriguing to me. There's much more emphasis on the integrity of one's word, even to death.
Smith: Yeah — I think part of why this is significant is that Ambrose brings it up too, though I've forgotten whether in the context of oath-making and the value of keeping your word. I think that's the context Cicero discusses it in, and then Augustine picks it up in City of God, Book One.
Logan: Okay. [reading] "After Cicero, Bainton recounts the first Christian account of justified war to be by Ambrose. The Bishop of Milan's position as praetorian prefect would have inclined him against the instinct to exclude soldiers in the same vein as Tertullian or Origen. He revived what Cicero advocated for and added that 'the conduct of war should be just and that monks and priests should abstain.' Mentored by Ambrose, Augustine watched as the Roman Empire began to collapse. His view of human nature allowed him to make a distinction between act and attitude, giving space for an ethic that served to justify outward violence. In writing to Boniface" — whose letters I'll probably read at some point before I start writing—
Smith: Right.
Logan: "—he pleaded with the Roman general to put off interest in monasticism in order to help protect the empire, which Augustine all too quickly identified with the faith." I meant to delete that or make it a footnote, but it made me think of Niebuhr, who also appeals to the state in some way for preservation — that it's irresponsible to let the state die, and therefore take culture and religion down with it.
Smith: Right, right.
Logan: Bainton cites that for Augustine, war's intent was to be just, its disposition love, and its auspices just as well. I thought that was important but couldn't quite make the connections I felt were there — it's a paraphrase from one of his sections.
Smith: I think what he means is this: there have to be certain key conditions — not many, but he lays them out — declared by someone actually in a position of authority. The disposition of love is one of Augustine's points — this is in De Libero—
Logan: Arbitrio.
Smith: He says the soldier is blameless for going to war, but is responsible for his disposition — if he brings sin on himself through bloodlust, then even if the war is just, the bloodlust brings guilt on the soldier.
Logan: Right.
Smith: So it's the individual soldier's attitude that preserves love. And the last point, concerning the auspices of justice — he says war should always be fought with an eye to the good at the end, so that you fight in a way that brings a just resolution and makes the defeated party believe the conquering side can be trusted to treat them justly.
Logan: Which sounds a lot like Cicero, saying you can never do something that makes the enmity more permanent.
Smith: Exactly, yes, yes, yes.
Logan: The authority bestowed on soldiers under oath ensured a kind of moral sterility — I think I get that from Paul Ramsey's chapter in War and the Christian Conscience.
Smith: Oh, the chapter on Augustine, at the beginning?
Logan: Yeah — I remember reading "moral sterility" specifically. Meaning private citizens couldn't take a life, since to do so would be a product of passion and self-assertion. Finally, the last point, taken up quite robustly in the modern era — justice rested on one side of the conflict only. Bainton reflects that with the modern world's attention to the margins and its liberative instincts, the suggestion that justice can be on both sides is valid — however much that throws off our moral considerations. I thought it was interesting that in the ancient period it's quite clear only one side could be just — but I think what Bainton's alluding to, and why Yoder includes revolution in his framework, is that we can now know our enemy more sympathetically and realize they may have real cause against us too. Which gets confusing.
Smith: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Logan: At the outset of the second millennium, Bainton—
Smith: It's the way Lincoln put it — "we pray to the same God" — but each side believes it's just, and only one can be, as opposed to the sense that there's error on both sides.
Logan: You don't think Lincoln had that sense?
Smith: No, I do think Lincoln's mindset in saying that each side believes God is for them, and yet only one can be right—
Logan: I'm trying to hear what you actually think. My instinct is to say both sides have something wrong with them, but God's still there for both, paradoxically.
Smith: My take is something like this: no side can claim to be wholly morally pure, no side is a perfect embodiment of justice such that justice is entirely with them and their opponents entirely unjust. I'd agree that, given the complexity, God can be both for and against both causes in certain respects. But it also seems to me that even with that lack of purity on one side, I do think God probably comes down on one side, and that side can rightly think of itself as righteous before God in a way the other isn't. But there also has to be the sense that the God who works all things for good desires the redemption of the enemy, and the reconciliation of both sides — and a way of recognizing there can be nobility and honor even in one's opponents, such that one doesn't vilify them to the point of thinking one can do whatever one wants to them.
Logan: It seems to me there was a shift somewhere along the way — I'm having trouble piecing it together — from "justice can only be on one side, period," to "justice can be, in some sense, on both sides, and that's why we need criteria." I think the ancient assumption was justice can only ever be on one side, period, and now the water's been troubled a little.
Smith: Yeah — but I think where Lincoln somewhat differs, to complicate what I just said — his quotation clearly sounds like the classical view, the ancient one you mentioned. But starting sometime in '64, when the siege around Petersburg drags on, and Lincoln's thinking, "the South is beaten, why doesn't this war end" — he has this comment suggesting maybe it's God's judgment, that blood must be shed to atone for the vile crimes of the nation. Not just Southern blood, but the blood of the whole nation — recognizing Northern culpability too, complicity in slavery. So the whole war becomes, in a sense, a judgment against both North and South.
Logan: Hmm.
Smith: Which takes the view: our side's right, but there's guilt on both sides that has to be acknowledged.
Logan: Which connects to the best Yoder will do with the siege of Jericho — he says the people of Jericho were a kind of sacrifice, proscribed, but the bottom line is they did wrong and were being judged, but for their own sake as well as Israel's, since that's what a sacrificial element is — for one's own sins. It's disturbing, but you can't get around it — you can't just be a Marcionite about it and say "that's just difficult."
Smith: Right, right, right — that was good.
Logan: I imagine that's coming from that book on the Civil War — Upon the Altar of the Nation?
Smith: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Logan: I really should read that.
Smith: I don't know if I got it from there — the Civil War's sort of one of my amateur areas of interest. Oh, did I show you this? There's a painting of the Kirkland Memorial at Fredericksburg — Sergeant Kirkland, with a South Carolina unit, during a lull in the fighting at the foot of Marye's Heights, went forward and gave water to the wounded Union soldiers.
Logan: That's interesting. What was his name?
Smith: Kirkland.
Logan: You said he was a private?
Smith: Sergeant, South Carolina — he was at Gettysburg, and then killed at Chickamauga. There's a big monument to him at Fredericksburg. I've been meaning to put a picture of it on my door, wanted to type up something about it first.
Logan: It seems like what's so depressing about just war is that it's a really reasonable, humanistic thing. I wonder sometimes if I'm really a pacifist because of the kinds of pacifists I see, and I suspect I'm probably not a just warrior based on the just warriors I've seen. But at the end of the day — like what I really liked about the keynote at our conference — no matter how you slice it — I was listening to a history podcast this morning about how we've treated veterans since the Revolutionary War, and they had a guy on from the Sons of Confederate Veterans who said all the veteran service organizations take care of veterans from each war, but Confederate soldiers didn't have that. Then someone tried to make the case that the South was really just trying to reinforce slavery, and I have difficulty fully believing that's what it felt like on the ground — I think a lot of the people who end up fighting have those larger questions somewhere off to the side. All I know is my country's asking me to do something, and I'm going to do it, and in the midst of it I'm going to try my best not to be a total jerk.
Smith: Yeah.
Logan: That's where I find a lot of inspiration, despite everything else we do with war.
Smith: Yeah — I've been watching, when I'm on the elliptical at home, this Ken Burns documentary on World War II. It takes four towns — Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; a town in Minnesota; and Sacramento, California — and follows families from each. There was one line — a soldier talking about when the US first went into North Africa, saying they knew they'd made a transition when they no longer saw killing as a moral problem, but as a craft.
Logan: Hmm.
Smith: And there's a part of me that just sinks hearing that. The other thing that struck me — at Guadalcanal, even before it was widely known what was happening in Germany — there was the Japanese treatment of prisoners, the Bataan Death March and so on. There was a case where they found US soldiers mutilated by the Japanese — genitals in their mouths, that kind of thing — and then they'd caught some Japanese soldiers, and the officers basically said, "Okay, how many of you lost buddies? Show of hands" — and then, "you can take these guys out and do whatever you need to do, get it out of your system." I read stuff like that and it just turns my stomach.
Logan: Mm-hmm.
Smith: I think it would have been better to invade Japan than drop the bombs, because I believe in non-combatant immunity. But hearing how the Japanese treated prisoners, you understand where the anger that fueled the willingness to drop the bomb came from. There's no easy answer.
Logan: No.
Smith: In a lot of ways it gets at the whole issue of interrogation too — the point that, who ran against Obama the first time — McCain, thank you — his point that we can't do certain things because it opens the door for other countries to do the same to our soldiers.
Logan: Yeah — and it's interesting, because Cicero wouldn't have been saying what he said if it hadn't been happening.
Smith: Right, right, right.
Logan: Don't succumb to it — and it's funny, Cicero and Augustine are kind of saying the same thing, make it a moral act. Which is why I think Yoder and Bainton are commendable in the same spirit — let's be serious about this and give it real credence. Yoder ultimately won't agree with just war, but he's saying we need to take it seriously, and when we do, we have to recognize some wars won't be just. It fights against the ideologizing of "God is on our side because we say so." For that reason I actually excluded a lot of the crusades material, since I wanted to focus on just war specifically. Bainton describes just war having faded—
Smith: Yeah, I agree, we can jump over the crusades discussion.
Logan: I think I've mostly touched on the rest already — he reads Aquinas after this period of near-anarchy, when feudal society tied land to lords, which is how he makes sense of Aquinas's "destroy no more property than it recovered" — the tenet of proportionality.
Smith: Right, right.
Logan: And then Abelard gets into conscience, which I'll probably avoid in writing. I think I gave more space to Bainton, but jumped to Yoder pretty quickly — Yoder doesn't use the language of "theory" for just war, since he sees it as evolved over time with varying schools of thought. He prefers "just war tradition," distinguished from "crusade" and "blank check" traditions — and pacifism too, actually, he has four strands: pacifism, just war, crusade, and blank check. He critiques just war theory for having a bias toward the civil order, but says a robust doctrine of sin, which Niebuhr was right to articulate, means the system wouldn't actually work. That's his critique of justified war — if our peace is eschatological, survival isn't the highest value, since we recognize we're going to die anyway.
Smith: And so—
Logan: I was reading his Politics of Jesus for another class and realized — I thought it was funny — that Niebuhr dismissed pacifism primarily on the grounds that Jesus, Paul, and the early church believed the world was passing away and weren't concerned with the things states now have to concern themselves with. I thought that was funny, because they were right — Rome is dead, we do have a different system now — but I don't know what to make of the survival question, since that's not something we can ask the state to adopt, but it is something that, to have an eschatology, we have to realize: we're beholden to sin, and its wages, and we're going to die.
Smith: Yeah. You know, I always find that argument problematic — it allows theologians and ethicists to dismiss sections of scripture, giving too much weight to the assumption that believing the kingdom is imminent fundamentally changes how one lives in the present. If the kingdom's coming next year, and something horrible happens — a country attacks and starts slaughtering another — if there's an issue of justice there, it doesn't seem to me that timing changes that. It puts too much weight on the question of time, as opposed to—
Logan: What Yoder's saying Niebuhr says, or what Yoder himself says?
Smith: The Niebuhrian argument puts too much emphasis on time, as if the immediacy of the second coming changes our sense of moral duty in the present — when actually a new creation has already been inaugurated, the Spirit is at work within us, the form of this age is passing away, even if not as quickly as we'd like. I've never quite understood the logic that Paul's theology has to be revised because he thought the eschaton was more imminent than it turned out to be.
Logan: Yeah — I was reading Barth before coming here, I think he'd say the same thing. One of the things that kept going through my mind reading Yoder's Politics was that war doesn't change the fact that we're going to die. I think you need a real robust doxology. The closest I can come to an argument in favor of going to war, knowing you're going in order to commit violence, is that you can't stand by and watch God's creation, including other lives, treated that way, and you're willing to put your life ahead of that — which is actually what a lot of Anabaptists will say too: if someone were going to rape your wife, you'd stand in the way of a bullet. There's a real overlap between that instinct and — Yoder puts it differently, and I took issue with it — the instinct that my life is less important than witnessing to God's whatever. Witnessing against war, whether you're a pacifist or a just warrior. Yoder says the soldier goes off to kill and hopefully comes home, and I just don't think that's it — what Patton describes as giving the enemy the opportunity to die for his country instead makes a soldier little more than a coward. Soldiers have to go knowing they may die.
Smith: Right, right, right, right.
Logan: And if they go with that knowledge, there's a sacrificial character there the church could stand to learn from.
Smith: Oh, yeah.
Logan: But it's not about killing — it's that death isn't the end, isn't ultimate. There's something more important than my living, that deserves my life in order to bear witness to it. That's common ground I'm really interested in — but it's a fine line, because I've heard people talk about soldiers as "lambs of God" and things like that, and I just think, oh, God.
Smith: Yeah — it's like that book on World War I we read for the masculinity class—
Logan: Do you remember the title? Wasn't the "school days" one, was it?
Smith: No, no — this was nonfiction. It was about Stars and Stripes, and a critique of the preachers who'd come to military camps — the point being: look, they don't need your gospel, because they're making a sacrifice, and you don't need to morally correct them when you're not the one fighting — as if a whole lot of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with combat itself somehow gets covered by the fact that they're sacrificing. Which I found so offensive.
Logan: Yeah, there's got to be something there. That's why I was so intrigued by Tripp York's The Purple Crown — I read that with Hauerwas. There's something in the parallel between martyrology and — I don't know — the martial. But it needs a real fine brush. The knowledge and acceptance of death, ordering your life such that death is realized as less important than a higher good.
Smith: Yeah — it's like the Spartan mother's words to her son: come back with your shield, or on it.
Logan: Oh, yeah, I remember that.
Smith: If you said that today, people would be in a tizzy. And heaven knows I don't want to romanticize honor. But I do think there's a point there — that death is not the greatest evil. I'd define dishonorable action differently than the Spartans would, but — I was thinking, if my own son went off, what would the equivalent be. You know who Daniel Inouye was?
Logan: Oh yeah, yeah.
Smith: He talked about when the edict finally came allowing Japanese Americans to fight, and his father driving him to the enlistment center, and stopping the car and saying — I won't get the quote exactly right — something like, "our country's given us many good things, two good jobs, an education for you and your brothers... I want you to go and fight, but I want you to conduct yourself in a way that doesn't dishonor the country, or dishonor our family." That's a more modern way of saying what the Spartan mother says.
Logan: Yeah. I did a presentation last summer on moral health — formation, fragmentation, and repair — trying to figure out what to say to people who ask, when a friend or brother or lover goes off to war and they disagree with the war. A pastor down by Fort Bragg asked me the same thing. One thing I found myself saying was: tell them, over and over, what a good person they are. Hopefully at some point they'll believe it — and then when the moment comes where it's easy to be a bad person, they'll remember, or even when they haven't been good, that they still can be. So I tell people, on the other end too: remind them they're good people. It's simple, but it seems to accomplish a lot.
Smith: I really like that — it puts it on the positive: you are a good and honorable young man. Make the choices that preserve that goodness and that honor.
Logan: Yeah. We've got about fifteen minutes, I think.
Smith: Yeah — he brings up — I think I paralleled a lot of what Yoder did with what Bainton talked about, went into more detail on the Reformation, post-Crusades, post-religious wars. He finally talks about just war doctrine, on the last page, only through his critique of the Reformation as "the beginning of nationalism in the modern sense" — the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions, setting up an environment where just war as a belief system couldn't be denied, contrasted with Catholicism, where it was never taught explicitly enough that denying it made you a heretic.
Smith: Right, right.
Logan: He doesn't use "heretic" — but it makes sense, because if it's a state church, the church lives and dies with the state.
Smith: Right, right, right.
Logan: Exactly — which is really problematic. It helped me understand — not the ideology of nationalism exactly, but that for Protestants, you can't deny the state's right to wage war, and the absence of a more universalizing church like Catholicism can lend itself to that problem. I'd never thought about it that way — I'm glad I kept reading into the Reformation section. And he cites a lot of that in light of Machiavelli and Hobbes, brings in the "blank check" strand toward the end. The questions I had, I only drew from Yoder — I wanted to get to Bainton too but ran out of time. If theologians effectively said the justifiable-war criteria are political, not religious or transcendental, and even the cause is political rather than religious — is there really anything theological at all about ancient or modern war? Is the just warrior really nothing more than a good citizen? And he talks about martyrs — the intrigue we grant to defeat — we don't talk about the march to Atlanta the way we talk about Little Bighorn, or the Alamo — places where we lost. We remember those more, and attribute a kind of martyr status to those who lose.
Smith: Right, right, right — the Light Brigade, yeah.
Logan: Yeah. I always try to contextualize this — there's an Iraq War vet, Thomas Young, shot four days into his deployment, paralyzed, came home, was with Iraq Veterans Against the War with me for a while, and the VA messed up his care and he became more paralyzed. About a week and a half ago he announced he was going into hospice and would end his own life — speaking of it in terms of suicide. The left has more or less lionized him, and I think he'll be made a kind of martyr — but it's interesting, he never got what he fought for. Che Guevara is someone Yoder mentions explicitly — lost, by his own standard, and yet we keep doing this. I was trying to think about it in Christological terms, the paradoxical nature of defeat.
Smith: Right, right, right, right.
Logan: He also mentions Camilo Torres, who Camilo Mejía is named after.
Smith: I don't know him.
Logan: Camilo Mejía went to Iraq as a reservist, and during his R&R deserted, refused to go back — he was on TV with Dan Rather, who accused him pretty heatedly of being a coward. He was born in Nicaragua, grew up there, then emigrated here — and apparently he's named after this priest, a liberationist priest who left the seminary and joined the guerrillas, and was killed in one of the first ambushes they set. Beyond leaving the priesthood, he's become, for an increasingly secular sense in Latin America, one of these hero figures — Camilo Torres, Che Guevara, Castro. It's interesting — at some point I might want to look more at what defeat does. I'm trying to think of parallels — we didn't talk about Vietnam the way we talk about Little Bighorn or the Alamo.
Smith: Right, right, right, right.
Logan: Anyway — there's something there. Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer — the other one I talk about, since he resorted, in some confusing way, to violence, and was killed as part of that, but we still give him a kind of martyr status — I've seen people call him a martyr, and I always have difficulty with that. Though what he was working toward — not the assassination itself, but bringing an end to the war — did, in a sense, succeed. So it got me thinking about the defeat question — but also whether there's anything properly eschatological, or doxological, to just war, or whether it's really just a way to be a good, honest, honorable citizen. Most of the just-war material I've read doesn't say what's actually in my head, which is something like: my life is worth less than this common good we've identified — whether that's our telos, or the Constitution, I don't know. The last book I'm reading is Dan Bell's Just War as Christian Discipleship, and I think that'll be a good text to read in this light.
Smith: Yeah. It's funny — I'm always a bit troubled when Americans make liberty the summum bonum. Partly because it suggests we don't have any other unifying principle beyond wanting liberty understood as autonomy, which strikes me as profoundly problematic from a Christian point of view. When Christians say, "why are you going to war," "I'm going to preserve freedom" — I think freedom is a good insofar as it rules out despotism, but I'm far more comfortable saying I'm fighting to preserve order and relative peace and relative justice than saying I'm fighting for freedom. Fighting for freedom sounds a little more triumphalistic than I'm comfortable with.
Logan: Why triumphalistic — where's the connection between freedom and triumphalism?
Smith: I think the terms "freedom" and "liberty" become synonymous with democracy in the American context, and my sense is there's nothing intrinsically good about democracy — in some cases I'd rather fight for a benevolent dictatorship. A society being democratic doesn't automatically make it just, so I'm reluctant to equate the two.
Logan: Could you say "I'm fighting for freedom" in a non-prideful way — not my freedom, but yours? I'm playing devil's advocate.
Smith: Sure — I guess it's the situation where I think freedom in the American context tends to mean "I'm fighting for democracy," and I don't think there's anything intrinsically good about democracy as such — having a democratic society doesn't necessarily make it a just one. That's why I prefer to talk about fighting for order, and for promoting relative justice and relative peace. And for me that grows out of — someone might push back and ask, doesn't this mean you're assuming the kingdom is postponed — but I see, within history and civilization, real goods that violent, oppressive, authoritarian, totalitarian regimes inflict harm upon, goods that are an extension of the goodness of creation, worth working to preserve, as well as opposing injustice as such. But with all that said — personally, in my own thinking about what I'd be doing with my life and my family's life right now, it's preparing us to lay down our lives and be witnesses. There is probably nothing greater I could do than prepare my children to be martyrs. My highest goal — have you ever read the book Silence?
Logan: I don't think so.
Smith: Worth reading — it's about a Jesuit priest in Japan during the slaughter of the Christians, the agony of watching others be martyred, whether he'd apostatize to prevent it. The most painful thing I can imagine would be watching my own children be tortured. And the thought I've had is: I'd hope I could raise my children to understand that this is sometimes what we're called to, and that I would not apostatize to save them, because I believe in the one who will ultimately save. When I was in Uganda, we heard a lecture from a Benedictine priest, from Burundi or Rwanda — he'd been running a school that was attacked, the dormitory hit, and the soldiers said, "divide yourselves, Hutu on one side, Tutsi on the other." And the students said, "we are not Hutu or Tutsi, we are Christian" — and so they killed them all. He got away, ran back to the dormitory, found one of the boys mortally wounded but not dead yet, and the boy looked up at him with a look of pride — holy pride is the best way I can put it — and said, "they did not break us. We did not separate." If you'd prepared those boys to die — what greater teacher could there be than that?
Logan: Yeah. I think it reorients how we think about our lives, and our deaths.
Smith: Yeah.
Logan: I was — my girlfriend Laura — we've been dating for a while — she ministered to a woman, and it made the news. A couple was in bed, someone broke in and was sexually assaulting the wife, the husband objected and was shot, the wife escaped, heard two more gunshots, they find each other again in the hospital later — he'd been shot through the spine, paralyzed. She was telling me this, picking me up from the airport — one of the most pivotal moments of her chaplaincy so far — and out of my mouth came, "well, he gets to know for the rest of his life that he's a good person, that he stood in the line of fire for someone he loved." There are so few opportunities to have that — and as soon as I said it I thought, oh my God, I can't believe I just said that, that's really inappropriate, this isn't a silver-lining situation. But she just nodded and said, "yeah."
Smith: I think that becomes one of those things about fear — the way soldiers are afraid of the question of what happens when the moment comes: will I have courage, or will I run? When the moment of testing comes, how will I stand up? And you're right that — it can become a kind of self-righteousness, but I think there's a real peace in knowing that you endured. To me that's an extension of what Paul's talking about in Romans 5 — even in our sufferings we rejoice, because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope — it's precisely in the suffering, and how we've endured it, that we've been shaped, that we've trusted God and been faithful, and that faithfulness in the midst of suffering is itself the hope: that it's God's Spirit in us, that we haven't been conformed to the world but to the Spirit.
Logan: Yeah. I have a tendency to rework slogans and phrases in favor of something more Christological than intended — there's the line "kill them all and let God sort them out," which came up in the reading, and I sometimes write "love them all and let God sort them out."
Smith: Yeah.
Logan: But there's one I really like, I want to put it on a T-shirt — "death before dishonor" is what kamikaze pilots would shout before guiding themselves into American planes. But it seems to me the cry of the early martyrs was "death before idolatry." It has to do with dishonoring God — apostasy is essentially saying, "my life is more important than staying true to you." I've always thought that was so interesting — death before idolatry. And that's also where I think the civil order can be a real good — I've never been opposed to military service, not because governing authorities are ordained as such, but because they can contain a good that's genuinely good. Not the highest good, but a good worth honoring.
Smith: Right, right, right.
Logan: Anyway — I think it's about 4:30.
Smith: Yep. I hope you have a good Triduum.
Logan: Yeah, so do I — hope yours goes well too. Should I email Dr. Doerfler? We talked about possibly precepting.
Smith: Right, right, right, right.
Logan: I emailed Thea Portier-Young too, haven't heard back. I don't know the process exactly — should I just email and say, "Dr. Smith thinks I'm not totally—"
Smith: Thea, or Amy Laura?
Logan: Thea.
Smith: Thea, okay.
Logan: About Old Testament — I don't know if I'd be qualified, but figured I'd ask, since she said something similar to you, that she'd welcome me as a preceptor, but I don't know Hebrew. I love the Old Testament, particularly because of all the violence.
Smith: Right, right, right.
Logan: But I don't know how to go about the timing and everything.
Smith: Yeah — I'll shoot Maria a message, but you can also message her directly and say you're interested.
Logan: Okay.