Just War v Nonviolence

[McCulloch]

Within Christianity there are two perspectives (and only two) which have the full weight and authority of Scripture and Church tradition behind them. The first and most commonly held by the Church Fathers is that of principled opposition to all forms of violence and the practice of total nonviolence. The second is that of just war as articulated by S. Augustine of Hippo - proportional, with right intention and declared by an accountable power as a last resort (not pre-emptively) in pursuit of a just cause. No war can be considered just unless it has been publicly considered against and conforms to all of these standards.

Questions for debate:

1. Are there only two options supported in legitimate Christian doctrine? If not, what other options are there?
2. Can these two options be reconciled ? If so, how?
3. If these two options are mutually exclusive, which one is the correct?

[MagusYanam]

Well, since I am the one who brought it up, maybe I should have a crack at it...

1.) Are there only two options supported in legitimate Christian doctrine? If not, what other options are there?

Total nonviolence and just war theory are generally considered the only two options available in the Christian tradition unless you want to count crusade or some other form of 'holy war'. Crusade, though, was a political invention of the 11th century, by Odo de Lagery (Urban II), with no tenable support in the preceding traditions or in the Greek scriptures (though there are Hebrew scriptures which, in isolation, would seem to sanction holy war).

2.) Can these two options be reconciled ? If so, how?

The goals of nonviolence and JWT are pretty much the same: a greater degree of social and political justice in the area affected. The disagreement is on the means appropriate to the task of achieving them.

Nonviolence eschews the use of force entirely, and insists on an approach of unity between means and ends - that justice cannot be achieved through the use of force and what Hegel called the dialectics of lordship and bondage. This approach generally demands that techniques of political pressure such as civil disobedience, symbolic warfare (satyagraha) and other forms of direct action be undertaken in lieu of violence when a grave social injustice arises.

JWT acknowledges that force may be employed under a very strict set of conditions, all of which must be considered and followed before that use of force can be considered morally justifiable. Notable thinkers and theologians in this tradition include Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr and Michael Walzer.

Generally, these two camps within Christianity have not always seen eye-to-eye, as it were, on many of these issues. That said, they have shaped each other in key ways. Forward-thinking Mennonite groups and public intellectuals such as John Howard Yoder have incorporated some of Niebuhr's criticisms of pacifism in their recent writings in order to rectify their shortcomings. (In fact, Yoder began writing the posthumously-published Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution as an attempt to reconcile his own nonviolence with JWT).

3.) If these two options are mutually exclusive, which one is the correct?

Well, there's the (practically literally) trillion-dollar question, isn't it?

Given the massive amount of Scriptural support (particularly in the Gospel of St Matthew) for the 'turn the other cheek', 'walk the extra mile' and 'resist not an evil-doer' form of nonviolent direct action and the fact that Jesus not only never condoned political violence in the same way but in fact warned against those who preach violence as 'false teachers' in St Mark 13, my sympathies are with the nonviolent position.

However, many pacifist groups are often allowed to be so at the expense of a social system which supports and protects them through the use or expectation of force. A nonviolent position which does not take account of this reality is not only naive but can be misguided and dangerous (this was Niebuhr's position).

That said, though I think nonviolence is 'the correct' way of going about matters, it demands a greater degree of activism political engagement in peacetime than in time of war, in order to sway public opinion away from imperial modes of thinking. After all, once a war has begun, it means that not only the governing bodies have failed to find a better solution to the present problem being 'solved' through force, but also the pacifists to begin to articulate one.