Dianne Knippers Lecture with Dr. William Abraham: Just War, Terrorism, and Christian Ethics

Here is a transcript of the October 7, 2013 Diane Knippers Lecture delivered by William Abraham, Albert Outler Chair of Methodist Studies at Southern Methodist University. It occurred at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church in Washington, DC.

Dianne Knippers Lecture with Dr. William Abraham, Albert Outler Chair of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University

Just War, Terrorism and Christian Ethics
Hosted by The Institute on Religion and Democracy
October 7, 2013
Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church
Washington, DC

Janice Crouse: I am so happy to see you here tonight. We’re due for a real treat. But I wanted to focus just a greeting for you on Diane Knippers. Most of you know that this is a series named for Diane, and that she was president of IRD for 20 years?

Mark Tooley: She was with us for 25 years, president for almost half that.

Janice: Her history, Mark’s history, and the history of IRD are very intricately linked. Diane was a wonderful person, and we’re very privileged tonight to have her parents here. Would you stand? Mr. and Mrs. LeMasters, Diane’s parents, here? *applause* Her husband Ed is in the back, please stand. *applause* He is a renowned artist, he and Diane had a marriage that was very exemplary. I admire them tremendously. Ed and I were colleagues on the faculty at Asbury College for a number of years, and Diane was a dear friend then, and remained a dear friend here in DC, when we came to DC. I can think of no greater tribute to her, and her contribution to public policy, then to have this series named for her, and to bring such stellar lecturers to DC, and to talk to us about very important issues. So thank you for being here, thank you for honoring Diane, my being here, and thank you for your interest in IRD.

Mark Tooley: Thank you, Janice. *applause* Diane was president from 1993 until 2005? Am I getting those dates correct? Okay. And I was hired by her in 1994. And we only had one IRD staffer who was more senior to myself, who was also hired by Diane, and that’s Faith McDonnell, our religious liberty director. So Faith, you are here?

Faith: Not good planning, was it? *laughter*

Mark: No, it’s not.

Faith: That’s quite a step there. Well, I have so many memories of Diane. It would be hard to come up with anything to tell you, but I do want to say what a joy it was, and what a privilege it was to work for her. When I came to the IRD in the fall of 1993, I was a lot younger than I am now. I didn’t even have a child. Now I have an 18 year old daughter, so I guess that’s where I’d like to start. Diane was so supportive of me, with family life, and letting me tote Fiona everywhere we went together, to General conventions, to diocesan councils, to demonstrations at the Sudan embassy, all kinds of things. And I believe it enriched my daughter’s life as well. When Fiona was born, Diane gave her a present. She gave her a book of art and I think Ed probably had something to do with finding that book as well. It was Sister Wendy’s, if you remember Sister Wendy talking about art. And she was always just so supportive, both with that, and of me with my work. I started as Diane’s assistance, and she was very gracious when she learned that my passion was the persecuted church around the world, to letting me go from the job that I’d been hired for, and becoming more involved in religious liberty work, and finally becoming the director of the program, so she was a wonderful person. We love her and we miss her. I’ll tell you one fun thing that happened was when Diane went to Beijing, to the UN women’s conference. We had a little system worked out, that in case she got in trouble with the Communist government, she would call us on the phone and she would say “the Chicken’s in the pot.” *laughter* So we thought we would never hear this saying. But it turned out one day while she was away, that it was Alan Wisdom’s IRD anniversary, so we all went out to the Cheesecake Factory, thank you. I was going to say the Magic Pan, but that was another one from the past. And we were out quite a bit of the afternoon, and apparently Diane had needing to get ahold of us, not because the CPC was after her, but for other reasons. And we came back to hear on the recording machine, “the chicken’s in the pot, the chicken’s in the pot” several times, so we got in touch with her right away. But I really, I know she would love to know that Dr. Abraham was speaking tonight. She was just… Her mind was amazing, and the way she tied things together, with the reform needed in the church, and actually the first week I came to IRD we were having a conference on church reform and I had to go pick up Dr. Abraham, so I’m coming full circle getting to hear him again tonight. So God bless you all. Thank you *applause*

Mark Tooley: Thank you, Faith. Before our introducing our speaker, just some logistics… our reception this evening will not be in the church, but will be in the Henley Park hotel, which is immediately out the door and to the left. It is literally maybe thirty steps away. Hope all of you will join us there for that. This being a Methodist Church, there is a no alcohol policy here. So out of respect for those of you who are not Methodist *laughter* we’ll go next door. You Episcopalians and Presbyterians can indulge. *laughter* As Faith mentioned, Diane Knippers knew Billy Abraham, and in fact I first met Billy Abraham thanks to Diane Knippers, when as Faith mentioned, Bill was the featured speaker at an IRD conference for church renewal leaders at a monastery outside Baltimore, exactly 20 years ago. And of course he was a dynamic and entertaining speaker, and remains a major thought leader within the Church in America, and is one of our most distinguished theologians certainly at large, but definitely in Methodism in America, and in the world. I won’t give you his full biography, but he has written many, many books. He is the Albert Outler chair of Wesley studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Just a few of the books he’s written include Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology, The Art of Evangelism, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Canonical Theism, and the most recent book, pertinent to this evening, is Shaking Hands with the Devil, the Intersection of Terrorism and Theology, and obviously Christian ethics, just war and terrorism are on the forefront of issues IRD has been addressing and so this is especially pertinent to our work. So Billy, we’re very grateful and honored that you could be here with us, and come, enthrall us with your intellect if you would.

*applause*

Billy Abraham: Well, it’s a pleasure to be the high-thinking and low-living *laughter*. Of Notre Dame, which is where I currently am for a year. I come from low-thinking for Washington, DC. *laughter* Actually, I’ll make a confession, I love politics. It’s a marvelous indoor sport *laughter*. But more importantly and straightforwardly, I’m absolutely honored to be here tonight to deliver this lecture in honor of Diane Knippers. I didn’t know Diane very well, but all I want to say about her she was absolutely a class act. So it’s the energy that just came from her naturally, the intellectual fecundity, the range of her interests, and just as an absolutely wonderful human being, all of that remains with me from my encounter from Diane Knippers. And please God when we get to the other side, we’ll be able to actually to sit down, and talk, and share war stories. Now one other preliminary comment. The work I present tonight, the argument I present to you tonight, is on the edge of some of my own research. So that’s a way of saying you know, if I’m in trouble I can always say, we’ll, I’m just a lay person. *laughter.*

My own private work at the moment is a major full volume work, on divine agency and divine action. And that’s maybe a five to seven year project. But I think that the issues of what I have to relate to tonight are absolutely crucial to the future of the church. I think that they are crucial to the future of the West and democracies, and therefore I want to bring my own perspective to bear on these matters. Now the topic is that of just war, terrorism, and Christian ethics. I’m going to expand it just a little bit, because I think I also want to touch upon the issue of pacifism. Now by terrorism I mean, in very broad terms, the deliberate use of violence, targeted at innocent civilians, for political purposes. Now you can expand that in all sorts of directions, but it’s the deliberate use of violence perpetrated against innocent civilians, for political purposes. There are other kinds of terrorism, but that’s the particular one I’m interested in. Now one way for Christians to respond to this, of course, is to deploy the resources of pacifism, so we’ll begin there.

The central idea of pacifism is that disputes, all disputes, including our social and political disputes, are to be settled without recourse, violence, or force. And of course one obvious advantage of pacifism immediately, is that it provides moral justification for the rejection of terrorism. You get it in one full fell swoop. If the course of violence is rejected, then terrorism is rejected and other ways of resolving disputes must be sought. Now the problem is that the cure proposed by pacifism, in my judgment, turns out to be worse than the disease. By rejecting all use of legal force, I think that we are bereft of all crucial resources in protecting innocent people from lethal attack. Applied to as a response to terrorism, pacifism would require that we respond to terrorism without that sanction. We’d have to deal with it without using armed police, and without soldiers. That’s the consequence. Where generally pacifism adheres we have to construct states without recourse to the ultimate sanction of force, and it seems to me on the face of it, this is just utterly nonsensical. So, in some respects, I find the pacifist position extraordinarily difficult to defend. But being a philosopher let me try!

The commitment to pacifism iridizes harm. And I think it’s important to begin with a distinction between two kinds of pacifism. On the one hand, there are pragmatic pacifists, who hold that rejecting the use of legal force will actually work in the end, even in disputes of terrorism. The claim, in this instance, is empirical. If we seek out and catalogue non-lethal ways, to resolve disputes, these tested practices will work, as a response to terrorism. On the other hand, and I’ll go further into this in a minute, on the other hand, there are religious pacifists, who ground their rejection of legal force in divine revelation. The claim in this instance is theological through and through. God requires us to [shun] the use of legal force, to resolve disputes, whatever the costs in suffering and death. Now you can mix and match, match, but those two crucial sort of ways at going at it I think are important to distinguish. Now pragmatic pacifists have tried in recent years, to develop the practices that would implement their vision of dispute resolution. And they work under the banner of a wonderful slogan, called “just peacemaking.” Thus far, approximately ten practices have been identified. I won’t list all of them here, I don’t want to put you to sleep just yet, but they involve non-violent direct action, independent initiatives to reduce threat, cooperative conflict resolution, acknowledging responsibility for conflict and injustice and seeking repentance, and forgiveness, and there are several others. But the crucial move here is, the very sophisticated move is to develop a set of practices you would place, and that would bring about the changes that you would require, without deploying lethal force.

Now I don’t think this is going to work. What we have here, in many ways, is in fact, a whole set of sort of causal claims about if you do this, or this, and this and this, this will follow. That’s fundamentally what’s at stake. The problem is that the explanations and predictions offered, are so vague and open textured, that you’ll always be able to explain well, if we’d done this, this would be. And so in my judgment, the carefully constructed area of science, or empirical sort of fact, or empirical sort of analysis, is bogus in this meaning. With terrorism, we are dealing first and foremost with human agents, and human actions. We’re not simply dealing with physical events and causes. So it’s going to be very difficult indeed to gather any story of the causal factors that are going to have the outcomes that are promised by in fact those recommendations from “just peacemaking.” Now if you want to follow up on this, I deal with this in my book on terrorism. The most important defender of this I think at the moment is Glen Stassen, from Fuller Theological Seminary. And I think if you look carefully even at his analysis, you end up at these just so stories. And in fact before he’s finished, he has to qualify these claims to such a degree that I think at the end of the day that they’re hard to support.

Now I’ll maybe put the key point I want to make here this way. The revised project of pacifism in this case ignores what I’m going to call the radical particularity of terrorist organizations and activity. Now this is a more general problem in discussions about terrorism, and we want to sort of tie it in to religion or whatever else. I think you’ve got to get to the specific agents in their particular location, their history, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it. Terrorism in Ireland was brought to its knees, I should say maybe terrorism in the North of Ireland, was brought to its knees, in part because inside agents, trained by the state, infiltrated the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, to the highest levels and hopelessly compromised its operations. Now any account I’m sure that you’ve read about this doesn’t know about this. That’s a fact that there were double agents, right at the top of the IRA. And what that did, was enable Gerry Adams, and others, to come to the point where they couldn’t win. And then they came to the table and all the people involved, it’s an amazing story, which I can pick up later. But what I want to get at here is that the radical contingency is not going to get at with any general sort of causal story of how to pull it off.

Now religious pacifists are right therefore in my judgment to reject the logic of pragmatic pacifism. The case does not rely just on the happy outcome of just peacemaking practices. Religious pacifists, in the Christian traditions, simply see pacifism as a practice in and of itself. They oppose the use of lethal force as a matter of principle. And what they insist on is simply this: God has told us not to use lethal force, argument over, we’re going to obey God rather than human agents. On this analysis they are prepared to accept suffering and death, rather than engage in the lethal use of force. Accepting suffering and death, in their analysis, is not an irrational option. For the commitment to their pacifism is grounded in divine revelation. Now, I’m going to give you a sideways move on this. If you’ve something that’s genuinely grounded in divine revelation, it seems to me you have knowledge. I think here Aquinas was exactly right, in fact, you have the highest form of knowledge. So that’s why the problems of suffering and death are not going to be taken seriously at this stage by those committed to religious pacifism. Certainly they will feel the temptation to take up arms in self-defense, or to protect their neighbors. But, such temptation is to be resisted, because it’s always overridden, by the warrant that you got within divine revelation. So in the most recent forms of Christian pacifism, proponents have stressed that the practices of pacifism simply rest substantially on divine revelation and on the ecclesial practices, the church practices that are developed within them. And these have been developed particularly by them. And for them the issue is theological through and through. Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine, reveals how we all live. He rejected the use of lethal force. He manifested the consequences of such living, in his suffering and death. He committed his followers to forgiveness and reconciliation in his life and moral mandates. And that opens up a whole set of issues as to whether forgiveness is dependent upon repentance or not. And finally, Jesus Christ made available the power to live in this manner, that’s to say in his resurrection and through Pentecost. And this is a very rich way of putting it. Once we step into that world, we need no further warrant for pacifism, it’s all in there, within the world of faith. Nor can we give reasons for stepping, so to speak, inside the world of divine revelation. You’re just in! God put you there. That’s why there’s an interesting pedigree behind this, theologically. The commitment to divine revelation is ultimate. It doesn’t rest on reason. And if that’s the case, then it’s not going to be overturned by any kind of empirical, or other, considerations.

Now if you had put this as well as Stanley Hauerwas, and I want to just quote one case from him: “Christians believe that the true history of the world, that history that determines our destiny is not carried by the nation-state. In spite of its powerful moral appeal, this history is the history of Godlessness.” It’s extraordinarily clear. “Only the Church has the stance, therefore, to describe war for what it is. For the world is too broken to know the reality of war. For what is war but the desire to be rid of God, to claim for ourselves the power to determine our meaning and our history? Our desire to protect ourselves from our enemies, to eliminate our enemies, in the name of protecting the common history we share with our friends, is but the manifestation of our hatred for God.” Now that’s a nuclear strike, intellectually speaking. Because it means if you really don’t agree with this version of pacifism, you hate God. Now, these are claims that have got to be taken seriously and I think if we reject them, we need to know why. Consequently those educated at Goshen College (a college sponsored but the Mennonite Church, one of the pacifist Christian denominations) are in a better position to know the truth about the political world than those educated at Duke University. In a Commencement Address, Hauerwas said:

For political science is not taught at Goshen College the way it is taught at Duke, since political science at Duke is not at the service of nation/state ideologies. The history you learn is different because you know you are members of a community more determinative than the power called the United States of America. You learned to distrust abstract claims about objectivity because you are part of the people of the Second Chance that learned long ago that such claims are used to silence the voices of dissent.

Now, again, briefly, I think his vision of the nation state is obsolete. And I’ll come back to that later. But his reductionist and simplistic descriptions of war, if you look at them, are so obviously false, that they undercut his claim to possess an exclusively privileged access to the truth about war, through the Church. Moreover, it is not persuasive and does not give a persuasive account of where to locate the true church that delivers such coveted goods.

Now here is my sort of nuclear strike, on the other side, very quickly. Truth to tell, Hauerwas, whom I count as a friend, has difficulty in coming to terms with the reality of terrorism, the terrorism of the IRA. Thus he is perfectly happy to allow the IRA’s self-description, this is before they came to the table, he’s perfectly happy to allow the IRA’s self-description of its activity as war, rather than terrorism. “War,” he says is “relative to each people’s history. We thus often seek to deny to the other side the right to describe their violence as war. For example, barbarians cannot be warriors, since they cannot fight in a civilized manner.” And then he says “a bombing in London by the IRA is terrorism, not war.” I pause there. What this really means is that the terrorists can make up their own self-serving descriptions of their evil actions and get a free ride in the name of conceptual relativism. I think that Hauerwas is incapable in this instance of distinguishing between truth and propaganda. At this level, so, what his particular observations reveal are not that the theologians of his school or church have privileged access to the truth, but that their judgments are subject to intellectual corruption. At this level, it is often not the pious insight, but the perceptive outsider, who can help us know what is at stake. To put the matter theologically, we might say that the truth is more visible through common grace, than through purported special grace.

There are wares, as well as tares, in the truth claims of any church. Now I think that the arrival of Islam as a serious player in the West shows how parochial and unpersuasive this influential vision or version of Christian pacifism has become. Radical Islamists and Christian pacifists can agree that revelation should be taken as decisive for action. If we cannot see the crucial status they ascribe to divine revelation, then we have not understood the concept of divine revelation and how it naturally and rightly functions. But an acute problem immediately is that you’ve now got rival versions of divine revelation on your hands, and it is only an additional problem of the schools of which Hauerwas belongs, that you are simply left in fact, with no help, whatsoever in distinguishing between different versions of divine revelation. And that’s what happens it seems to me, when you lose reason. So there needs to be a much more careful, nuanced account, see that book on divine revelation, as to how we put those two together. Now, let me make sure I stay on place here. I think that even if we give the case for divine revelation, the Christian case, without an argument for, I think the warrant then that’s used by Christians to in fact defend pacifism, will not stand secure.

A standard and correct objection at this point is that Christian pacifists have taken isolated elements of the teaching of Jesus, say the Beatitudes, that are meant to apply between persons, and have extended to apply them between state and state, or between states and their citizens. In this respect, they fail to see the anger of God and judgment as the anger of love without hate. They commit the sin of refusing the God given vocation to exercise the office of arrest and judgment. They cannot see that love in public relations, to quote the wonderful theologian of the late 19^th century Peter Forsyth, “they cannot see that love takes the form of mutual respect of law, justice, liberty and even health, especially with respect to the weak.” So in my judgment, to put it bluntly, I think that in many ways the most interesting theological form of contemporary sort of pacifism is the least illuminating when it comes to the problems that we face. They opt out of political life all together, that would be the logic of it. Or they fall back on the pious platitudes of pragmatic pacifism. Or they bind negative stereotypes of the state and the nation that correlate conveniently with their own theological commitments. In the latter case, they accept generalizations about consumerism, globalization, capitalism, and the nation-state. You get lots of moral energy in my judgment, but they do not capture the realities that we have to deal with. And they will not have this in moving forward in the political and social arena.

What would pacifist options really mean in the public square? Should we immediately disband the Defense Department, and work for the relocation of its funds, say to overseas aid, or to tax relief? Should we replace armed police with unarmed security officers? Options like these in my judgment are rarely canvassed by those who actually propose pacifists positions. And I don’t think that’s accidental, because they occupy what I would call, a kind of lalaland. Now, the just-war tradition. The central motivation behind the just war tradition, as we found, for example, in Augustine, Ambrose, and Aquinas, is something like this: love of our neighbors requires that we protect them when they are assaulted by violent evil. Love is not just a matter of refraining from violence, but of doing all we can to help our neighbors. It’s one thing to refuse to engage in violence when we ourselves are attacked. It’s another to refuse to use violence to protect other people who are unjustly attacked. Standing aside and letting others kill innocent civilians, in the end, is a matter of refusing to take responsibility, for helping and loving other people. So all we should be prepared on this analysis to do, up to and including, using lethal force, for example, to stop terrorists from killing innocent people. Now, that’s the broad picture.

Now a distinction, as I did in the earlier case, I want to draw, a distinction between what I’m going to call a maximalist vision of the just-war tradition and what I’m going to call a minimalist version of the just-war tradition. Now I leave it to the egg heads in our midst to see whether I have given up completely, by the time I’m finished on the just-war tradition. But as I say, that’s for the exam afterwards. Now the maximalist position is the drive to codify the criteria governing the use of legal force. And those crucial elements, there are eight or nine of them, I’ll just give you some of them for example, the War on Terrorism to be applied in this case must repair or prevent some great wrong. It must be declared by the legitimate authority, Congress, President or Parliament. It must declare the ends of the war in advance. It must be engaged in as a last resort, after negotiation fails, and so on. There must be a reasonable chance of success. There must be proportionality, there must be right intention, and there must be just means used in carrying out the war on terrorism. Hence we must then distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and so on. Now, while I admire the idealism at work in the maximalist position, I think it fails by setting in place dubious operational and moral straight jackets that judgment, may, if used flexibly, but undercut it if deployed as an absolute code.

Now the language of the War on Terrorism may be central to masking one of the crucial problems that this vision of just war sort of has to confront. I think there’s merit of speaking of the War on Terrorism, just as there was merit on speaking, for example, of the Cold War in the 20^th Century. The metaphor on the War on Terrorism draws attention to the fact that we’re not dealing with mere politics, that we’re facing the use of lethal force, that crucial national interests are at stake, and that conventional civilian defenses are inadequate to deal with the enemy. However, there cannot literally be war, a war on terrorism. For terrorism is simply one tactic, in a network of tactics to deploy, or to gain, political ends. For example, in Ireland, terrorist groups had all sorts of other bells and whistles, like taking care of the poor and standing up for all sorts of wonderful causes. You never just simply have terrorism as a tactic, you have other stuff usually. Thus a critical assumption that we need to have in place, in order to apply a strong version of the just-war theory is missing. There is no conventional enemy, complete with a state and a conventional army. And there’s often no standard declaration of war. In addition, it is often impossible to determine a reasonable chance of success, and to work out a just sense of proportionality by way of response. Now of course we can insist that it’s enough if we could apply most of the criteria, and do it in a relaxed manner, say in an Irish pub, after we’ve had some orange juice! This in fact, is in keeping with the developments behind the whole just-war debate. The list of criteria I in fact cited are the final stages of a process of debate that’s gone on for centuries. The move to codify is a later development, and I think it’s an effort to formalize our best in formal judgments. So, perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much if in fact it doesn’t fit all the time. But of course is what you want to say, if you’re committed to the just war tradition, is that we want to be able to say with a straight face, that we have been morally just in our use of lethal force.

Now I think that by this stage, the maximalist position is coming under severe strain. We’ve accepted that one crucial condition for just-war theory is missing, there is no actual war, the war on terrorism is a metaphor. We’ve conceded that crucial conditions of application have been abandoned, chances of success and proportionality. We have re-interpreted the history of the just-war tradition as the development of a political insight, rather than a code of conduct. And all that’s left is that we act justly. I think we’re knocking down the door of what I’m going to call the minimalist version of just-war. And I think that dealing appropriately with terrorism requires not just that we knock on that door, but that we walk through it. What is critically at stake in responding to terrorism is that we be justified in what we do, rather that we be just in what we do. It would be wonderful to be just, but justice is not always possible. It is insight, this insight, that is, that I think is not only at the base of the just war tradition, which is why I sort of want to keep it afloat without abandoning it too quickly.

The aim is to set limits to the use of lethal force, and to foster a robust debate across the board in political and military and legal circles about what the limits are, although frankly I don’t trust lawyers any more than I do trust politicians. But differently, the goal is not to give up on justice, but to recognize there are certain [times] where the ideal of justice is impossible. Thus, in my judgment we have to work, what we have to work on, is the least of the evil options available to us, and then to argue our case in the public domain. As P. T. Forsythe insisted, “it’s not in order that war be made in order to do good, but to prevent the prevention of good, to resist wrong, and especially wrong to those who cannot resist for themselves.” Now underneath therefore the deployment of the just-war tradition, and the minimalist version that I want to hold to for a moment, lies the ineradicable hand of human judgment, without which we would never have any codification in the first place. That judgment may be wise or unwise, informed or uninformed, good or bad. It’ll always be imperfect, bound by the light of hindsight, and open to criticism by intelligent opponents. It cannot be some reliable method that will eradicate trust in fallible human agents, fallible human discernment, trained on particular challenges. There is no guarantee that we will be just at this level of our lives. We can, I think, insist that we be justified by way of prudence, intelligence, and the best moral sense we can muster. And we would be exceptionally fortunate if we had political and military leaders who could measure up to this logically precise but intellectually inexact in standing.

Now it’s important that we understand what’s at stake in this minimalist version, as I’m still calling it, in the just-war tradition. There is no claim that what we do represents an effort to establish the kingdom of God on earth. There is no claim of claiming divine sanction, or of any kind of appeal, direct appeal to divine revelation, at least for the moment. There is no effort to claim any kind of high moral ground. What it is at stake is the goal of protecting the innocent, of restraining evil, and in doing so in a manner that indeed may be morally permissible, but is likely to be shot through with tragedy, moral dissonance, and evil of bad conscience. If there’s equally no pulling back from using the best practices that we can, short of use lethal force, and there is no dispute of blank moral checks to be filled at will. There is no setting up of the state’s action as a criteria of the moral action, and there is no withdrawal into a private world of secrecy, disconnected from public evaluation, and there’s no reduction of moral and political reason to mere tactical reason. In short, there’s no move to cut military and political action loose from morality, and letting it swing away from ethical and theological evaluation. And the underlying assumptions then are these: the world is shot through with evil and sin. People deliberately and systematically reject the full resources of grace in their private and in their public lives. The default position of human life is war, not peace. It is conflict, not harmony. If you lived at a period of relative peace, sing the Doxology. And by the way, I’m not an Augustinian on the doctrine of sin, because it doesn’t go deep enough. But you could see that I’m within earshot of what of much Augustine has already said. And the contingencies these assumptions entail must be taken with radical seriousness.

Now let me finish off with some general comments of where I am and what brought me on this manner. I think in dealing with terrorism we live on the edge of a moral apocalypse. In order to respond to it, some of those responsible for the welfare of others may land in a place where our standard moral markers have been distorted. In such circumstances, the only moral compass that may remain is the mandate to do the least bad thing in the circumstances. The best move to make by way of justification for our actions is that we do the least evil given all the options available. We can engage in justified action, but the depths of evil that we face has obliterated the option of just action or just war. Now World War II may serve at this point as a precedent. The challenge presented by the emergence of total war was unparalleled. There was no limit to what Hitler would do in eliminating Jews, in killing non-combatants of enemy nations, and in the enforced coercion of his own citizens, including children, in the war, with the Allies. If he had succeeded, the outcome would have been one utterly catastrophic, on all fronts, for both victors and vanquished.

In responding, there’s no question that Winston Churchill led the Allies into reactions that failed the tests of the just-war tradition as developed by the maximalists. The chances of success were utterly precarious. There were very mixed intentions. The proportionality was highly questionable and there were systematic, unrestrained attacks on non-combatants. Not surprisingly there was a heated debate, a moral and theological debate at the Church of England at the time. Represented by Bishop George Bell, of Chichester, and Archbishop Cyril Garbett of York. Bell was convinced that the Allies were guilty of barbarism. Garbett argued that the choice was between the lesser of two evils. The dispute was never resolved, and I think honest differences will remain. Now it’s no surprise that the kind of destruction and suffering involved in World War II led us, if you read some of the literature on this, it led us to reach for language that went beyond mere secular description and borrowed from the language of faith. Observers of and participants in the terror let loose on civilians find themselves exactly in these circumstances. They naturally spoke of living through apocalypse, of doomsday scenarios, of facing Hell on earth. Look at that fascinating, eschatological language. They were enduring experiences that were worse than the end of the world. As is the case in some forms, where terrorists go nuclear, for example, we are already in the same position with respect for potential for terroristic activity.

After being lulled into a sense of false security with the end of the Cold War, we are marred by living in some respects what I would call an apocalyptic world. The nuclear option is back on the table, and we have even fewer moral constraints in the social and political arena than I suspect we had in the earlier part of the 20^th Century. So what I’m getting at here is that, I think in that in order to describe really radical evil, you need the language of eschatology. You need the language of the apocalyptic. And in that world, you’re really outside the utter normal standards of discourse. And then one other point I want to make before I finish. We also have a wider political and international context that is subject to ongoing, systematic change. We live neither in a time when the state has its own theological ideology, that excludes the Christian voices in action in the public square, nor in the time when Christian leaders occupy control the organs of state. I’m going back to the view here, that we live in a world of nation-states. There are two big alternatives actually, right there, in the theological literature. One is that we’re living in the world of empire, and as the United States is of course the primary manifestation of empire in the contemporary world, and so there’s a whole history to that that’s interesting. But the one I’m particularly keen to call into question is the simple idea that in fact that we live in a world that can be described any longer as a nation-state. The state of the West in fact is changing dramatically in the last generation, that has moved, in the words of Philip Bobbitt, a very important observer on judgment on these matters, “It has moved from being a nation state, to become a market state.” Nation-states can control their boundaries, their economics, their cultures, and their security. They seek to provide in varying degrees health-care, education, and old-age security. A cocktail of changes in communications and technology, in other areas, the failure of socialism and globalization, all of these have undermined, in my judgment, the nation-state.

And what we’ve not done, what we might call market-states, to use the language of Bobbitt, market-states concentrate on maximizing opportunity. They balance public and private means of delivering public goods. They do it in different ways in Britain and the United States. They look to the market place and its practices as the criteria for success and what they do. Note the compromise originally on ObamaCare. So whether you live in Moscow, London, Tokyo, Brussels, Dublin, Seoul, or the like, you’re really living in a kind of market-state. And politics and religion reflect the background music of the market-state. So we have market churches, we have market preachers, we have market research-driven politicians. Even philanthropy is now administered on the model of market practices. We can rave and rant all we want about this, but I think that’s where we now live. And it’ll take time for the new religious, political, legal, and military dust to settle within that changing context. And I think it’s not surprising that we find ourselves not only living at times in an apocalyptic world, but living actually just in a normal political world, where we don’t quite know, where we are. In the meantime, and with this I finish, when the terrorists come knocking at my door, I want to have soldiers, and a helicopter nearby. I want soldiers to take on those who are attacking the innocent, and I want a helicopter to take us to the hospital and fix us up. Now I also would love to have a robust church, that’s able to really breed effective politics in the public order. Thank you very much.

Mark Tooley: Thank you, Billy. We have time for a few questions, if there are any in the audience?

Question: I really enjoyed the talk. Two questions. You mentioned about conceptual relativism and the confusion between truth and propaganda and that’s I think a very powerful criticism, a very strong criticism. I like that a lot. Question number one is has Hauerwas responded to your critique at all? Question number two, okay, the minimalist definition of just war, and if I understood you right, you said, I’m paraphrasing, I could be wrong, the best we can hope for is a lesser evil. Is that correct?

Bill Abraham: Hmmmm…

Question: Okay, here’s my question, evil is always evil. Is it really right to say if we are, I understand your approach, I understand the difficulty of defining what justice would be, facing these particular circumstances, but evil is always evil. Does such a thing as lesser evil really exist? I mean, if this is a moral quandary, that I don’t think is satisfied with calling it a lesser evil. If we are justified, even if the definitions of justification have changed, are difficult to come by, how can we still call it an evil? That doesn’t resolve the problem for us. Correct?

Billy Abraham: Excellent. Now the answer to the first question is no. *laughter* Now the issue of conceptual relativism and Hauerwas would be another whole debate. And it has to do with really what’s at stake there, if I may just take a moment further on it, I really think that there are certain forms of what’s called fideism, in relation to theology. That’s the same where you can’t give any good reasons for your theological position, that then actually show up by losing your mind in the political arena. And that requires some unpacking, but I would like to make that case somewhere, some day. Now, I think on the second, and I just want to say yes I do think there is lesser evil. Now if you’ve got a standard of perfection, that disappears. But if you’re in a world where you have to make choices between the alternatives, all of which are evil, you can’t run away from that. I think running away from that is escapism, which is also an evil.

Question: Why would it be evil is my question?

Bill Abraham: Because… because you end up doing things, it seems to me, that are evil, like using people as an end rather than a means, as a means rather than an end. Like facing the real probability, then in fact the real, the reality that innocent people will die.

Question: I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m trying to… I question it myself. I mean, is the only resolution in that war defiles everyone?

Billy Abraham: I don’t want to go that far. I don’t want to go that far. But what I don’t want to lose is the part of the apocalyptic dimension here. I mean I think that if you take on terrorism, you’re going to end up doing some really awful things, and you can say whether or not evil. I don’t want to say no, yes, they are evil. And I mean it involves evil as a deceit. I mean, take the IRA case. Where what happened was a young fella who got into trouble with the certain groups of the IRA in Belfast, who beat him up. So he goes to the police and he says look, I’m willing to help. They take him, they train him, and they put him into the very heart of the IRA. Now in any terrorist organization, you have to have disciplinarians. After all, if I go rob a bank, and go to Costa Rica, or wherever it is, just because on the grounds of being a terrorist, somebody’s got to come in and stop that. So you have to have an enforcer and a disciplinarian. He ended up as the enforcer and disciplinarian at the very top of the army council of the IRA. Now what did he do? He was known as either “Steak Knife” or the “Nutter.” And “Nutter” meant he blew your brains out. So he took people who were renegades within the IRA and he killed them. Now, in drawing him into, this may be one example, drawing him into the War on Terrorism, into dealing with terrorism, you’ve got to deal with these evil things, that either, that you’re connected to, because if you have any serious kind of the casual factors that are going to be going on there, you can’t run away from that. That’s what I don’t want to avoid, and that’s why I’m going to stand path for the moment on my position. That’s a very, very good question.

Question: Well, yes, in discussing pacifism, you use the expression “lethal violence.” Does not the pacifist hate violence, even non-lethal violence? Let me just backtrack on this. I feel greatly concerned and puzzled by the alliance in the U.S. of some Christian pacifists and the left-wing, which I think is contradictory. The left wants an expansion of the state, which is a coercive institution. You see with health care now, you can go to prison, unless you do as you’re told on health care. And how can you, I ask how can you be a pacifist and want the expansion of the state compulsion throughout the society. Is there a particular state when you always use lethal?

Billy Abraham: Yeah, I think that’s a very good question. You know, I haven’t really thought why I wanted to use that term. Maybe it’s because in certain logical circles, violence has become such an extended term to involve violence in terms of speech, or, well violence mostly in terms of speech, that I’ve actually sort of stuck with this very particular term, and I think maybe I really need to go back and think whether I need to use that term here. And I don’t think I’d be giving up anything if I abandoned that at this point. I think it would be cleaner, and if you like, conceptually easier, to defend. But there may be ways in which in fact it’s important to keep this in mind. Maybe between the pacifists who still think that they can have police who can use coercion, and of various sorts, but not lethal force, or whatever. Maybe it would work there. But I think your point’s a very valid one, in terms of my use of this, and I may, I think I’ll have to go back and I’ll look again as to whether I want to stick with that, maybe in future iterations of this. But very good question.

Question: Yeah, I’m intrigued a little bit by the continuum of greater or lesser evil thing, and how, and who decides which is which. Using an example that’s been in the news would be the use of waterboarding in Gitmo, to, I suppose to finding out there’s a nuclear bomb to go off in New York City. Which one is the greater and…

Billy Abraham: Yes, very good question and very good issue. And there are two parts to it, two parts I want to answer. One is we do. And there’s no running away from having to make judgments, and I could, I mean I could give you a wider rationale as to why I think that’s the case, but you can’t outsource this problem. We have to make the judgments. We got to make them in our families, in societies, in the church, in society, and I think that’s the way it’s meant to be. I mean, I think that part of the beauty of the Christian tradition for me is that in fact, you know, the marvelous moment in the life of Jesus, when he was asked how to decide how the will was to be decided. And he said look, go home and sort this out amongst yourselves. There’s a tremendous dignity in my judgment in human beings having to work this stuff through. The other issue I want to put on it is, and is that it’s got to be done in the public domain, as far as possible. That’s to say it’s got to be, and this is why I think democracy is very, very important, so that the issues are aired, the legal considerations, the whole sort of relevant facts are brought to bear on it. And then you’re going to have to fish or cut bait. And I’m not going to get into the issue of waterboarding or whatnot, but it’s always seemed very odd to me to call this torture. I remember when I was a kid we were bad kids, right? We were sometimes tempted to torture innocent animals. Torture has the component, in my judgment, in being for the fun of it. Now this is not doing something for the fun of it. At least if we’re going to argue about it for the moment, we’re going to have to get clear at the wider context in which this is going to take place. And what I’ve been used to in much in the discussions I’ve overheard is that it’s torture and that’s wrong. And no question as to what actually constitutes torture. It’s simply assumed that this is torture. But torture has to be governed by certain intentions. So of course that’s where then you go to the pub and you really talk it through, or you go to the committee and really talk it through, which is why I think democracy depends on all of these sort of debates that go on in the church, and society, in groups like this here, all over the place and that’s very important in this.

Question: Yes, it’s about belief. I would love to hear this continue, this discussion about evil, and I think it may even be enriched if the word sin was used also, in that discussion. My question for you would be do you see a pathway in the public arena, in the will of people in the U.S. to start discussing evil.

Bill Abraham: Discussing?

Question: Evil.

Bill Abraham: No. The question is, do I, and this is just an observation, do I see in say the political and public arena…

Question: A pathway, even a pathway?

Bill Abraham: A pathway. Not yet. I mean, I think that’s why I think once you, sin is not going to get on the table. As this is why you have to have a very complex story, I think of, a description of American political life. My atheist friends, for example, who are with me at Notre Dame right now, as fellows, one of them says I’m not going to use sin. He has a deep conviction about how bad things are, but he’s not going to use that language. So we’re not going to get him into the conversation. But I think there’s a tremendous, well, I put it very globally. I think our public discourse is being stripped, for a host of reasons. Of the range of resources, linguistic and semantic resources, that we need to put in place, to deal with the kind of evil that we have to face, that’s the wider question right here. And that’s why I think that the answer to that is get off our duffs and start really working this out in thorough going ways, and getting this out into the public arena, and insist that, for example, secular ways of describing evil are radically inadequate. Now that’s why in the book on terrorism, actually, the last chapter is on the demonic. Now I have a difference between a small d demonic and a big D Demonic, so relax. But I think that the loss of the language of the demonic is a very serious matter for the Christian tradition, not just in ontologically, but the levels of evil. This is why I don’t think Augustine was deep enough. He didn’t go deep enough that here I show my underwear, but in Ireland we believe in the little people, so relax. I think the radical evil is demon possession. And that’s a deep component of the Christian tradition, and in my wait on the road if I live long enough, I’m going to actually take that on as a full-scale issue within contemporary philosophy, and insist that these be dealt with.

Question: Yes, I want to ask you. Unprovoked aggression.

Bill Abraham: Can you speak up just a little sir?

Question: I said don’t say anything against Churchill, that’s my point. Number two, unprovoked aggression. How is it that everything since World War II, in my opinion, has been unprovoked aggression, and therefore, violating the just-war theory? I think the U.S. has violated the just-war theory numerous times and I think that the Church, all the churches, have been silent, deplorably silent.

Billy Abraham: Well, just two things. One is, you know, Churchill was not nice to my home county, but in fact, I actually think that Churchill was, we’ve got to face the music on that. And I don’t think it’s in the interest of truth not to. And again, there might be differences of fact about what we want to say happened, and so on and so forth, but I think that’s where I’m arguing that we’ve got to have a deep option of being in a world where the likes of what Churchill did, on my analysis, I just want to leave it.

Question: I want to hear about unprovoked aggression, since World War II.

Billy Abraham: Well look, on that one I think that unprovoked aggression is bad, and evil. Absolutely. Nowhere in what I’ve said here would endorse that.

Question: But where have the churches been?

Billy Abraham: I’m just a sort of an Irishman on a bicycle sort of trying to get through. I mean, I would say that a lot, in the Church to be, I suspect, I don’t know, but I suspect you’d find a fairly significant body of material that would actually be with you on that matter. So I don’t think you’re alone. Thank you, sir.

Mark Tooley: Time for a couple more questions.

Question: Am I right to notice that your analysis might lead to this conclusion, that both pacifists and what you call the maximalist just-war people are under the illusion that they could keep their hands clean in the messy world. The one by not doing anything and the other by applying this rigorous code. Whereas you’re arguing that you can’t avoid messy hands, but you can do your best.

Billy Abraham: I think that that would be true. I haven’t thought it out in those terms, as to what would be the case, but I, I mean, your just-war folk and pacifists claim a high moral ground. That’s really what’s at stake here. And I want to take that high moral ground away from them.

Question: From both?

Billy Abraham: From both of them, absolutely. And again, I have to say that, this is maybe too personally relative, but to grow up in a world, I watched the whole terrorist operation on, by the way, it’s a very complicated story in the North of Ireland, which I’m not going to get into here, but that has shaped me very deeply in terms of realizing what we’re up against and how difficult that is. And that, I mean, I’ve listened to, my own leaders in the Church in Ireland, many whom were actually vital for solving the problem in the end. But I got weary of them. I got weary of these platitudes; I got weary of these grand statements that were being made in the name of high moral ground. Because I thought there would simply be hot air. Let me just, qualify that. Maybe in the providence of God we need these other folk to keep the rest of us sort of too deep in the other direction. And so I actually think that one other crucial factor in getting to just where we were, in the 90’s, in the Irish situation, many years spent by leaders in the churches, getting together, and in my judgment, in ways that I would consider almost morally romantic, working through these issues. But they had a vital role in the body politic, in providing part of what was needed, in order to get to where we got, on the good side of the agreement, even though we’re now facing other problems related to that. So I just, I think the world is really messy, and so these other folk I want to drag into that messy world, hope without sort of.

Question: Could you talk about how you would apply the minimalist just-war theory to the conflict in Syria?

Bill Abraham: I haven’t a clue. And here’s why, here’s why. I don’t have enough information. This is where John Wesley was very astute, actually. A bit over the top, he told his preachers to stay out of politics. He wanted to be in politics. But the counsel that he gave was vital, and I, that’s why I say this work here is on the edge of my central work, as a scholar. Wesley said, what often happens, is that preachers get into the political arena, is that they make assumptions about facts that they don’t have access to. And I think that that’s inescapable. Now this is not to say to call for withdrawal or whatever. This is a lot more complicated than that. But on this particular case, I simply don’t know enough as to how I would make that call. My goal at this point is to simply, if there are Christians out there, who are involved in that world, and are happy to make judgments about it, that they shouldn’t be intimidated by it, either by the various kinds of pacifism, or, by the maximalist just-war position. If you like, I want to give them some intellectual slack, some moral landscape room to operate within, and that’s as far as I can go. It’s a very good question.

Mark Tooley. One more question. Yes?

Question: In your view of just-war, how would address the issue of maintaining the human dignity of our enemies?

Billy Abraham: Yeah, how would I propose sort of maintaining the human dignity of our enemies? That’s where I think a lot of what goes into the just-war tradition can be deployed. That all those concerns about what you do when you’re prisoners of war, how far you can keep the dignity of those that you’re fighting, when you’ve got them under control, when you’ve got them, that’ll be the test case. I don’t see why the standard view of sort of go with the just-war tradition shouldn’t be in deployment at that moment, yeah. So, I have not really thought that issue through, with the care that I should. That’s where I think that, I mean I think that in Christian ethics, we need more work on how do we form and prepare Christian soldiers to engage in fact in the kind of things that they engage in. Alistair McIntyre is about to give a lecture on issues related to this at Notre Dame, which I hope to get to, but I’ve not really gone deep enough into that world to be able to say very much. But I think that would be, I don’t see that, I mean, you’ve got to treat these people as made in the image of God, and go further, you’ve got to see them as redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus Christ. Now, how you operationalize that, given human inclinations and desires, that’s going to be tough, how you prepare people to keep that in place, and I think it would require a lot more sort of taxonomy of various situations to take it very far at this point. It’s a very good question.

Mark Tooley: Thank you very much, Professor Bill Abraham, and thank you all for being here for this remembrance of Diane Knippers, and please join us for our non-Methodist reception.

*applause*