This is the transcript of IRD’s annual Diane Knippers Lecture given this year on October 7th by Irish Methodist theologian William J. Abraham on war, terrorism and Christian ethics. He is the Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.
Let begin by a quick definition of terrorism. In broad terms I take terrorism to be deliberate acts of violence targeted at innocent civilians for political purposes. Before I take up the issue of just war let me prepare the ground by looking at the main alternative in Christian ethics, namely, pacifism.
The central idea of pacifism is that disputes are to be settled without recourse to violence or force. One obvious advantage of pacifism is that it provides immediate moral justification for the rejection of terrorism. If recourse to violence is generally rejected, then terrorism is rejected; other ways of resolving disputes must be sought. The problem is that the cure proposed by pacifism turns out to be worse than the disease. By rejecting all use of lethal force, we are bereft of crucial resources in protecting innocent people from lethal attack. Applied to the response to terrorism, pacifism would require that we respond to terrorism without the use or sanction of lethal force. We would have to deal with terrorism without armed police and without soldiers. More generally pacifism entails that we have to construct states without recourse to the ultimate sanction of force. On the face of it, this whole way of thinking is nonsensical. It is not surprising that few can take this option seriously, once they attend to its implications.
Yet the commitment to pacifism dies hard. It is useful to sort out the crucial options by means of distinction. On the one hand, there are pragmatic pacifists who hold that rejecting the use of lethal force will actually work in the end, even in disputes with 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, there are religious pacifists who ground their rejection of lethal force in divine revelation. The claim in this instance is theological: God requires us to eschew the use of lethal force to resolve disputes whatever the costs in suffering and death. One can, of course, mix and match the grounding here, but it is important to be clear exactly what is on offer and not to equivocate on the relevant evidence.
Pragmatic pacifists have tried hard in recent years to develop the practices that would implement their vision of dispute resolution. This important enhancement of the pacifist tradition flies under the banner of just peacemaking. It looks to evidence from political science and the history of the prevention of war; it thus aims to be persuasive across the board to all people of good sense and good will. Thus far ten practices have been identified as critical to just peacemaking: (1) nonviolent direct action; (2) independent initiatives to reduce threat; (3) cooperative conflict resolution; (4) acknowledging responsibility for conflict and injustice and seeking repentance and forgiveness; (5) advancing democracy, human rights, and religious liberty; (6) fostering just and sustainable economic development; (7) working with emerging cooperative forces in the international system; (8) strengthening the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights; (9) reducing offensive weapons and weapons trade; and (10) encouraging grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations.[1]
While there is an air of repetitive realism in and around this new version of pacifism, it totally fails as an adequate response to terrorism for a host of reasons. If we extract the appeal to divine revelation and take it on its merits as an empirical proposal, it works off a series of generalizations that can be twisted and turned to fit any situation to bring about the desired results. If we keep enough balls in the air as the causes of terrorism, should we deploy this or that just peacemaking practice, we can always conveniently select whatever balls we need in order to fool ourselves that peace would have occurred or that peace will occur. The explanations and predictions offered are always sufficiently vague or open-textured to allow for expedient revision. The carefully constructed air of science is bogus and misleading. With terrorism we are dealing first and foremost with human agents and their actions; we are not simply dealing with physical events and their causes. So this whole way of identifying the problems and working on proposed solutions is a recipe for intellectual and practical illusion.
Glen Stassen, for example, argues that “democratic states with human rights almost never directly make war against other democratic states with human rights…” [2] Clearly this provides no help in making sense of Irish terrorism, or in resolving it. Nor does it illuminate terrorism in the democratic states of India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the like. Moreover, the claim is immediately subject to massive qualifications. Stassen continues: “…although admittedly the U.S. funded and supported the overthrow of the popular government of Iran that brought the Shah to power, the overthrow of the Alliende government in Chile that brought the notorious Pinochet to power, and the contras in Nicaragua that sought to topple the democratically elected Sandinista government by means of terrorism, etc.” [3] The grand causal claim about the beneficial effects of democracy has collapsed before it even gets off the runway.
Put differently, the revised project ignores the radical particularity of terrorist organizations and activity. Terrorism in Ireland was brought to its knees in part because inside agents trained by the state infiltrated the IRA to the highest levels and hopelessly compromised its operations. We can always propose that there could have been other ways to get the terrorists to stop killing innocent civilians for political purposes; but these just-so stories are always possible; they ignore the radically contingent activity of human agents. We can dress up these proposals in terms of a new paradigm, claim demonstrations on the basis of empirical research, talk incessantly about root causes, develop what seem to be law-like generalizations, but such rhetoric is self-deceiving. In the end what we get are a raft of moral and political recommendations dressed up as empirical research; we are presented with limiting platitudes masquerading as fact.
In time we may be able to harvest a host of insights from pragmatic pacificism that may be of value politically in resolving disputes. However, these insights belong in the mix of factors that play within the political arena rather than as one element in some grandiose new paradigm for preventing terrorism. Otherwise, they are really partisan political judgments that are given an intellectually privileged position that cut off pertinent debate. At their best they represent a network of practices that anyone committed to peace will be glad to implement. Once they are set up as an alternative to appropriate military options, they are likely to kindle false hopes, if not actually foster further terrorist activity.
Religious pacifists are right to reject the logic of pragmatic pacifism. Their case does not rely on a happy outcome to just peacemaking practices; they simply see pacifism as a practice in and of itself. They oppose the use of lethal force as a matter or principle. In the Christian case they accept this principle as a matter of obedience to the divine will. While they readily commit to peacemaking practices, their commitment to pacifism may in no way depend on their success. Indeed empirically they may well reject the logic of pragmatic pacifism; they expect and accept suffering and death rather than engage in the lethal use of force.
Accepting suffering and death is not an irrational option, for the commitment to pacifism in this instance is grounded in divine revelation. Given that divine revelation is the strongest possible warrant for a course of action, religious pacifists refuse to allow suffering and death to count as a decisive counter-argument against their position. They may well feel the temptation to take up arms in self-defense or to protect their neighbors, but such temptation is to be resolutely resisted. In the most recent forms of Christian pacifism proponents have stressed that the practice of pacifism rests substantially on essential church practices without which the commitment to pacifism will fail. The practice of pacifism becomes a matter of faith from top to bottom. Both its grounding and its execution depend on divine revelation and divine grace as mediated through Jesus in the church. The issue is theological: Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine, revealed how we should live (he rejected the use of lethal power); manifested the consequences of such living (suffering and death); committed his followers to forgiveness and reconciliation (in his life and moral mandates); and made available the power to live in this manner (in his resurrection and through Pentecost). Once we step inside this world, we need no further warrant for pacifism. Nor can we give reasons for stepping inside the world of divine revelation, for the commitment to divine revelation is ultimate; it does not rest on reason.
Stanley Hauerwas goes even further and insists that the truth about politics and war can only be known inside his world of divine revelation.
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. 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 destiny? 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 of God. [4]
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. [5]
Hauerwas’ vision of the nation-state is now obsolete, as I will indicate later. More importantly, his reductionist and simplistic descriptions of war are so obviously false that they undercut his claim to possess an exclusively privileged access to the truth about war through the church. Hauerwas does not, moreover, provide a persuasive account of where to locate the true church that delivers such coveted goods. Truth to tell, he has difficulty in coming to terms with the reality of the terrorism of the IRA. Thus he is perfectly happy to allow the IRA’s self-description of its activity as war rather than terrorism. “War 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 warriers since they do not fight in a civilized manner. A bombing in London by the IRA is terrorism, not war.” [6] What this really means is that terrorists can make up their own self-serving descriptions of their evil actions and get a free ride in the name of conceptual relativism. Hauerwas is clearly incapable in this instance of distinguishing between truth and propaganda. What his particular observations reveal is not that theologians of his school have privileged access to the truth but that their judgments are subject to intellectual corruption. At this level it is often not the pious insider but the perceptive outsider who can help us know what is at stake. To put this theologically, we might say that the truth is often more visible through common grace than through special grace; there are weeds as well as tares in the truth claims of any church.
The arrival of Islam as a serious player in the West shows how parochial and unpersuasive Hauerwas’ influential version of Christian pacifism has become. Radical Islamists and Christian pacifists can agree that revelation should be taken as a decisive warrant 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. An acute problem is immediately generated when we are confronted, as we now are, with rival visions of the identification and meaning of divine revelation. Radical Islamists appeal to a divine revelation that gives them warrant for engaging in terrorism; Christian pacifists appeal to a divine revelation that gives them warrant for rejecting the use of lethal force. If both sides can rest pat on divine revelation, then both can claim legitimacy. If both insist that reason can only operate inside their chosen worlds of divine revelation, then we simply have to take it or leave it. We have to take their word for it that they got it right on divine revelation. But taking their word for it leaves us now with competing revelations in which one gives warrant for war and the other gives warrant for pacifism. We are in a hopeless impasse.
Christian pacifists have the additional problem of securing the claim that divine revelation provides warrant for pacifism. As in the case of radical Islamists who claim sanction for terrorism, their claim is a minority report. The standard and correct objection at this point is that Christian pacifists have taken isolated elements in the teaching of Jesus, say, in the Beatitudes, that are meant to apply between persons, and extended them to apply between state and state, or between states and their citizens. They fail to see that the anger of God in judgment is the anger of love without hate. They sin the sin of refusing the God-given vocation to exercise the office of arrest and judgment. They cannot see that love in public relations it “takes the form of mutual respect, of law, justice, liberty, and even help – especially to the weak.” [7] As a consequence of these mistakes Christian pacifists are bereft of positive illumination when it comes to the right ordering or our political life together. In reality they either opt out of political life altogether, or they fall back upon the platitudes of pragmatic pacifism, or they buy into negative stereotypes of the state and nation that correlate conveniently with their theological commitments. In the latter case they accept unwary generalizations about consumerism, globalization, capitalism, and the nation state. These judgments deploy lots of moral energy, but they do not begin to capture the actual realities we currently face. Christian pacifists are certainly very clear on what not to do in response to terrorism; we are not permitted to use lethal force under any circumstances. This is simple and straightforward. However, we are given no real help in moving forward positively. There are few, if any, robustly pacifist networks of political policy available as live options. Pacifist option might mean, for example, the immediate disbandment of the Defense Department and the reallocation of its funds, say, to overseas aid or to tax-relief. It might mean the replacement of armed police with unarmed security officers. Options like these are rarely canvassed, of course, because they represent political lalaland. In the meantime pacifists are freeloaders within the current social and political arrangements.
We are, at least initially, given help on relevant political choices when we turn to the option of just war theory. The central motivation driving just war theory as we have received it from Augustine, Ambrose, and Aquinas is 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 is one thing to refuse to engage in violence when we ourselves are attacked; it is another to refuse to use violence to protect other people who are unjustly attacked. Standing aside and letting others kill innocent civilians is refusing to take responsibility for helping other people. So we should be prepared to do all we can, up to and including using lethal force to stop terrorists from killing innocent people.
Again it is useful to sort out the crucial issues at stake by means of a distinction. On the one hand, there is a maximalist version of the just war tradition. In this case, proponents work from a network of tough criteria, which, if satisfied, underwrite the morally positive justification of the use of lethal force. On the other hand, there is a minimalist version of the just war tradition. In this case, proponents reject the drive for a network of tough criteria, preferring instead to rely on informed judgment, and they reject the whole notion of a positive moral justification for the lethal use of force in all circumstances.
A hallmark of the maximalist version is the drive to codify the criteria governing the use of lethal force. The crucial elements involved in just war as applied to terrorism can be easily catalogued. (1) The war on terrorism must repair or prevent some grave wrong, e.g. restore rights wrongly done, or reestablish a more just political order. (2) The war on terrorism must be declared by the legitimate authority, say, by president, congress, or parliament. (3) Government must declare the aims of the war on terrorism, e.g. destroy Al Qaeda, remove the Taliban, and work for a better Afghanistan. (4) The war on terrorism must be engaged in as a last resort, e.g. after negotiation fails, or if negotiation simply will not work. (5) In a just war on terrorism there must be a reasonable chance of success. (6) There must be proportionality, that is, we should not resort to war on terrorism if the consequences would likely be worse than not doing so. Strenuous efforts to prevent negative, likely consequences need to be made. (7) There must be a right intention. Hatred and revenge are not appropriate; there must be a real intention to get rid of terrorism and to restore genuine peace. (8) Just means must be used in carrying out the war on terrorism. Hence we must distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, aim at military targets, and keep destruction proportionate to the achievable just ends in view.
While I admire the idealism at work in the maximalist position, it fails by setting in place dubious operational and moral straightjackets that may aid good judgment if used flexibly but undercut it if deployed as an absolute code. The language of war on terrorism may be central to masking one of the crucial problems we face at this point. Just as there was merit in speaking of a Cold War in the twentieth century, there is merit in speaking metaphorically of a War on Terrorism in the twenty-first. The metaphor of a war on terrorism draws attention to the fact that we are not dealing with mere politics, that we are facing the use of lethal force, that crucial national interests are at stake, and that conventional civilian defenses (like responding to terrorists as mere criminals) are inadequate to deal with the enemy. However, there cannot literally be a war on terrorism, for terrorism is simply one tactic in a network of tactics deployed to gain political ends. Thus a critical assumption that we need to have in place in order to apply a strong version of just war theory is missing. There is no conventional enemy, complete with a state and a conventional army; and there is 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.
We can, of course, insist that it is enough if we can apply most of the criteria of just war theory, even if we have to apply them in a rather relaxed manner. This is in keeping with the historical development behind the whole just war debate. The list of criteria I cited is, in fact, the final stage of a process of codification that has gone on over centuries. The move to codify is a later development; it is an effort to formalize our best informal judgments. So we should not worry too much if there is slippage here or there in the application of old insights to a new situation. The overall aim is to set limits to the use of lethal force and thus to come away in the end with a good conscience, that is, with a sense that we have engaged in a just rather than unjust war. We want to be able to say with a straight face that we have been morally just in our use of lethal force.
By now the maximalist position is clearly coming under severe strain. We have accepted that one crucial condition for the very application of just war theory is missing (there is no war); we have conceded that crucial conditions of application have been abandoned (chances of success and proportionality); and we have reinterpreted the history of the tradition of just war as the development of a critical insight (rather than a code of conduct). All that is left is the claim that we are still acting justly. In reality we are knocking on the door of the minimalist version of just war theory. I think that dealing appropriately with terrorism requires us to walk through that door without apology.
What is critically at stake in responding to terrorism is that we be justified in what we do rather than that we be just in what we do; it would be wonderful to be just, of course, but justice is not always possible. It is this insight (that we be justified in what we do) that lies at the base of the just war tradition. The aim is both to set limits to the use of lethal force and to foster a robust debate across the board in political and military circles about where those limits are. Put differently, the goal is not to give up on justice, but to recognize that there are circumstances when the ideal of justice is impossible; thus we have to work on what is the least of the evil options available to us and to argue our judgments in the public domain. The move to codify best practices in this arena is a worthy one, but it is never final, and we should be wary of assigning positive moral worth to our actions even when we satisfy our best formal criteria. As P.T. Forsyth insisted: “It is not urged that war may 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.” [8]
Underneath any codification there lies the ineradicable hand of human judgment without which we would never have any codification in the first place. This judgment may be wise or unwise, informed or uninformed, or good or bad; it will always be imperfect, bound by the light of hindsight, and open to question by intelligent critics. It cannot be cast into some fully reliable method that will eradicate trust in fallible human agents and fallible human discernment, trained on particular challenges. There is no guarantee that we will be just at this level of our lives. We can and should insist that we be justified by way of prudence, intelligence, and the best moral sense we can muster. We will be exceptionally fortunate if we have political and military leaders who can measure up to this logically imprecise but intellectually exacting standard.
It is important to understand what is at stake in this minimalist version of the just war tradition as applied here to terrorism. There is no claim that what we do represents an effort to establish the kingdom of God on earth. There is no hint of claiming divine sanction, or of any direct appeal to divine revelation. There is no effort to claim any kind of high moral ground. What is at stake is the goal of protecting the innocent, of restraining evil, and of doing so in a manner that may indeed be morally permissible but is likely to be shot through with tragedy, moral dissonance, and even a bad conscience. Yet there is equally no pulling back from using the best practices of dispute resolution; there is no abandoning of relevant (though contested and changing) rules of military engagement; there is no distribution of blank moral checks to be filled in at will; there is no setting up of the state action as criterion of moral action; there is no withdrawal into a private world of secrecy disconnected from public evaluation; and there is no reduction of moral and political reason to mere technical reason. In short, there is no move to cut military and political action loose from morality and letting it swing loose from ethical and theological evaluation. The underlying assumptions 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 public lives; the default position in human life is war not peace (it is conflict not harmony); and the contingencies these assumptions entail must be taken radically seriously.
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 places where our standard moral markers have been destroyed. In such circumstance the only moral compass they may remain is the mandate to do the least bad thing in the circumstances. The best moves we can make by way of the justification of our actions is that we do the least evil we can, given all the options available. We can engage in justified action, but the depth of evil that we face has obliterated the option of just action or just war.
World War II can serve 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 civilians in the war with the Allies. If he had succeeded, the outcome would have been utterly catastrophic on all fronts for victors and vanquished. In responding there is no question but that Winston Churchill led the Allies into reactions that failed the tests of the just war tradition as developed by the maximalist. The chances of success were 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 moral and theological debate in England at the time, as represented by Bishop George Bell of Chichester and Bishop 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; honest differences still remain; both were right.
It is no surprise that the kind of destruction and suffering involved in World War II 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 in found themselves in exactly these circumstances. [9] They naturally spoke of living through the apocalypse, of doomsday scenarios, of facing hell on earth, of enduring experiences that were worse than the end of the world. Prosaic descriptions of evil as, say, unspeakably wicked or heinous, did not do justice to what was faced. Were terrorists to go nuclear, we would be in the same position. As in the case of some forms of conventional warfare, we are already in this position with current forms of terrorist activity. After being lulled into a sense of false security with the end of the Cold war, we are now back living in an apocalyptic world. The nuclear option is back on the table; and we have even fewer moral constraints in place in the social and political arena than we had in the early part of the twentieth century.
We also inhabit a wider political and international context that is subject to ongoing, systematic change. We live neither in a time when the state had its own theological ideology that excluded Christian voices and action in the public square, nor in a time when Christian leaders occupy and control the organs of state. In the first scenario it was natural that much of the church was pacifist; in the second it was natural that a more maximalist version of just war theory worked relatively well. Many think we can legitimately see our current situation as more or less identical with these two options. The description of the wider context is crucial at this point. Some think we are in a nation state that has its own secular ideology and idols. Others say we are living in a new Empire run by Christian fundamentalists, free market capitalists, neo-conservatives, or some combination of the same. So, it is argued, we live in either a confessionalist secular state or a new version of Christendom.
Both these proposals are empirically mistaken.
The state in the West has itself changed dramatically in the last generation. It has moved from a nation state to become a market state. [10] Nation states can control their boundaries, their economies, 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, technology, the failure of socialism, and globalization have undermined the nation state. In their place we have market states. Market states concentrate on maximizing opportunity. They balance public and private means of delivering public goods; and they look to the market place and its practices as a criterion of success in what they do. This is true of Moscow, London, Tokyo, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin, Seoul, and the like. Politics and religion reflect the background music of the market state. So we have market churches, market preachers, and 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 this is where we now live. It will take time for the new religious, political, legal, and military dust to settle; it is not surprising that we feel blinded and disoriented.
In the meantime, when the terrorists come knocking down my door, I want to have soldiers and a helicopter nearby. I also want a robust church in the neighborhood that has a saint or two in its midst and that is able to breed effective politicians in the public order. But that is a topic for another day.
- This list of practices was developed by a network of scholars and can be found in Glen Stassen, ed., Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998).
- Glen Stassen, “Turning Attention to Just Peacemaking Initiatives that Prevent Terrorism,” 12, http://www.fuller.edu/sot/faculty/stassen/cp_content/homepage/homepage.htm; accessed 2/20/2007.
- Idem.
- Stanley Hauerwas, “Should War be Eliminated,” in John Berkham and Michael Cartwright, The Hauerwas Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 420.
- “Why Truthfulness Requires Forgiveness,” The Hauerwas Reader, 315.
- The Hauerwas Reader, 420, fn. 43.
- P.T. Forsyth, The Christian Ethic of War (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916), 192.
- Ibid, 87.
- Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) makes this abundantly clear.
- Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) provides a fine account of this development.
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