In Defence of War by Nigel Biggar (review)

Nigel Biggar’s recent work, In Defence of War, is, from the first page, a provocative work. Theological defense of military intervention has fallen on hard times in recent decades, though historically the tradition of Christian ethics tilts decidedly in this direction. Over seven chapters, Biggar offers not a comprehensive analysis of just war but in many ways a theological apologia and retrieval of some of its more salient aspects.

Biggar opens his book by taking on the most well-known proponents of Christian pacifism (Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and Richard Hays), finding their collective work wanting on empirical and moral grounds, naming the “Anabaptist distinctive” as “theologically incoherent and morally hypocritical” (60). In the next chapter Biggar begins to unpack his realist account for Christian participation in war, exploring the role of love in combat, arguing that a form of “forgiving retribution” is intrinsic to a Christian account of forgiveness (71). This ethic, central to the moral deliberations of the just war tradition, is a scriptural ethic routinely ignored by pacifists.

Throughout the work, Biggar defends against pacifisms of various types, both theological and philosophical. Chapter 5, for example, attends to the philosophical work of David Rodin, a contemporary critic of the just war theory; criticisms against both philosophical and theological pacifism likewise under-gird his chapters on double effect and interventionism. While Biggar gives a good deal of attention to philosophical and political pacifism, his Christian pacifist target seems to be quite narrow. The opening chapter, “Against Christian Pacifism,” focuses on the work of Hauerwas, Hays, and Yoder with the implicit assumption that, having dealt with them, Christian pacifism as such can be shown to be untenable. The reduction of the polyphony of Christian pacifism, however, to this recent Anabaptist-influenced work was not entirely persuasive.

Later chapters take up various and often undiscussed aspects of the just war tradition, including the principle of double effect, proportionality, and the relation between the just war tradition and international positive law. In each of these chapters Biggar offers a theological account of war that is rich and multidisciplinary, with analysis that is not strictly analytical but deeply historical. Throughout the book, this reviewer was reminded of Michael Walzer’s classic Just and Unjust Wars, as Biggar peppers his comments with military history and firsthand accounts by soldiers in wars both modern and ancient. As the work unfolds, various case studies such as Kosovo and Iraq ground his discussions, avoiding much of the abstract argumentation that pervades so much literature on war ethics.

In the end the virtues of Biggar’s volume lie not with a defeat of pacifism as an alternative approach to Christian ethics but with his careful descriptions and robust assessment of the contours of a Christian realist account of participation in war. Biggar rightly directs us to view just war not as a pragmatic concession but as a complicated facet of the moral life. The chapters on double effect, legal positivism, and especially his defense of the Iraq war as justifiable, are particularly worth the read and should be carefully debated. Biggar has done the discipline a great service by pushing ethicists beyond sloppy tropes and into the deeper waters of careful analysis of what a Christian account of war might look like.