In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Common Knowledge 8.2 (2002) 304-309



[Access article in PDF]

Luther's Lamb
When and How to Fight a Just War

Jean Bethke Elshtain


After prayer, Youssef found me and gave his interpretation of the differing outlooks of Christianity and Islam.
"In Islam, if I slap your cheek"—he slapped my cheek—"you should slap my other cheek. But in Christianity, Jesus says turn the other cheek. The U.S. is Christian, so why doesn't it turn the other cheek?"

—Jeffrey Goldberg

If the lion lies down with the lamb, the lamb must be replaced frequently.

—Attributed to Martin Luther

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist violence of September 11, 2001, the common language invoked by the United States government and its partners was the language of justice. Within less than two months after the attacks on New York and Washington, and even as the threat of biological terror presented itself, a competing language, equally informed by Christian sources, emerged in competition: the language of pacifism. The intellectual community, especially, began to urge varieties of policy that would turn the other cheek toward nations that host or harbor terrorists. Common Knowledge is neither a pacifist journal nor a [End Page 304] Christian one. But the journal is known for its remoteness from black-and-white formulations and high-horse morality. Common Knowledge is an appropriate venue, then, and this is a painfully appropriate time, in which to examine the sources and motives of our rhetoric and their actual relationship to the aim of peace that Common Knowledge emphasizes.

In the dark days of Nazi terror, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, had been moving—remarkably so, for a German Lutheran of his era—toward pacifism, yet committed himself to a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler: to cut off the head of the snake. Bonhoeffer observed that the great evil that had appeared among the German people had "played havoc with all our ethical concepts." He was severe in his criticism of those who "flee from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness. But anyone who does this must shut his mouth and his eyes to the injustice around him. Only at the cost of self-deception can he keep himself pure from the contamination arising from responsible action." One who cares for responsible action, Bonhoeffer taught us, must ask this question: How is the coming generation to live?

In asking such questions and in arriving at his (for an aspiring pacifist) surprising answer, Bonhoeffer was relying on a tradition of Christian thinking that can be traced back to St. Augustine. It is in The City of God that Augustine grapples with the challenge to violence of Christian teaching and develops the doctrine of the "just war." His conclusion in that text is that wars of aggression and aggrandizement are never acceptable, that violence is never a normative good; but that there are occasions when resort to force may be tragically necessary. What, then, makes a war justifiable? For Augustine, the most potent justification is to protect those in no position to defend themselves from certain harm. If one has compelling evidence that harm will come to persons unless action involving coercive force is taken, a requirement of loving one's neighbor may be a resort to arms. Self-defense is trickier. According to Augustine, it is better for the Christian as an individual to suffer harm than to commit it. But are we permitted to insist that others adopt the principle that prohibits self-defense? No, surely not.

The upshot of Augustine's reflections, refined over time and extended into a context no longer positively Christian, is that a primary rule for those committed to just war is the immunity of noncombatants—the so-called principle of discrimination: noncombatants must not be the intended targets of violence. The carefully worked-out murder of noncombatants demands a response, indeed a punishment. The punishment must not inflict grievous harm intentionally on the noncombatants of a country whose operatives have harmed your citizens, but the punishment does need to interdict wrongdoers from causing...

pdf

Share