Just War (11)
638
The church, therefore, exercises no sway over government; neither does government over the church. Every Christian, contends Luther, is a citizen of both domains, with responsibilities in each. This is a departure from medieval thinking, which had tended to conflate the two.War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective. Crossway
If force in fact cannot be morally qualified, as the ideological pacifist will argue, then one will have to acknowledge that the entire criminal justice system is wrongheaded and that "criminal justice" as we understand it, whether in the domestic or an international context, is bound for failure and should be eliminated immediately as an utter waste of time and resources.War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective (Kindle Locations 1057-1058). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
Peace and stability themselves are the fruit of justice. For this reason, peace is incompatible with a tolerance of evil.War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective (Kindle Locations 1057-1058). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
If we believe that if Britain had only been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent of conscientious objectors to military service, Hitler's heart would have been softened and he would not have dared attack Poland, we hold a faith which no historic reality justifies.
It is not possible to disavow war absolutely without disavowing the task of establishing justice.
In its classical expression within the Western moral tradition, the use of force finds justification on four principal grounds: to protect the innocent, to recover what has been wrongfully taken, to defend against a wrongful attack, and to punish evil.76 The just warrior, then, takes up arms and enters conflict only reluctantly for the express purpose of protecting innocent human beings and preventing greater evil. The just-war position is made necessary by the fact that we live in the period of the "already but not yet," that is, in the temporal order that is characterized by human fallenness and penultimate peace. Like the pacifist, the just-warrior is committed to "putting violence on trial," in the words of one theorist; and like the pacifist, he will also evaluate life from the perspective of those who suffer and those who are potential victims.77 At the same time, unlike the pacifist, he will highly qualify peace and find deficient the world's definition of peace, fully aware that some forms of "peace" are oppressive, totalitarian, and therefore unjust.War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective (Kindle Locations 917-926). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
Rather, it is an approach to statecraft that views peace as not only possible but morally obligatory as a by-product of justly ordered human relationships. Peace, in this light, is not to be understood merely as the absence of conflict; it is rather the fruit or consequence - the by-product - of a justly ordered society. At its best, the just-war tradition has worked to forge moral and political links between the limited use of armed force and the pursuit of peace, security, justice, and freedom.Charles, J. Daryl. War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective (Kindle Locations 878-882). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
just-war thinking is best understood as an approach to comparative justice applied to the considerations of war or intervention.
War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective (Kindle Locations 369-370). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
Just war tradition has to do with defining the possible good use of force, not finding exceptional cases when it is possible to use something inherently evil (force) for the purposes of good.The War to Oust Saddam Hussein: Just War and the New Face of Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 35-36
true religion looks upon those wars that are waged, not for motives of aggrandizement or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.
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