Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. We have recently taken some detours away from directly discussing the issue of Christian non violence, so I thought it might be a good thing to come back to that discussion. While I feel like I've laid out a pretty solid overarching case for the issue of non violence and provided plenty of resources for you to be able to dig a lot deeper into each of those points, one thing as reflecting back, one thing that I feel like I could dig into a lot more is kind of going on the attack for the counter position. Well I did that a little bit I believe in episode four where I talked about how some of the merits of just war theory are extremely questionable, I feel like I could really dig a lot more into that and that's what I want to do today. Some of what I have to say will be a little bit repetitive from episode four, but instead of giving you some ideas in a twenty minute time span, we're going to turn this into at least a few episodes, if not one for each point for Just War.

So today we're going on the offensive and trying to answer the question of does the just war theory really make a lot of sense? Because a lot of critics like to take a look at the non violent position and say that it's really idealistic and it just doesn't work and it's not tenable. And we've done a lot of discussing, you know, how Ruas does a good job of unpacking that and kind of swinging back to just war theorists. We took a look at what Yoder's book, What Would You Do? That book kind of talked about some real life examples of non violence in action.

You can go to a really good website called Waging Nonviolence which gives you a lot of real world examples and their podcast called City of Refuge gives one example from World War II, not Belgium, not Denmark, but another example from France of a community that used non violence to successfully save 5,000 people. And then you can look at a really good book that I just read called Victories Without Violence and it gives a lot of interesting stories of especially Quakers who used violence throughout the course of history. So, we can see that pacifism isn't nearly as untenable as people say it is, and often times a lot of people just assume that just war theory is tenable and the only tenable thing, especially in comparison to pacifism, and that's what C. S. Lewis said in his discussion, he just thought that pacifism was idealistic and assumed that the alternative wasn't.

So we want to of tear that down, we want to look at just war theory and really assess it and address it. So today we are going to just take a look at the history of Just War. Now this is going to be a very brief history and incomplete. It's going be something that you're going to want to research a lot further and hopefully I don't do injustice to it by simplifying it too much. But to keep things kind of short, just going to probably gloss over quite a number of things.

And of course, you know the position where I'm coming from and I have a certain bias, so definitely check out other sources and dig deeper. But I'm going to give you my short perspective of the history of just war. And to make it short, we're going to deal with basically two guys. The two guys in Christian thought who are famous for putting the ideas of just war into writing and being something that we can work through and think through. That would be Augustine and Aquinas.

Now you can find varying lists of what these guys kind of came up with, but essentially the criteria for just war that you are going to be able to pull cumulatively out of these two individuals is going to be that a war needs a just cause, so a legitimate reason to go to war. Generally the defense of innocent life or borders or whatever else. And that's you can discuss that and dispute that, what a just cause is. But there must be a just cause, there must be a just authority and that would be probably I think they would agree a national government, not some militia that you piece together, but it has to be a just authority, however it is that you define that, You know, so a king would be a just authority, a president would be a just authority. Would a warlord, let's say you go to Afghanistan or I don't know what what do they call them in Japan, like shoguns or something.

I don't know. I'm I'm ignorant about what they call them. But they, you know, in in their history had sorts of of people like that where it wasn't a unified empire all the time but you kinda had these of these more localized authorities. So I don't know how you define it and we can discuss you could discuss how you want to define a just authority, but there must be some just authority to be able to do this. Romans 13 talks about governments, so whatever Romans 13, whatever you think that means by governments, that's what we would say just authority is.

And there's right intention, so are you going to war for the right reason which kind of goes with just cause, and are you controlling yourself in war? So are you just seeking revenge? Are you trying to take war too far, like when when they want peace and and you refuse to relent? Is that a right intention? No.

So right intention before the war and throughout the war. And there's discrimination which is basically are you discriminating between combatants and non combatants, between innocents and the non innocent as you go out and do your killing. Then we also have last resort is the war, a last resort or could you figure out another way to get around this? Could you find peace in some way? Now, on top of those, which are the basic ones you're going to get from Aquinas and Augustine combined, we also have modern agreements on two other ideas and I'm going to list these separately because there might be more disagreement among Christians for these but it's largely agreed upon.

That is reasonable success, so if you don't have a chance at reasonable success and you throw your armies at another army just to get slaughtered, you don't accomplish anything, you don't accomplish your goal that seems like a waste of life. So you have to have reasonable success. And finally, just peace. And we see this a lot, especially after World War I, and we realized that we basically created horror by having a very unjust or harsh peace treaty. We need to have a just peace, a fair treaty, one that doesn't just completely demoralize a country and we need to kind of help to stabilize a country after we go to war with it.

So the winner needs to not just win but then needs to help rebuild and come alongside of another country and that would be just peace. Alright, so those are the essential ideas of Just War that we will get into in subsequent episodes. But let's talk about men who came up with these sorts of ideas or recognize these ideas and put them on paper. First you got Augustine in the March, around that time. And Augustine came at a really interesting time in Christian history, he came at a time a little bit after Constantine when Christianity was gaining power, gaining political power.

And it had just started to become popular and influential and it was a unique time to to really be involved and and a great time for Augustine to come on the scene because he was able to then have a lot of influence not just in his day but throughout history because his work survived and he was influential at a time when Christianity was trying to get its bearings. And one of the things you're going to see from a lot of pacifists is that they find Augustine highly suspect in terms of his just war theory because, you know, it's really questionable whether Augustine was trying to rationalize a position a rationalize his position from a place of power or not because it seems like there's a really abrupt change in policy or in theology, as Constantine took over and as Christianity became the status quo because you don't find any endorsement of violence prior to Constantine. You find just univocal ideas about, you know, no abortion, no capital punishments, no no war, no self defense, just nothing. And then you get Constantine and then you get Augustine coming on as kind of the mouthpiece for Christianity trying to put that theology down in a in a rational way and and trying to kind of solidify ideas.

And, you know, it really begs the question, was was Augustine just trying to help Christians maintain power, whether he realized it or not, you know, he might not have been malicious but a lot of us do this all the time where you kind of assume the position that you're in and you defend that position rather than acquire a position because you've rationally thought it through. So we don't know Augustine's motives and we don't know what his subconscious was doing but all of the evidence seems to indicate that the early Christians were opposed to the types of things Augustine was saying and Augustine was kind of a product of his environment. And you can kind of see this in some way because Augustine doesn't really throw off as much as a lot of people like to think he does. You know when you think of Augustine you think this guy who invented the just war idea, which isn't true, mean there were ideas that were going around and you know, in Greek thought and Roman thought that he recognized and used and all of that. But you can see that that Augustine really had a lot of the the orthodox position from the very early church because even though Augustine justified war which he wanted to do because Christianity was now coming to power and you kind of needed Christians to be soldiers and you needed to maintain power and fight off enemy forces, the invaders.

But, you know, even though Augustine was was justifying war, he doesn't justify other sorts of violence. Okay, capital punishment because that's that's the arm of the state, but Augustine does not justify self defense. He can't imagine how anybody can kill somebody who's attacking them or their family. This goes back to something Yoder says in in his book, What Would You Do? Where he talks about how it's so interesting that we Americans aren't bothered when we hear of civilians getting killed in in our wars, right?

The Vietnamese civilians, Iraqi civilians, Afghani civilians. You know, we're like, well, that's kind of a shame, it's it's collateral but you know, what what can be done about it? But when it's our family, we say that they have a right to life and we will defend them and kill any aggressor that comes after them. And Yoder's point is just that our anger is really about our possessions and our things and not so much about what is right and what is just. Because if it was about what's right and what's just, we'd have just as much indignation about civilians from other countries getting killed, but we don't.

We we just care about kind of what's ours and what's in our sphere of influence, who our neighbor is, I guess you could say in more biblical terms. And Augustine recognized that issue. He said, Hey, if somebody's coming after your family or if somebody's coming after you, you're you're not gonna be neutral. You are going to have these passions that make you hateful and angry and unloving as you strike out at the aggressor. You're gonna you're gonna strike out not in love but in in hate and anger and protection of your possessions, jealousy, envy, whatever you wanna call it.

And that is not a good thing because Jesus tells us to love at all times. Love God and love others. Augustine recognized that love is the guiding principle and you just can't throw that off. You can't get rid of it and be a Christian, it doesn't work. So you always had to maintain love and that's exactly what the early church said.

But what Augustine did, Augustine did to try to enable his country to have power, his group to have power, is that he just said, well if my government commands it and I'm a warrior, then I can kill in a disimpassioned manner. I can kill people without hate, I can kill people in love because my government tells me to do it, I'm obeying the command, it's kind of an amoral thing, I'm just doing it, it's just a kind of a duty. So Americans like to to justify war today and we like to justify self defense and our gun culture and all of that and that's just something that Augustine would have been abhorred by, I think. This idea that well somebody comes into my home, I'm going to blast them. You know, that they should know better.

So while Augustine gets you part of the way in this idea of just war, when you kind of dig into his true thoughts, he actually sets at least American war lovers back quite a bit because he actually goes more against our culture than he goes for us. Now Aquinas is the second famous person in terms of Christian history of just war. And Aquinas, I don't know if I would say he built on Augustine's ideas or if he kind of took what what he liked but Aquinas kind of took out three main points of of what we talked about up above just cause, just authority, and I believe right intention, but that doesn't really matter so much. Is kind of in line with Augustine, but here's what Aquinas essentially kind of gives us that advances us to more where we are today. Aquinas added this idea of double effect and get to that in just a second.

Essentially what this idea of double effect allowed was it kind of extended the violence that we were able to do. And so Aquinas was okay with self defense, he thought it was legitimate because if the state said that a citizen could defend themselves, then individuals who were just being an arm of the state which allowed the killing of other people. But, while Aquinas was okay with his self defense, he was only okay so long as one's intent was not to kill. Now this is where we get into the double effect where the double effect says that the intent of good in an action can justify an evil outcome. We talked about this a bit in our ectopic pregnancy episode on the consequentialism series, but just to kind of rehash that a bit.

So one example of what I think would be a legitimate double effect is if you have a pregnant mother who has cancer and she has to decide do I take chemotherapy and put my child's life at risk knowing that, I don't know, let's say it has a ninety nine percent chance of dying. So mom takes chemotherapy, is she a murderer? I would say no because of double effect. She was taking the chemotherapy and the chemotherapy's job was to kill the cancer but as a side effect, the baby dies. We can see this in the bridge film as well if you look on YouTube, bridge operator, Drawbridge has his kid at work with him one day and the kid is playing around and kind of falls into the gears but at that moment a train is coming and the dad has to decide, do I put the bridge down knowing that my son almost certainly will die and get crushed in the gears and save the 20 people on the trolley or do I not lower the bridge and let the people on the trolley die?

So he lowers the bridge, his son dies, is the father guilty of murder because his pulling of the mechanism killed his son. I would say no, that's a legitimate example of a double effect because the father pulled the lever in order to save the people on the trolley, right, the bridge coming down, he pulled the lever to make the bridge come down, not to kill his son. His son's death was a side effect. Now, we can kind of get a clearer picture of what a double effect is by taking a look at what I think are bad examples of a double effect. One example would be if one person is at the bottom of an organ donor list, say a heart donor list and another person is at the bottom of a liver donor list and they both know that they are going to die, they are not going to get their organ in time.

And so the one kills the other in order to get the organ that he needs. Well, if they're both gonna die anyway, can't I just kill the one so that I can then acquire their organ? I mean, they're gonna die anyway. Well, no, because their death, right, their harm was the means, it was the thing that you needed to do in order to accomplish your task. You did violence to somebody to accomplish your end.

That's what you had to do. You couldn't have taken their organ without their death. In the chemotherapy and baby example, right, you could have taken the chemo to kill the cancer and the baby lived. You wanted of those things and both of those things were intended. In the bridge, same thing, but when you you try to take somebody's heart or liver, their death a part of the process in order to get what you want.

We see a similar example in two Kings where a city is besieged and two neighbors, one neighbor goes to the king and says, hey, look, this great injustice has been done. My family is starving, my neighbor's family is starving, and yesterday we agreed to eat my kid, kill my kid and eat him. And then today we were gonna kill my neighbor's kid and eat him, but now she hit her kid. She's like, that's unjust. Now we're now we're gonna starve.

Like, that's not fair because I've we've already killed and eaten my kid. And you ask the question, okay. They're they're all starving. By eating the one kid, they saved two families' lives, at least for a for a time. Was that is that really just to murder a child and eat him in order to save a number of people's lives?

And I most Christians would say, no. That's not. You you can't murder somebody in order to sustain your life. Like, that's you murder an innocent person to sustain your life. That just isn't reasonable, that's not moral.

And so that would not be a double effect even though your intention was to get food to eat, the death of another person is not really a byproduct, it's the means to get the thing that you want. So what I think Aquinas largely does, so I think Aquinas goes wrong here because he essentially is arguing that shooting an intruder can be a good thing so long as your intent is to prevent harm of your family and not to kill the intruder. So he's basically saying it's like the chemo and baby or like the son and the bridge story. Right? If somebody's coming and I know they're coming to harm my family and I shoot them and I'm not trying to shoot them in the head or something that I know is gonna kill them, and I shoot them in order to stop them from harming my family, as long as in my heart I really don't want their death, what I'm really trying to do is protect my family, then that's okay and if they die, that's a side effect.

I mean there are lots of questions you could have because essentially if you shoot them and they keep coming and then you shoot them again and they keep coming and you shoot them in the head, okay you didn't really want their death but at some point you definitely know that it's going happen if you're aiming for their heart, you're aiming for their head or you shoot them multiple times. You know that their death is a means to protect your family. So the question is, which category does that fall into? Is that a legitimate double effect or is that not a legitimate double effect? Now Aquinas, I'm sorry, Augustine acknowledged that such self defense was just in a legal sense but he denied that it was just in a moral sense before God.

So this is where Aquinas really furthers the discussion of just war and self defense and and the doing of violence for Christians. I'll link a good article that digs into some of that stuff below. Now, see a lot of internal conflict in Augustine and Aquinas' work, much of which we'll discuss in subsequent episodes under each aspect of Just War. It might end up that we have an episode for each piece of Just War Theory, each of the five to eight pieces I decide to highlight. But I just want to point out a few that I think are extremely glaring that I want you to keep your ears peeled for.

So first, Augustine's recognition of love I think is huge and I think he's spot on, right? Love God, love others all the time. Who do I love? My neighbor. Who's my neighbor?

Even my enemy, right? Love is the guiding principle and that's undeniable, I believe, for Christians. But Augustine's application seems a little bit lacking. He does way better than most people who come after him and way more than most moderns really acknowledge because we like to take his justification for war and then forget all the stuff he said about love and self defense. But, you know, Augustine's application still seems lacking even though he's he's really close.

Now how do you kill your enemy in love, in war any more than than you can when they're attacking your family? So I might be I might have passions in the moment because I'm scared if somebody breaks into my home, but I guarantee you that before you go out to battle or when you have bullets whizzing by your head or when you have the nationalism that you have to have to psych people up to go out and conquer their enemies for God and country, I guarantee you, you've got passions. Like, it really possible to do that in a disimpassioned way? I don't think it is. I think that's just as inherent in a war that's commanded by my government than in in the heat of the moment if somebody breaks into my house.

Your country is your homeland and your home is your home. And what's the difference? So, it seems kind of Augustine's got really great logic on this idea of love, but then he seems to just back out and and not apply it appropriately or consistently when it comes to war. And that's why, part of why I think so many pacifists just have problems with the post Constantinian era where it just seems like people start to their thinking starts to get murky when it comes to things that influence the power of the state because you've got this marriage of church and state. Definitely check out the book Anatomy of a Hybrid, I think it kind of gets into some of the stuff that's enlightening.

So another glaring issue I think we can see with Aquinas because Aquinas seems to recognize the problem with using another's death as a means to save one's life. But somehow he thinks that, you know, if there's an aggressor and I don't want to kill them but I hack them with a sword as a means, that that's really any more loving than just trying to to slash their head off in the first place. It's almost as if he like, he misapplies his own double effect or he he thinks that, you know, slashing somebody with a sword is is more loving than trying to kill them right right off the bat. And I just I don't know. It's it's hard for me to think how I slash somebody with a sword, hack somebody with a sword in love, whether I'm intending to kill them or seriously maim them or whatever.

It seems like their harm is a means to the end I'm seeking, it's not just some byproduct. I think the third issue is that, and you see this in a good book on moral injury and soldiers and warfare called Killing from the Inside Out. And the book isn't, I'm pretty sure it's not ultimately a pacifistic book. It's sympathetic towards pacifism, but it more just kind of looks at war realistically and and asks people on both sides to consider the the cost to soldiers and and why that might be the case. So it's a it's a really good book, but it in it, I remember there's a really interesting piece that I never really realized before and it it talks about how I think up through the eleventh or twelfth century, Christianity recognized the impropriety of war and they did this for a long long time.

They would require penance from soldiers even in wars that were just or even for killing people in a just war, they would require penance. We see a similar sort of concept from Aquinas who says that killing is fine out of one side of his mouth, but then he calls it improper for holy workers. He says that, well, priests and clerics shouldn't be doing this work and you ask, I'll give you a quote from him here in a second, but you have to ask, if especially Protestants today who take the priesthood of God more seriously or maybe not more seriously, but we apply it more broadly and we think that we're the temple of God and we're all a royal priesthood, then how much more would Aquinas' observation apply to us? So here's a quote from Aquinas. Now warlike pursuits are altogether incompatible with the duties of a bishop and a cleric for two reasons.

The first reason is a general one because to wit, warlike pursuits are full of unrest so that they hinder the mind very much from the contemplation of divine things, the praise of God and prayers for the people which belong to the duties of a cleric. Wherefore, just as commercial enterprises are forbidden to clerics because they unsettle the minds too much, so too are warlike pursuits. According to two Timothy two:four, No man being a soldier to God entangleth himself with secular business. The second reason is a special one because to wit all the clerical orders are directed to the ministry of the altar on which the passion of Christ is represented sacramentally according to first Corinthians eleven twenty six. As often as you shall eat this bread and drink the chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord until he come.

Wherefore it is unbecoming for them to slay or shed blood and is more fitting that they should be ready to shed their own blood for Christ so as to imitate indeed what they portray in their ministry. For this reason, it has been decreed that those who shed blood even without sin become irregular. Now, no man who has a certain duty to perform can lawfully do that which renders him unfit for that duty. Wherefore, it is altogether unlawful for clerics to fight because war is directed to the shedding of blood. So, I mean essentially what Aquinas is saying is that if a pastor's job, bishop, priest, cleric, whatever, if their job is to administer the sacrament which represents the sacrifice of Christ, how can they go and sacrifice other people?

It's better for them to lay down their lives than to kill other people because they represent God to people. Now, this is where the book Anatomy of a Hybrid, I think illuminates a lot of things because Aquinas is living in a sacral society, a society that is built on all of these traditions and know, everybody gets baptized and everybody does this, everybody does that, you know, you're all, you're kind of, you're automatically opted in at birth and you have to go through all of these motions and you have this priest who you have to go to and he's your intercessor, he's your mediator before God. And so, you kind of have that specified sacred secular role. But we don't really think like that as Protestants today, We would say that we shouldn't have that distinction because all of us are to represent Christ before the world. And Aquinas' observation here is that if we're gonna truly represent Christ to the world, then the only way we can really do that is by laying down our own lives.

It's just that Aquinas thought that was a priest job back in the day and today, Protestants recognize that we're a royal priesthood and that's all of our jobs. And that's again where Yoder's book comes in, The Politics of Jesus which it says that, look Christ's life is not just descriptive of the Messiah but it's prescriptive for us in many ways. And that's where the rub is. You know, if Christ's life is prescriptive for us and we're to be disciples and followers and we're supposed to act as Christ acted, which Philippians two among other passages but especially Philippians two seems to say, then we act like Christ because we're all representatives of him. And that's what the very early church did and recognized.

Augustine even Augustine even recognized that to a certain extent just not in war justified by government but even Augustine said, Yeah, that's kind of what you do because we can't kill out of love unless directed by a higher authority. So taking all that into account, seems that Aquinas and Augustine are really strange bedfellows for modern warriors who want to justify warfare as a long standing tradition in Christianity. It ignores the strongest, uncompromised side of the very early church and their unwillingness to kill their enemies, to kill for the states, to kill on abortion, to kill on capital punishment, to love everybody, even their enemies. Aquinas and Augustine also, they failed to justify the extent of killing that we attempt to justify today, particularly in The United States. Now if you go back to episode one, season one, where I talk about how I grew up, I mean, conservative Christians are just somebody comes into my house, I'm gonna blast them.

Right? We are violent and we are are okay with violence towards our enemies. People in my group would say, you know, why don't we just nuke the Middle East? You know, just drop bombs. Well, know, I'm glad we dropped the a bomb, look how many American soldiers it saved.

We are just just terrible in terms of the violence we're willing to exact and and support. But Augustine and Aquinas, at least in their logic, maybe not in their inconsistent applications, but at least in their logic, don't justify the extent of our violence today. Augustine and Aquinas also failed to justify our flippant attitude towards killing enemies. The, you know, well, just nuke them. Right?

You know, when I when I read Augustine and Aquinas, it seems like they are doing a lot of work to justify violence in extreme circumstances by just authorities and with extreme reserve in terms of, know, Aquinas even though he he extends violence beyond what Augustine did. Aquinas knows that this is a serious issue and he goes to great lengths to say, well you can do it in this case but you know you gotta make sure of this and that and that and that. And they recognize the seriousness of this issue which is something that we just don't recognize today. So, hopefully you understand a little bit better the very brief shallow history that I just gave you of Just War. And we're going to start talking in the next episode about my questions and issues with each point of the Just War and why I think Just War just falls apart logically.

It's it's it's idealistic, it's incoherent, it's hypocritical, it's illogical, and it just doesn't work. It it doesn't hold up. So I'm excited to get to that and I hope you enjoyed this episode. So that's all for now. Peace because I'm a pacifist.

When I say it, I mean it.