Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In this episode, we are continuing our discussion of just war theory. In the last episode, we looked at men like Aquinas and Augustine, who are credited with kind of formulating and advancing the idea of just war. We took a look at their rationales and we assessed some of the basic issues in their rationales. And we also looked at what some of the potential motivations would have been, particularly for Augustine who comes right after Constantine and at a time when Christians were just starting to get a taste of power and influence, and why there might have been a rationalization there.

Because as we see in his life and reasoning, a lot of what he said was in regard to war was very opposed to what the early Christians had said. The early Christians were very against all violence, whether that's abortion, murder, or capital punishment, warfare, and self defense. Then we even see Augustine, who is very famous for advancing just war theory, but at the same time, he was against self defense because he couldn't see how a Christian could love in self defense, and those sorts of things. So even in Augustine we see that he's got this remnant of this teaching that at the center is love, but Augustine just felt like he could rationalize how one could lovingly kill in warfare meted out by the state. So it was an interesting discussion and we also were able to look at what the different tenets of just war theory are.

You can find different formulations of this. They're overall very much the same, but you have some overlap and you've got different names for some of the different tenets. But by and large, they're mostly the same. So when we go through our Just War series, I might cover one that you haven't heard of before which is really just a synonym for a different formulation that you've heard or there will be some overlap or something. So if I miss something and you want to send in a question, I'd be happy to do another episode or answer a question, but I'm going to hit on what is largely currently agreed upon as the Christian ideal for just war.

The first tenet we are going to get into is the idea of just cause. To go to war or to do violence, somebody must have a just cause. So the first question, I think the foundational question we need to ask is, what cause is enough to make someone lose their right to life? Right? What cause is great enough that it warrants my doing of evil or my doing of violence, I should say.

I don't want to kind of load the question there, but my doing of violence. And some people would probably say, well, I mean in the Old Testament it's very clear. You know, the Noahic covenant, God says, if somebody sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. And then you see lots of civil laws and other sorts of things in Israel dictated by God that have violence done to people for all sorts of reasons. And while that's true, there are two basic issues with invoking the Old Testament here.

The first is that the New Testament command to love and to love even your enemies and to forgo vengeance and leave that to God is the ethic that Christ gives us. And so, in the Old Testament, sure, let's say that God God did use violence and command violence for for appropriate use. Well, that's that's all well and good, but in the New Testament, he has revoked that. He does not give individuals the the right to do that. And so, as a Christian, God has a different order for me than He had for people in the Old Testament.

The second issue, and we'll talk about this more throughout the series, but the second issue with saying that the Old Testament gives us justification to do violence is that you're going to have a really broad justification to do violence then. In the Old Testament, revenge was justified. They had cities of refuge, like if somebody accidentally killed somebody, there was retaliation often by the the family of the person who was killed. And that retaliation wasn't punished, is why they had cities of refuge so that it's kind of like when you play tag, right, there's base where nobody can touch you and that's what they did. Right?

But the Avengers were not judged for avenging through killing, that was kind of seen as a just thing. If you didn't make it to the City Of Refuge you must have been guilty or you deserve to die. We also have examples of certain civil laws that no Christian, no Christian, is advocating violence for today, whether that's stoning kids who are disobedient or all sorts of things that God thought was a just cause back in the day. You know, if we're going to say, God God maintains his use of violence today, you have a lot of explaining to do telling me why we then shouldn't and can't kill disobedient children. Why we shouldn't be seeking that if we can't.

Because that was obviously a just cause for God in the Old Testament and that's not rescinded. If you don't believe that violence is rescinded, then you have a lot of explaining to do how such civil laws would be bad. Now you might say, well in Israel's theocracy, that's God's law for them but we're not in a theocracy. And we could have a long discussion about that. If you want to look up the Romans 13, I believe episode or the one on politics in season two, you know, that's definitely a long discussion, but those sorts of laws held even when Israel wasn't a theocracy, when they had kings.

And not to mention, God's moral law is objective. So if it was objectively good to kill kids or objectively right to kill kids back then and that's God's heart to kill disobedient kids, you have a hard time explaining how God has changed so that such a thing wouldn't be just and good. So if stoning kids was a just cause back in the day for their disobedience, then certainly it would be a just cause if we implemented that today. And the means, right? We we want these quick deaths, lethal injections or whatever it is that that we support.

But they used to stone people and and other kinds of of means. And so we just have to ask then why are those things off limits for us today? And when you invoke the Old Testament, you bring in lots of problems because you can't just bring the idea that violence can be used at times today, but you have to explain why the reasons for violence and means of use are highly regulated when the Bible doesn't declare that in the New Testament. Well, I think there are clearly some major issues with an inconsistent application of the Bible justifying modern day violence, there's still another aspect of this question that I find problematic because most of the time what Christians are going to do is they justify the use of violence as this this idea of protecting innocent life. So the reason I'm justified in killing somebody isn't so much that they've lost their right to life, but that I'm protecting innocent people and their right to life.

But we can clearly see that this isn't really what we believe and you can come up with a number of scenarios that prove this, because there are scenarios that you can imagine where there are innocent lives in danger yet we would not kill to save those innocent lives. One the best examples and probably nobody's gonna get this because, you know, I like the movie Watchmen but not that many people really did. But it was a great movie because it was this this huge moral conundrum where the villain won in the end but the villain's role was actually trying to save many people's lives and because of the villain's actions, billions of people's lives were saved but to save those lives, the villain actually had to kill tens of millions of people. And so at the end, you're just like, your mind's blown and you're like, who's good, who's bad and, you know, that was back when I was a consequentialist and I couldn't figure out who was good and bad exactly. But, you know, he he saved billions of lives by killing tens of millions of people and most Christians are gonna say, no, that wasn't right what he did to kill tens of millions of people is murder.

So there are plenty of situations, you could probably think of a number yourself where by killing some innocent people to save a larger number of innocent people, we wouldn't do it. Of course, there are as we we saw in our consequentialism episodes, there are situations where we would kill innocent lives to save innocent lives, but then there are other scenarios where we just couldn't even imagine that, to kill innocent lives to save innocent lives, we wouldn't do it. So, just war theory doesn't really rely on excusing killing in order to preserve life because there are plenty of situations we recognize that we wouldn't kill life to save life. In fact, what we end up doing, what just war theory does is it doesn't truly, when you dig down, excuse killing by saying we're preserving innocent life, what it does is it excuses the killing of an individual, it is arguing that an individual loses their right to life. The reason I can kill in war isn't because innocent lives are at stake, it's because somebody has become my enemy and has lost their right to life.

So many Christians try to hide behind this idea of preserving innocent life because we think that's what it's about, we think that's what makes something honorable when in the end we're really just making up excuses for why somebody has lost their right to life. You know, if go back to the old trolley car example, if there's a trolley headed off the rails and you can push a guy in front of it to slow it down and stop it in order to save the people in the trolley, do you push the guy in front of the trolley to stop it to save lives? No, of course you don't because that's wrong, that's murder. You can't justify killing a person to save people's lives even though the people on that trolley are innocent. But if you want to kill that person, all you have to do is make them an aggressor and they now lose their right to life.

The value of the lives of the people on that trolley doesn't change but the value of the person who you murder changes. That's what just war does, it goes against Jesus' words and it makes our enemies have a different value of life and that to me seems to be a problem. Second question I have for Just Cause is, you know, is it really possible to kill your enemy in love? Augustine seems to think that it is if the state issues that you can kill, but as we looked at in our moral injury episodes, it doesn't seem like an individual really escapes unscathed. There's obviously something in somebody's soul that tends to recognize the problem with killing.

It's just hard to imagine that going into battle, and battle after battle after battle, it's really a possibility to go and kill your enemy in love. It seems like hatred is inevitable, but even if you can avoid hatred, how do you kill in love? That just doesn't seem like something that's that's possible to do. Whether you're fighting for your family in self defense or whether you're fighting for your country, especially with with all the nationalistic rhetoric that comes along with, you know, why our nation is so much better and fight for our freedom and all this idolatry we have in the military and patriotic sphere. You aren't just fighting because somebody gave you orders to go and do this in a sterile manner, you're doing this with all sorts of passions involved, and it just it's not possible to kill your enemy in love.

I think the burden of proof would be on Augustine here. Another thing to think about. Aquinas seemed to think that, well, if I'm shooting an intruder or somebody not intending to kill them but intending to just hurt them and stop them. Now you have to ask, well, how is shooting to significantly injure somebody loving? I mean, maybe you can argue that it's more loving than trying to kill them, although you're you're significantly increasing their their pain and suffering.

But how how is that loving to to seriously injure somebody? That doesn't seem to to really fit. Aquinas doesn't fix the problem by saying, well, I didn't try to kill him. I just tried to hurt him. That that just doesn't follow.

I then have to also ask, moving on, should we fight for the most just causes? Like if we say, Hey, a cause is just and worth fighting for, Do we also have to say that if a cause is just and worth fighting for, we should? Like, are we are we obligated to where we see injustice? Should we go and try to fix that injustice? If so, then I have to ask why do we allow genocides in some countries to just persist and we just let it go while attacking minor dictators largely because those dictators have oil that we want or or something out of self interest.

And how do you let a Rwandan genocide go on but you attack Iraq that doesn't really pose a threat and doesn't have the weapons that you're fabricating that they do. Why do we pick the wars that we pick? And it seems like it's almost always out of self interest. And you can just take a look at World War II. It wasn't, and we'll get to whether or not that was a just war, but one of the things is like people say, well Japan attacked us, so we had to attack them back.

So really we needed to retaliate, we needed revenge. When we were content to let them massacre Chinese and other groups of people for years, just let them go, let them just slaughter babies, bayonet women and children, make them, daughters, and fathers have sex with each other, mothers and sons. It it was just grotesque, but we were okay to let that go. But when they attacked us and killed, what, 3,000 of our people, which isn't a small number, but compared to what they were doing in China and the atrocities of what they were doing in China, and then we decide to attack them. I mean, the fact that we only decided to attack them after they after they attacked us, showing that we felt confident enough to go after them, but we were content to let them massacre Chinese people for a number of years before and Koreans as well, I believe.

I mean, that just that just seems wrong to me that that our wars are largely out of self interest and not really about of justice and a just cause. And we like to couch things as just causes when really it should be self interest that's that we recognize as the primary motivator. Another question. So what what about pre vengeance? Right?

Today, have quite a lot of information and you know with statistics and other sorts of things that we can implement, we can recognize when other countries produce a certain level of threat for us and may or may not attack us or harm us. We know that somebody from ISIS has a high probability of propagating their ideas with other people and will produce at least somewhere down the line individuals who are going to harm American citizens. So if we know that, even if they're not a direct threat to us at this moment, why can't we go and prevent ourselves using statistics and satellite data and all this other stuff so that we can build a case? Why can't we of host that movie with, I think it's Tom Cruise, Minority Report. Why can't we just say, you know what, we've got a strong enough case that you're guilty of harming us in the future, so therefore we are going to prevenge ourselves.

Seems like that should be a legitimate thing to judge people before they actually do things. I mean, we do end up doing things like this. Right? Weapons of mass destruction. Most Christians think that it would be justified to take out North Korea.

Japanese, here's an interesting one, the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor, right? If pre vengeance is okay, then if we were a threat to the Japanese, if they thought that we were really strong, wasn't it right and smart for them to prevenge by attacking Pearl Harbor? I mean that was a just cause because they thought that we were a threat and harm to them. You know, on a side note, having read recently Victories Without Violence, a book about a lot of individuals who won victories without violence, one of the common things that I often saw in there was that one of the reasons pacifism often, or when it works, why it works, is because it assuages fears. So a lot of times violence is escalated by fear and and caused by fear, but when you allay somebody's fears, they have no reason to try to dominate you and and have power over you if they recognize your powerlessness.

Of course, that's not always the case but you have to ask, had The United States not been militaristic, had we and we weren't militaristic then like we are now. But had we not been a threat, would Japan have ever attacked us? Maybe they would have, I don't know. But it's just, you know, it's just really interesting to think about the fact that we had a powerful military is in part what gave them cause to attack us. Yet, when we kind of do this with weapons of mass destruction, or when we invoke the domino effect and why we need to intervene in a variety of places in the world back in the sixties, seventies, fifties, whatever, we're completely okay with prevengeance when it comes to us.

But when other people invoke that against us, we call it a travesty of justice and just something that's that's terrible, some big betrayal. I wanna ask one more question then. Go down one more rabbit hole. That would be, as far as just cause goes, we see this preemptive idea on more of an individual level and throughout some of this I will get to the individual level at times too because the same rationale for just war theory often applies almost exactly to the individual. Right?

We need to have a just cause in order to shoot an intruder. And so this preventions thing is going to carry over because when you have an intruder in your home, how is killing them justified? Because you you just wonder you don't know what they're in there for for sure. Maybe they're brandishing a gun. You don't know if it's fake or loaded or if they haven't threatened you or you just you don't know what their intent is coming into your home, and you don't know what they're there for.

And it just, a lot of Christians that I've heard say, well, if there's somebody in my home, I'm not gonna ask questions. I'm gonna shoot. And I I understand that sentiment because, you know, the guy's probably not there gonna he's not gonna have a cordial conversation with you. But it just strikes me as really odd that the the reaction isn't to barricade yourself in your in your house and or in your bedroom and call the cops. It's to make sure that this injustice doesn't doesn't get off scot free.

And you don't even know what they're there for. Are they there just to steal a little bit of money? Are they there to kill you? I don't know, but we're we're okay in our culture with pre vengeance even if we don't know that they're going to harm us or even kill us. We prevenge and we're okay with that.

And that doesn't seem like a just cause to me. But then what else is interesting to me is that there are a lot of states where killing murder is not punishable by the death penalty. And certainly other things aren't, kidnapping, rape, other things are not justified. We don't justify in the justice system the killing of somebody who commits those crimes. And so you have to ask if we recognize that it's unjust to institute the death penalty for a robber.

And in most cases, the death penalty isn't even instituted against a murderer and the death penalty isn't instituted against rapists. And you know what? Even a lot of Christians don't think that the death penalty should be instituted against rapists. Now I've heard of people for castration and other things, but you have to ask, if the death penalty is so rare and the justice system recognizes that it's either off limits because it's unjust or it's only just in the most severe of circumstances, then how in our judgment of an intruder in our home, how are we justified in the killing of that individual, of instituting the death penalty by our own hands? And sure, the state says that we can, but how do you wrestle with that intuition that says, we shouldn't execute all rapists?

And then, when you have somebody come into your home and you say, I don't want him to rape my wife, so I am going to kill him so he doesn't get the chance. I'm not going to ask him any questions. How do you justify that? Like, what's the rationale that makes the death penalty okay in one scenario but it would be off limits and reprehensible in another? That's just something that strikes me as a bit off.

Those are just questions off the top of my head when it comes to Just Cause. I'm sure if you give me a few months, I would have a number more. There are a couple here that I skipped that didn't seem as applicable, but which might be interesting talking points in the future. So we'll leave it at that and let you kind of mull that over as I prepare to get on with the next issue in the next episode. That's all for now, so peace.

And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.