(72) S4E8 The Incoherence of Just War Theory: Just Peace
Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are going to continue our discussion on the incoherence of just war theory. And today we are looking specifically at the idea of just peace. And this is one of those which is a more recent edition, I think rightfully so, after a lot of people have recognized, I think specifically after World War one, that violence and war don't solve anything if we don't make sure that there's restoration, which it just amazes me that that the idea of restoration and reconciliation weren't a part of this Christian idea of just war. Right?
Derek:I mean, that that seems like just the natural biblical desire to to seek reconciliation and restoration and to not be content without that, which I think says a lot about the the viability and coherence or lack thereof of just war theory. It's a a man made idea that subverts the biblical ideal, it seems to me, which is why nobody ever really cared about reconciliation because it it was more just war has, it seems to me, always or mostly always been about getting what you need to get and justifying the violence that you need to do for your your nation's self interest. And and the failure to have this idea of just peace until more recently seems indicative of that. So depending on what formulation you're looking at, you will not see this idea of just peace but I'm putting it here because I think it's important and I think as Christians, if you're going to adhere to just war, then I think you need this idea of just peace because it just makes sense from a biblical standpoint. First question I would have is, how has the marriage of church and state, the marriage of religion and the sword worked out for peace?
Derek:I would refer you to, to the book Anatomy of a Hybrid to take a long look at how violence and the state and the church have, worked while married to each other. And I would also point you to one of my favorite podcasters, Dan Carlin, and his Hardcore History episode on torture. And it while it's an appalling episode, the thing that's so sad to me throughout the whole thing is that he's not talking about like some crazy, you know, Eastern Chinese tortures or bamboo tortures or things that, you know, were done by the heathens or the pagans or whatever whatever Christians used to call them. These are things that are done pretty much exclusively I think in in his episode, it's all about Europe, but exclusively by self proclaimed Christians. And it's appalling.
Derek:It's terrible. And then you can even get into the modern day and you you go to was it Waco or Austin or I I don't remember where it was, but in Texas, maybe it even Dallas, in Texas in like 1914 I want to say, right around World War one, there was a there was the killing of a man named Jesse Washington And you're gonna want to tune out for about a minute or two here if you don't want to hear absolutely horrific, grotesque things as I I describe what people did to him. But in the the quote Christian South, you had people take this guy who we now believe had mental disability, who was accused of I don't know if he he did it he actually did this or not but accused of murdering a white woman. And even if he did it, it doesn't excuse what follows, but you had a group of over 10,000 people, I think it was like 19,000 people, who convened outside of the courthouse and when the guilty verdict was passed, which of course it was going to be no matter what, they pulled him out of the courthouse and they had a chain ready to lynch him.
Derek:They lynched him over a fire and they would put him down into the fire and then they'd lift him up so that, they could extend how long he survived. So this wasn't like a lynching around his neck, it was around his his arms or whatnot. So they would raise him and lower him over the fire. Well, when he was put down over the fire, he would try to climb back up the chain with his hands and they didn't want that to happen, so one by one they they cut off his fingers so that he ended up having to, you know, couldn't climb but he would beat the chain with his stumps, the stumps of his hands, fingerless hands. And so he couldn't climb up anymore so he'd be lowered over the fire.
Derek:And at one point somebody while he was hanging down castrated him right there, just castrated him, and they would raise him and lower him and raise him and lower him until eventually he died after quite a long time. And that was nineteen thousand people, as far as I can tell, no intervention by anybody, 19,000 white most or all would have claimed to be Christians. How do you excuse that? And there's a lot that goes on there. It's not just because people are willing to do violence, but you have to ask if the church was separated from the state and the church did not view the sword as a legitimate means of accomplishing anything, any sort of justice, especially in one's own hands.
Derek:Could a Christian group without the idea of SWORD and SWORD married with state, could they have done what they did? And I don't think they could have. Now maybe that group could have been influenced by other things of course, in the inhumanity of African Americans at that time and and other sorts of things. Nevertheless, the willingness to do violence is is a huge starting point for people to be able to do this sort of thing. So anyway, I recommend looking up those resources, looking up the the execution of Jesse Washington, Dan Carlin's hardcore history on on torture and what Christians have done throughout the ages, and Anatomy of a Hybrid, is more of a a theological look at how the church and state have functioned together.
Derek:And it's not a pretty picture. Just think about Europe, not only in their willingness to execute other people, but in all of the wars that they waged, crusades against other people, but as well as as wars within Europe itself. When you mix the church and state, the church is indistinguishable from the world, and it's indistinguishable from Christ. I'm sorry. It's it's easily distinguishable from Christ because Christ looks very different than the church married to the state.
Derek:What kind of got me about this too as a a reformed individual is I discovered that in the Westminster Confession in the original and as well as in the the I believe it was the Belgic Confession, one of the one of the other main reform documents, and one of their articles like 37, 20 seven, something like that. I'll I'll try to link these below, but the king or the state was actually viewed as important for the church and written right into those church documents. And at least for the the Westminster because that that began to be used very early on in The United States because you had a number of Presbyterians, but the Westminster Confession was altered, in my opinion, in large part because of the American Revolution and its need to be justified, and then a a bias towards not having a king. And so it was just interesting to me that, of course, the Westminster gets altered right after the American Revolution here in The United States, and not for theological reasons, don't think. It certainly doesn't seem that way, but more because it was it was out of self interest.
Derek:And that that struck me as very ironic and something that I would have never known had I not looked into nonviolence because the Westminster Confession like, right on the cover, it it says the Westminster Confession of like 15 whatever year it was. And so you think, oh, okay, so wow, that's amazing. This is sort of like the Bible in the sense that it's been unaltered over many many centuries. Right? So it's it's very similar to like the the Presbyterian Bible.
Derek:Of course, Sola Scriptura for us, but Westminster Confession comes comes fairly close to for a lot of people. And of course most people, if you ask the higher ups and elders and things, they would know that it's altered. It's been changed several times in various places, but that's not something that's really ever thought about. We think, well if our if our ancestors changed it, they probably didn't change many places and they probably did it for really good reasons. We don't think of those reasons as being self interested and whatnot.
Derek:So what's the point of that? I don't know. It's just an extension of thinking about the marriage of the church and the state, thinking about how even in Protestant denominations who might say that they don't think that way or that, you know, it's grotesque what what people did in the Middle Ages. We were for those sorts of things. You had Calvin who's famously known for, I think it was Michael Cervatis or something, having him executed.
Derek:And, course, people try to soften what Calvin did, and and certainly, it seems like he he was trying to help Servitus out a little bit in in making his death less harsh. Nevertheless, Calvin Calvin was for the execution of of heretics. And then you've got somebody like Zwingli who would drown Anabaptists and, you know, advocate their drowning. Oh, who's the other guy? Luther Luther was like anti Semitic towards the end there, and he advocated various sorts of violence against people.
Derek:And it's really not a not a pretty it's not a pretty history even for we Protestants. It and and you can see that even written into our own historical documents. So just peace? Yeah. I think that's I I think that's kind of a farce.
Derek:I don't think that's something that when the church has the sword, there's not gonna be a just peace. The church has to put down the sword and beat it into plowshares, And the Church has to be the example of what peace looks like. How can the Church advocate and facilitate and cultivate and create peace when they've got a sword in one hand? We need plowshares, we need pruning hooks, we need to be the example because we are the kingdom. While we submit to the worldly kingdoms, we never obey, we never bow, and we never take part in what it takes part in that is evil.
Derek:Another question I have is, how does a use of violence as a legitimate option influence a culture's use of violence against groups seen as inferior? We saw this a little bit with the Jesse Washington issue, but I also think of the thirteenth amendment and how we can prisoners can be slaves. Like literally, thirteenth amendment, it it allows for slavery of prisoners and we treat slavery or we treat prisoners like slaves. I have one friend who is who is in prison, and he tells me all the ways that they take advantage of them. Now I've seen Dateline specials about how how they are some prisons are essentially forcing them to go to video only calls so that these companies can make money.
Derek:And we've got prisons that are for profit, and we've got prisons that are enslaving people, and you've got sheriffs in in places like, I think in Mississippi or Louisiana, who are are saying, you know, we're really sad that we're losing some of our our labor here, and literally saying stuff like that, and but we're okay with it. Conservative Christians are okay with it because violence against people who deserve it, and that the definition of those people who deserve it over time have changed. In the early nineteen hundreds, Jesse Washington who was black, he deserved it. Even though today he wouldn't deserve it unless he was walking the streets in a ghetto and he was shot by a police officer, then he would deserve it. And you've got people today like immigrants, they deserve it.
Derek:I mean, if they come here illegally and they're put into facilities without what they need to have reasonable accommodations so that they're they're clean and safe, then that's their problem. They deserve it. They came here. They should have known what they're getting into. Now they did it illegally.
Derek:Prisoners, well, they committed crime. They deserve to be enslaved. They deserve to not be able to talk to their family and and all of that. A willingness to use violence messes up a culture because it allows us to do violence to the people who we deem unworthy of kindness. It allows us to have this tool that we should never have with people who we consider undeserving or enemies.
Derek:So rather than figure out how to reform and love and help prisoners, We figure out how to make money off of them and how to make sure that that their life is the worst it can possibly be for as long as it needs to be. They need to make amends, have have penance, and that penance involves having violence done to them. Makes me wonder if I lived in a country where we tried to love and rehabilitate and help prisoners instead of make money off of them and be punitive, solely punitive, I wonder what our recidivism rate would look like, and I don't know the answer to that. I somebody can maybe look up statistics on other countries that have good systems. Maybe there's a country out there that's less punitive and, and works to rehabilitate and love and and set example for.
Derek:I'd love those statistics and I'd love to know about that. But I would guess that a culture steeped in violence like we are and a culture who's willing to use violence against those we define as enemies, I would guess that we perpetuate the cycle of violence, we have higher recidivism rates, and we don't set a good example of of Christ likeness. I also wonder how when we use war as a tool, how real most of the peace we have is. Because it seems to me that wars create new tensions, they exacerbate old problems, and and it's just the cycle of violence. And you see it in the movie The Kingdom that I referenced in season one.
Derek:This this idea that, okay, well, we went some bad guys got us, but really because our country ticked them off by doing bad things to to their families first. So now we're gonna go kill them. We go kill them, and now I ticked off this family who's gonna come back and try to kill me and seek vengeance. You know, we we really perpetuate violence as a cycle. And I think you you can see this just as a continuing thread and and I'm not gonna be able to talk much about it here because, it's been a while since I I looked at it and I I'm not a great historian on on this topic at the moment.
Derek:But just I want you to to do some research and and look into this. But let's just start back in World War one and I'm sure World War one happened for a multitude of reasons that led up to it, but we'll just use World War one as our starting point. We end up getting into a war and out of that war, we have the the rise of the Middle East and the oil reserves there, and we have all of this colonization sorts of stuff. Great Britain, part of the reason that they're in in the war and and they do some fighting over, I believe, in Turkey and such. They've got some some self interest, a lot of self interest over there with, whether it's different colonies or resources or whatever it is.
Derek:So the Middle East gets involved and we get involved with it. And then we see the Middle East rise. And then Hitler comes back because of an unjust war treaty in World War two, and we've got another World War which is really just a continuation of World War one in a sense and in injustices created by that. And then after that, we have involvement in Korea in the fifties, and now North Korea hates us. We have involvement with Vietnam and lose a lot of people there.
Derek:And then lo and behold, but the Middle East that's been created and messed with by the West for a number of years, and especially after World War two, the creation of of Israel and the displacement of of certain of the Palestinians and the Arab world and the tension with Egypt and all of that that that we created through the creation of the state of Israel. Now we have we're dealings with the Middle East and Afghanistan. We help Afghanistan out against Russia, and then lo and behold, Al Qaeda comes up and comes after us, and then Iraq, and we we mess with Iraq, and we, we essentially create ISIS by doing that in this power vacuum. And all of these things are are extremely interconnected in a in a complex sort of web. In some senses, it's complex.
Derek:I mean, you can go back really far and you can see all these all these various connections between each event. But in one sense, it it makes it it's very easy to see how our war in World War one led to, at least in in significant part, led to our poor relations with The Middle East today, and how all of these things are just connected and how Hitler would have never happened if we wouldn't have had World War one probably. We wouldn't have had that issue. And so it just makes you wonder, it really makes you wonder, does war really have a chance of creating just peace? Because you can look at any individual one of those wars.
Derek:We might say, well World War one, look we're friends with, and World War two. Hey look, we're friends with Germany now, we're friends with Italy now. See? It worked out. There's just peace.
Derek:Yeah, but you're leaving out a big part, a big part of what also happened in World War one which was related to The Middle East and what happened in World War two which was the creation of the State Of Israel, the displacement of the Palestinians. You you just you have to you have to selectively look at the peace you feel like you get in order to say that such a thing as just peace has existed in our wars that we've conducted in in the twentieth century and twenty first century. You just don't find just peace. It doesn't happen. What you do find is cyclical violence and the creation of new enemies and the exacerbation of of old enmity.
Derek:Another question I have is what does moral injury do to just peace? What of a society of individuals who are willing to kill? Those are related questions but sort of two separate ones. And I've just started to look into the the issue of moral injury and it's fascinating. I've I've only read like two books on it But it's just fascinating to hear stories of soldiers who talk about it and to hear hear evaluations of, I don't know, sociologists, psychologists, whatever these people are of of what goes on.
Derek:But we can see this in things like PTSD as well as other psychoses or I don't know if they're technically called a psychosis, if that's derogatory. Whatever it is, this moral injury is a problem. People come back scarred and different. We see the the significant rate of suicide of people in the armed forces, and we see we see just problems when we have a society of individuals who are willing to kill, when taking life isn't really whether it's one's own because we have a high suicide rate, or the lives of others which we have so much gratuitous killing in our culture. And what does it do when you have these two groups of people?
Derek:Soldiers who have moral injury as well as a society of individuals who are taught that war and killing are noble things and we have a society of people who are willing to do that. Can you really be can you really have a just peace, not even not even externally with other countries, can you have a just peace in your own country when you have a society of individuals individuals who are willing to bear the sword? And I don't know that you can. And this makes me think that the church is even more needed to be this respite from a culture that is willing to do violence to other people who we deem to be enemies. We need a picture of a group of people who are unwilling to define anyone as enemy, all as neighbor, and who are unwilling to pick up the sword, but who are willing to self sacrifice.
Derek:That's what brings just peace. Right? We worship the Prince of Peace, and we believe that only He can bring that. And we have to ask, what does it look like to exemplify the Prince of Peace? Final set of questions here.
Derek:How does just peace achieved through war Which we already said it's not really achieved. That's that's really a faulty idea. But how does just peace attempted to be achieved through war compared to biblical peace? Doesn't biblical peace call one to lay down their rights? We see this, of Christians with, whether it's a slave obeying their masters.
Derek:Paul's not saying slavery is good, but he's saying, hey, look, your identity is in Christ. We don't have to to subvert the system. Obey your master and and set an example so that your master can see Christ. But master, if you're a Christian, you better treat your slave like a brother. And when you treat your slave like a brother, he's not gonna be a slave much longer.
Derek:We see this in lawsuits. Christian, isn't it better to be defrauded by a brother than to take take your brother's actions to court before unbelievers and have them see what what Christians are doing to each other? It's like eat the cost. Right? Bear bear the burden.
Derek:Don't don't air this. Right? Just as Christ sacrificed himself for you, sacrificed for your brother or sister, don't take him to court. We see so many examples of that. Rather than use violence and force others to compel, we're to lay down our rights even when there's great injustice done against us.
Derek:You know, even in first Corinthians five where we see the harshest example of church discipline, what we see is an exclusion from community, not violence or or coercion. Paul says of this guy who's having sex with his stepmom, he says, hey, look, this guy's doing terribly evil things, things that not even the Gentiles, not even the unbelievers are doing. Get him out of here. Right? Pray for his flesh to be delivered to Satan.
Derek:Right, pray for his his life to be taken essentially so that his soul may be saved, right? If if he is not a part of the Church anymore, then he is not protected by the Church's prayers and love and community. And when he gets out there, his soul or his flesh is gonna be devoured by Satan. He will not have the protection of the church because he's refusing to be a part of that that sacred body. But he doesn't tell the church to enact justice against him.
Derek:He doesn't tell them to take him to court. He doesn't say anything other than, you're not gonna fellowship with him. Right? He's not a part of you. And then what we see is is later on that guy comes back and he's restored in second Corinthians and Paul says, hey, don't be so hard on him.
Derek:He's repented and he's come back, now accept him. Right? That that's it. That is what the church does. We we are a fellowship of peace, an example of the kingdom lived out here.
Derek:We don't use coercion and we don't seek somebody's death, but we recognize that when somebody is a part of their community, they are protected by our love and partakers of our peace. And somebody who's known that peace, as I think Hebrews shows, and then leaves that peace for for a period, are there without hope. And as as Paul says in first Corinthians five, they are susceptible to to Satan and judgment. Alright. Well, I think that is all for this episode.
Derek:So peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
