What about war?

Question 12006

Just war thinking has been the settled position of most Christians for something like sixteen centuries, and yet I find that very few believers could tell you what it actually claims. War is one of the most painful realities in human history, and the Christian conscience has never been comfortable with it. Nor should it be.

The range of Christian opinion runs from absolute pacifism at one end to something close to holy war at the other. Scripture does not hand us a single proof text that settles it. What it does hand us is a framework built out of God’s character, the reality of a fallen world, and the responsibilities He has given to governing authorities.

The wars of the Old Testament

The Old Testament is full of battle. The conquest under Joshua, the campaigns of David, the prophetic oracles against the nations. Modern readers recoil, and I understand why. But these were not human land grabs dressed up in religious language. They were specific acts of divine judgement carried out by a theocratic nation acting under direct instruction.

The destruction of the Canaanite peoples is explicitly described as judgement for sin, and it was delayed for four hundred years until “the iniquity of the Amorites” was complete (Genesis 15:16; Deuteronomy 9:5). That is not the behaviour of a capricious deity. It is astonishing patience, followed at last by reckoning.

What I will not do is draw a straight line from Jericho to any modern conflict. No nation today is Israel. No government today receives direct commands to make war on its neighbours. Confusing theocratic Israel with a modern state under common grace is a hermeneutical mistake with a body count, and Christians have made it more than once.

Did Jesus rule out force altogether?

The pacifist reading takes its stand on the Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies (Matthew 5:44). Turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39). Blessed are the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9). I want to say clearly that this is a serious position held by serious believers, and it should never be caricatured as cowardice.

But read the cheek saying in context. The blow described is a backhanded slap to the right cheek, an insult rather than an assault. Jesus is addressing personal retaliation and wounded pride, not the question of whether a state may resist an invading army. The passage is about my honour, not about my neighbour’s survival.

Notice too what Jesus and the apostles never do. They never tell a soldier to leave the army. John the Baptist told soldiers not to extort and to be content with their wages (Luke 3:14). Peter preached to Cornelius, a centurion, and no demand to resign appears anywhere in the account (Acts 10). That silence is loud.

Two spheres, not two standards

The distinction that unlocks this for me is between personal ethics and public responsibility. I am forbidden to avenge myself (Romans 12:19). The very next paragraph says the governing authority bears the sword as God’s servant to execute wrath on the wrongdoer (Romans 13:4). Paul placed those two paragraphs side by side deliberately.

That is not a double standard. It is a recognition that God has assigned different functions to different offices. My heart is to hold no grudge. The magistrate’s duty is to restrain evil so that the weak are not devoured. A police officer who refused to intervene in an assault on the grounds of turning the other cheek would have misunderstood both his job and his Bible.

What the just war criteria actually require

The just war tradition, developed by Augustine and refined by Aquinas and others, is not a licence. It is a set of restraints. The cause must be just, ordinarily defence against aggression or the protection of the innocent. The authority must be legitimate, not a private faction. The intention must be right, aimed at peace rather than plunder or revenge.

Then come the tests that governments most often fail. War must be a last resort after other means are genuinely exhausted. The harm caused must be proportionate to the objective. There must be a reasonable prospect of success, since throwing lives away for a gesture is not righteousness. And combatants must be distinguished from non-combatants, because the deliberate targeting of civilians is always wrong.

Applied honestly, just war criteria condemn a great many wars that Christians have blessed. That is rather the point. The tradition exists to make the case for war harder to make, not easier.

The soldier and the believer

Can a Christian serve in the armed forces? I believe so, and I have known godly men and women who have. The soldier who serves under lawful authority, who obeys the constraints of proportion and discrimination, and who refuses unlawful orders, is not living in contradiction to the teaching of Jesus.

What that soldier cannot do is check his conscience at the gate. Obedience has limits. A command to target civilians, to mistreat prisoners, or to participate in an obviously unjust campaign is a command a believer must refuse, whatever it costs. We must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29) is not a slogan for comfortable situations.

Praying for peace in a world that keeps choosing war

Paul tells Timothy to pray for kings and all in high positions, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life” (1 Timothy 2:1-2). Peace is what we are told to ask for. It is not a naive request. It is an acknowledgement that peace is God’s gift rather than humanity’s achievement, and that governments need prayer precisely because their decisions carry such weight.

I also think the church has a duty of realism here. We are not building the kingdom through geopolitics. Wars and rumours of wars are part of the landscape until the King returns (Matthew 24:6). That is not fatalism. It stops us from investing ultimate hope in political settlements that were never designed to carry it.

Where our hope finally rests

The prophets look forward to a day when nations “shall beat their swords into ploughshares” and “neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). That is not achieved by treaty. It arrives with a Person. When Jesus reigns from Jerusalem, war ends because the one thing that produces it, the human heart in rebellion, will finally be dealt with.

Until then I pray for peace, I support the protection of the innocent, and I refuse to pretend that any war is good. The best that can be said of any conflict is that it was less evil than the alternative. That is a sober verdict, and it should keep us from ever waving flags with too much enthusiasm.

What the church has actually said down the years

The earliest Christians lived as a persecuted minority with no access to political power, and much of the surviving second-century material leans away from military service. That is worth knowing, though it is also worth remembering that their situation was not ours, and that the New Testament itself never issues the prohibition some later writers assumed.

Augustine, writing after the empire had turned, set out the framework that became the just war tradition, and Aquinas sharpened it. The Reformers took it up. Baptists have generally sat somewhere between that tradition and a strong emphasis on liberty of conscience, which is why our congregations have often held both soldiers and conscientious objectors without splitting over it.

I find that history clarifying rather than authoritative. The church has never been of one mind here, and anybody who claims a single Christian answer that every faithful believer has always held is not describing the record. What the record does show is a persistent refusal to bless war lightly, which is a good instinct to inherit.

There is one more thing that history teaches, and it is uncomfortable. Churches have a poor record of resisting the wars their own governments wanted. When the flags come out and the papers turn patriotic, pulpits tend to follow. If the just war criteria mean anything, they must be capable of producing a verdict that our own side does not want to hear, and a church that has never once reached that verdict should ask itself why.

So, now what?

War is never good. At its very best it is the least bad option available in a world where evil sometimes has to be resisted by force to prevent something worse. The just war framework exists to keep that judgement honest, and applied properly it makes going to war far harder than most governments would like.

So pray for peace. Hold your leaders to a standard higher than convenience. Honour those who serve while refusing to sanctify what they are sometimes sent to do. And keep your eyes on the Prince of Peace, because He is the only one who will ever end this. You may also want to read whether Christians should be pacifists, along with the question of capital punishment and what Scripture allows in self-defence.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

Matthew 5:9 (ESV)