{"id":37046,"date":"2024-04-03T10:00:08","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T17:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=37046"},"modified":"2024-03-25T09:53:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T16:53:00","slug":"its-just-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/its-just-war\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s just war."},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in a denomination that began with a full-throated support for The United States. In the 1930\u2019s and 40\u2019s, the Foursquare Church, led by the Canadian immigrant Aimee Semple McPherson, supported patriotic musicals, sold war bonds, and prayed against the godless hordes the US seemed to be battling on every front.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

In many ways my church continued to uphold this value. If there was a conflict anywhere in the world that the US (or it\u2019s \u201cfriends\u201d) were involved with, we were hoping and praying it would end, with our side<\/em> as the victors.<\/p>\n

We also prayed for our missionaries regularly, and as a church gave money towards the ministry of reaching godless hordes around the world for Jesus.<\/p>\n

Until I was a teenager it hadn\u2019t occurred to me that the people who we were praying would die in battle[2]<\/a> were the same ones we were praying (and paying) for to reach for Jesus.<\/p>\n

Around the time I figured this out, I declared I was becoming a pacifist, but then realized I couldn\u2019t quite embrace a full version of it. Like my son who when he was 7 proudly proclaimed he was going to become a vegetarian\u2014until he figured out that meant he couldn\u2019t eat cheeseburgers\u2014my desire to embrace pacifism was an emotional decision that I hadn\u2019t well considered, and it didn\u2019t stick.<\/p>\n

But then, I went to a Mennonite university (Fresno Pacific University) and ended up pastoring in a very Quaker town (Newberg, Oregon). Along the way I got to know some very sincere, quite brilliant, and godly people who had sound arguments against war, with the opinion that it was never justified.<\/p>\n

And along the way I also got to know some people (especially those who served in the military or law enforcement) who were very sincere, quite brilliant, and godly people who had sound arguments for why war is sometimes necessary, and even just.<\/p>\n

So, the question is, did I end up as a pacifist or a militarist?<\/p>\n

The answer is, yes.<\/p>\n

In the book The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury<\/em> by Mark LiVecche, a case is made for \u201cJust War\u201d and against pacifism. To him it\u2019s not just a philosophical argument but a very practical one. LiVecche is concerned about the moral harm that veterans, and cultures, suffer when there\u2019s not a solid embrace of the rationale for wars that are necessary for protection or retributive justice.<\/p>\n

I would like to have critically engaged with and done a deeper dive into several of the ideas presented in this book. One of them, for instance, would be how to better guard against the desensitization to human life when killing is increasingly handled in a \u201chands-off\u201d way through drone warfare. Or it might have been helpful to process how the church can proactively extend healing to those veterans who return from war with deep moral wounding because of what they have participated in.<\/p>\n

However, what I\u2019m processing most after engaging with this book is this: Christians like many I grew with can sometimes consider a conflict and ignore the moral and theological implications because \u201cit\u2019s just<\/em> the way war is\u201d. And Christians like those I met along the way can sometimes see that same conflict and conclude it\u2019s wrong because \u201cwar is just always evil.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Where do I land? <\/em>I\u2019ve found articulating exactly where I stand on the Pacifist\/Militarist continuum is like attempting to explain my position in the tension between Calvinism and Arminianism, where unless you are solidly in one or the other of those corners, you\u2019re going to get a lot of flak for expressing an opinion in the middle (an opinion that I can\u2019t quite explain 100% myself… you know, there\u2019s that thing called \u201cmystery\u201d?)<\/em><\/p>\n

So, I\u2019m not arguing against the sometimes necessity of war. I just finished the show Masters of the Air<\/em>; it once again seems clear to me that there are moments when the world needs to stop evil, and the only way to do that is through war, which always includes death.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s one thing to carefully wrestle through some of Augustine\u2019s Just War Theory[3]<\/a>, or Aquinas\u2019 expansion of that theory[4]<\/a>, or even LiVecche\u2019s own arguments and emerge with some grasp of the soul wounds and moral injury war can cause, even in a justified war; it\u2019s another thing altogether to throw uncritical support behind your nation, or the nation your country backs up, as if it were a Sunday afternoon football game, and you are rooting for the guys wearing the right colors.<\/p>\n

I think a pacifist should understand that just war is sometimes necessary. But I also think a militarist must understand that it is never \u201cjust war\u201d. Though the cost sometimes must be paid (for instance to stop Hitler), there is always a cost, not just to the side who \u201clooses\u201d but a moral cost to the side who \u201cwins\u201d too (to both the combatants and the ‘spectators’).<\/p>\n

Maybe an answer is, as LiVecche suggests, to live into the reality of recognizing the \u201cenemy\u201d as our neighbor[5]<\/a>, and to believe that that enemy, too, \u201cis worthy of being loved.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> https:\/\/resources.foursquare.org\/world_war_ii_and_angelus_temple\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> We weren\u2019t praying directly and explicitly for their deaths but praying for \u201cour side\u201d to have victory would produce those results nonetheless (although I have been in a denominational meeting where there was direct prayer against the enemies of the US, with a chaplain asking God to put \u201cwarheads on their foreheads\u201d No kidding!).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God <\/em>(books 19 and 20).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Mark LiVecche, The Good Kill, 7.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Mark LiVecche, The Good Kill, 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I grew up in a denomination that began with a full-throated support for The United States. In the 1930\u2019s and 40\u2019s, the Foursquare Church, led by the Canadian immigrant Aimee Semple McPherson, supported patriotic musicals, sold war bonds, and prayed against the godless hordes the US seemed to be battling on every front.[1] In many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,3098],"class_list":["post-37046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-livecche","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37046"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37049,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37046\/revisions\/37049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}