It is now over three years since the tragedy of September 11, 2001. It seems that the years have passed rather quickly and wars have raged in the meantime. Our country had enjoyed a fairly long stretch of peace by modern standards, almost thirty years since Vietnam, with very few military actions and those of limited duration. But peace among nations is an illusion, unrest and violence seethed throughout the world, whether we Americans were cognizant of it or not. Civil wars, ethnic cleansing (a polite word for genocide), all these things raged on while America enjoyed peace. In the modern world there is no shining city on the hill, we cannot possibly remain an insular, “peaceful” nation. On September 11 we were attacked and now as Christian Americans we are faced with the dilemma of understanding this war and how we can remain focused on Christ’s imperative to love and the sovereignty of God as our nation wages war. It is my hope that these reflections on the nature of war, making use of the thought of St. Augustine, will add depth to our understanding of where Christianity takes its stand in time of war.
In almost any worldview the objective of war is, in fact, peace. Only a madman makes war for the sake of war. The plain truth is that the goal of the current war is peace but in the complexity of the modern world that objective is not easily achieved. The process has proven to be long and difficult but the objective of peace remains behind it all. War is practical reality in the earthly city, it is bloody, it is horrible, it is recurrent but each time it is waged it eventually restores peace, and no war lasts forever. So it will be with our current struggle eventually one side will win and one side will lose and peace will return, for a while at least. Only the coming of the Kingdom of God will put an end to all wars. Until that day though the tumult of war will continue to tear apart the society of humans. We must face the reality that the absence of war in too many cases leads to injustice and oppression rather than peace. This is why so many theologians from Augustine to Karl Barth and C.S. Lewis cannot morally justify pacifism. Pacifism is an idealist position and we do not live in an ideal world. Reality is as Augustine says, “For it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging wars.” (City of God, XIX.7) To ignore injustice and oppression in the name of peace violates Christ’s commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Insular ignorance and avoidance hearkens back to the wicked days at the end of the book of Judges where everyone “did what was right in their own eyes,” and ignored the suffering of others.
“It comes to this then; a man who has learnt to prefer right to wrong and the rightly ordered to the perverted, sees that the peace of the unjust, compared with the peace of the just, is not worthy even of the name of peace.” (City of God, XIX.12) We pray and hope for peace but we must realize that unless the peace is a peace with justice it is not the will of God. As long as we dwell in the earthly city we will wage war. We must then try our very best to be governed by justice. Through it all we pray that the arrival of the Heavenly City will come and war will be wiped from our nature and replaced once and for all with the love of God. Pray for peace but support those who sacrifice themselves for the sake of justice.
