by Kevin O'Neill, LLB, MSc

Abstract

With 42 million Britons declaring themselves Christian in the 2001 census, the influence of Christian thinking on the morality of war must surely have had a major impact on British attitudes to the conflict in Iraq. The rather loose phrase, “Christian thinking”, is intended to accommodate all forms of opinion which claim to be derived from the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Just as, however, it is proper to defer to the greater expertise of philologists in order to learn the precise literal meaning of ancient texts such as the Gospels, so also is it proper to defer to the expertise of the teachers of the Christian Church so as not to commit the logical fallacy of vicious abstraction – that is, to take Biblical quotes out of context and interpret them in isolation – but rather, to determine the true meaning of the whole of Scripture.

First Principles of Interpretation

A simple example of the above-mentioned fallacy may be seen in the famous misquotation of St. Paul, “Money is the root of all evil”, which abstracts from the actual reading of Scripture: “'The love of money is the root of all evils'”² (my emphasis). (All translated Scriptural quotations in this chapter are from The Jerusalem Bible, London, 1966, except for the title, which is taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible).

In The Medieval Inquisition, Albert C. Shannon of the Order of St. Augustine reminds us of the fundamental law of all literary criticism, that “the author cannot be presumed to contradict himself”. In other words, unless a contrary motive can be proved (as opposed to cynically assumed), ordinary human experience tells us to presume that people speak and write honestly and with integrity. “In the case of the Bible”, Shannon continues, “God Himself is the primary author”³. Questioning of the status of the Bible as the Word of God is irrelevant here because we are assuming a debate among Britain's majority Christians, for whom this is a given fact: we are not discussing whether the Bible is authoritative, but what that authority actually tells us.

Tools for Reconciling Inconsistencies

The existence of apparent inconsistencies and contradictions within the Bible – even within the New Testament alone - has long been recognised by Christian theologians. In Law and Revolution, a book in part devoted to describing the development of the law of the Catholic Church as the first modern Western legal system, Harold Berman notes of the pioneering theologian Peter Abelard (1079-1142), that he “sought by means of scholastic methods of analysis and synthesis to apply rational criteria for judging which revealed truths were of universal validity and which were of only relative validity”.

This nature of the scholastic method of Biblical interpretation must be firmly understood. Berman continues: “This was not, then, the kind of fundamentalism which takes all the words of the text as being equally true under all circumstances; the whole is taken to be true, and within the whole the parts are assigned various shades of truth”⁴ (my emphasis).

The technique of dialectically (i.e. logically) synthesising contradictions is possibly more familiar to the modern reader in the murderous form of Marxist dialectics. The word “dialectic” is related to the word “dialogue”, coming as it does from the ancient Greek belief that knowledge of the truth can be reached through disputation with an opponent. Marx, however, made human lives the objects of his cosmic-level dialectical disputation between the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie”. Treating people, who in reality have rational souls and free-will, as if they were irrational creatures whose lives are controlled by external “scientific” laws of nature, Marx - who magically managed to observe these laws which invisibly compel the rest of us – drew a picture of the world which he hoped would soothe the consciences of the future murderers of whole swathes of the world's population.

Whereas for Marx, however, the “conflict” between the opposites of “working-class” and “middle-class” would be resolved by the destruction of the latter by the former, the object of scholastic method – textual reconciliation – was somewhat more mundane. Nevertheless, the Marxist deception does provide a dramatic illustration of the steps involved in twelfth-century dialectical reasoning: analysis and synthesis of opposites.

Scholastic Dialectics in Practice – the Example of Christ

The exercise of dialectical reconciliation of Scripture can in fact be seen in the thinking of Christ Himself as the following passage from Matthew shows:

“The devil then took him [Jesus] to the holy city and made him stand on the parapet of the Temple. 'If you are the Son of God' he said 'throw yourself down; for scripture says:

He will put you in his angels' charge,

and they will support you on their hands

in case you hurt your foot against a stone'.

Jesus said to him, 'Scripture also says:

You must not put the Lord your God to the test'”⁵.

Here Christ opposes Satan's citation with a contrary quotation from Scripture, and synthesises the two readings into an appropriate conclusion, demonstrated by his not putting God to the test.

Why, we may ask, does He reach this conclusion and not the one desired by the Devil? Clearly He is applying as the overriding principle that which He Himself declares to be the greatest and the first commandment: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind”⁶. It is surely not in keeping with this commandment to presumptuously expect God to 'jump' when told to.

The Gospels on Soldiery

The rule of literary criticism described above (that an author cannot be presumed to contradict himself) is applied with great clarity on the subject of war by St. Augustine (354-430), as quoted by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) in the latter's Summa Theologica: “If the Christian Religion forbade war altogether, those who sought salutary advice in the Gospel would rather have been counselled to cast aside their arms, and to give up soldiering altogether. On the contrary, they were told: “...be content with your pay.” If he commanded them to be content with their pay, he did not forbid soldiering”⁷. The Biblical quote is from Luke 3:14, and is uttered by John the Baptist. Doubting Thomases who insist on citing only Christ's own words (which is incompatible with respecting the status of the whole of Scripture as God's Word) can refer to Matthew 8:10, where Christ likewise does not reproach the centurion for his profession, but rather remarks that “nowhere in Israel have I found faith like [his]”.

“Just War” as an Exception to the Fifth Commandment

This implicit endorsement of the profession of soldiery should be refutation enough of those pacifists and others who insist on elevating such quotes as “Happy the peacemakers”⁸ and “offer the wicked man no resistance”⁹ to the level of fundamental, overriding 'constitutional documents' within the body of Scripture as a whole. Rather than reconciling an apparent contradiction, this is to arbitrarily, and of course unwarrantably for a Christian, invalidate part of the Word of God.

Again, to the doubting Thomases who for their own reasons like to cite Christ's admonition, “[A]ll who draw the sword will die by the sword”¹⁰, Thomas Aquinas presents an apparent contradiction within Christ's own words. Aquinas references Matthew 10:34 by saying, “Those who wage war justly aim at peace, and so they are not opposed to peace, except the evil peace, which Our Lord came not to send upon earth (Matth. x. 34)”¹¹. Christ's exact words are: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth: it is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword”. (In case you were wondering, yes, the same word for 'sword' – 'machaira' - is used in both passages in the original Greek.)

How do we reconcile Christ's apparent militarism and pacifism? Instantly, the objection may be raised that in the latter quote, 'sword' is not meant literally. If, however, we must subject literalism to the requirements of clarity here, why not in the former passage? Thus, Peter Abelard explains Matthew 26:52 as follows: “Hence Truth [i.e. Jesus] says, “Everyone who takes up the sword will perish by the sword.” “Who,” he says, “takes up the sword” out of presumptuousness, not someone to whom it was entrusted for the sake of administering punishment””¹² (my emphasis).

Though he makes no explicit reference to it, Abelard may have had in mind in making this interpretation the following passage from the Gospel of St. John, in which Christ confirms the authority of the State to use force in execution of the law:

“Pilate then said to him, 'Are you refusing to speak to me? Surely you know I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?' 'You would have no power over me' replied Jesus 'if it had not been given you from above'"¹³.

The Unwarranted Invention of Rules of Scriptural Interpretation

The necessity for dialectical reconciliation undermines the pacifist's attempt to invent a 'principle of abrogation' by which the phrase 'turn the other cheek'¹⁴ somehow overrules all other seemingly contradictory Biblical statements. Not only have we demonstrated that such an extreme literalist approach would lead to ludicrous conclusions (for example, that Christ should admonish Himself for drawing the sword!), but, perhaps less obviously, no warrantable justification can be given for attempting to raise God's Word as contained in Matthew 5:39, in and of itself any higher than any other verse in any other chapter in any other Biblical book. The Gospels are not a codification of Divine law with a given hierarchy of chapters and verses; rather, they are written in narrative form and must be subject to common sense rules of interpretation.

What, then, is the Hierarchy within Divine Law?

We have already quoted the greatest and first commandment above, from Matthew 22:37. In that passage Jesus continues, “The second resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law”¹⁵. What, however, does it mean to love your neighbour? In answering the question. “Who is my neighbour?”, Christ related the parable of the Good Samaritan¹⁶. From that famous tale we can infer that to love a man in distress it is not enough to wish him well from the bottom of our hearts – we must express that love in deeds.

By extension we can say that to defend (by action) a man who is in the process of being beaten by brigands is to love him. For pacifism to succeed it must assert that the brigand should also be the object of our love in that we should not use force to resist him. Here, however, we have another moral dilemma: not to use force where one is able (common sense dictates that force is required to protect the victim of an attack) is to fail to exercise charity; but, for the pacifist, to exercise force at all is prohibited.

On the subject of moral/legal dilemmas, the following quote from an anonymous commentator on Gratian's Decretum - the first systematic exposition of Church law (c.1140) - is apposite: “[I]t must be stated that no one can really be in doubt between two evils in this way. For it would then follow that necessity can make one do something evil. But...if necessity really requires us to do something evil, then the [law] that prohibited [it] would be impossible to obey..... Therefore, the person's doubt cannot really arise from the matter itself, but it must arise in the mind and from foolish opinion”¹⁷. In other words, dialectical (that is, logical) reconciliation is again required.

Why Have Morality?

At this point it is worth asking a fundamental question: what is the purpose of morality? What goes on in a person's mind when he presumes to demand of another that he, for example, “stop the war”? In the Christian worldview, which has infused British culture to such an extent that its unique influence often goes unnoticed, it is precisely because of the two afore-mentioned Divine commandments that we exercise prudence in our lives. We act morally out of love for God who offers us eternal life if we keep His commandments (Matthew 19:17), and, secondarily but relatedly, out of love for our neighbour who has, with us, been given this same promise.

From this we can see that it is out of keeping with Christian love for our neighbour to allow him to triumph where he has chosen to do evil; that is, to do evil of which he is clearly the proximate cause, such as attempting murder, but not “evil” as defined by the national Socialist as inherent in being Jewish or by the international Socialist as inherent in being “middle class”.

Here then we have our reconciliation of what to do when faced with the dilemma of not helping one neighbour who is under attack from another neighbour. Harold Berman notes that, historically, Church lawyers extrapolated from Imperial Roman law – regarded by contemporary jurists as “written reason” - the legal principle that “force may be used to repel force”, in order to accommodate the fact that, while both the Old and New Testaments forbid killing, “yet both give examples in which the use of force is approved”. From this synthesis, Berman explains, they derived “a general concept of justification for the limited use of force”, applying it not only to such legal issues as force used in the execution of the law and in self-defence, “but also to political and theological questions concerning a “just war””¹⁸.

Administration of Justice versus Glorification of Injustice

Among the great systematisers of Christian doctrine in the crucial formative period of Western law to which we have been referring (roughly from the mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century), a great debt is owed to St. Anselm (1033-1109), who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Further on in Law and Revolution, Harold Berman describes how it is to Anselm that Western law owes its understanding of punishment for crime for which one is morally responsible as necessary for the preservation of justice¹⁹.

On this subject of State punishment (related, as we have seen, to the idea of the just war), St. Anselm refutes the pacifist's desired inference from viciously abstracting the Scriptural quotation, “Vengeance is mine [i.e. God's]”²⁰, by noting (in accordance with, though without mentioning, John 19:11, quoted above): “[W]hen the powers of the world rightly accomplish this end [i.e. vengeance], God himself does it who appointed them for the purpose”²¹.

Anselm further observes, “Injustice...if it is cancelled by compassion alone, is more free than justice [which is regulated by law], which seems very inconsistent. And to [this] is also added a further incongruity, viz., that it makes injustice like God. For as God is subject to no law, so neither is injustice”²². Moreover, with reference to the political prelude to the recent war, the idea of providing an unlimited time period for justice to be administered is indistinguishable from not requiring it at all.

Returning to this subject later in the same work, Anselm notes, “[I]f God abates the punishment [which is due for sin, He] makes man happy on account of his sin, because he has what he ought not to have” (my emphasis). Faced with his interlocutor's subsequent 'despair' of God's mercy (Cur Deus Homo is written in dialogue form), Anselm replies, “God is merciful.... But we are speaking of that exceeding pity by which he makes man happy after this life. And...happiness ought not to be bestowed upon any one whose sins have not been [paid for] according to the extent of sin”²³.

To condemn God for His justice, either directly in terms of His damnation of the unrepentant, or indirectly in terms of punishment through His lawful temporal ministers (i.e. the State), is not to be merciful to the unrepentant criminal but to be 'unmerciful' to God and the State: for why, in all fairness, should one 'stubborn will' be preferred to another? In truth, such condemnation is an act of partisan rebellion against God.

It is undeniable that the consequence of the pacifist alternative to the Christian solution would be to allow evil to triumph. There is no other possibility unless one believes, heretically and contrary to all human experience, that human nature can be magically changed by an act of wishful thinking; and this is no more likely than that a starving man can be fed by magic. A Divine miracle, it is true, could accomplish both these things, but we have already seen that it is not our place to put the Lord our God to the test.

When is a War Just?

In this seemingly roundabout way, it has been the intention of this chapter to praise the heroism of the Allied soldiers, and the courage of their governments, in their removal of the national Socialist regime of Saddam Hussein. Is such a war permissible according to Christian morality? I think the answer to this question should be obvious by now, but for emphatic confirmation we may quote Aquinas again: “True religion looks upon as peaceful [that is, in accordance with seeking a just Christian peace] those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandisement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good”²⁴. This is how President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have described their intentions, and nothing but unfounded cynicism has gone into disproving them.

What of Martyrdom?

In Matthew 19:16-22 we can see best illustrated the constant teaching of the Catholic Church that a distinction must be made between on the one hand, the Ten Commandments, which apply to all – rich and poor, soldier and civilian - and are necessary for salvation, and what are called “counsels of perfection” which are the special witness or calling of the comparatively few. Another, perhaps more wince-inducing example of such counselling is contained in the prior passage of Matthew 19:12: “[T]here are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can” (my emphasis).

This latter proviso, undoubtedly read with much relief by most Christian men, clearly refutes any puritanical attempts to suggest that all Christians, to attain salvation, must accept what for most would be unbearable burdens. Thus to turn one's cheek to the extent that one suffers death as a witness for Christ is truly to be blessed, but not something to be demanded of all²⁵. Anyone who makes such a demand of his neighbour is therefore putting himself above God, Who, in His mercy, requires nothing so harsh of us.

Finally, returning to the question of war and soldiery, even the literalist cannot claim that Matthew 5:39 requires us to turn our neighbour's cheek. Thus when the State sees a criminal triumph, or the United States see a dictator persevere, they fulfil their Christian duty in executing the moral law and punishing the evil-doer.

Conclusion: The Soldier as an Example to us all

In his second letter to Timothy, St. Paul encourages the former to endure the hardships of his work in preaching the Gospel. By way of example to him, he lists three professions in which such dedication is essential: that of the soldier, the athlete and the farmer respectively²⁶. Of the first he notes, “In the army, no soldier gets himself mixed up in civilian life, because he must be at the disposal of the man who enlisted him”. In this spirit, the Allied soldiers in Iraq have ignored the spiteful calumnies of many in their home countries, and risked their lives for their Iraqi brothers²⁷. Such action is worthy not only of our pride but, more importantly, our praise.

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