There is a peculiar habit of mind that grips the modern person, including the modern Christian, when the topic of war arises. The habit is to assume, almost without examination, that war is the practical answer to human conflict and that those who suggest otherwise have wandered into a sentimental garden where the hard realities of history do not intrude. The pacifist, on this account, is the dreamer. The warmaker is the realist. The pacifist offers ideals; the warmaker offers, or claims to offer, results.
I want to examine this assumption carefully, because the question of whether war works is more complicated than it first appears, and the careless answer is as misleading as the careless question. The complication is this: the Christian who confesses Jesus as Lord cannot simply accept the world’s frame, in which the question “does it work” is asked as though the answer would settle the matter. To accept that frame is already to have lost the most important argument, which concerns what kind of story we are in, what time it is in that story, and what counts as working. And yet there is something to be said about effectiveness, narrowly understood, that the warmaking tradition has not wanted to hear and that the Christian witness for peace has sometimes been too embarrassed by its own theology to say plainly. Both things must be said together, in the right order, with the theological claim governing and the practical claim serving.
This essay attempts that double saying. I will argue, first, that the question of effectiveness, as the world poses it, is not the question the Christian is finally answerable to. I will argue, second, that even when the question is posed in the world’s own terms and answered on the world’s own evidence, war does not perform as advertised. These two claims belong together. The first prevents the second from becoming a new kind of Constantinianism, in which the church justifies its peace witness by demonstrating its utility to the powers. The second prevents the first from becoming a quietism in which the church withdraws into the purity of its convictions and lets the world believe whatever it wishes about the actual outcomes of its violence. The cross is not useful in the way armies are supposed to be useful. But armies are not useful in the way they claim to be either. These are different points, and they require different kinds of argument.
The Frame Within Which the Question Is Asked
Begin with the question itself. “Does war work?” The question presupposes a great deal. It assumes that we know what we mean by “working,” that we share a standard of effectiveness against which various means might be tested, and that the Christian and the warmaker are looking at the same field of action and asking which tools accomplish their common purposes. None of these presuppositions can withstand scrutiny.
What does it mean for war to work? The classical just war tradition, in its most honorable form, offers a careful answer: war works when it secures a just peace, restores rightful order, and is conducted with proportionality and discrimination so that the harms inflicted are not disproportionate to the goods secured. This is a serious answer that deserves respect. The just war tradition is not, as some pacifist polemics suggest, a cynical rationalization for whatever the prince wishes to do. It is a serious moral tradition that has insisted, against the prince’s preferences, that not every war is just and that not every method is permissible even in a just war. Augustine’s tears over the necessity of force, Aquinas’s careful conditions, Vitoria’s defense of the Indians against Spanish brutality, and Ramsey’s insistence on the immunity of noncombatants: these are not nothing. The Christian who dismisses this tradition without engaging with it has not done his homework.
But the tradition rests on assumptions that the Christian has reason to question, and these assumptions are not incidental to it but constitutive of it. The first assumption is that the political order that war is meant to defend is the order to which the Christian owes ultimate loyalty, or at least that the order’s preservation is identical to the preservation of God’s purposes in history. This was the Constantinian settlement, and the just war tradition is its child. The second assumption is that the Christian, asking what is to be done in extremis, asks the question in the same voice as the prince and reaches conclusions calibrated to the prince’s situation. The Christian becomes the chaplain to power, articulating the conditions under which power may use its sword, rather than the witness against power, asking whether the sword is the instrument the gospel has placed in the church’s hands at all. The third assumption, perhaps most importantly, is that effectiveness is measured within the horizon of the present age, in terms of outcomes recognizable to those who do not confess that the decisive event of history has already occurred and the powers have already been disarmed.
It is this third assumption that the Christian must, I think, reject most strenuously, because it governs all the others. If the decisive thing about history is what happens in the next generation of geopolitics, then, of course, one will calibrate one’s actions to secure favorable outcomes in that generation, and armed force will be among the available instruments. But the Christian confession is precisely that the decisive thing about history has already happened, in a Galilean province under Roman occupation, when a Jewish rabbi was crucified by the legitimate authorities and raised on the third day. The shape of history has already been determined. We are not waiting to see how things turn out. We know how things turn out, and that knowledge frees us from having to secure outcomes by our own violence, because the outcomes are not finally ours to secure.
To the realist, this may sound like quietism, but it is the opposite of quietism. The Christian who has been freed from having to manage history is not freed for inactivity but for a different activity, the activity of witness, the patient construction of communities in which the politics of the new age are practiced amid the old. This activity is not less political than war but more so, because it rejects the powers’ definition of what counts as politics. It affirms that the gospel has political content, that the church is a political body, and that the church’s practices, including baptism, eucharist, and the binding and loosing of conflicts within the body, are themselves political acts that constitute an alternative to the politics of the sword.
The Powers and Their Captivity
To make it clearer why war cannot do what it claims to do, I have to introduce a category that the modern political imagination has largely forgotten, yet that the New Testament treats with great seriousness. This is the category of the principalities and powers. Paul speaks of them constantly and gives us a way of seeing the political world that the modern eye has lost.
In Paul’s account, the powers are the structures of human social existence: the political institutions, the economic systems, the cultural patterns, and the ideologies and traditions that organize collective life. They are not merely human inventions, though they are not separate from human inventiveness either. They have a kind of life of their own. They were created good, for the ordering of human community in the service of God’s purposes, but they are fallen, and their fallenness consists in their pretension to be ultimate and in demanding the loyalty that belongs to God alone. The powers tell us that they are necessary. They tell us that without them human life would dissolve into chaos. They tell us that we must serve them, sacrifice to them, and, if necessary, kill for them. And in their fallen pretension, they are believed.
The cross, on the Pauline account, is the event in which the powers are unmasked and disarmed. They are unmasked because, in the crucifixion of Jesus, they reveal what they truly are: instruments of death, willing to crucify the Son of God in the name of order. They are disarmed because they are shown not to be finally in charge, not finally able to determine the outcome, and not finally worthy of the loyalty they demand. The resurrection vindicates this unmasking. The Lord they killed is raised, and the powers stand exposed as the penultimate realities they always were.
What does this have to do with war? Everything. War is the most spectacular display of the powers’ pretension to ultimacy. It is the moment when the nation declares, with maximum force, that it is worth dying for and worth killing for, that its preservation is the highest good, and that those who refuse to participate in its violence are traitors to the human project. War depends for its meaning on the lie that the political order it defends is ultimate, that its preservation is what history requires, and that human flourishing is impossible without it. The Christian who goes to war has, whatever his intentions, accepted this lie. He has agreed that the powers are what they claim to be. He has, in his willingness to kill and be killed, performed an act of worship directed at something other than God.
This is why the question of war’s effectiveness, posed in the world’s terms, is the wrong question. The world asks whether war achieves the ends the powers set for it. The Christian asks whether the powers are ends worth achieving. The answer, given by the cross, is that they are not. The political orders that war defends are penultimate, fallen, on their way to being put under the feet of the risen Christ. They are not worth killing for, because killing reinforces their pretension to be what they are not and because it itself participates in the pattern of violence by which the powers maintain their lying claim to ultimacy. The Christian’s refusal of war is not, fundamentally, a calculation about consequences. It is a refusal to bow at the altar that war erects.
What Then of Effectiveness
Having said all this, and having insisted that the Christian is not ultimately answerable to the world’s question about whether his peace works, I now want to take up that question in the world’s own terms and offer some observations. I do so for two reasons. The first is that the Christian witness for peace, while not grounded in claims about effectiveness, need not concede that its position is ineffective. The world has told a particular story about its violence, and that story is not actually true even on the world’s own evidence. The Christian who lets the world’s story stand unexamined has done the world no favor. The second reason is more pastoral. The Christian who is being asked to consider the gospel of peace is often paralyzed by the assumption that peace would be lovely if only it worked, and that since it does not work, he must, regretfully, do what is necessary. Loosening the grip of that assumption, even a little, makes space for the gospel to be heard.
What can be said about war’s effectiveness on the world’s own terms? A few points, briefly.
First, war’s consequences are spectacularly unpredictable, in ways that defeat the calculus by which it is supposed to be justified. The First World War was launched by men who believed it would be brief and decisive. It was neither, and its consequences included the conditions for the rise of fascism and a second war worse than the first. The Second World War defeated Nazism, a great good, but it also produced the partition of Europe, the Stalinist domination of half the continent, the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian populations, and the nuclear standoff that has hung over every subsequent generation. The American war in Vietnam did not prevent what it was launched to prevent. The American war in Iraq produced, instead of a flowering Mesopotamian democracy, the conditions for sectarian civil war and the rise of new and more virulent jihadist movements. I list these not to score polemical points but to note a structural feature of war as an enterprise: it produces consequences its planners did not foresee and would not have chosen, and the calculus by which they justified it is therefore already invalidated by the time the war is over.
Second, war as actually conducted does not respect the limits that the just war tradition seeks to set. The tradition insists on the immunity of noncombatants. The history of modern war is the history of that immunity’s collapse, decision by decision, each defensible in terms of military necessity, until the protection of civilians becomes a fiction even the combatants no longer believe in. Aerial bombardment of cities in the Second World War, the bombing of dikes and villages in Vietnam, and the use of indiscriminate weapons in more recent conflicts: none of this was supposed to happen on the tradition’s own terms. All of it happened repeatedly in wars that the tradition was held to authorize. In this sense, the tradition has consistently failed to govern the practice it claims to regulate.
Third, the assumption that armed force is the only effective response to tyranny is contradicted by a substantial historical record of nonviolent resistance that has changed regimes and orders. I would not place too much weight on this, for the reasons given above, but the record is not nothing. The Indian independence movement, the American civil rights movement, the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, the fall of Marcos in the Philippines, and the dismantling of South African apartheid: these were not won primarily by armed struggle. They were won, in significant part, by sustained campaigns of nonviolent action that mobilized populations a violent revolutionary cannot and produced political orders less burdened by the formative habits of killing. The Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, who refused the sword and were killed for their refusal, did not bring down the regimes that killed them. But they preserved a witness that has continued to bear fruit five centuries later, and the regimes that killed them have long since passed away. Effectiveness is a longer story than the next geopolitical cycle.
These three observations, taken together, do not prove that nonviolence always works or that war never accomplishes anything. They establish something more modest. The world’s confidence that armed force is the realistic instrument and nonviolent witness is the unrealistic ideal cannot be sustained by the world’s own evidence. The instrument the world has trusted has consistently failed to deliver on its promises. The instruments the world has dismissed have, in ways the world prefers not to notice, often delivered more. On examination, the realist turns out to be the person who clings to a particular set of tools regardless of the evidence and calls that clinging realism. On examination, the pacifist turns out to be the person willing to consider the evidence, including evidence the dominant tradition would prefer not to count.
On the Witness of the Early Church
Before its alliance with the empire, the early church generally refused military service. The historical record on this is more contested than some pacifist treatments have suggested, and I do not want to oversimplify. There were Christians in the Roman armies, particularly toward the end of the pre-Constantinian period, and the patristic witness is not univocal. But the dominant pattern, well attested in writers from Tertullian to Origen to Lactantius, was that Christians did not bear the sword, and that this refusal was understood as a corollary of their confession that Jesus is Lord.
What is relevant to our present purposes is not the historical detail but the shape of early Christian self-understanding. The early Christians did not refuse military service because they had calculated that nonviolence would be more effective than violence. They refused it because they believed that the powers of the present age had been unmasked at the cross and that the Christian’s loyalty was to a different Lord whose kingdom was not of this world’s pattern. Their refusal was first theological and only secondarily, if at all, calculative. And yet they outlasted the empire that despised them. The witness they bore, the communities they formed, the practices they sustained: these proved more enduring than the legions that crucified their Lord and persecuted his followers. There is something in this for our own thinking, though I would not press it too far. The faithfulness of the church does not depend on outlasting empires. But it has, in fact, often outlasted them, and this is at least worth noticing.
The Constantinian settlement of the fourth century changed the question. With the empire’s conversion, or rather its adoption of the church as one of its instruments, the Christian was placed in the position of having to reconcile his confession with his new responsibility for the order imposed by the empire. The just war tradition, in its mature form, is the product of this reconciliation. It is an attempt to think Christianly about the use of the sword that the church has now inherited from the empire. I do not say it is a dishonest attempt. I say it is an attempt conditioned by a settlement that the New Testament does not anticipate and that the early church would have found incomprehensible. To unwind that settlement, to recover what the church was before it became the empire’s chaplain, is the patient work the peace tradition within Christianity has been engaged in for many centuries, with mixed success and substantial resistance.
Concluding Reflections
I have argued two things, in a particular order. First, I have argued that the Christian’s witness for peace is not grounded in calculations of effectiveness but in the confession that the cross has unmasked the powers and disarmed their pretension to ultimacy. The Christian refuses war not because it fails to work but because participating in it would constitute a worship of the powers that the gospel has overcome. Second, I have argued that even when one takes up the question of effectiveness in the world’s own terms, war does not perform as advertised. Its consequences are unpredictable. Its restraints are not respected. Its alternatives have a record more substantial than the dominant tradition allows.
The order of these arguments matters. To begin with effectiveness and to ground the peace witness in its supposed utility is to remain within the Constantinian frame. It is, in effect, to tell the powers that the church has a better technique for achieving their objectives and to ask them to consider hiring it. This is a confusion. The church is not in the business of offering improved techniques to the powers. The church is the body of those who have confessed that the powers are not in charge, and whose common life is meant to be a foretaste of the order that is coming and that has, in a hidden way, already arrived.
But once the theological frame is in place, practical observations also have their proper place. They serve as a kind of cleanup operation, clearing away the obstacles that keep the gospel of peace from being heard. The person who has been told that war is the realistic answer needs to hear that, on the world’s own evidence, it is not a particularly good answer to anything. This hearing does not make him a Christian. It does not constitute the gospel. But it removes one of the lies that has kept the gospel from being taken seriously, and that removal is its own kind of service.
The work before us, then, is not finally the work of argument, though argument has its place. It is the work of forming communities where the politics of the new age are practiced, where conflicts are addressed through the practices the New Testament offers, and where the body of Christ exists as the visible alternative to the body politic that demands our worship at the altar of war. This work is slow. It is unglamorous. It does not make headlines. It produces no immediate geopolitical results that can be cited to the powers as evidence of the church’s usefulness. But it is the work the cross has placed before us, and I am persuaded it is the work in which history is actually being made, even when history’s appointed observers are busy attending to the spectacle of the latest war and writing as though the spectacle were what mattered.
War does not work, in the limited sense in which the powers themselves understand “working.” But the deeper point is that the question of working, posed in the powers’ terms, is not the one the church is finally answerable to. The question the church is answerable to is whether its life, in this generation as in every generation since the resurrection, bears witness to the Lord whose victory has already determined the shape of history and whose peace, hidden but real, is the truth about the world that war has been trying, with diminishing success, to obscure.
