Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson answers questions on the topic of War in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Male: Dr. Carson, what would be your reaction or response to the developments within the Roman Catholic Church and its teachings on just war, particularly since Vatican II, the emphasis on the presumption against violence, and the increasing concern about not hurting innocents?
Don: The concern not to hurt innocents is always a good one to reiterate, but what has to be recognized is that the strongest voices along these lines in Catholicism have come from Western, somewhat liberalized Catholicism. It’s not what you find in the Catholic Church in Poland, for example, which has been under the feet of another kind of oppression for a long time. They’re the ones who wanted to side with America amongst the European states. Likewise, Slovakia is still predominantly Catholic, and so forth.
So in my judgment, although the bishops of this country have said some important things about watching over the concern of noncombatants, and although it is entirely right to make war the last step in defense, the way they have formulated themselves, it seems to me, has been, in fact, to break the entire heritage of Catholic teaching on just war, which is why people like George Weigel and Cole and others have, in fact, been trying to say, “Don’t turn over so much. In fact, just war theory, properly understood, is the moral high ground.”
So far, there has not been an engagement at that level. There have been, rather, pontifications from various sides, but not much engagement of the actual issues, except in a few journals and that sort of thing.
Male: I was wondering what you thought of Bush’s preemptive policy, if that lines up with just war.
Don: That’s the biggest point of attack by critics of Bush’s policy from a just war perspective. Sir Fred Catherwood in Britain, for example, goes after him on exactly that ground. But that was something I was trying to hint at in the last 10 minutes. When just war theory was formulated, it was at a time when it took months to put together an army, and then you knew when they were coming, and you had options and could send out emissaries and so forth.
If you assume that just war is right in the stopping of aggression where it could kill tens of thousands of people, if you will grant me that for a moment, what does it mean when the means of doing so would be after you’ve smuggled in a tactical nuclear device in a container vessel into New York Harbor? Do you have to lose 50,000 people before you’re allowed to try and stop them? That’s the question.
Then the question becomes whether or not, under restricted conditions, preemption may be a form of defense. The difficulty is as soon as you put it that way it leaves the barn door wide open for all kinds of totalitarian, nasty steps or an aggressive conduct or whatever. So without attempting to judge Bush’s policy, per se, that’s the problem.
On the one hand, just war theory does permit, indeed sanctions, indeed morally mandates a defense where you’re talking about the saving of lives. On the other hand, because of the constrained time now that contemporary warfare brings into play, what precisely does defense look like when, in fact, you could have already lost 100,000 people before the game even begins?
That turns, whether we like it or not, on some kind of preemption. I think a lot of rigorous thought needs to be given to the kind of restrictions that should be placed on preemption to be qualified as just war theory. Sadly, part of the restrictions is going to be in terms of the kind of trust we place in our intelligence, and that is part of the debate nationally now, isn’t it?
So these things are becoming very, very difficult, but unless you say the difficulties mean you have to abandon any possible just war defense until you’ve lost 100,000 people, then it seems to me that sooner or later you are into some kind of preemption, and what we ought to be devoting a lot of thought to is what kind of safeguards we should put around that so this does not become a justification for naked aggression.
Male: Dr. Carson, because the just war criteria involves a human judgment about particular wars, it seems that they’re especially vulnerable to societal pressures and to nationalism. I think this is what’s clearly seen in probably the classic illustration of an unjust war, where the German church, overwhelmingly, the majority, did not seem to apply the criteria faithfully. My question is would true belief in just war and, more importantly, an expression of Christian love involve Christians not merely opposing verbally their own nation, but actually fighting and taking up arms against their nation when it involves itself in an unjust war?
Don: Yes. It’s worth even reflecting on the birth of this nation in this regard. I’m a Canadian, and the justification for the American Revolutionary War was a kind of extension of just war theory. Just war theory was always between states, but this was really rebellion against what was perceived to be home state. Jonathan Edwards, for example, who died just before the Revolutionary War, saw himself basically as a British American gentleman.
At the same time that many Americans were preaching sermons from the Old Testament and saw themselves calling arms to overturn oppression, about 40,000 Americans preached sermons from different texts and went up into what was then called Upper Canada, Ontario, and another 35,000 into Lower Canada, then Quebec, because they felt they should be loyal to King George III. Both were Christians. That’s very painful history.
Nevertheless, there may be a time when you are prepared to pay the penalty to stop massive injustice. It’s too easy an example, but supposing you are a Christian with a sensitive conscience living next to Auschwitz. Do you bomb the tracks to stop the trains from bringing people through as a moral act? I don’t want to be the one who has to make all of those calls personally, but I will not throw stones against those who answer that question with a yes. If you don’t like that example, change it. There are a lot of them around in the last 100 years.
If you’re going to protest and refute things, it may be at the cost simply of deciding to pay with your life. You make your protest, knowing it’s going to cost you. His name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Just war theory itself is nation to nation. What I am saying is that there is a new thing now in that the possibility of genocide comes from small groups of terrorists that are non-national. That is a very difficult one to sort out, but we’re going to have to think it through … without formulas.
Male: Dr. Carson, how do you see the defensive mandate within just war theory dovetailing or not with a directly internal national interest? So if we can see that there are injustices and even genocide going on at many places at once at any given time, in the modern context of the US being the only superpower, how do we decide where the injustice is massive enough and where to intervene or not based on just war theory?
Don: There is no formula. The last point really covers that. That is, you must be quite sure that the force you use is not going to bring about more evil than the evil you’re stopping. That’s a hard equation to make, but it is one you do have to make. There are entailments in even being perceived to be, let alone being, the world’s policemen. There are huge dangers in that. That’s not something we want to do to ourselves psychologically.
On the other hand, most critics do say that had there been a determined effort on the part of NATO and others to stop the Hutus and the Tutsis, a million lives could have been saved, and we didn’t do anything. Why? Insufficient oil interests? It’s a hard one to sort out. I’m not suggesting that we are responsible for stopping everything that in theory we could. There may be concealed entailments down the road we barely are aware of.
I’m not a politician. I’m not a statesman. I don’t want to start pontificating on this one or that one in every case. I think that would be foolish. I am saying that number eight in the list of just war theories warns you against simply assuming that every stopping of something may not have a worse evil in the entailment, and that is what has to be raised again and again and again.
Female: Dr. Carson, in Muslim countries, I’m wondering if democracy is considered a part of the Western secularism, and if it is, then will it ever succeed in Iraq or other Muslim countries?
Don: That is a very, very difficult question to answer. If by democracy you bring with it all of the entailments and expectations of Western liberal democracy, then it’s very difficult to imagine. The trouble is that democracy can mean roughly two things. It can mean rule by the people in some broad sense.
In that sense, you can have democracies, that is, some ruler who is actually voted in by the people and thus has sanction from him, who is nevertheless so corrupt and so monolithic and so intolerant, even with the support of many of his own people, that it is still, strictly speaking, in this narrow sense, a democracy.
But under the theories of Western democracy, there are several things that have to be in place for the term democracy to be applied, and that includes the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and two or three other things. The separation of church and state has been part of it as well. The difficulty is that where there is no vision of a separation of church and state, where the ummah, the people, of Islam are more important than any particular nation, it is very difficult to see how that will come about.
The two countries where it’s closest to coming about, I suppose, are Turkey and Malaysia, but they’re quite different too. Turkey is probably the most secularized of the large Muslim states. Malaysia is different again. There the Malays are thoroughly Muslim, and it’s dangerous for them to convert. The large Chinese population, however, is far more mixed, and they can hold massive Christian conventions and this sort of thing and nobody objects, so long as they just stick with the Chinese race.
Then the tribals are animistic and going either toward Islam or Christianity. That’s sort of open game at the moment. It is democratic in some senses, but it is the Malays who are in power, and where that will end up in the long haul is anybody’s guess. I just don’t know. It is difficult to imagine a Western-style democracy in a devout form of Islam. Democracy in some sense, yes, but it won’t be Western-style, that’s for sure.
Male: Thank you, Dr. Carson. My question is along these lines. Do you see the trend toward secularization, secular governments, sort of pushing the whole just war idea out the door? Is there a way that just war theory can flourish in a government or in a society that is thoroughly secularized?
Don: That’s a very shrewd question. I think the very nature of just war will undergo a change, and it’s not just secularization. I think there is an issue bound up with postmodernism. After 9/11, the newspapers in this country, for the first time in about 20 years, were starting to talk seriously about the nature of evil again. Long essays in Time magazine by Lance Morrow on evil, and so on. It was all the rage for a bit.
Then there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Stanley Fish, who’s one of the sort of semi pop gurus of postmodernism. He was asked, “Have you changed your view on evil in the light of 9/11?” He said, “Of course not.” “What do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, “it all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? From the point of view of the victims jumping out the windows from 96 floors up, it was a pretty awful thing. From the point of view of New Yorkers running away from the dust cloud, it was pretty disgusting. From the point of view of many Muslims around the world, they were dancing in the streets. It all depends on your point of view. Was it a courageous act of heroism or was it barbarous terrorism? It depends on your point of view. It exactly proves my point.”
“So,” he was asked, “if you can’t decide on the evil question there, then do you think they should be stopped?” “Oh yes,” he said. “Why?” “Well, because I belong to the American tribe.” Now that’s really scary, because that’s really “Might makes right. My side must win.” There’s no moral claim there at all. That is scarier yet.
It seems to me that in the public arena we are going to have to say that a postmodern neutrality is morally bankrupt. It is not the higher ground. It is massively intolerant. We are going to have to reengage at the level of fundamental epistemological questions to reestablish the place for just war theory that is genuinely motivated by integrity and love.
Male: Dr. Carson, in the light of “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what’s God’s,” as Christians, what role, if any, does national patriotism play in this just war theory?
Don: Clearly, since we are citizens of both countries, as it were, the eternal heavenly kingdom and the country in which we find ourselves, we owe some loyalty and allegiance to both. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much knowledge of history to know how quickly patriotism can become jingoism too. “My country, right or wrong, but my country.” In which case, you can never prosecute anybody after a melee. You can never think through questions of just war theory. You really can’t. It’s just, “What I do is right.”
I would want to argue in the strongest terms that even though we may in this country be profoundly grateful for many of the freedoms and thank God for them and be proud and grateful for many of the good things, we had better all remember that empires rise and fall. Even the great nations are but the dust on the fine balance, according to Isaiah.
While we should be grateful and thank God for the liberties we have, that just makes us stewards who are all the more responsible to use the resources we have. We are perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be arrogantly pushing Western values as intrinsically superior, and I would be prepared to argue that although democracy is a pretty bad form of government, it’s better than all the rest. That’s what Churchill said. It’s the worst of all forms of government except for all the rest.
So there are some things to be grateful for here, but one of the things a Christian should argue for very strongly is that no political system promises utopia. Let me step back just for a moment here on a related issue. I’m a Canadian, but when I came to this country, I made a point of reading the Federalist Papers, and I tried to read as many primary documents as I could bound up with the founding of the nation and so on, so that I would understand as much as I could. So I speak partly as an outsider but as someone who has read pretty heavily into American history.
One of the things I observed is that at the time of the Federalist Papers, even someone like Madison would argue very strongly that the primary reason for democracy is not because the American people as a whole know best, but because there has to be ownership and accountability. The fact that you have an electoral college instead of direct voting is partly a way of slowing things down and preserving some distance.
The founding fathers didn’t trust the masses any more than they trusted any other part of power. They just didn’t, because they still believed in the heritage of Judeo-Christian thought. Even when they weren’t Christians themselves, they still believed human beings are evil. As a result, part of the point of the exercise in the separation of powers, for example, and in the electoral college and such devices, and having stated terms so that you can turf blighters out every so often…
All of that was on the assumption that there were certain commonalities on the nation on the plus side of moral heritage, and on the other side that you had mechanisms short of war for getting rid of any power block. No power block was allowed to become too strong, including the appeal of the masses as a whole.
Today, no politician talks like that. I don’t care whether you’re Republican or Democrat or Green or anything else. We speak of the great wisdom of the American people or, in Canada, the Canadian people, the British people, the French. It doesn’t matter. “Because the great American people have voted, therefore, this is the wise decision.” Give me a break. If you have more sinners voting, you have more sinners voting. What can I say?
So it is blisteringly important for any Christian with an eternal perspective not to confuse democracy or any political system with the kingdom of God. Here there is no utopia. It is ou-topia; that is, no place. There is no such place. Trust no politician who presents his or her platform as if it is going to solve everything. He is either stupid or a liar, because, in fact, you never solve everything.
This does not mean there are not good things to do and better and inferior policies and you have to make informed decisions in voting. Fine. But there is no utopia until Jesus comes back. That means our strongest and best and noblest allegiance to this nation, which surely ought to call forth more allegiance than is sometimes found on the radical fringes, nevertheless ought to be qualified by a far greater allegiance to the kingdom that endures forever. For the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, and he and he alone will reign forever.
