When Kings go off to War

So I was reading a blog post by Catholic Answers Live radio host Patrick Coffin the other day, specifically this one. It's an interesting commentary about the attitudes that many atheists tend to have towards believers, but what really stood out to me was the silly rationalization that Dr. Richard Dawkins gave for not debating Dr. William Lane Craig. He doesn't debate people who support genocide? Really? I feel like if I was given the chance to confront a man on (what I considered) his dangerous ideological fallacies, I would jump on it. How else can progress be made?

But regardless, the point I found interesting was one that many, many atheists I know have thrown out there, and one that most of my Christian friends try to duck or ignore. Namely, how can we justify our belief in an all loving God, a God that is, in fact, Love itself, when that same God ordered the genocidal butchering of entire cities that occur time and again in the Old Testament? How could that possibly jive with Christ's message of "Do to others as you would have them do to you"?

Modern Christianity has many advantages. We have the ability to look backwards over thousands of years, and see a lot of the big picture. What may have been confusing for a Jew in antiquity can become crystal clear for those of us that can look and see how the hardships of his life pointed so definitively towards its fulfilment in Jesus. But it also has its disadvantages. We are so disconnected from the culture and norms of the apostolic age and beyond that we often fail to see the context in which some of those hardships could have occurred.

God chose to reveal Himself to the world through the Israelites. He set these people aside as His chosen, to slowly but surely prepare the world for His coming as the incarnate Son. We know this already, because we get to look back on the entirety of the now-closed canon of Scripture and this this as we read through the New Testament. But we often forget that it was slowly-but-surely. The Bible was written over the course of thousands of years, and in that time God's chosen people changed in many ways. We can see the covenant grow from a marriage with Adam and Eve, a family with Noah, a household with Abraham, a tribal nation with Moses, a kingdom with David, and of course the fulfillment of it all with Christ when the world was ready to begin accepting Him.

And just as we see the covenant grow, we see the challenges posed by the world around them grow as well. For much of their existence, the Israelites were a collective of a fiercely tribal system surrounded by polytheistic paganism on every side. If they didn't have that danger to face, I have my doubts as to if they could even have lived with each other without resorting to full-time violence. The only thing holding them together over the long run was their desire to defend themselves from the darkness around them, and even that wasn't enough oftentimes.

How could the nation that was was meant to be the light in the darkness, to be the catalyst of salvation in the world and gather all people to itself accomplish any of this when it couldn't even keep itself together?

Last week, we talked about the idea of Just War. The world that ancient Israel existed in was one of violence and war. It was commonplace for a city-state to simply up and lay siege to the lands of another for little to no reason, so much so that spring was even considered the time of year when kings go off to war. If you did not go conquering, you were likely to be conquered.

As I said before, the development of God's people was progressive. Christ even noted this when He told the leaders of the Temple that their understanding of marriage was incomplete, that Moses had allowed divorce because the people simply were not yet ready to hear the full truth that Christ was now presenting to them. Things that they had always regarded as truth and law were being challenged by the very one who put them into law in the first place, as He showed them the next and final step in the story of salvation.

Because in the end, it is a story of salvation. As I'm sure you've noticed has become a semi-common theme in my entries, people are messed up, and as a result salvation history is messy. In it, Israel represents the children of God, those that are meant to be pure and holy. But as in our personal lives, sin finds a way to creep and slither in, infecting and tempting the people of God. The nations and paganism around them represent that sin, that temptation. Although hard to understand then you look at the individual event from the comfort of your 21st century home, in the grand picture it begins to make sense.

If you have cancer, you do not sit by and wait, you attack it. And you do not stop when you've eradicated 99% of it. It's a zero-sum game. You get it all, or you die. When the ancient Jewish tribes were commanded by God to eradicate the pagan nations around them, they were being commanded to respond to sin in the only way they culturally and contextually were prepared to. God tolerated an evil in order to work it towards the ultimate good, as He does all things. Although initially counter-intuitive, without war and violence Christ's message of peace could never have happened.

Ultimately, these are hard verses for us to understand, and oceans of ink have been spilled trying to make sense of them. There are many mysteries of our faith that we will never fully grasp in this life. Grasping how evil can ultimately produce good is one of the most profound. A particular theme in the ancient scriptures is that as God is ordering His people to do one thing or another, although that thing may have immediate practical uses (destroy this city before they destroy you or you become landless nomads for all time), it fits in the grand design in a way that can only be understood in the light of Christ a thousand years later (eradicate sin before you are damned).

But the unfortunate reality is that when an atheist, or anyone else who has no desire to see scripture in any sort of context, comments on these passages, there are too few of us who stand ready to challenge them on any sort of intellectual level. So my challenge to you is to steep yourself in scripture, and never forget both the narrow and wide context of God's mercy.

A Well-Formed Conscience

The concept of Just War has been done to death. I was going to talk about it a bit, but we all pretty much get it. War is never the ideal, but when pushed to certain circumstances, a war can be considered just. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas pretty well have the subject covered. If you want to read about it, by all means, go nuts.

So instead, I'm going to sort of branch out from it. First off, I want to briefly hit on the issue that many people pick up, namely that war is never ever ever okay ever for any reason ever. Basically, I tend to agree, except for the tiny issue that humanity is profoundly messed up at a very fundamental level. Everything we do turns to dust and ruin. It's messy being people. Imagine you're a parent, and you come home one day after work to find your entire kitchen has been smeared with brown paint and there sitting in the middle of it all is your naked, smiling toddler, proud at his contribution to household beautification.

God, for all intents and purposes, deals with that every moment of every day with every single one of His billions of children. Thank goodness He's more understanding than we are.

The reality is that war and conflict exist, and nearly always have. This does not make violence the human ideal, but it does make it the human condition. They are a reality that we need to deal with directly, and with the understanding that we can't just simply wave them off with claims of Christian pacifism.

But all that aside, what I really want to talk about is a slightly more complicated issue. Just War very explicitly touches on if a conflict is Just, and that would naturally extend to the soldiers fighting on the just side. But what about an unjust conflict? What about the soldiers fighting for that side? Are they sinning by participating? How about soldiers compelled into service in one way or another?

You know, culpability is a funny thing. It can vary from sin to sin, and person to person. There is no "one-size-fits-all" answer to explain it. So I'm going to focus in on the criteria that we use to determine a mortal sin: The sin must be a grave matter, you must have knowledge that what you're doing in sinful, and you must be doing it with full consent of the will.

Patriotism is a great thing. Being willing to step up when your country calls you to duty, to fight for and defend your principles, those things can be noble. But patriotism alone isn't a theological mandate, or some sort of excuse for invincible ignorance. Now, if your country steps into a conflict with the intent to resolve it for the sake of peace and ending human suffering, or if you, as a soldier, are led to believe as such, an argument could be made that your duty as a soldier has not conflicted with your faith.

And excellent example of the other side of this though would be the Nazis. German soldiers were very much held accountable for their sins, and their attempts to hide behind the flag simply didn't fly. They knew the atrocities being committed, they participated with consent of the will. Nobody held a gun to their head.

Except maybe they did. Many killings have occurred in history through force. This is a tricky area, but I will say one thing about it. There's always a choice. So ask yourself, is the choice you're making a selfless one, or a selfish one?

Even in a conflict that could be deemed just, unjust things can, and do, happen. Your team goes into a town to drive out the dictator subjugating it's people, a good and noble purpose. But are you doing the right things during that fight, limiting the combat to enemy soldiers, or are you abusing innocents? What if those innocents pull weapons on you themselves? Do you shoot first and ask later, or try to disarm them? It's a muddy area for many people.

This highlights another point, which is the importance of a well-formed conscience. Atheists and relativists will talk about how religion has somehow "hijacked" morality, but this is an absurd notion. Morality is from God, that's very true, but it is, in many way, written on our hearts. You generally don't need to be a Christian to know murder is wrong. But what religion tends to do is bring forth the concepts of absolute truths. There is a real "right", and a real "wrong". But how do we know what these absolutes are? Well, additionally, religion introduces the concept of a well-formed conscience. Our moralities, like most other things, demand to be learned, developed, and refined, but I'd argue that most people don't realize they need to or simply don't want to do this.

This is where morality moves out of the realm of concepts and into practice. In war, you often cannot take the time to study and think, but instead must rely on intrinsic reaction, and the Christian action must come to the forefront. In many ways, this is the goal of a well-formed conscience, and vital to the application of Just War doctrine specifically, as well as our actions in general.