100 Billion Lighter and Faining for the Swine Food

Out there in the future, the grandchildren will ask us why we plunged them into such a murky clam chowder. The poor kids might have been able to swim out of a soup. But we are hellbent on the chowder, one that has sat on the stove for too long. The latest installment of this kind of thing was the 100 billion dollar foreign aid package recently passed by Congress. But this recent bit of folly only indicates the real trouble we will pass down to coming generations. The 100 billion itself isn’t the poison. It is an indicator of the poison.

I say the 100 billion itself isn’t the poison because I well know there are men out there with intel the average citizen does not have. A military strategist could likely explain how necessary the money is and how most of it is going to build our own military infrastructure and whatnot. My point does not need to contest those. My point is that our nation is the prodigal son three months into his bender when he still had enough money in the bank to keep him from chewing on the pig’s husks. But everyone knows that the boy is in trouble. Everyone can see the bad decisions. Mrs. Margaret, the local dairy farmer, is praying for the lad, hoping he will wise up.

The wisdom we should consider at the moment is twofold. The first fold involves the principles of just war. The second concerns what is required that we would abide by those principles. The first is a matter of the mind, the second, a matter of the heart. 

Principles of Just War

The principles of just war have been developed over centuries and they are still friendly guides. Just War thinking falls into three categories: 

(1) Justice in going to war. 

(2) Justice in war. 

(3) Justice in finishing war.

The principles involved in justly going to war include legitimate authority. Uncle Bob the plumber can’t declare war on North Korea. “Ah,” you say, “you don’t know my Uncle Bob.” Yes, I see, let me rephrase. Uncle Bob cannot declare war on North Korea while simultaneously meeting this “legitimate authority” standard of just war. Next up is just cause. No going to war because the nation next door gave you a wet willy. Just cause requires that you are defending citizens’ lives and livelihoods, or righting wrongs. Right intention comes next. Even if you have a just cause, you must add to that right motives if you’re going to war righteously. Follow these up with war being the last resort, having a likelihood of success, and ensuring that the ends justify the means (the money and the dead men really have to be worth it). That’s six principles in all in the first category. For a helpful sketch of these principles, and the ones coming in the next two categories, see A Basic Guide to the Just War Tradition by Eric Patterson.

The principles involved in justly waging war include military necessity. Once you are in the thick of it, you must do everything necessary and just to win the battle. No dragging war on because of the increased cash flow. Then there is proportionality. You cannot take out three guys on a hill with an atom bomb. Discrimination wraps up the third category. In short, don’t shoot the non-combatants.

Justly ending war requires order. You have to be able to govern the area after all is said in done. On this point, you might ask, can Zelensky really govern Crimea if he were to take it back? Justice comes next. This justice requires punishment of war crimes, restitution, and the like. Finally, there is conciliation. Come to terms publicly and sign the treaty, the equivalent of shaking hands and buying the other guy a beer.

Those are the principles and they are straightforward enough on the surface. But it takes all of two seconds to see the age-old question set before us: Legitimate authority, says who? Just cause, defined by what dictionary? The objectives of a particular war must be worth the men’s lives. And where is the scale upon which we can weigh such a value?

The trouble is that all of these principles involve justice. This justice is apparently the thing that our prodigal nation could not find if the blindfolded lady walked up to them on a Saturday in the park and slapped us in the face with a strong backhand. You can tell that we know nothing of this justice by a glance at the recent riots on college campuses. The reality is that you cannot get at justice without heaven, and more particularly, being reconciled to the God who dwells there.

George Washington has a pertinent word—”The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.” Saint Augustine does us one better. In a very Christian Nationalist sentiment, he responded to Cicero’s definition of commonwealth by essentially saying, “If Cicero is right on the terms, then pagan Rome simply wasn’t a real people but a mob. Here he is in toto—

“Where there is no true justice there can be no ‘association of men united by a common sense of right’, and therefore no people answering to the definition of Cicero. And if there is no people then there is no ‘weal of the people’, but some kind of a mob, not deserving the name of a people. If, therefore, a commonwealth is the ‘weal of the people’, and if a people does not exist where there is no ‘association by a common sense of right’, and there is no right where there is no justice, the irresistible conclusion is that where there is no justice there is no commonwealth. Moreover, justice is that virtue which assigns to every one his due. Then what kind of justice is it that takes a man away from the true God and subjects him to unclean demons? Is this to assign to every man his due?” (City of God, 19.21)

Say it with Augustine: No justice, no peace. No true God, no justice. And here we have the foreign policy of Christian Nationalism: Christ is the Lord of war. This foundational claim will certainly cause those Columbia University professors to set their hair on fire. But, come to think of it, they have already set their hair on fire because, I will say it again: No true God, no justice, and no peace. You will have Christ as the Lord of war, or you will have Lord of the Flies.

The real culprit in all of this is likely Hugo Grotius. He sent us down miles of bad road with a simple hypothetical. In his The Rights of War and Peace, he posited that natural law would exist without God. Given his Arminian tendencies, he essentially taught that natural law finds its source in human nature. As Reuben Alvarado put it in The Debate That Changed the West, according to Grotius, “The natural law is not dependent on God for its content, nor for its existence, but only for its implantation in us.” This is a very Pelagian idea in which God gives man capacity, but does not give him the will and action itself. You can hear the residue of Grotius’ thought in Washington’s quote above. Grotius would likely be just fine with our first president’s claim. We need the rules of order and right that heaven has ordained. Yes, so far so good. But how do we obtain those rules? Is it merely a matter of having eyes in our heads? Being smart? Following in the footsteps of our recent forefathers who worshipped at the throne of reason? How is that working out for us?

Let me put it to you another way. Kings reign by wisdom—”I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions . . . by me kings reign, and princes decree justice. By me princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth” (Proverbs 8:12, 15-16). Now, you might say, disagreeing with Augustine you might say, that we could get some competent Turk to obtain this wisdom and keep our sons from dying on a foreign battlefield in a senseless war. But this same wisdom says only a few verses later, “The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was” (Proverbs 8:22-23). 

Do you really want to claim that this is not an allusion to the Wisdom, the Word Himself through whom all things were made and in whom are found all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge? Do you want to go the way of Grotius and claim that this wisdom would exist apart from and without the Creator God? 

All of this shakes out to a very simple and full-proof gospel. Christ is Lord. You will kiss the Son or kiss the void. Man wants a wisdom machine, not a Living Wisdom. Man wants paint by numbers just war theory. He wants a just war thingamajig, one that will receive all of the relevant data on one end, run a mathematical equation, and pop out a right answer on the other. He wants this because it would enable him to carry on without repenting. 

But lower-case wisdom comes from upper-case Wisdom. And if you will not be reconciled to the latter, then you will not abide with the former. Christ is Lord of all, and that includes war. We are becoming weak and dumb because of our idolatry. Man becomes like the idols he worships, deaf, dumb, and blind. And while it is true that the iniquity of the Americanites is not yet complete, while it is true that the prodigal son still has some greenbacks to spend, there is a full measure, and we are well down the road toward that squanderer’s situation when he “fained to fill the belly with the husks the swine did eat” (Luke 15:16).

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