My Son's Labor as Christian Vocation

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Today my youngest son Gabriel graduates from Army Basic Training at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. He surprised us with the decision this winter. Tomorrow he heads to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for eighteen weeks of training to be a combat medic.

Earlier this summer, when Fleming Rutledge inquired about my boys and I shared how they both planned to serve in the Army, she immediately responded:

“You must be so proud of them!”

I am.

Thoroughly.

Fleming’s response, however, made me realize just how few other clergy colleagues responded with a similar affirmation. Todd Littleton is another such friend. In fact, most reacted in ways that implied I was a poor parent— as though Gabriel is not an adult capable of making his own decisions. Maybe folks are surprised at my sons’ paths because I have such a large online footprint associating me with the theologian Stanely Hauerwas, perhaps the most notable advocate of Christian nonviolence.

On the one hand, I think such a response depends upon a selective reading of Stanley.

On the other hand, I believe Stanley’s espousal of nonviolence to be insufficient to the demands of the gospel and its implications for Christian vocation.

To read Stanley is to be reminded—rightly—of the scandal of the gospel. The kingdom of God is not commensurate with the kingdoms of this world. The church is neither a nation among nations nor identifiable with any of them. The crucified Christ is not Caesar. These are essential reminders in a world that regularly confuses faith with flag and martyrdom with militarism.

(That we live in a time when the once and again president and his enablers eschew honor and virtue, patriotism and international allies, leads me to think many of Hauerwas’ critiques of America no longer hold water. There is a place for Christian patriotism and a Christian defense of political liberalism. Indeed he has confessed his failure to appreciate liberalism as a means to secure relative peace. What presents itself as “Christian Nationalism” is idolatry. It’s antidote is not what Mainline Christianity so often serves up— a haughty, too cool cynicism— but Christian care of the public square.)

For all their prophetic clarity, proponents of Christian pacifism, like Stanley Hauerwas and Brian Zahnd, too often flatten the Christian moral imagination into a single ethical posture: refusal. Nonviolence, for them, is not merely a witness to the coming kingdom but the only permissible Christian response to evil in the here and now. Anything else, they suggest, is idolatry.

The problem with this position is not that it takes the cross too seriously, but that it fails to take creation seriously enough.

It assumes a world already redeemed, rather than one still groaning in Easter’s labor pains. It confuses the eschatological sign with the eschatological reality. It forgets, as my teachers Robert Jenson and David Bentley Hart both insist, that God’s love is not merely passive or poetic, but active, providential, and at times—yes—militant.

Military service, then, need not represent the uncritical acceptance of violence or a sanctification of nationalism, but a tragically necessary vocation within God’s ongoing war against chaos and injustice. There is, Jenson and Hart both argue, a choice other than the compromised realism of Reinhold Niebuhr and the disengaged pacifism of Hauerwas, one that instead recovers a more ancient claim: just war, rightly understood, is a work of charity.

Modern Christian ethics tends to reduce its options to two familiar poles: pacifism and realism. American Christian ethics treat the Christian pacifism of the sort one associates with, say, John Howard Yoder, and the so-called Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr and his disciples as the only available options for Christian moralists. Both claim to speak from a posture of humility before the gospel. Both, however, proceed from the same premise: that war is by its very nature evil.

Whether the response is to withdraw in nonviolence or to engage while confessing tragic compromise, the result is the same. The Christian never has any choice in times of war but to collaborate with evil; he must either allow the violence of an aggressor to prevail or employ inherently wicked methods to assure that it does not. What neither approach considers is that war may sometimes be waged virtuously, not because it is good in itself, but because the good—justice, order, peace—sometimes demands the sword.

The Christian tradition has long held this to be true.

For both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the use of force is not categorically sinful; it is morally intelligible when exercised in love.

Charity is not always gentle.

As Augustine taught, love of neighbor may require the suppression of injustice; to refuse to protect the weak from the violent is not sanctity but a failure of love. For Aquinas, because all human loves must be ordered within the love of God, “an unjust peace is not pleasing to God,” and thus, the love of political community must always be subordinated to the love of divine justice.

It follows, then, that war is not always the tragic choice of the lesser of two evils—for Christians are forbidden to choose evil at all. Rather, when it is waged on behalf of justice and by just means, it is a positive good, a work of virtue, and an act of charity.”

My friendship with Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, made in these days after and months after the 10/7 atrocity, has helped me to see how much of Hauerwas’ arguments for Christian nonviolence rely upon an almost Marcionite refusal of Jesus’ own scriptures. After all, the Decalogue’s command is not a prohibition against killing but a disavowal of murder. “The Lord is a man of war,” declares Exodus 15:3. In Canon and Creed, Robert Jenson insists that this confession “is not an archaism to be apologized for,” but a fundamental witness to God’s relation to the world. The simple fact is that the present groaning creation is one of violence and injustice. If the LORD is to be both the author of our history and an actor within it, there is no way for him to be so involved with us but as the God who takes sides.

For Jenson, this is not metaphorical.

It plays out in the lives of nations, in the contest between justice and injustice, in the struggle to protect the vulnerable. It is carried out, not only by angels and apostles, but also by those whom the scriptures call “the servants of God”—magistrates, judges, even soldiers.

Jenson is quick to distinguish between the church and the state:

“Entire renunciation of violence is the calling of the church herself and doubtless also of certain individual believers. But it can never be the calling of all historical agents, nor can God’s actual creation occur without those ‘who bear the sword.’” The church is a foretaste of the peace to come; it cannot abolish the world’s need for order in the meantime.”

— Commentary on Ezekiel

The insufficiency of pacifism comes into sharpest focus in the face of real historical evil. In The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley Hart turns to the Holocaust as a searing case in point.

He writes:

“The Holocaust was not merely the collapse of moral reasoning but the eruption of an abyss whose horror can never be circumscribed by any conceivable economy of meaning. In such a world, any theology that shrinks from confronting atrocity fails both morally and metaphysically.”

Hart does not celebrate violence; in fact, he is one of its most eloquent critics. But he refuses the idealist fantasy that sees martyrdom or withdrawal as a sufficient response to evil.

As he puts it:

“The refusal to oppose evil with force may itself become a complicity with evil. The notion that a peaceable withdrawal into martyrdom is always a sufficient response to atrocity founders at the gates of Auschwitz. The world is not yet reconciled. The resurrection has revealed the final Word, but it has not silenced every scream. Until then, the labor of restraining evil, even by force, may be itself a work of charity.”

The refusal to oppose evil with force may itself become a complicity with evil.

None of this romanticizes soldiering. The vocation of arms is neither salvific nor simple. It is, at best, a vocation of tragic faithfulness—an act of stewardship within a disordered world.

Jenson captures the tension:

“The resurrection does not abolish the world’s tragedy; it renders it penultimate.”

The soldier’s labor is not eschatological, but neither is it godless.

It belongs to the old aeon still groaning for redemption, and yet, like every penultimate thing preserved in God’s providence, it can be taken up in love. If we go forth to fight for God’s justice, we do so as citizens of a Kingdom not of this world, one that can make use of the post-Christian state, but that cannot share its purposes. This is not merely nationalism in ecclesial dress. It is a call to a kind of chivalry—an obedience not to Caesar but to the One who will, in the end, judge the nations with justice.

The Christian calling is peace. But the Christian calling is also justice. These are not opposites.

In a fallen world, peace that ignores injustice is not peace at all. In this world between the times, we may yet need those who wield the sword—not out of hatred, but out of love.

Yes, Christ tells us to turn the other cheek. And indeed, it is one thing to turn the other cheek against insult and casual abuse, or even to accept martyrdom, but another thing altogether to permit oneself simply to be murdered to no good end. Charity demands that love of self be ordered toward the love of God—and that the defense of one’s neighbor, and sometimes even of oneself, may be among the highest forms of that love.

The tragic is the faithful.

There will come a day when the swords are beaten into plowshares. But that day has not yet come. Until then, “between the times,” as Jenson puts it, “the tragic is the faithful.” And faithfulness, in such times, may sometimes wear a uniform.

To return to my original point, it is why I am very proud of my son.

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