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Between Pacifism and Jihad: Just War and Christian Tradition
Pacifism. Jihad. Militarism. Are these our only alternatives for dealing with global injustice today? J. Daryl Charles leads us to reconsider a Christian view of the use of force to maintain or reestablish justice. He shows how love for a neighbor can warrant the just use of force. Reviewing and updating the widely recognized but not necessarily well-understood just-war teaching of the church through the ages, Charles shows how it captures many of the concerns of the pacifist position while deliberately avoiding, on the other side, the excesses of jihad and militarism. Aware of our contemporary global situation, Charles addresses the unique challenges of dealing with international terrorism.
197 pages, Paperback
First published May 27, 2005
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April 15, 2012
Discussing issues raised for Christians by the possibility and character of just war, Charles adopts an approach summarizable by three points. First, his approach develops a middle and critically mediating position between pacifism and militarism. Second, he articulates that position within a framework derived partly from judicious interpretation of Scripture, partly from critical and intellectual engagement with Christian tradition, including explicit discussion of seminal Christian thinkers ranging from the Patristic age down to the present. Third, his approach is ecumenical. Charles writes unabashedly as an evangelical Christian with Anabaptist roots, but accepts solid Christian reflection on just war from whatever quarter it may come.
For covering a set of topics at once so broad, complex and rich in implications, for appropriating and summarizing in nuce the positions of a pleiade of Christian thinkers, for bringing just war theory to bear on the newer problems posed by terrorism and post-war reconstruction, the book is surprisingly short. Also surprisingly, that brevity is not a major shortcoming of the work, which is of the proper length to satisfy its aims, consisting largely in reappropriating and rearticulating the just war tradition within Christian thought and practice, getting its essential features right, but also promoting further thought and discussion by readers on these issues, including possible critique of alternative positions readers have been taking on the morality of warfare and on the use of force more generally.
Charles makes one of his motivating assumptions (he calls it a “fundamental bias”) clear in his last chapter: “the church is morally responsible for the world." This requires, in his view, Christian engagement with politics and culture, and the book’s critical portions can be interpreted as Charles’ attempts to remove, or at least cast a clear light on, obstacles, impediments, and stumbling-blocks keeping many Christians from more than superficial engagement with culture and politics.
There is another reason for the book’s brevity inherent to just-war thinking itself. According to Charles, “[b]ecause just-war criteria give an approximate account of what is just, we are forbidden from giving an absolute or definitive answer to the question, Was this war just?” Charles’ reasoning justifying this seemingly absolute prohibition of absolute answers rests on two bases. Moving from generality to particular situations, there will at times be legitimate disagreement even among those who think through just war principles or theories. Also, just war thinking cannot lapse into utopianism calling for perfect justice in this life. Just war perspectives, in order to work, cannot be applied mechanically or unrealistically. They demand good judgement, and this requires cultivation of good judgement, itself no more reducible to a method or technique than anything that requires good judgement. This book could quite profitably be used as an aid for cultivating good judgement on the vital, quite literally life and death, matters it addresses.
Charles diagnoses several serious problems with much contemporary Christian thinking, teaching, and discourse about the morality of warfare, whose remedy lies in reappropriation of the Christian tradition(s) of just war thinking. Lack of attention to, and in many quarters almost entire ignorance of, this tradition is the first problem he focuses on. “Sadly, much of Christendom – whether evangelical, mainline Protestant, or Roman Catholic – has been divorced from the wisdom of this consensual tradition. . . . At the most basic level the average layperson, even when he or she intuits what justice demands in a particular situation, is often unable to offer a rationale as to why this is or is not so."
Charles’ criticism, all too often confirmed by experience, is not something that could be met simply by better catechesis, for he makes another criticism, again a common present-day experience: “Few religious leaders and commentators seem capable of linking theological belief to responsible citizenship and to the culture of which we are a part. Sadly, many Christian ethicists and not a few Christian writers lack a basic intuition for moral reasoning that is historically informed and theologically faithful."
While the Christian just war tradition is a position critically mediating between pacifism and militarism, Charles devotes the bulk of his critique to pacifist positions, for two reasons. First, in Western democracies, pacifist positions present more prevalent and deeper obstacles to serious and responsible thought about war and the use of force, particularly because of a shift in fundamental assumptions guiding moral thinking and action, even in some putative interpretation of the just war tradition. “[W]e have today – perhaps less so among laypeople but overwhelmingly so in academic circles and in many religious quarters – a presumption against war and force in general rather than a presumption against injustice."
Second, because Christian pacifism does have significant contemporary appeal among Christians, not least because does get some matters correct, it requires a “measured critique," which runs throughout the entire book, but is most concentrated in chapter 5 and 6. The failures Charles charges pacifism with are many and considerable ones: providing an advantage to evil and tyranny; adopting and promulgating “an excessively apocalyptic view of governing authorities,” which leaves it “unable to contribute meaningfully to statecraft. . . national security issues. . .[and] political philosophy"; ascribing unrealistic effectiveness to its preferred methods of nonviolence and nonresistence; giving short shrift to demands of justice that issue from an adequate understanding of demands of Christian charity; selective and onesided engagements with “the church’s rich and broad history, which affirms, rather than negates, the worth of the soldier and the magistrate alongside all other vocations," as well as with Scripture itself; and, “fail[ing] to distinguish between homicide and murder."
Between pacifism and militarism, which Charles also calls the “jihadist”, “crusader” or “political realist” position, sits the just war position. The greatest strength of this book is that it both stresses and exemplifies the point that the Christian just war position can only be such if it is in fact a Christian just war tradition. Scriptural passages that pacifists (or militarists) cite to support their positions have already been addressed by numerous and illustrious Christian thinkers. Ignoring this both requires and disseminates theology that becomes historically ill-informed, highly selective, and inadequate to its objects and goals. As Charles notes, “[f]or those believers who care to allow Christian history to inform their faith, reading classical texts can be both threatening and liberating." It is threatening precisely because sincere intellectual engagement of the thinkers discussed in the book on issues of justice, charity, force, and violence requires one to call one’s own beliefs, arguments, practices, even sensibilities into question, to measure them and the contemporary context shaping them against those thinkers and doctrines. It can be liberating as well, “safeguard[ing] us from adopting beliefs that depart from the witness of Scripture, from the church’s consensual understanding, and from the witness of reason and natural moral law.”
Two particularly strong points of Charles’ discussion of just war response to terrorism are his discussion of the pedagogical value of our responses and his extension of just war thinking to post-war reconstruction. In the course of the second, he discusses the need for sanctions for war crimes, application of just war principles to humanitarian interventions, and post-war nation building involving (re)construction of civil society, legal systems, education, and the need for providing security for these nascent and vulnerable social goods. The interpretation of just war theory Charles articulates would view sanctions, humanitarian interventions, and nation-building not only as morally permissible but as in some cases morally required. Although Charles has his eye primarily on Radical Islamic terrorism, the spread of Wahabbism and similar militant and intolerant movements (which he terms the “‘Talibanization’ of nations in Africa, the middle East and Asia” (157), an evocative if inaccurate description), and persecutions of Christian minorities, the principles he articulates are of wider application, applicable for example to regions in Africa where self-perpetuating, warring and horribly exploitative militias rule, to narco-terrorism, or to rogue states outside of the Islamic world.
A criticism can be made, namely that Charles’ treatment of the spectrum from pacifism to just war thinking to militarism, while very good on the region between pacifism and just war thinking, and good on distinguishing just war thinking from militarism, is too reductive in its treatment of the militarist pole, particularly by using terminology such as “crusader”, “jihadist”, and “political realist” rather indiscriminately for positions “view[ing] war and coercive force as justifiable under any circumstance. No moral restraints beyond political expediency or the ‘command of God’ need be applied." Charles’ description clearly fits some who were historically engaged in Crusades or jihad; just as clearly, this is a needless caricature of others so engaged. Without conflating Christian just war thinking and Islamic thinking about jihad, one can point to moral restraints that do not reduce merely to political expediency or ‘command of God’ (understood voluntaristically) in some interpretations of jihad.
It seems that there must be a spectrum of positions, policies, and responses, ranging from better to worse, between just war and the limit point of naked aggression, Charles’ “militarism”. Put in another way, all use of force that does not clearly meet just war criteria should not be treated and assessed equivalently, particularly if just war thinking is, as Charles rightly points out, a matter of moral theory connected with statecraft and engagement in and critical reflection on culture. Patriotism, heroism and virtues of the martial types (including traditions and narratives inculcating them), and the small-group loyalty necessary for military units’s cohesion and effectiveness do not fit neatly into just war thinking or militarism as Charles describes them, and critique of contemporary pacifism ought to include its unnecessary, even harmful denigration of them. One might respond that just war thinking is not intended to address these matters, that these lie outside of, or perhaps beneath its scope (if they are regarded as merely instrumental means for actually using force according to just war principles), but that would seem to point out limitations of just war thinking which might, indeed should be overcome by fuller theorizing and reflection, and deeper delving into the thinkers in the Christian just war tradition.
For covering a set of topics at once so broad, complex and rich in implications, for appropriating and summarizing in nuce the positions of a pleiade of Christian thinkers, for bringing just war theory to bear on the newer problems posed by terrorism and post-war reconstruction, the book is surprisingly short. Also surprisingly, that brevity is not a major shortcoming of the work, which is of the proper length to satisfy its aims, consisting largely in reappropriating and rearticulating the just war tradition within Christian thought and practice, getting its essential features right, but also promoting further thought and discussion by readers on these issues, including possible critique of alternative positions readers have been taking on the morality of warfare and on the use of force more generally.
Charles makes one of his motivating assumptions (he calls it a “fundamental bias”) clear in his last chapter: “the church is morally responsible for the world." This requires, in his view, Christian engagement with politics and culture, and the book’s critical portions can be interpreted as Charles’ attempts to remove, or at least cast a clear light on, obstacles, impediments, and stumbling-blocks keeping many Christians from more than superficial engagement with culture and politics.
There is another reason for the book’s brevity inherent to just-war thinking itself. According to Charles, “[b]ecause just-war criteria give an approximate account of what is just, we are forbidden from giving an absolute or definitive answer to the question, Was this war just?” Charles’ reasoning justifying this seemingly absolute prohibition of absolute answers rests on two bases. Moving from generality to particular situations, there will at times be legitimate disagreement even among those who think through just war principles or theories. Also, just war thinking cannot lapse into utopianism calling for perfect justice in this life. Just war perspectives, in order to work, cannot be applied mechanically or unrealistically. They demand good judgement, and this requires cultivation of good judgement, itself no more reducible to a method or technique than anything that requires good judgement. This book could quite profitably be used as an aid for cultivating good judgement on the vital, quite literally life and death, matters it addresses.
Charles diagnoses several serious problems with much contemporary Christian thinking, teaching, and discourse about the morality of warfare, whose remedy lies in reappropriation of the Christian tradition(s) of just war thinking. Lack of attention to, and in many quarters almost entire ignorance of, this tradition is the first problem he focuses on. “Sadly, much of Christendom – whether evangelical, mainline Protestant, or Roman Catholic – has been divorced from the wisdom of this consensual tradition. . . . At the most basic level the average layperson, even when he or she intuits what justice demands in a particular situation, is often unable to offer a rationale as to why this is or is not so."
Charles’ criticism, all too often confirmed by experience, is not something that could be met simply by better catechesis, for he makes another criticism, again a common present-day experience: “Few religious leaders and commentators seem capable of linking theological belief to responsible citizenship and to the culture of which we are a part. Sadly, many Christian ethicists and not a few Christian writers lack a basic intuition for moral reasoning that is historically informed and theologically faithful."
While the Christian just war tradition is a position critically mediating between pacifism and militarism, Charles devotes the bulk of his critique to pacifist positions, for two reasons. First, in Western democracies, pacifist positions present more prevalent and deeper obstacles to serious and responsible thought about war and the use of force, particularly because of a shift in fundamental assumptions guiding moral thinking and action, even in some putative interpretation of the just war tradition. “[W]e have today – perhaps less so among laypeople but overwhelmingly so in academic circles and in many religious quarters – a presumption against war and force in general rather than a presumption against injustice."
Second, because Christian pacifism does have significant contemporary appeal among Christians, not least because does get some matters correct, it requires a “measured critique," which runs throughout the entire book, but is most concentrated in chapter 5 and 6. The failures Charles charges pacifism with are many and considerable ones: providing an advantage to evil and tyranny; adopting and promulgating “an excessively apocalyptic view of governing authorities,” which leaves it “unable to contribute meaningfully to statecraft. . . national security issues. . .[and] political philosophy"; ascribing unrealistic effectiveness to its preferred methods of nonviolence and nonresistence; giving short shrift to demands of justice that issue from an adequate understanding of demands of Christian charity; selective and onesided engagements with “the church’s rich and broad history, which affirms, rather than negates, the worth of the soldier and the magistrate alongside all other vocations," as well as with Scripture itself; and, “fail[ing] to distinguish between homicide and murder."
Between pacifism and militarism, which Charles also calls the “jihadist”, “crusader” or “political realist” position, sits the just war position. The greatest strength of this book is that it both stresses and exemplifies the point that the Christian just war position can only be such if it is in fact a Christian just war tradition. Scriptural passages that pacifists (or militarists) cite to support their positions have already been addressed by numerous and illustrious Christian thinkers. Ignoring this both requires and disseminates theology that becomes historically ill-informed, highly selective, and inadequate to its objects and goals. As Charles notes, “[f]or those believers who care to allow Christian history to inform their faith, reading classical texts can be both threatening and liberating." It is threatening precisely because sincere intellectual engagement of the thinkers discussed in the book on issues of justice, charity, force, and violence requires one to call one’s own beliefs, arguments, practices, even sensibilities into question, to measure them and the contemporary context shaping them against those thinkers and doctrines. It can be liberating as well, “safeguard[ing] us from adopting beliefs that depart from the witness of Scripture, from the church’s consensual understanding, and from the witness of reason and natural moral law.”
Two particularly strong points of Charles’ discussion of just war response to terrorism are his discussion of the pedagogical value of our responses and his extension of just war thinking to post-war reconstruction. In the course of the second, he discusses the need for sanctions for war crimes, application of just war principles to humanitarian interventions, and post-war nation building involving (re)construction of civil society, legal systems, education, and the need for providing security for these nascent and vulnerable social goods. The interpretation of just war theory Charles articulates would view sanctions, humanitarian interventions, and nation-building not only as morally permissible but as in some cases morally required. Although Charles has his eye primarily on Radical Islamic terrorism, the spread of Wahabbism and similar militant and intolerant movements (which he terms the “‘Talibanization’ of nations in Africa, the middle East and Asia” (157), an evocative if inaccurate description), and persecutions of Christian minorities, the principles he articulates are of wider application, applicable for example to regions in Africa where self-perpetuating, warring and horribly exploitative militias rule, to narco-terrorism, or to rogue states outside of the Islamic world.
A criticism can be made, namely that Charles’ treatment of the spectrum from pacifism to just war thinking to militarism, while very good on the region between pacifism and just war thinking, and good on distinguishing just war thinking from militarism, is too reductive in its treatment of the militarist pole, particularly by using terminology such as “crusader”, “jihadist”, and “political realist” rather indiscriminately for positions “view[ing] war and coercive force as justifiable under any circumstance. No moral restraints beyond political expediency or the ‘command of God’ need be applied." Charles’ description clearly fits some who were historically engaged in Crusades or jihad; just as clearly, this is a needless caricature of others so engaged. Without conflating Christian just war thinking and Islamic thinking about jihad, one can point to moral restraints that do not reduce merely to political expediency or ‘command of God’ (understood voluntaristically) in some interpretations of jihad.
It seems that there must be a spectrum of positions, policies, and responses, ranging from better to worse, between just war and the limit point of naked aggression, Charles’ “militarism”. Put in another way, all use of force that does not clearly meet just war criteria should not be treated and assessed equivalently, particularly if just war thinking is, as Charles rightly points out, a matter of moral theory connected with statecraft and engagement in and critical reflection on culture. Patriotism, heroism and virtues of the martial types (including traditions and narratives inculcating them), and the small-group loyalty necessary for military units’s cohesion and effectiveness do not fit neatly into just war thinking or militarism as Charles describes them, and critique of contemporary pacifism ought to include its unnecessary, even harmful denigration of them. One might respond that just war thinking is not intended to address these matters, that these lie outside of, or perhaps beneath its scope (if they are regarded as merely instrumental means for actually using force according to just war principles), but that would seem to point out limitations of just war thinking which might, indeed should be overcome by fuller theorizing and reflection, and deeper delving into the thinkers in the Christian just war tradition.
November 15, 2023
Charles is right in pointing out problems and inconsistencies with most pacifist proponents, and he's right in pointing out that all governing and politics—all!—are based on the use of power and proactive force, or violence, to subject a people. Beyond that, the book is worth very little. Much ink is spent honoring the legacy of just war criteria from Augustine et al, but none is used to justify or even recognize the fact that no modern wars, even those Charles would presumably categorize as just, satisfy these criteria under any stretch of the imagination.
Charles attempts to frame his position as a happy reasonable medium from the start, as pacifism is written off as an absurd ideological naivete and jihad is used exclusively in an explicitly derivative sense; non-violent rhetoric (which at the extreme, Tolstoyan end is even beyond my own position) is never addressed properly and Charles doesn't even so much as nod to the reality that jihad, as it is meant by most Muslims, is something many Christians should learn from and perhaps even imitate.
It goes without saying that I disagree with his interpretation of Romans 13:1-7, despite his helpful insistence that the preceding and following material are vital for understanding the passage. Throughout the book, I heard Paul's words in Romans 12 echoing through my mind, reeling against the author: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." For Charles, on the other hand, retribution and punishment are divinely ordained activities of the exousiai and Christians should partake.
I'll leave you with the most shocking words I encountered. Perhaps Charles meant something other than he said, but if so I must say he chose poor words to say it: "any interpretation of the Bible or mandate for the Christian community that calls us away from the cultural mainstream and that breeds civil disengagement is inconsistent with the teaching of Scripture and is to be rejected as sectarian. Even those interpretations that don the mantle of 'prophetic' authority."
Charles attempts to frame his position as a happy reasonable medium from the start, as pacifism is written off as an absurd ideological naivete and jihad is used exclusively in an explicitly derivative sense; non-violent rhetoric (which at the extreme, Tolstoyan end is even beyond my own position) is never addressed properly and Charles doesn't even so much as nod to the reality that jihad, as it is meant by most Muslims, is something many Christians should learn from and perhaps even imitate.
It goes without saying that I disagree with his interpretation of Romans 13:1-7, despite his helpful insistence that the preceding and following material are vital for understanding the passage. Throughout the book, I heard Paul's words in Romans 12 echoing through my mind, reeling against the author: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." For Charles, on the other hand, retribution and punishment are divinely ordained activities of the exousiai and Christians should partake.
I'll leave you with the most shocking words I encountered. Perhaps Charles meant something other than he said, but if so I must say he chose poor words to say it: "any interpretation of the Bible or mandate for the Christian community that calls us away from the cultural mainstream and that breeds civil disengagement is inconsistent with the teaching of Scripture and is to be rejected as sectarian. Even those interpretations that don the mantle of 'prophetic' authority."
May 30, 2025
You know, if you're going to write a book with that title, it really shouldn't take you till p.124 to acknowledge (in a footnote!) that jihad doesn't necessarily involve military struggle.
And the statement that Daniel Pearl was "treated to slaughter as a lamb, as it were, when he was slit at the throat" is mind-boggling - "treated to"? WTF?
Yeah. Charles makes some good points about the principles governing the use of force, but I almost wish he didn't, because his style is so annoying.
And the statement that Daniel Pearl was "treated to slaughter as a lamb, as it were, when he was slit at the throat" is mind-boggling - "treated to"? WTF?
Yeah. Charles makes some good points about the principles governing the use of force, but I almost wish he didn't, because his style is so annoying.
December 29, 2016
Uses Latin for no apparent reason except to improve perception of self as authoritative, which he's not. His attempts to use the Bible to back up his arguments are poor. He says he's reading between the lines, but he's really just making up dichotomies that don't exist in the scriptures. In the end he believes Jesus' words, such as the Sermon on the Mount, apply to individuals, but not to states and those in positions of authority. I just saved you 8 hours of reading.
November 8, 2007
Gives a very comprehensive overview of Christian thought and teachings from the time of Christ to the present on how just war theory is still applicable and needed in today's theological discussions.
August 27, 2009
Helpful historical overview of just war theory and modern application.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews