Military affairs expert Keith Pavlischek lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity & National Security Conference on Nov. 3, 2018.

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Actually, I’m actually a trained theologian, believe it or not, and so that’s going to be more of my focus here. But I don’t know how I can follow Doug; that was really good, even if he is an army guy. The way I heard World War One, everything’s going bad until the Marines showed up, and then by the Lord, it was over. That’s the way we tell the story.

I know that a lot of folks don’t know the difference between different services and the different cultures, so I’m going to start off with a little joke that kind of gets at different service culture. You may have heard this, Doug. When they decided they were really going to emphasize jointness, they had to create a dictionary of terms because sometimes terms were used in a different way by the different services. One example was the word “secure.”

For example, if you told a Navy guy to secure a building, he’d turn out the lights and lock the door. If you told an Army guy to secure a building, he’d post a sentry and put up barbed wire or razor wire, as they call it these days. If you tell a Marine to secure a building, he’s going to assault it using fire maneuver, kill or capture everybody inside, establish a hasty perimeter, and begin aggressive patrolling to maintain the spirit of the offensive. And if you told an Air Force guy to secure a building, he’d take out a 30-year lease with an option to buy. If you know anything about service culture, there’s always a little bit of truth in that joke.

Doug’s comments are going to dovetail very well in a portion of my talk unexpectedly, and I think you’ll see where that comes. My task is to talk a little bit about the critics of the Just War tradition. This is going to assume that you know a little bit about Just War theory and the Just War tradition, specifically the Christian Just War tradition, which essentially says that there are times that Christians and states may permissibly and not evilly go to war. It establishes the criteria by which we do that if there’s a just cause.

Just authority, just intention, and then the conduct of war are to be constrained by notions of discrimination or distinction and non-combatants and proportionality. That’s all I’m going to say about it. I’m going to have to assume that you are at least familiar with that because what I’m going to talk about are historical Christian theological critics of the Just War tradition. I’m not going to give you a full 500, 600, 2,000 year history in all its details, but I think I’m going to be able to give a taxonomy that will be informative. When you think about or confront critics of the Just War tradition, it will allow you to be a little more informed and maybe even engage in dialogue with a little bit more rigor and intelligence.

The place I always start this is what I think is the most important theological critique. I call it, it can be called, sectarian pacifism or peace church pacifism. It is most succinctly and accurately represented in the Schleitheim Confession. I know you’re all familiar with the 16th century Reformation history. The Schleitheim Confession was the consolidation of Anabaptist thought. They all met together and they established this confession.

The relevant portion is this concerning the sword. They said the sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ. Outside the perfection of Christ is a very important phrase. These are the pacifists. It punishes and puts to death the wicked and guards and protects the good. In the law, the sword was ordained for the punishment of the wicked and for their death, and the same sword is now ordained to be used by worldly magistrates.

I always point out here these are the Mennonites, and I always point out that they don’t make Mennonites like they used to. My pacifist friends get very upset; they get all pacifist aggressive against me. But that’s essentially their confession. Now, the important point to observe here is that this form of Christian pacifism does not dispute the fact that the use of the sword to promote the good and punish evil is not a divine vocation of secular government.

It doesn’t deny that. Quite frankly, the biblical witness, particularly Romans 13, was just too clear for them to deny it. So they are not opposed to war or to police functions as such, but to Christian participation in these activities. It’s outside the perfection of Christ. So they say it will be asked concerning the sword, shall one be a magistrate if one is chosen as such? A magistrate, it’s a 17th-century terminology for public authority, civil authority, the government.

A magistrate is according to the flesh, but the Christian is according to the spirit. Their houses and dwellings remain in this world, but the Christians are in heaven. Their citizenship is in the world, but the Christian’s weapons of the conflict and war are carnal and against the flesh only, but the Christian’s weapons are spiritual against the fortifications of the devil. The worldlings are armed with steel and iron, but the Christians are armed with the armor of God, with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God.

This is why another reason you call this dualistic pacifism because there’s a strict dualism between the church, the community of believers, and the world, including secular government. So it’s a strong dualism. Now, these Anabaptists and all the peace churches who followed them reached the conclusion that biblical Christianity considered not only military service but all politics and hence all political offices outside the purview of the New Testament because Christians share in the perfection of Christ. The utmost pain and penalty that they could inflict was excommunication from the church, understood as a community of believers radically separated from the political authority, from any political authority.

So this is the dualistic pacifism of classical Mennonites and the peace churches that grew out of them. Now, the Reformers, obviously not just the Reformers but also Rome, the Roman Catholic Church, rejected the argument that the office or vocation of a government official, including that of a soldier or a magistrate responsible for bearing the sword, was out of bounds for the individual Christian. Calvin probably gets to the point as he typically would in his treatise against the Anabaptists in typical 17th-century theological polemical fashion.

Calvin, for example, thought it was crazy to claim that the duties of such offices were good and acceptable when a non-Christian pagan performed them but were somehow wicked when a Christian performed them. This is Calvin, which is as if one would say, “I confess that this work is commanded by God,” for instance, in Romans 13, you know, “bear the sword to promote the good and to punish the evil.” So this is good; it’s commanded by God. But there is no man that can do it with a good conscience, and also whoever shall do it shall forsake God. I pray you, is there any man that hath but one ounce of brains that will speak after this manner, I’ve seen that also translated as “is there any blockhead? What kind of blockhead thinks like this?” I think it was written in French or Latin. This sort of set the agenda and also set up the conflict between Magisterial Protestantism, Roman Catholicism on one end, and the peace church tradition on the other.

Now, let’s jump forward a few centuries to where we arrive at what becomes relevant to the talk we just heard from Doug. I call it utopian pacifism or liberal pacifism of the late 19th and early 20th century. What was happening at this time in American church history was the rise of the social gospel movement. As we’ve seen, the sectarian pacifism of the peace church tradition, like the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, opposed participation in war. But the folks of this new form of pacifism were opposed to war as such.

This came to expression in various efforts to abolish war in both religious and secular visions of a world without war. This is what we’re seeing in the Presbyterian Wilson, who drank very deeply from the well of progressive Christianity in the late 19th century. This had both religious and secular versions, and this new movement was summarized by our greatest contemporary Just War historian and theorist, James Turner Johnson. It was characterized by internationalism, social transformation, and individual moral transformation towards peaceful behavior and universal brotherhood.

Johnson highlights several assumptions that distinguish the sectarian pacifism of the peace church tradition from these new utopian or progressive visions. The sectarian tradition of the peace churches was profoundly dubious about the possibilities of history after the fall and outside the perfection of Christ. They wanted the state and political authority to use the sword because they knew all hell would break out if it didn’t. They were dubious about optimistic and progress-specific views; they saw sin as held in check within that history by civil government, and war as one of the means God allowed such governments to use to fulfill their functions.

In contrast, this more modern utopian or progressivism tradition has always assumed that human history is capable of being moved through human actions toward a goal of perfection. War will have no place in the ideal global society toward which progress trends, and the abolition of war now will hasten the progress of human history toward this goal. It sounds a little bit like the kind of thing Wilson believed. Johnson says mainstream American religion drank deeply of the stream of progressive social thought during the late 19th and early 20th century. The non-peace church Christian pacifism of the World War I era was an outgrowth of the sincere belief that through moral transformation at the individual level, leading to social transformation, the world would grow beyond war.

As a side note, and this is particularly relevant, some pacifists could embrace war as a means to a utopian end. For example, the war to end all wars or to counteract forces being used for narrow national self-interest and so forth. Hold that thought. Now, the most notable opponent to all this was Reinhold Niebuhr and his so-called Augustinian realism, including the rediscovery of original sin. I always say, I actually think I’m one of the few people in the Providence crowd who thinks Reinhold Niebuhr was a little overrated. How bad does it have to get when you’ve got a major mainline theologian at Union Seminary in New York who is hailed because he reintroduces the notion of original sin? It’s got to be pretty bad. You’ve just been through World War I, you’ve got the Great Depression.

Niebuhr did say somewhere that original sin is the one Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable. Yet he doesn’t make an argument for it, because his opponents had drunk so deeply at the well of this progressive vision that they couldn’t even be dislodged from it by the slaughter in the trenches of World War I or the Great Depression. Niebuhr’s critique of pacifism is set forth in his great essay “Why the Church is Not Pacifist,” originally published in 1939. Niebuhr argued that the refusal of the Christian Church to espouse pacifism is not apostasy. Here’s where he pulled out the bayonet and stabbed them in the throat: most modern forms of pacifism are heresy.

Good for you, Niebuhr, even though I’m tough on Niebuhr, he had that right because he rediscovered original sin. But the radical form of pacifism was held by his liberal Protestant contemporaries, who have reinterpreted the Christian gospel in terms of the Renaissance faith in man. Modern pacifism is merely the final fruit of this Renaissance spirit which has pervaded the whole of modern Protestantism. It didn’t invade all of modern Protestantism because there were a whole lot of fundamentalists and you had Lutherans and Calvinists. They were around, but nobody was paying attention to them; they just weren’t hanging out at Union Seminary in New York.

We have interpreted world history as a gradual ascent to the Kingdom of God, which waits for the final triumph only upon the willingness of Christians to take Christ seriously. It could have been targeted at Wilson. By the way, let me just say incidentally, the most dangerous people in the world are pacifists who give up the pacifism, then it’s bombs away. Michael Walzer talks about this in his book Just and Unjust Wars because now it’s like, well, we’ve got to do evil so that good may come, so that doesn’t become any restraint anymore.

That’s the second type of broad criticism of the Just War tradition, this sort of progressive, mystic, utopian view. Don’t think that there aren’t lingering bits of this still around. The third type can go by various names: modern war pacifism, just war pacifism, or just peacemaking, identified with Glenn Stassen, and perhaps more pejoratively, crypto-pacifism. In the 1960s, the great Paul Ramsey, who everybody here should know, and if you don’t, go out and buy a book, wrote War and the Christian Conscience in 1968. Paul Ramsey identified this problem; he labeled it bellum contra bellum justum, or war against just war.

Its fundamental line of reasoning stems from the assumption that modern warfare, supposedly unlike pre-modern warfare, is inherently both indiscriminate and disproportionate. Those are the two jus in bello categories that you have to fight a war with discrimination and proportionality. But they argue that this is impossible under conditions of modern war, and therefore since no war can meet the jus in bello tests of discrimination and proportionality, no war can be fought justly. If no war can be fought justly, then the only moral option is not exactly the theological pacifism of the peace churches or their Sleitheim Confession, but it is a modern functional pacifism. That’s another term you could throw out: functional pacifism.

Where do you find this? You find this in the early ’80s, the Catholic echoes of this in “The Challenge of Peace.” You find it in Glenn Stassen, and you’ll find it in a lot of people who usually might say, “I’m not a pacifist, but…”

Among the most important and influential contemporary critics of this revisionist view are, as I mentioned, James Turner Johnson, who has conclusively demonstrated that such a functional pacifism and moral confusion have no place within a Just War tradition. George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has challenged this for decades within the Roman Catholic Church, and about everybody associated with Providence magazine, including me.

Where does that lead us? I’m going to quote here Michael Walzer, who wrote this in the Army War College magazine about ten years ago. Walzer was writing in the context of one of Israel’s incursions somewhere, fighting back against, I think it was Hamas at the time. He says

Now, this is Michael Walzer. Now, you know Michael Walzer, if you’re not familiar, wrote probably the classic text that is still used everywhere called “Just and Unjust Wars” in 1977. Walzer, it’s important to note, is a man on the Left. He founded Dissent magazine. He’s a Democratic Socialist, right? But he’s a smart guy and he knows the tradition.

And here’s what he observed. Many clerics, journalists, and professors, however, have invented a wholly different interpretation and use of Just War Theory, making the theory more and more stringent, particularly with regards to civilian deaths. In fact, they have interpreted it to a point where it is pretty much impossible to find a war or conflict that can be justified. Historically, Just War Theory was meant to be an alternative to Christian pacifism.

Now, for some of its advocates, okay, here’s where he’s blown the cover off, it is pacifism’s functional equivalent. In other words, they’ve reinterpreted the Just War tradition in such a way to make it really pacifist, a kind of cover for people who are not prepared to admit that there are no wars that they will support. That’s why we call it functional pacifism or crypto-pacifism. There’s a lot more to be said about that because that’s, I think, where so many people are today and you may have some questions, but I wanted to move on to my final point.

And I’m still not sure what I want to call this, but a couple of years ago when we kicked off the Providence founding thing, I gave a talk. One of the more distinguished folks in the audience, I was quoting Paul Ramsey because I think Paul Ramsey is the most important thinker on just war of the last century. He said, “Well, you know, one of the things that you guys can really do is to bring to younger folks’ attention these great people that have kind of fallen off and people aren’t reading anymore.”

And so that’s what I did with Paul Ramsey and just war, but there’s another author in a book that I like to call your attention to because it has everything to do with IRD, the founding of IRD, and also the kind of thinking that we do here. I call this, I don’t know, a revolutionary non-commitment to nonviolent pacifism or blame America first pacifism. I identify this with a book written in the late ’90s by a political scientist named Guenter Lewy called “Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism.” I think this book is really important, and we should probably do something, maybe in Providence, about going back on this.

What Lewy did was some archival research into four pacifist organizations and how they developed. These were the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. He went into the archives and, to make a long story short, what he found was that they had started out as very principled pacifists. But as the 20th century developed, they increasingly became sympathetic to third-world revolutionary movements. Surprise, surprise.

Of course, if you know anything about IRD, it was what, some 20 years ago or 30 years ago, that IRD really got famous because they exposed a lot of mainline denomination support for third-world revolutionary movements. That’s what Lewy found when he looked at these organizations. I wanted to read you a passage that sort of summarizes this toward the end of his book. “American pacifist organizations today do not adhere to these pacifist principles. Worse still, they are less than candid about the muddled Marxist ideology that they have embraced and that they cloak in innocent-sounding humanitarian slogans.”

“Pacifist groups counsel policies that are couched in the language of peace and justice, but that in fact support and promote some of the most brutal and ruthless forces in the world. Instead of openly acknowledging that they have become partisans of communist revolution in the third world, they call themselves progressives. This is a long time ago, this, you know, like I think I said ’98, I think I meant ’88, yeah, 1988, and speak of working for the establishment of a new economic world order, etc. Since pacifists do not want to use force in the defense of the society in which they live, they argue that American democracy is not worth defending. American society is described as militaristic, unjust, and oppressive, the root cause of evil in the world.”

Jumping ahead: “While the major American pacifist organizations today accept the use of force in the struggle against pro-American authoritarian regimes, they at the same time continue to adhere to pacifist principles with regard to war between nations.” Remember when I said, hold that thought back when pacifists, the utopian-type progressive pacifists, could support a war if it was in order to end all wars or to oppose narrow self-interest? Well, that’s exactly what we sort of had with these pacifist organizations identified by Lewy because they could support insurgent movements around the world without supporting counter-insurgent, state-sponsored counter-insurgent forces.

So, I pull that up at the end because I just want to highlight how far so much pacifism and critics of the Just War tradition have moved. From the pacifism of the peace church tradition, which at least tried to maintain a certain theological integrity, even though we disagree with their premise, to this newer form that blends with or supports revolutionary violence while still maintaining a veneer of nonviolence.

It got to the point where you had major pacifist organizations of the 20th century supporting revolutionary movements around the world. There’s a whole lot more to be said, but I’m gonna wrap it up. A lot of this has to do with perceptions that the state system itself is inherently corrupt. So, the national system and therefore movements from below, even if they’re Maoist-inspired insurgencies, are considered worthy of support.

Everything I’ve tried to do today in talking about critics of the Just War tradition has been focused on one side of the criticism, that is, theological Christian or at least claiming to be theological Christian on the more pacifist side. There are other criticisms of the Just War tradition that would come from a more Machiavellian or a moral realist position, maybe even a militaristic position or whatever, but I haven’t addressed those. Those equally need to be addressed, but since we’re talking about Christian views on foreign policy, I wanted to focus on the Christian, ostensibly Christian, objections to the Just War tradition.

So that’s why I want to close. I thank you for your questions, and how did I do for time here?

I was wondering if the U.S. has ever gotten itself into a war and it turns out to be a just war, but they came up with reasons that in hindsight might not have been very well justified. I’m thinking particularly of the U.S. decision to go into Iraq. There was mention that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, I guess particularly nuclear weapons that they were starting to develop. I’m wondering, was that sound justification? I know we did the right thing, but could sometimes we come along with the wrong reason?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. Some people say there’s a kind of conspiratorial view that says the Bush administration knew that there wasn’t WMD but used it as an excuse. If that’s the case, well, that’s obviously unjust because it’s the manufacturing of a false cause for war. But this is not history for me, this is memory. I think it’s very clear that he believed that there were WMD, not necessarily maybe a nuclear program but particularly chemicals.

When the director of the CIA tells you it’s a slam dunk, you know? There were good reasons to believe that Iraq had WMD. I believe that. I was doing intelligence. But then the more interesting question is, what if you sincerely believe it but it turns out to be wrong? Does that render it unjust? I think it’s a genuine mistake in a world, and then you can ask further questions that if that wasn’t a cause of war, would there still have been sufficient justification to go? My answer would have been no. It was the slam dunk that turned out not to be the slam dunk.

At the time, I would make the case that they met the criteria, the jus ad bellum criteria.

Thanks so much for the comments. I appreciate you. You actually came to Regent and talked for one of Team Patterson’s classes one day a few months ago.

Yes, sir, Jason Carrier, Regent University. The question we got is from the election meddling, the last election, the rise of technology, specifically cyber. I’m curious, there’s a lot of discussion on Just War tradition’s ability to account for cyber. Specifically, just causes. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I don’t have many, to tell you the truth. I’m hesitant because it’s such a new thing and I honestly haven’t studied it. I get questions like that and so, rather than opening my mouth and removing all doubt about my foolishness, I’ll probably wave on that.

I also get questions a lot not on that but on drones. The big thing is people want to talk about drones, they want to talk about cyber and how that applies to Just War. With cyber, I’m not smart enough, haven’t studied it enough. People who grasp the basic principle of the Just War tradition have to take that on. With drones, I don’t think there’s anything new. There’s nothing that should be said about the use of UAVs that can’t be said about other remote weapons.

They’re subject to the same constraints as JDAMs or cruise missiles or whatever. In fact, I think they can be more discriminant and proportional because they have the capability of loitering. The questions become relevant because I always point out that with the Just War tradition, you have to do the blocking and tackling first. You have to understand where the tradition came from, understand the principles, how the principles relate, and understand where the opposition comes from.

You have to get that before you’re going to go into running pro-offense. You’ve got to do blocking and tackling, and then you can move on to those harder questions. If you try to jump in, this is where you get people going off half-cocked. They don’t know the tradition, they don’t know the theory, and yet they’re holding forth on new cyber stuff, most of which is so classified you don’t know what’s going on anyway. How’s that for a non-answer?

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