Seventeen years ago, terrorists weaponized passenger planes and launched an unjustified attack against the United States. That day reminded Christians of things we must never forget.

Force is always only the form love takes against terrible evil in the last resort when nothing else will protect the innocent, restore justice, and bring about the conditions for peace. The old Chestertonian nugget remains: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

Augustine’s influence runs deep and broad through Western Christian doctrine and ethics. This paper focuses on two particular examples of this influence: his thinking on political order and on just war.

Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013) was an American political theorist, ethicist, and public intellectual who made scholarly contributions to various debates, and especially on the just war tradition.

There may be no prudent responses against North Korea’s regime for Otto Warmbier’s murder. But such a concession to realism over justice does not invalidate the morality of the retributive instinct. It remains. And it remains deeply Christian.

The notion of retribution or punishment has long been the scourge of social science. Christian thinkers should develop the distinction between retribution and revenge or retaliation.

Since my commissioning in 1988 as a United States Army Chaplain Candidate, the fundamental purpose of war has changed relatively little: war generally remains a contest of wills to achieve political ends between nation-states employing military force. However, war inherently seems different today, does it not? How so?