Christian pacifism became untenable for me because the God who punished, killed, and destroyed in the Old Testament remains the God of the New Testament.

Preoccupation with “empire” by some American Christian elites may be back now that Donald Trump is president.

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.

Christian ethicists should read less moral theology and political philosophy and more history.

The just war ethic is really and first an approach to politics as the moral exercise of power in service of justice, fairness, stability, and ultimately peace.

Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the assumptions of progressive Christianity and helped create the political theology of “Christian realism”, which sought a more biblical view of how the Christian citizen can live responsibly within a civilization in crisis.