War

Against pacifist sentiment and calls for isolationism, Reinhold Niebuhr insisted on a realistic Christian response to political crises, one willing to dirty its hands to avoid catastrophic evil. However, his dialectic between love and justice produces a catastrophic paradox.

This article about the reality of God’s eternal love and justice amidst the context of World War II was originally published in Christianity & Crisis on May 18, 1942.

Why is the just war tradition seemingly so easily abused?

It is as scandalous as it is shocking. It is much more than dereliction of duty. We ought to be soul-crushingly ashamed.

This is a great story. A necessary story. It should be told to our children over supper. And every time we retell it we must, ourselves, attend to it closely for this story is also a greatly clarifying story. It helps to brush aside much of the twaddle that passes for contemporary moral wisdom, including within the Christian culture. But precisely what has it clarified? Three things, primarily…

It was a terrible anniversary. Seventy years ago this past week, at zero eight fifteen hours, August 6th, 1945, the Enola Gay, a U.S. Army Air Force B-29, dropped an 8,900-pound bomb, dubbed “Little Boy”, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later a second bomb, Fat Man, fell upon Nagasaki.

The recent surge in interest in moral injury has been largely motivated by psychiatric battle casualties suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but of course combat veterans throughout history have staggered home suffering not necessarily from physical injuries as classically perceived but injured all the same.

The headlines are exasperating, if a bit hyperbolic: Reuters writes, “Pope Says Weapons Manufacturers Can’t Call Themselves Christians” while the Daily Beast puts it, “Pope: Gun Makers Are Not Christians.”