The following lecture was recorded during Providence’s 2017 Christianity and National Security Conference. Marc LiVecche discusses his late doctoral supervisor, Jean Elshtain, and how 9/11 shaped her view of the relationship between Christian intelligence and the use of force and state political power. The following is a transcript of the lecture.

Our last speaker, of course, is Mark LiVecche, the managing editor of Providence, the founding managing editor. He, of course, was a student of the great Jean Bethke Elshtain at the University of Chicago. Some of you, many of you, may be too young to remember her, but she was really one of the great minds in terms of Christian thinking and public theology, especially relating to the issues that this conference has addressed. And where she’s still alive, she would be the featured speaker at this event. But hopefully, by convening this event, we are inspiring and motivating future Jean Bethke Elshtains.

But Mark LiVecche, if you would come share with us—can’t believe you’re still here, fantastic. What did Mead call this? The Bataan Death March? So, I feel like if we’re at the end of the Death March, I feel like that guy who sees you at the end of the Death March and then asks you to go for one more walk.

LiVecche: So, it’s okay, part of the—so the good news and the bad news. The good news is that Providence has obviously accumulated a community of like-minded—not to say monolithic, but like-minded thinkers. The bad news is I go after all of them and I actually have nothing new to say. My nine-year-old daughter would say, “Oh, that’s just old news, Dad. You have nothing to say.” But I’m gonna plow on anyway, and we’ll just consider this sort of a summary of what has already been said.

I’m trying to figure out how I can position my computer so I can actually see it. Anyway, I am tasked, as Mark has said, with talking about my late doctoral supervisor Jean Bethke Elshtain and the role that those terrible, heartbreaking, and yet heroic days sixteen years ago this month played in shaping her view of the relationship between Christian intelligence and the use of force and state political power.

I’m going to begin, like I usually do when I talk about this, and that’s to kind of place us back in the moment for a moment: in the dark days after those planes hit, Jean Bethke Elshtain, political theorist, Christian intellectual, and very importantly here, grandmother, professed to a friend: “Now we are reminded of what governments are for.” September 11, 2001, she forever after insisted, made plain that the primary purpose or the primary responsibility of government is to provide for basic security, ordinary civic peace characterized by the presence of justice and order.

Now, taken together, these are primary goods without which no other goods, such as health or life, can long endure. This responsibility, a moral burden really, she understood to be divinely imposed; it came with the territory. Made in the Imago Dei, in the image of God, human beings are given the responsibility to exercise Dominion, providential care. Partly why we named the magazine what we did, providential care over all the earth, over all the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the lions, the tigers, and the bears, that’s pretty good after a Death March.

Nevertheless, this does not mean Elshtain cautioned that every government and every public official is godly, but rather that each is charged with a solemn responsibility for which there is a divine warrant. A Christian political ethic is necessarily an ethic of responsibility. 9/11 loomed large in Elshtain’s moral imagination, and her reflections on that horror would ground much of her work for the next decade at the intersection of theological and political ethics. It loomed large for her because it encompassed so much else that loomed large for her: considerations of goodness and evil, heroism, judgment, the use of force, justice, responsibility, guilt, loss, finitude, tragedy, punishment, the influence of religious beliefs on political action, mercy, moral formation. Who was all in there? It was for her that kind of event that takes us right back to the beginning, back to creation and the Creator, and the kind of creature that we were crafted to be: a creature free to love God and free to love one another. But freedom, of course, has risks. We are free creatures, at liberty to say no to God and to turn away.

And as has been alluded to numerous times, it comes as no surprise that turn away we have. This rebellion then inaugurates a kind of second beginning. From then on, we must deal with a creature who has fallen from God into narcissism and to that pride enabling us to believe that our patrimony in the Imago Dei is something to be seized or grasped so greedily that we perceive ourselves as God’s, unfettered, unbound, doing as Eric Patterson gestured to Genesis yesterday, doing what is right in our own eyes. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and he saw that it was good and it was good and then it all seemed to go to hell from there.

Elshtain’s final scholarly appointment, you should know, was for eighteen years as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School with joint appointments in Political Science and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. For several years after 9/11, she concurrently held the Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University, residing at the university’s Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. She was a prolific writer, a curse her, a prolific writer and speaker. She delivered hundreds of lectures throughout America and abroad. She wrote over six hundred essays in scholarly publications and journals of civic opinion. She wrote over twenty books, including works such as Women and War, Public Man, Private Woman, Democracy on Trial, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, Just War Against Terror, and Sovereignty: God’s State and Self. But these accolades, vast as they are, say I think the least about her scholarly pursuits.

In the days after she died, it became clear to those of us whose doctoral work she supervised that it was the informal time, say, time spent in her office that we most meaningfully recall. If you don’t believe me, ask Deborah down here if John Gallagher is still around. Go find him. Dan Strand already left us, but he could text him. It’s times in her office that I think we most remember. It was there, sometimes their children bouncing on her knee or sitting alongside us coloring with the crayons that she always had on hand, that she taught us what it meant to care about, as we’ve already said, I think it was you, the first things in life.

Somebody talked about this, the first things and it was John McKenna, see. I recall my own initial meeting with Jeanne. I think this is worth sharing. We spoke, of course, about my scholarly interests, the direction of my research, expectations for my course of study and the like. But as we finished, she leaned forward and she asked, “But why ethics? What’s this really all about?” This is the Jean voice, by the way. I have it too. Leave OISS if you want to hear it later. “Why ethics? What’s this really all about?” And so I took the chance, first time I’ve ever met the woman. I took the chance that the honest answer was actually the answer she wanted. It usually was, right?

So I reach it in my book bag and pull out the book I was reading, pull out pictures of my kids. I was using them as place cards, put them on the table. That’s why I want to study ethics. And so she leans over and she picks up the pictures of my kids and she looks at them and she mumbles something about munchkins, but she puts them down and she reaches into her own bag and I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, she’s gonna mace me, right?” She’s rifling through her purse and there’s probably like an autographed picture of the Pope, you know, the Dalai Lama, things like this. And she pulls out pictures of her not kids, but grandkids and she starts thumping them down on the table. “All right, there’s Joanne and Christopher and Christi and Bobby.” She smiles at them and then she smiled at me and she said, “We’re gonna get along fine.”

No matter what the central topic of a subsequent office visit, Jean never, not once, failed to ask about my family. Never. She made sure that I remember to take afternoons off, play with my kids. Never a problem for me, I should see my high school record if you don’t believe me. She made sure I took the weekends away from books, spent them in the company of family, and she regularly inquired after the welfare of my wife. And she not infrequently reminded me never to forget that it was the Spartan women who made that nation strong, all right? Her intellect might well ride the heights of intellectual inquiry, and yet she remained grounded in the everyday things, everyday concerns in which our ideas run into reality. And she insisted that we, her students, stay attuned to the now and the not yet, preoccupied by the ambiguities, the responsibilities, the limits, and the joys that characterize this time in between times.

Now, why is it important to, just in this in a discussion of Elshtain’s view of force and American power, to talk about all that? Because Elshtain, anchored in the transcendent, believes that earthly things mattered, matter, matters, right? She took for granted that people, fashioned in the Imago Dei, matter, particularly that every single person is of inestimable worth, everyone ought to be cared for, and that each can be formed to love, to carry out their unique vocation within history. This ought to be self-evident to the Christian. Those who love God are bound to love what God loves. That’s how it goes with love. To love something is to desire the flourishing of the beloved.

But Elshtain also understood that we live in a time between times in which neighbor often preys upon neighbor. In such a world, things tend not to flourish on their own. They have to be helped to. But in our broken world, cursed by human fallenness—and this is important—the world is fallen, right? People are fallen. The world is cursed because of us. It’s an important distinction. In a world cursed by human fallenness, to promote the flourishing of our neighbor sometimes means that we’re gonna have to vie against those who threaten that flourishing. It means we must sometimes punish evil, take back what has wrongly been taken, and protect the innocent, which by now I hope you know is the Just Cause clause of the Just War tradition.

This, in turn, leads to a dilemma. Sometimes, those who threaten the flourishing of our neighbor cannot be talked out of their wrongdoing, so they must be knocked out. When that’s the choice, what do we do about human evil? Do we retreat in the face of it to some alternative peaceable community? Do we pretend that it isn’t happening? Or do we affirm the existence of limits and say no in the face of it? Do we who are Christians take our place in a tradition that is long accepted the responsibility to stand against those tyrants committed to the torture their dissenters. Now, Stain’s concern for the everyday things sprung from her awareness that the everyday manifestation in public life of certain words: order, concern, community, justice, responsibility, and love tend toward the welfare of the innocent, while the manifestation in public life of other words: disorder, atomization, solipsism, injustice, desertion, indifference tend toward the annihilation of the innocent.

In Elshtain’s work, and her students’ work, had to be about the cultivation of that former set of words or our work was finally about nothing at all. Happily, the rich tradition of Christian intelligence, as you’ve seen, has much to commend in shaping our thinking about the goods and the limits to a political power’s pursuit of order, justice, and peace. Primary among them, as you have seen, is the Just War tradition, that framework for case-by-case moral reasoning that affirms wars may be justly fought in the last resort and for the aim of peace when a sovereign authority over whom there is no one greater, responsible for the care of the political community, determines that nothing else will retribute a sufficiently grave evil, take back what has been wrongly taken, or protect the innocent.

Now, within the Just War tradition, Elshtain insisted is found a Western political vision committed to the use of force within limits, as a ready sword against evil. Excuse me, she understood that it is no light thing to promote the killing of one made in the imago Dei, but she also recognized that the present dilemma is often what to do when one imago Dei is stomping in the face of another imago Dei, or entombing their corpses by the millions and lime pits, or passing them up as smoke in crematory chimneys. That’s the question: what do you do then?

All of this, of course, requires the ability to render judgments. We’ve heard about this today. Elshtain was a moral realist, like Augustine. She knew that there are objective truths to be discovered, honored, and encoded and embraced. But both Augustine and Elshtain also understood the present human condition includes a certain epistemological uncertainty. There has been a rupture, she wrote, a rupture has been affected between reality and our capacity to know that reality. And yet, as John alluded to, evidence remains among them human passions. For Augustine, Elshtain asserts that emotions are a mode of thought, embodied thought, and that we must remain cognizant of what the body is telling us, because the body is epistemologically significant.

So, as an aside, I remember quite clearly the first great moral shock of my life. It’s probably what made me an ethicist. I was 4 or 5 years old, and I descended the steps in our old home in Michigan. And then we either had a black-and-white TV or my memory is better, or I’m just that old and that’s what people had. But my dad was watching a black-and-white film, at least, and I would discover later on that this was a telecast of Les Misérables, I think the 1933 version, if it matters. Depicted on the screen was a drawn and haggard prisoner. He was wild-eyed and he was chained, clad, and, you know, he had his wild hair and his beard and he was employed in some sort of back-breaking labor. I know now it was galley work. And he seemed to me a beast. He was frightening, frightened. I conjectured aloud, pointed at the screen, and I said, “Bad man.”

My father turned to me and he considered me, and now I realized I think he was sizing me up. Then he told me that the prisoner, prior to his arrest, was destitute, unsuccessful in his attempts to find work, even though he tried, and despairing over his failure to care for his starving family. And so finally, desperate, he breaks a bakery store window, steals bread to end his family’s hunger. They put him in prison for this. So I was distressed, I was bewildered, I was threatened, and I was enraged.

And I did what I think a child of four or five years old can do in such moments. I made a noise that was something like a muffled howl, and I went running away in tears and went running upstairs, down the hallway, crawled under my bed, where I sobbed, snot pouring out of my face, going into the carpet, this whole bit. It was the purest intellectual response of my life right then, and probably, frankly, now, but certainly that I knew. But I could not then articulate that all is not right in our world. I think you’ve heard this over the last couple of days. All is not right in our world. What ought to be, is. I yearn for the way things ought to be and there resides within me, therefore, something that strikes like tinder and desires remedy. So this is a three-tiered response to an injustice that I just felt this really now age has only confirmed to fit this in my youthful impression.

The inculpatory witness of history attests that the cultivation of Hell on Earth by some human beings over others is simply one aspect of the human condition made manifest. Neighbor has preyed upon neighbor time out of memory. My youthful impression can be called the naive impression of evil and I don’t mean naive here as a pejorative but in the old definition that signifies something that is unlearned or untutored or untaught. I did not need to be told that the fate of Jean Valjean was unjust, I knew it. It was like an involuntary shudder at sudden cold.

Now, Elshtain believed in the importance of such intuitive responses and she warned against the loss of what her friend Leon Kass in an essay on human cloning called the wisdom of repugnance. She affirmed Kass’s desire to get us to pay attention to what we find offensive, repulsive, and distasteful, for it might, stress on might, it might alert us to deeper realities. Like Augustine, Kass and Elshtain said, arguing for the potential epistemic value of strong reactions, like horror at the sight of torture scenes, or revulsion when we see self-mutilation. Now, Elshtain knew that we must not end with the emotion, of course, but neither all we did discounted. In a culture increasingly allergic to moral judgment, she feared, our capacity for repugnance is dwindling fast and we mustn’t let it. Repugnance points to that which offends something very deep within us, something really fundamental has been violated, she said. Certain things simply ought not to be and we mustn’t be indifferent. Sometimes we ought to shudder.

Oh, Albert Camus, one of Elshtain’s great heroes, concurred. Living in a century in which the totalitarian will swallow tens of millions of souls in death camps and killing fields, Camus paid close attention to the revulsion that he felt and he could not be indifferent. He says this, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no value whatsoever then everything is possible and nothing has any importance there is no pro or con the murderer is neither right nor wrong we are free to Stoke the crematory of fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers evil and virtue or mere chance or caprice. But this was not to be believed can we recognize that his own deep feelings of revulsion and repugnance always meant more than they were conscious of saying. Elshtain insisted even childish impressions are not to be jettisoned without cause, for they may well be key ingredients of our nature. “Shallow,” she would say, “are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” Now, for Elshtain, to couple moral realism with a notion of political responsibility is to understand that the Just War tradition is not only a leash that limits the occasions and dimensions of a nation’s use of force. The Just War tradition is also a goad that spurs the use of force in the last resort.

For this reason, it is a misrepresentation to suggest that the Just War framework is primarily interested in preventing violence. It is not, at least not necessarily. The issue is that violence comes in different kinds. Common law and common sense know this; some violence is always and everywhere wrong, like the violence of murder, and it should never be done. Another kind of violence, however, must be undertaken in response to that kind of violence that is always and everywhere wrong; that kind of violence can be morally sanctioned.

This is the violence of the Just War tradition, expressed in satisfaction of the conditions of just cause and with appropriate discrimination and proportionality. It’s true that different kinds of violence are not always easy to discern. Take, for example, the difference between a deranged sadist who cuts off a child’s leg for kicks and a conscientious surgeon who removes the infected leg to save the child’s life. Both acts, on the surface, have a lot in common, but factors such as motive, circumstance, and available options help us render distinctions.

This is why the Just War framework has categories of proper authority, just cause, and right intent. They help us distinguish between actions that, on the surface, look alike. The Just War framework, therefore, offers no new moral legislation; it simply articulates a kind of criterion by which we have navigated moral conflict forever. There’s a lot riding on this. A robust politics of democratic argument, as Palestine insisted, turns on making the right distinctions.

America’s war against terrorism would collapse into a horror were we to fail to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in our response. It is these distinctions and the ability to make them that our stains saw in peril in our day. She lamented the increasing incapacity, from both the pulpit and the podium, to make basic divisions that allow one to distinguish, say, between soldiers and terrorists, or to distinguish justice from revenge, just war from arbitrary violence, sentimentalism from love.

In agreement with Patterson, I should say that Elshtain often insisted it was better to call just violence something else. Following St. Aquinas, she called it force, as Eric did. Such a term helps to avoid some of the ideological problems associated with violence, which, by definition, can be understood as always expressing aggression and vehement anger. In that sense, violence is always arguably technically unjust. Force, on the other hand, is simply an interaction that can change the motion of another object, which is precisely what the Just War intends to do against evil.

Generally in my work, I note the distinction and then I don’t dogmatically stick to it, mostly because I’m lazy. But that distinction is important. I want to turn, in closing, to the claim sometimes made that it is not those who argue for non-violence who must give a moral accounting, but only those who argue for war, even just war. There are those who will insist on this. If I argue for non-violence, I don’t need to make an account, but if you argue for Just War, you need to make an account.

In light of history, this seems incoherent. In just two years, in January, we will be observing the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Perhaps Providence will host a conference on site; you’re all invited. I was living in Central Europe at the time of the 50th anniversary and attended that commemorative event. At the end of the official ceremonies, they began to read the names of all the people killed in that camp. They said early on they were going to read until they finished.

After the official ceremony, I toured around with my friend, and they were still reading names when we left. My friend and I sat down afterward and thought about how long it was going to take. I managed to work this out: if you take the estimated 1.2 million people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, assuming it takes a second to read each name, they would have been reading for 13.8 days—almost two weeks of an endless litany of lost souls.

There are those who argued for non-violence against Nazi aggression in 1939, those who argued for non-violence against Soviet aggression in Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. They argued for non-violence despite aggression against Bosniak Muslims in the 1990s, and for non-violence despite the horrors in Rwanda, and on and on. War has costs; I don’t deny this. So too does peace, and therefore everyone must give an account of their moral assertions.

As C.S. Lewis said, if war is sometimes just, then peace is sometimes unjust. In 1939, 1956, 1968, and in September 2001, the choice was not between violence and non-violence. Violence was happening. The choice was whether violence would only be used to victimize or whether counter-violence would be employed to rescue those victims.

Of course, as we’ve already heard, the Just War tradition is not about when to choose war over peace; rather, it’s about identifying those occasions when the road to peace necessarily leads through war. Peace is always the aim of justified conflict, whether with our children, with our neighbors, or with our international neighbors.

Again, as Mead reminded us, we’re not scrambling for some sort of ultimate peace. We know we’re not going to have it. When Elshtain used to remind her friends on 9/11 that the primary responsibility of government is to provide for basic peace, she had in mind Augustine’s notion of tranquility of order. This is not the perfect peace promised to believers in the kingdom of God. Elshtain pointed out this is the danger of going last, in which the lion lies down with the lamb.

Elshtain was fond of quoting Luther but could never find the citation that said on this earth, if the lion lies down with the lamb, you have to replace the lamb frequently. So, what kind of peace did Elshtain actually have in mind if we can’t achieve this final sort of peace? She had nothing more in mind than a simple, beautiful, quotidian kind of peace.

She talked about mothers and fathers raising their children, men and women going to work, and citizens of a great city making their way on streets and subways. Ordinary people fly to California to visit their grandchildren or transact business with colleagues. All of these actions are simple but profound goods made possible by civic peace. They include the faithful attending their churches, synagogues, and mosques without fear, and citizens—men and women, young and old, black, brown, and white—lining up to vote.

Elshtain’s love of such basic goods helps to keep the terrorist attacks of 9/11 always on her working mind. Like her alarm over our dwindling capacity for repugnance, she feared that with the distance of time, many of us would forget what that day was really like. We shouldn’t, she warned; it was just as bad as we remember it. Our emotions at the time were not extreme; they were appropriate to the horror. Anger, she said, remains an appropriate feeling.

So with that, I conclude and welcome questions, comments, or funny stories if you have them.

Q&A

Where’s our microphone guy? We have an older student right over here.

Question: Augustine, particularly in the City of God, struggles mightily to understand how love in the City of God can intersect with and interface with love in the City of Man. You’ve done an exceptional job of explaining how Elshtain visualized and understood this and can direct us to peace in the City of Man. My question is whether her work took any kind of methodical or systematic examination of how the love of the City of God can inform the City of Man.

LiVecche: It’s a good question; it’s a great question. I think the easy answer is yes, but the harder answer is trying to remember precisely how she did that and what she said about it. One of the things we’ve alluded to is that she would have found energy in someone over the Bataan Death March who talked about approximate responsibilities and primary responsibilities for our own constituencies or maybe primary responsibilities to our own children, these types of things, and then how those responsibilities can radiate out. I think it’s an expression of what sort of eschatological love will look like, how it could look, or influence how we love on Earth. She would have found these conversations that we seem to be having nowadays about acting as if we have to choose between things like compassion or security, and acting as if those are zero-sum concerns, she would have found those conversations incoherent. I think she would have understood that it is in our national interest to be concerned for being morally good. She would have acknowledged that as a father, I have a primary responsibility for my kids.

She would have gotten that. That primary responsibility for my children might sometimes come at other people’s expense. So that if I’m hiking with Joseph and my children and Joseph fall into a pit of vipers, I’m pulling my children out first. They may use Joseph as the ladder for all I’m concerned, but they’re going to get out, right? That shouldn’t be too shocking to anybody, including Joseph. But my concern for my children’s basic necessities doesn’t include overwhelming concern for their luxuries. And I have no concern for their luxuries if my neighbor doesn’t have enough to eat.

Under certain complicated scenarios, I may even jeopardize their basic necessities for the welfare of my neighbor. For instance, if the Nazis come looking for the Jew that we’ve hid in the cellar, my children’s security is at stake. So, love dictates that we understand that we have obligations that radiate out from the primary responsibilities we have, that the selfish desires we may have, as you want to find selfishness an absolute evil, but you would recognize that there are limits to that. I don’t know if that’s answering a question at all.

So, you put special emphasis on her advocacy that we go with our gut when our gut tells us that that’s an outrage. You know, let’s listen to our gut. And so, I guess rephrasing my question slightly, I mean, would you say that she’s saying that, in some sense, our gut is transmitting the divinity that is within us? That, in some sense, might be where the City of God and the city of man come together? I never heard her conjecture. Someone, my colleague over here is squishing up her face and suggesting, though you want to see some other, right?

Which is this language about trying to, yeah, go to the younger one first. I meant faith. Faith is clearly the younger one. Sorry, you’re the intern. I’m perfectly happy to throw you under the bus. I was at a conference a couple of years ago where I heard a speaker who works with Muslims trying to bring them to a knowledge of Jesus tell us, “You need to get over 9/11.” And I was outraged by that. And I think, in terms of what you’ve been saying about Jean and about just the whole issue of just war, how do we help other people to understand that remembering is not hating?

That you can forgive, but it doesn’t mean that you deny that something happened. You’re not in denial. Yeah, I’m probably at a loss for understanding how to help someone see that, other than to do the conceptually obvious work of pointing out the self-evident, right? I mean, it seems to me, maybe a better answer would be this: that if it’s true that the aim of a justified war is peace, then a ramification of that is going to have to be, it seems to me, that peace or reconciliation occurs only after a whole bunch of hard work has been done.

So, I can pretend to have peace with you if we’ve never reconciled, if wrongdoing has never been acknowledged, if repentance has never been demonstrated, if forgiveness has never been offered, we can pretend to have peace. And some of my South African friends would say, “We got an awful lot of truth, but we haven’t gotten a whole lot of reconciliation yet.” But we’re trying to sort of put her on anyway, and that has mixed reviews. You have to remember, because these things have been done.

And if matter matters and if history is important, then the way to peace is through reconciliation, and the way to reconciliation is through forgiveness, and the way to forgiveness is through repentance and being quite confident that the person who says they are sorry can sort of back up their articulation by demonstrating to us in some capacity that we have reason to trust that they’re serious and that they’re not going to do it again, and that we can actually live in peace. I guess that’s what I would do.

I would ask them how they think peace happens. You know, peace doesn’t happen by forgetting somebody. I don’t know, right there, right there in the beginning, in the front. A quick comment and then a question. One another phrase I’ve heard concerning their response is, sometimes, peace is unjust. Is the question, is it about whose peace is it? Is it the peace defined by the Nazi regime or is the peace defined by the folks who are responding to the violence?

But my question kind of relies on the connection between the just fortress as it relates to sometimes the use of self-defense for individuals and then comparing that to kind of what the Bible says. There’s two kind of problematic passages for me, and even though I agree with the just war tradition. One is kind of like the imprecatory Psalms. Does the Christian have to say to David, “Hey David, we can’t read these anymore because we have to have a loving attitude towards everyone now based on Christ’s command?”

And then the second thing is, sometimes in Matthew five, Christ gives us this image of accepting persecution, almost of like accepting the injustice is done to you based on your faith or based on your following of God. So, are there places where you as a Christian, in some cases, might use a weapon in self-defense individually on the street? But then, in some context, I might be willing to accept injustice or accept violence based on my faith.

Great, loving the imprecatory Psalms. I don’t think Pacetti or Psalms used to pray them regularly. What’s it? Yeah, good. So, let me address that one first. And it’s similar to the answer to Faith’s question. You know, what is love, right? It’s a good question Christians should be asking that because love is complicated. And if there’s one of my favorite all-time movies is P.T. Anderson’s “Magnolia.” Have you seen Magnolia? Lord, seriously, is nobody seen? Okay, good.

Oh my goodness, see, this is remedial. You have to go and you have to see Magnolia. Now, I’m not a guy for trigger warnings, but I will tell you it’s a god-awful film in a lot of ways. Right? It’s very hard. But if it’s basically an extra Exodus film, it’s about people leaving the slavery of their own sort of sins and finding freedom. And I can’t prove this to you without giving something away, so I’m not going to prove it to you.

But just watch the film and you discover it’s an Exodus film. And if you, you’re going to know far too much about me by me explaining this film to you. Now, you know, I like these crazy films. I also watch sometimes these crazy films with the subtitles on because occasionally you learn a lot. You catch things that you missed otherwise. If you listen to this, if you watch it with the subtitles, there’s a point where all the characters begin to sing an Amy Mann song.

And I’m trying to remember the name of it, but it begins with, “It’s not what you thought when you first began.” Okay, if you listen to it with the subtitles, the character adds a word, love. She says, “It’s not what you thought when you first began, it’s so you begin to realize that this other thing that’s going on in the film, this disquisition on love, what is love? And a God who loves his people is going to do some of the things potentially, in last resort presumably that occurred to these people in this film, God will get us back if he can, and he’s going to do all sorts of things to do that.

I’m so loved. Is it necessarily what we thought when we first began? And I think Joe talked about this in relationship to the enemy. So, how do you get to peace with your enemy? How can you get to the point where you can begin to knowingly forget the things that they’ve done to you? Well, you know, you have to love them. We know that. But that doesn’t exclude punishment. And in fact, as Joe talked about with our children, I punish my children, okay, probably for some personal gain as well.

I want to be able to go out to eat at night without them climbing over the neighbors and things like this. So, you have to discipline children who can actually function in society, like children, not feral beasts, right? That’s important. But I also punish my children because I love them. And I want to promote their flourishing. And I think people who say that you can’t read certain Psalms anymore, they mistake love for wanting people to be happy.

And happiness is good if we mean a theological sort of human flourishing sense. But if we mean sort of this gassy kind of happy that just wants people to be thrilled in this way or in that random way without any sort of coherence to why they were made, well, which genuinely make them flourish, etc. Then that’s not loving. You demonstrate love by helping people be what they were meant to be. That’s full of judgment and all sorts of potential for arrogance and all kinds of things. That’s a very long-winded way of saying you pray the imprecatory psalms because it’s an act of love. Very often love in the first degree for the besieged neighbor, but very often love in the second degree for the enemy neighbor.

There’s a very good book called by Jay Glenn Gray. Cap Easy. You know, I thought you only had the one Jay going Gray. It doesn’t matter. In this, he lists four images of the enemy. He talks about ways that war fighters throughout history have been able to do the dirty business of killing by having one of these four sort of images of the enemy. One is the beast, you know, or is the devil, or you know, just this poor hapless chap just like me, he’s just doing his job. So sort of a professional image. But these are all things that those four images that Gray insists are the four ways that war fighters can view the enemy. All four of those images are counter to the Just War tradition.

So then the claim is that, well, if that’s the case, then the Just War, the attitudinal requirements of do not hate and do not desire revenge, all these things are impossible. Soldiers actually can’t do them. What’s missing there is simply the biblical insistence that you view your enemy as a neighbor and you treat your enemy as you treat any neighbor. You endorse what is good, you resist what is bad, and on and on. And if you read certain war memoirs, you begin to see all sorts of areas where soldiers do this all the time.

There’s a great war memoir called “What It Is Like to Go to War” by Karl Marlantes. And some of you might know this name because he’s been in these recent Vietnam series on PBS. And Karl Marlantes tells this story where he’s they’ve attacked a hill and there’s a gun emplacement. And he’s managed to flank the gun emplacement. And he’s waiting for the Vietnamese soldier to pop back up so he can shoot him. The soldier pops back up. He’s now close enough to realize this is just a kid. Kid has a grenade. That’s a problem. And the kid is looking straight at me. That’s another problem. And so Marlantes hesitates. He hesitates. And he says, you know, I sort of hoped he would do something that wouldn’t make you have to shoot me. Throw the grenade away. He’d throw up his arms and surrender, whatever. But the kid snarls, pulls, you know, his arm back and throws the grenade. Marlantes just shoots, kills him.

He says, if you ask me what I felt at the time, I would have said, God, felt great. You know, the grenades, we’re done, you know, no more bombs. That feels good. The mission’s been accomplished. That I’m happy, too. I’m alive. He says, if you ask me what I feel now, he says, I feel remorse. He says, I realize that this Vietnamese soldier was just like my kid. Maybe he was going to die in a crummy little hole, probably hundreds of miles from home. As he’s terrifying, Americans are running up this hill. He says, but here’s the problem. If I felt empathy for him, then which is what I feel now, I wouldn’t have been able to kill him. And so J. Martin cook, another ethicist says, you know, this proves that those four images are necessary and adjust for images is impossible.

My counter to that is what made him hesitate right here? He is on a hill in Vietnam under fire, and he hesitates. That’s a stupid thing to do in combat. All right. But he hesitates for just a moment, hoping ridiculously that this kid would just throw the grenade away and throw up his hands. Right? And I think in that luminous little moment, he loved his enemy. And then he killed persecution. Very briefly, this is a partial answer because I was long-winded on the first one. Most of the persecution that is called blessed obviously has to do with bearing witness to being a Christian, not being an American or a capitalist or anything else. So I think they’re different categories.

First of all, I think most self-sacrifice in Scripture is efficacious to some sort of desired end. You don’t self-sacrifice simply for the sake of self-sacrifice. You know, there’s the scene, you’ve seen Monty Python, Life of Brian, who’s seen that? All right. More people than Magnolia. So there’s hope for you. But it’s like the scene at the end where everybody is crucified and over the hill come these arm’s warriors, right? And all the Romans run away. Run away. I know I’m mixing films there, but they run away. And all the crucified people are pretty thrilled to see the Roman soldiers run away. And a group of armed warriors approaches them.

But it turns out, darn it, that this is the crack Judean people’s front suicide squad. Right? So they all pull out their swords in an act of solidarity and slay themselves. Right? So self-sacrifice for the point of self-sacrifice, this is not just comical and stupid, but I think un-biblical. It’s not an act of love to yourself, to your besieged neighbor, to your enemy neighbor. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and this again, this is going to be the soundbite of the conference, it didn’t accomplish all that much, right? No, it accomplished everything right. But what it accomplished was to reconcile humanity to God. It didn’t reconcile me to al-Qaeda, right? Now it laid the groundwork that that reconciliation ought to be about. That happened. But it’s also sort of like PT Anderson’s. Oh, brother, where art thou? Or no, no, no, I’m sorry. Is that PT Anderson? No, brothers. Thank you. Oh, brother, where art thou? Where he knocks over the Piggly Wiggly, but if he gets baptized and now he’s good, he says, I’m square, you know, I’m square with God. But then the other guy who points out, well, that’s fine, but the state of Mississippi is a, you know, harder to please or something. It’s late in the afternoon. My analogies are falling away.

But self-sacrifice in the Bible is efficacious for a desired end. Self-sacrifice for the simple purpose of being self-sacrificial is silly and unstrategic and doesn’t accomplish anything. I don’t know where our microphones are. Somebody actually have one? Go ahead. Whoever needs to ask a question, ask me. Oh, since we’re on the line of movies, I just wanted to ask, have you seen the movie about Masada? I saw the old one, but I was a child, so I have a feeling. Yes. Is that the only one, maybe? Yeah. Since they also end up is it committing suicide? What’d you say about that? In terms of, no, that’s a great question. That’s a great question.

I was on Masada in May of this year during the I was with the Philos project, one of our publisher’s co-sponsors doing a trip to study the Six Day War, the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, that parade to Jerusalem, showing my political cards there. We went to Masada. We’re on top of Masada and we heard this story. And I remember standing on the mountaintop, not knowing that somebody was going to pin me on this, wondering, you know, what do I do about this, you know, the alternatives were going to be gruesome, all right. They were going to die. That was a foregone conclusion, unless the hand of God came down and smote the Romans and, you know, I like, you know, I’m a la Vecchia. I like the Romans, but they were vicious, right? And they would have probably crucified, you know, any of the survivors. They would have raped and enslaved the women, but they would have made a spectacle of them. They want to simply killed them. It would have made a spectacle of them to prevent, you know, further rebellion.

That was an act of defiance that, you know, probably under the horrible options available, you know, was, I don’t know, a reasonable thing to do. So I don’t know if that’s a satisfying answer, but I don’t condemn them for that. I don’t want to do a thought, but, you know, how to probably just piddled and ended up, you know, not doing anything.

Question: So as Ellis, James PhD student, where were your severe as disagreements with her? And what do you think is the theme or themes in her scholarship that are relatively underdeveloped and should be taken up by Roger or current graduate student?

Lovely question. This is Joe Hartman still here. That’s too bad.

She understood. I’m going to say this and not have time to unpack it terribly, but she gave too much to the idea that you move through life and incurred guilt, moral guilt simply by attempting to act morally. So such that war is morally evil is morally necessary. You do what is morally necessary; it has to be done. But to kill another human being incurs moral guilt. Undoubtedly, it’s an evil because the taking of life is the privation of an essential good. Life is an essential good, and taking it is an evil.

I think there are ways of thinking about killing that allow for a distinction between moral evil and non-moral evil. She would wave her hand at that; it’s a bunk. Therefore, a soldier’s duty is a moral tragedy, which it is, but not in the sense that they necessarily incur moral guilt. They do evil; the taking of life is always uneven, but it’s not necessarily a moral evil. She and I disagreed on that.

She believed that you couldn’t celebrate the fact that we are the kind of nation willing to do the terrible deeds necessary to avoid lesser evils and reach for the greatest possible good, which is what Christians ought to do. She was hesitant about the jubilation of sending soldiers off to combat with ticker tape parades. I understand that this image is complicated, but I had much more space for war as a positive good than I think she did.

So my critique is that she was too tuned in to the idea of burden. What I think is underdeveloped is her work on movies. She was working on a book about movies, but I don’t know where that book is. She understood the power of symbols and their significance. Movies are important; she loved them. She couldn’t go out and jog, so I think she watched a lot of movies and recognized they are a great way to reach wide audiences.

She always wanted to teach a class just on films. She once mentioned that someone needs to do a political theology of Khem, the rebel, which hadn’t been done. I think that would be another important project. Deborah, would you add to that?

Several folks here are contributors to a book we have coming out. I am a co-editor of “Jean Bethke Elshtain: Politics and Ethics in Society,” which is from Notre Dame, Spring 2018. Part of the purpose of the book is to discuss themes that Elshtain was concerned about but did not fully develop. One thing that stands out is that she took a path from Wittenberg to Rome in her life. In her scholarship, she was largely Augustinian, but there was an underdeveloped natural Aquinas point of view that might bear some working out.

So that’s one theme, but there will be many more explored by the 20 to 25 contributors.