Warring Thoughts: A Christian Perspective on Military Conflict

These are a con­densed ver­sion of the notes from Glen’s Chi Alpha mes­sage on 4/1/2003.


* What should we think about war?
* What should do in a time of war?

First, what should we think?

You can divide peo­ple into four camps:
1. Prag­ma­tists: We gotta do what we gotta do. Us or them. No rules in love or war.
2. Prin­ci­pal­ists: War is always regret­table but not always evil. It must be waged accord­ing to cer­tain rules.
3. Paci­fists: War is always evil, killing is tan­ta­mount to mur­der, so to die help­less is prefer­able to tak­ing up arms in defense of one’s life, fam­ily, coun­try, or val­ues.
4. Pas­sivists: Not my prob­lem. I’m not a sol­dier nor a gov­ern­men­tal leader. I’m sorry that peo­ple are dying, but it’s no skin off my nose.



The Bible Adopts a Prin­ci­pled Per­spec­tive
* God com­mands mil­i­tary action at least 35 times in the Old Tes­ta­ment.
* Many heroes of the faith were mil­i­tary lead­ers (Hebrews 11:32–34).
     Abra­ham (pur­sued the armies that abducted his rel­a­tives)
     Joshua (con­quered the Promised Land)
     David (waged war through­out his reign as king)
* The New Tes­ta­ment endorses war

     Some sol­diers are com­mended as right­eous peo­ple (Matthew 8:5–12, Acts 10:1–2)
     The Chris­t­ian life is described using mil­i­tary metaphors (Eph­esians 6:10–20; 2 Tim­o­thy 2:3–4) this point is more pow­er­ful than it might seem at first glance: try to reimag­ine these pas­sages as though Paul were using the metaphor of a pros­ti­tute serv­ing her client and see how dif­fer­ent they are: the metaphor assumes that the pro­fes­sion is not morally rep­re­hen­si­ble.
* The Bible also acknowl­edges the hor­ri­ble suf­fer­ing that war brings and talks of war as a bad thing.


The City of God book 19 chap­ter 7 or in his Against the Manicheans part 22.74Summa The­o­log­ica in the sec­ond part of the sec­ond part ques­tion 4arti­cles on just war the­ory.

For a war to be just, it must be waged
* by a legit­i­mate author­ity
* for a moral rea­son
* in a moral man­ner
* with a rea­son­able chance of suc­cess
* and only as a last resort.

HOW SHOULD WE ACT IN A TIME OF WAR?

We Should Be Care­ful Lest We Sin

* We Must Trust God: Psalm 27:3
* We Must Love Our Ene­mies: Matthew 5:43–44
* We Must Seek a Just Peace: Proverbs 25:5; Psalm 82:3–4

We Should Pray
* We Should Pray For the Inno­cent : 1 Tim­o­thy 2:1
* We Should Pray For Our Lead­ers: 1 Tim­o­thy 2:2
* We Should Pray For Our Ene­mies: Luke 6:27–28
* We Should Pray For Our Mis­sion­ar­ies: 2 Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans 3:1