Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez on Religious Authority and Cause for Justified War: The Centrality of Religious War in the Christian Just War Tradition

Contrary to the received understanding that Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez ruled out religious war by grounding just cause in natural law, they supported a robust view of papal authority for war when necessary for the defense of the church against heretics, schismatics, and pagans as well as for the spread of Christianity and Christendom throughout the world. They believed that religious wars were in accord with natural law as a means to its fulfillment in Christianity, as a justification for the defense of the church as the one true faith, and as a moral obligation to provide all of humanity with the opportunity to receive Christian truth and grace. The neo‐Thomists' vigorous support for religious war was in the mainstream of the Christian just war tradition from the time of the wars against pagans in the early middle ages through their own time. This finding and the continuation into the modern era of sanctified patriotism stemming from the mixing of church and state especially during war that began in early Middle Ages, along with the historic roots of the recently prominent presumption against war, argue for a more complex understanding of the normative Christian just war tradition than that found among supporters of the classic interpretation of that tradition.     

GRATIAN AND MENGZI

In this essay, I compare two pioneer thinkers of the “just war” tradition across cultures: Gratian in the Christian tradition, and Mengzi (Mencius) in the Confucian tradition. I examine their historical-cultural contexts and the need for both to discuss just war, introduce the nature of their treatises and the rudimentary theories of just war therein, and trace the influence both thinkers’ theories have had on subsequent just war ethics. Both deemed just cause, proper authority, and right intention to be necessary conditions for initiating a just war. However, Gratian’s theory has a presumption against injustice whereas Mengzi’s theory has a presumption against war. As a jurist of the Church, Gratian sought to discriminate just from unjust wars, while Mengzi, a moral-political advisor to rulers, was more concerned with avoiding bloodshed and building lasting peace. In addition to examining these thinkers’ respective historical influences, I submit that Gratian’s Decretum and the Mengzi are pioneering in two more senses. First, they offer important clues to understanding how just war ideas were developed very differently in medieval Europe and in premodern China. Second, both embodied features that helped shape their subsequent intellectual tradition, which in turn molded the different legacies of these two works.     

TWO CULTURES OF RELIGION AS OBSTACLES TO PEACE

Abstract. There are two contrasting cultures in every religious tradition, the holy war and peaceable garden cultures. Examples are given for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Conflict is basic to human existence, stemming from the uniqueness of human individuals and their groups. Churches, instead of helping their societies develop the middle-ground skills of negotiation and mediation, have insisted on a choice between two extreme behaviors: unitive love or destruction of the enemy. In international affairs this has led to the identification of the church with the state in wartime and kept it from claiming the important middle ground of peacemaking. Institutionalized religion can pick up its missed opportunities.     

Aquinas and Luther on War and Peace: Sovereign Authority and the Use of Armed Force

Recent just war thought has tended to prioritize just cause among the moral criteria to be satisfied for resort to armed force, reducing the requirement of sovereign authority to a secondary, supporting role: such authority is to act in response to the establishment of just cause. By contrast, Aquinas and Luther, two benchmark figures in the development of Christian thought on just war, unambiguously gave priority to the requirement of sovereign authority as instituted by God to carry out the responsibilities of ensuring a just and peaceful order in the world. On this conception it is the sovereign, in deciding whether to resort to armed force, who must make sure to satisfy the other moral requirements of the jus ad bellum . This paper examines Aquinas and Luther on sovereign authority for use of armed force. Recapturing the importance of this conception is important both for the proper understanding of just war tradition and for working out its implications for such contemporary issues as humanitarian intervention and "regime change."     

The Calls of Kairos and Islam

The greatest challenge to Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century emerged from liberation theologies and specifically from the point of view of pitting the Christian faith against the most despicable conditions of inhumanity. Oppressive contexts and conditions gave rise to deep reflection on what it means to be a Christian in situations where Christians oppress fellow Christians. The negative goal of Muslim-Christian relations requires looking into both religious traditions to see how the messages of Islam and Christianity have been misappropriated and distorted to serve the interests of the powerful. The positive goal will be to rediscover the emancipatory functions of Islam and Christianity in the midst of history and culture, and direct the resultant awareness to serve present and future objectives of Muslim-Muslim, Christian-Christian and Muslim-Christian relations.     

REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES IN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

Reproductive medical technology has revolutionized the natural order of human procreation. Accordingly, some have celebrated its advent as a new and liberating determinant of kinship at the global level and advocate it as a right to reproductive health while others have frowned upon it as a vehicle for “guiltless exchange of sexual fluid” and commodification of human gametes. Religious voices from both Christianity and Islam range from unthinking adoption to restrictive use. While utilizing this technology to enable the married couple to have children through the use of their own sexual material is welcome, the use of third party, surrogacy, and reproductive cloning are not in keeping with the sacrosanct principles of kinship, procreation through licit sexual intercourse, and social cohesiveness for building a cohesive family as uphold by both Christianity and Islam. To examine such larger issues emanating from these new ways of human procreation, beyond the question of legality, is a point which legal scholars in both Christianity and Islam, when issuing religious decrees, have not anticipated sufficiently. The article proposes to be an attempt to that end through a qualitative critical content analysis of selected literature written on the subject.     

THINKING COMPARATIVELY ABOUT RELIGION AND WAR

In contrast to the period when the Journal of Religious Ethics began publishing, the study of religion in relation to war and connected issues has prospered in recent years. This article examines three collections of essays providing comparative perspectives on these topics, two recently authored studies of Buddhism and Islam in relation to war, and a compendious collection of texts on Western moral tradition concerning war, peace, and related issues from classical Greece and Rome to the present.     

New religious movements in Islamic West Africa

Christianity and Islam have interacted extensively with traditional African faiths to engender innovative religious developments known as 'New Religious Movements in Africa'. Although the majority of these movements have arisen out of the interaction with Christianity, a number of them have been inspired by Islam. The article, following an established paradigm for New Religious Movements, covers 'African-Related Movements' which are neo-primal, i.e. movements where the inner dynamic and basic structure derives from traditional faith to enable them to cope with new situations and the 'Synthetist movements' which reflect a real assimilation of Islamic elements, but are less ethnocentric and more universal in outlook. The former are referred to as 'Africanized neo-Islamic Movements' whereas the latter are called 'Orthodox New Islamic Movements'. Between these two are the 'traditional movements'. Reasons for the different effects of Islam and Christianity on African tradition and a comparison of Islamic and Christian movements are also presented.     

Cosmic Justice and Sanctioned Violence: The Huangdi Yinfujing and the Legitimacy of War in Religious Daoism

《黄帝阴符经》或《阴符经》是道教传统中一部极为主要的文本。虽然文本作者不详,而且篇幅短小、语义晦涩,但自唐代以来一直被当作奇书,引发多种注释与解读:内丹修炼抑或兵家谋略。本文以(唐)李荃注释本为主,阐述《阴符经》有关阴阳、生杀、机时、五贼、三盗等所涵盖的道家/道教的本体-宇宙观,并以此论述就有关暴力与战争议题所展示的道教伦理观。笔者认为,《阴符经》在重玄思辨中,强调道教"治身治国"的理念,其暗含的"义战"思想亦带有一定的黄老印记。     

Reimagining Just War as Anchored in,Tethered to,and Tempered by Mercy

This essay considers whether the just war tradition is compatible with Christian theologically grounded conceptions of mercy. After considering and rejecting positions that pit mercy and war against each other, the essay mines the work of Walter Kasper and James Keenan on Christian mercy to develop a position that reimagines mercy as compatible with traditional just war criteria. In particular, this analysis leads to the conclusion that Christians may endorse just war in the form of humanitarian intervention. By doing so, they allow mercy to temper the aspects of warfare that diminish the humanity of others.     

“Hands up Who Wants to Die?”: Primoratz on Responsibility and Civilian Immunity in Wartime

The question of the morality of war is something of an embarrassment to liberal political thinkers. A philosophical tradition which aspires to found its preferred institutions in respect for individual autonomy, contract, and voluntary association, is naturally confronted by a phenomenon that is almost exclusively explained and justified in the language of States, force and territory. But the apparent difficulties involved in providing a convincing account of nature and ethics of war in terms of relations between individuals has not prevented liberal theorists from attempting this task. This paper examines a recent attempt by Igor Primoratz to sketch out the implications of a consistent liberalism for just war doctrine and, in particular, as regards the question of who may be a legitimate target of attack in wartime. Primoratz’s paper itself is a critique of Michael Waltzer’s authoritative exposition of just war theory for failing to be sufficiently and consistently liberal. The debate between these two authors is a productive site for investigating the potential and limitations of liberal theories of just war.     

Islam and Christianity: On “Religions of Law”

The pursuit of mutual understanding has not infrequently led Muslims and Christians to define their religious traditions in stark doctrinal opposition one to the other. In this regard, the “religion of law” (Islam)/“religion of grace” (Christianity) dichotomy has a particularly venerable history. This article sets out to re-examine and deconstruct a couplet that would strike many as a platitude, first by giving an account of the Sunni tradition of law-generation, situated in the broad context of the many options represented by different Islamic sects, and then by revisiting the paradigmatic understanding of law in the Christian dispensation worked out by Aquinas. This exposition leads to the conclusion that any simple opposition is to be avoided at all costs, obfuscating, as it does, much more than it elucidates. Furthermore, Christianity emerges from our chosen perspective as, in some sense, more essentially a “religion of law” than Islam ever could be.     

THE IDEA OF DEFENSE IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY THINKING ABOUT JUST WAR

What is, or should be, the role of defense in thinking about the justification of use of armed force? Contemporary just war thinking prioritizes defense as the principal, and perhaps the only, just cause for resorting to armed force. By contrast, classic just war tradition, while recognizing defense as justification for use of force by private persons, did not reason from self‐defense to the justification of the use of force on behalf of the political community, but instead rendered the idea of just cause for resort to force in terms of the sovereign's responsibility to maintain justice, vindicating those who had suffered from injustice and punishing evildoers. This paper moves through three major stages in the historical development of just war thinking, first examining a critical phase in the formation of the classical idea of just cause as the responsibility to maintain justice, then discussing the shift, characteristic of the modern period, to an idea of sovereignty as connected to the state and the prioritization of defense of the state as just cause for use of force, and lastly showing how this conception of the priority of defense became part of the recovery of just war thinking in the latter part of the twentieth century. The paper concludes by noting recent changes in thought on international law that tend to emphasize justice at the expense of the right of self‐defense, suggesting that the roots of just war thinking imply the need for a similar rethinking of contemporary just war discourse.     

The Ahmadiyya and the Study of Comparative Religion in Indonesia: Controversies and Influences

As an organization of foreign origin, the existence and contribution of the Ahmadiyya in Indonesia has been a subject of debate. Some scholars ignore it completely as unimportant, while others consider that it has had significant influence. The contribution of the Ahmadiyya to Indonesian Islam most asserted by the movement itself is its efforts to check and respond to Christian missionary activity. In what way has the movement actually made a contribution to that effort? How widespread is the influence of the Ahmadiyya in the discourse on Christianity, in particular, and the study of comparative religion, in general, in Indonesia? Why has the Ahmadiyya paid more attention to the issue of Christianity than other Muslim groups? This article aims to answer these questions by analysing literature on Christianity written and distributed by the Ahmadiyya in Indonesia and the effect this has had on relations between Islam and Christianity in two fields – religious mission and academia. The article presents three propositions. First, Ahmadiyya literature, with its apologetic, polemical and controversial character, had a significant influence on the academic study of comparative religion during two periods of instability: the late colonial era and the first two decades after the declaration of independence in 1945. Second, Ahmadiyya literature on Christianity has been most influential through the way it sets out to create a sense of the superiority of Islam and its compatibility with modernity. Third, for the Ahmadiyya, the issue of Christianity, particularly the death of Jesus, has been used as evidence that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the second Messiah.     

Sex Reassignment Technology: The Dilemma of Transsexuals in Islam and Christianity

The birth of people with confused or ambiguous sex makeup as a biological fact since the annals of history has posed the challenge of accommodating them within the binary gender of sociocultural systems. In this process, the role of religion as a defining factor in social engineering has been paramount. Major religions, such as Islam and Christianity, have addressed this issue within the frame of their God-ordained laws by devising a set of moral and legal imperatives specific to the “third gender.” Modern developments in medicine and biology, however, have made sex reassignment possible for this category of people, today called transsexuals. The question is: How do Islam and Christianity respond to it. After presenting an analytical view of both Muslim scholars and Christian religious authorities on the legitimacy of sex reassignment for transsexuals, this paper attempts to explore if such a dilemma can be resolved.