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.     

Missions without missionaries: the social dimension of church growth in Muslim Java,Indonesia

We live in a world where religion is not confined to the private sphere and where faith-based acts, from Qur'an burning to terrorist activities, affront not only believers but also non-believers. Indonesia, where moderate Islam has long enjoyed its compatibility with other religions, has recently emerged as a hot spot of Muslim–Christian violence. In order to examine the social face of faith in ‘unfavourable’ circumstances, this article analyses church growth in Muslim Java by addressing the sociological issues related to what makes a church strong. Through an empirical investigation into the Java Christian Church, the article demonstrates that a church manages to establish a firm foothold in a Muslim society by developing the porosity of the religious frontier at the organizational level.     

IS A MESSIANIC POLITICAL ETHIC POSSIBLE? Recent Work by and about John Howard Yoder

In his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially Preface to Theology, in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and The Jewish‐Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder's proposal for a renewed Jewish–Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics.     

AUGUSTINE AND THE LIMITS OF PREEMPTIVE AND PREVENTIVE WAR

While Michael Walzer's distinction between preemptive and preventive wars offers important categories for current reflection upon the Bush Doctrine and the invasion of Iraq, it is often treated as a modern distinction without antecedent in the classical Christian just war tradition. This paper argues to the contrary that within Augustine's corpus there are passages in which he speaks about the use of violence in situations that we would classify today as preemptive and preventive military action. While I do not claim that Augustine makes an explicit distinction between the two types of war (such would be anachronistic), I will argue that based on examinations of De libero arbitrio I.v.11–12 and De civitate Dei I.30 Augustine's discussions of hypothetical cases or actual wars in history provide insights helpful for contemporary reflection on preemptive and preventive wars.     

Mission and Reconciliation in the Orthodox Church

This article examines the Orthodox view on reconciliation as reflected in the famous patriarchal and synodical encyclicals early in the last century and in more recent official documents: the Messages of the Primates of the Orthodox Churches, the approved documents of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s official statements. These are looked at in reference to (i) the mission statement of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, Together towards Life, and (ii) the papal encyclicals Unitatis redintegratio and Ut unum sint. The article further examines the need for a common Christian witness and the reactions within the Orthodox world from a tiny but vocal anti-ecumenical minority. It underlines the importance of a Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities along with the existing Universal Declaration of Human Rights to address the ecological problem and inequities of the current world economic system, based on the interrelatedness of economy and ecology and the consolidation of the interfaith dialogue for a wider reconciliation. The article also underlines the highest priority of the theological dialogues at all levels and by all bodies of the Orthodox ecclesial reality as a necessary step to promote reconciliation. Finally, the article assesses (i) the dialogue aiming to achieve the visible unity of the church; (ii) dialogues generally focusing on Christian unity, or even unity with other faithful; (iii) dialogues aiming as much as possible at common Christian witness; and (iv) dialogues focusing on the church’s responsibility toward society and the integrity of creation.     

Jesus' Prophethood and Islam: Insights from the Risale‐i Nur

While Jesus’ prophethood is an indisputable component of his identity in the Christian tradition, it has been marginalized for centuries in favor of his identity as savior. In this article, I argue that an engagement with an understanding of Jesus’ prophethood in Islam, particularly as explicated by the Turkish thinker Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, can help Christians recover a more robust interpretation of Jesus as prophet that has a positive impact on a Christian articulation of the church and of discipleship today.     

Military Service in the Church Orders

The debate concerning the approach of the early Christians to the military can be advanced by paying attention to a genre of literature that scholars have largely ignored: the church orders. These documents—the Apostolic Tradition, Canons of Hippolytus, Testament of Our Lord, and Apostolic Constitutions—are illuminating in that they deal with ethics within comprehensive treatments of worship, catechesis and pastoral life. They also are useful in that they, as variations upon a common original, are means of monitoring change across the third and fourth centuries. This article uses the church orders to assess four elements of a “new consensus” (David Hunter) on Christians in the military. By and large it confirms these, but at times it alters emphases and adds nuances. It argues that: (1) the church orders viewed killing as the big problem for Christians in the legions, not idolatry; (2) the church orders confirm that the pre‐Christendom church was divided on Christian participation in the legions; (3) the church orders provide evidence for both discontinuity and continuity on the issue across the centuries, although the deepest continuity, based on John the Baptist's “rule” of Luke 3.14, is between the pre‐Constantinian laity and later theologians; (4) the church orders confirm a regional variation in attitude and practice. The church orders' authority in practice is never clear.     

Freedom from and Freedom for: Luther's Concept of Freedom for the Twenty‐First Century

This article examines Martin Luther's two fundamental claims around Christian freedom. Drawing on Luther, I suggest three primary characteristics of Christian freedom that should be recovered and championed in our twenty‐first‐century context: it is relational, it is a gift; and it contains within it an ethical imperative for the sake of the neighbor. Together, these three characteristics point to the fact that in a Christian understanding, “freedom” is never considered by itself, but only in the larger context of “freedom from” and “freedom for.”     

WHETHER SPIES TOO CAN BE SAVED

Spies, like soldiers, do a job and employ tactics that need justifying. I offer an argument for how Christian ethics may handle the moral problems of spying and do so by looking at the morally troubling tactics used by spies through the eyes of those who played an important role in shaping Christian theology and philosophy and have become normative in Christian moral thinking on the use of force. I argue that spying may be justifiable when we conceive the profession as a kind of use of force that is governed by the just war criteria. Spying is a particular kind of use of force that takes its moral character from those who authorize it, with what justification, to what ends, and with what methods. Particular attention is given to the tactics of disregarding the rules of war, the telling and living of lies, running covert operations, and assassinating military and political leaders.     

The queer life of Christian exceptionalism

This response to Jasbir Puar's monograph, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), brings Puar's analysis to bear on the current attraction to ‘Christian identity’ as a historical analytic in the fields of New Testament and early Christian Studies, and to increasing associations of the ancient emergence of ‘Christian identity’ with transgressive queerness. I argue that this latter trend, especially, abets certain forms of Christian exceptionalism under the guise of resistance against empire, but I also suggest that this scholarship reveals certain affinities between the notion of queerness as pure transgression and contemporary Christianity.     

“Never Again War”

This essay addresses the complexities of the Roman Catholic position on war by evaluating recent documentary evidence, attending to the contemporary challenges of terrorism and humanitarian interventions. It presents two arguments. First, attending to traditional Catholic resources for assessing war, papal criticism of recent military action, and debates about a recent shift in Catholic just war logic, this essay argues that Catholic teaching on war has undergone a repositioning in a pacifist direction. Second, it contends that recent critiques of this shift in position by scholars such as George Weigel and James Turner Johnson, however, are wrong to categorize this a “functional pacifism.” Though a development from within just war theory and pacifist reasoning, the Church's new stance does not operate as a type of pacifism, allowing too many possibilities for justified armed conflict to be labeled as “functional” pacifism. The essay concludes by examining the traditional Catholic theological commitments that place limits on any movement toward pacifism, precluding even a functionally pacifist position.     

Forgiveness as singularity: The “Allah” controversy in Malaysia and the church's public discourse of cheek‐turning

This paper adopts a Lacanian motif to present the world as being psycho‐theologically characterized by sacrifice and loss, with its subjects (including, more often than not, Christians) remaining in bondage to a vicious cycle of tit‐for‐tat violence and retribution. The chief solution to this situation is for the church to mimic the mercy, forgiveness, and cheek‐turning displayed by Jesus. Through via unconditional forgiveness in the face of injustice and oppression, the community defined by the enemy‐loving work of Christ can exemplify an unravelling of the present diabolical world system. In Lacanian terms, the church is responsible to initiate an ongoing assault of the Real (of peace‐making and forgiveness) upon the Symbolic Order (of rights‐seeking and oppression). This article argues that turning the cheek is no mere political tactic, but is indeed the church's singularity, that is, that aspect of a subject whose jouissance (or enjoyment) refuses the validation of the Other. It concludes by highlighting two episodes from the “Allah” controversy in Malaysia where Christian leaders prioritized forgiveness and reconciliation over legal reprisal.     

Flagships in a sea of unbelief? Christian affiliation around big church buildings in England

Census data have prompted research on why there is so much local variation in religious identity. This study uses the key statistics of the 2011 UK National Census, aggregated by electoral wards, to investigate whether the presence of an important church building (a ‘flagship’ cathedral or cathedral-like parish/abbey church) correlates with higher Christian affiliation than would be expected if there were no such church building nearby. Using all 6,712 English wards within 30 km of a large church, those within 3 km had about 5%–7% fewer self-identified Christians than those further away. However, when social demography is controlled for, wards closest to large churches had around 1% more Christian affiliates than expected. Greater than expected levels of affiliation persisted when the analysis was restricted to buildings outside urban conurbations or just to Anglican or just to Roman Catholic cathedrals. Reasons for this ‘proximity’ effect are discussed, including the possibility that the sheer physical presence of such a building may heighten the chance of individuals self-identifying as Christian.     

THEOLOGICAL ETHICS, THE CHURCHES, AND GLOBAL POLITICS

Several discourses about theology, church, and politics are occurring among Christian theologians in the United States. One influential strand centers on the communitarian theology of Stanley Hauerwas, who calls on Christians to witness faithfully against liberalism in general and war in particular. Jeffrey Stout, in his widely discussed Democracy and Tradition (2004), responds that religious people ought precisely to endorse those democratic and liberal American traditions that join religious and secular counterparts to battle injustice. Hauerwas, Stout, and many of their interlocutors envision liberal U.S. culture as the context of Christian social ethics. The ensuing debate rarely incorporates Catholic scholars, feminist scholars, scholars of color, or international and liberationist voices. Their inclusion could enhance an understanding of the role of the church in society, and support a common morality in the face of global pluralism. More importantly, it could broaden the scope of discourse on religion and politics to envision global Christian social ethics.     

Disturbing Politics: Neo‐Paulinism and the Scrambling of Religious and Secular Identities

Abstract : One of the most remarkable characteristics of recent cultural theory is its obsession with the early Christian apostle Paul. With this interest in Paul as contemporary cultural theory, a panoply of modern identities find themselves obsolesced, scrambled, or otherwise useless. This essay attempts to find new points of orientation within those scrambled identities that have appeared with this new Paul, and the essay does so by exploring the idea that we are now repeating a Pauline moment of kairos, that apocalyptic moment in which meaningful transformation of the world may occur.     

THOMAS AQUINAS BETWEEN JUST WAR AND PACIFISM

Some recent authors have argued that Aquinas deliberately integrated a pacifist outlook into his just war theory. Others, by contrast, have maintained that his rejection of pacifism was unequivocal. The present article attempts to set the historical record straight by an examination of Aquinas's writings on this topic. In addition to Q. 40, A. 1 of Summa theologiae II–II, the text usually cited in this connection, this article considers the biblical commentaries where Aquinas explains how the Gospel “precepts of patience,” especially Matthew 5:39, “Do not resist evil,” should be interpreted in light of the doctrine of just war. The article concludes that Aquinas formulated a two‐stage theory whereby pacifism was rejected as a suitable form of agency for the state (respublica), while it was affirmed as the appropriate response to evil for the agency of the church (ecclesia).     

The Paradox of Terrorism in Civil War

A great deal of violence in civil wars is informed by the logic of terrorism: violence tends to be used by political actors against civilians in order to shape their political behavior. I focus on indiscriminate violence in the context of civil war: this is a type of violence that selects its victims on the basis of their membership in some group and irrespective of their individual actions. Extensive empirical evidence suggests that indiscriminate violence in civil war is informed by the logic of terrorism. I argue that under certain conditions, that tend to be quite common, such violence is counter productive. I specify these conditions and address the following paradox: why do we sometimes observe instances of indiscriminate violence evenunder conditions that make this strategy counterproductive? I review four possible reasons: truncated data, ignorance, cost, and institutional constraints. I argue that indiscriminate violence emerges because it is much cheaper than its main alternative – selective violence. It is more likely under a steep imbalance of power between the competing actors, and where and when resources and information are low; however, most political actors eventually switch to selective violence. Thus, given a balance of power between competing actors, indiscriminate violence is more likely at early rather than late stages of the conflict. Overall, the paper suggests that even extreme forms of violence are used strategically.     

The White Cross in Muslim Java: Muslim–Christian Politics in the Javanese City of Salatiga

The interplay of religion and politics has been a consistent theme within the literature of political radicalism and religious violence in the contemporary Muslim world. Indonesia, which has long paraded its multi-layered history of religions, recently emerged as one of the main sites of Muslim–Christian violence. The religious volatility that has characterized Indonesia over the past decade has, however, left variations in vitality between faith-based organizations under-researched. In order to examine how the Christian churches undergird their institutions in the world's largest Muslim country, this article takes as its case study Salib Putih (White Cross) in the Javanese city of Salatiga and traces how a legal issue comes to transcend the boundary between religion and politics at local and national levels.     

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.