Theopedia

War

“For it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for it does not carry the sword for no reason. It is God’s servant, an avenger that brings wrath on the one who does wrong.”

— Romans 13:4 (CSB)

Definition

War is armed conflict between political communities. Scripture gives the civil magistrate, not the individual Christian, “the power of the sword” to punish evildoers and defend the innocent,1 and the Reformed confessions extend that grant to war “upon just and necessary occasion.”2 Christians disagree over how far it extends. Pacifism holds that lethal force is never permitted to a follower of Christ, even in a just cause. Just war doctrine holds that force may rightly be used under strict conditions: when entering a war is justified (jus ad bellum), and how it must be fought (jus in bello).

Confessional Witness

The Reformed confessional family agrees on this: God has invested the power of the sword in civil magistrates, not in the church or in private Christians, and government may rightly use it in war. The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that God “hath ordained civil magistrates to be under him, over the people, for his own glory and the public good; and to this end hath armed them with the power of the sword, for defence and encouragement of them that do good, and for the punishment of evil doers.”1 It is lawful for a Christian to hold that office, and magistrates “for that end… may lawfully now, under the New Testament wage war upon just and necessary occasions.”2 The Westminster Confession states the same principle in nearly identical language, permitting the magistrate to “wage war upon just and necessary occasion,”3 as does the Savoy Declaration.4 This is Reformed teaching generally, not a distinctive of the 1689 alone.

Biblical Basis

Paul grounds the magistrate’s authority to wage war in Romans 13: government “does not carry the sword for no reason” but is “God’s servant, an avenger that brings wrath on the one who does wrong” (Rom. 13:4). This comes directly after Paul forbids believers to avenge themselves and tells them to leave vengeance to the Lord (Rom. 12:17, 19); Paul does not mean vengeance goes unanswered until the eschaton, but that God answers it now, through the civil authority he has appointed as his “servant” for that purpose.5 The distinction Paul draws is not that force is intrinsically wrong but that a private response to evil is forbidden a believer while a public response is entrusted to civil government.

James traces war to its root in fallen human desire: “What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain” (James 4:1-2). Scripture also records wars that God himself commanded, most extensively Israel’s conquest of Canaan. These wars do not offer a direct template for a modern nation, since Israel alone held a unique, unrepeatable divine commission to occupy a specific land as God’s own covenant people, and it was God, not Israel’s military strength, who won its battles (1 Sam. 8:7, 20). They nonetheless show that engaging in war is not intrinsically evil, and that God restrained Israel’s conduct even in a divinely sanctioned war, forbidding, for example, the destruction of fruit trees in a siege (Deut. 20:19).6

Historical Development

Patristic origins of the just war tradition

Just war reasoning did not originate with Christian reflection. Plato held that only a governing authority could declare war and that an enemy’s property should not be needlessly destroyed; Aristotle held that war could be justified for self-defense, the defense of a neighbor, or to correct a prior injustice; Cicero argued that war must be a last resort after diplomacy is exhausted, fought only for a just cause such as self-preservation, and declared by a proper authority.7

The Christian just war tradition began with Ambrose of Milan (339-397), who applied the virtues of courage, prudence, and love to a nation’s self-defense and to the defense of the weak, provided restraint was used: “he who does not keep harm off a friend, if he can, is as much in fault as he who causes it.”8 Ambrose’s convert Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is, in J. Daryl Charles’s judgment, “the most important figure in the historical development of the just-war tradition,” developing “just cause, proper authority, formal declaration, the aim of securing a just peace, retribution as distinct from revenge, and discrimination between innocence and guilt.”9 For Augustine, defending the innocent is required by love itself, not merely by a calculation that war is the lesser of two evils: force against an aggressor aims “to punish him ‘with a sort of kind harshness,’… constraining him from further wrongdoing and encouraging him to repent and embrace peace.”9

Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

Augustine’s principles were developed over the following centuries into two sets of criteria, traditionally given their Latin names: jus ad bellum, governing whether entering a war is justified, and jus in bello, governing how a just war must be fought.

Under jus ad bellum, a war requires just cause (defense against aggression, defense of the defenseless, or the remedy of an injustice, never conquest, revenge, or plunder) and right intention, ending a grave injustice and restoring a just peace rather than acting from hatred. It requires legitimate authority: Thomas Aquinas distinguished duellum, a private quarrel, from bellum, a public war that only political authority, not private citizens, may declare.10 It requires last resort, all reasonable (not every conceivable) peaceful remedies having been exhausted, and proportionate objectives, so that the cost of war does not exceed the injustice it remedies. It requires a reasonable chance of success, a criterion Jesus himself illustrates when he pictures a king weighing whether ten thousand troops can stand against an invading twenty thousand before deciding whether to fight or sue for peace (Luke 14:31-32).

Under jus in bello, a just war still requires discrimination, or noncombatant immunity: intentional attacks on civilians are forbidden. Dietrich Bonhoeffer drew the line at arbitrary killing, in which “innocent life is deliberately killed,” distinguishing it from killing in self-defense or the defense of a neighbor under attack; by contrast, “the killing of defenseless prisoners or the wounded, who are not capable of attacking my life, is arbitrary.”11 It requires proportionate force, limited to what just objectives actually require, and good faith, which prohibits the torture or abuse of prisoners, the use of human shields, and the use of chemical or biological weapons.

Pacifism’s early dominance and later revival

Pacifism was “the dominant view of the church in the first three centuries,” after which it became a minority position, with particularly strong advocacy “especially since the Reformation.” Just war doctrine “has been the majority view among Christians historically, at least since the fourth century.”12

Opposing Views

Pacifism

Pacifists hold that all violence, even to overcome a greater evil, is morally wrong; pacifism is not passivism, since pacifists still actively resist evil, but only by peaceful means. Some pacifists read the Old Testament’s violence as an accommodation God made to a bloody, fallen world, part of a “progressive trajectory” that “weans his children away from the use of violence to the point that they can see in the model of Jesus one who shows what it means to overcome evil through suffering.”13

The central pacifist text is Matthew 5:38-48, where Jesus replaces the lex talionis with “don’t resist an evildoer” (v. 39), illustrated by turning the other cheek, giving up a coat as well as a shirt, and going a second mile. Preston Sprinkle reads the Greek verb behind “resist” (anthistemi) as usually denoting violent resistance specifically, so that Jesus “specifically prohibits using violence to resist evil.”14 But each of Jesus’s own examples involves no resistance of any kind, and Jesus applies the command across “all citizens of God’s kingdom,” with no room for a separate rule governing a Christian’s public or official conduct.15 The command culminates in “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44), modeled at the cross, where Christ prayed for those crucifying him (Luke 23:34) and where Paul says God demonstrated love for enemies by dying for sinners (Rom. 5:7-10).

Pacifists read Romans 12-13 the same way. Richard Hays holds that “there is not a syllable in the Pauline letters that can be cited in support of Christians employing violence,”16 conceding that Romans 13:4 gives the sword to government but insisting “that is not the role of believers.”17 Myron Augsburger concludes that Christians “can only encourage the government to be the government and to let the church be the church,” even while respecting government’s right to declare war without personally taking part in it.18 Pacifists add that Paul’s own warfare language is consistently spiritual rather than literal (2 Cor. 10:3-5; Eph. 6:11-17), and that Revelation’s “war of the Lamb” is won by “the blood of the Lamb and… the word of their testimony” (Rev. 12:11), not by literal violence.19 Pacifism is not cowardice: figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. show that nonviolent resistance can demand as much courage as armed resistance.20

John Howard Yoder and the renunciation of violence

In John Howard Yoder’s influential The Politics of Jesus, Jesus’s own example carries the pacifist argument further still. Yoder reads Jesus’s Gethsemane request to “take this cup away from me” (Luke 22:42) as a final instance of “the temptation to exercise social responsibility, in the interest of justified revolution, through the use of available violent methods,” a temptation Yoder holds Jesus faced repeatedly throughout his public ministry.21 Hays agrees that “the temptation to refuse the cup is precisely the temptation to resort to armed resistance.”22

Objections and Responses

If lethal force is always evil, then God’s own commands to Israel to wage war and execute justice must themselves be unjust. Reading the Old Testament’s warfare as merely an accommodation to a violent culture, on the way to a nonviolent ideal, does not hold up: if all use of force is wrong without exception, then God’s own authorization of it stands condemned along with it. Scripture instead condemns unjust violence without condemning every use of force.23

Jesus told his disciples not to resist evildoers and to love their enemies, and Paul repeats the same command in Romans 12; neither leaves room for a Christian to use force, in or out of government. Both texts govern how a Christian responds personally to those who wrong him, not whether government may punish evildoers. Immediately after forbidding personal vengeance, Paul turns to explain that God has appointed civil government as his “servant” to execute that same vengeance publicly (Rom. 13:4); the command not to avenge oneself and the affirmation that government rightly bears the sword sit side by side in the same passage, addressed to the same readers.5

Jesus’s Gethsemane prayer to have the cup removed shows that the temptation to violence was a recurring, defining feature of his public ministry, which his followers must therefore also renounce absolutely. This reads nonviolence into the text as an interpretive lens rather than out of it. Jesus’s desire to avoid the cross reflects the ordinary human dread of suffering together with his foreknowledge of bearing the Father’s wrath and experiencing separation from him (Matt. 27:46), not a temptation toward armed revolution.24

Related Doctrines

The civil magistrate’s power of the sword also grounds capital punishment. Paul’s teaching that vengeance belongs to God alone (Rom. 12:19) is treated at greater length under Revenge.

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 24, para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 24, para. 2. ↩ ↩2

  3. Westminster Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 23, para. 2. ↩

  4. Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order (London, 1658), chap. 24, para. 2. ↩

  5. John Stott, quoted in Ken Magnuson, “15. Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020): Paul’s repeated “authority… is God’s authority” and “ministry… is God’s ministry” (Rom. 13:4a, 4b, 6) is “a genuine affirmation that God has ‘established’ the state with his authority… and that when exercising its authority to punish evil it is doing God’s will.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Ken Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020): “Israel’s wars are not fought or won by their great military power, but by God himself”; God even “commands Israel not to destroy trees when laying siege to a city (Deut. 20:19).” ↩

  7. Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force”: Plato “asserts that war requires many laws, including that only a governing authority can declare war,” and “affirms something akin to noncombatant immunity”; Aristotle “asserts that war may be justified under certain circumstances, such as self-defense, the defense of a neighbor, [or] to correct a previous injustice”; Cicero “develops something of the idea of war as a ‘last resort,’ after exhausting all reasonable diplomatic efforts,” requiring “a just cause” and declaration “by a proper authority.” ↩

  8. Ambrose of Milan, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  9. Augustine of Hippo and J. Daryl Charles, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩ ↩2

  10. Thomas Aquinas, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force”: Aquinas “distinguishes between ‘duellum (the private quarrel or duel) and bellum (war). Insofar as war is a public matter, bellum must be adjudicated by political-legal means and not private citizens.’” ↩

  11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  12. Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  13. Preston Sprinkle, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  14. Sprinkle, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  15. Sprinkle, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force”: “there can be no distinction between private and public spheres or one’s role in personal relationships versus the role of the state.” ↩

  16. Richard Hays, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  17. Hays, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  18. Myron Augsburger, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  19. Hays, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  20. Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force”: “a consideration of examples such as Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrates that many pacifists know the cost of nonviolent resistance, and face that reality with amazing courage.” ↩

  21. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  22. Hays, quoted in Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force.” ↩

  23. Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force”: “if all use of force, and particularly killing, is wrong, then God’s own authorization of war and capital punishment must be unjust. Does God himself need to be weaned off violence? No, instead, God condemns unjust violence and evil emphatically, but not all use of force, not even every killing, is unjust.” ↩

  24. Magnuson, “Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force”: “to argue that the resort to violence is a constant temptation in Jesus’s public ministry, and further, that it is precisely the temptation to avoid the cup of suffering, is to read too much into the text, using nonviolence as a primary interpretive lens.” ↩