… continued.

Craig

In your paper you quote Jurgen Moltmann, who distinguishes the difference between justified and unjustified violence. Is that distinction helpful in this context?

Joshua

Yes, I think Moltmann’s perspective is helpful. I think one of the main weaknesses of the absolute pacifist position is that it doesn’t distinguish between justified and unjustified violence. But we need to be careful about how we employ these terms. There’s always a danger if we consider the criteria we’re using to determine whether violence is justified or not, because the distinction doesn’t really map perfectly onto the distinction between defensive and offensive. But that’s the distinction that’s often applied. I think it has a lot more to do with the purpose and the character of the violence that’s employed. I think Moltmann has a point that violence can be justified when it serves what I’ve referred to as something like the negative function of force. 

So, violence never serves any positive purpose and we can never build the kingdom of God with violence or through military means – it’s a total categorical mistake to assume that we could ever do that – but there is a negative function of violence in the sense that violence can be used in order to restrain evil and to protect innocent life. And such use of violence is always tragic. It is never going to be something positive or something that we can celebrate, but it may sometimes be morally necessary. And so that’s the distinction I would make. 

So just violence is employed in order to protect innocent life, and unjust violence is an aggressive violence. It seeks domination. It’s a violence that’s disproportionate to the threat that’s faced. And I think the Russian war against Ukraine is a good illustration of this distinction. Because I think if Ukraine just laid down its arms and decided not to fight on principle, if it capitulated, the result would not be peace I can tell you that for sure. It would be a genocide on a scale that we have not witnessed in Europe since the Second World War. So the defensive violence that Ukraine is employing against Russia is serving the negative, but morally necessary, purpose of protecting civilians from massacre, from torture, from rape, from child abductions in the tens of thousands which Russia has done, and also from intended cultural erasure which is an aspect of the war that’s often neglected: the way in which Russia is systematically trying to erase Ukrainian language and cultural identity. This really is a war of annihilation. And so, yes, I think the distinction is legitimate.

Craig

So do those who are saying that Jesus’ words are just too weak have a point? Has that argument got an element of truth to it? Maybe a revision is needed, simply in order to reflect the fact that war today is a completely different thing to past engagements between military forces on a battlefield somewhere, in which it is mainly the combatants who lose their lives?

Joshua

I can understand their perspective, and the sentiments behind that line of argument, but I don’t think it applies in this case. I don’t think Jesus was naive or idealistic at all. In fact, quite the opposite. I think Jesus was very, very realistic in his assessment of both the human condition and the wider societal and political issues. I think we sometimes misinterpret Jesus. So I don’t think Jesus was naive, but I think that we’ve often been quite naive in the way that we’ve interpreted his teachings, especially his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t think in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was offering a blueprint for how to run a society or how to organise a political system. I think that what Jesus was doing in the Sermon on the Mount was announcing the kingdom of God and describing what life looks like when God’s reign breaks into the world. 

I think the Beatitudes describe a radical reorientation of values. I sometimes think about the Beatitudes using the term employed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, where Umwertung aller Werte denotes the ‘revaluation of all values’. Jesus is essentially turning the world’s value system on its head and seeing morality from a completely different perspective. Jesus is promoting an attempt at a radical reorientation of all human values: a world in which the meek are the ones who inherit the earth, the peacemakers are called the children of God, the people who hunger after righteousness are are the ones who are satisfied in the end. And I think this is realistic. I don’t think it’s idealistic. I don’t think it’s naive at all. I think it’s realistic because it recognises that the power structures and the customary assumptions of the world are fundamentally disordered. And I think the Sermon on the Mount is radical, it’s subversive, precisely because it refuses to accept the worldly criterion of success: whether it’s power, or success, or fame, or money people put first. And so I think that’s the real power of the Beatitudes. 

Jesus wasn’t addressing the big political issues or giving us a blueprint about how society ought to function. He was speaking to a community of disciples about how to live as witnesses to the kingdom of God. So there comes the question of the applicability of Jesus’s teachings. And, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, ‘if someone strikes you, then turn the other cheek’. Whilst I think it is naive to assume that what Jesus meant here was that we should respond passively to every instance of genocidal aggression, I don’t think Jesus, was giving us instructions about how how state authorities should respond to genocidal aggression by a foreign invader. I think there’s a difference between the personal ethics of following Christ and political responsibility. There is a difference between responding to personal insults on the one hand and responding to systematic annihilation and genocide on the other. So I think the question we should ask when we read the Sermon on the Mount is, what does faithfulness look like? In the context of what Jesus says about the coming of the kingdom of God, what does Jesus require of us in specific situations? 

I’ve met my Ukrainian friends and I’ve challenged them a little bit. I’ve pushed back on some of their militaristic attitudes because I think, at heart, I’m not really a great advocate of violence or militarism. But at the same time, I’m certainly not a naive, absolute pacifist. And I’ve tried to have this conversation with them. And what’s been really, really illuminating for me is the way in which they speak about how they understand their calling. Because these guys know the Sermon on the Mount. They know the words and the teachings of Jesus inside out, not as academics and scholars, but as people who are living these realities. And I can say that these are people who don’t take any pleasure in their military service. They don’t glorify in violence. And they frequently describe the war as a living hell. It’s literally the word that they use whenever they talk about the war. It’s a living hell. And their motivation in joining the fight and resisting evil with violence is not a kind of burning hatred for the enemy, but they are doing what they’re doing out of love for their own families, for their own communities, for their own country, and their desire is for peace. 

I think they are the kind of people who are described by Jesus as hungering and thirsting for righteousness. And I don’t think that their resistance to the Russian genocide can be interpreted as unfaithfulness to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. I really don’t believe that it is. So I don’t think Jesus was naive in his teachings and I don’t think my Ukrainian friends are naive in the way that they interpret Jesus’s teachings. Jesus wasn’t naive because he knew that he was heading towards crucifixion. He knew that the powers would eventually kill him. But his response was shaped by his vocation to die for the sins of the world. 

So there’s a recognition that our faithfulness requires the protection of vulnerable, innocent life, especially when all the other alternative options involve some sort of moral compromise. And that would lead me to discussing Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his response to Hitler and the Nazis, but that might take us off onto a different tangent.

Simon

Well, you’re in Berlin, you’re on the other side of Berlin to where Bonhoeffer lived, but he was someone who really wrestled with this. And, while there’s no direct evidence that he was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler that some of his family members were involved in, it certainly seems that he knew about it and he was clearly wrestling with the very same issues. It sounds like you’ve thought about that a bit. Do you want to outline briefly what you think the parallels are.

Joshua

Yes, okay. The Bonhoeffer case is really fascinating and illuminating. Bonhoeffer himself was someone who was quite committed, certainly in his early years, to absolute pacifism: the categorical repudiation of violence. And it was only when he was confronted with this extreme situation that there’s some evidence that his views started to change. I think Bonhoeffer implied in his writings that he had reached the point where he was willing to sin in order to save others, or to prevent an even greater evil. And there’s a bit of a paradox in this position; but I think Bonhoeffer, if he did decide to participate in the assassination of Adolf Hitler, realised that his own actions, or the actions of his friends and family involved in the conspiracy against Hitler, didn’t cease to be sinful just because their actions were done for the right reasons. 

So I think Bonhoeffer’s argument is particularly illuminating because he’s not trying to justify or to rationalise his participation in the plot against Hitler, but he’s saying that we live in a radically fallen world where the powers and principalities are unfettered, unleashed in all of their destruction. And sometimes in these situations, we exhaust all the available options. And so anything that we do involves a moral compromise by necessity. And, if we don’t act, then the moral compromise is even graver, or the sin is even graver. And I think there’s a logical progression from this conviction, from his argument that he made in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, where he speaks about costly grace as opposed to cheap grace. Cheap grace would say, ‘this is justified, I can do whatever I want with a clear conscience because God will forgive me’, but costly grace would say ‘this evil or sinful action might be necessary, but I can’t do it without recognising my need for God’s forgiveness’. And so I think there’s some theological wisdom here in this tension, in this paradox. 

We refuse the self-righteousness that comes from believing that we can we can respond to complex moral decisions with completely clean hands or with complete innocence. And it acknowledges the tragedy of what it means to live in a fallen world, a world that is so far departed from the ways of God. And, in Bonhoeffer’s case, this shouldn’t lead to a moral paralysis or a type of relativism where everything is equally good or equally bad. It leaves us free to act in obedience to our conscience before God. And, even if we act imperfectly, we always have resort to God’s mercy, to God’s forgiveness. 

Interestingly, there’s been a renaissance of Bonhoeffer studies in contemporary Ukrainian theology at the moment. I’ve got a few good friends who are really wrestling with Bonhoeffer’s ideas. And I think the conclusion that my Ukrainian friends are coming to, as they’ve been wrestling with Bonhoeffer, is that the Ukrainian resistance, including armed or violent resistance to the Russian campaign of genocide against them, is that resistance to this evil is tragic, and involves some kind of moral compromise, but nonetheless it is still necessary.

So the Ukrainian military chaplains say that some of the Christian soldiers they’re serving with have actually killed Russian soldiers. And they recognise that it’s a moral compromise to take a life, but it is done in order to protect civilians, not with a sense of revelling in the loss of life, even the loss of an enemy life. It’s recognising that this is tragic. And the Ukrainian chaplains don’t do confession in the same way that Catholics do, but they still have soldiers who come to them seeking forgiveness. even while they’re defending innocent life. It is so complicated, it’s a really tricky issue. And we can’t sit in our comfortable armchairs in the UK or Germany and pronounce moral judgments on the rights or wrongs of our Ukrainian friends. But I think it just reminds us that we’re not saved by our moral purity, we’re saved by God’s mercy revealed to us in Christ. And Bonhoeffer was eager to say that this doesn’t give us a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card to sin as much as we want. But he’s saying that in certain extreme situations we might have to act in ways that involve us in evil. And even when we’re doing this, we need to trust in God’s forgiveness rather than our own righteousness. It’s uncomfortable. It’s difficult. There are no easy answers or clear ethical guidance about how this works in practice. But we do have to be honest about the moral complexity and the tension of what it means to follow Christ in a world that is so radically departed from the ways of God. 

So I don’t think either the kind of Christian realism of someone like Reinhold Niebuhr or the just war ideas of Augustine and Aquinas and their contemporary advocates are the answer, but I also don’t think that categorical repudiation of armed force, i.e. Anabaptist pacifism, is the answer either. I think the answer lies somewhere in Bonhoeffer’s attempt to reconcile this idea of costly grace and moral compromise, and always expressing solidarity with oppressed people.