Should Christians fight in wars?

I recently heard of a new Christian group who is very critical to believers who serve in war – specifically because of Jesus’ words in Luke 6:27-38 about loving and praying for enemies, turning the other cheek, and giving whatever is asked of you. They claim fighting America’s wars is fighting for a worldly Kingdom. It is these claims I want to refute in this post.

According to C.S. Lewis (1949), acclaimed Christian philosopher, when Christ spoke these words recorded in Luke, there was a specific application for them his audience would not have missed.

"Does anyone suppose our Lord’s hearers understood him to mean that if a homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party, tried to knock me out of the way, I must stand aside and let him get his victim? I at any rate think it impossible they could have so understood him. I think it equally impossible that they supposed him to mean that the best way of bringing up a child was to let it hit its parents whenever it was in a temper, or, when it had grabbed the jam, to give it the honey also. I think the meaning of the words was perfectly clear – “Insofar as you are simply an angry man who has been hurt, mortify your anger and do not hit back” (p. 86).

He goes on further to say that if a person were in an official position, like a parent, or a court judge, or a soldier, “your duties may be very different because [there] may be then other motives than egotistic retaliation for hitting back” (p. 86).

Lewis also has a lot to say about serving in war. Like Lewis believed about WWII, I believe our cause to be honorable in Iraq and even further, I believe it’s our nation’s duty to at least attempt to help a less fortunate nation – even when it’s tough. It’s unfortunate though, this modern war in Iraq will likely not have the same outcome as WWII, because people in America (and Iraq) aren’t united for the common good, as Americans were in WWII. (Indeed, Americans had to be united because the laymen understood the war threatened the homeland if Hitler succeeded in Europe.)

I think if the greater good would come from the decision to go to war, then war (although tragic) is justified. It is rational to say that peace under Hitler (or Islam) would in no way be better than a war preventing his (its) rule.

I think Lewis’s strongest point about war is made on page 75ff though. To summarize, he said good countries should do good things for other countries. However, no single country has resources to do good things for all countries in need. In the process of helping A, it neglects B. So it therefore makes sense that the good country should choose to help the country who is a benefactor and neglect the one who has no special claim on it. And sometimes “it involves helping A by actually doing some degree of violence to B” because B is threatening A.

Consider the following excerpt from Lewis (1949):

The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil. Nor am I greatly moved by the fact that many of the individuals we strike down in war are innocent. That seems, in a way, to make war not worse but better. All men die, and most men miserably. That two soldiers on opposites sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment when his selfishness in most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant, should kill [each] other in plain battle seems to me by no means one of the most terrible things in this very terrible world (p. 77-78).

I would take it even further and say that when women and children die resulting from collateral damage in war, (although unjust), it is not the worse evil that could have happened to them. Their own countrymen could be doing far more damage to them in life, than the attacking country has done in killing them unintentionally. (This I know to be the case from experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many times the lives of the innocent suffer long lives under their oppressors.)

Finally, I believe that even in a corrupt society, there can be righteous individuals in that society’s military who do good things wherever they’re sent. (Wasn’t this the case with Cornelius, officer in the Roman Empire in Acts 10.) Additionally, When soldiers serving under a corrupt establishment asked Jesus how they should live, (Luke 3:14) he did not instruct them to defect. He told them not to treat people poorly and be satisfied with their pay.

There may be a lot of corrupt decision makers involved in the process of this war, but in no way do I see those decisions inhibiting the righteous work of individual soldiers. Furthermore I believe the ultimate attempt is for America to help Iraq, not harm it.

There is a caution every believing soldier should be aware of though. It would not be good for a soldier to serve his country as he would serve God. We shouldn’t allow the war “to absorb our whole attention, because it is a finite object and therefore intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of the human soul” (Lewis, 1949, p. 52). And also, “A man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or party, or class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most empathetically belong to God: himself” (p. 53).

Reference

Lewis, C.S. (1949) The weight of glory. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.