March 25, 2025 • 49 mins
- Stassen & Gushee, Kingdom Ethics
- Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
War!
(00:01):
Huh!
You know that song?
No.
You don't know that song?
No.
War!
Huh!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Who's sang that?
Somebody back in the day.
Welcome to TikTok Theology, a podcast that tackles the major trending topics on social
media that concern the Christian faith.
(00:22):
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less, but those videos can identify
current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt, and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
Hello friends.
Welcome back.
Today we're kind of doing one of those things that we like to do in all of our seasons is
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where we kind of end up with like a piggyback episode.
Because we, you know, we start a conversation in a previous season and then we know that
everything is so multifaceted that one episode is just not going to cover it.
So last, no, two seasons ago now with the legend himself, J-Dub, we talked about is
God violent and then reflecting on like the Old Testament and God's view on violence and
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all those things.
And kind of hand in hand in that conversation is war.
Since a lot of the Old Testament includes these kind of reflections on war that Israel
was going into pretty consistently.
Yeah.
There's stories about war, holy wars, which is a whole other topic that's even beyond
even what we're going to talk about today.
When we talk about reconciling the violence of God, the rhetoric in the Bible of violence
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that lend itself to like, okay, how should Christians view war in the first place?
Correct.
Which we have seen a lot of conversations about war, especially in the last year or in
some, in some change now since the Israel Palestine war broke out.
And so there's been a lot of conversations, especially with Israel and its nature and
it's pretty much direct relation to scripture and Christianity in a way in the Bible.
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And so it's been a lot of conversations.
Ukraine and Russia.
Ukraine and Russia.
Yeah.
So some aspect of war has been happening for the last almost five years.
So it's definitely been one of those things as at the top of the for you page, a lot of
conversations, a lot of protests have happened, a lot of trending hashtags and things about
this.
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So it kind of lends to the conversation, the question of like, what's Christian stances
on war?
Is war ever justified?
Is this ever like what we're supposed to be doing?
And so we think this is a really important conversation to kind of riff off of and going
even deeper than we went on the, is God, like is God's nature to be violent?
And also I think it's, it speaks pretty clearly about our global status in the world, which
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our theme this season is really about these global issues.
Just because neither of these wars were actually in, we're not in these wars.
No, we're not.
So we're supplying arms for both Israel and for Ukraine, supplying support through NATO.
So we're involved in some ways, but then like all of our protests here that have been happening,
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especially for the Palestine-Israel war, been a lot of protests there.
It's odd, you know, like back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, like those kind of sentiments of
like anti-war protesting.
A lot of it had to do with us being at war.
And so they were trying to call us to pull out, but like here it's like about us supporting
another war from two other sovereign nations, which is, which is different, you know what
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I mean?
Correct.
And so, so it's a whole other complicated facet.
And obviously it's important for the world and it's been important politically, but
it hasn't affected our lives personally too much unless you have had like you, you know,
someone who's a hostage or something like that, which is not as prevalent as if we were
fighting a war.
Correct.
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Nevertheless, I think it's a super important issue to talk about.
This is something that's common in ethics classes where we'll talk about like, you know,
what are some Christian stances on war, but like, let's think about it just kind of like
broadly take a step back.
And so, Megan, let me ask you, is it wrong for people to kill each other often by the
masses and rarely by ever even knowing the person that they're killing?
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Yes.
All right.
What about, is it wrong for people to cause incredible and widespread suffering for whole
communities?
Yes.
Also wrong, huh?
Well, that's the profile of war.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, like we, like when we think about it, war is the most destructive and horrific type
of human interaction that we can possibly do.
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Right.
Like the worst case scenario of like, hey, I have a conflict.
Let's kill each other.
Right.
Like that's literally the worst thing.
I hate that.
Right.
You know, like, it's like, Hey, obviously we can think of like other moral things that
are abhorrent like, um, rapes and certain things like that, but those often take place
as acts of war too.
Yeah.
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You know what I'm saying?
I mean, that's literally how Israel and Hamas started with the October 7th, you know, massacre
that was going on that was all involved.
So man, like war, can you think of it ever as a moral good?
Like it is good morally.
I mean, you would make your what self-defense argument, I guess, where it's like, it feels
like war would be bad if you're the person starting it.
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Yeah.
But if you're on the receiving end, it feels like, Oh, well now it's justified because
you attacked me first.
Now I'm defending a land kind of thing.
But you just said it right there.
You said it's justified.
And I think that's a clear, that's a very important distinction.
Right.
Being justified means you're not wrong in doing it, but that still doesn't make it good.
Good.
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Correct.
Right.
And I think about war as not a moral good.
Like it is always.
Oh, it's always morally bad.
It's always morally bad by itself.
Then the next question is, is it ever justified to do?
Yes.
Because that's a different thing.
And I think you just made a perfect example.
Why?
Like if you're defending yourself or if you're defending someone that you're in care of, right?
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Something like that.
Then we would say it's justified, you know, intruder comes to your house.
Yeah.
It's the same way that like people who you don't, you're not charged for murder if someone
like breaks into your house and tries to kill your family and then you, yeah, I don't know,
shoot them or whatever.
Then you're not usually, it's not like, oh, they're arrested too.
It's like, oh, this was in self-defense.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that's the same kind of logic that we're going to talk about.
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And so we're going to take as a starting point as just a premise.
We're not going to put it under argumentation.
If war is morally good or bad, we're going to assume that it is bad, but we're going
to ask when are those situations, when it's morally justified, if there ever are.
And so let's define it though.
Or let's use this kind of like rationalistic political definition here.
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It's a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within
a nation or state.
Cool.
Cool.
Yeah.
That's on simple, right?
Word.
So we're not using it metaphorically.
We're using it literally, right?
Yeah.
Between different states, nation states.
So if it's not morally good, how can it be justified?
In Christian ethics, there are usually three responses to if a war is morally justified.
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And those are pacifism, which would say no.
Know it all times.
Know it all times.
Christian realism, which would say yes.
And just war theory, which would say if it's justified, yes, under these particular circumstances.
So let's talk about it.
So shall we unpack?
I think I know people on all three of these.
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I do too.
What about you?
Have you ever struggled between this?
For me, not real.
I mean, I've never been a pacifist.
I've never been like, oh, never.
I don't know.
Because I feel like in this world that we live in, I feel like it's almost unrealistic
to be like, oh, never.
That's a common critique of pacifism.
You know, because it's like in a fallen world, in a world where sin is corrupted.
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Like I think that there's always an option that there could be some violence that you
experience.
And I feel like the answer, I would never be like 100%.
No.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
The main thing we got to ask then are what's the argument?
What do pacifists even say?
Why are you the way that you are?
So pacifism, I think, is the clearest, most literal reading of what Jesus calls us to
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do.
It makes sense to who Jesus is.
And I think people can point towards a bunch of passages where Jesus says things that the
rhetoric seems violent or seems war-oriented, but it's really not the case.
When Jesus talks, he talks about spirits and principalities.
He says my kingdom is not in his world.
You know, he doesn't bear flags for any nation, anything like that.
You know, when he says, I didn't come to make peace, I came to declare war.
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It's not against nations.
It never is.
Right.
Like he makes that clear distinction about what the kingdom of God is.
Well yeah, the homie showed up not being a war god, which is what everyone had thought
their messiah would be, which is why he caused such a stir.
Exactly.
It's like if he wanted to be all about war in the first coming, he would have.
That's what the zealots wanted.
But he wasn't.
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Yeah.
And so there was so much peacemaking language that Jesus makes and so much anti-national
government propaganda type thing that he's saying that it makes, you know, like the
most literal reading of what Jesus teaches is pacifism, like when you read the sermon
on the mount.
And so for the first 300 years of its existence, the church was pacifist.
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And so they were literally being martyred.
They were not fighting back.
They were not doing anything to provoke and not creating massive regimes and stuff like
that.
The early Pentecostals, the original Pentecostals were also pacifists, especially at Azusa Street.
Right.
William Seymour, he instructed his people not to say even utter and ill word back to the
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people who were like, they were demonizing them and they were like saying racial slurs
and doing a whole bunch of evil stuff, you know, towards them and saying stuff towards
them.
And he wouldn't even allow them to say anything like that.
So there's a long tradition of Christians being pacifists.
And I think it's just a literal reading of Jesus.
So Christian pacifism tries to convey a clear witness of Jesus in the midst of war, in the
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midst of hurt and death and stuff like that.
Pacifism says following Jesus makes you entirely different, completely utterly counter cultural.
And it means when you turn the other cheek, it is more than simply saying, I'm not going
to strike you back.
Like you actually have to go in there and make peace and actually be that peacemaker.
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So it would say killing in general is wrong.
And in the masses through war is wrong.
It disobeys and distorts Jesus' witness for peace whenever we kill.
But when you look at the book of Revelation, when Jesus returns and he is the judge and
he comes, you know, in robes dipped in blood.
A lot of people say that he's like this warring guy and she right makes a good point.
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That, that robe dipped in blood.
If you look at the rest of context of Revelation, so much of the imagery is subverted.
He argues that that is not the blood of the people he just killed, but the blood of martyrs.
That's interesting.
Right.
That he's emerging from.
I also feel like in Revelation, Jesus is not killing people or like it's always just
warring against like the enemies, the enemy and like demons and darkness.
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Right.
Like it's not like Jesus is not coming back to actually like, there's language about
be war like war on the people of earth.
Yeah.
There's language about like kings and stuff like that.
I was just having a conversation with a friend about this, about like kings and stuff like
he's killing people.
I was like, all right, but you have to think of like what the context here.
This is talking about yeah, an evil regime being overthrown, but ultimately it's Helen
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death that are thrown into like a fire.
It is powers and principalities.
It's not individuals because the individuals, if Jesus is he of whom all things were created.
He created those individuals.
Correct.
And the best way to think about people is not as us first them as they're like enemies
of God as if they're like some kind of demonic entities that the devil made.
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These are God's creations.
They are God's image bearers.
They are the best images, family members who have left our prodigals, right?
People that are lost.
Not people that are other.
And there's a difference there.
Whenever we start thinking of people as others as just like these evil miscreants, people
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that are just like totally like the enemy, we forget the fact that they're supposed
to be in God's family.
They are the lost brother that we're supposed to go after.
They're image bears.
And this is so, so when anyone is lost, that's always a tragedy for Jesus, for God, that's
always a tragedy.
He lost one of his children forever.
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An image bearer that's supposed to be a child and adopt a child, right?
Lost forever.
And so, yeah, it's just goofy thinking about like Jesus coming back and killing people
viciously and being angry and stuff like that.
And I don't think that's how we should read Revelation whatsoever.
Yeah.
I also don't think that's what Revelation is trying to say.
We actually think about it in like apocalyptic literature and like comparisons of like that
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not everything's as literal as you want to just straight up read it to be.
Which we are going to have a episode this season about reading the signs of the end
times and we're going to talk a little more about that imagery and where it comes from.
So we'll circle back to this one.
We'll circle back, but just put a pin in it for now.
You know what I mean?
Oh, of course.
But yeah, so this is, you know, pretty literal of Jesus calling us to peace.
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And so some have argued that there's two kinds of pacifists, that there is like a rules pacifist.
So one is committed to nonviolence as an obligatory rule.
That's a very deontological duty ethics type thing.
Like you have to be one that would, you know, like not fight back no matter what.
Another one would be a discipleship pacifist.
And this is where someone is committed to nonviolence as a way of life.
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Now that's a little more interesting because it's not looking at the action.
Oh, I got struck.
I cannot strike back.
That's like the action.
That's the rule.
Right.
This is saying like, no, I'm a person of peace in every aspect of life always forever.
And so it's part of me being a disciple of Christ.
But if this discipleship pacifist, you could see exceptions to rules being made.
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You can kind of see that there.
And so that starts to see, to me, starts blurring the lines between just war theory.
So discipleship pacifism and just war theory, I think are pretty congruent.
You can be a just war theory advocate, but be a discipleship pacifist where you're saying
like I'm living a life of peace and trying to, you know, have peace in every aspect of
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life.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
I feel like that's where I feel like I'm a just war person.
But do you like the discipleship pacifism where you're committed to non-violence?
I think that that's, but I mean, I think that's how we've been modeled by a lot of like believers
and stuff like MLK did a lot of that.
Like people, especially you've done like protesting and stuff before where they're like, they're
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comfortable taking a stand against something, which I think is half the time what war is
is because there's a difference of opinion about something.
And so if you have a stand against something, if there's a way to do it where you can find
a way in which to demonstrate that something's wrong, but in a peaceful manner,
And a non-violent way.
Yeah.
Then I would, I'm always going to want to pick that one.
Yeah.
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You know?
And so I feel like those two things, the discipleship pacifist and then just war, I think are super,
our homies probably.
I think they work together.
Yeah.
And so you've...
The homies of it all, but yeah, living a life of peace is also how Jesus has called
us to live and so I think it takes the really good aspect of being a pacifist and what the
heart of that is.
And then also kind of does make the understanding of the point I made earlier of like this life
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might, could bring violence and to respond to that in a way that protects you or your
family or your community is not.
You think it's justified.
Yeah.
It's justified.
Yeah.
I think that's a pretty, I think as a common stance, probably where I'm at too.
And justifiable.
I think it's justifiable.
So I want to bring up somebody that's like a mercurial figure that we literally call
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a modern day martyr all the time.
And that's the great theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Which we love and we reference all the time on this place.
And so like, so you think about like Nazi Germany, you have a group of German theologians.
So like, so the fact that, you know, Germans are aggressors in Nazi Germany, a couple of
things need to be put into place.
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One, the Nazi army was a voluntary army.
Right.
And there was the German army and the German army had to fight with the Nazis together.
In fact, my grandpa had to fight with the German army with the Nazis, which is crazy.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's like something because I'm half German and he would always make the distinction
that he wasn't ever a Nazi and that he had, he had to do it like nobody could.
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Jürgen Moltmann, one of my favorite theologians of all time went to war and was part of the
German army had to go.
And as soon as he went out into the field, he was so opposed to war, he put his hands
up and surrendered, was captured and became a prisoner of war like right away.
As a prisoner of war, we're going to have a theological education because Americans
acted very good in that situation.
But yeah, so there was the Germans that opposed Hitler and the war formed this thing called
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the Barman Declaration led by one of my favorite theologians of all time, Karl Barth, which
we reference a lot here too.
But then you had a Dietrich Bonhoeffer who opposed the Nazi rule and he wrote so many
important books like the cost of discipleship is just absolute classic.
And in it, he talks about like living a life of pacifism, kind of like a discipleship pacifist.
But he was part of a scheme to assassinate Hitler, got caught and then ended up getting
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killed, went to jail and he wrote like letters from prison and a bunch of other important
works and he ended up getting executed.
And so we think of him as a martyr, but like that's an act of killing.
But in his mind, his justification is killing the one like possessed or some kind of demonic
like dude would save millions of Jewish lives and stop a war and a bunch of like hurt all
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over the place in the whole world.
So that was his justification, which is crazy coming from someone who argues along the lines
of pacifism.
So there is I think somewhat wiggle room even within pacifism to not be as hard lined on
a rules, which is interesting.
So the next one is Christian realism.
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So these ones would say, yes, it is justified.
Pacifism idealistically would say, no, it's not justified.
Yet we do see exceptions to the rule.
One realism, one of the main guys who spoke about this is a famous American theologian
named Reinhold Niebuhr and he wrote a book called Moral Man and Immoral Society.
Are you familiar with that at all?
No, I'm not actually.
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Okay.
So this was like really, really important.
And in fact, Barack Obama cited Reinhold Niebuhr as being an important theologian in his thinking.
So did Martin Luther King, Jr.
And although he did critique Niebuhr some in his writing, so did a bunch of people.
In fact, I think a lot of Christians in the Democratic Party actually look at Reinhold
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Niebuhr as an important voice to how to justify wars and stuff like that and governance.
In his book, he basically says, there's a difference between individual and group ethics.
Individually you have ability to be sympathetic towards others and to overcome our own egoism.
Social groups, however, do not.
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Christians strive to be moral, but societies don't.
So he says societies are not moral.
They're actually immoral.
And so his book, Moral Man, Immoral Society, speaks towards that.
So in other words, Christians individually should follow Christ's commandment to love
others individually, which looks like for him charity, kindness, right?
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Love, loving kindness.
Politically, however, he thinks the love of others looks like justice, which is an equivalent
to the biblical commands to love others.
So a lot of people have taken that.
So love people individually, show charity, but when we're talking about groups, make
a just society.
I disagree with this.
Number one, that premise right there, I already disagree with because immediately know.
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Yeah.
Cause I already arrived at the bath because to me, justice is not public love.
Public love is reconciliation and reconciliation goes way beyond justice.
Justice just says, Hey, a man and a woman have equal rights.
A white man and a black man have equal rights.
That kind of deal.
Reconciliation says, you're my sister.
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The black man is my brother.
We're reconciled in the kingdom of God.
There's something that goes further way beyond mere justice.
Justice should be the ground floor, but reconciliation is actually this familial thing.
And so I disagree with right off the bat that just saying justice in it, but like, let's
just keep following the logic here.
And so if loving others looks like justice for all, then he thinks that Jesus extends
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a pure ethic of love and non-violence, but this is like a morality that's personal and
actually impractical for an immoral society.
I think a lot of people reason like this.
I think it's wrong, but I think a lot of people reason like this.
Jesus's high ideals must be moderated by an ethics of realism when we start thinking about
the society.
You have a hard time with that.
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Me too.
So he'll say that Jesus ethics of love only deals with the vertical dimension that deals
with the will of God and the will of humans, but it doesn't deal with the horizontal dimensions
of politics and social ethics.
Which I feel like once you start making that claim about how Jesus's commands can lean
a couple of different ways or he wasn't thinking about it politically or socially, I feel like
once you kind of start that belief system on a set, you can justify a whole bunch of
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stuff.
You can justify a lot of things.
So I find that as a very feel logically slippery slope.
It is.
I mean, yeah, it feels like, oh, it's just war or whatever.
But if you have a theology statement about any aspect of what Jesus says that you're
comfortable saying, well, we can edit a little because it doesn't actually fully encompass
what we need to in the human experience.
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I feel like you can really start to kind of apply that in other places where it gets
a little bit dangerous.
And you see it being applied all the time.
So like think about how Christian politicians who hold this apply it.
Like you've heard people say, I'm personally against abortion.
But however, I think we should have as a society the right to choose.
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That distinction is exactly Niber's distinction.
You have your own personal morality, but then for social groups, you just want justice.
You just want whatever is fair.
But if abortion is fundamentally killing or something like that, then I think it's different
there.
Like you shouldn't look at just like fairness there.
You know what I'm saying?
But it needs to go beyond that.
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So you can see how it gets applied.
I think that was Joe Biden's reasoning because Joe Biden is a devout Catholic and Catholics
are super duper against abortion.
And so like how did he justify that?
That's exactly how he justified it.
He says, I'm personally against abortion in my own personal ethics and my Catholic
upbringing and like my faith and stuff like that.
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But as a pluralist society, I don't think we should govern in this way and have those
laws, which you know, that's another point.
But like you can see he utilized Christian realism there.
So what Nibir would say, nations are intrinsically selfish rather than functioning on reasoned
action, nations act in accordance to the will of the many within a group.
And what about when a society is tyrannical, the tyranny of the majority?
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You know what I mean?
Like what do you do?
You know what I'm saying?
The 99 cannibals who want to eat that 100th person.
You know what I'm saying?
But we say that a lot even with like the Taliban, where it's like the majority, they are governing
the state of, you know, even though they're not like the majority of people wouldn't be
like, oh, that's perfect.
That's exactly how we want to act.
And other Middle Eastern people condemn that and other Middle Eastern countries condemn
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that.
But the radical majority has taken over that space.
Well, actually the Taliban is interesting in a lot of these groups because a lot of
them aren't, they'll take over from power, but they're still in the minority.
So like, for example, Hamas, most of the Palestinians are against that government, but they have
taken over.
A radical minority then.
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But the ones who are louder, scarier.
But there's other states that like they are governed in the majority.
Like most of the people there do believe that.
So that could be both.
But like these like ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, all these like terrorist governments, what
they've done is they've taken power despite what the people, they didn't go.
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They didn't get in there democratically.
So that and that's the problem.
You know what I mean?
So like the Israel-Palestine war, the problem is that Hamas has been identified by NATO
as a terrorist regime.
And they are the ones who are governing Palestine, like Gaza, like this area.
And so, and they're using war tactics that are uncouth and then Israel's responding with
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an extreme force.
And there we got it.
We have a conflict.
It's horrible, right?
Man.
So, if nations are this corrupt, how can there ever be justice?
And so for what Nibir would say is justice can come through revolution and by political
force.
So just like you said, there's a justification because you're able to separate and you're
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like, oh, Jesus is moral and this is not.
My problem is it's like, then you're making Jesus like only in charge of your emotions.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
He's not in charge of every aspect of your life because part of our lives is like being
in society.
Right.
You know what I mean?
I don't like that.
Yeah.
Which I think is interesting and honestly a little counter who Jesus was because so much
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of his preaching and his ministry was in the culture in which he lived, but also challenging
the culture in which he lived.
Like Jesus didn't exist outside of the culture that he lived.
Like a historically.
Yeah.
So almost this doesn't even really fully flesh out a robust theology of who Jesus was as
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a man who lived and walked among us because you're saying that, oh, Jesus didn't didn't
speak these things in his ministry to a culturally relevant space when I would argue that he
challenged the culture and gave a counterculture viewpoint because he was very aware of the
culture that he was involved in and he was around.
So I feel like this doesn't even fully.
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He's socially engaged, but he wasn't political in the way of like, like promoting a correct
like, you know, Rome.
Correct.
Or anything like that.
He challenged so much of being a Jewish citizen occupied by Rome.
So he lived in a space where he was influenced by Roman culture and Roman society and then
also influenced by Jewish society and in Jewish culture.
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And he speaks a lot to Jewish culture and a lot to Roman culture.
He speaks against both and like counter culturally, but not like in this, in a literal revolution.
Yeah.
So I feel like to say that Jesus didn't fully like his declarations of peace and stuff don't
fulfill enough for us to view our political space and our societal space.
I feel like wouldn't fully understand who Jesus was.
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Yeah.
And what his mission was and what his mission and his point of, but I don't know that feels
like me.
I agree.
I agree.
And so what this kind of like leads to is like, and he does, he does say this in the
book, violence is not intrinsically immoral.
Right.
It's right off the bat.
And the reason why is because the only thing that is intrinsically immoral for him is ill
will.
(27:22):
Now there is something, you know, something about that, that does make sense.
If you think about violence as mere force, then yeah, he's right.
But if you think about violence as being wrapped up in ill will, then that's different, but
he's trying to cause a distinction here.
Right.
Which is hard.
Yeah.
So he says violence is not always enacted out of ill will.
For example, self-defense, you know, right?
That's not an act of ill will because you're trying to protect someone.
(27:44):
So we must learn when and how it is morally acceptable to use violence.
So he says sometimes the ends justify the means in other words.
And so for him, a just nation establishes an appropriate balance between the ends and
the means and violence and revolution can be permissible if they result in a just social
system.
That seems to not gel with what Jesus is saying, but at the same time as an American, our country
(28:12):
was started out of a revolution.
Correct.
So personally, here's my thing.
I think the American revolution was justified.
I do not feel comfortable when we use scripture to justify it.
You can justify it by other means.
You can say like, Hey, I think it was biblically neutral.
(28:34):
You could say that yet I justify it because it is because we live in a society that was
unjust.
And so we wanted to have justice, you know, no taxation without representation.
Come on, somebody, you know what I mean?
Come on, somebody.
We got to get back to that.
We got to throw some tea in the fiber again.
That's right.
America.
America.
But Lord, the point is we are justifying it, but we're not using like, like God has
(28:56):
a Lord.
Yeah.
And that's the problem.
And we're just like, like, manifest destiny and like really foul like justifications,
biblical justifications for why you're acting heinous and horrible.
And that's, we need to start.
I mean, I just think as a people, we need to be way more cautious with the God said,
God will say at the Lord thing that we tend to get really comfortable saying.
And then just kind of like, we can like accept that there, there's some justification for
(29:19):
things and not everything has to be a God ordained for me to do this.
It's like, oh Lord, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, Hey, scripture does not
give me the go ahead to fight in this revolution, but it also doesn't say don't.
And my justification for this has to do with political justice.
(29:42):
I think that's perfectly fine.
I think scripture can be not neutral on things, but like not speaking on certain things in
our own.
In the way that we would experience it.
In the way that we experience it now.
And because of that, I think we can make justifications in other ways.
So that's a, it's a little nuance, a little tough.
(30:02):
And also doesn't fit every situation.
It doesn't fit every situation.
Bible is not neutral on everything.
Exactly.
And so, but like revolution, we have like, you know, in the Apocrypha, you have Judas
Maccabees taken back the temple from the Greeks.
We have like that.
And we could see that as like somewhat of a revolution.
So there's a little bit of that, but there isn't like hardcore, just like revolutionary
(30:23):
tactics.
Like maybe, maybe the Exodus, you know what I mean?
But like, that's not going to find a verse that says it's okay to go to war.
Right.
There's a lot of wars talking about war, but there's no like, here's the permission, permission
slip.
Like I think a lot of us sometimes can look at the Bible and be like, where's the verse
that says you're good period.
Like and that's not always in there, which is why we have to do everything with a lot
(30:44):
of prayer and discernment.
And it needs to be about because like oftentimes the Bible is not going to explicitly state
on every concept.
Yeah.
All right.
So just give us a little thumbs up.
And if you're looking for the Bible to justify things, be cautious, be cautious, but especially
when it comes to war, like there's just a lot of nuance to it and we're aware of that.
(31:05):
But I also believe that Jesus was aware of that and that God is aware of that and he's
big enough to kind of speak to these things.
Totally.
And so also the Wesleyan quadrilateral, like our sources for theology, you have scripture,
which is kind of like the big one, especially for Protestant theology, that everything needs
to match up the scripture, but then we have reason, tradition and experience.
(31:25):
So a lot of what we're doing here is like using reason to make sense of the scripture
and the overall theme of what God's story is emulating and saying.
Sometimes when we talk about political revolution, like the French Revolution, American Revolution,
yeah, it's going to be hard to find biblical justification, but it's also hard to find
(31:46):
the Bible saying no to it too.
And I think it's totally fine to just like to say, Hey, my reasoning is not biblical,
but it's not anti-biblical.
You know what I'm saying?
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
So the last one of these is called just war theory.
And this is a really, really popular theory.
It goes all the way back with Ambrose and Augustine in the fourth century.
(32:06):
I mean, this is like how Augustine has justified a lot of war.
He says war in a nutshell isn't good.
I think he would agree with that.
It isn't immoral good.
But there's situations when it can be justified.
So it developed particularly while Roman Empire was under the threat of barbarians and it
was inspired by stoicism, which is this Hellenistic philosophy in the third century before Christ.
(32:32):
And that stoicism taught that destructive emotions result from errors in judgment and
that a sage or like a wise person is a person of moral and intellectual perfection.
And they would not suffer from such emotions or suffer those emotions in general.
So it was inspired by that.
So really taking a really rationalistic approach to what's going on.
(32:52):
And so this is a definition for it.
It's a theory that claims in order to justify killing and war, there must be a reason so
important that it overrides the truth that killing is wrong.
So basically it justifies it, right?
That's why it's called just war.
Which is why I feel like this is where I fit.
Yeah.
Because it's like, this is the truth, but also here's a few conditions.
This is what we believe, like I'm not going to go around killing people because I think
(33:14):
it's cool, but I'm also like not going to go around and be like, well, there's never
a moment where I'm going to defend myself or defend the people I care about or, you
know.
So the rules are criteria.
There's seven rules for going into war and an eighth that concerns your method while
you're in war.
So I love rules.
Yeah.
(33:35):
So this is so fun.
You like this?
I love rules.
All right.
And then see, see if you agree with all of these.
I know you've already kind of like, I've eluded.
Yeah.
You're already eluded, but then see if you would add anything or whatever.
So the first one is, do you have a just cause?
That's is it, is there is humanitarian intervention needed to stop a terrible massacre?
(33:55):
Is there a Holocaust?
Is there a genocide?
What's going on?
Is something terrible happening that you were trying to stop?
That's a just cause.
Is there just authority?
Was a constitutional process followed to declare war?
Or did some tyrant just get up in there?
And start just start causing issues with a constitutional process.
Then, you know, like everybody knows what would declare a war and it's gotten the criteria.
(34:18):
So there's that.
Yep.
Here's a big one.
Is it the last resort?
Can this great evil be stopped in any other way?
Because wouldn't you say any other way than killing each other is probably a better way?
I would agree with this.
So that's my fear.
That's the, that's the last resort thing.
Right.
Just intention.
What is the future aim of this war?
What's the intention?
(34:39):
Is it actually just, or are you trying to like get some oil reserves?
Which is what a lot of people have argued of why some of the wars we fought.
Oh, I can't stand like most of the wars that weren't world wars.
I mean, honestly, like most people will say the only one that's like really, really justified
for America to fight in was World War Two.
(35:00):
Two because of Pearl Harbor.
Because of Pearl Harbor.
Correct.
But even then the atomic bombs, even though I was that the response, I personally think
they were justified, but that's where it gets iffy.
And you'll see the rest of these right here.
So what was that a little too?
That's what's iffy, but like, but us entering the war and the way we did stuff.
(35:21):
Yeah.
So that's just intention.
Now also the probability of success.
It's wrong to aimlessly murder and kill people.
So can you like at least win?
Like, like if are you putting your people out to just like die for the vibes?
Like come on.
I'm gonna get it.
So also the proportionality of cost.
(35:42):
I'm sorry.
It's not like emotional right there.
It's just like the cost.
There was air and I choked on it.
So the proportionality of cost, will the total good of victory outweigh the total evil and
suffering cause?
You know what I mean?
So like is the evil cause, you know, affecting a thousand people and then the war will affect
(36:06):
millions.
Right.
Then maybe it's not just like the proportionality of the cost is not just.
Is there a clear announcement?
This is a big one.
Did the government announce and give conditions for avoiding the war?
Say like, Hey, we're going to fight.
If you don't stop this, right?
Stop these things.
That's what can justify the atomic bombs.
Yeah.
(36:27):
They did ask them.
They were like, please, they were like, stop.
We told them exactly what they would do.
Correct.
And, and, and said like, Hey, you guys need to surrender or else it's going to happen.
So that could justify that.
So, and then finally, fought by just means.
And so you're not directly hurting civilians, nor are you killing surrendered people, nor
are you torturing.
See the atomic bombs might have been like, it did directly hurt civilians.
(36:50):
And so, and lasted for generations of hurting civilians.
Yes.
But the thing that's crazy is like Japan has generally a positive view of America.
And one of the reasons why it's like, we did not kill their, their main leader that they
thought was divine.
And we also put billions of dollars to rebuild Japan.
(37:11):
And we treated them.
They're an ally.
They're an ally.
And we treated them with a lot of dignity and respect afterwards.
And we were like, so cautiously getting into it and warning, like a lot of them don't hold
it against us.
No.
That shows you that a just war actually, after the conflict, you can respond really
well.
Yeah.
Well, because I'm assuming the same situation of like the majority of the Japanese citizens
(37:32):
were probably not like, Oh, awesome.
Let's keep doing this.
Right.
And we were like, ah, like if we had control of the government, we would stop it, but we
don't.
So we can't.
Yeah.
The US spent billions of dollars rebuilding Germany, Japan, other things.
And, and we have great relations with all of them.
You know what I mean?
So like we really tried not to go into war until Pearl Harbor provoked us into it.
(37:55):
That's the one that people think is good.
It's a little bit questioned because of the atomic bombs, the excess of them, of course.
And that's the first time ever being used.
But yeah, I mean, but generally, do you agree with this?
Oh yeah.
I loved that whole thing.
But also like if wars actually followed that, most wars wouldn't be fought.
No, probably not.
Like I can't even think of one outside of World War II, us entering that did them.
(38:19):
It's usually because of some kind of like unhinged, like unprovoked oftentimes.
Like what was it?
World War I was the assassination of the Archduke.
Franz Ferdinand.
Like randomly all of a sudden.
And it was like, bro, what?
And then everyone.
And it caused a whole thing.
And it's like you could have just not killed him.
Maybe.
And so we didn't do that.
(38:40):
Israel and Palestine.
What if Hamas just didn't invade like that?
They didn't do the October 7th.
Yeah.
Like what if?
Or if Ukraine didn't just randomly Russia showed up and.
Yeah.
Now all of these have seeds that went into it.
Like you know, Palestine and Israel have been beefing forever for literally millennial.
And so and then Ukraine and Russia have had stuff too.
(39:02):
Like Russia's been trying to usurp that land for a long time.
That one seems pretty clearly unjustified.
Yes.
The Palestine and Israel war seems absolutely unjustified, but also like when they give
the reasoning of whatever, then you're like, okay, I see it.
But yet, yet that reaction is absolutely absurd.
Correct.
(39:22):
So I think when we talk about, is there ever a time when war is justified?
I would say yes.
And I think you would say yes.
And I would say the place to be is to kind of like have pacifism as a way of life, non-violence
as a way of life, yet also agreeing with just war theory.
If they were, you know, followed.
When it comes to war, yeah.
(39:43):
Yeah.
If it was followed, you know, well.
Like I'm a pacifist in the sense of like, I'm not going to ever be like, let's take
this outside.
You know, like in the life that you live, you should not be violent.
Like you really shouldn't.
Like there's just like, like let's be so for real.
Come on.
So I feel like I'm pacifist in this.
(40:05):
Like I feel like the disciple, the discipleship pacifist is like more of like a personal,
like how I would live my life and the just war theory is like more political, like literal
views on war.
Yeah.
Cause I'm not so much going to war.
Right.
Right.
But it's like, you know, but you don't like that separation the way Christian realism
does.
Oh yeah.
No, I hate that because you think Jesus is Lord of all.
(40:26):
Yes.
There are times when you can't avoid war essentially.
Yeah.
And so, and if that's the case.
There are, you have to have.
Then you got to have these rules, these standards.
Yeah.
All right.
So if we take that kind of complexity here, how should the church respond to what we're
saying to everything we're saying here?
Cause what, what, first of all, what can the church even do?
(40:47):
We're not declaring war.
So what can we do?
I don't know.
I feel like when you're not a part of war, like you're not a person involved, especially
when you're not a person involved, like our job is really to just like pray to like storm
heaven on behalf, you know, cause it's like, there's nothing we can really do to put a
(41:09):
stop to any of these wars that are currently happening.
Not in a, not in a, in a kind of one to one way.
No, like we can't, we're not going to show up on the front lines and be like, stop, you
know?
Yeah.
And so I feel like it's really important for us to not get, well one, not get so caught
up in debating amongst ourselves who have no skin in the game about how it goes and letting
(41:34):
it just like letting these thoughts and things like destroy ourselves and our communities
and our relationships.
Like we should really just be interested in being like Lord, like your people are hurting
on both sides.
How do we like, I, and, and asking like, how should I be involved?
Should I be involved?
What can I do?
What can I not do?
(41:54):
And let the Lord really like speak to those things.
Cause I feel like, you know, is our best use of our autonomy to post on social media in
ways that are really mean and offensive.
Yeah.
No, probably not.
Is like, let's be spending time really like in prayer.
Yeah.
But like for both sides.
For guidance and wisdom.
(42:15):
Yeah.
For like the Lord to really show up in both spaces.
I think one thing there's these philosophers, Glenn Stassen and David Gushy, they were a
really good book called Kingdom Ethics and in it, they argued for just peacemaking.
And so this was like, and this is what the church can do.
They argued and I, and I agree with this.
(42:35):
I think it's cool.
I wonder what you think about it.
They'll say that like what we can do is be preventative and that's by changing hearts
and minds towards the calls to nonviolence that Jesus has called us to before any war
happens, before anything happens.
And so it encourages pacifists to be their name, literally a peacemaker.
Yeah.
(42:55):
Like, so don't talk about just like after the war has happened, don't, or like after
the violence has happened, but like prevent it.
You know, just war is good, but what about preventing war in the first place?
What are the preventative measures that we can do?
So just peacemaking is, you know, what Jesus taught us.
He said, go and be a peacemaker.
That's the initiative.
(43:16):
Go and be reconciled.
He said.
So we make peace with people, with each other, socially everywhere.
And that should be our motivation and our church should promote peace everywhere.
And so here are the, you like the rules.
Here's the 10 practices of just peacemaking and see, see what you think about these.
So one support nonviolent direct action.
So this is like MLKJ or Gandhi.
(43:38):
You already said you supported that.
Yeah.
Like you liked that.
Yeah.
It's nonviolent, but it's also directly opposed to injustice.
And it makes a statement.
It makes a statement.
And especially with like MLKJ and all the things that they did, like they actually like
cause not a little bit of a ruckus or it's like, oh, the buses couldn't run because
people were here in the streets or not using, or they weren't being, or they were being
boycotted.
(43:59):
So things actively changed, but they were nonviolent, but they were nonviolent.
So it's like, there's a way to do that where it's not like, oh, I just showed up and I
blew up the buses.
Yeah.
You know, take independent initiatives to reduce a threat.
And I guess that's a court, of course, according to what you can do, if you can de-escalate
it, do it, use cooperative conflict resolution.
(44:19):
And so that's a big deal, but like, you know, you're going to want to work with the other
side, whoever's like doing the conflict, acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice.
This is big.
So he's saying seek repentance and forgiveness.
If you cannot repent, how can you bring resolution to the injustice?
(44:41):
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So democracy, human rights and religious liberty.
And so that would be, I think that's probably biased a little bit for our Western society,
but like, I'm with it, you know, of course, foster just and sustainable economic development,
because if people can have a good way of life and we keep bringing that, then you're not
(45:02):
going to, the conflicts will be lessened and reduced.
Work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system.
Bring peace into UN and international organizations, reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade.
So like being really against people getting nukes and like trading and this like other
stuff and then encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations.
(45:23):
Do you think these are good steps?
I like them.
I think I mean, I love a good practical step.
Yeah.
I mean, they're, they're, you know, nuts and bolts, actual things that we can do personally
and in our government, corporately everything to help bring peace in the world.
So, and that's, and again, peacemaking is not saying it's not validating Islam as a
(45:45):
faith, but it's not killing each other, which is a big deal, which we love that part.
You know what I'm saying?
It's not validating an atheist position in whatever, but it's also not killing people
and being hate, hate, trade towards each other and stuff like that.
Correct.
And peacemaking is being that loving kind witness and then taking to task what Jesus
(46:06):
has actually called us to do.
Yeah.
Not arming yourself to the teeth, just find the second amendment and saying you're going
to threaten anybody who shows up on your lawn.
Yeah.
You know, there was this, there's a Leonard Skinner song that talks about, there was a
peacemaker in my dresser drawer.
Oh, no hard.
I'm thinking that's, that's legit blasphemous.
Yep.
That's legitimately taking what Jesus says and saying the opposite.
(46:31):
Jesus says to be a peacemaker actual and this is saying to inflict violence, kill the other
person.
That's how you made peace.
It's the actual opposite, which is very frustrating.
And I think the song is called like God, guns and glory or something like that.
It's like, man, I don't know what God you're serving, but ain't Jesus.
Yeah.
Ain't Jesus.
It also does like comes against the American view of like weaponry and the second amendment
(46:53):
and stuff.
And so I think it's good to be challenged every once in a while.
And the thing is like, you can have a weapon, you can have all that kind of stuff, like
whatever.
And the thing reframe your thinking for you to actually follow Jesus and be one that would
make peace and actual peace in the world, not metaphorical peace, not peace by analogy,
but actual peace, reducing violence, reducing hatred, by vote, peace by who you're voting
(47:17):
for peace in general, peace, people's little person.
Yeah.
Reconcile.
Actually just be a person who in your day to day life, you're about peace.
And I think it comes in little habit changes of like, is that life giving to post on social
media?
Is that a conversation I should be engaged in?
Should I buy this shirt?
Should I brandish this weapon?
Should I be promoting what I'm promoting?
(47:38):
To live, like war is not just, it doesn't just happen one day.
There's so many itsy-bitsy little things that build up for whoever amount of time.
If you're stopping it along the way, then you're making peace.
You're making peace because we're not getting to this point where everybody's so escalated
and elevated that it's like the only option that we have left is to go to war.
(47:58):
Now we should be in the process, dismantling and dismantling and bringing peace in our
day to day life so that it doesn't get to the point where we're like, okay, now we have
no other option.
Keeping with the last resort aspect.
Exactly.
I messed with that so heavy.
But I mean, it's, I think that's a good thing.
(48:20):
And I think that's kind of the literal advice that we can do as a church is we need to disciple
people to be peacemakers, like actual peacemakers.
Full steps, real ways, peaceful in your personal life, peaceful in your social interactions,
peaceful in your political engagement, peaceful in every aspect.
How do you actually bring that?
(48:40):
We need to be peacemakers in this world.
We need to push that a lot harder and we need to diffuse the nonsense, violent rhetoric
that somehow has entered a church in a bunch of different ways and are all of society.
And we needed to be not about that.
It's not what Jesus was about.
And like, let's literally be red letter Christians.
It's due to things that Jesus has asked us to do.
You know what I mean?
Shocking.
(49:01):
It shouldn't be, but it kind of is.
But it kind of is.
Well that's it.
That was a good conversation.
I think we can, you know, we're going to come back to these topics all the time, but
I think this is a good way to kind of get some definition of what's going on.
Obviously, it's an ongoing debate and you might have questions on whether passivism works
(49:21):
or just war theory or Christian realism.
What is the extent of certain stuff?
But I think having a healthy dialogue along these lines and just being like, let's truly
embody what it means to be a peacemaker.
Like if we can be subtle and not as Christians and then try to figure that out, and I think
we're on the right path.
I would agree.
Yeah.
So all right.
Well, this was brought to you by the School of Theology and Ministry at Life Pacific University.
(49:41):
We'll see you next time.
War!
(00:01):
Huh!
You know that song?
No.
You don't know that song?
No.
War!
Huh!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Who's sang that?
Somebody back in the day.
Welcome to TikTok Theology, a podcast that tackles the major trending topics on social
media that concern the Christian faith.
(00:22):
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less, but those videos can identify
current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt, and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
Hello friends.
Welcome back.
Today we're kind of doing one of those things that we like to do in all of our seasons is
(00:43):
where we kind of end up with like a piggyback episode.
Because we, you know, we start a conversation in a previous season and then we know that
everything is so multifaceted that one episode is just not going to cover it.
So last, no, two seasons ago now with the legend himself, J-Dub, we talked about is
God violent and then reflecting on like the Old Testament and God's view on violence and
(01:06):
all those things.
And kind of hand in hand in that conversation is war.
Since a lot of the Old Testament includes these kind of reflections on war that Israel
was going into pretty consistently.
Yeah.
There's stories about war, holy wars, which is a whole other topic that's even beyond
even what we're going to talk about today.
When we talk about reconciling the violence of God, the rhetoric in the Bible of violence
(01:30):
that lend itself to like, okay, how should Christians view war in the first place?
Correct.
Which we have seen a lot of conversations about war, especially in the last year or in
some, in some change now since the Israel Palestine war broke out.
And so there's been a lot of conversations, especially with Israel and its nature and
it's pretty much direct relation to scripture and Christianity in a way in the Bible.
(01:55):
And so it's been a lot of conversations.
Ukraine and Russia.
Ukraine and Russia.
Yeah.
So some aspect of war has been happening for the last almost five years.
So it's definitely been one of those things as at the top of the for you page, a lot of
conversations, a lot of protests have happened, a lot of trending hashtags and things about
this.
(02:16):
So it kind of lends to the conversation, the question of like, what's Christian stances
on war?
Is war ever justified?
Is this ever like what we're supposed to be doing?
And so we think this is a really important conversation to kind of riff off of and going
even deeper than we went on the, is God, like is God's nature to be violent?
And also I think it's, it speaks pretty clearly about our global status in the world, which
(02:41):
our theme this season is really about these global issues.
Just because neither of these wars were actually in, we're not in these wars.
No, we're not.
So we're supplying arms for both Israel and for Ukraine, supplying support through NATO.
So we're involved in some ways, but then like all of our protests here that have been happening,
(03:02):
especially for the Palestine-Israel war, been a lot of protests there.
It's odd, you know, like back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, like those kind of sentiments of
like anti-war protesting.
A lot of it had to do with us being at war.
And so they were trying to call us to pull out, but like here it's like about us supporting
another war from two other sovereign nations, which is, which is different, you know what
(03:27):
I mean?
Correct.
And so, so it's a whole other complicated facet.
And obviously it's important for the world and it's been important politically, but
it hasn't affected our lives personally too much unless you have had like you, you know,
someone who's a hostage or something like that, which is not as prevalent as if we were
fighting a war.
Correct.
(03:47):
Nevertheless, I think it's a super important issue to talk about.
This is something that's common in ethics classes where we'll talk about like, you know,
what are some Christian stances on war, but like, let's think about it just kind of like
broadly take a step back.
And so, Megan, let me ask you, is it wrong for people to kill each other often by the
masses and rarely by ever even knowing the person that they're killing?
(04:10):
Yes.
All right.
What about, is it wrong for people to cause incredible and widespread suffering for whole
communities?
Yes.
Also wrong, huh?
Well, that's the profile of war.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, like we, like when we think about it, war is the most destructive and horrific type
of human interaction that we can possibly do.
(04:32):
Right.
Like the worst case scenario of like, hey, I have a conflict.
Let's kill each other.
Right.
Like that's literally the worst thing.
I hate that.
Right.
You know, like, it's like, Hey, obviously we can think of like other moral things that
are abhorrent like, um, rapes and certain things like that, but those often take place
as acts of war too.
Yeah.
(04:52):
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, that's literally how Israel and Hamas started with the October 7th, you know, massacre
that was going on that was all involved.
So man, like war, can you think of it ever as a moral good?
Like it is good morally.
I mean, you would make your what self-defense argument, I guess, where it's like, it feels
like war would be bad if you're the person starting it.
(05:14):
Yeah.
But if you're on the receiving end, it feels like, Oh, well now it's justified because
you attacked me first.
Now I'm defending a land kind of thing.
But you just said it right there.
You said it's justified.
And I think that's a clear, that's a very important distinction.
Right.
Being justified means you're not wrong in doing it, but that still doesn't make it good.
Good.
(05:35):
Correct.
Right.
And I think about war as not a moral good.
Like it is always.
Oh, it's always morally bad.
It's always morally bad by itself.
Then the next question is, is it ever justified to do?
Yes.
Because that's a different thing.
And I think you just made a perfect example.
Why?
Like if you're defending yourself or if you're defending someone that you're in care of, right?
(05:59):
Something like that.
Then we would say it's justified, you know, intruder comes to your house.
Yeah.
It's the same way that like people who you don't, you're not charged for murder if someone
like breaks into your house and tries to kill your family and then you, yeah, I don't know,
shoot them or whatever.
Then you're not usually, it's not like, oh, they're arrested too.
It's like, oh, this was in self-defense.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that's the same kind of logic that we're going to talk about.
(06:19):
And so we're going to take as a starting point as just a premise.
We're not going to put it under argumentation.
If war is morally good or bad, we're going to assume that it is bad, but we're going
to ask when are those situations, when it's morally justified, if there ever are.
And so let's define it though.
Or let's use this kind of like rationalistic political definition here.
(06:39):
It's a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within
a nation or state.
Cool.
Cool.
Yeah.
That's on simple, right?
Word.
So we're not using it metaphorically.
We're using it literally, right?
Yeah.
Between different states, nation states.
So if it's not morally good, how can it be justified?
In Christian ethics, there are usually three responses to if a war is morally justified.
(07:05):
And those are pacifism, which would say no.
Know it all times.
Know it all times.
Christian realism, which would say yes.
And just war theory, which would say if it's justified, yes, under these particular circumstances.
So let's talk about it.
So shall we unpack?
I think I know people on all three of these.
(07:28):
I do too.
What about you?
Have you ever struggled between this?
For me, not real.
I mean, I've never been a pacifist.
I've never been like, oh, never.
I don't know.
Because I feel like in this world that we live in, I feel like it's almost unrealistic
to be like, oh, never.
That's a common critique of pacifism.
You know, because it's like in a fallen world, in a world where sin is corrupted.
(07:50):
Like I think that there's always an option that there could be some violence that you
experience.
And I feel like the answer, I would never be like 100%.
No.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
The main thing we got to ask then are what's the argument?
What do pacifists even say?
Why are you the way that you are?
So pacifism, I think, is the clearest, most literal reading of what Jesus calls us to
(08:17):
do.
It makes sense to who Jesus is.
And I think people can point towards a bunch of passages where Jesus says things that the
rhetoric seems violent or seems war-oriented, but it's really not the case.
When Jesus talks, he talks about spirits and principalities.
He says my kingdom is not in his world.
You know, he doesn't bear flags for any nation, anything like that.
You know, when he says, I didn't come to make peace, I came to declare war.
(08:40):
It's not against nations.
It never is.
Right.
Like he makes that clear distinction about what the kingdom of God is.
Well yeah, the homie showed up not being a war god, which is what everyone had thought
their messiah would be, which is why he caused such a stir.
Exactly.
It's like if he wanted to be all about war in the first coming, he would have.
That's what the zealots wanted.
But he wasn't.
(09:00):
Yeah.
And so there was so much peacemaking language that Jesus makes and so much anti-national
government propaganda type thing that he's saying that it makes, you know, like the
most literal reading of what Jesus teaches is pacifism, like when you read the sermon
on the mount.
And so for the first 300 years of its existence, the church was pacifist.
(09:21):
And so they were literally being martyred.
They were not fighting back.
They were not doing anything to provoke and not creating massive regimes and stuff like
that.
The early Pentecostals, the original Pentecostals were also pacifists, especially at Azusa Street.
Right.
William Seymour, he instructed his people not to say even utter and ill word back to the
(09:43):
people who were like, they were demonizing them and they were like saying racial slurs
and doing a whole bunch of evil stuff, you know, towards them and saying stuff towards
them.
And he wouldn't even allow them to say anything like that.
So there's a long tradition of Christians being pacifists.
And I think it's just a literal reading of Jesus.
So Christian pacifism tries to convey a clear witness of Jesus in the midst of war, in the
(10:06):
midst of hurt and death and stuff like that.
Pacifism says following Jesus makes you entirely different, completely utterly counter cultural.
And it means when you turn the other cheek, it is more than simply saying, I'm not going
to strike you back.
Like you actually have to go in there and make peace and actually be that peacemaker.
(10:26):
So it would say killing in general is wrong.
And in the masses through war is wrong.
It disobeys and distorts Jesus' witness for peace whenever we kill.
But when you look at the book of Revelation, when Jesus returns and he is the judge and
he comes, you know, in robes dipped in blood.
A lot of people say that he's like this warring guy and she right makes a good point.
(10:51):
That, that robe dipped in blood.
If you look at the rest of context of Revelation, so much of the imagery is subverted.
He argues that that is not the blood of the people he just killed, but the blood of martyrs.
That's interesting.
Right.
That he's emerging from.
I also feel like in Revelation, Jesus is not killing people or like it's always just
warring against like the enemies, the enemy and like demons and darkness.
(11:15):
Right.
Like it's not like Jesus is not coming back to actually like, there's language about
be war like war on the people of earth.
Yeah.
There's language about like kings and stuff like that.
I was just having a conversation with a friend about this, about like kings and stuff like
he's killing people.
I was like, all right, but you have to think of like what the context here.
This is talking about yeah, an evil regime being overthrown, but ultimately it's Helen
(11:39):
death that are thrown into like a fire.
It is powers and principalities.
It's not individuals because the individuals, if Jesus is he of whom all things were created.
He created those individuals.
Correct.
And the best way to think about people is not as us first them as they're like enemies
of God as if they're like some kind of demonic entities that the devil made.
(12:01):
These are God's creations.
They are God's image bearers.
They are the best images, family members who have left our prodigals, right?
People that are lost.
Not people that are other.
And there's a difference there.
Whenever we start thinking of people as others as just like these evil miscreants, people
(12:24):
that are just like totally like the enemy, we forget the fact that they're supposed
to be in God's family.
They are the lost brother that we're supposed to go after.
They're image bears.
And this is so, so when anyone is lost, that's always a tragedy for Jesus, for God, that's
always a tragedy.
He lost one of his children forever.
(12:45):
An image bearer that's supposed to be a child and adopt a child, right?
Lost forever.
And so, yeah, it's just goofy thinking about like Jesus coming back and killing people
viciously and being angry and stuff like that.
And I don't think that's how we should read Revelation whatsoever.
Yeah.
I also don't think that's what Revelation is trying to say.
We actually think about it in like apocalyptic literature and like comparisons of like that
(13:07):
not everything's as literal as you want to just straight up read it to be.
Which we are going to have a episode this season about reading the signs of the end
times and we're going to talk a little more about that imagery and where it comes from.
So we'll circle back to this one.
We'll circle back, but just put a pin in it for now.
You know what I mean?
Oh, of course.
But yeah, so this is, you know, pretty literal of Jesus calling us to peace.
(13:29):
And so some have argued that there's two kinds of pacifists, that there is like a rules pacifist.
So one is committed to nonviolence as an obligatory rule.
That's a very deontological duty ethics type thing.
Like you have to be one that would, you know, like not fight back no matter what.
Another one would be a discipleship pacifist.
And this is where someone is committed to nonviolence as a way of life.
(13:49):
Now that's a little more interesting because it's not looking at the action.
Oh, I got struck.
I cannot strike back.
That's like the action.
That's the rule.
Right.
This is saying like, no, I'm a person of peace in every aspect of life always forever.
And so it's part of me being a disciple of Christ.
But if this discipleship pacifist, you could see exceptions to rules being made.
(14:14):
You can kind of see that there.
And so that starts to see, to me, starts blurring the lines between just war theory.
So discipleship pacifism and just war theory, I think are pretty congruent.
You can be a just war theory advocate, but be a discipleship pacifist where you're saying
like I'm living a life of peace and trying to, you know, have peace in every aspect of
(14:34):
life.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
I feel like that's where I feel like I'm a just war person.
But do you like the discipleship pacifism where you're committed to non-violence?
I think that that's, but I mean, I think that's how we've been modeled by a lot of like believers
and stuff like MLK did a lot of that.
Like people, especially you've done like protesting and stuff before where they're like, they're
(14:59):
comfortable taking a stand against something, which I think is half the time what war is
is because there's a difference of opinion about something.
And so if you have a stand against something, if there's a way to do it where you can find
a way in which to demonstrate that something's wrong, but in a peaceful manner,
And a non-violent way.
Yeah.
Then I would, I'm always going to want to pick that one.
Yeah.
(15:19):
You know?
And so I feel like those two things, the discipleship pacifist and then just war, I think are super,
our homies probably.
I think they work together.
Yeah.
And so you've...
The homies of it all, but yeah, living a life of peace is also how Jesus has called
us to live and so I think it takes the really good aspect of being a pacifist and what the
heart of that is.
And then also kind of does make the understanding of the point I made earlier of like this life
(15:44):
might, could bring violence and to respond to that in a way that protects you or your
family or your community is not.
You think it's justified.
Yeah.
It's justified.
Yeah.
I think that's a pretty, I think as a common stance, probably where I'm at too.
And justifiable.
I think it's justifiable.
So I want to bring up somebody that's like a mercurial figure that we literally call
(16:05):
a modern day martyr all the time.
And that's the great theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Which we love and we reference all the time on this place.
And so like, so you think about like Nazi Germany, you have a group of German theologians.
So like, so the fact that, you know, Germans are aggressors in Nazi Germany, a couple of
things need to be put into place.
(16:26):
One, the Nazi army was a voluntary army.
Right.
And there was the German army and the German army had to fight with the Nazis together.
In fact, my grandpa had to fight with the German army with the Nazis, which is crazy.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's like something because I'm half German and he would always make the distinction
that he wasn't ever a Nazi and that he had, he had to do it like nobody could.
(16:46):
Jürgen Moltmann, one of my favorite theologians of all time went to war and was part of the
German army had to go.
And as soon as he went out into the field, he was so opposed to war, he put his hands
up and surrendered, was captured and became a prisoner of war like right away.
As a prisoner of war, we're going to have a theological education because Americans
acted very good in that situation.
But yeah, so there was the Germans that opposed Hitler and the war formed this thing called
(17:09):
the Barman Declaration led by one of my favorite theologians of all time, Karl Barth, which
we reference a lot here too.
But then you had a Dietrich Bonhoeffer who opposed the Nazi rule and he wrote so many
important books like the cost of discipleship is just absolute classic.
And in it, he talks about like living a life of pacifism, kind of like a discipleship pacifist.
But he was part of a scheme to assassinate Hitler, got caught and then ended up getting
(17:35):
killed, went to jail and he wrote like letters from prison and a bunch of other important
works and he ended up getting executed.
And so we think of him as a martyr, but like that's an act of killing.
But in his mind, his justification is killing the one like possessed or some kind of demonic
like dude would save millions of Jewish lives and stop a war and a bunch of like hurt all
(17:57):
over the place in the whole world.
So that was his justification, which is crazy coming from someone who argues along the lines
of pacifism.
So there is I think somewhat wiggle room even within pacifism to not be as hard lined on
a rules, which is interesting.
So the next one is Christian realism.
(18:17):
So these ones would say, yes, it is justified.
Pacifism idealistically would say, no, it's not justified.
Yet we do see exceptions to the rule.
One realism, one of the main guys who spoke about this is a famous American theologian
named Reinhold Niebuhr and he wrote a book called Moral Man and Immoral Society.
Are you familiar with that at all?
No, I'm not actually.
(18:39):
Okay.
So this was like really, really important.
And in fact, Barack Obama cited Reinhold Niebuhr as being an important theologian in his thinking.
So did Martin Luther King, Jr.
And although he did critique Niebuhr some in his writing, so did a bunch of people.
In fact, I think a lot of Christians in the Democratic Party actually look at Reinhold
(19:00):
Niebuhr as an important voice to how to justify wars and stuff like that and governance.
In his book, he basically says, there's a difference between individual and group ethics.
Individually you have ability to be sympathetic towards others and to overcome our own egoism.
Social groups, however, do not.
(19:21):
Christians strive to be moral, but societies don't.
So he says societies are not moral.
They're actually immoral.
And so his book, Moral Man, Immoral Society, speaks towards that.
So in other words, Christians individually should follow Christ's commandment to love
others individually, which looks like for him charity, kindness, right?
(19:42):
Love, loving kindness.
Politically, however, he thinks the love of others looks like justice, which is an equivalent
to the biblical commands to love others.
So a lot of people have taken that.
So love people individually, show charity, but when we're talking about groups, make
a just society.
I disagree with this.
Number one, that premise right there, I already disagree with because immediately know.
(20:04):
Yeah.
Cause I already arrived at the bath because to me, justice is not public love.
Public love is reconciliation and reconciliation goes way beyond justice.
Justice just says, Hey, a man and a woman have equal rights.
A white man and a black man have equal rights.
That kind of deal.
Reconciliation says, you're my sister.
(20:27):
The black man is my brother.
We're reconciled in the kingdom of God.
There's something that goes further way beyond mere justice.
Justice should be the ground floor, but reconciliation is actually this familial thing.
And so I disagree with right off the bat that just saying justice in it, but like, let's
just keep following the logic here.
And so if loving others looks like justice for all, then he thinks that Jesus extends
(20:50):
a pure ethic of love and non-violence, but this is like a morality that's personal and
actually impractical for an immoral society.
I think a lot of people reason like this.
I think it's wrong, but I think a lot of people reason like this.
Jesus's high ideals must be moderated by an ethics of realism when we start thinking about
the society.
You have a hard time with that.
(21:11):
Me too.
So he'll say that Jesus ethics of love only deals with the vertical dimension that deals
with the will of God and the will of humans, but it doesn't deal with the horizontal dimensions
of politics and social ethics.
Which I feel like once you start making that claim about how Jesus's commands can lean
a couple of different ways or he wasn't thinking about it politically or socially, I feel like
once you kind of start that belief system on a set, you can justify a whole bunch of
(21:33):
stuff.
You can justify a lot of things.
So I find that as a very feel logically slippery slope.
It is.
I mean, yeah, it feels like, oh, it's just war or whatever.
But if you have a theology statement about any aspect of what Jesus says that you're
comfortable saying, well, we can edit a little because it doesn't actually fully encompass
what we need to in the human experience.
(21:55):
I feel like you can really start to kind of apply that in other places where it gets
a little bit dangerous.
And you see it being applied all the time.
So like think about how Christian politicians who hold this apply it.
Like you've heard people say, I'm personally against abortion.
But however, I think we should have as a society the right to choose.
(22:16):
That distinction is exactly Niber's distinction.
You have your own personal morality, but then for social groups, you just want justice.
You just want whatever is fair.
But if abortion is fundamentally killing or something like that, then I think it's different
there.
Like you shouldn't look at just like fairness there.
You know what I'm saying?
But it needs to go beyond that.
(22:36):
So you can see how it gets applied.
I think that was Joe Biden's reasoning because Joe Biden is a devout Catholic and Catholics
are super duper against abortion.
And so like how did he justify that?
That's exactly how he justified it.
He says, I'm personally against abortion in my own personal ethics and my Catholic
upbringing and like my faith and stuff like that.
(22:57):
But as a pluralist society, I don't think we should govern in this way and have those
laws, which you know, that's another point.
But like you can see he utilized Christian realism there.
So what Nibir would say, nations are intrinsically selfish rather than functioning on reasoned
action, nations act in accordance to the will of the many within a group.
And what about when a society is tyrannical, the tyranny of the majority?
(23:20):
You know what I mean?
Like what do you do?
You know what I'm saying?
The 99 cannibals who want to eat that 100th person.
You know what I'm saying?
But we say that a lot even with like the Taliban, where it's like the majority, they are governing
the state of, you know, even though they're not like the majority of people wouldn't be
like, oh, that's perfect.
That's exactly how we want to act.
And other Middle Eastern people condemn that and other Middle Eastern countries condemn
(23:44):
that.
But the radical majority has taken over that space.
Well, actually the Taliban is interesting in a lot of these groups because a lot of
them aren't, they'll take over from power, but they're still in the minority.
So like, for example, Hamas, most of the Palestinians are against that government, but they have
taken over.
A radical minority then.
(24:04):
But the ones who are louder, scarier.
But there's other states that like they are governed in the majority.
Like most of the people there do believe that.
So that could be both.
But like these like ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, all these like terrorist governments, what
they've done is they've taken power despite what the people, they didn't go.
(24:26):
They didn't get in there democratically.
So that and that's the problem.
You know what I mean?
So like the Israel-Palestine war, the problem is that Hamas has been identified by NATO
as a terrorist regime.
And they are the ones who are governing Palestine, like Gaza, like this area.
And so, and they're using war tactics that are uncouth and then Israel's responding with
(24:51):
an extreme force.
And there we got it.
We have a conflict.
It's horrible, right?
Man.
So, if nations are this corrupt, how can there ever be justice?
And so for what Nibir would say is justice can come through revolution and by political
force.
So just like you said, there's a justification because you're able to separate and you're
(25:15):
like, oh, Jesus is moral and this is not.
My problem is it's like, then you're making Jesus like only in charge of your emotions.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
He's not in charge of every aspect of your life because part of our lives is like being
in society.
Right.
You know what I mean?
I don't like that.
Yeah.
Which I think is interesting and honestly a little counter who Jesus was because so much
(25:35):
of his preaching and his ministry was in the culture in which he lived, but also challenging
the culture in which he lived.
Like Jesus didn't exist outside of the culture that he lived.
Like a historically.
Yeah.
So almost this doesn't even really fully flesh out a robust theology of who Jesus was as
(25:56):
a man who lived and walked among us because you're saying that, oh, Jesus didn't didn't
speak these things in his ministry to a culturally relevant space when I would argue that he
challenged the culture and gave a counterculture viewpoint because he was very aware of the
culture that he was involved in and he was around.
So I feel like this doesn't even fully.
(26:17):
He's socially engaged, but he wasn't political in the way of like, like promoting a correct
like, you know, Rome.
Correct.
Or anything like that.
He challenged so much of being a Jewish citizen occupied by Rome.
So he lived in a space where he was influenced by Roman culture and Roman society and then
also influenced by Jewish society and in Jewish culture.
(26:39):
And he speaks a lot to Jewish culture and a lot to Roman culture.
He speaks against both and like counter culturally, but not like in this, in a literal revolution.
Yeah.
So I feel like to say that Jesus didn't fully like his declarations of peace and stuff don't
fulfill enough for us to view our political space and our societal space.
I feel like wouldn't fully understand who Jesus was.
(27:02):
Yeah.
And what his mission was and what his mission and his point of, but I don't know that feels
like me.
I agree.
I agree.
And so what this kind of like leads to is like, and he does, he does say this in the
book, violence is not intrinsically immoral.
Right.
It's right off the bat.
And the reason why is because the only thing that is intrinsically immoral for him is ill
will.
(27:22):
Now there is something, you know, something about that, that does make sense.
If you think about violence as mere force, then yeah, he's right.
But if you think about violence as being wrapped up in ill will, then that's different, but
he's trying to cause a distinction here.
Right.
Which is hard.
Yeah.
So he says violence is not always enacted out of ill will.
For example, self-defense, you know, right?
That's not an act of ill will because you're trying to protect someone.
(27:44):
So we must learn when and how it is morally acceptable to use violence.
So he says sometimes the ends justify the means in other words.
And so for him, a just nation establishes an appropriate balance between the ends and
the means and violence and revolution can be permissible if they result in a just social
system.
That seems to not gel with what Jesus is saying, but at the same time as an American, our country
(28:12):
was started out of a revolution.
Correct.
So personally, here's my thing.
I think the American revolution was justified.
I do not feel comfortable when we use scripture to justify it.
You can justify it by other means.
You can say like, Hey, I think it was biblically neutral.
(28:34):
You could say that yet I justify it because it is because we live in a society that was
unjust.
And so we wanted to have justice, you know, no taxation without representation.
Come on, somebody, you know what I mean?
Come on, somebody.
We got to get back to that.
We got to throw some tea in the fiber again.
That's right.
America.
America.
But Lord, the point is we are justifying it, but we're not using like, like God has
(28:56):
a Lord.
Yeah.
And that's the problem.
And we're just like, like, manifest destiny and like really foul like justifications,
biblical justifications for why you're acting heinous and horrible.
And that's, we need to start.
I mean, I just think as a people, we need to be way more cautious with the God said,
God will say at the Lord thing that we tend to get really comfortable saying.
And then just kind of like, we can like accept that there, there's some justification for
(29:19):
things and not everything has to be a God ordained for me to do this.
It's like, oh Lord, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, Hey, scripture does not
give me the go ahead to fight in this revolution, but it also doesn't say don't.
And my justification for this has to do with political justice.
(29:42):
I think that's perfectly fine.
I think scripture can be not neutral on things, but like not speaking on certain things in
our own.
In the way that we would experience it.
In the way that we experience it now.
And because of that, I think we can make justifications in other ways.
So that's a, it's a little nuance, a little tough.
(30:02):
And also doesn't fit every situation.
It doesn't fit every situation.
Bible is not neutral on everything.
Exactly.
And so, but like revolution, we have like, you know, in the Apocrypha, you have Judas
Maccabees taken back the temple from the Greeks.
We have like that.
And we could see that as like somewhat of a revolution.
So there's a little bit of that, but there isn't like hardcore, just like revolutionary
(30:23):
tactics.
Like maybe, maybe the Exodus, you know what I mean?
But like, that's not going to find a verse that says it's okay to go to war.
Right.
There's a lot of wars talking about war, but there's no like, here's the permission, permission
slip.
Like I think a lot of us sometimes can look at the Bible and be like, where's the verse
that says you're good period.
Like and that's not always in there, which is why we have to do everything with a lot
(30:44):
of prayer and discernment.
And it needs to be about because like oftentimes the Bible is not going to explicitly state
on every concept.
Yeah.
All right.
So just give us a little thumbs up.
And if you're looking for the Bible to justify things, be cautious, be cautious, but especially
when it comes to war, like there's just a lot of nuance to it and we're aware of that.
(31:05):
But I also believe that Jesus was aware of that and that God is aware of that and he's
big enough to kind of speak to these things.
Totally.
And so also the Wesleyan quadrilateral, like our sources for theology, you have scripture,
which is kind of like the big one, especially for Protestant theology, that everything needs
to match up the scripture, but then we have reason, tradition and experience.
(31:25):
So a lot of what we're doing here is like using reason to make sense of the scripture
and the overall theme of what God's story is emulating and saying.
Sometimes when we talk about political revolution, like the French Revolution, American Revolution,
yeah, it's going to be hard to find biblical justification, but it's also hard to find
(31:46):
the Bible saying no to it too.
And I think it's totally fine to just like to say, Hey, my reasoning is not biblical,
but it's not anti-biblical.
You know what I'm saying?
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
So the last one of these is called just war theory.
And this is a really, really popular theory.
It goes all the way back with Ambrose and Augustine in the fourth century.
(32:06):
I mean, this is like how Augustine has justified a lot of war.
He says war in a nutshell isn't good.
I think he would agree with that.
It isn't immoral good.
But there's situations when it can be justified.
So it developed particularly while Roman Empire was under the threat of barbarians and it
was inspired by stoicism, which is this Hellenistic philosophy in the third century before Christ.
(32:32):
And that stoicism taught that destructive emotions result from errors in judgment and
that a sage or like a wise person is a person of moral and intellectual perfection.
And they would not suffer from such emotions or suffer those emotions in general.
So it was inspired by that.
So really taking a really rationalistic approach to what's going on.
(32:52):
And so this is a definition for it.
It's a theory that claims in order to justify killing and war, there must be a reason so
important that it overrides the truth that killing is wrong.
So basically it justifies it, right?
That's why it's called just war.
Which is why I feel like this is where I fit.
Yeah.
Because it's like, this is the truth, but also here's a few conditions.
This is what we believe, like I'm not going to go around killing people because I think
(33:14):
it's cool, but I'm also like not going to go around and be like, well, there's never
a moment where I'm going to defend myself or defend the people I care about or, you
know.
So the rules are criteria.
There's seven rules for going into war and an eighth that concerns your method while
you're in war.
So I love rules.
Yeah.
(33:35):
So this is so fun.
You like this?
I love rules.
All right.
And then see, see if you agree with all of these.
I know you've already kind of like, I've eluded.
Yeah.
You're already eluded, but then see if you would add anything or whatever.
So the first one is, do you have a just cause?
That's is it, is there is humanitarian intervention needed to stop a terrible massacre?
(33:55):
Is there a Holocaust?
Is there a genocide?
What's going on?
Is something terrible happening that you were trying to stop?
That's a just cause.
Is there just authority?
Was a constitutional process followed to declare war?
Or did some tyrant just get up in there?
And start just start causing issues with a constitutional process.
Then, you know, like everybody knows what would declare a war and it's gotten the criteria.
(34:18):
So there's that.
Yep.
Here's a big one.
Is it the last resort?
Can this great evil be stopped in any other way?
Because wouldn't you say any other way than killing each other is probably a better way?
I would agree with this.
So that's my fear.
That's the, that's the last resort thing.
Right.
Just intention.
What is the future aim of this war?
What's the intention?
(34:39):
Is it actually just, or are you trying to like get some oil reserves?
Which is what a lot of people have argued of why some of the wars we fought.
Oh, I can't stand like most of the wars that weren't world wars.
I mean, honestly, like most people will say the only one that's like really, really justified
for America to fight in was World War Two.
(35:00):
Two because of Pearl Harbor.
Because of Pearl Harbor.
Correct.
But even then the atomic bombs, even though I was that the response, I personally think
they were justified, but that's where it gets iffy.
And you'll see the rest of these right here.
So what was that a little too?
That's what's iffy, but like, but us entering the war and the way we did stuff.
(35:21):
Yeah.
So that's just intention.
Now also the probability of success.
It's wrong to aimlessly murder and kill people.
So can you like at least win?
Like, like if are you putting your people out to just like die for the vibes?
Like come on.
I'm gonna get it.
So also the proportionality of cost.
(35:42):
I'm sorry.
It's not like emotional right there.
It's just like the cost.
There was air and I choked on it.
So the proportionality of cost, will the total good of victory outweigh the total evil and
suffering cause?
You know what I mean?
So like is the evil cause, you know, affecting a thousand people and then the war will affect
(36:06):
millions.
Right.
Then maybe it's not just like the proportionality of the cost is not just.
Is there a clear announcement?
This is a big one.
Did the government announce and give conditions for avoiding the war?
Say like, Hey, we're going to fight.
If you don't stop this, right?
Stop these things.
That's what can justify the atomic bombs.
Yeah.
(36:27):
They did ask them.
They were like, please, they were like, stop.
We told them exactly what they would do.
Correct.
And, and, and said like, Hey, you guys need to surrender or else it's going to happen.
So that could justify that.
So, and then finally, fought by just means.
And so you're not directly hurting civilians, nor are you killing surrendered people, nor
are you torturing.
See the atomic bombs might have been like, it did directly hurt civilians.
(36:50):
And so, and lasted for generations of hurting civilians.
Yes.
But the thing that's crazy is like Japan has generally a positive view of America.
And one of the reasons why it's like, we did not kill their, their main leader that they
thought was divine.
And we also put billions of dollars to rebuild Japan.
(37:11):
And we treated them.
They're an ally.
They're an ally.
And we treated them with a lot of dignity and respect afterwards.
And we were like, so cautiously getting into it and warning, like a lot of them don't hold
it against us.
No.
That shows you that a just war actually, after the conflict, you can respond really
well.
Yeah.
Well, because I'm assuming the same situation of like the majority of the Japanese citizens
(37:32):
were probably not like, Oh, awesome.
Let's keep doing this.
Right.
And we were like, ah, like if we had control of the government, we would stop it, but we
don't.
So we can't.
Yeah.
The US spent billions of dollars rebuilding Germany, Japan, other things.
And, and we have great relations with all of them.
You know what I mean?
So like we really tried not to go into war until Pearl Harbor provoked us into it.
(37:55):
That's the one that people think is good.
It's a little bit questioned because of the atomic bombs, the excess of them, of course.
And that's the first time ever being used.
But yeah, I mean, but generally, do you agree with this?
Oh yeah.
I loved that whole thing.
But also like if wars actually followed that, most wars wouldn't be fought.
No, probably not.
Like I can't even think of one outside of World War II, us entering that did them.
(38:19):
It's usually because of some kind of like unhinged, like unprovoked oftentimes.
Like what was it?
World War I was the assassination of the Archduke.
Franz Ferdinand.
Like randomly all of a sudden.
And it was like, bro, what?
And then everyone.
And it caused a whole thing.
And it's like you could have just not killed him.
Maybe.
And so we didn't do that.
(38:40):
Israel and Palestine.
What if Hamas just didn't invade like that?
They didn't do the October 7th.
Yeah.
Like what if?
Or if Ukraine didn't just randomly Russia showed up and.
Yeah.
Now all of these have seeds that went into it.
Like you know, Palestine and Israel have been beefing forever for literally millennial.
And so and then Ukraine and Russia have had stuff too.
(39:02):
Like Russia's been trying to usurp that land for a long time.
That one seems pretty clearly unjustified.
Yes.
The Palestine and Israel war seems absolutely unjustified, but also like when they give
the reasoning of whatever, then you're like, okay, I see it.
But yet, yet that reaction is absolutely absurd.
Correct.
(39:22):
So I think when we talk about, is there ever a time when war is justified?
I would say yes.
And I think you would say yes.
And I would say the place to be is to kind of like have pacifism as a way of life, non-violence
as a way of life, yet also agreeing with just war theory.
If they were, you know, followed.
When it comes to war, yeah.
(39:43):
Yeah.
If it was followed, you know, well.
Like I'm a pacifist in the sense of like, I'm not going to ever be like, let's take
this outside.
You know, like in the life that you live, you should not be violent.
Like you really shouldn't.
Like there's just like, like let's be so for real.
Come on.
So I feel like I'm pacifist in this.
(40:05):
Like I feel like the disciple, the discipleship pacifist is like more of like a personal,
like how I would live my life and the just war theory is like more political, like literal
views on war.
Yeah.
Cause I'm not so much going to war.
Right.
Right.
But it's like, you know, but you don't like that separation the way Christian realism
does.
Oh yeah.
No, I hate that because you think Jesus is Lord of all.
(40:26):
Yes.
There are times when you can't avoid war essentially.
Yeah.
And so, and if that's the case.
There are, you have to have.
Then you got to have these rules, these standards.
Yeah.
All right.
So if we take that kind of complexity here, how should the church respond to what we're
saying to everything we're saying here?
Cause what, what, first of all, what can the church even do?
(40:47):
We're not declaring war.
So what can we do?
I don't know.
I feel like when you're not a part of war, like you're not a person involved, especially
when you're not a person involved, like our job is really to just like pray to like storm
heaven on behalf, you know, cause it's like, there's nothing we can really do to put a
(41:09):
stop to any of these wars that are currently happening.
Not in a, not in a, in a kind of one to one way.
No, like we can't, we're not going to show up on the front lines and be like, stop, you
know?
Yeah.
And so I feel like it's really important for us to not get, well one, not get so caught
up in debating amongst ourselves who have no skin in the game about how it goes and letting
(41:34):
it just like letting these thoughts and things like destroy ourselves and our communities
and our relationships.
Like we should really just be interested in being like Lord, like your people are hurting
on both sides.
How do we like, I, and, and asking like, how should I be involved?
Should I be involved?
What can I do?
What can I not do?
(41:54):
And let the Lord really like speak to those things.
Cause I feel like, you know, is our best use of our autonomy to post on social media in
ways that are really mean and offensive.
Yeah.
No, probably not.
Is like, let's be spending time really like in prayer.
Yeah.
But like for both sides.
For guidance and wisdom.
(42:15):
Yeah.
For like the Lord to really show up in both spaces.
I think one thing there's these philosophers, Glenn Stassen and David Gushy, they were a
really good book called Kingdom Ethics and in it, they argued for just peacemaking.
And so this was like, and this is what the church can do.
They argued and I, and I agree with this.
(42:35):
I think it's cool.
I wonder what you think about it.
They'll say that like what we can do is be preventative and that's by changing hearts
and minds towards the calls to nonviolence that Jesus has called us to before any war
happens, before anything happens.
And so it encourages pacifists to be their name, literally a peacemaker.
Yeah.
(42:55):
Like, so don't talk about just like after the war has happened, don't, or like after
the violence has happened, but like prevent it.
You know, just war is good, but what about preventing war in the first place?
What are the preventative measures that we can do?
So just peacemaking is, you know, what Jesus taught us.
He said, go and be a peacemaker.
That's the initiative.
(43:16):
Go and be reconciled.
He said.
So we make peace with people, with each other, socially everywhere.
And that should be our motivation and our church should promote peace everywhere.
And so here are the, you like the rules.
Here's the 10 practices of just peacemaking and see, see what you think about these.
So one support nonviolent direct action.
So this is like MLKJ or Gandhi.
(43:38):
You already said you supported that.
Yeah.
Like you liked that.
Yeah.
It's nonviolent, but it's also directly opposed to injustice.
And it makes a statement.
It makes a statement.
And especially with like MLKJ and all the things that they did, like they actually like
cause not a little bit of a ruckus or it's like, oh, the buses couldn't run because
people were here in the streets or not using, or they weren't being, or they were being
boycotted.
(43:59):
So things actively changed, but they were nonviolent, but they were nonviolent.
So it's like, there's a way to do that where it's not like, oh, I just showed up and I
blew up the buses.
Yeah.
You know, take independent initiatives to reduce a threat.
And I guess that's a court, of course, according to what you can do, if you can de-escalate
it, do it, use cooperative conflict resolution.
(44:19):
And so that's a big deal, but like, you know, you're going to want to work with the other
side, whoever's like doing the conflict, acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice.
This is big.
So he's saying seek repentance and forgiveness.
If you cannot repent, how can you bring resolution to the injustice?
(44:41):
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So democracy, human rights and religious liberty.
And so that would be, I think that's probably biased a little bit for our Western society,
but like, I'm with it, you know, of course, foster just and sustainable economic development,
because if people can have a good way of life and we keep bringing that, then you're not
(45:02):
going to, the conflicts will be lessened and reduced.
Work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system.
Bring peace into UN and international organizations, reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade.
So like being really against people getting nukes and like trading and this like other
stuff and then encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations.
(45:23):
Do you think these are good steps?
I like them.
I think I mean, I love a good practical step.
Yeah.
I mean, they're, they're, you know, nuts and bolts, actual things that we can do personally
and in our government, corporately everything to help bring peace in the world.
So, and that's, and again, peacemaking is not saying it's not validating Islam as a
(45:45):
faith, but it's not killing each other, which is a big deal, which we love that part.
You know what I'm saying?
It's not validating an atheist position in whatever, but it's also not killing people
and being hate, hate, trade towards each other and stuff like that.
Correct.
And peacemaking is being that loving kind witness and then taking to task what Jesus
(46:06):
has actually called us to do.
Yeah.
Not arming yourself to the teeth, just find the second amendment and saying you're going
to threaten anybody who shows up on your lawn.
Yeah.
You know, there was this, there's a Leonard Skinner song that talks about, there was a
peacemaker in my dresser drawer.
Oh, no hard.
I'm thinking that's, that's legit blasphemous.
Yep.
That's legitimately taking what Jesus says and saying the opposite.
(46:31):
Jesus says to be a peacemaker actual and this is saying to inflict violence, kill the other
person.
That's how you made peace.
It's the actual opposite, which is very frustrating.
And I think the song is called like God, guns and glory or something like that.
It's like, man, I don't know what God you're serving, but ain't Jesus.
Yeah.
Ain't Jesus.
It also does like comes against the American view of like weaponry and the second amendment
(46:53):
and stuff.
And so I think it's good to be challenged every once in a while.
And the thing is like, you can have a weapon, you can have all that kind of stuff, like
whatever.
And the thing reframe your thinking for you to actually follow Jesus and be one that would
make peace and actual peace in the world, not metaphorical peace, not peace by analogy,
but actual peace, reducing violence, reducing hatred, by vote, peace by who you're voting
(47:17):
for peace in general, peace, people's little person.
Yeah.
Reconcile.
Actually just be a person who in your day to day life, you're about peace.
And I think it comes in little habit changes of like, is that life giving to post on social
media?
Is that a conversation I should be engaged in?
Should I buy this shirt?
Should I brandish this weapon?
Should I be promoting what I'm promoting?
(47:38):
To live, like war is not just, it doesn't just happen one day.
There's so many itsy-bitsy little things that build up for whoever amount of time.
If you're stopping it along the way, then you're making peace.
You're making peace because we're not getting to this point where everybody's so escalated
and elevated that it's like the only option that we have left is to go to war.
(47:58):
Now we should be in the process, dismantling and dismantling and bringing peace in our
day to day life so that it doesn't get to the point where we're like, okay, now we have
no other option.
Keeping with the last resort aspect.
Exactly.
I messed with that so heavy.
But I mean, it's, I think that's a good thing.
(48:20):
And I think that's kind of the literal advice that we can do as a church is we need to disciple
people to be peacemakers, like actual peacemakers.
Full steps, real ways, peaceful in your personal life, peaceful in your social interactions,
peaceful in your political engagement, peaceful in every aspect.
How do you actually bring that?
(48:40):
We need to be peacemakers in this world.
We need to push that a lot harder and we need to diffuse the nonsense, violent rhetoric
that somehow has entered a church in a bunch of different ways and are all of society.
And we needed to be not about that.
It's not what Jesus was about.
And like, let's literally be red letter Christians.
It's due to things that Jesus has asked us to do.
You know what I mean?
Shocking.
(49:01):
It shouldn't be, but it kind of is.
But it kind of is.
Well that's it.
That was a good conversation.
I think we can, you know, we're going to come back to these topics all the time, but
I think this is a good way to kind of get some definition of what's going on.
Obviously, it's an ongoing debate and you might have questions on whether passivism works
(49:21):
or just war theory or Christian realism.
What is the extent of certain stuff?
But I think having a healthy dialogue along these lines and just being like, let's truly
embody what it means to be a peacemaker.
Like if we can be subtle and not as Christians and then try to figure that out, and I think
we're on the right path.
I would agree.
Yeah.
So all right.
Well, this was brought to you by the School of Theology and Ministry at Life Pacific University.
(49:41):
We'll see you next time.
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