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Christian Attitudes Toward War & Peace
s/t: A Historical Survey & Critical Reevaluation
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
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About the author
Roland H. Bainton
79 books43 followersRoland Herbert Bainton, Ph.D. (Yale University; A.B., Whitman College), served forty-two years as Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. A specialist in Reformation history, he continued writing well into his twenty years of retirement. His most popular book, Here I Stand, sold more than a million copies.
Ordained as a Congregationist minister, he never served as the pastor of a congregation.
Ordained as a Congregationist minister, he never served as the pastor of a congregation.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 4, 2020
Bainton’s historical survey of Christian perspectives on war and peace is well-structured and informative. Evangelicals holding to the inerrancy of Scripture will object to the way the author approaches the authority of Scripture but his historical scholarship is solid. Chapters 1-13 contain the most helpful elements of the work. Bainton shifts to his personal “critical re-evaluation” of the themes of war and peace from a Christian perspective in chapter 14. With this shift comes a decrease in the academic rigor which characterized the book up to this point. His case for pacifism is unconvincing due to its simplicity and naivety. This departure from Bainton’s previous thoroughness of chapters 1-13 strikes the reader. In all, this work is worth reading primarily for the historical survey of Christian attitudes toward war and peace.
March 10, 2014
Roland Bainton, the son and husband of Quakers, himself a Congregationalist minister, writes that, originally, “limited war presupposed … conditions which were fulfilled by the Greek city-states;” “independent sovereign states of approximately equal strength” “with forces so well matched that… wisdom pointed to mediation rather than to the arbitration of a long and indecisive conflict” Plato was the forerunner to just war, but never called it that, since conflict amongst the city- states he would not call “war.” Aristotle, in his Politics (I, 1256, B., 23-26), asserted that a just war was one to enslave people to their proper status in the face of resistance. The Roman jurist Cicero adjusted it in his De Officiis (I, 34-40, 83; II, 27; III, 46, 107) for use by states as they existed during his time. He laid the foundation for such tenets as "formal declaration by an authority" based on the Roman practice of Pater Patratus, the 'father of fathers' of the Fetiales in the Fecial College (not unlike the bishop of bishops in contemporary Roman Catholic tradition). Bainton leaves unclear whether and to what extent this practice of the Fetiales derived from Deuteronomy, in which Israel appeals for peace and provides a time for response before waging war. However, given the sacred nature of both war and peace in ancient era, it may simply be that it was common practice to avoid conflict at all costs, even up to the last. Cicero also insisted upon an "adherence to oaths" between enemies and friendlies. He maintained no protection of noncombatants, but the vanquished were spared humiliation and guaranteed full citizenship. Bainton recalls concrete examples of this occurring.
Many centuries after Cicero, Bainton recounts the first Christian account of justified war to be by Ambrose. The bishop of Milan's position as a praetorian prefect would have inclined him against the instinct to exclude soldiers in the same vein as Tertullian or Origen. He revived what Cicero advocated for and added that the “conduct of war should be just and that monks and priests should abstain.” Mentored by Ambrose, Augustine watched as the Roman Empire began to collapse. His view of human nature allowed him to make a distinction between act and attitude, giving space for an ethic that “served to justify outward violence.” In writing to Boniface, he pleaded with the Roman general to put off interest in monasticism in order to help in protecting the empire, which Augustine all too quickly equated with the faith. [Here one could draw direct parallels with Niebuhr, who too appealed to the state for preservation of culture, including religion] Bainton cites that for Augustine, war's intent was to be just, its disposition love, and its auspices just. With Cicero, Augustine insisted, “Faith must be kept with the enemy.” The authority bestowed upon soldiers under oath ensured moral sterility; meaning private citizens could not take life, for to do so would be a product of the passions and self-assertion. Finally, and this final point is taken up in the modern era quite robustly, justice rested upon one side of the conflict only. Bainton reflects that with the modern world's attention to the margins and its inherent liberative instincts, the suggestion that justice can be on both sides of the war is valid (however much that throws off our moral considerations).
At the outset of the second millennia, Bainton describes just war as having faded while a kind of anarchy prevailed in the church, which gave way eventually to the phenomenon of the crusade. Bainton recounts numerous episodes in which clergy took up arms even while the just war shifted focus from protection of life and honor to the protection of property. Rebellions were forbidden in the increasingly feudal society by the determination that “an inferior ruler could not make war upon a superior ruler,” though such a leveling would be hard to determine without question given the agrarian nature of society compared to the relatively unified pluralism of Rome. Aquinas, therefore, was a product of his time in focusing on the issue of property in his deliberations on war, based upon natural law and the relationship between land, harvest, and feudal survival. He introduced the tenet of proportionality; that a just war may not “destroy more property than it recovered.” Abelard was the first to confront the issue of conscience, finding that the “conscience is obligatory though not exempt from the consequences.”
Many centuries after Cicero, Bainton recounts the first Christian account of justified war to be by Ambrose. The bishop of Milan's position as a praetorian prefect would have inclined him against the instinct to exclude soldiers in the same vein as Tertullian or Origen. He revived what Cicero advocated for and added that the “conduct of war should be just and that monks and priests should abstain.” Mentored by Ambrose, Augustine watched as the Roman Empire began to collapse. His view of human nature allowed him to make a distinction between act and attitude, giving space for an ethic that “served to justify outward violence.” In writing to Boniface, he pleaded with the Roman general to put off interest in monasticism in order to help in protecting the empire, which Augustine all too quickly equated with the faith. [Here one could draw direct parallels with Niebuhr, who too appealed to the state for preservation of culture, including religion] Bainton cites that for Augustine, war's intent was to be just, its disposition love, and its auspices just. With Cicero, Augustine insisted, “Faith must be kept with the enemy.” The authority bestowed upon soldiers under oath ensured moral sterility; meaning private citizens could not take life, for to do so would be a product of the passions and self-assertion. Finally, and this final point is taken up in the modern era quite robustly, justice rested upon one side of the conflict only. Bainton reflects that with the modern world's attention to the margins and its inherent liberative instincts, the suggestion that justice can be on both sides of the war is valid (however much that throws off our moral considerations).
At the outset of the second millennia, Bainton describes just war as having faded while a kind of anarchy prevailed in the church, which gave way eventually to the phenomenon of the crusade. Bainton recounts numerous episodes in which clergy took up arms even while the just war shifted focus from protection of life and honor to the protection of property. Rebellions were forbidden in the increasingly feudal society by the determination that “an inferior ruler could not make war upon a superior ruler,” though such a leveling would be hard to determine without question given the agrarian nature of society compared to the relatively unified pluralism of Rome. Aquinas, therefore, was a product of his time in focusing on the issue of property in his deliberations on war, based upon natural law and the relationship between land, harvest, and feudal survival. He introduced the tenet of proportionality; that a just war may not “destroy more property than it recovered.” Abelard was the first to confront the issue of conscience, finding that the “conscience is obligatory though not exempt from the consequences.”
June 28, 2020
Originally published in the early 1960s, "Christian Attitudes Toward War & Peace" is a little dated by this time, and the imminent danger of nuclear warfare, although not having disappeared, seems to be less on the consciences of the world's inhabitants. Although cast in the dark shadow of the atomic age, Roland H. Bainton's survey of the history of the Church and its relationship to warfare and peace-making is insightful and helpful. Bainton, a pacifist, devotes the majority of his work to the historical stances of the Church throughout major eras and ages of world history, but allows for his own beliefs and opinions on the subject of war and peace to surface in the final two chapters.
The traditional stances of the Church throughout history have been threefold: adherence to pacifism, to the just war, and to the crusade. I found this book helpful in showing the diversity within the Church in regard to war and peace, primarily after the time of Constantine (prior to Constantine, the majority Christian attitude was one of peace-making and pacifism). The Just War Theory, although the most popular of the traditional stances, proves to be much more of a complex theory when it is taken realistically and pragmatically. When one takes into account the various stipulations required for declaring a war truly "just," one would have to declare "there has never been such a war." It causes me to wonder what stance the majority of Christians, then, espouse? It must be a middle way between the Just War Theory and the crusade; sadly, at times, the crusade seems easier for many Christians in the U.S. to accept, because of a longstanding belief in the myth of a "Christian nation." While I espouse a more pacifist (or "nonviolent") approach, I commend the Just War Theory and would love if truly our wars were waged with a sense of this theory, as I believe it would deter us from the majority of national and international conflict.
The traditional stances of the Church throughout history have been threefold: adherence to pacifism, to the just war, and to the crusade. I found this book helpful in showing the diversity within the Church in regard to war and peace, primarily after the time of Constantine (prior to Constantine, the majority Christian attitude was one of peace-making and pacifism). The Just War Theory, although the most popular of the traditional stances, proves to be much more of a complex theory when it is taken realistically and pragmatically. When one takes into account the various stipulations required for declaring a war truly "just," one would have to declare "there has never been such a war." It causes me to wonder what stance the majority of Christians, then, espouse? It must be a middle way between the Just War Theory and the crusade; sadly, at times, the crusade seems easier for many Christians in the U.S. to accept, because of a longstanding belief in the myth of a "Christian nation." While I espouse a more pacifist (or "nonviolent") approach, I commend the Just War Theory and would love if truly our wars were waged with a sense of this theory, as I believe it would deter us from the majority of national and international conflict.
February 11, 2020
Roland Bainton has done an excellent job in chapters 1-13 in the history of looking at war. The question he imposes on the reader for evangelical Christians is war justified in our view? Writing during the 1960’s we see that war sometimes is a horrible thing. But the problem with the book is he cites some scripture but does not give us a biblical mandate in why Christians should hold to his view of pacifism. All though his point on page 249 is an excellent point “As a matter of the wielders of power have not infrequently been men of high integrity. If power corrupts, so also does weakness. Existence corrupts.” In other words sin corrupts our whole being, and if God does not destroy why should we destroy others?
October 3, 2011
I've read this fine book before, perhaps more than once. This time I only read a couple chapters; chapters 4 and 5 "War and Peace in the New Testament" and "The Pacifism of the Early Church". I'm looking for some specific information this time.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews