Roger’s Reviews > War, Peace, and Violence: Four Christian Views > Status Update

For that is what war does: it seizes hold of everything, including the categories of legitimation and delimitation, and weaponizes them. Some wars are "just" if fought for x, y, and z? Very well, we will show that the thing for which we desire to fight meets those criteria. And in the end, we will show that the religious permissions are, in fact, religious commands: Deus vult! God wills it!

Even so, once we have given Christian sanction to uses of lethal force--not in the highly generalized terms of Paul in Romans 13:1-7, which amount to the merest observation as to why rulers exist--then it is hardly surprising if the just war criteria are extended to encompass the kind of legitimation that its protagonists will designate holy war.

To be sure, realism will always appeal to moral reasons for refraining from war or not, but my concern is that those reasons will be naturalized, articulated only in political terms of necessity that ultimately have no need for the language of Christianity, with Christianity now the handmaiden of statecraft.

But once war is conceived of as an event embedded within a tragic but necessary framework, it is unclear to me how anything that governs how we get into war, why we might desire or not desire war, or prevent war can be spoken of in anything other than the language of--as Nolte rightly worries--realpolitik, actions governed not by moral evaluation but by what works.