Religious ethicists debate ‘Just War’ theory

Leaders of two church groups met last week to discuss whether the United States would be morally justified in going to war with Iraq. Ethicists from The National Council of Churches (NCC) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) came to different conclusions.
   
Congressional legislative staff and members of the media — as well as national and international leaders of the NCC — met in Washington, D.C., Feb. 27, to discuss their religious views on the potential war. “As people of faith, we are one in our concern about the rush to war. We are one in our opposition to thinking war is an option,” said Bob Edgar, a United Methodist and General Secretary of the NCC.
   
Jim Winkler, staff head of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, said that Christians should come face-to-face with the choice between their willingness to participate in war and their faith in God and Jesus as the Prince of Peace. “The prevailing assumption in the U.S. government is that war with Iraq is inevitable. As a Christian, I find such sentiment  unacceptable.”
   
Winkler also stated his belief that no matter how bad Saddam Hussein is, the people of Iraq do not want America to take over as “their new dictator or proconsul.”
   
Bishop Manfred Kock, president of the Evangelical Church in Germany, said, “War is contrary to the will of God. All war brings distress to innocent people and often does not achieve its goal.”
   
Ethicists and experts of the SBC came to a different conclusion during a meeting at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Feb. 26. The four panelists were Daniel Heimbach, professor of ethics at Southeastern and an authority on the doctrine of Just War; Richard Land, president of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Mark Liederbach, an assistant professor of ethics at Southeastern; and David Jones, also a Southeastern assistant professor.
   
Baptist Press reported that the conclusion of the four panelists was that the United States would be morally justified in its war with Iraq.
   
Heimbach, who served as a member of President George H.W. Bush’s administration, said that war in some cases can be legitimized by the Bible. He quoted such texts as Romans 14:19, Proverbs 2:7–9 and Romans 13.
   
Heimbach argued that any conflict with Iraq under the current presidency would be justified as a continuation of the earlier conflict because Iraq has never fully complied with the terms of their 1991 surrender agreement. “You can send inspectors back over … but if there’s no deadline, then you have turned Just War into pacifism. War with Iraq is justified,” he said.
   
At one point in the discussion, Land said, “The biblical standard is not peace at any price. The biblical standard is a just peace.”
   
Liederbach said that it is a Christian’s responsibility to pray for a heart change in the Iraqi leaders. “That’s how a Christian wages spiritual warfare,” he said.
   
All panelists agreed that pacifism is not the only option for a Christian, pointing out that it is not God’s design for evil to rule on earth.
   
Land added, “The resort to lethal force, authorized by a legitimate authority, is sometimes the price human beings pay for living in a moral universe.”
   
Another Southern Baptist, former President Jimmy Carter, disagrees with calling the possible war on Iraq a “just war.”
   
“As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards,” Carter wrote in the March 8 New York Times.
   
“This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.” (EP, ABP)