Part 1 of a Review of Daniel M. Bell Jr., Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church Rather than the State (Brazos, 2009).
As soon as my eyes fell on Daniel Bell's new book at the Brazos exhibit at the SBL Annual Meeting, I decided to buy it. It's not just that I've been engaged in thinking, writing, and teaching about the so-called "just war" tradition (hereafter JWT) myself and thought this might be another useful resource. More than that: some of the lines used on the book cover sound themes that I've argued need to be front and center in the Church's life.
In this and succeeding posts I will engage the book as I read it. I make no pretense of being disengaged or "objective" about the topic.
Judging a Book by Its Cover
Bell's title certainly makes the point: If the JWT is part of "Christian discipleship," then it's not optional; it's not to be relegated to those individuals who want to ride their own pro-war or anti-war hobby-horse. Understanding and applying the tradition should be central to who we are as the Church.
Similarly, the subtitle seems to throw down the gauntlet. The JWT is a theological tradition and thus belongs to the Church and has its first and appropriate home in the Church's thinking about war. We--and when I use the first-person pronoun, I always mean "we the Church" (an issue to which I will return below)--should own the JWT. But one is more likely to find courses on JWT taught at military academies than at seminaries. As Bell knows (and as others have made the point before him), the JWT has largely been coopted today by military planners and the policymakers who want to "sell" their latest war by dressing it up as "just." The "most common way of dealing" with the JWT today is as "a list of criteria meant to guide public policy with regard to war" (p. 20). The cynical calculation behind such use of the JWT is that Christians can be encouraged to acquiesce in another war--if not positively to cheerlead from the pulpit and run interference against pacifists, both useful contributions to the warmaking aim--if they can be lulled into trusting the military planners to give the war a churchy-sounding stamp of approval.
So far so good; so far I'm on board with Bell's agenda.
The cover also smacks the reader in the face with a very different prospect, however. The cover image appears to be a U.S. Naval battle map from the war in the Pacific (1944); the cover announces a Foreword by a military chaplain. I would like to think the good people at Brazos intended the jarring mixed message the cover sends: I would hate to think it passed, so to speak, beneath their radar. If this is a book about "recentering the tradition in the Church rather than the State," why does the argument depend in part on the approval of a military chaplain? It's that incongruity that provoked me to buy the book (perhaps the publisher's intention!) but that also set my theological Spidey sense tingling. Bell may occasionally set Church and state in opposition, but is this more than lip service? Will he actually sustain that tension in any theologically credible way?
A Rough Start
Asking a military chaplain to offer the Foreword (whether that was the author's idea or the publisher's) inevitably sets the tone for the book. (Immediate, arguably irrelevant disclaimers: I don't know Chaplain Lt. Col. Scott A. Sterling; I have counted military chaplains among my friends, including George Metcalf, the supervisor of military chaplains in Patton's army upon whom Patton called to pronounce a prayer for favorable weather for U.S. bombers against German troops hunkered down in the Ardennes in 1944.)
Though Bell seeks to achieve a moral high ground by promising not to pontificate about one war or another (because that would prove a "distraction," p. 15), Sterling's first sentence in the Foreword evokes the (second) Iraq War (depending, of course, on how one numbers wars: given the tremendous civilian death toll of President Clinton's economic sanctions against Iraq, I argue that there has been one single, long, unrelenting war in Iraq for twenty years, and counting).
Sterling is honest about his audience: they are "soldiers who wanted to talk about and resolve the moral and ethical dimensions of the war we were fighting in Iraq" (7). Sterling understands his responsibility (and those of other military chaplains in Iraq) to be "to assist our soldiers in coming to terms with the moral implications of their unique and terrible jobs." And what are those jobs? "As in every war, the soldiers' task was simple and horrifying: find and kill enemy warriors, which often resulted in the destruction of homes and infrastructure and taking the lives of innocents along with enemy soldiers" (ibid.)
The phrases I've italicized (not in original) speak volumes about the discipline of military training. The Christian soldier, if he or she is enlisted in the U.S. military, is not encouraged to ask, in every battlefield engagement, "why am I here?" or "am I justified in throwing this grenade" or "firing this M4?" The soldier's job, the chaplain says, is to find and kill. It happens--"often," says the chaplain--that doing their job means innocent people get killed, right away; the reference to destruction of homes and infrastructure, an incident of commendable honesty, points to the reality that other innocent people will die later as a "result" of what U.S. soldiers have done. (We need not assume that the commanding officer intended the deaths of innocent people; to fall back into the impersonal construction of Army-speak, it just "often happens.")
One might stop, right here, and ask: "Should a Christian accept a job assignment that will reliably and often result in the deaths of innocent people?" In such stark terms most Christians would readily answer, "no." I submit--and this is my bias going into this book--that the tremendous effort the U.S. military spends in recruiting and training officers and enlisted men and women and the massive cultural representations of military service beamed into our heads daily have as their primary function to plant a different answer: "No, unless there's a military reason to do something else that has the inevitable, expected, but unintended consequence of killing innocent people. Then it's okay."
I suspect at the outset that Bell will exert his considerable erudition to get us, 240 pages later, to nod in agreement. It will of course be a sophisticated argument, but from the start the gravitational pull of this book is toward the battlefield, toward those sincere U.S. soldiers agonizing over the last mission or the next mission.
Why? Why does the U.S. soldier trump all other identifications, locations, sympathies in a book about Christian theology? In what way is Christian formation the presumption at the center of this book and in what way has the presumption of military necessity already inserted itself as a theological consideration?
Pronoun Trouble
Chaplain Sterling is "amazed" that Bell can speak so eloquently and directly to the concerns of enlisted U.S. soldiers without having served in the military himself (p. 8). For Lt. Col. Sterling, this is the great benefit of the book. He knows that "our military" will be involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, "and humanitarian crises throughout the world" (a characterization that he doesn't blush to use), for years to come. If the Church embraces Bell's book, he concludes, "we can all feel more confident that our nation will strive to maintain the moral high ground in its military endeavors and beyond."
This, in the foreword to a book presented as Christian theology. Sterling explicitly invokes an identity as U.S. citizens who identify with "our" troops and care above all that "our nation" maintain the alleged "moral high ground" in its military endeavors. In what way are these Christian theological concerns? Are these presumptions to remain unquestioned throughout an ostensibly Christian book?
And who, at last, are "we" as we read? For Sterling, "we" are Americans who presumptively identify with our nation's righteous cause, the "moral high ground" (details be damned). One can't help wondering if this book might sound a bit different if written from Sandinista Nicaragua, where Christians perceived their nation to be under unwarranted and brutal military and economic attack from the United States. Is it even possible for Bell to disentangle his nationalism from his Christianity? Or will he plead that his "situation" as an American constitutes a dumb responsibility to give the most powerful and the most destructive military in world history presumed standing in matters of Christian theology?
Comments