The Christian & War

A Study That Asks Whether A Christian May Scripturally Function As A Punitive Agent of the State and Other Related Questions.

In this book, Allan Turner observes that since the Vietnam era, there has arisen, in America and the whole of Western society, a way of thinking that argues against all war. Consequently, a book discussing the question of a Christian’s participation in war and other related issues in light of this emerging consensus seems not just appropriate but necessary. The threat of world wars and global holocaust which loomed during the Cold War, although still quite possible today, seems to have dimmed with the passing of the twentieth century. Even so, some of the worst features of twentieth-century warfare continue to comprise our thinking about contemporary war-fighting.

These have been articulated as: the understanding of war as an all-or-nothing conflict that can only end when one side is entirely victorious and the other entirely vanquished or driven into unconditional submission; the conception of the enemy as including all members of the opposing society, making a distinction between combatants and noncombatants irrelevant; the use of atrocity as a means of war; the use of ethnic, religious, or other cultural differences in much the same way as ideology was earlier employed to make the enemy appear less than human and, in any case, totally in the wrong (James Turner Johnson, Morality And Contemporary Warfare, 1999, p. 5). Thus, contemporary wars are still viewed within the framework of “total war” thinking—a way of thinking that views war as immoral and therefore all war-fighting, even when deemed “necessary,” as nothing much more than “a necessary evil.”

In an environment where war is, by definition, immoral, it is difficult for “good,” “decent” folks to think positively about war-fighting. This book is an effort to correct such thinking and to instruct the interested reader as to what the Bible actually says about this most important subject.