Blessed Are the Pacifists: The Beatitudes and Just War Theory

Blessed Are the Pacifists: The Beatitudes and Just War Theory. By Thomas Trzyna. Herald, 138 pp., $11.99 paperback.

The Horrors We Bless: Rethinking the Just--War Legacy. By Daniel C. Maguire. Fortress, 112 pp., $7.00 paperback.

Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War, 2nd edition. Edited by Glen Stassen. Pilgrim, 216 pp., $18.00.

It has now been ten years since the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder died. Yoder remains most remembered for his book The Politics of Jesus and for providing a profound grounding for a Christian pacifist alternative to just war theory. Yet at times Yoder employed just war reasoning himself to evaluate the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He also regularly taught courses on the just war tradition. Among his students were ROTC cadets at Notre Dame. He even lectured on just war at Culver Military Academy.

As a student I once accompanied Yoder on the trek to Culver, 30 miles south of South Bend, and listened as he emphasized to these youths the importance of maintaining the integrity of the just war tradition. David Weiss, a fellow graduate student who went with us, later reflected, "As I listened to him, the aging, bearded, internationally known Mennonite pacifist, field their sometimes sophisticated but just as often ill-formed and awkward questions--always with unfailing grace--I realized that I was watching something akin to redemptive patience."

Why would Yoder, a committed pacifist, bother to use just war thinking himself or take the time to teach it to students? For one thing, he ecumenically and dialogically respected the integrity of his nonpacifist interlocutors. Believing that one of his roles was to be a friendly critic of just war theory, Yoder called upon its proponents to think more seriously about what it would really mean to honor and adhere to this mode of moral reasoning.

The key question Yoder asked just war advocates was this one: "Can the [just war] criteria function in such a way that in a particular case a specified cause, or a specified means, or a specified strategy or tactical move could be excluded? Can the response ever be 'no'?"

In other words, how do just war proponents make the demands and claims of the tradition truly operational? If proponents would actually "exercise effective discipline and limit the harm they do," Yoder hoped, then this just war approach "with teeth" would lead to less violence, injustice and loss of life in the world.

In the years since his death and especially as the Iraq war approaches its fifth anniversary, I often find myself wondering what Yoder would have had to say about the terrorist threat, the so-called war on terrorism, the claim that a country has the right to embark on preventive war, the abuse at Abu Ghraib and the transition away from viewing water-boarding as a form of torture. Although Yoder is no longer with us, echoes of his thinking are discernible in the books under review here. Each finds fault with just war theory and offers alternatives to it, but none jettisons it entirely.

In his brief, nonacademic book Blessed A re the Pacifists, Thomas Trzyna, an Episcopalian and an English professor at Seattle Pacific University, contends that though just war theory has "a long and honorable history," it is "far less useful" today than its proponents admit--especially because most Americans are unfamiliar with it. Furthermore, he charges, the tenets of the theory are "flawed and contradictory." Quite often, he explains, just war criteria are used to rationalize what is already happening, and they can be invoked "equally well on both sides" of a conflict; they are "little more than a framework for publicity and propaganda." We do not tend to embark on war only as a last resort, he argues, and noncombatant immunity is impossible in practice in modern warfare. Indeed, Trzyna asks whether we can find any cases in which wars "have been prevented because the theory was applied and discussed."

Surprisingly, Trzyna does not cast just war completely aside but proposes a reformulation of the theory. First of all, just war theory needs to define more clearly "what is worth fighting about." Trzyna suggests that "the survival of the world's core of peoples and values" might count. He also proposes that a new criterion be added requiring that a victorious nation restore a "defeated nation to autonomy, with its cultural identity intact, to the degree that such an identity can be reframed in pacifist terms," as was done in Germany and Japan following World War II.

Trzyna does not reject the idea that there should be "small police or military powers" that are lightly armed and "sufficient to maintain a generally peaceful world." Still, Trzyna believes that pacifists, rather than just war theorists, are blessed--and that the Beatitudes, which represent "the heart of Jesus' teaching," offer a "pacifist religious philosophy" and provide "a comprehensive, step-by-step argument for a way of life that can create peace." Trzyna refuses to define pacifism negatively as an absolute refusal to use violence; instead, he portrays it as a reasonable and empirically effective method for preventing and resolving conflict. Drawing on the work of Gandhi's "first disciple in the West," Lanza del Vasto (1901-1981), Trzyna refers to the Beatitudes as "the manual" for living, a manual that "may be applied to any size of community" and does not entail separation from the world. Trzyna then proceeds to offer a meditation on each Beatitude, noting how it depicts a way of being in the world that involves putting into practice specific attitudes, dispositions and virtues, such as mercy, gentleness, humility, patience, imagination, honesty and "a willingness to suffer and sacrifice, 'up to and including the sacrifice of life itself.'"