Just Policing: How War Could Cease to Be a Church-Dividing Issue
2004; Duquesne University Press; Volume: 41; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2162-3937
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoAll these considerations compel us to undertake evaluation of with entirely new attitude. Vatican II (1) Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting idealistic goal; but it is less idealistic than idea that military action could be truly instrument of justice. John Howard Yoder (2) If best intentions of just-war theorists were operational, they could allow only for just policing, not warfare at all. If Christian pacifists can in any way support, participate, or at least not object to operations with recourse to limited but potentially lethal force, that will be true only for just policing. That, in a nutshell, is twofold thesis of Just Policing proposal. While its title relies on word play to anticipate that twofold thesis, its subtitle attempts a more steely precision. Driving this proposal is a thought experiment. It does not claim that we are upon threshold of Christian unity vis-a-vis quite yet. Rather, it is exercise in imagining for of reaching that threshold. It seeks to chart how just-war and pacifist Christians might converge sufficiently that a new horizon would come into view, wherein we might then see more clearly how could cease to be a church-dividing issue. Some such convergence may be possible if together we explore a conceptual territory that longstanding debates between pacifists and just-war thinkers left surprisingly unmapped. Joint examination of policing, I suggest, may point us toward conditions for possibility of agreement vis-a-vis war. While events of September 11, 2001, and debates in months following prompted this thought experiment and crystallized its arguments, principal occasion for its drafting was international dialogue between representatives of Mennonite World Conference and Pontifical Council for Promoting Church Unity, which was roughly midway through its initial five-year cycle at time. While casting eye to other conversations among other Christian traditions, concerns and contributions of Mennonite and Roman Catholic faith communities inevitably receive greatest attention. (3) I. War: Can We Have It Both Ways? Virtually every Christian tradition is trying to it both about war. This may be a sign of honest puzzlement, or it may be a sign of diplomatic fudging, but it is surely one sign of unfinished agenda. The Roman Catholic Church has long been custodian of Christian tradition of just-war deliberation, which began when Saints Ambrose and Augustine used arguments from such Roman thinkers as Cicero in order to justify some wars while disciplining all wars. Since Vatican II, however, Catholic Church has also given a new level of recognition to vocational pacifism, at least. In early 1980's, U.S. Catholic bishops writing on The Challenge of Peace explicitly paired traditions of just and pacifism or active nonviolence as legitimate Christian responses to war. (4) Historic peace churches (Mennonite, Church of Brethren, Society of Friends) certainly do not recognize legitimacy of just-war thinking with easy reciprocity that would mirror statements by mainstream Christian traditions. Yet in their own way, peace churches found that they, too, must have it both ways by acknowledging need for someone, somewhere, to use potentially lethal violence to preserve order in a fallen world. In formative years of sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, Schleitheim Confession of 1527 gave this recognition classical expression for Mennonites by speaking of the as an ordering of God outside perfection of Christ; accordingly, secular rulers are established to wield sword that punishes and kills wicked but guards and protects good. (5) Though conservative rather than activist Mennonites are more likely to quote Schleitheim Confession today, many of very Mennonites who most sought to oppose war on looming in September and October of 2001 found themselves reflecting logic of Schleitheim, nonetheless, as they called for alternative, international, judicial responses to terrorism that would still require some military or police force to apprehend criminals. …
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