by Dr. Philip Blosser. The Ratzinger Forum, August 16, 2002.

War is hell. Those of us who don't know this from first-hand experience have a pretty good idea of it from recent Hollywood fare like "Black Hawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers." The idea of making endless academic distinctions about the theoretical justifiability of war within the safety of magazine pages in articles composed from the comfort of an office computer with a mug of coffee at hand, may strike some of us as a trifle perverse. What kind of reasoning about war, we may want to ask, could possibly be moral, especially once we've agreed with General Sherman that war is hell!

I would like to do something a bit different, as others before me have delved into the details of Aquinas and Luther, as well as Augustine and others on just war theory. I think that we stand at such a vast emotional distance today from the kind of thinking involved in just war reasoning, that I would like to try to work backwards, starting from where I think many of us are today, and delve back into the conditions that led us here. My hope is that this may open the way to a clearer understanding of what is involved in the kind of moral reasoning that we find in what we call the just war tradition, a tradition of moral reasoning largely in eclipse today, except, perhaps, as James Turner Johnson recently pointed out to me, in our various military collages, where it is still very much alive.

By "moral reasoning," I mean something quite simple and obvious. For starters, we can probably all agree, as long as we're talking about war, that one fought in self-defense is probably not as bad as a war of aggression; that a limited war (like the Gulf War) is not as bad as total war (like the two World Wars); that a war that achieves a just and lasting peace is not as bad as one that doesn't; or that a war in which prisoners are taken alive is better than one in which they are indiscriminately killed; or that one in which prisoners are treated humanely is better than one in which they are treated like animals; or that one in which civilians are not deliberately targeted is better than one in which they are, and so on. This kind of analysis, as well as the thinking about the principles underlying it, is what I mean by moral reasoning; and it's the kind of reasoning involved in thinking about justifiable aspects of war.

Such were the changes that were overtaking us everywhere, of course, and not merely in the Catholic Church. I found it significant that Time magazine named Stanley Hauerwas "America's best theologian" two days before the terrorists struck on 9/11/01, which in itself may be a commentary on the ambivalence of the responses emanating from the various Christian communities in the weeks and months that followed. In 1970, Hauerwas, who was then teaching at Notre Dame in Southbend, IN, discovered the writings of Mennonite pacifist theologian, John Howard Yoder, who was then teaching at the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart. They met, Hauerwas became a confirmed pacifist, and the rest is history. That same year, Hauerwas was asked to represent Notre Dame and present a paper at a colloquium with the theology department at Valparaiso University. Hauerwas introduced his remarks by saying that here he was, "a Methodist of doubtful theological background (Methodists by definition have a doubtful theological background), representing a Catholic department of theology speaking to a bunch of Lutherans to say that the Mennonites had been right all along" ("When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference," 6). This is almost as telling, in my opinion, as the subsequent appointment of John Howard Yoder to the theology faculty at Notre Dame. Was Yoder the revenge of the 16^th century Anabaptist peasants upon their Lutheran and Catholic oppressors? It looked like Mennonite pacifism was getting the upper hand against classic just war reasoning.

All of this collectively signals the vast distance at which we now stand, as a culture, from the Catholic tradition of just war reasoning after only a few, short decades. The tradition of moral reasoning by Christians about the justifiable use of force as part of an overall framework of public and international policy has largely been forgotten. This is what I mean by the "eclipse of moral reasoning." One is more apt to hear that war cannot be reasoned about morally at all, today, than the kind of nuanced analyses found in Catholic tradition about the civil duty involved in decisions about the use of lethal force by police, the death penalty (one thinks of Supreme Court Justice Scalia's recent defense of the death penalty), and justifiable war. Paul Ramsey warned us about all this. (Weigel, 89-92)

A friend of mine recently emailed me a joke, about that well-known nation in the news lately, notoriously armed with weapons of mass destruction, which threatens the world with the terror of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, led by an irrational maniac named George Bush. The remarkable thing about this joke is that, even if we may not like it, its humor is readily accessible to us. No vast distance separates our outlook from the set of assumptions animating it. The sentiment is similar to that of the oft-quoted remark: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Or the comment of Duke University's Stanley Fish on the events of 9/11--that "there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one." (Bennett, 57)

What these statements all have in common is the outlook of postmodern skepticism and relativism, which, according to Allan Bloom, is the most predictable fact about university and college students across our nation today--an outlook he characterized significantly, in the words of his erstwhile bestseller, as The Closing of the American Mind (1988). Considered on its own terms philosophically, it is an embarrassingly weak position, and no different from the relativism rebutted by Plato and rejected by almost every serious thinker since. Not only is such relativism self-refuting (for if nothing is certain, then neither is relativism); it is blind-sighted about the most elementary steps in moral reasoning. As William Bennett recently observed: "Last time I looked, there was a crystal-clear distinction between a terrorist and a freedom fighter, and it had to do with the morality of means: a freedom fighter doesn't massacre innocent civilians in pursuit of his ends." (Bennett, 46)

II. Analysis of Attitudes Toward War

Having examined the history behind what I have called the "eclipse of moral reasoning," now I would like to briefly situate the alternative positions on war within a larger historical framework, then critically examine the underlying assumptions of those that constitute the greatest challenge to the just war tradition.

From a bird's eye view of history, the basic attitudes of people toward war fall into three large groups: the view that war is (1) normal, (2) abnormal, or (3) fallen.

The view that war is a normal fact of life found widespread acceptance among the ancient Greeks, for whom Ares, the god of war, was a major God, while Irene, the goddess of peace, played only a minor role. One finds it also in Heraclitus' view that war is "the father of all things," and in Plato's view that the republic must be prepared to defend itself (it is noteworthy that he distinguishes between war against fellow Greeks and against non-Greeks, setting restrictions on the former). It can be found in the cynical "realism" of Machiavelli; Thomas Hobbes's notion that the "state of nature" is the state of "war of all against all"; G.W.F. Hegel's view of war as a principle of national regeneration (fight or stagnate!); Friedrich Nietzsche's romanticized cult of war ("a good war hallows every cause") and cynical rejection of Judeo-Christian ethics as weak and feminine; Heinrich von Treitschke's militant Aryanism ("war is the remedy for an ailing nation"); Friedrich von Bernhardi's "survival of the fittest" ethic, which drew on Karl von Clausewitz; and Naziism.

The view that war is abnormal (and eradicable) found support among the ancient Stoics who regarded themselves as citizens of the world; others argued for a particular European peace, such as William Penn and abbé Saint-Pierre; and, still others argued for the international abolition of war, like the Enlightenment thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, and, later, Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell; others argued for a single world government, like Emeric Cruce. (Those, like Pierre Dubois and George of Podebrad, king of Bohemia, who wanted to unite European nations for common defense against the Turks in the 17th century probably don't count here.)

A third view was taken by those who regarded war as neither "normal" nor "abnormal," but as fallen, in the sense of resulting from our fallen or sinful nature, as Christians have generally believed. "We are mistaken," wrote C.S. Lewis, "when we compare war with ‘normal life.' Life has never been normal." ("Learning in Wartime," 22) And that is because life itself, even at its most tranquil, is fallen. This is why "war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself." (Ibid., 21) In view of eternity, Lewis could even suggest that the questions raised by war are "relatively unimportant." (Ibid.)

This view of war as fallen, subdivides again into two subsidiary views: the view (1) that warfare, though an effect of sin, may, under certain conditions, be practiced in a manner that is sinless (in the sense of involving no actual, as opposed to original, sin), and (2) that warfare itself is always and everywhere inherently sinful.

The first of these views, of course, is the position taken by classic just war reasoning, such as found in Catholics like Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, and developed more systematically by Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez in the 16^th and 17^th centuries; and Protestants such as Martin Luther (with qualifications), John Calvin, Hugo Grotius, Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter. But it is also the view found in varieties of just war pacificism that object to unjust wars but see nothing wrong about engaging in wars that are just.

The second view, that war is inherently sinful, again subdivides into two more views--(a) that war, though sinful, must sometimes be accepted as the only responsible alternative in a fallen world, and (b) that war must always and everywhere be utterly renounced. The first of these is a view found among many mainline Christian groups, but comes to particularly clear expression in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and the mainline Lutheran tradition, and finds some antecedent support in various remarks by Luther (particularly in reference to his view of the "two kingdoms"). The second view, that war must be utterly renounced, represents the position of "absolute pacifism" found classically in the writings of Anabaptists (Mennonites, Brethren, etc.) such as Guy F. Hershberger, John C. Wenger, and, preeminently, John Howard Yoder; as well as various contemporary variations, such as the late Cardinal Bernadin's "seamless" or "consistent" life ethic (opposing abortion, euthanasia, death penalty, and all war), and Dorothy Day's and the Catholic Worker's indiscriminate condemnation and renunciation of all killing, even in defense of oneself or others.

The greatest challenge to the tradition of just war reasoning historically came from the side of Machiavellian realism, which views war as natural and subject to no moral constraints. In recent decades, however, the primary challenge has come from the other views -- on the secular front, from the view that war is abnormal and eradicable, and on the religious front (which we are focusing on here), the view that war is fallen and inherently sinful, and must be either renounced completely (the "absolute pacifist" view), or accepted some cases as the only responsible alternative, although unavoidably sinful (the "dirty hands" view). These views have made significant inroads among Catholic thinkers in recent decades, even though they represent a radical break with the mainstream of Catholic tradition. Here I will examine only the last two religious views, which have posed the most serious challenges to just war reasoning, especially the pacifist view.

A. The ‘Absolute Pacifist' Tradition

Classic ‘absolute pacifism' finds its most authentic expression in Mennonite theology, which traces its ancestry to the Anabapatists of the Reformation era, who articulated the position of Christian pacifism in Article 6 of the Schleitheim Articles of 1527. Concerning the power of the "sword" mentioned by Paul in Romans 13, these articles declared that it had been ordained by God "outside the perfection of Christ." The idea was that God might use that sword to accomplish His purposes, just as He may use the wrath of heathen nations like Assyria to visit His judgment upon the Children of Israel when they turn away from Him, but that doesn't mean we'd want to be caught dead fighting in the Assyrian army! Christians, according to the Mennonite tradition, are called to a higher New Testament ethic of love and nonresistance. They are called to work for the establishment of the "Peace of Christ" (Pax Christi), not the "Peace of Rome" (Pax Romana).

By way of historical support, Mennonites suggest that the earliest Christians were pacifists and shunned military service, that certain bishops, like Basil of Caesarea, may have imposed a penance upon soldiers for killing even in a just cause (although these claims are disputed). When the Roman Emperor, Constantine, was converted to Christianity and legalized the Faith, of course, all this changed. Christianity became a state religion, which meant armies were then enlisted to defend a Christian empire. In keeping with the classic Protestant textbook tradition, of course, all this is viewed as part of the corruption and ‘fall' of the Church from its early purity; and the subsequent Catholic tradition is viewed as representing a profoundly corrupted and tainted form of Christianity, not merely with respect to its development of a just war theory.

Yoder does not see this New Testament ethic as apolitical (his magnum opus is significantly entitled The Politics of Jesus). In fact, he chides the just war tradition for de-politicizing the Gospel, by which he means interpreting the ethic of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as socially inapplicable or politically irrelevant. Yet the fact remains that when proponents of this sort of pacifism are called upon to articulate their response to events such as those of 9/11 or the war against terrorism, they often come off sounding implausible. Accordingly, Stanley Hauerwas worries that pacifists, such as he, get sidelined because they look like they just "have nothing to say." Pacifists are just "not going to have an immediate policy response," he concedes. "So that means that we must go on, as [Karl] Barth said in 1933, as if nothing has happened." ("Interview," 1) On the other hand, the temptation to be politically relevant keeps tugging in the direction of suggesting policy recommendations. But to the degree that they remain faithful to their pacifism, their policy recommendations come off sounding silly. For example, Hauerwas asks about the possibility of apprehending terrorists nonviolently, or of an international police force that would never have to kill anyone. He quotes Jean Vanier who said in a Catholic Worker column in response to 9/11: "Let us give our hand to all those around the world who suffer, who cry out and are fearful. . . . Let us remember that the smallest gesture of beauty and tenderness done with humility and confidence will bring unity to the world and break the chain of violence." (Ibid., 2). In an interview with Jim Wallis in Sojourners, Hauerwas agonized over the palpable impotence of the pacifist position, finally suggesting that ground troops in Afghanistan would be better than bombing, in order to avoid civilian deaths. But at that point he was no longer reasoning as a pacifist, but engaging in classical just war reasoning. Even Yoder himself, apparently, was not immune to this temptation, and was speculating about the possibility of a global police force near the end of his life.

H. Richard Niebuhr, in his book, Christ and Culture, characterized the Anabaptist position as a "Christ against Culture" stance, pitting the Church against the world, in a posture of prophetic witness. Despite Yoder's claims to the contrary, this characterization seems to accurately define the Mennonite position. It is even echoed in the title of one of Yoder's own books, The Christian Witness to the State. Note: the Christian stands outside of and over against the state as witness to the state concerning the demands of the Gospel of love and peace. There is no question of the state's being "Christian" in any sense of the word, or conforming to the New Testament demands of Christ's ethic.

A problem here is with the way in which Christ's ethic of love is assumed to apply directly to foreign policy and the exigencies of warfare. What did Jesus mean by his command to "turn the other check"? The absolute pacifist assumption is that Jesus here imposes a duty of nonresistance on everyone in every circumstance. Yet without in the least minimizing the demand Jesus places on his hearers to mortify their anger and shun revenge, one can ask whether the statement does not imply a reservation in favor of obviously exceptional cases. Accordingly, C.S. Lewis asks:

John Courtney Murray was once asked by a puzzled friend what foreign policy had to do with the Sermon on the Mount. He answered, "What makes you think that morality is identical with the Sermon on the Mount?" Moral reasoning, Murray insisted, was not simply a matter of quoting Scripture. But to understand this, he said, it was first necessary to recognize the shortcomings of the moralistic outlook that has dominated American thinking about morality down to our own day. He described it thus:

To put the matter in contemporary terms, this view asks: "What would Jesus do?" The problem with this is that there are some basic ways in which we can't take Jesus as our example, because He came to do for us what we could not for ourselves, namely to die for our sins. The real question, rather, is "What would Jesus have us do?" And He tells us to love our neighbor, and leaves it to us to think through what that means. Moralism provides no resources for moral judgment amidst the complexities of world affairs, because it denigrates the peace of a rightly ordered political community as something sub-Christian and unworthy of the Christian calling to a higher peace, the Shalom of the eschatological Kingdom. There is also a similar confusion here involving the concept of "love." The diverse demands of love in the manifold relationships of temporal existence -- love of parents, children, spouse, community, co-workers, church, country, each with its unique and particular demands -- are eclipsed by the unconditional and absolute meaning of love expressed in the command of Christ to love God with your whole heart and your neighbor as yourself. This is what the Dutch Calvinist philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, calls the "Cape Horn" of Christian ethics (II, 149, 154; cf. 141), because it represents the temptation of the Christian ethicist to displace the irreducible temporal modes of love demanded by moral reasoning in favor of the transcendent fullness of Christian love in which there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, but all are one in Christ (Gal. 3:28). But the fact is that our world remains full of such distinctions, as evidence by Paul's own letter to the slave owner, Philemon. This, in fact, is the confusion represented in Third of the Twelve Articles of the Swabian peasants whom Luther addressed in his Admonition to Peace, by their assumption that fraternal oneness in Christ entailed an automatic abrogation of their legal status as serfs (Admonition, 12).

The ‘dirty hands' tradition finds its clearest expression in classic Lutheranism, which, according to H. Richard Niebuhr, represents a "Christ and culture in paradox" view. This position is clearly expressed in Reinhold Niebuhr's significant title Moral Man and Immoral Society. The Christian stands simultaneously as a member of two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Christ, in which he stands under the high demands of Christ's Sermon on the Mount, and the Kingdom of this World, in which he stands under the demands of civic responsibility, which inevitably fall short of those high demands. Again, in a letter to a pacifist who was reluctant to favor the Allied war effort against Hitler, Niebuhr wrote: "Your difficulty is that you want to live in history without sinning . . . our effort to set up the Kingdom of God on earth ends in a perverse preference for tyranny, simply because the peace of tyranny means, at least, the absence of war." (Love and Justice)

Antecedents to this view can be found in Luther, although he was by no means a systematic or consistent writer -- particularly in the contrast between his Treatise on Christian Liberty and his pamphlet, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. As H. Richard Niebuhr notes, "it is a far cry from Luther's celebration of the faith that works by love, suffering all things in serving the neighbor [in the former], to his injunction to the rulers to ‘stab, smite, slay, whoever can [in the latter]." (H.R. Niebuhr, 170f.) In the former, he talks about a Christ-like joyful love of neighbor that "takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss," just as the Father causes His sun "to shine upon the good and upon the evil." But in his pamphlet against the peasants, we read that "a prince or lord must remember in this case that he is God's minister and the servant of his wrath to whom the sword is committed for use upon such fellows. . . . Here there is no time for sleeping; no place for patience or mercy. It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace." (Ibid., 171) "There are two kingdoms," writes Luther, "one the kingdom of God, the other the kingdom of the world. . . . God's kingdom is a kingdom of grace and mercy . . . but the kingdom of the world is a kingdom of wrath and severity. . . . Now he who would confuse these two kingdoms -- as our false fanatics do -- would put wrath into God's kingdom and mercy into the world's kingdom; and that is the same as putting the devil in heaven and God in hell." (Ibid., 171f.) But it is the single individual, according to Luther, who lives simultaneously in both kingdoms, much as it is the same individual who is simultaneously justified and sinner, simul justus et peccator. As Niebuhr observes: "So far as a person is responsible only for himself and his goods, faith makes possible what the law of Christ demands, that he do not defend himself against thieves or borrowers, against tyrants or foes. But where he has been entrusted with the care of others, as father or governor, there in obedience to God he must use force to defend his neighbors against force. The greater sin here is to want to be holy or to exercise mercy where mercy is destructive." (Ibid., p. 178, citing Luther's "Secular Authority"; emphasis added)

Practically, the "dirty hands" position does not differ from the Catholic tradition insofar as it accepts the responsibility of civic duty. Where it does differ is in its frequent assumption that such responsibility unavoidably involves one in sin ("dirty hands"). Luther himself is ambivalent on this point. But others, like Reinhold Niebuhr, are not. This assumption often plays out in a tension between the competing demands of love and justice, Gospel and Law, internal and external, the private and public. On this view, justice represents something less than love, since the ideal of justice resides in the domain of Law and sin. The root of the problem here, it seems to me, is a failure to see that justice itself is an expression of love. This is preeminently evident in the Cross of Christ in which the fullness of God's love coincides with the fullness of His justice. But what prevents this from being apparent in the justice of a just war, for example, is the same thing that prevents the "absolute pacifist" from seeing that love of a well-ordered political community is not a rival to the love of God and Shalom of His Kingdom, but a distinctively political, temporal expression of God's love a fallen world. It is the problem of the "Cape Horn" of Christian ethics, all over again. As Aristotle shows us, the general concept of justice is refracted as if by a prism into a diversity of particular kinds of justice -- commercial justice, remedial justice, and distributive justice. Each of these has, for the Catholic, its proper place in life -- even the remedial (or retributive) justice that sometimes imposes fines for misdemeanors and severer penalties for severer crimes. The fact that certain forms of remedial justice are made necessary by our fallen nature does not, of itself, make such justice anything less than an expression of divine love and grace.

I am aware that this classic Niebuhrian interpretation of Luther has been called into question by a new Finnish interpretation, which discounts the familiar "paradoxes" and "dialectical tensions" associated with Luther's "two kingdoms," grace and law distinction, etc. (Braaten & Jenson, Union with Christ) But this is a discussion for another venue and does not change the fact that Niebuhr's interpretation accords with what has been the dominant one for the past two centuries, or more.

John Courtney Murray saw this sort of "dirty hands" ethic as suffering from the effects of the same moralism that afflicts "absolute pacifism." In particular, he noted three "pseudo-problems": The first was the alleged gulf between the "personal" and "social" ethics, which supposes that a responsible "social" or "political" ethic demands a violation of one's "personal" ethic. This pseudo-problem did not exist within the natural law tradition of moral reasoning, in which society and the state were "natural" institutions with their own relatively autonomous, public purposes, such as justice, freedom, security, and general welfare. Any effort to bring the organized action of politics under the control of the values that govern personal and familial life would have been seen as inherently fallacious. The second pseudo-problem was national "self-interest," which was thought to involve an unavoidable acceptance of absolute state sovereignty. But the answer to moralism was not an immoral realism, but moral reasoning, properly understood. The tradition of moral reasoning required that national interest, recognized as a valid and constant motive, be given only a relative and limited status as an end of nation action, always balanced by the higher and more ultimate international order to which its national interest must contribute. The third pseudo-problem was "power." It was supposed that power and force, though unavoidably necessary, were inherently tainted by evil. "The traditional [natural law] ethic," says Murray, "starts with the assumption that, as there is no law without force to vindicate it, so there is no politics without power to promote it." That power can be abused is but a testament to the fact of its ordinary and proper use as an agent in promoting good. (Weigel, 124f.)

There is a reason why some early Christians were pacifists. They were not in charge in the world. They represented a minor sect. They were often persecuted. They met for prayer in the catacombs. During most of the period in which the New Testament was composed, they lived in expectation of the imminent return of Christ. This expectation colors much of the outlook of the Gospels. It would be anachronistic, therefore, to expect the New Testament to include a systematic articulation of moral reasoning about problems that emerged only when that expectation of an imminent return of Christ was transformed by the realization that His second coming would not occur in the foreseeable future. The beginnings of this transformation can be seen already in the arguments in the Book of Acts and Paul's Epistles about whether gentile Christians should observe Mosaic laws on circumcision and diet. These arguments, though not about war, reflect an understanding that a detailed set of rules for public Christian life in the interim between the Resurrection and Second Coming are not to be found directly in the sayings of Jesus.

When Constantine dropped the Imperial Roman prescriptions against the Christian religion in the Edict of Milan in AD 313, Christians abruptly found themselves in a very different world -- one where they were no longer marginalized and persecuted, but where their religion was suddenly the state religion of Rome and their emperor himself was a Christian. It was a world where they found themselves having to take responsibility for society, and think -- as Christians -- about questions of political order and foreign policy. Augustine's rejection of early Christian pacifism and his articulation of a theory of justifiable war must be seen as a necessary part of this development in Christian self-understanding, once the decision had been made to leave the catacombs and undertake a transforming mission in the world. This transforming mission involved the development, following Augustine, of a tradition of moral reasoning about political life.

George Weigel is explicit about seeing this emergent Catholic tradition of moral reasoning as "conversionst" or "transformationalist," that is, in terms of H. Richard Niebuhr's category of "Christ the Transformer of Culture." (Weigel, passim) It was not possible in this ethos for the Church to think of itself as "over against" the world, since it had to be responsible for transforming the world. This is when it became clear to Christians that it was not enough to ask "What would Jesus do?" -- but rather, "What would Jesus have us do?" And over the centuries, Christians concluded that what Jesus wanted them to do was not only to mortify their anger by turning the other cheek, but also to build cathedrals, hospitals, and universities; not only to write commentaries on scripture, but also to compose treatises on medicine, philosophy, law, political and constitutional theory -- like Aquinas, who wrote that a just government required the consent of the governed, and that the role of government is not merely remedial -- to restrain sin -- but a natural good and gift from God. (Copleston, 419, 168f.) Among the other things Christians concluded, over the years, was that they had to ask what Jesus required of them when turning the other cheek would mean failing to defend one's neighbor or capitulating to the "evil peace" of a repressive aggressor. This was the beginning of the tradition of moral reasoning that began the arduous work of formulating the conditions under which war came to be regarded as sometimes justifiable, sometimes even a duty of love to neighbor and God, as a means of defending or restoring the just peace of a rightly ordered political community. The task of establishing and preserving such a peace was understood, not as a sinful undertaking to sully one's hands, but as a vocation eminently worthy of the Christian in the interim between Christ's Resurrection and Second Advent.

I would like to close with a remark by James H. Toner, Professor of International Relations and Military Ethics at the U.S. Air War College. A number of years ago, he said, while teaching in Vermont, he was on a public affairs panel discussing just war issues. He soon discovered that he was the sole supporter of that notion and was feeling considerable hostility from his audience. An elderly man in the rear stood and said that he wanted to support his views on just war, adding that he was a classical musician. Great, thought Toner: there's one person in the room who agrees with me, and he's probably a nut. "I want to tell you," the man continued, "what is the sweetest music I have ever heard." Toner cringed. "Although I have heard wonderful music thousands of times," the man went on, "the most beautiful was the sound of U.S. Army tanks. You see, they were coming to [the death camp where I was being held as a young man], and that sound meant that I would be able to grow up." (First Things, 5/02, 6)

© 2002 Philip Blosser

Dr. Blosser teaches at at Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina, and is an associate of the Center for Theology. Among Dr. Blosser's published works are Scheler's Critique of Kant's Ethics.

An earlier version of this article was presented by Dr. Blosser at the Tenth Annual Aquinas/Luther Conference held October 24-26, 2002 at Lenoir-Rhyne College, and reprinted with his permission. The Ratzinger Fan Club [http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com] was also privileged to reprint his essay ""The Kasper-Ratzinger Debate and the State of the Church"", published in the New Oxford Review (April 2002).