Excellent synopsis of the three Christian traditions of thinking about war and their prospects.

I’d add one addition. The Just War tradition all too easily lends itself to the idea that it’s a “Just War Theory”, and that the theory is basically a checklist that is picked up by statespersons when they are contemplating a war. If you have check-marks all the way down, then you’re in the clear. The problem with this is that whoever is employing the “theory” and going down the checklist has their own settled judgments about when they have “just cause” or employ “just means.” And those judgments can be wildly at variance with the Gospels and the exhortations of The Sermon on the Mount/Plain.” I am sure that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were patting themselves on the back that their “Just War Checklist” was filled-out. But what they take to be a just cause and just means are not what someone formed by the Gospels will take it to be.

The Just War Tradition is not just a checklist: it is a theory (and practice) of statecraft. (Insight courtesy Stan Hauerwas.) But a state that is constrained to adopt, say, drone warfare and nuclear deterrence for its defense, is not, eo ipso, a just political reality to begin with. Whether this means Christians cannot be genuinely patriots, in particular American patriots, is an open question. (See my “Can a Christian be a Patriot?” for the full argument.) I don’t want to shut that idea off altogether. But it is an open question, one that most American Christians take to be closed and bluntly preposterous. I think that a serious look at American history, filled as it is by war and violence, should serve to make it clear that the relation between the Church and the American state should not, at the very least, be an easy one. — -LMN