As Christians called to serve the Church in differing
Christian traditions, we appeal to our Christian sisters and brothers to
join a campaign to abolish war as a legitimate means of resolving
political conflict between states and within them.
Although our Appeal is addressed to the Christian community, we
believe that many people not part of that community may want to join.
This Appeal, drawing on the teaching and example of Jesus
Christ, wishes to engage all Christians in a serious conversation about
the Christian and moral acceptability of war.
Indeed it wishes to draw all concerned human beings into the
examination and development of alternatives to war.
God has created all for the Kingdom of Peace. Only in such a comprehensive enterprise can the Appeal’s
final goal of actually abolishing war have any chance of being realized.
We hope those committed to upholding the doctrine of just war will
join us in examining the case for the abolition of war.
The defenders of just war have also a stake in making war
unnecessary.
To many theologians this call for the abolition of war will
appear presumptuous. To
others, it may seem theologically flawed and, in practice, futile.
Yet with John Paul II’s phrase from Centesimus Annus,
“War Never Again,” ringing in our ears and with Tertullian’s
succinct summary of early Church teaching before our eyes; “The Lord in
disarming Peter henceforth disarms every soldier,” we have the basic
challenge that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the
destructive powers of this world, were radically overcome.
It is loyalty to the example and teaching of Jesus Christ which
summons Christians to renounce war and to seek with the wider religious
and human communities to develop alternatives to protect the innocent, to
restrain aggressors and to overcome injustice.
Christian attempts at justifying war from the fourth
century onwards have always been intellectually and spiritually vulnerable
and politically inconclusive. It
is very doubtful if any war during that period satisfied the traditional
criteria of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.
In more recent times, Christian leaders who still endorse the
concept of a just war are finding it increasingly difficult to see how the
criteria of last resort, non-combatant immunity, and proportionality
could nowadays be met. In
current official Church documents and theological analyses, there is a
discernible unease with the applying of ‘just war theory’ and even
greater unease with its Christian authenticity.
Why do we make this appeal now? We do not think that the horrors of modern war are the
primary reason. Neither do we
believe that because people are so enlightened today that they will more
readily respond. These
considerations may be supportive, even persuasive reasons for many people. We call for the end of war now because this time like all
time is under God’s judgment. There
is no time like the present (or the past) to say again in John Paul II’s
words, what has already been said by God in Christ “War Never Again”.
We have no illusions that our call for the abolition of war
will bring an immediate or even quick end to human massacres.
So we are phrasing the appeal in terms that invite dialogue and
promote serious conversation and analysis among Christian leaders on the
Christian roots of this peace project. We hope to involve university faculties in the theological
and secular sciences, as well as research institutes in a better
understanding of the causes and consequences of particular wars and in the
search for peaceful alternatives. The
results of such work should reveal to a wider and (non-)Christian public
that war is immoral and unnecessary.
Such a program calls for energetic and lengthy
conversations - the kind of conversation that becomes a process of
conversion for all: conversion
of Christians to the anti-war dimension of their own faith and conversion
of others to the peace-making potential of their fellow-human beings.
A hard road lies ahead and one strewn with intellectual, ecclesial
and political obstacles. Yet
Christian hope must be that this foolishness of God will confound the
worldly-wise by persistent witness to peace, by the creative development
of peace-making attitudes and structures and by achieving non-violent
resolutions of particular conflicts.
There are encouraging human precedents for the larger hope.
It was once assumed that slavery was part of “the natural order” and
that those calling for its abolition were utopian dreamers.
We are well aware that disguised forms of slavery still exist, but
no one thinks aloud that it can be justified or that a public profit may
be made from it.
We know that what we call war will continue in various
guises also, but we trust that Christians will no longer be tempted to
affirm war’s necessity or to seek its justification.
Let the twenty-first century be for war what the nineteenth century
was for slavery, the era of its abolition.
May God grant that Christians give the leadership to achieve that.
Stanley Hauerwas,
Enda Mc Donagh
Duke
University, USA Maynooth, Ireland | 
