Abstract
Alan Billings, The Dove, the Fig Leaf and the Sword: Why Christianity Changes Its Mind about War, SPCK: London, 2014; 192 pp.: 9780281072248, £12.99 (pbk)
The newly elected Police Commissioner for South Yorkshire has brought together a wealth of scholarship, pastoral insight and practical experience to present a considered and thoughtful review of Christian thinking about Just War theory. Adopting a largely chronological approach, Billings traces the origins of Just War principles back to the interaction between the philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero and an early Christian reading of the Jesus tradition. Following a familiar path, Billings argues that the early Church was broadly pacifist at first, but shifted its position as it moved from the periphery to the centre of society around the time of Constantine. This early pacifism was motivated primarily by a reading of the gospel which not only gave priority to the command to ‘love your enemies’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ but also reflected the relative powerlessness of a small sectarian minority. The move to integrate the Church into the State, however, prompted theologians to rethink: the God of the Hebrew Bible commands war as a remedy for injustice, and even Jesus can apparently call on the disciples to arm themselves (Luke 22.36). This ambiguity embedded in Scripture thus allows Augustine and his followers to argue that war can sometimes be a necessary evil designed to protect the innocent from the excesses of human sin and corruption.
The Just War principles bequeathed by Augustine started to acquire a taken-for-granted quality as the medieval wars spread across Europe, and was challenged only by the horrific crusades against ‘infidels and heretics’. Luther stood in the same Augustinian tradition as he prepared the ground for the seventeenth-century wars of religion and the subsequent transfer of authority from the Church to the emerging nation state. Enlightenment rationalism brought its own secular version of Just War theory, but the myth of national identity it promoted persuaded all but a tiny minority of nineteenth-century Christians to abandon any residual doubt and give largely uncritical support to the military throughout the First World War. The impact of this tragedy prompted a more reflective mood initially, but this was largely brushed aside as unfinished business provoked a return to conflict in 1939. But the debate was reopened again as public awareness of the moral ambiguities of Allied action during the war was sharpened by unease over the new nuclear weapons, then pushed even harder by the moral dilemmas generated by the interventionist wars of recent decades and the so-called ‘war on terror’. All this has coincided with the decline of the institutional Church in the West which has allowed a degree of critical distance to open out between the Church and State. In this context, the pacifism of the early Church is once again starting to become thinkable.
This is a timely contribution in the centenary year of the First World War. The book is well written and accessible. Billings’s own position as a ‘Christian realist’ in the tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr is clearly acknowledged, and there is a good awareness of the complexity of the historical data. The scholarship is a little dated at times, parts of the discussion are in danger of oversimplifying, particularly in relation to the biblical material, and there are some obvious minor errors; and it may be questioned whether Billings is really fair to Hauerwas and the pacifist position he endorses. But this is still an excellent book, to be commended to undergraduates and church groups alike.