Curious Christian

I recently read Brad East’s article in Christianity Today arguing that just war theory is supposed to be frustrating, and on that point, I think he’s right.

At its best, just war theory is not a permission slip for violence but a restraint upon it. It is meant to slow us down, to make us hesitate, to force moral clarity in moments where fear and power would otherwise take over. If war becomes easy, then just war thinking has already failed.

That’s an important reminder, especially in a cultural moment where moral language is often used to justify what has already been decided. And yet, I find the article doesn’t go far enough.

East appeals to “the tradition,” but the tradition is not a flat, unified voice. The earliest Christians were overwhelmingly pacifist. Before Christianity had power, it largely rejected violence outright. Only later, after the church’s entanglement with empire, did just war theory emerge as a way of limiting the violence Christians had come to accept. That matters.

Because just war theory is not the starting point of Christian ethics, it is already a concession. And that leads to a deeper concern. While the article calls us back to tradition, it says less about something even more foundational: the New Testament itself.

The teachings of Jesus (love your enemies, turn the other cheek, put away the sword, etc) once sat at the centre of Christian moral imagination. Today, they often feel distant, abstract, or quietly sidelined. We still quote them, but they rarely seem to govern our instincts when questions of war and power arise.

So the problem is not simply that we’ve misunderstood just war theory. It’s that we may no longer be formed by the kind of discipleship that made both pacifism and just war morally serious in the first place.

What we are left with instead is a troubling trajectory:

• from refusal of violence
• to restraint of violence
• to rationalisation of violence

And in many cases now, even the language of restraint feels optional.

Many hawkish Christians today don’t wrestle with just war criteria in any meaningful way. The moral friction is gone. The hesitation is gone. The weight is gone.

Which raises a hard question: If our ethical frameworks no longer slow us down, are we still being guided by them? Or have we simply replaced them? If just war theory is to mean anything, it must recover its ability to trouble us. And if Christian ethics is to mean anything, it must return not only to “the tradition,” but to Christ himself.

So perhaps the call is this: Before we ask whether a war is just, we need to ask whether we are the kind of people who can still hear and obey Jesus.  Because without that, neither pacifism nor just war will save us from ourselves.