IB World Religions 3.6.2. Peace, Conflict and Justice: Pacifism, Just War, Crime and Punishment Notes

3.6.2. Peace, Conflict and Justice: Pacifism, Just War, Crime and Punishment

Christian teaching on peace

1. Christian thinking about war begins from shalom, the Hebrew word for peace understood as wholeness and right relationship, not merely as the absence of fighting.
2. The Sermon on the Mount supplies the sharpest texts. Jesus blesses the peacemakers, tells his hearers to turn the other cheek, and commands them to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.
3. Other passages point in another direction. Paul writes in Romans 13 that the governing authority does not carry the sword in vain, and the Gospels record Jesus both accepting a sword and telling Peter to put his away.
4. The early Church leaned heavily against military service. Tertullian argued that in disarming Peter, Christ disarmed every soldier, and Origen held that Christians serve the emperor by prayer rather than by fighting.
5. The position shifted once Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 and the empire became officially Christian. Christians then had to answer what a ruler responsible for public order should do about violence.
6. Two answers have run through the tradition since. Pacifism holds that a Christian may never use lethal force, and the just war tradition holds that force can be permitted under strict conditions.

Christian pacifism

1. Pacifism in its Christian form is the conviction that following Jesus rules out killing. It has been held continuously since the first Christian centuries.
2. The historic peace churches carry it as official teaching. They are the Mennonites and other Anabaptist bodies, the Religious Society of Friends known as Quakers, and the Church of the Brethren.
3. The Quaker peace testimony of 1660 told Charles II that Friends would not fight with outward weapons for any end whatsoever. That commitment has been maintained ever since.
4. Pacifism has never been confined to those churches. Dorothy Day built the Catholic Worker movement on it, and Pax Christi works for it within the Roman Catholic Church.
5. Martin Luther King Jr turned it into a strategy for social change, combining the Sermon on the Mount with methods learned from Gandhi in the American civil rights campaigns.
6. Conscientious objection is where the conviction meets the state. British tribunals in both world wars assessed objectors, assigning some to non-combatant service and imprisoning others, and most European states now recognize the right in law.

The just war tradition

1. The just war tradition sets out to limit war rather than to bless it, by imposing conditions strict enough that most wars fail to meet them.
2. Augustine framed it in the fifth century. He argued that a ruler may use force to protect the innocent, provided the motive is love of neighbour and not hatred or a desire for glory.
3. Thomas Aquinas reduced it to three requirements in the Summa Theologiae: proper authority, just cause and right intention. Later writers added last resort, reasonable prospect of success and proportionality.
4. Those conditions are jus ad bellum, the tests for going to war at all. A second set, jus in bello, governs conduct during it, above all discrimination, the rule forbidding deliberate attacks on non-combatants.
5. Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius carried the framework into international law, and it stands behind the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter in their treatment of force.
6. The Catechism of the Catholic Church still lists the conditions and adds that judging whether they are met belongs to those who hold responsibility for the common good.

Modern conflicts and church responses

1. Churches now apply these criteria to particular wars in public, and their conclusions often differ from one another and from their own governments.
2. Nuclear weapons produced the sharpest test, since the scale of harm strains both discrimination and proportionality. The United States Catholic bishops accepted deterrence only conditionally in The Challenge of Peace in 1983.
3. Pope Francis went further in 2017, declaring that the possession of nuclear weapons and not only their use deserves condemnation. British churches remain divided over the renewal of the Trident submarine system.
4. The 2003 invasion of Iraq split Christians along lines that ignored denominations. Pope John Paul II opposed it, the Archbishop of Canterbury questioned it, and many American evangelical leaders supported it as the removal of a tyrant.
5. The war in Ukraine has divided the Orthodox world. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has publicly supported Russia's campaign, while Ukrainian Orthodox and Greek Catholic leaders describe it as aggression against their country.
6. Religious and secular arguments now interlock in these debates. Churches cite the UN Charter and humanitarian law, governments argue about proportionality and civilian protection, and the two vocabularies have largely merged.

Crime and punishment

1. Christian thinking about punishment moves between two poles that both appear in scripture: justice that must be done, and mercy that goes beyond what is owed.
2. Four aims are usually distinguished. Retribution gives an offender what is deserved, deterrence discourages others, protection shields the public, and reform aims to change the offender.
3. Retribution has biblical roots in the law of lex talionis, an eye for an eye, which most scholars read as a limit placed on revenge rather than a demand for it.
4. The reforming aim draws on the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, and on Jesus's refusal to condemn the woman caught in adultery in John 8.
5. Practical involvement follows from Matthew 25, where Jesus identifies himself with the prisoner. Nearly every denomination provides prison chaplains, and bodies such as Prison Fellowship run programmes inside jails.
6. Restorative justice is now the most distinctive Christian contribution to the debate. It brings offenders and victims together to address the harm done rather than only to allocate punishment.

The death penalty debate

1. Capital punishment divides Christians more sharply than almost any other question in this area, and both sides argue directly from scripture.
2. Supporters cite Genesis 9, that whoever sheds human blood shall have their own blood shed, and Romans 13 on the authority of the state to bear the sword.
3. Opponents answer with the commandment against killing, with Jesus stopping the stoning of the adulterous woman, and with the argument that life imprisonment protects the public just as effectively.
4. Roman Catholic teaching has changed within living memory. Evangelium Vitae in 1995 restricted the penalty to cases of absolute necessity, and in 2018 Pope Francis revised the Catechism to call it inadmissible.
5. American Protestants remain divided. The Southern Baptist Convention endorsed it with safeguards in 2000, while Methodist, Episcopal and Presbyterian bodies have called for abolition.
6. Secular evidence now shapes the religious argument. Campaigners point to more than 190 exonerations from death row in the United States, many through the DNA work of the Innocence Project, so churches on both sides debate fallibility as well as principle.