Yoder on Just War

Quotes from J H Yoder, "the Logic of the Just War Tradition," from "Christian Attitudes Toward War, Peace, and Revolution," edited by Ted Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker:

"The place of hindsight, describing important changes, and differing with the actors in the story about which changes were important, is puzzling, even if all we think we are doing is description. However, the description is also evaluation. Some think of the changes as progress, as clarification of truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others think of those changes as degeneration or deviation or just plain apostasy. Is there not something patronizing about saying, “Martin Luther thought he was conservative, thought that he was calling the church back to a faithfulness the existed before the Middle Ages, but as a matter of fact he was moving things forward into modernity”? Or about saying, “Augustine thought he was just moving on, reading the same Bible in his age that others had read before, whereas in fact he was importing Neo-Platonism into Christian thought?”
Certainly it would be improper and patronizing if we were to do this only with those with whom we differ, and if in doing so we were making a judgment on their intelligence or sincerity. But the reading of history cannot avoid observing the difference between what people were conscious of arguing about and other dimensions of its meaning. Some of those dimensions are dictated by factors in the situation, which people in the moment are not self-critical about. Some of them are decided only later, by how the switches of history were set. Thus, options we think we are choosing among may turn out not to be the ones we help bring about."

"Next, more importantly, we assume that the good guys should win. We assume we have a mandate to take charge of the historical process, to help God’s will triumph. We feel we have a duty to make history come out right—to use power to assure that the historical process at large, or our segment of it, takes right turns instead of wrong turns. We have a moral obligation to take charge of historical process from the top. Responsibility has become the word for that duty."

"A more precise phrasing would label it justifiable war rather than just war: war is not good or righteous in itself; it is a regrettable evil, justifiable only under certain circumstances. Just war theory is a concession, not an approval, not an obligation, and not a mandate. It gives permission only to the prince, who has a unique place in God’s purposes and in the society. The doctrine intends to make no change in the ethics of non-sovereigns."

"The next observation about the kind of approval medieval theologians gave to war is more foreign to our ways of thinking about ethics: the doctrine had more to do with penance than with decision making. We have to step back and ask historical and cultural-anthropological questions about where moral language was located in the social process. Modern people think of moral principles as coming at the front end of a decision process. Medieval culture did not reason this way. Before anyone could come to the holy ceremonies of the Eucharist, they had to do penance for their sins. The one who comes to confession asks, “What are my sins?” The priest responds, “What have you done? Here is an inventory of possible sins. One of them is, ’Have you killed anybody?’ If so, ‘Was it in a just war?’” Even killing in a just war called for penance, though less than the penance required for other kinds of killing. So the place where moral insight came to bear on the decision process in early medieval culture was not in advance deliberation on questions such as, “Shall we go to war?” or “In this war, shall we kill civilians?” After the fact, after involvement in bloodshed, then the clergy could determine how bad it had been, and how long the disciplinary process should be until those who had fought would again be in the state of grace, so that they could be restored to the sacraments."