Judy and I are on an email list of about a hundred people who served in Vietnam with several Church-related non-governmental agencies during the 1960s and 70s. That period was one of extraordinary conflict and change, socially, politically and personally for those of us who were directly involved in Vietnam as well as for the generation in the US who came of age during those decades.
Participants on this list have shared reflections and feelings about our time in Vietnam, experiences that had a transformational effect on our lives for many of us. Many chose to continue on a path of service to people living in poverty and conflict, often living for years in Asia or other parts of the world or working for peace and justice at home.
Our two years in Vietnam was the first time we, growing up Lutheran, had encountered people committed to a pacifist stance on war. These were mainly volunteers serving with the traditional peace churches, the Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren. Many of the young men served as conscientious objectors. Interestingly, one of our Lutheran colleagues had also taken the CO position, almost unheard of among Lutherans. Neither in my early formation in church nor in studies at Luther college had I been exposed to this alternative life and theological view. During the reformation, the early Reformers, such as Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin, were all proponents of the just war theory. Only the “radical reformers” i.e., the Anabaptists, rejected the notion of a just war.
Whether or not we were pacifists, almost all of us who served in Vietnam Christian Service believed the US war in Vietnam was not a “just” war. I was beyond draft age, so did not have to face a choice between going to Vietnam as a soldier and resisting the draft. In fact, during my senior year in high school I raised my right hand and joined the US Army Reserve, vowing to defend the flag and country by violent means if necessary. It was just what young men did in the Minnesota rural community where I grew up. There was a plaque on the back wall of our rural Lutheran church with the names of members of the congregation who had served in the military during the first and second world wars, with a star next to the ones who had lost their lives. My brother had joined the Army before me and served two years during peacetime, between wars. My father did not serve in the military, not because he tried to avoid it, but because he was a farmer and too old for the draft during WWII.
While growing up in a somewhat politically conservative community, my world view began to change to a more liberal one through college and graduate studies and travel. In 1960 I volunteered for a year in England in a Lutheran retreat center that served many WWII refugees from Eastern Europe who had settled in England. Many of them had lived through the ravages of both Soviet communist repression and occupation and the terror of Naziism. I met no pacifists during that year, but heard plenty of horror stories about the human cost of war.
Recently there has been a lively exchange of opinions from some of the participants on our email list. It seems we are unanimous in the opinion that the invasion by Russia of their neighbor Ukraine is an abhorrent and unjustified act of war. In this exchange lifelong pacifists struggle with questions of what they would do in practice, not just in theory, if one’s home or country was thus attacked.
I have been thinking about this issue while not commenting on it, largely because I do not have clarity about my opinion on pacifism, even as I had great admiration for colleagues who took this stance and went to Vietnam to serve Vietnamese civilians suffering the ravages of that violent conflagration.
Two Christian authors and thinkers who had an early impact on me were CS Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Recently I took a look to see what insights they provide on the question of just war theory and pacifism. I have read only a tiny portion of the many books written by these two prolific thinkers, but can point to Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, and The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together by Bonhoeffer as books that brought me to a fuller Christian commitment and more mature faith.
Both Lewis and Bonhoeffer described their conversions to Christianity in the 1930s during the build up to the Second World War. Though Bonhoeffer had been a lifelong Lutheran, he came to a fuller understanding and Christian commitment through his study of the Beatitudes. Lewis, a don at Oxford, describes his conversion as both an intellectual and surreptitious experience in his book Surprised by Joy. He wrote “that while riding to a zoo in his brother’s motorcycle side car, when we set out, I did not believe that Jesus is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did”.
The BBC asked him to give a series of radio talks during the height of the blitzkrieg in London, and it is said that his voice became just as familiar to the anxious British people as was Winston Churchill’s. These talks were later compiled into the book Mere Christianity which became a classic. I read it while in England in 1961, a kind of conversion experience for me, though I had been raised as a Christian in my youth.
I re-read these two books recently with a mind sensitive to what Lewis had to say about war and peace, and specifically, pacifism. I found a number of statements that showed he had a low opinion of pacifism, and, though I understand how experience forms belief, I wondered if he may not have searched the scriptures thoroughly to see the validity of opposition to war that some take.
Darrell Cole, a professor of ethics at Drew University, summarizes the views of C. S. Lewis:
Lewis had been a soldier, so he knew what it was like to experience that essential nature of all battle, so aptly summarized by Homer as “men killed and killing.” Thus, Lewis possessed the mind of someone at home with just-war doctrine, and he had the experience to know its applicability to modern warfare. Indeed, his battle experience consisted of enduring the rigors of the trenches in the First World War, arguably the most horrible kind of warfare the world has ever witnessed. If there ever was a type of warfare designed to turn the most hardened veteran into a pacifist, surely it was the kind of warfare seen at the Somme in 1916. Yet Lewis was never a pacifist, and, in fact, he argued vigorously against pacifism on a number of occasions.
Lewis gave a paper to a pacifist society in 1941, stating fully the reasons why he was not a pacifist. According to Lewis, pacifism fails to persuade on every level of moral judgment: facts, intuition, reasoning, and authority. For many modern Christians, there are two pertinent facts: War is evil, and war is necessary. Thus, such Christians are persuaded by the “facts” that they must do necessary evil. Lewis is too careful a thinker to fall into such a trap. For him, war is certainly disagreeable, but it is not necessarily evil.
I was disappointed to see CS Lewis take pot shots at pacifism in his books, and particularly when he argued that “ordinary citizens often lack sufficient training to decide whether a given war is winnable. Thus, Christians do not have the same duty or right as have their leaders to decide when a war is unjust”.
That idea goes completely contrary to my view. Certainly, citizens should hold political leaders accountable for decisions that bring us into unjustifiable wars, e.g., Vietnam, Iraq, etc. I doubt that politicians even consider the criterion of the just war theory in making decisions to send their armed forces into war.
So then,
turning to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most famous theologians of the 20th
Century. Certainly, we learn from his
writing, but more so from his life and witness, especially the events
surrounding his death. He was executed
by the Nazis just weeks before the end of the war after several years of
imprisonment. Why? The narrative I have always heard was that it
was because he joined in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
An interesting article by Ted Grimsrud, a professor at Eastern Mennonite University, examined this history in a different light. In this article he refers to the work of his colleague at EMU, Mark Thiessen Nation in a book he co-wrote with Anthony Siegrist and Daniel Umble (Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering the Call to Peacemaking, published by Baker Academic in 2013). Grimsrud wrote:
Bonhoeffer was well known as a pacifist in the years leading up
to his arrest, based in part on his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount in
(the book) Discipleship. But then, the story goes, he had a change of
heart given the exigencies of Nazi tyranny and joined with the conspiracy that
sought to assassinate Hitler. The attempt on Hitler’s life failed, the
conspirators were arrested, and most—including Bonhoeffer—put to death.
Bonhoeffer, then, has
become kind of a poster boy for “Christian realism,” a recognition that pacifism is a fine ideal but at times in the real world one must, of necessity, turn to
the sword and use “evil” methods to defeat a greater evil.
…. Now, this use of
Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom may be, and of course has been vigorously debated for
years. But maybe one of the premises that all sides to the debates have
generally accepted—that Bonhoeffer indeed did take part in the effort to kill
Hitler—is not actually true.
….. Bonhoeffer
refused to fight in the military and found a way to do constructive ecumenical
work while not violating his convictions. He was arrested mainly because he was
known to have connections with assassination conspirators, but was convicted of
draft evasion (in his case, a profoundly pacifist stance), not involvement in
the plot. In the end, he was executed. We don’t know exactly why, but quite
likely simply because he was seen as an enemy of the state (which had been his
label from 1933)—one of thousands the Nazis put to death in the final months of
the war as a concluding act of revenge.”
So, in the end pacifism was not an option in my youth, but now in my old age where do I stand? If someone with a gun broke into my home to
rob, I would not shoot that person, because what he would take from me is not worth my taking his life, and besides I do not own a gun. If someone was violently attacking my
grandchildren, I would try to put myself between them to try to physically dominate
and restrain the attacker, but with poor results for me, no doubt.
On a gut level I agree
with the just war doctrine though I think the military answer to world problems
is too often contrived by politicians, ill-conceived, without a clarity of how to end it, and
unnecessary.
But I do feel great empathy
with the Ukrainian people as they defend themselves from a very unjust and
increasingly barbarous attack by Putin. I also remember the personal stories I
heard from Estonian, Polish and Latvian survivors of WWII back in 1960, both soldiers and civilians who were caught up in the war and had no choice about it. On the other hand, I witnessed death and
destruction in Vietnam in a war I did not consider just. There does seem to be clear criterion for
making the distinction.
In the end, I am caught
in a quandary by Jesus and the Beatitudes he taught. I have never been able to practice those
“blessed are the ___” principles to my own satisfaction. But I believe what the
Gospel writer wrote is right: Blessed are the
peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. Mt 5:9
