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But such forbearance was for Christians only. The Crusades to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels amounted to a war of aggression launched by the church, with license for every kind of excess in the name of Christ. That the same body that could impose the Peace and Truce of God should be capable of rejoicing in a cargo of Saracen noses and thumbs or of filling the Temple of Solomon with blood has been the dark paradox of religious faith in every time and place. Just and holy wars are incompatible. The just war is predicated on awareness of human intemperateness, inadequacy and guilt; the holy war drowns all that in the joyous, irresponsible assumption of being an instrument of God's will. In this respect, Protestantism was no different from the Church of Rome. Luther and Calvin reworked Augustine's just-war doctrines, but the religious wars following the Reformation and periodic outbursts of heresy-hunting discarded the Sermon on the Mount for the text from Jeremiah: "Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood."
In the 19th century, when humanism rather than Scripture undergirded much of man's morality, it seemed as though holy wars had become a thing of the past. But the new religion of nationalism was to demand its own crusades. Clergy blessed the guns on both sides as World War I broke out and quickly degenerated into frothing fanaticism. "Kill Germans!" cried the Bishop of London. "To kill them not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old ... I look upon it as a war for purity." In the U.S. writes Yale Historian Roland H. Bainton, "Jesus was dressed in khaki and portrayed sighting down a gun barrel."
The reaction to the passion and the bloodletting of World War I was a wave of idealistic pacifism. When World War II came 21 years later, the Allies went into it reluctantly, grimly and without elation, faced with an evil as obvious and inarguable as evil can ever be. Even scrupulous moralists agree that World War II was the closest thing to a just war in modern times. And yet, in retrospect, the means were horrifying. The saturation bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin were designed primarily to kill and demoralize civilians. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified as taking fewer Japanese and American lives than would have been lost in an invasion. But the fact remains that the bombing of Germany and Japan obliterated the discrimination of a just war between soldier and civilian. This led many Christian thinkers to decide that the concept of the just war was simply no longer applicable in modern times because a nuclear exchange would kill so much of the world's population that whatever good might be aimed for—freedom, for example—would itself be wiped out and rendered meaningless through nearly universal destruction.
The Chief Arguments