Yesterday, I summed up an article by Phillip Gray arguing that Yoder and Hauerwas end up Donatist, and also fail to account for the history of the church since they assume that the true church is pacifist.
Yoder, though, isn’t as perfectionist as that. In When War Is Unjust , he not only commends just war theorists like John Courtney Murray and Paul Ramsey, but recognizes that the history of Christendom is seasoned with “real models of Christian statesmanship and civil heroism,” leaders “who, in the exercise of public responsibility, saved or created nations, kept the blood-thirstiness of war from getting out of control, and made some kind of peace through limited power, with restraint, wisdom, and magnanimity.” He recognizes that some saints were soldiers, though he adds that they were not “Machiavellian.”
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Rome and the Church in the United States
Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste…
Marriage Annulment and False Mercy
Pope Leo XIV recently told participants in a juridical-pastoral formation course of the Roman Rota that the…
Undercover in Canada’s Lawless Abortion Industry
On November 27, 2023, thirty-six-year-old Alissa Golob walked through the doors of the Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic in…
