M.Litt Dissertation (John Perry)

Theology in the Crosshairs

Toward a Martial Hermeneutic

Prologue

The way Jason was rubbing at his eye troubled me. It was not the clumsy, fleeting swat characteristic of a person satisfying an itch or deterring a gnat. It was calculated; his pinky was raised and he pulled at the flesh around his eye so forcefully I was almost repulsed. He rocked slightly in his chair and did not look me in the eye while he recounted his experience of killing another human being. 

“I remember, man! I remember the look on his face, he was right in my crosshairs!” he said. He was sweating slightly, as though he was nervous, like he had never practiced what he was about to say. It was candid, unrehearsed. That meant it had probably remained unspoken. 

In the six years that had passed since he had been in Iraq, Jason had been discharged from the Army and finished his undergraduate degree. He had found some of my writing helpful and had reached out to me in order to discuss his interest in theology. He was well read, but shared my concern that theologies about war and soldiering did not reflect the lived experience of combat. I had met with him under the auspices of talking to him about whether he should apply to a Master of Divinity program, but our conversation quickly turned to more pressing matters, such as our shared familiarity with modern warfare. I was not Jason’s priest, but my sense was that he was confessing to me, to the only person in six years that he trusted enough with his story, with the weight of his sin.

“F**ckin’ Hadji had...  I mean, I know we’re not supposed to use that word, but… Anyway, the guy had a weapon. I saw it. My guys were moving too fast and I was on security, so it was my lane,” he continued. “So I looked at him in my AimPoint, straight f**king at him. When I squeezed my trigger, it was like he hiccupped. Do you know what that feels like?”

“Hiccups? Yeah, man I get hiccups.” I said, hoping to diffuse his anxiety. 

“Nah, I mean killing someone.”   

Introduction

“The question of killing” rests at the heart of a debate between Richard Hays, a pacifist Bible scholar and Methodist minister at Duke, and Nigel Biggar, a professor of moral theology and Anglican priest at Oxford. The question of Christians taking up the sword, or of Jesus’s prohibition of violence animates their correspondence in Studies in Christian Ethics. Their exchange is representative of the tension between exegesis and hermeneutics as well as the difficulty in resolving moral quandaries by way of rational claims rather than particular context. 

Hays, an exegete, and Biggar, an ethicist, traded arguments about whether or not and to what extent Christian soldiers in the New Testament provide guidance for modern Christians to resolve problems like those Jason’s experience calls to our attention. Indeed, their ministerial training and academic expertise seems to suggest Biggar and Hays should be uniquely skilled at providing people like Jason and myself the resources for resolving these fundamental disagreements. But by the end of their correspondence, neither of them seemed any closer to consensus, and in ways they even seem to have become even more entrenched in their disagreements. 

Resolving the question of killing as Christians requires solid exegesis and sound hermeneutics, both a critical read of the texts that shape us as Christians as well as a grasp of the context in which we read them. It also requires patience and courage, for the Church must face the tragic reality veterans encounter everyday. People like Jason and myself are much more likely to kill ourselves than our civilian counterparts. Female veterans are twice as likely as civilian women to take their own lives. The Church in America is not immune to this moral crisis, as nearly seventy percent of the Department of Defense is made of up Christians. 

Stanley Hauerwas proposes “a moral crisis may suggest that a community has not rightly understood the practical force of its own conviction.” Something has happened in political theology that two Christian veterans have only each other to look to for clear, credible theological resources for wrestling with war. In 1958, GEM Anscombe observed that the way modern morality represented “the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one.” This is precisely the disease that has infected political theologies of war, which originated in penitential form but by the 17th century had become little more than a list of criteria used by heads of state. Alasdair MacIntyre, writing over two decades after Anscombe, faulted the Enlightenment and liberal philosophy for modern moral stratification because of its tendencies to privilege the voices most “shrill, and assertive, and expressive.” To recover consensus and coherency, MacIntyre proposed people “learn how to think as if one were a convinced adherent of that rival tradition” in order to “identify… its crucially important unresolved issues and unsolved problems [by the standard of that tradition]… and to enquire how progress might be made in moving towards their resolution and solution.” This is my concern in this paper, to think both as a pacifist and as a realist in order to identify the crucial problems in need of resolution so resources for consensus might be identified.  

In this paper, I intend to show that Biggar and Hays prescribe an initially helpful paradigm for their particularly Christian disagreement about violence. Their paradigm is lacking, however, in several ways. For at the close of their correspondence, readers were left no closer to consensus, were given no clearer picture of what it meant to be a Christian soldier, whether in the first or the twenty first century. For pastoral theology to collaboratively interact with exegesis, there must be some hermeneutical work involved. For the New Testament to be relevant to contemporary questions about killing, the cases presented in the New Testament must be brought into conversation with cases from our own day. 

Casuistry provides resources for what I suggest is a question of ecclesiological hermeneutics; what does it mean that Christian soldiers are integral to the story of salvation history? In order for the church to be equipped to engage the ethical questions of Christian soldiering, the Church must discover an ethical system capable of engaging contemporary exegesis in the midst of charged ideological and political differences. For the New Testament to be relevant to our modern questions about killing, the cases presented in its pages must be brought into conversation with cases from Church history. A major obstacle in the Hays/Biggar debate is that, as Protestants, they have limited theological language for dealing with the way New Testament soldiers relate to subsequent military martyrs, soldier saints, and patriot pacifists who followed their precedent. Both Hays and Biggar indirectly rely on the language of casuistry insofar as they focus on the instances of soldiers in the gospels. Biggar’s casuistic ethic and Hay’s narrative exegesis call the Church to “Specify and Distinguish” as well as to “Narrate and Embody,” as the titles of their main essays suggest. However, Biggar’s casuistry is too permissive and leads him to use case studies of New Testament soldiers in a broadly exemplary fashion. On the contrary, the way Hays reads the soldier narratives leads him to generally categorize them as cautionary tales; he conflates “anomalous” with “unsuitable,” though this is not borne out by the text.

Because they do not go far enough in their specifying, distinguishing, narrating, or embodying, they fail to create space in which consensus is possible. Biggar and Hays fail to appreciate how their perspectives might intersect; thus they ultimately fail to express the ways in which cases of Christian soldiers function narratively in the Church’s story. Applying their proposals more carefully will move the church towards a more particularly martial hermeneutic emphasizing the intersection of ethics and exegesis, canon and culture, text and context. By following Biggar’s and Hays’s lead and applying their insights more carefully, consensus becomes far more likely and wider theological agreement may be discovered.

After describing and critiquing their arguments, I will synthesize casuistry and narrative with the help of Stanley Hauerwas’s Casuistry as Narrative Art, carrying my claim forward that a restrictive casuistry combined with an inclusive narration moves us toward a martial hermeneutic capable of growing theological consensus. By exploring story as a site for overlap between casuistry and narrative, I will provide the initial outlines for a martial hermeneutic capable of holding in tension commitments that Christians share across political or ideological boundaries.  

I. Description 

Biggar begins the correspondence with his review of The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Hays’s 1996 introduction to biblical ethics. Specifically, it is Hays’s discussion of “Violence in Defense of Justice” that animates him and in which our description must begin.

I.A – “Test Cases” of New Testament soldiers

Before his 14th chapter, Hays has already gone over the Descriptive, Synthetic, and Hermeneutical tasks of his New Testament ethic, but the only task that Biggar takes much notice of is the Pragmatic task. It is into this fourth and final task that Hays folds the question of killing, in which “Test Cases” are used as aides in “making specific judgments about ethical issues.” Following his established method, he begins with a descriptive task, grounding his interpretation in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. In terms of synthesizing the multivocal witness of scripture, he sees nonviolence established as normative throughout the other gospels and confirmed in Pauline theology such that “from Matthew to Revelation we find a consistent witness against violence.” It is within this synthetic move that Hays couches his discussion of soldiers in the New Testament. He references four examples that Biggar later attaches to, including

• Soldiers in Luke’s gospel at the River Jordan speaking to John, who “does not suggest they abandon their profession”

• The centurion of great faith in Matthew and Luke whose “military connections” warrant no objection from Jesus

• A centurion at the foot of the cross, who is “the first human character in Mark’s gospel to recognize Jesus as the Son of God” 

• Cornelius, “the first gentile converts in Acts”

Oddly enough, Hays makes sure to reflect briefly on Old Testament Holy War texts, but Biggar does not take them into consideration and so repeating them here is unnecessary. 

As part of the synthetic task brought to bear against the test case of canonical combatants, Hays elaborates upon the soldiers in question through the three images central to his hermeneutical enterprise; community, cross, and new creation. Within his discussion of community Hays claims, “the place of the soldier within the church can only be seen as anomalous.” In terms of the cross, it is “the focal lens” through which the canon must be read, and “Jesus’ death moves to the center of attention in any reflection about ethics.”  Finally, the category of new creation acts to caution the community against both “a foolish utopianism” as well as despairing cynicism.  

In the following hermeneutical and pragmatic segments of his chapter, Biggar raises only two objections to Hays’s ethic. The first is Hays’s claim that canonical soldiers provide the only and “fragile basis in the New Testament narrative for a more positive assessment” of armed force. The second is his use of “unambiguous” to describe the scriptural proscription against the use of violence. For the purpose of concision, I will now move on to Biggar’s critique. 

I.B - Biggar 

Biggar’s argument is lengthy and complex, but two main theses emerge that are directly relevant to this study. He begins by focusing on the instances of soldiers in the New Testament, citing the lack of clear criticism scripture contains in reference to them. Secondly, he focuses on violence and insists that pacifism, to which Hays subscribes, fails to see that scripture only forbids certain kinds of it, not violence per se. 

The case(s) of Christian soldiers

Biggar’s “systematic refutation” of Hays’s Moral Vision “from [a proponent] of the doctrine of just war” frontloads his attention to soldiers in the New Testament, criticizing Hays’s exegesis of their literary role. Hays, according to Biggar, views the biblical authors as condemning military service as such and therefore condemning the soldiers themselves. But by Biggar’s read of the texts, “the New Testament nowhere explicitly commends soldiers for being soldiers.” 

Thus, a fundamental question this raises for Biggar is the lack of evidence that soldiers should give up their profession in order to be fully part of the emerging Christian community. Indeed, a robust martial hermeneutic will show that soldiers display more than just God’s ability to reach the worst of society. Biggar is justified in readings Hay’s presentation as one in which military roles are viewed as generically “immoral” because Hays is much harsher toward the martial vocation than scripture. “Surely,” Biggar claims, “its authors would have taken care to tell us that soldiers who became Christian disciples renounced military service?” 

Biggar goes on to argue that Paul has no qualms with violence and nor should contemporary Christians; Romans 13 is taken to infer “no objection in principle to the publicly authorized use of force.” Biggar is dissatisfied with the typical pacifist reading of Romans 13, in which “the authorities” role of punishing the wicked is not a role for believers. Role dualism, of Christians necessarily rejecting violence and ‘the world’ necessarily employing violence, sets up too strong a distinction between the Church and the world it inhabits, such that having one role for believers and another for non-believers “is not a practicable alternative under current conditions of rampant sinfulness.” Like Reinhold Niebuhr did in his essay “The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal,” Biggar accuses “the Anabaptist distinction” of being unrealistic. According to Biggar, the Just War Tradition (JWT) produces people who bear the sword in order to restrain sinfulness, “who use the sword pacifically” and “qualify and discipline the[ir] use of force.” 

More important to Biggar is his claim that Jesus (and the New Testament as a whole) does not condemn violence or military service per se, as Hays’s Anabaptist interpretation suggests. Rather what is condemned is specifically “nationalist” violence leading as it does to revolt and civil war, related to “private” vendettas and other unauthorized uses of force. Biggar sees Hays as twisting a specific prohibition against nationalism into a universal prohibition against violence, which explained Biggar’s accusation of “generalizing beyond the evidence.” Instead of specific concerns about the military profession, Biggar claims that the New Testament evidences “general concerns about violence,” including the important distinction he wants to make, that violence is of many kinds. 

Types of violence

Violence with anger and hatred is one thing, according to Biggar’s critique, but violence with love is another. His distinction cuts between violence that is “appropriate and proportionate” and that which is intemperate and “driven by rage and indignation.” Biggar’s interpretation is that the former (“resentment”) is acceptable on biblical grounds whereas the latter (“anger”) violates scriptural commitments that Christians must hold in common. He leans on Joseph Butler’s interpretation of Paul in order to say, if according to Ephesians 4:26 one can be angry without sinning, then Matthew 5:22 can be taken to mean that “violence against injustice is bound to be resentful, but it need not be angry.” Resentful violence hates injustice and can be executed without sin, but angry violence reflects a “touchy lack of control,” is intemperate, and therefore inherently sinful. 

Thus, Biggar claims that violence is in fact varied, and that the New Testament contains no absolute prohibition against resentful violence, provided it is temperate and in the service of public order. A typology of violence is crucial to his claim that scripture permits soldiering and that therefore, insofar as Hays fails to see the complex nature of violence, his pacifist interpretation has no hermeneutical value; it is not “practicable.” 

Biggar argues against Hays’s Moral Vision with this rubric, specifically that the New Testament “does not forbid retaliation that is not motivated by anger or hatred.” Or to use fewer double negatives, Biggar claims that the text allows for certain types of violence and contains no absolute prohibition against violence per se, only violence which is intemperate. Christians can be soldiers because “resentment suffer[s] the discipline of love.”  Biggar returns frequently to the claim that violence can be loving, that “violence… governed [by love] is morally different than that which is not.” Against what he sees as Hays’s assumption that “love and compassion preclude violence,” he insists that “violence can suffer love’s discipline,” that “anger and violence can actually be governed by the motive of compassion and the intention of peace.” Biggar concludes that Hays is wrong not just in generalizing violence but also in applying his generalization to the text and suggesting violence per se is prohibited. Biggar’s point is to insist that violence is not so settled a term as Hays assumes, that in fact there are types of violence that Hays fails to explore which undermines a pacifist hermeneutic.

Summary

In terms of both violence and military service, Biggar sees important specifics being overlooked by Hays’s pacifist interpretation of the New Testament. He insists that Hays inappropriately infers “an absolute prohibition of the use of lethal violence” which is flawed because the pacifist distinctions employed fail to distinguish “anger and hatred” of personal vengeance from temperate resentful violence of public sanction. Alongside Hays’s ignorance of important distinctions about violence, Biggar accuses him of misinterpreting the presence and significance of soldiers themselves in the text, skewing his Moral Vision, blurred as it has been by pacifism. Hays’s Moral Vision is flawed because it assumes that soldiers are employed in an inherently “immoral profession,” which the text does not support. Thus, an overall criticism he has is that Hays “generalizes too much and distinguishes too little,” failing to recognize important distinctions between temperate and intemperate violence.  

I.C Hays

Hays engages the New Testament soldier narratives in response to Biggar, but in far too exclusive a manner, concluding that nearly all accounts of soldiers in the New Testament as cautionary tales. He stands by his hermeneutical principles in Moral Vision and refutes much of Biggar’s assertions regarding soldiers in the New Testament as well as the proposed typology of violence. 

Response to Christian soldiers 

For Hays, pacifism is morally obligatory since “disciples are called to embrace his way of non-retaliation… because they are to follow and imitate Jesus.” Therefore the purpose and function of narrative in the Christian community is to affect behavior. Thus Hays, like Biggar, quickly attaches himself to the soldier narratives in the New Testament. These narratives can and should provide object lessons for the Church’s position on violence.

His attention to soldier narratives is determined by his understanding that their story, insofar as it falls within scripture, informs “moral discernment… through the paradigmatic function of narrative.” New Testament soldiers therefore provide a necessary model through which the Church might arrive at the kinds of moral distinction relevant to the question of killing. He finds Biggar’s soldier-favoring distinctions troubling because they are argued from silence, eisegetically imported into, rather than exegetically extracted from, the New Testament.

Hays insists that the absence of stories applauding soldiers is instructive and should imply a normative Christian ethic about violence. The lack of clear stories should be read as a warning to the community to avoid the behavior by which soldiers are known. There appear to him to be “no positive paradigms in the New Testament – zero instances – of disciples of Jesus having recourse to violence or being commended for taking up the sword to oppose evil.” 

For Hays, soldier narratives are “the oddities, the texts that stand, or at least seem to stand, in tension with... the great weight of the New Testament witness.” Their presence is out of sync with wider concerns the New Testament raises about peaceability and hospitality. In particular, Hays reads the story of the unnamed soldier at the foot of the cross as displaying the troubling tension that soldiers make present in scripture. Hays insists he represents little more than stark narrative contrast; “Dramatic reversal is the only narrative function of this centurion. He is not a model for Christian discipleship. We are not told what happened to him subsequently.”  

Rather than trying to surmise easy answers to such an ambiguous event, Hays cautions against cheap theology, for “our task is not to explain away the tension.” JWT might give us a way to think about the ambiguity in texts such as these, but the instinct to find answers does not guarantee the questions are being asked by the text. By Hays’s estimation, there is no way to know what happened to the soldier at the foot of the cross, and ambiguity is what the text allows for, nothing more. In fact, unknowing calls the community to deeper questioning if it is to be fully appreciated, for “we must think carefully about how a Gospel that contains tensions of this sort is to be read as a source for normative Christian ethics.” 

Hays observes that Biggar has made a case that requires a proof the text does not provide. For Biggar’s claims about JWT to “stick” scripturally, an argument from silence is not enough. Biggar would need a canonical example of a soldier who used violence and was praised for the good (justice, peace, etc.) that his violence clearly produced or, more simply, an example of a soldier being unequivocally commended for his acting as a soldier qua soldier. The problem is that “nowhere in the New Testament do we find any narratives in which soldiers are commended for their military actions.” In Hays’s eyes, Biggar “seems to think that if he can find an individual soldier or two in the New Testament, then individual Christians will be given license to become… sword-wielders” 

Response to types of violence

Regarding the claim that there are multiple forms of violence, some of which the New Testament allows, Hays is unconvinced because he finds no evidence for it in scripture. The probable distinctions Biggar introduces about types of violence are canonically untenable because there is “no passage in which Jesus distinguishes between illegitimate unauthorized violence and legitimate publicly authorized violence.” Even if violence might be tolerated, “Jesus never told stories in which the good guys kill the bad guys.” Had he, there might be some justification for charitable violence or the public sanction of violence rubbing off onto the Christian community. Though other sacred texts might contain clear and explicit incorporation of violence into their moral commitments, “the New Testament never narrates an act of sword wielding heroism by a Christian.”

Thus for Hays, the distinction Biggar draws between illegitimate nationalist violence and legitimate violence of temperate public sanction is highly suspect. Even if the distinction might hold up in modern ethical discourse, there is no precedence for it in scripture, and therefor no paradigm through which Christian might employ it in moral discernment. “There is not the slightest evidence in the text of the New Testament that Jesus’s rejection of violence was premised upon a fear of the dire consequences of resisting Rome or a desire to avoid internecine nationalist conflict”

Regarding Biggar’s interpretation of Romans 13, Hays is concerned that “Biggar generalizes his interpretation into a ‘distinction between what is permitted public officials and what is permitted private subjects or citizens.’” Hays defends his own distinction between Christians and public officials because he sees this it as both reigning in permissive tolerance of potentially corrupt governments and also as a distinction that scripture insists Christians be bound by. In particular, he calls on Christian ethicists to centralize scripture in their scholarly reflection, “If our concern is to seek guidance from the New Testament, the distinctions must be the distinctions actually made by its authors, not distinctions projected backwards anachronistically.”  

Summary

Overall, Hays accuses Biggar of the inverse charge made against him. Whereas Biggar claims Hays “generalizes too much and distinguishes too little,” Hays turns the table to suggest Biggar “distinguishes too much and generalizes too little.” The specificity Biggar employs is simply not derived from scripture or sound moral reason, he explains. Biggar’s reading represents to Hays “a legalistic hermeneutical principle that whatever is not explicitly forbidden is therefore permitted.” The problem Hays has with Biggar is that his methodology forces the texts of the past to serve the interests of the present, emphasizing hermeneutics to the detriment of exegesis. In a similar way, the problem Hays has with JWT is that it “submerges our moral deliberation almost entirely in the present tense of the mundane politics of this age.”  

II. Criticisms

Biggar rightly observes that “the real nub of the matter [is] the making of moral conceptual distinctions, and their importation into the interpretation of the New Testament text.” Hays, however, accuses Biggar of making distinctions that are foreign and even antithetical to the text. Distinctions are necessary, but the kind of distinctions used and the boundaries they set up are where divergence occurs. In the following section, this study will explore one substantial weakness their arguments share, that the morally relevant distinction rests between soldier and non-soldier, and what this reveals about weaknesses unique to each argument. A discussion about the types of violence must move toward a more specific distinction about where the morally relevant boundary is for differentiating sinful from tolerable acts. After these considerations have been explored, I will discuss Biggar’s permissive casuistry and Hays’s exclusive narration. 

Part of the reason their disagreement seems irresolvable is that Biggar and Hays have different ways of answering the same question. The hermeneutical question of killing is about soldiers in the New Testament and what it has to do with the Church today. I will establish that close scrutiny of the text and of the nature of military service reveals that they have both imported a distinction that, regardless of its historicity, has lost any and all hermeneutical value for the Church today. In other words, even if first century Roman soldiers were indeed primarily tasked with wielding swords, to speak of “soldiers” in such flat and homogenizing terms today does the Church no practical good. Modern warfare blurs the line between combatants and civilians, both in conventional and asymmetrical forces. Furthermore, I will show that the formal distinctions in the United States military between combat and noncombat roles should merit moral attention and consideration.

To overlook such an important distinction fails to do the work theologians and ethicists are called to. I will therefore show, after discussion of Biggar’s and Hays’s shared oversight regarding the nature of modern warfare, that Biggar emphasizes political imperatives to the detriment of canonical commitments, while Hays focuses on scriptural content to the detriment of cultural context. Put another way, Biggar has a permissive casuistry of which the practical effect is to “ease the conscience rather than to govern it” while Hays employs a restrictive narration which impairs his ecclesiology and denies the necessity of a martial hermeneutic. 

II.A - Sword wielding is a common flawed assumption

Biggar and Hays establish quickly that for both of them “soldier” is equivalent to “sword wielder.” In “Specify and Distinguish,” Biggar does not yet use the explicit language of sword wielding, but it is clearly operative in his interpretation of Romans 13 and those who “bear the sword.” The first time it comes unambiguously into play is in Hays’s “Narrate and Embody,” when he directly links Biggar’s notion of public officials (evidently referring to Biggar’s Pauline exegesis concerning those “in governing authority”) to “sword wielders.” Biggar assumes the same definition of soldiers as sword “wielders” or “bearers” numerous times in “The New Testament and Violence: Round Two.” Hays carries this usage forward in his response, “The Thorny Task of Reconciliation: Another Response to Nigel Biggar,” confirming that the assumed definition is shared. 

As it is evident in their writing, “being a soldier” for both Biggar and Hays is about being a weapon-toting enforcer of public law and order. For Biggar, this role is one that is often exemplary, whereas for Hays it is a role the Christian tradition has exclusively marked as cautionary. For each of them, the nature and function of soldiering is reducible to one thing – weaponized violence. “Soldier” has a positive connotation for one and a negative connotation for another. They use the word “soldier” in very different ways without coming to terms with their disparate meanings. They cannot both be right, but they both might be wrong. 

More importantly, the operative assumption is that soldiers are inherently sword wielders, and the cavalier use of the word ignores the cultural context within which they are each situated. Neither of them challenges the assumed meaning, which the Oxford Dictionary of English summarizes as “a person who serves in an army.” Service is easily quantifiable and can be defined in clear contractual terms. But to mark enlistment or commission as the morally relevant distinction inappropriately polarizes soldiers from civilians.

In liberal democracies, moral significance is attached to the taxes that fund the bombs as much as it is attached to the voices expressed by the vote for politicians who send a minority to commit violence “in our name.” The oft-repeated clause “in our name” undermines the supposed moral distance between the violence of the trigger pullers and the citizens back home; it makes a direct link between the many and the few by insisting the violence of soldiers is determined by popular sovereignty. Civilians are not morally innocent of the violence represented (symbolically or actually) by soldiers, and yet they are not exactly guilty either. 

To assume an either/or forces us into a misleading moral zero sum game; soldiers are guilty for the violence they (all) perform but civilians are (all) innocent because their fingers are not on the triggers. To insist on soldier/civilian as the morally relevant distinction means that a cook who has never left garrison is morally culpable for martial violence while the president who has never served in a military capacity is morally blameless. Rather than the binary construct assumed by Biggar and Hays, it is more appropriate to think of sin in terms of a hierarchy or taxonomy. Abraham Heschel’s maxim proves instructive; “in a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.” There must be degrees of moral transgression; from clear and direct guilt of a sniper who has full awareness and control over their violence, to the indirect but morally proximate violence of their spotter and the morally distant responsibility of communities in whose name they each serve. 

In terms of the military broadly construed it is inaccurate to assume that the military itself is reducible necessarily to the vocation of killing. Take the United States as an example, who’s Constitution distinguishes between protective defense and belligerent aggression. Section 3062 of Title 10 US Code places “defense” as the primary function of four stated parts of its mission. It is only the last function that even hints at responding to “aggressive acts” of foreign nations. The sharp moral distinction between soldier and civilian assumes a kind of absolute condemnation of the martial vocation in light of its supposedly belligerent nature. But the function and purpose of the American military, at least, is not so ill conceived. Clumping soldiering necessarily into violence does not bear out clear distinctions made by the constitution that American soldiers, at least, swear to defend. In other words, there is no perfect parallel between soldiering in killing. Complicity in violence is more diffuse, and civilians in liberal democracies share the burden of responsibility eve if they are not directly guilty. 

However, in the same way that we cannot assume that every American is directly responsible for every violent act performed in war, we must not make a direct and uncompromising link between killing and soldiering, for it is not a perfect parallel. Some soldiers do kill, which calls for certain considerations in moral deliberation. But some soldiers provide medical care, supply food, or repair bridges and because their primary duties differ from those who do, applying the question of killing to medics, clerks or engineers does not apply as readily. Being a soldier today “cannot simply be homogenized” any more than the New Testament can. 

Not every Soldier is the modern equivalent of a sword-wielder. We have to take “soldier” for what it can possibly mean for us today in order to arrive at a valuable interpretive method we can apply to the question of killing. If the New Testament is to have any value for us today, some amount of imported distinction is necessary, which is precisely why Biggar’s impulse is not entirely without merit. After all, he acknowledges “if I want guidance from [scripture], then within the terms of what it says I must venture an interpretation of what it means for me here and now.” For one, when capitalized, “Soldier” means a person employed by the United States Army. The generic term means combatants in the broader sense regardless of time, nationality, etc.; i.e. a person serving in an army. Failing to adequately exegete the word “soldier” has left Hays and Biggar unable to distinguish between important sub groups that exist formally and explicitly within the military community and which possess important moral substance. 

The distinction between a “combat arms” Military Occupational Specialties (of the 11, 13, 14, 18, and 19 designations) and those categorized as “combat service support branches” is of crucial importance. The distinction within the martial community between combat jobs and noncombat jobs is fiercely defended. Those closest to “the action,” such as snipers, are most proximate to moral transgressions such as killing or coercing and they act in almost tribal fashion in defending their unique status. A sharp contrast exists and is enforced between “grunts” that wield the modern equivalent to swords in the infantry, artillery, air defense, special operations, and cavalry/armor professional classifications on the one hand and “POGs” (“Personnel Other than Grunt”) on the other. 

Biggar and Hays seem oblivious to all this, and perhaps for good reason, but those for whom ‘sword wielding’ is actually a professional consideration (some might say “privilege”) are few and proud. Not only are the cultural distinctions between grunts and POGs operative and morally significant, they are extremely precise. Service and support personnel are socially inferior to combat arms positions in the martial fraternity, evidenced by their not receiving the same type and rank of awards as grunts. The prestige of being awarded a Combat Action Badge (CAB), for example, is so valuable that there is even concern about how far away from a Small Arms Fire (SAF) incident a person may be in order to be eligible. Badges like the CAB are valued because they make a POG something of a pseudo-grunt, someone worthy of the cultural esteem the military grants those closest to the kinds of morally compromising circumstances that combat entails. 

Even within the combat arms MOSs, there is a further and more exacting distinction between infantrymen and other positions internal to the combat arms classification. This supports my claim that the morally relevant distinction is far more restrictive than Biggar and Hays seem to fathom. The infantry are in closest mechanical and therefore moral proximity to battlefield violence and are highly aware and protective of that status. A hierarchy of honors reflects this once more. Although “there is no precedence for combat or special skill badges within the same group,” as an artilleryman, my Combat Action Badge does not merit the same prestige that a Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB) does, despite both being classified as Group 1, the top tier of Combat or Special Skills Badges. In fact, initially, the CAB was classified as Group 2, though the regulations have been updated to reflect formal equivalence between the CIB an infantryman may wear and the CAB all other soldiers may wear. 

Certainly part of the social equation is that snipers and others highly trained in lethal force and are elite due to physical characteristics. However, because the skills they gain are specifically oriented toward violence, which the New Testament and Christian tradition have been reluctant to endorse, the elitism is also of moral significance. Grunts are not just the finest physical specimens; they are also those who will engage in the clearest moral transgressions with the highest level of awareness and intent.

What difference does all this make? The distinctions relevant to the question of killing, as they exist for the embodied experience of combat and military service, are both explicit and enforceable. To assume that being a soldier is morally homogenous is false because there are some soldiers who will never use a firearm after initial training, and to treat those soldiers on equal moral ground with snipers, mortar men, or fighter pilots violates both reason and experience. I have shown that the distinction within the military between types of soldiers is culturally and morally significant. If these distinctions are operative for those to whom “sword wielder” is not just paradigm, but reality, why is it not also seen as compelling for Biggar and Hays? 

The morally relevant distinction must be far more restrictive than what they assume; the question of killing comes down to what distinction we might draw within the military between combatants themselves. Rather than soldier/civilian, we should be aiming to articulate, for example, the moral difference between a sniper and his spotter. In cases like these, who is directly guilty in the proper sense, and who is indirectly responsible? 

What keeps Biggar and Hays from seeing these important considerations is not that they have never been soldiers, but that the particularity of soldiers’ lives and perspectives are conspicuously lacking in their appraisals. Biggar tries too hard to include soldiers into the canonical fold with a permissive casuistry while Hays excludes them narratively from the story of salvation history by typecasting them as “unsavory” “anomalous” outsiders. Biggar’s case studies fail because his ethic is not rigorous enough, but so lax as to have an effect that it seems “more concerned to ease the conscience rather than govern it.” Hays’s narration dissolves because he refuses to consider that soldier narratives might in fact provide positive paradigms. He assumes soldier stories cannot or do not embody the good protected by the Christian We, namely the transmission of salvation history.

II.B – Biggar’s permissive casuistry

Biggar reveals himself to be more favorable to soldiers than an objective appraisal allows. His distinctions between types of violence do not emerge from the text, but are overlaid onto it, impairing his ability to competently judge the cases of soldiers. “Whence do I get these distinctions?” he asks, “from ethical reflection [and] my own experience” comes his reply. But try as Biggar does, he is unreliable because he tries to speak for a community to which he does not belong, the martial fraternity. He defends the concept of war and the vocation of soldiering rather than to remain true to the strong objections to violence Hays finds in the New Testament; he emphasizes political imperatives to the detriment of canonical commitments. His permissive casuistry adequately engages neither the exegetical considerations Hays raises nor the Church’s historic rejections of violence. His distinctions lack credibility and render him unable to fully engage Hays’s arguments and build consensus. A more restrictive casuistry, by contrast, allows the necessary fuller engagement.  

Although he cites his “own experience” as a source for his conclusions about military ethics and scripture, he does not actually have any. He only cites experience he has of reading “copious amounts of military history” and “speak[ing] with a colonel in the Royal Marines.” Experience and reason form the two pillars of his argument “that anger and violence can actually be governed by the motive of compassion and the intention of peace.” With only one of his two pillars to lean on, his claim that charitable violence is different from angry violence loses much credibility. For experience to work as a proof, one must have it and a compelling analogy, but Biggar has neither. It is not that civilians cannot say meaningful things about the question of killing, but Biggar’s conspicuous lack of experience undermines his argument precisely because he is so insistent upon using it to support his assertions about violence. It may be that his reason suffers due to his lack of experience; he has constructed a “conceptual reality” that does not derive from the experiential reality of soldiers themselves. His distinctions might work in theory, but they are not evidenced by experience. 

Similarly, his often-arrived-at conclusion, that all or most soldiers are basically exemplary, is simplistic and does not bear out in reality. Some soldiers throw themselves on grenades to save their friends or noncombatants whereas other soldiers urinate on dead bodies or throw puppies off cliffs. Biggar is unable or unwilling to distinguish between the virtues involved in being a soldier and the vices that mark a bad soldier. But as these cases make clear, there are cases in which soldiers fail to be soldiers and cases in which soldiers excel at being soldiers. 

In his exchange with Hays, his conclusions reveal a very permissive ethic in terms of soldiers and the violence they employ. Though he might be right that not all scriptural soldiers are described as sinners, he fails to identify a soldier who does act sinfully in the text. Charles Mathewes observes the same pattern applied to war more broadly by Biggar in his In Defence of War. In his review, Mathewes observes, “Each of the cases Biggar analyzes is one that he finally judges the just war tradition to approve.” Just as Biggar finds it hard to identify a war he does not like, he cannot easily identify a soldier he does not admire. For example, in Mark’s passion, Biggar cites the soldier at the foot of the cross being “the first human character in the gospel to recognize Jesus as the Son of God” but overlooks the soldiers who feature prominently in striking Jesus in the face or mocking him just a few passages earlier. Although Mark 15 dedicates five verses (vv.16-20) to soldiers striking, spitting, and mocking Jesus. Biggar makes no mention of their behavior, opting instead to emphasize another soldier nineteen verses later (v.39) who acts in a way that affirms his thesis.

By leveraging the cases of soldiers in the New Testament and bringing them into conversation with contemporary concerns, Biggar is relying on the resources of casuistry (however permissively). Casuistry offers some insight for understanding his conclusions, since it will help illuminate why both Biggar and Hays focus on the cases of Christian soldiers as exemplary or cautionary. Several times in the exchange, he uses “case” to describe the instances of soldiers in the New Testament. He cites “the case of Cornelius,” the case of the ideal “God-governed society,” he cites cases to prove his point “where soldiers have regarded their enemy with respect rather than hatred,” the case of “incorrigible sinners,” he calls his part of their correspondence his own comprehensive “case,” the “cases of the centurion at Capernaum (Matt. 8.5–13; Lk. 7.1–10) and Cornelius (Acts 10.1–11.18)” and two more cases, of “of a soldier encountering Jesus and meeting with nothing but approval… and of a soldier encountering one of Jesus’s apostles.” One or two instances and it might be argued that “case” is simply a placeholder, that there is no relationship to casuistry per se. But whether he intends it or not, Biggar is engaging in casuistry.

What is casuistry? 

Casuistry is “a reasonable and effective set of practical procedures for resolving the moral problems that arise in particular life situations.” A methodology that gave rise to common law, casuistry begins ethical inquiry with specific cases, comparing them in order to arrive at sound moral judgments. Contrary to deontology, which emphasizes rules as determinative, and consequentialism, which emphasizes outcomes, casuistry is unique in starting with specifics rather than generalities. Rules and outcomes are the operative principles in play for deontology and consequentialism, but casuistry cuts against the grain by insisting that particular cases must be decided based on other similar cases, building flexible maxims to live by rather than concrete rules or hypothetical outcomes. 

Deontology, on the one hand, is problematic because rules are not self-defining. “Thou shalt not steal” does not distinguish between thefts for hunger from theft for accumulation of wealth. Consequentialism, on the other hand, can only be hypothesized at the moment of moral consideration because outcomes exist exclusively in the future. Casuistry is primarily concerned with cases, but the point is to compare enough cases to deduce maxims to serve as short hand for determining a precedent. Jonsen and Toulmin describe maxims as “formulas drawn from traditional discussions and phrased aphoristically, which served as fulcra and warrants for argument.” From enough paradigmatic “type cases,” a casuist can form a tentative maxim that can serve normatively, but which is never set in stone. 

Unfortunately, casuistry fell into disrepute in the 18th century after Blaise Pascal famously condemned it in his Provincial Letters, and it has never fully recovered its credibility. Abusive casuistry eventually came to be called Laxism, implying the permissive attitude of casuists toward those with money or power, especially the Jesuits engaged publicly in teaching, preaching and taking confession. The problem Pascal (and much of the French populace) had was with “the Jesuits’ lax treatment of penitents” particularly “the most notorious public sinners” in the aristocratic class, who “were readily absolved by their Jesuit confessors.” When Pascal lampooned Jesuits, it was for their moral laxity, not necessarily casuistry per se. 

Is Biggar’s “ethical reflection” casuistic? 

Although casuistry might seem suspect given its modern reputation for moral leniency, but is in fact is a helpful resource for ethical reflection. Biggar himself insists, “there is in Christian ethics a necessary place for a discipline of reflection upon normative ethics which enjoys the conceptual clarity and precision, and the methodical rigour, of casuistry.” Although it has become synonymous with deception, casuistry “can operate in a manner that is faithful to basic theological tenets,” and “can just as easily be rigorist as it can be lax.” It is unfortunate, however that the way Biggar employs casuistry is permissive, sophistical; his casuistry seems “more concerned to ease the conscience than to govern it.”

Biggar’s ethical reflection is casuistic in so far as he is taking the cases of soldiers in the New Testament in order to speak hermeneutically to soldiers of our own day, such as “a colonel in the Royal Marines.” Put another way, Biggar is effectively suggesting that, if the case of scriptural soldiers prescribes one thing, then that thing is true for soldiers today. Casuistry is not a derogatory term, and done properly it can and should be seen as a legitimate method of ethical inquiry. Indeed, casuistry is helpful if we find that it helps us resolve his disagreement with Hays. Because hermeneutics requires sound exegesis, the cases of modern soldiers requires sound “Test Cases,” to use Hays’ subtitle, of those models left for the Church in our sacred texts. The cases are alike in their marital particularity, but we must let the text inform our interpretation, not the other way around. 

Is Biggar’s casuistry permissive? 

Biggar’s casuistry is permissive if the preponderance of his cases effectively excuses that behavior of soldiers which is immoral. Jesuit Laxists were willing to “take on, or create, any kind of moral case” who “lost all sense of moral seriousness” and were known to have “lacked a sense of moral balance and perceptiveness.” Pascal lampooned the casuists of his day, condemning them for the “scandalous and excessive moral license they have introduced.” For Pascal, it was the aristocratic class that suffered no negative sanction, but for us it is Biggar’s lax moral deliberation regarding soldiers. If this is the case, we must do the careful work of crafting a more restrictive casuistry in terms of the question of killing. It is not, as we have seen above, a matter of who is a soldier and who is not, but who is directly guilty and who is indirectly responsible. The soldier/civilian distinction assumed by Biggar and Hays is far to broad and indistinct, it does not care to concern itself with the moral complexities within the martial fraternity itself, it only distinguishes between those who are or who are not soldiers. 

There needs to be greater clarity and specificity in terms of violence, but Biggar proposes the distinction rest upon internal emotive characteristics he provides no paradigm or framework by which to judge. Who is to say, if the Menedez brothers loved their parents just as other children do, that they actually did not murder them but merely killed them lovingly? Rather than basing his typography of violence on internal dispositions like anger for its “touchy lack of control” a more rigorous casuistry would base its restrictions on more quantifiable criteria, like ‘Whose finger was on the trigger?’ or ‘Who had eyes on target and control of indirect assets?’ In as far as Biggar’s construct gives more approval to soldiers and their deeds then it does sanction for their misdeeds, it is permissive. In terms of casuistry, it is a kind of Laxism and fails to appropriately distinguish between the goods a soldier protects or enacts and the evils to which their vocation might lend themselves. 

II.C – Hays’s exclusive narration

As a biblical scholar, Hays’s distinct task is to bring the texts of the past into our own day, to interpret archaic words and aphorisms into an ethic contemporary Christians can adopt. Hays emphasizes paradigm for its hermeneutical value; it helps readers see where they fit in the overall narrative of the ongoing story of salvation history. However, all or most soldier narratives are basically deterrent for Hays; they are negative paradigms that warn the community how not to be. According to Hays, New Testament soldiers act as cautionary tales for Christians to avoid. But by making this move, characters are reduced to mere caricature; unsavory features like killing or coercion are taken as the primary purpose and function of soldiers, which has been disproven by the above discussion of US Title Code governing the Army. 

Nonetheless, his assumption that soldering is inherently morally compromising dominates the way Hays perceives soldiers. Hays’s mistake is that he focuses on scriptural content to the detriment of cultural context. To narrate the stories of soldiers better, Hays would have to 1) better diagnose the nature of soldiering and its inherent function and value and 2) recognize a more inclusive We than he uses in this set of correspondences. He fails to grasp that the Church needs members of the martial community in our midst to help us decipher the value contained in their scriptural narratives. 

What is narrative?

Hays is rather vague about his specific meaning for “narrative” and does not elaborate whether there is any particular definition he prefers for finds theologically or exegetically sound. As a broader ethical project, narrative theology has emphasized storied elements of the canon above propositional claims one might derive from the Bible. Like casuistry, narrative is suspicious of principles and generalizations, tending to emphasize “specific literary features of realistic narrative as exemplified in diverse ways.” 

Hays asserts that narratives and stories contain a diversity of positive and negative paradigms that either encourage or caution by providing “nuanced models of behavior both wise and foolish.” Positive paradigms summarize “characters who model exemplary conduct” while negative paradigms “model reprehensible conduct.” According to Hays, “the New Testament tells a story in which we find ourselves situated.” Because narrative calls for embodiment, we see ourselves in the story; we are supposed to identify with characters because we are situated there with them. We are taken up by the plot, excited by the climax, and anticipate final resolution. Their values, concerns, and motivations help illuminate our own. 

Narration is therefore not value neutral; stories like the Gospels are supposed to shape a reader. Christians are expected to see the Word of God as incarnate not just two thousand years ago, but today in our own time as well.  Hays explains “the Christological case for pacifism is... a matter of seeing the overall narrative of [Jesus’s] life as the embodiment of human wholeness... narrative as a disclosure” Narrative is crucial because embodied-ness breaks down the barrier between author and reader, between story and self, between God and humanity. If narrative is disclosure, then “they” should become “we” because God has become man. Hays’s theological emphasis on embodiment creates a problem because Hays does not see soldiers as integral to the story of the Church, evidenced by his categorizing their appearance as anomalous and “in tension” with the overall community. His excision of the martial niche within the Christian community, however, does not bear out the witness of scripture or ecclesiology. 

Is Hays’s narration exclusive?

Fellow pacifist and Duke colleague Stanley Hauerwas has often lamented that “In America Christians have failed to distinguish the Christian We from the American We.” This is Hays’s failure as well, made most evident by his interpretation of “the centurion at the foot of the cross.” Hays’s interpretation of the centurion at the foot of the cross is somewhat flawed. He claims, “dramatic reversal is the only narrative function of this centurion. He is not a model for Christian discipleship. We are not told what happened to him subsequently.” The problems with his statement are legion. 

What he can possibly mean by “we” in this sentence is highly restrictive. At most, it is a Protestant “we,” for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches stand in whole-hearted disagreement. In those traditions, the soldier who pierced Jesus side is the same as the one who goes on to call him “God’s son,” and he is given the name Longinus (after the longche, a Greek word reserved for a Roman spear used in battlefield engagements that was used instead to pierce Jesus’s side). Longinus is a model for Christian discipleship precisely because of his dramatic reversal. Furthermore, he has been revered as a saint since as early as the eighth century, a time predating the distinctions between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.  If “We” properly includes the one, holy, catholic and apostolic churches, then we are told what happened to this centurion. Not by the texts that became the gospels but by the tradition that canonized them. 

Hays had been concerned about the same ecumenically alienating instinct in Biggar; “I am struck by how little attention Biggar’s essay gives to this ecclesial dimension of moral discernment” Furthermore, he uses “tradition” in precisely the way required of catholicity. By “tradition” Hays implies time (as in “Christian tradition from the time of Constantine to the present”), propositional doctrines (such as “natural law traditions” or JWT, which he calls “the church’s majority position”) and people (which is the church’s eloquent minority” tradition carrying “a cloud of witnesses” that include Tertullian, Dorothy Day, and even soldier saint Francis of Assisi). He hobbles his ecclesiology if he cannot narrate the story of martial members of the Body of Christ with requisite sympathy. Even if Hays does not adhere to the tradition that named the soldier Longinus and claims he “quit the military life, received instruction from the apostles,” and was martyred, Christian soldiers are not a They.  As members of the Body of Christ, it is proper that their lives are included in the Christian We and should be read sympathetically rather than antagonistically. We must discover the harmony their story keeps with the story of salvation history, not immediately assume variance and dismiss their stories as anomalous. If narrative is disclosure, then “they” should become “we” because God has become man.

Even anomalies can be treated as paradigms in which harmony with the broader story is waiting to be discovered. As exceptions to the rule, soldiers are roundabout ways of proving the rule; they do not exist apart from or in contradistinction to it and can even help clarify communal self-interpretation. Hays fails to see this, insisting that even such a centrally instructive narrative like Longinus “is not a model for Christian discipleship.” Hays has shown himself to be an unreliable narrator at least when it comes to the narratives of Christian soldiers, effectively using the third person plural They (as referent object) for Christian soldiers, but the Christian We is always in first person plural – We, the catholic We, which includes Cornelius and Longinus alike. My being or having been a Christian soldier does not necessarily make me somehow alien to the story of God that the Body of Christ makes evident. The martial trajectory that carried Martin, Francis, Joan, or Ignatius into the Church might not be a common route, perhaps even marked by unsavory moments, but it is by no means one that marks me as fundamentally anomalous to the story of salvation history. 

III. Synthesis

Why is all this important? What difference does it make that Hays and Biggar, two generally reliable and skilled theologians cannot resolve their moral disagreement about the question of killing? It makes a world of difference for those people for whom the question of killing is irreducibly personal. Since 2001, Biggar and Hays’s home countries jointly initiated a war against an abstract noun in reaction to the terrorist hijacking of four planes over American air space. Since then, the evolution of war from conventional and limited forms to unconventional and asymmetrical forms has made itself tragically clear. The Christian soldiers who deploy might look to theologians like Biggar and Hays for guidance on the question of killing, but may find little of value. Although neither calls themselves a Practical Theologian, that’s no excuse to produce impractical theology. 

If the cases I saw in six years of service were any indication, and if soldering has any uniformity over time, then any negative simplification of soldiers in terms of moral guidance is flawed. However, I witnessed enough carnage and ‘touchy’ lack of self-control by soldiers closest to the action that Biggar’s claim that it is possible for battlefield violence to be dispassionate lacks credibility. Soldiers, like any human agent, are capable of both evil and good alike, sometimes switching between the two with blinding speed and frequency. Combat exponentializes stimuli and therefore response, and I am not convinced that a healthy human being can kill dispassionately any more than I am that sexual intercourse is possible without an erection. 

The polarizing nature of the western church's dialogue about serving God and country is reflected in Biggar and Hays’s interminable moral disagreement as well as the well-documented epidemic of soldier suicide. This suggests the Church is in the midst of what Hauerwas calls a “moral crisis” and has not understood its own convictions. Methods for interpreting soldiers in the New Testament directly affects prescriptions for the modern church, but Biggar and Hays cannot get their disparate techniques to intersect. In this section, I will explore ways in which casuistry and narrative can work in tandem to move the Church toward a particularly martial hermeneutic capable of building moral consensus on the question of killing. 

Thankfully, the notions of paradigm, precedent, stories, and cases overlap enough to provide us resources for looking at scripture and our own context in more dynamic ways. For this reason, I will propose that Hays and Biggar can refine their methods to move toward intersection rather than divergence. Instead of Biggar’s permissive casuistry, I propose a restrictive one. Thinking through his insistence that there are different types of violence calls us to defining more precisely the boundary around which martial violence is actually proscribed by church tradition. Not along internal emotive lines as he does, but in terms of more practical concerns about actions which have historically animated theological ethics. Instead of differentiating between types of violence, I claim we need to differentiate between those people who would actually be directly guilty of committing some type of sin and those far greater numbers of people who would be indirectly responsible for complicity in evil. We need to be able to distinguish between direct guilt for sin and indirect responsibility for evil. Once we do that, the moral distinction between the sniper and the spotter and the civilian back home comes into greater clarity, allowing us then to judge individual cases based on judicial precedent derived from classical casuistry. 

Turning to Hays, I will show that his ecclesiology suffers from his inability to narrate particular stories of soldiers as exemplary. His We can only imply a restrictive and atrophied ecclesiology that denies the importance of tradition and canon. I will show how taking a more inclusive narration of the soldier stories of the New Testament require the Church to abide by a more comprehensive paradigm than the one Hays prescribes for soldiers. Furthermore, an inclusive narration must be coupled with a radically inclusive definition of “canon” and a high Christology, for the Body of Christ embodies the story of the Church in the Bible and as it continues to unfold through history. 

Casuistry as narrative art

Although hays and Biggar fail to get their methods to converge, narrative and casuistry are not mutually exclusive. It is not that cases and stories are so different that they cannot speak to one another, but that the way they have been leveraged by Hays and Biggar is unhelpful. As we have seen, it is permissive casuistry and exclusive narration that is problematic. 

Hauerwas helps bridge the gap left between Hays and Biggar. Hauerwas recognizes casuistry and narrative both start from the bottom, from recorded experience and the need for interpretation; particulars determine universals, experience shapes reason. Deduction from generally stated principles “fails to do justice to the interrelation between stories that form our lives and the prohibitions and positive commitments we think correlative of those stories.” Scripture is our most fundamental Christian authority, and “the community discovers what in fact its commitments entail” through the stories that it tells. 

Stories of soldiers in the Bible provide precedent for Christian behavior. As paradigms, “their lives imaginatively challenge our own so that we may learn how to embody the virtues which determined not only what they did but how they did it.” This need not worry pacifists if we adequately assess those paradigms or precedents that are either novel or prohibitive; in other words we do not need to say that all soldiers are to be imitated because not all soldiers in scripture provide positive models of behavior. But some soldiers do precisely that, like the Centurion of Great Faith or Cornelius. 

These cases remind us that it cannot be said for certain that soldiers in scripture are inherently negative paradigms. The very fact that two esteemed theologians cannot agree over the ambiguity of scripture on this point is noteworthy. Biggar’s assertion that soldiers seem to inhabit “a social role that [the New Testament] takes entirely for granted” remains valid, and more must be done to diagnose the nature of being a soldier without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Because the New Testament seems either unwilling or unable to make a decisive stance for or against soldiers, there is good reason to read the soldier narratives as complicated and multifaceted. There are good and bad examples in the text and theological ethicists are duty bound to exercise due care in differentiating between the two even if scripture leaves room for some disagreement. The conversation the New Testament starts about Christian soldiering is still alive and well, as their exchange makes clear, which is promising. Hauerwas reminds us “it is through the conversation that the community maintains a faithfulness to the narrative.”

It is therefore of crucial importance that the Church properly define the morally relevant distinctions operative for political theologies. Because casuistry and ethics are determined by narrative for Hauerwas and Hays, immorality is defined in terms of community self-identification rather than rules or outcomes. Each recognize that “the abstraction of ‘decisions’ or ‘acts’ into ‘case studies’ … fails to deal with the most essential aspect of any decision, namely its narrative context.” 

Hauerwas does not use the legalizing language of precedent but he does recognize the significance of naming stories as cautionary rather than exemplary; “negative prohibitions of a community... are markers of the outer limits of the communal self understandings [which tell us when we will] no longer be living out the tradition that originally formed us.” Casuistry is helpful in the same way the courts continually revise our American legal self-understanding in the same way narrative does Christian theological self-understanding. 

The outer limit of self-understanding, the morally relevant distinctions operative for Christian theology, is precisely what Biggar and Hays cannot agree on. For Biggar, soldiers fall comfortably within such limits but for Hays they do not. Narrative helps us frame scripture in morally compelling ways such that if scripture makes certain claims about soldiers of the first century then those claims are compulsory for us as well. Casuistry can then pick up the baton from there and give us seemingly similar cases in our era separated by time but not so much by context. This is why Biggar and Hays each attach to ‘sword-wielding;’ it is a stand in for whatever that thing is which is timeless and common for soldiers qua soldiers. But the assumption that violence is an explicit or formal characteristic essential to soldiers has been shown to be suspect. 

This will explain the important inter-relationship between exegesis and hermeneutics; without one, the other suffers. Exegesis is meaningless without sound hermeneutics and hermeneutics must rely on sound exegesis if it is to be morally compelling across time. Likewise, casuistry without narrative can be legalistic, whereas narrative without casuistry is essentially entertainment.  We need a mentality of both/and not either/or, a restrictive casuistry and an inclusive narration of Christian soldiering. 

Restrictive casuistry as precedent

Although soldiers are known to perform incredible acts of charity, it is also true that soldiers have done horrible evil in the exercise of their duty. This is true both in scripture and in the life of the Church from the second century onward. If not all stories are exemplary, then some are cautionary. Ethicists must be able to carefully distinguish between cases that are positive paradigms to be followed, and which are negative paradigms to be condemned. Our moral diagnoses must cut more sharply amongst combatants rather than simply between soldiers and civilians more generally. A more restrictive framework will help us differentiate between direct guilt that requires absolution on the one hand and indirect responsibility that needs repentance more broadly. The moral questions I faced as an artilleryman were different from those of a cook or a combat medic, and they assume important moral distinctions. Because both Biggar and Hays are Protestant theologians, they do not benefit from the moral taxonomies of other communions and this impairs their ability to differentiate between types of soldiers, instead often referring to “soldiers” generically in ways that disrupt rather than enhance moral discernment. Let us turn briefly to the important distinctions in order to help differentiate between types of combatants rather then continuing to rely upon a dangerously broad distinction between soldiers and civilians. 

Sin and sniping

Sin lies behind much of the debate between Biggar and Hays. Biggar tries to claim that justified violence is not sinful. This is central to his claim about types of violence. Soldiers, insofar as they are resentful and dispassionate, are abiding by the Pauline injunction to “be angry but do not sin” because “there is a form of anger that is not sinful.” His terminology is confusing because anger is what he uses to describe sinful violence and resentment is his term for justified violence. Nonetheless, Biggar has necessarily implied certain types of violence are scripturally tolerable and are therefore not sinful. Resentment is applied to martial violence in general, and maybe that is true in an ideal war, but the reality of war I witnessed over fourteen months in 2004 was marked more by passionate and indiscriminate violence fueled by a great many passions. What accounts for this difference? Biggar’s version of JWT falls under Aristotelian episteme, theoretical knowledge concerned with principles that are idealized and atemporal. Episteme is theoretical and scientific, which Aristotle contrasts with phronesis, or practical wisdom, concerned with particularities that are concrete and temporal and which encompasses all ethical inquiry. Episteme might exist in theory, but not in reality. 

The problem of modern JWT is that it uses scientific approaches to come to practical solutions. But science as Aristotle saw it only spoke of perfect forms that do not actually exist in nature. When we think and speak about circles, we refer in our minds to its perfect form, but nature cannot actually produce one. Likewise, a “just” war might be a stand in for epistemic ‘perfection,’ produced not by practical wisdom (which Biggar claims to have via his “own experience”) but by scientific knowledge. The universalizing instinct in modern political theorists abuses casuistry by relying on general but unattainable principles derived from logic instead of maxims drawn directly from experience. After all, Biggar has no first hand experience of war from which to draw his conclusions, so he must rely on reason rather than experience. Jonsen and Toulmin identify part of the problem of abusive of casuistry in public discourse as principles becoming “unqualified and unconditional,” meaning they are unquestioned. But we must question whether principles derived from logic, when they contradict embodied experience, retain any authority or credibility. Rather then taking a politician or theologian’s word that a war is just, we will know it by the stories shared by soldiers. 

What does this have to do with sin? Theory forces us toward absolutes like perfection or imperfection, and its use in public discourse too quickly sets up false dichotomies and zero sum games. Our point has been to insist that the distinction between soldier and civilian is too simplistic and unrealistic. It might be okay in theory but it does not pan out in reality. The reality of sins, at least in combat, is that it exists in types, which Paul recognized and which in the Roman Catholic Church is broken down “according to their gravity” into either mortal or venial types. Different types of sin called for penances based on the particular kinds of sins committed, which Bernard Verkamp expertly outlines but which escapes the notice of most JWT defenders. If sin is fundamentally atypical, then there is no moral distinction between the sniper who pulls the trigger, the spotter who assists him, the politician who voted for the war, or the civilian funding it by taxation. But this was not the view of the Church for the first thousand years. It is a convenient innovation that eases the conscience of civilians to the detriment of soldiers. To get soldiers off the hook, realists like Biggar will often push the occurrence of sin into even darker territory, into the unknown internal disposition of individual soldiers. But this too conveniences rather than convicts people’s hearts, eases rather than governs people’s consciences. 

Internal dispositions vs. external evidence

With Augustine, Biggar highlights the internal motivations for killing and attaches moral significance to them. Unlike Biggar, Augustine acknowledges the morally destructive nature of war in Book XIX, chapter seven of City of God, writing “a man who experiences such evils, or even thinks about them, without heartfelt grief, is assuredly in a far more pitiable condition, if he thinks himself happy simply because he has lost all human feeling” The feelings that produce and result from martial violence have been misappropriated if they are inverted to justify deeds which leave a moral scar. Even if I am wrong, it is unclear from Biggar how ethicists might judge between touchy impassioned anger and dispassionate justified resentment. In the lack of a reliable method to ascertain internal motivations and therefore differentiate between types of violence and the attachment of guilt, theologians like Augustine often turned to more practical concerns. 

If Phillip Wynn is correct that when Augustine writes about war he is reflective of early Christian literature in being “overwhelmingly pastoral” rather than systematic, then a more proper way to interpret JWT is as a pastoral response to combat stress. Wynn observes, “detached and theological rumination “ in the first millennium “is never found applied to war.” For the first thousand years, when Christians thought and taught about war, it was not to justify it but to reintegrate its practitioners back into the fold because combatants had sinned. Rather than focus too heavily on the emotions that might have led them to act in certain ways, liturgical consequences were based on actions they had performed. 

Canon and penance

Unfortunately, the prevailing use of JWT moves us no closer to a martial hermeneutic because, if Biggar is any indication, it is morally permissive for soldiers, policy makers, and heads of state. JWT can be boiled down to nothing more than what Dan Bell calls “a Public Policy Checklist.” In fact, the earliest frameworks used by the church to understand war and soldiering were manuals for priests listening to soldiers returning from battle. 

Irish clergy produced penitentials in the fifth century that combined ethical imperatives from scriptural and patristic literature in order to advise those who desired to confess their sins. Penitentials provided specific prescriptions for absolution from sin and therefore reintegration into the community of faith. For several hundred years, these crudely constructed penitentials ruled the day in terms of an extra-biblical moral canon which were “written to guide clergy and faithful in” confession and repentance. Theodore of Tarsus, the late seventh century Archbishop of Canterbury, appears to be the first who “began applying such penances also to killing in war.” 

Penitentials were the earliest type of confessional books, which Jonsen and Toulmin claim were precursors to later Summas which provided a kind of script for all kinds of casuists, including “priests and ministers, psychologists and agony columnists” Whereas the earliest penitentials were a kind of “primitive casuistry” leveraged for the spiritual wellbeing of individuals morally proscribed from the community of faith by nature of their misdeeds, Summas were the logical progression of the genre and reflected the influence of speculative theology. By the time Aquinas began writing his own Summa, theologians had already perfected the use of cases to build a pastoral framework for use by clergy engaged in receiving confession. If JWT has been made a system, it exists as “the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one.”

Although the canon law may seem rigid and formulaic, Jonsen and Toulmin emphasize that the genre arose “not as a rational system, but as the accretion of many particular solutions.” In other words, canon law rose from the bottom up, it did not trickle from the top down. Like the canons, casuistry is an accumulation of particular instances that produces a precedent, a kind of moral shorthand to use as a guide for subsequent cases. Insofar as JWT presents itself as a “rational system” deduced from logical propositions, then it has not arisen from the embodied reality of life in combat. Rather we must begin with the particular cases as they exist in reality or as they are presented to use in scripture. 

New Testament soldiers as precedent

In terms of the New Testament soldiers, a restrictive casuistry helps us differentiate between good soldiers and bad soldiers if it prioritizes the particularity of each case rather than assume a universal principle is operative. To determine precedent from the texts, we have to differentiate between positive models and negative models. In the absence of descriptions of internal disposition, we will have to interpret their actions in the context of the story. Actions are more helpful for casuistry because they can be subjected to rational deliberation, whereas internal disposition is hidden and immeasurable. Besides, “All deeds are right in the sight of the doer, but the Lord weighs the heart.”

By calling for overtly quantifiable criteria for moral conduct we can distinguish between the soldiers gambling for Jesus’s clothes from the centurion of great faith. The former case would be cautionary because mockery, though widely tolerated in military culture, neither promotes characteristics integral to and valued by the community nor is it formally allowed in regulatory literature. In other words, when another member of my platoon punched a handcuffed civilian police officer in Iraq, we all watched but we were all wrong. We were not being soldiers, we were being hooligans. On the other hand the centurion of great faith is exemplary not because he happens to be in the military, but because of the particular significance his actions intimate. He represents a positive paradigm because of his humility, which is magnified by his venerated Roman status as soldier. In other words, his being a soldier makes his humility stand out even more because it is so unexpected and alarming. 

Paradigm cases or positive precedents are those that are generally reflective of the qualities the community desires to promote and therefor commensurate with what it will mean for a soldier to act qua soldier. We have already outlined the function of American soldiers, for example, as primarily defensive in nature and only being aggressive in the final of four formal functions as they are enshrined in US Title Code. This function and purpose, even if it is broadly construed or anachronistically characterized as “sword-wielding,” only includes acts that defend borders or civilize the provinces (for example). Actions that work against socially sanctioned function and approval would constitute negative precedents. A maxim that helps me illustrate my point would be “do not kick a man while he is down.” A man on death row is already ‘down,’ and it is simply excessive to make his plight even worse by public insult. The soldiers who mock Jesus would therefore be a negative precedent, a cautionary tale for all soldiers to look at as counseling against.  

Novel cases are more difficult to interpret and easily integrate into communal self-understanding. Biggar refers to “novel cases” in contrast to type cases, or positive paradigms. Novel cases are those “that do not readily fit the rules that are to hand” It is not that novel cases are necessarily negative or cautionary; they stand out from the norm and are challenging to categorize. For American or British interpreters, examples for a novel case of Christian soldiering would be those soldiers who were well within their authorized duty in crucifying Jesus. These cases are novel because of the tensions they force us to consider in terms of nationality and Christianity. The tension can be put this way; if dutiful soldiering is generally okay, the case of obediently executing an innocent man presents a problem. Perhaps slapping and mockery were excessive, but nailing his hands and feet to the cross was in fact precisely what public order called for. I will not conjecture here as to the moral weight of their deeds, I only mention their case to highlight that there are distinct types of cases within the text and within the martial community in question. Rather than remaining at the level of soldier versus civilian as the morally relevant distinction, my claim is that there must be even greater specificity and distinction in theological ethics if we are to move toward consensus. 

For a robust martial hermeneutic, casuistry provides important and historically credible tools for building theological consensus on Christian soldiering. Theologians therefore must dig deeper into scripture as well as our cultural context in order to arrive at more credible distinctions about the nature of soldiering as it is understood communally for the Christian community. We must be able to identify in the texts those cases that will be instructive precedents after which we may model our actions and reasoning alike. We must also be able to identify and wrestle with those novel cases that are hard to categorize and therefore translate either as cautionary or exemplary, recognizing there will be differences in interpretation. Those differences will be far fewer if we can move the morally relevant distinction, the “boundary for communal self understanding,” closer to individual combatants and therefore particular cases. Rather than granting either a generic moral prohibition or blanket approval to soldiering, the Christian community can and must allow the particularity of embodied military experience to determine our martial theologies, not the other way around. After all, my own experience suggests that those cases that can credibly be deemed negative are fewer than pacifists often admit and more than realists will attest. 

Inclusive narrative as paradigm

An inclusive narration exemplifies the essence of the catholic Church, which is invisible and transcends denominational affiliations. Hays must expand his definition of We and his narration of Christian soldiers because the community that is carried by the story of God includes them as members by baptism. If it is that the soldiers of the New Testament leave questions unanswered, then we must recognize that, we have perhaps hundreds more at our disposal to illuminate the paradigm for faith that soldiering might provide. A martial hermeneutic requires both a catholic We and a catholic canon, a tradition that is both textual and oral and which does not push soldiers to the margins. 

A catholic We

For Hays, “we” is restrictive when it should be permissive. In the same way his interpretation pits Catholic and Orthodox understandings of “tradition” in stark contrast to his own understanding, he sees soldiers in stark contrast to lives that more clearly evidence the marks of saintliness to which he is accustomed as an ordained United Methodist minister. His narration is far too either/or for it to work ecumenically, noteworthy because by corresponding across the Atlantic to a minister in the Church of England, it is clear he is not writing within his own Methodist fold. Their exchange transcends denominational borders and relies on language and stories that predate both the Methodist Church and the Church of England. The Christian community that gave birth to the conversation they have jumped into is wider and deeper and more diverse then the kind of language either of them suggests. 

The Christian We is inclusive; it is always in the first person, not the third person. Hays gives us no reason or method to surmise that some baptized Christians are We while others (such as Christian soldiers) are They. He makes a fascinating case that the New Testament may possess that worldview, but it is not clear that the authors have their mind made up either since they include stories of soldiers that both venerate and vilify. The text itself is multivocal and diverse, and the paradigm for a credible martial hermeneutic should be as well. 

If the condition for ecclesial membership is baptism, then Cornelius is part of the ecclesial We, but Hays seems hesitant to treat his narrative as a clear positive paradigm; he is only one of “two centurions who do not fit the ‘notorious sinner’ profile” who Hays goes on to point out has done something that “necessitated repentance.” By Hays’s account, Cornelius does not constitute a moral model. By stating unequivocally that Cornelius is a minority report from the martial community, he makes the very mistake he cautions his readers against, of “explaining away the tension.” Instead of sitting with the ambiguity that soldiers in scripture are complex characters, he essentially flattens their story into binary terms that align more easily with the story he sees being told. Besides the obvious problem this raises with his encouragement about remaining in tension, it also begs the question of whether the Bible is the only canon to which Christians might turn to better comprehend the paradigm of Christian soldiers.  

A catholic canon

If it is true that “We find our identity and our moral vocation as the people of God within the story of Jesus Christ,” then it is the theologian’s duty to situate that story within the 2000 years that story has been unfolding. If tradition is one of the four pillars of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, then Hays is not excused from reading the canon with catholicity in mind. For the universal Church, the meanings of canon, tradition, and the Body of Christ as radically expansive. Canon means “list” or “rule” and, used by Catholic and Anglican communions, implies both the texts incorporated into our sacred scriptures as well as the catalogue of saints and holy people who have witnessed to God’s story of salvation history. 

This same canonical tradition maintains Longinus’ story. Whether it is historically valid or not is an important question, but historicity is only one of several factors informing canonization. The story of saints’ lives and deaths were often embellished, “idealized and oversimplified,” but that is precisely why they are so valuable. Hagiographic literature is important not for how it reveals the way things actually were, but of the way the author believes things should have been, “according to the hagiographer’s ideology and worldview.” Longinus may or may not have existed, and the text is ambiguous as to whether it is one person or two, but his story being preserved in a particular way gives us insight into the paradigm for faith he provided the community that venerated him. Hays and Biggar are each member of this community, unless they trace Methodist or Anglican apostolic succession earlier than 586, which would be difficult. 586 CE is the most reliable dating for the Rabbula Gospels, the oldest illuminated manuscripts of the canonical gospels. It is noteworthy because its crucifixion scene not only depicts but also names the soldier in question. 

This establishes Longinus’ cult prior to the Church of England’s claims about their apostolic succession dating to Augustine of Canterbury, who was not established on the British Isles until 597. Before 597, there could not have been a distinction between what eventually would call itself the Church of England (or its derivative Wesleyan denominations, of which Hays is a member). In other words, even if Biggar and Hays wanted to make a distinction between the Catholic canon and their own, it would not hold water. Longinus belongs to their canon as much as he does to that of the Roman Catholic or Orthodox traditions. Besides, canon does not end with Revelation; the canon includes people, not just words. Longinus’ “dramatic reversal” is precisely the reason that he is a model for Christian discipleship for “while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” What greater enemy than one’s own executioner? What greater reconciliation than with the man who killed him? 

Conclusion(s)

I have tried to show in this study that although Hays’s and Biggar’s prescriptions and methodology are sound, they do not employ them adequately. They argue past one another, never succeeding at getting their claims to intersect. The specificity and narration they call for in their title essays remains unattained because they each fail to critically engage with the embodied reality of combat as instructive for hermeneutical principles to which they adhere. Biggar is clearly influenced by casuistry, but fails to see how his political commitments override his ability assess those cases when soldiers have compromised their moral standing. The energy he expends arguing for a typology of violence might be better spent interrogating the nature of soldiering and its complex theological history. Hays displays profound exegetical skill but his pacifism seems to override sound reason such that he feels compelled to judge positive paradigms as morally compromised. The stretches his point so far that his he is forced to selectively arbitrate terms of ecclesiological membership in highly dubious fashion. In the midst of their unresolved debate, Christian veterans like Jason are left to fend for themselves in the post-combat moral landscape. The divergence of views evidenced by Biggar and Hays at the close of their discourse is disheartening, to say the least. 

To increase the likelihood of theological consensus, I have proposed that the Church can move toward a particularly martial hermeneutic by taking more seriously those methods prescribed by Biggar and Hays, but with some key adjustments. Casuistry is important if we are to look to the New Testament soldiers as precedents, as they have done by emphasizing their narratives. However, we must move the morally relevant distinction much closer to the act of killing. If we are to get any closer to answering the question of killing, then we need to have a distinction not broad, as between soldier and civilian, but narrow, as between a sniper and his spotter or other indirect participants. After all, the boundaries of communal self-understanding for the Christian church include a great many soldiers who, like Cornelius and the soldiers at the River Jordan, were never instructed to depart their military profession. If we are to make sense of the canonization of saints like Joan of Arc, who never left the military, or Ignatius of Loyola, who only left due to an injury, we will need to think much more critically about the act of killing itself. When we do, we will have a more inclusive narration of the soldier saints that are a part of our canon. We will find soldier speaking to us during the liturgy, as before the priest consumes the Eucharist in Catholic mass, the whole congregation proclaims with the Centurion of Great Faith; I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” We will notice that Joan of Arc is more saint than soldier, having preferred to be a guidon bearer over being a sword-wielder. 

Constructive work to show what a martial hermeneutic is capable of could not be attempted in the space allowed, though it would be a paper all its own. It would have to marshal the resources of a wide range of disciplines, from Church history to political theology and hagiography to moral philosophy. It would differentiate between types of soldiers rather than types of violence and would hold in tension the ambiguity of the novel cases such as those soldiers who were performing their duties in crucifying Jesus but clearly distinguish between positive paradigms like Cornelius and negative paradigms like the unnamed soldiers who struck, spit upon, and mocked a condemned man. Such a hermeneutic would get the Church closer to the question of killing because it would arise from those whose tragic experience allows them to speak credibly to the subject at hand. 

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Jason did not end up enrolling in a masters program, unfortunately. His story is not over yet though, and I am encouraged each time I see him. He has not returned to the story he shared with me three years ago, which makes me wonder if he has found ways to tell other people he trusts as well. The Church is where joys are multiplied and grief is divided, after all. As more Christians take up the question of killing with those for whom it is neither hypothetical nor rhetorical, his story, and others like it, will be shared and the burden will slowly be lifted because others will carry it alongside him. 

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