In Killing from the Inside Out, Robert Meagher gives a rather startling and formidable biography (or rather an extended obituary) of philosophical and textual reflections that have come to be called the “Just War Tradition” (JWT). I had the privilege of previewing the book, and I cannot understate its value in the ongoing debate between realism and pacifism in Christian scholarship. However, I am in the unenviable position of having to qualify how I can speak so enthusiastically about the work while fundamentally disagreeing with its premise, that JWT be “torn up from its roots.” Since having read and endorsed the book, Phillip Wynn released his Augustine on War and Military Service, driving the final nail into the coffin of our attempts to leverage the bishop in service to imperial violence. That Augustine never intended to outline a coherent Christian account of war is clear not only from the lack of any robust treatment in any of his many and diverse systematic works, but in the epistolary form in which he did engage the issue. He writes most directly on the subject of war in his letters to generals Marcellinus and especially Boniface. In fact, Augustine’s dedication of City of God to the former should clue us in to the importance of a martial hermeneutic to inform not just pastoral theology, but systematics as well. I fear the instinct to jettison wholesale the admittedly problematic JWT risks robbing the church of valuable theological reflection.

As a member of the martial fraternity to which Augustine wrote, I am reluctant to endorse Meagher’s claim that the church must unequivocally reject JWT, “to pull up, from its roots, the just war tradition” (xx). Rather I propose that to treat it systematically is to commit a category mistake, to treat it in a way it was never intended. As an alternative, I suggest that Christians take it for what it might be worth, as a pastoral framework for use by clergy engaged in ministry with soldiers and veterans. Instead of trying to make the tradition a system, we need to be attentive to particularities; those in which it arose and those for which it may (or may not) be useful. Rather than remaining at the level of abstractions and universals with systematicians, ministers would do well to more carefully prune the JWT, rather than throwing the seeds out with the grey water. We must keep in mind that the (perhaps sour) fruit might not be the part God has given us for our use, but the branches that can carry the weight of those lives touched by war.

If it is true that more of Augustine’s reflections on war are epistolary rather than systematic, then a more proper way to interpret JWT is as a pastoral response to combat stress.1 William Portier addresses Augustine and the topic of “sorrow of soul” in an unpublished conference paper from 2011.2 Citing book XIX, chapter 7 of The City of God, Portier suggests animi dolore should have a more religious connotation than its somewhat secular rendition, which Henry Bettenson translates as “heartfelt grief.” By the time Augustine has composed the final four books in 427, he has already corresponded with several Christian soldiers and is unequivocal in his diagnosis that war is inherently damaging to the soul. He writes, “A man who experiences such evils, or even thinks about them, without [sorrow of soul], is assuredly in a far more pitiable condition, if he thinks himself happy simply because he has lost all human feeling.”3

Augustine’s correspondence with the African general Boniface is exemplary in this regard, spanning at least two years and predating City of God be nearly a decade. His second letter to the Roman general is notably shorter and more concise then his earliest letter, in which Augustine had written a lengthy and sweeping refutation against Donatism.4 Augustine writes again in 418, telling the general “even your bodily strength is a gift of God; for, considering this, you will not employ the gift of God against God,”5 revealing the career soldier’s concern that war might not fit with his religion. Based on the high rank he has gained, it is a safe assumption that Boniface has used no shortage of strength against enemies he has learned that Jesus called him to love. Tragically, Augustine’s zeal to oppose Christian heresy has blinded him to the very simple (but likely) central thesis of Boniface’s initial correspondence in 416; “Father Augustine, I know not what I do; help me understand who and what I am as a Christian soldier.”

Although a stretch, it is worth considering the extent to which Boniface was thinking about becoming a repentant pacifist. Many years later, the same in which Augustine is finishing his major work, they resume their epistolary relationship. We learn that, in the eleven intervening years since their last exchange, Boniface had asked about becoming a monk, still a radical movement away from civilization often undertaken by penitents fleeing the vicious excesses of urban life. Augustine disapproves not because Boniface had martial obligations as a high-ranking general, but because he had conjugal duties to his wife.6 A smart man, Augustine learns as he goes, being attentive to circumstances he might not understand, and responding to particularities articulated by a member of his congregation.

Without knowing Greek, he may not have even been aware of pacifism’s vehement Greek apologists, Tertullian and Origen. If he was, he may have sensed that their condemnation of the martial vocation might be too severe for a priest to offer a penitent, especially since the earlier situation, in which Christians were formally prohibited from the military, was no more. After all, it would be nearly seven centuries before Christendom would justify violence wholesale, as Pope Urban II did in triggering the crusades in 1096. There was not as much need for a pastor to prescribe the kinds of liturgical expressions recorded by the penitentials, the equivalent to voluntary temporary excommunication, the likes of which Bernard Verkamp describes in The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times.

Having been provided a Roman education, surely Boniface would have been intimately familiar with Cicero, the pagan jurist. Roland Bainton makes clear in Christian Attitudes to War and Peace that Cicero’s De Officiis borrowed the idea of a just war from Aristotle, “who had said that a just war is one waged to enslave those who by nature are destined to be slaves and who resist their destiny.”7 Ambrose of Milan, Augustine’s mentor, then adapted Cicero’s title for his own treatise directed at pastors, De Officiis Ministorum, so it is not inconceivable that the pair saw their duty to soldiers in particularly pastoral terms. It might very well be that he uses Cicero to establish trust with a wounded warrior in the same way Meagher or I might rely on Karl Marlantes or Jonathan Shay in our own day. Their not being Christian would prevent us from calling it theology per se, but the effect of their writings nonetheless have proven fruitful for many veterans, Christian or not.

War is not primarily a systematic problem for the church, but one having everything to do with pastoral responsibility to individual human lives. As a priest, Augustine responds reassuringly in a way that evokes Tyler Boudreaux’s notion of “dispossession” in Packing Inferno. Though it makes more sense in relation to survivor’s guilt, in which a soldier feels guilt for something over which they had no control, dispossession can also be applicable sacramentally. In Augustine’s letters to Boniface, it is clear they both are grappling with how to make sense of Christian duties in light of our faith: Was the force disproportionately evil? Were noncombatants targeted? Was violence resorted to in haste? If the answer to these are no, then individual soldiers might feel some moral relief. Just as Ambrose and Augustine before us, we can find something of value in a pagan epistemic structure, not theology in the proper sense, but pastoral nonetheless.

But Meagher and other pacifists do not see JWT in this way. Many wish, with him, to “tear it up from its roots,” to throw out the entire tree. But there is constructive value to JWT, and pacifists are mistaken if they think they are somehow signing off on war by leveraging the pastoral value of a martial hermeneutic. Augustine responded to a person in crisis by establishing a starting point that each could identify with, thereby establishing trust, which is precisely why Meagher’s careful attention to the experience of soldiers is important. It is in his ministering with them that he comes face to face with the fact that war is not something veterans can teach to civilians, for to know war one must endure it.

His point is crucial, then, that the fact that Augustine “himself never served in the military nor shed blood is not enough to excuse him from learning something from those who did” (80). Augustine’s failure to pay close attention to the numerous biographical passions and vitas of soldier saints and military martyrs is a gaping hole in the great doctor’s theology. But it is also often a gap in the theology of many prominent theologians as well. Just as Augustine should have taken more cues from the likes of Martin of Tours, Victricius of Rouen, Marcellus of Tangiers, and others, so too should today’s theologians and ministers steep themselves in the literature of war shared by Christian soldiers.

Writing off JWT in the way most pacifists do assumes they can accurately identify the roots of war, but I am not sure they have. Clerics, like Meagher and many other faculty going through seminary during the Vietnam War, were made exempt from conscription. Without condescending their civilian status, it is critical to articulate what is lost by theologians’ epistemic privation from war. The tired old joke is a stinging critique of those who would preach against practices of which they have no fundamental knowledge: How many veterans does it take to screw in a light bulb? You don’t know, you weren’t there!

Pacifist theologians or ministers face an uphill battle in either vilifying or venerating people for engaging in activity of which they have no firsthand knowledge. Soldiers know pacifists cannot know the lessons learned in war, and have no reason to trust (otherwise valid and needed) condemnations by those who have not been. In order for theology to gain any traction against war, or for salvific reintegration to occur thereafter, ministers must establish trust, which is what Augustine does with Boniface over a series of letters spanning several years. From there, the more complicated moral surgery of parsing out the beauty from the tragedy in combat can occur.

To disregard the contribution Augustine and others made to martial theology and personnel does the Church a disservice. More importantly, there is something soldiers, and war more broadly, can teach the Church. Meagher certainly knows this well, working as he has with veterans for many years now. He knows what he does not know and has taken war seriously at least insofar as he has taken veterans seriously, for the terrible wisdom they bring home from war provides a needed and prophetic critique of the tendency of nations to go to war. But without some kind of structure in place to hold the burdens they carry, we invite disaster.

The knowledge I bear as a veteran makes clear that there is far more complexity to war than what initially meets the eye. If that is the case, then before we start tearing up JWT, we actually need to keep digging. Even if it is only so that we can be sure we trace each and every one of its roots so that they too may be thrown into “the unquenchable fire.”8 But until we get to the bottom of this thing we call war, I worry our reckless uprooting will only till the soil, making it fertile ground for ever more evil to emerge from the Church’s disassociation with the knowledge of war carried home by our soldiers and veterans.

Rather than throwing it out with the bathwater of violence, I want to take JWT for what it really is. Evacuating all serious theological engagement from the moral reality of war carries with it the unwanted and unwelcome corollary of evacuating a good bit of Augustine’s very valuable work. Throwing out JWT would make the work of those who have worked to take war seriously, like Hauerwas or Yoder, a fool’s errand. But their point in engaging it is one I share—taking war seriously as a political and moral act requires we do so as theologians and disciples, not merely as pacifists. It requires that we get to the bottom of this thing we call war without bulldozing through the lives by which war gains any coherency, human beings that even Augustine knew harbored inestimable sorrow of soul. In the midst of the epidemic of suicide in the military community, the last thing we need is a bull in a china shop. We need careful ministers, theologians of grace, who can traverse the journey home from war with us. That trek requires a structure that JWT provides in this messy interim while we wait for war to end.

As a theological ethicist who for the past year or so has been thinking and writing about just war and the phenomenon of moral injury experienced by military personnel following their deployment in combat zones, I eagerly anticipated the publication of Robert Emmet Meagher’s Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War. Moral injury definitely is a timely and significant issue about which the book makes a helpful contribution in addressing. Moreover, Meagher is a wonderful writer, masterful with a turn of phrase, and accessible while erudite with his command of a literature not often considered in just war circles. From Sophocles to Girard, Homer to Freud, Tertullian to Camus, the pages are rich and provocative with insights gleaned from poets and philosophers, novelists and theologians, sinners and saints. Most importantly, he has tried, as he encourages others to do, to listen to those who have been to war, who have killed others, who have lost fellow warriors and friends, and who have witnessed terrible things. Their experience inspired and to some extent informed Meagher’s book, and rightly so. Indeed, I found it difficult to put Killing from the Inside Out down, and given how much underlining I did, the non-underlined sentences now stand out on each page more.

In the end, however, although I am in agreement with some of Meagher’s project, especially with regard to moral injury, I think his account of the just war tradition—and, in particular, his major criticism of it—is problematic. That is, while Meagher covers a lot of ground historically, his reading of it is deficient with regard to recent just war scholarship. In addition, rather than criticizing the just war tradition and indicting it for the phenomenon of moral injury, I think the just war tradition, rightly understood and practiced, instead might not be part of the problem but possibly part of the solution to it.

Before delving into that, though, I want to highlight again the need for the sort of attention Meagher attempts to offer to the issue of moral injury that returning warriors are experiencing. First and foremost, his book contributes to a discussion about moral injury that Christians should be already having, but aren’t—at least not enough. To date, moral injury has been addressed mostly in psychological and cognitive rather than theological or philosophical terms. It has been treated clinically and therapeutically instead of pastorally and spiritually. Of course, these former perspectives and approaches are necessary, but they are insufficient without the latter. As Meagher notes early on, “The ranks of secular caregivers attending to those suffering from invisible wounds are filled by therapists and counselors with one or other cluster of qualifying letters after their names . . . [and when] veterans, even those not previously or particularly religious, report that their souls are dead or that they have lost their humanity and want it back, many MDs and PhDs on the frontlines of veteran care rightly wonder why they are the ones to be hearing this” (3). This is a crucial point. Unfortunately, although Meagher rightly correlates moral injury with the shame or guilt—or pollution—that warriors feel from combat, I think he could have devoted less of his effort to critiquing the just war tradition and more instead towards addressing this problem.

Fortunately, others are now helpfully developing this point. Indeed, the phenomenon of moral injury has been reductionistically medicalized, as Erica Ann Jeschke’s recently defended dissertation, “The Body Beatific: Total Force Fitness and Social Reintegration/Rehabilitation of America’s Warriors” (PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 2015), persuasively shows. Like Meagher, she listened—though, unlike him, she did so through hours and hours of interviews—to a score of combat veterans share about their difficulties in reintegrating into civilian life. She, too, found that an overemphasis on the cognitive fails to capture what these warriors are experiencing—that, instead, there is something more holistic involved, and she calls for the retrieval of embodied practices to help in the process of reintegration.

Similarly, Duke psychologist and moral theologian Warren Kinghorn notes this reductionism of the medical model and how it does not allow therapists “to speak about these phenomena in anything other than psychological and cognitive terms” (66).1 For them, morality is not something that is deeper than, or that transcends, the psychological, cognitive, or emotional. Like Jeschke, Kinghorn suggests that moral injury refers to “something that modern clinical disciplines structurally cannot provide, something like a moral theology, embodied in specific communities with specific contextually formed practices” (59).

And like Jeschke and Kinghorn, Mark A. Wilson is also critical of “the hegemony of the therapeutic model” which obscures the place of virtues and practices for healing and reintegration (66).2 He calls for the virtue of “moral grief” as an “active response” to address moral injury. According to Wilson, “Where many therapies, especially pharmaceutical ones, seek to neutralize the experience of psycho-emotional suffering, the present account of moral grief contends that it would be the absence, not presence, of lamentation that should be our concern” (66). Here Wilson articulates well my own sense that the phenomenon of moral injury is today’s way of naming what Augustine referred to as the mournfulness that just warriors should experience. Indeed, I am more bothered if returning warriors don’t exhibit such mournfulness—which also brings me to Meagher’s problematic narrative regarding just war. Much has been happening in just war theory in recent decades, including a retrieval of its theological dimensions within the Christian tradition.

Daniel M. Bell Jr., for example, reframes just war as a form of Christian discipleship, and he identifies virtues and practices that are necessary if Christians are truly serious about fighting justly and only in just wars.3 In his narrative of the just war tradition, Bell notes how it became less theological and more secular in recent centuries, focusing less on virtues and practices, more on principles as a sort of cognitive or public policy checklist. The secularization of just war thereby makes it more susceptible to being abused as a cover by governing authorities who “justify” wars of national self-interest, at best, or imperialism, at worst. Just war no longer has “teeth.” Of course, Meagher might counter that it has always been toothless, but I disagree.

Another development in just war thought is recent attention to postwar justice, i.e., jus post bellum. Louis Iasiello, a retired admiral and a US Navy chaplain, stresses the need for social rehabilitation as a component of post bellum ethics. In addition to the need for social rehabilitation and restoration for children, the elderly, the sick, refugees, and others affected by war, especially the weakest and most vulnerable, Iasiello highlights the imperative to reintegrate soldiers back into society after war. He writes:

Combatants are not amoral agents or machines. . . . Warriors are persons—they are body-mind-spirit. They are complex moral agents who must live and fight within the context of military protocol and duty. . . . While warriors submit to the authority of their superiors, they never submit so completely that they surrender or forfeit their moral personhood. . . . Warriors are soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen who must kill when legally ordered to do so, but must live with those decisions the rest of their lives. (45)4

Iasiello’s point about the personhood and moral agency of warriors echoes the above authors, and it resonates with Wilson’s observation that “the veteran’s moral injury is not different in kind (though often in degree) from the experience that all moral agents have” (58). For example, divorce may be morally justified, but there is still pain involved, maybe even moral injury, including if one is not at fault, and it is rightly mourned. That was my experience during and following an annulment. Likewise, although I was never in the military (I was in Army ROTC in college, but I didn’t go through with it, because I worried about the possibility of being deployed in an unjust war), I worked for several years in law enforcement, as a corrections officer and a reserve police officer, and I felt mournful even when I performed my duties, including when using force, justly. Thus, after a police officer kills a suspect, that cop normally spends time not on patrol but in another assignment, and he or she usually has access to counseling and a chaplain. This is one of the reasons I initially thought of something similar for just warriors and moral injury.

The returning soldier feels guilt or remorse, even though he may believe that he did the right thing. Or perhaps more so if he has doubts, as may be the case for some soldiers involved in recent wars that lacked moral clarity, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. Just as many draft dodgers in the 1960s were not pacifists, but instinctually felt that that particular war was unjust, so too perhaps many who are experiencing moral injury are doing so due to an unarticulated but reflexive sense of just war. Their “gut” sense that something is wrong, even if they cannot articulate it with just war language, should be respectfully heard. As Admiral Iasiello puts it, warriors “sometimes return from combat with mixed emotions, and oftentimes with a spirit of regret and sadness. . . . Few feel they may now return to life as usual” (41). In his, and my, view the jus ad bellum criterion of right intent entails a post bellum duty to try to promote a just and lasting peace for all involved in and affected by war, including not only the defeated but also the returning victorious soldiers. Iasiello suggests that “humility, regret, and perhaps contrition acknowledge this ambivalence and may actually ease a warrior’s transition to peacetime existence” (ibid.). Such language of virtues and practices brings to mind the church’s ancient practice of requiring penance and other rituals for returning soldiers.

Accordingly, in After the Smoke Clears, my coauthor Mark Allman and I called for social rehabilitation as a component of the restoration phase of jus post bellum, and we highlighted the importance of this for returning warriors.5 Nations should assume the responsibility to assist warriors in their transition back to civilian life once the fighting has ended. And if churches are going to continue to recognize just war as a valid enterprise for their members, they too should provide moral and spiritual assistance for Christian military personnel. In this connection, we suggested the appropriateness of a medieval practice that encouraged soldiers coming home from war to make a retreat in order to repent for the sins of war and to heal from the psychological and spiritual damage inherent in combat. Even a just warrior who fights in a just war experiences, witnesses, or participates in many evils. In the Christian tradition, not all sin is voluntary.6

Indeed, according to Bernard J. Verkamp, in his book The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times, to which Meagher refers on occasion, the “Christian community of the first millennium generally assumed that warriors returning from battle would or should be feeling guilty and ashamed for all the wartime killing they had done” (11).7 In response, rituals were put into practice to provide healing and reconciliation for these soldiers. Depending on the bishop or the penitential, variation existed as to the penances that were imposed, with some stricter than others; nevertheless, all are evidence of an effort to address a perceived need on the part of these soldiers. In general, the appropriate penance corresponded with “the kind of war they had been engaged in, the number of their killings, and the intention with which they had been carried out” (ibid.). For example, in the fourth century, Saint Basil of Caesarea held that although “homicide in war is not reckoned by our Fathers as homicide,” warriors returning from battle should still be made to “abstain from communion for three years.” Centuries later, after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Synod of Norman bishops imposed a set of penances on all soldiers who fought under William the Conqueror: anyone who knowingly killed a man during the battle had to do penance for one year for each person he killed; anyone who wounded a man and did not know whether he died later had to do penance for forty days for each man he struck; anyone who did not know the number of either of these had to do penance for one day each week for the rest of his life; and archers who killed and wounded but, due to distance, did not know how many, had to do penance for three Lents (17, 21–22). For a variety of possible reasons, which Verkamp carefully considers, by the late medieval and Renaissance periods this practice waned, though a few echoes of it lingered as far as the sixteenth century. An important factor he highlights is secularization, and as I noted above, this also occurred in connection with developments in just war theory at that time, when it came to have less to do with moral character and the virtues. Hence, writing two decades ago with Vietnam veterans in mind, Verkamp laments how the “therapeutic” society of the West, with its reductionist concentration on psychological treatment, has lost the “moral sensibility” that is “derived from a uniquely religious teleology” (11–12).

Kinghorn too calls upon Christian communities to revive practices, virtues, rituals that aim at healing and restoration, including for just warriors: “What is notable about them is that they provided a formal, liturgical space and time for veterans to reflect upon, lament, and possibly even to mourn their war-making practices without repudiating their necessity or the necessity of the campaigns of which they were a part” (69). Kinghorn also observes that “moral injury provides an important reminder that attention to the traumatic effects of war on soldiers . . . cannot be separated from more theoretical considerations of war’s moral justifiability” (i.e., jus ad bellum) and how it is fought in bello (63–64).

This is where I think Meagher’s book is flawed. Sure, he refers to Basil and the later penitentials in connection with war (84–85, 104–5). However, instead of calling for a retrieval of such practices in connection with a more theological account of just war, Meagher levels a scathing attack on the just war tradition: “The deceptive and destructive core of the Christian just war doctrine can be stated very simply. It is the claim that wars, or at least some wars, and all the killing and destruction they entail, are—in addition to being necessary—good and right, even virtuous and meritorious, pleasing in the sight of God” (xiv). “War and killing,” Meagher adds, “now blessed, soon became not the lesser of two evils but a positive good” (xv). And, if just war means that it is good, the “haunting question raised and pursued relentlessly in this book is ‘how can there be moral injury in a just war?’ The traditional and mostly unquestioned answer is that there can’t be. The idea that dutiful service to one’s country in a just war can be simply ‘wrong,’ putting at risk one’s humanity and very soul, is blasphemous and unthinkable to nearly everyone except those who have experienced it to be the case” (xvii).

But he seems to be confusing correlation and causation. Plus, instead of trashing just war in its entirety, I place the blame more on a secularized version of just war that is more permissive and less honest in its invocation of the criteria of the tradition. Still, while just war language and principles, admittedly, have more often than not been honored in word more than deed and misused to rationalize war, as the ancients put it, abusus non tollit usum (“because something can be abused does not mean cannot be intelligently used”).8 Moreover, not all just war theory, past or present, regards just war as good. To be sure, there is a debate on this right now in the literature. Some see just war this way, such as Darrell Cole9 and Alexander Webster,10 but most just war ethicists do not and, indeed, they worry about that perspective.11 Like Meagher, they view it as dangerously on the cusp of holy war or crusades, in which there are no rules that constrain the violence against the enemy who is regarded as irredeemably evil. Unlike Meagher (83, 100–101) and perhaps Christians during the Crusades, these just war ethicists do not conflate just war and holy war. These just war ethicists—not only Augustine and Aquinas as Meagher asserts (91, 99, 108)—hold a presumption against war; it is something that requires moral justification for embarking upon it and moral constraints during its execution. He is simply incorrect when he writes, “Regrettably, such a presumption was not their legacy” (108). The US Catholic Bishops are representative of this approach in their 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace, and other denominations, including the United Methodist Bishops in their 1986 pastoral letter, In Defense of Creation, similarly articulated just war theory. Some even continue to say that just war is a “lesser evil” rather than, as the aforementioned Webster attempts to argue, a “lesser good.” In addition, Meagher is outright wrong when he writes “that to this day the Roman Catholic Church, as well as almost every mainline Christian denomination and sect, fails to outspokenly endorse and publically defend selective conscientious objection to war, much less pacifism” (97).

So, with regard to Marine captain Timothy Kudo, Meagher writes, “The fact is that when Kudo enlisted the morality of killing was not on his mind. It was a question he hadn’t yet asked” (xvii). Well, he should have—but I don’t necessarily blame him, for the church should have facilitated his asking such a question, as The Challenge of Peace and In Defense of Creation and other denominational documents meant for Christians to become better informed about just war principles. Still, sadly, most are not. And, as Bell suggests, more is needed than a checklist of principles. Formation is as necessary as information. The same is true, I have argued, in connection with jus post bellum. When Noah Pierce’s mother describes how the military trained and turned her son into a killer, she is right when she says that afterwards he needed to be “un-trained” (5). Still, I would beg to differ from Meagher when he writes that “a great many combat veterans,” including Pierce, “followed all the rules” and, therefore, are not war “criminals” (xviii, 2, 4–5, 141–42). Even if we grant that they may not be criminals legally, the “bad things” that Meagher describes they’ve done, including shooting at point-blank an unarmed man, can indeed be labeled as immoral violations of just war criteria. Even if the nation that sent them to war, the commanding officers who issue their orders, and the citizens who “support” them with applause and accolades do not name such actions as morally wrong, the just war tradition, rightly understood and when instilled and taught in this way by communities such as the church, does regard the intentional and direct targeting of noncombatants as morally unjustified.

In the end, war, including just war, is toxic, and the evils that it entails do something to all involved. No war, like no person (and, if we are honest, probably no marriage), is perfectly just.12 Meagher’s otherwise excellent chapter on “Killing: Moral Agency and Pollution” fails to consider theological literature on nonvoluntary sin. There is more to it than intent and consequences. He rightly refers to “the confusing complexity of human agency and accountability” (41). He is right, I think, when he writes, “Killing may be unwitting, accidental, sanctioned, or forbidden. Either way, there is pollution,” and this requires “purification” through ritual (42). I am not sure about his distinction between “guilt” and “shame,” but he is probably right that these “may well overlap and become entangled” and that “the shame experienced by many veterans today might well be given the diagnosis of ‘pollution’ as the ancients understood it” (45). In my view, it is a just war perspective that, rather than causes this problem, helps to recognize all of this and, hopefully, to mourn and lament it properly.

On Veterans Day 2013, American televangelist and prosperity preacher Kenneth Copeland appeared alongside evangelical activist David Barton on Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast to offer American veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan a biblical elixir for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “If you will do this thing,” Copeland said, loosely quoting Numbers 32:20–22, “if you will go armed before the Lord to war . . . and the land shall be subdued before the Lord, then afterward, you shall return—you’re coming back—and be guiltless before the Lord and before the nation.” Turning to the camera, Copeland stated, with finger pointed for emphasis, “Now, any of you suffering from PTSD, listen to me, you get rid of that right now, you don’t take drugs to get rid of it, it doesn’t take psychology, that promise right there will get rid of it.” Picking up where Copeland left off, Barton added, “Guys who have been through battle, they need to understand . . . you come back guiltless before God and the nation.” Pointing out that many of the figures in the “faith hall of fame” of Hebrews 11:4–38 were warriors, Barton finished with emphasis:

You’re on an elevated platform up here, you’re a hero, you’re put in the faith hall of fame, if you take this thing and move the way . . . I mean, how many people did David slay? But that’s a difference, and we used to in the pulpit understand the difference between a just war and an unjust war, and when you do it God’s way, not only are you guiltless for having done that, you’re esteemed.1

Copeland and Barton, to be sure, are caricatured figures, hardly representative of American Christianity as a whole, and their comments on PTSD were criticized even by those on the religious right.2 But like all caricatures, they display in unvarnished form a set of social beliefs that lurk just beneath the surface in American Christian engagement with veterans: that fighting in a just war renders soldiers “guiltless before God and the nation,” and that therefore any guilt and shame experienced by modern veterans as a result of their participation in war—at least war that adheres to established rules of engagement—is a socially generated theological mistake.

This is the presumption that Robert Meagher attacks with vitriol in Killing from the Inside Out. Meagher provides a schematic but cogent history of just war theory as it evolved from ancient Greece and Rome, through Christian writers like Ambrose, Augustine, Gratian, and Francisco de Vitoria, through transitional figures like Grotius, and finally to the modern canons of international law exemplified in the Geneva Conventions. Writing as a Christ-haunted humanist, Meagher writes of the Greeks with an admiring approbation: they may have been brutal and bloodthirsty warriors, but in their poetry and drama they captured the horror and lure of combat, the deep interpenetration of war and sex, and the considerable psychological and moral toll that combat takes on even the most decorated heroes. Not so, he argues, with Christian architects of just war theory, who were caught between the pacifism of Jesus and the early church on one hand, and the pragmatic post-Constantinian need to maintain an empire on the other. Meagher argues that Ambrose, Augustine, and their successors conveniently abstracted themselves, as bishops, from military service and war (and marriage and sex), while propagating an abstract theory of just war in light of which war could be conducted without sin, and even could be an act of love—an act of love not only of those for whom one is fighting but for one’s enemy, that he might be prevented from further evil. Ambrose and Augustine were less clear, however, about how exactly war could be fought without sinful passion, and about the role of conscience in determining what commands in war should be followed. These elisions, Meagher argues, have dogged the just war tradition to the present day, even in its present secular form as displayed in international law: politicians, commanders, and other leaders embrace a theory that just war can be fought without malice and without sin, while failing to engage the psychological and moral context in which killing in war—not to mention other forms of violence that often accompany war—actually occurs. The rotten fruit of this is that servicemembers and veterans often struggle deeply with what they have done, or what they have participated in, while at war, but encounter social expectations and theological narratives that shoehorn them into the role of righteous “just warrior” if they have acted within the limits of the Geneva Conventions and military Rules of Engagement, or “war criminal” if they have violated them. This struggle can result in the same emotions and outward behaviors as PTSD—avoidance of war-related memories, nightmares, emotional numbing, social isolation, staying constantly on edge. Indeed, it may be a form of PTSD, though more recent psychological work has preferred the term “moral injury”: “the violation, by oneself or another, of a personally embedded moral code or value resulting in deep injury to the psyche or soul” (xvii). Moral injury, Meagher argues both in the abstract and by relating the narratives of modern veterans, shows just war theory to be a “dead letter”—“never more than a theory, and at its worst . . . a lie, a deadly lie” (129).

As a theologian and psychiatrist who works with combat veterans, I am haunted by Meagher’s work, convinced with him that just war theory has served in the past, and in some ways still serves, as a justificatory abstraction that legitimates decisions to wage war without accounting for war’s terrible psychological cost on those who fight it, not to mention those who witness and bear it. His description of moral injury is accurate and cogent, and his engagement with classical texts adds to and complements similar work that has been done by writers like Jonathan Shay (Achilles in Vietnam, Odysseus in America) and Nancy Sherman (Afterwar). His account of the erotic aspects of war’s violence in classical literature is sobering and enlightening. To anyone—and that includes most of us who are civilians—who has become complacent with war because we assume that wars fought on our behalf are just, Meagher’s book provides a much-needed affront.

There are three aspects of Meagher’s argument, however, that trouble me. The first is a persistent concern that Meagher’s dismissal of just war theory and its Christian proponents comes at the cost of charitable engagement with them. Meagher does not struggle, as Augustine and Aquinas both did, over why the New Testament lacks any clear prohibition against military service, if Jesus and the early church indeed were so clear that the faithful could not serve in the military—even though the gospel accounts of John and the soldiers (Luke 3:14), Jesus and the centurion (Luke 7:1–10) and Peter and Cornelius (Acts 10–11) would seem to offer perfect opportunity for such a prohibition. Meagher does not highlight the way that Augustine, far from romanticizing war, acknowledged the misery of it (“Let every one, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling,” De Civ. Dei 19.7). And perhaps most troublingly, Meagher downplays any effect of just war theory in limiting wartime violence, by pointing out that nearly every modern war has witnessed violations of the Geneva Conventions and that the US military rules of engagement are at times broken. Sometimes, however, exceptions prove rules: are we really to believe that the Geneva Conventions and military rules of engagement, both products of the just war tradition of jus ad bellum, play no role in the conduct of modern warfare?

Second, Meagher’s argument comes dangerously close to reconstructing the very problem that it is ostensibly intended to rectify, namely, the way that social attitudes often leave no room for soldiers to reflect honestly about their experiences of war. Moral injury, in Meagher’s narration, emerges when veterans struggling with their wartime actions are forced into the role of just-warrior heroes, and find no space in just war for their own stories to be heard: “so long as we cling to the moral justification of our wars we remain blind to the moral injury they inflict” (xvi). His solution is to “uproot” the just war tradition. But his uprooting is so pervasive that his solution leaves no room for honest moral reflection about war. If just war theory is in fact a “deadly lie” (129) and if what is left is the “essential and thus inescapable criminality and atrocity of all war” (133), then what is there to say to the servicemember who is fully aware of war’s brutality but who at the same time longs for peace, who believes with Augustine that the purpose of war is to restore peace and to restrain evil, who laments the necessity of killing in war and seeks to avoid dehumanization of the enemy, and who rigorously observes jus ad bellum principles such as noncombatant immunity? That he or she should be feeling moral injury, even if he or she is not? That any moral justification for war is a lie? That he or she is not “guiltless before God and the nation,” but quite its opposite, with no middle ground? I should be clear that I do not know whether a just war position like this is ultimately tenable, given the methods of modern military training and the conditions of modern warfare. But I would not want to close off this possibility without listening carefully to the stories of servicemembers and veterans who believe that it is. “Moral injury,” as a concept, should foster open and expectant engagement with veterans’ experiences, whatever they are. It should not be a rhetorical tool by which to prove, on historical grounds, the “inescapable criminality and atrocity of all war.”

Finally, as a Christian theologian I am unclear about the nature of the polis, the political community, for whom Meagher is writing. Who is the “we” of Killing from the Inside Out? Over the historical trajectory of the book, the polis shifts from “we” the ancient Greek observers and chroniclers of war, to “we” early pacifist Christians, to “we” imperial Christian Romans who see in just war theory a way to preserve Roman boundaries, to “we” the medieval warrior-monks dedicated to the preservation of Christendom, to “we” early modern Christians for whom just war served as a theological front for colonialism, to “we” inhabitants of modern nation-states who rely on a secularized model of just war to legitimize military force to pursue our own interests. Meagher’s constructive proposals—an end to an all-volunteer army, universal conscription, and civilian public service—all speak to the US population as a whole. Notably missing in this very theological book, however, is the presence of any “we” capable of calling the polis of the modern nation-state into question. There is no role for the church in Meagher’s account, other than a historically complicit and destructive one. But this is surely a missed opportunity. Meagher cannot without irony decry the role of Constantinianism in the fourth century and, at the same time, dismiss the role of Christian communities as loci of moral formation, discourse, and healing in the twenty-first century. Veterans with moral injury do not need simply better governmental policies; they rather need a community capable of bearing their griefs, calling out their strengths, welcoming them unconditionally, and traveling with them on the long road of reconciliation and healing. Some modern commentators like Nancy Sherman, and perhaps Meagher himself, long for the American polis as a whole to be just such a community. But this may be asking too much. Better, rather, for churches and Christian communities to take on this role for those who will receive it, and to walk alongside veterans, listening and learning and sharing life together, without being subsumed by the immediate needs of the nation-state. It may be only then that Christians will discover what it means to seek just war, and what it means to work for peace.

0730 hrs 20 Feb 2003

“Mom . . . I’m sure you have heard a lot of speculation on whether or not the U.S. is going to war. Well, this is what I know . . . Our sister unit (6/6 Cav) is here now with our parent hq’s [sic] 11^th Aviation Regiment. In about two or three more week [sic] I believe we will be moving north to cross over into Iraq. I ask for your prayers for myself and every soldier here on this camp so we can do what we came here to do and then go home.” (Letter from Dweylon Fifer to Pamela R. Lightsey)

Like Robert Meagher, war has personally impacted my life. My own son, Dweylon was deployed and arrived in Iraq during the early days of the invasion. The excerpt above is from the last letter he sent from his assignment in Kuwait. Some days after writing that letter he and his unit, following a Patriot Missile, unit crossed the border into Iraq. These days, he speaks very little of his experience other than to voice his disapproval of the war, a “war based on lies that cost many people, Americans and Iraqis their lives.”

As I read Meagher’s Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War I could help but remember the words of my son’s letter. His letter and several other memories of the invasion were for me as watermarks offering thematic highlights couched on the margins of Meagher’s printed text.

Beginning with the title, which is drawn from the tragic story of Iraqi war veteran Noah Pierce, who committed suicide, Meagher makes it quite clear that “going home” as my son put it, is a difficult if not near impossible journey for many veterans who struggle with internal responses to having committed actions that were so counter to their moral upbringing. It is in this way that moral injury differs from PTSD that is a victim’s response to a traumatic event. Moral injury, as Rita Nakashima Brock puts it, “is a negative self-judgment based on having transgressed core moral beliefs and values or on feeling betrayed by authorities. It is reflected in the destruction of a moral identity and loss of meaning. Its symptoms include shame, survivor guilt, depression, despair, addiction, distrust, anger, a need to make amends and the loss of a desire to live.”1

Though not explicitly pronouncing him as suffering from moral injury, Noah’s mother, according to Meagher, described war and its impact on military personnel as “killing from the inside out” (xiii). Taking on this imagery, Meagher throughout this writing does not spare the reader the gory details of war and the wounds, often invisible, that war veterans bear. Rather than a simplistic red, white and blue naivety or steep American exceptionalism, Meagher—through Noah’s story—confronts the American public with the ghastly images of combat: crushing an Iraqi child under the tracks of his Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFVs are large weighty tanks averaging multiple tons) and shooting civilians at close range (4). He reminds us that “all killing kills something in the killer” and that “there is no such thing as killing without dying”( xviii). In Noah’s case, according to his mother, “He couldn’t forgive himself for some of the things he did” (5).

What Meagher does in beginning his treatise on the history and various versions of just war theory with the lived stories of combat veterans like Noah is a brilliant contextualization of the why of the just war tradition. That is to say that Augustine, Aquinas, and other early Christian theologians were not grappling with the ethical dynamics of war as though some objective erudite commentary. Rather, they were concerned about the impact of soldiering and warring upon the material lives and spiritual well-being of Christian believers. Meagher is right that “both Augustine and Aquinas shared a moral presumption against war and killing and saw these as a last and unfortunate resort” (108). Their chief reflections centered on the intention of the Christian warrior and the sin of doing war. How might we dare consider participating in the Emperor’s military or war making in light of our witness as followers of the one who has been proclaimed the Prince of Peace? Can war be a means to bring about justice?

It is a myth that war may be just. There is no cleanliness or virtue to war and yet each contemporary advance to war has with it an attempt by the power elite to pretty it up with unachievable promises and rhetoric about the valor of our military troops. With this in mind it is rather appropriate that Meagher turns to Greek literature, its mythical gods and in particular the epic poetry of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in order to describe the brutality of war. As a classical scholar, Meagher understands the power of a good story to make a point. He draws upon these great works to bring us into the mindset of the imaginary warriors in the Trojan War, their thoughts during the heat of the battle, their victories, strategizing, failures and regrets. Meagher threads the reader through the imagined killing fields and the character—wise and crazed—of the protagonists. At the same time, he skillfully recounts the stories of contemporary warriors like West Point graduate and soldier Craig Mullaney and his struggle to reconcile his moral upbringing with how he was being trained to kill. For him and other warriors, the matter of war is often tied to the matter of belief: “Do you believe in a just war?” (12).

Yet no conscience can be assuage having experienced the slaughter of war where mangled and torched bodies, combatant and noncombatant, lay wasting. So it was in Iraq. On Friday, March 21, 2003, the United States and its allies launched a crippling aerial attack against Baghdad, Mosul, and other central Iraq cities. This was no mythic struggle. It was my mental watermark that lay on the pages as Meagher traces the history of just war theory—through classical literature and church history—to make his most provocative argument: that just war theory only serves to legitimize war and fails to address the moral wounding of both warrior and us all. War is sin. It is our human failure to find a way to respect our differences and to resolve our disagreements. The red plumes of fire, grey clouds of ashes, and hearing the explosions of the cruise missiles on that dreadful night now known as “Shock and Awe” made that quite clear to me as I watched the CNN telecast with fear gripping my heart knowing that a real person, my son, was somewhere in the area of that danger. Just war theory be damned.

In the wake of evidence that the primary rationale for our invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was grossly inaccurate and as we see the increasing challenges of drone warfare, Meagher’s argument that just war theory only serves to legitimize war is worth noting. Neither new interpretations of just war theory, such as the inclusion of “preemptive strike” nor the imagined cleanliness and precision available through modern technologies are capable of justifying the moral injury of warriors and the impact of war upon their families. No “just cause” allows the warrior to walk away from the injustice and murder they will invariably experience in war. Meagher is spot on in presenting this truth.

That said, as an African American the one watermark that caused me to fold my arms while reading Meagher’s text comes from the history of black people struggling for liberation from slavery. War and slave rebellion, mutatis mutandis, both involve violence and killing. To the extent that Meagher’s work suggests a moral imperative against all war is worth pondering. The Augustinian argument against killing in self-defense has never rested well with me as an African American. I cannot imagine where my people would be today had not thousands of slaves given their lives fighting, warring against their slave masters. No theory on the justice of war was necessary because having exhausted all attempts to convince their Christian captors of the sin of slavery, violence was understood as a necessary means to liberation, whether physically or spiritually.

I wonder: How might Meagher have described the Haitian Revolution that ended slavery and French occupation of that colony? What can we say of war and violent rebellion against the injustice of slavery and colonial occupation?

The progeny of slaves might read the pages of his seductive reflections on love and war in Greek literature, his attempt to use these works to help us understand the warrior in battle, with a healthy suspicion. Meagher’s argument about wars waged for the conquest of women and the resulting pillage and plunder of cities, and especially the rape of women by the victors reminded me of the justification white slave owners gave to torture and maintain control over black bodies. The exploitation of black men and women’s sexuality began on the auction block. The fear of black men as hypersexual beasts who were prone to attack innocent white women was the reason many were murdered. I find it difficult, even as a queer lesbian to consider a possible “sexual heat” of these revolutions or to bring to bear on these rebellions a “sexuality of war and conquest” as Meagher purports: “While our focus here is on Homer and the Iliad, it is important to note that the fusion of war and sex, the erotic character of violent conflict and conquest, is not confined to Bronze Age epics” (21). As I imagine the heat of mad hatred after years of oppression on the minds of the male and female warriors of the uprisings both in America and Haiti there is no room for notions of sexual passion or revengeful rape. Indeed there is no evidence to remotely suggest slaves attempted to rape white women during these rebellions. No chronicles left, to my knowledge, which trace an erotic sense of war among the slaves. To imply a fusion of war and sex would be a disservice to these sacred battles. The quest for human rights unfettered by a “fusion of war and sex” has been on the minds of African Americans in battle since their captivity on African shores.

Therefore to say, “Just war theory is a dead letter,” is an invitation to investigate how long it has been dead and if in fact it were ever alive in every context of Christian thought. Though our lives have been impacted by just war theory, black veterans’ rationale to enter war has often had little to do with theory and more to do with our existential existence. For instance, when W. E. B. DuBois called upon blacks to “Close Ranks” in support of WWI, he did so with the belief that supporting the war would advance the cause of civil rights. Blacks, ineligible for the Vietnam draft because of low qualifying scores were subsequently recruited from the ghettos after such standards were lowered.

What is therefore missing in Meagher’s project is an acknowledgment of the profound sense of participation in war in order to procure one’s human rights and to be accepted as a human beings of many black veterans as well as the trickery of the US government in their conscription. Meagher does begin to get at this in the conclusion as he discusses the notion that we have an “all-volunteer army” which is as much a fallacy as just war theory. Prior to the invasion of Iraq one African American politician, Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY), introduced a bill in Congress to reinstate the draft. “I truly believe that those who make the decision and those who support the United States going into war would feel more readily the pain that’s involved, the sacrifice that’s involved, if they thought that the fighting force would include the affluent and those who historically have avoided this great responsibility,” Rangel said.2 Universal conscription may not prevent the grandeur of war, especially given our modern technologies, but it would have a helpful impact on our readiness to do war.

It is after all our propensity to do war that motivated the early theologians to put pen to paper detailing their thoughts about war and the Christian. Though we have not come to the place of cleansing ourselves from the temptation and subsequent yielding to participate in oppression and war, we ought at the very least stop deluding ourselves with the rhetoric of the righteousness of behavior. No one but a morally bankrupt being walks away from killing unscathed. Perhaps, unwittingly, this is the greatest caution Meagher has offered: that those who decide our participation in war have less compunction than those who fight.