7 - Renarrating the Christian Just War Tradition

Summary

The concluding chapter renarrates the history of the Christian just war tradition in a way that better accounts not only for the ongoing interactions between the political and the natural but also for the ironies, disjunctions, and ambiguities that arise as the tradition transitions out of one social imaginary and into another. Along the way, it suggests a way of interpreting traditions as formed around a particular set of questions – which in the case of Christian just war thinking are those of theological anthropology – which exert centripetal, cohering, forces even as answers to those questions exert centrifugal forces which shape the tradition’s contextual engagements within a particular social imaginary. The moral foci of traditions do not, therefore, drive them forward through time so much as exist as moral precipitates arising out of those contextual answers. Including environmental history within narratives of the history of the Christian just war tradition does more than enrich that tradition, though. It helps shape it to address wars in a warming world as we exit the Holocene and enter the Anthropocene.