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Surrender: A Moral Imperative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

John H. Yoder
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Abstract

The integrity with which a thinker, a political decision-maker, or a society can claim to hold to the just war tradition depends upon the readiness to draw and to implement the consistent negative conclusion, when the honest application of the classical “just war” criteria renders a negative reading on the justifiability of a given (or contemplated) military enterprise. The most qualified just war thinkers stated this conclusion firmly in the 1950's, but others have not pursued the theme with equal consistency.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , Fall 1986 , pp. 576 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1986

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References

Notes

1 Murray, John Courtney S.J., “Morality and Modern War” in Morality and Nuclear Warfare, ed. Nagle, William J. (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1960)Google Scholar. Also published as a pamphlet by the Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1959.

2 Ramsey, Paul, War and the Christian Conscience (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 151.Google Scholar

3 Ramsey, Paul, “Counting the Costs” in The Vietnam War: Christian Perspectives, ed. Hamilton, Michael P. (Grand Rapids: Edermans, 1967), p. 33.Google Scholar

4 Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age—A Theological Discussion (mimeographed) Study Department, World Council of Churches, Geneva, 1957, paragraph 66, p. 30Google Scholar. A few pages of the 1957 text, but not the above lines, are reproduced in the indispensable source book on the ecumenical conversation about war. Dumbough, Donald F., ed., On Earth Peace (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1978), pp. 185 ff.Google Scholar

5 The document itself narrowly escaped being shredded. It was released for circulation only under the specification that it was “but a first step in a continuing study process. … No point here expressed is to be understood as an official view of the World Council of Churches.”

As a matter of fact the “continuing process” has to this day not taken place. An edited version of the bulk of the document was published in 1961 under the signatures of the chairman of the Commission and the secretary of the Division of Studies. The passage quoted above has been transformed there into an awkward rhetorical question but not excised: “finally (although we would answer ‘No’) we ask: ‘if all-out war should occur, does a Christian have any alternative but to accept a cease-fire, if necessary on the enemies terms, and resort to nonviolent resistance?” (SirTaylor, Thomas and Bilheimer, Robert S., Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age, A Theological Discussion [London, SCM Press, 1961], p. 37).Google Scholar

6 Childress, James, “Just-War Criteria,” in War or Peace? The Search for New Answer, ed. Shannon, Thomas A. (Monyknoll: Orvis, 1980), pp. 41 ff.Google Scholar Childress spelled out this logic more fully in his book Moral Responsibility in Conflicts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 64 ff.Google Scholar Part of the present article's thesis is that Childress's own further argument undercuts this starting point.

7 Of the fourteen commission members (in addition to staff from the WCC Study Department and Churches' Commission on International Affairs) one was an Admiral in Her Majesty's Royal Navy, several were in government. Perhaps three could be identified as pacifist.

8 We must however not grant in principle that a given war could not also stand clearly condemned on ad helium grounds. A condemnation would differ in that there would be no justification for “continuing the struggle by other means.”

9 This point was also helpfully made in a communication from James T. Johnson.

10 SirKing-Hall, Stephen, Defence in a Nuclear Age (Nyack, NY: Fellowship Press, 1959)Google Scholar. He had been saying the same thing in his professional publication, The King-Hall Newsletter, since 08 1945.Google Scholar

11 American Friends Service Committee, In Place of War: An Inquiry into Non-Violent National Defense (New York: Grossman, 1962).Google Scholar

Anders, and Boserup, Mack, War Without Weapons (New York: Schocken, 1975)Google Scholar; Moulton, Phillips P., Violence: or Aggressive Nonviolent Resistance? (Wallingford, PA: Pendal Hill Publications, 1971)Google Scholar; Roberts, Adam, ed., The Strategy of Civilian Defense (London: Faber & Faber, 1969)Google Scholar [also Baltimore: Penguin, 1969 under the title Civilian Resistance as National Defense].

Sharp, Gene, Exploring Non Violent Alternatives (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1979), pp. 161Google Scholar; Sharp, , Making the Abolition of War a Realistic Goal (New York: Institute for World Order, 1980), 14 pp.Google Scholar; Sharp, , Making Europe Unconquerable: A Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense System (New York: World Order Institute, 1983)Google Scholar; Sharp, , The Politics of Non Violent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973)Google Scholar; Sider, Ronald and Tucker, Richard, “International Aggression and Non-military Defense,” The Christian Century, 6–13 07 1983, pp. 643–47Google Scholar; Sider, Ronald, Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1982), pp. 231–294Google Scholar; Woodward, Beverly, “Violence, Non-Violence and Human Struggle,” in Study Encounter (Geneva: World Council of Churches), 12, no. 4 (1976), 1935.Google Scholar

12 Cf. the studies of the Association for Transamament Studies, of Omaha.

13 Ebert, Theodor, Gewaltfreier Aufstand: Alternative zum Bürgerkrieg (Freiburg: Verlag Romback, 1968)Google Scholar. A massive literature exists in all the Western European languages. The German adjective gewaltfrei carries less passive overtones than our “nonviolent.”

14 “De quoi s'agit-il?” chap. 1 in War and Politics (New York: MacMillan, 1973), pp. 1–28Google Scholar. Brodie describes how both sides of World War I continued beyond the limits of both winnability and morality, because of an emotionally tilted mentality or “doctrine” closed to Clausewitz's realism.

15 Above (note 8) I noted that the criteria ad helium should not be rejected. Here let me add that it is odd to attend (as the entire contemporary debate does) only to these three interlocking criteria in hello, to the neglect of numerous others: respect for the nature of the human person and society as rational beings (which from Thomas Aquinas to the turn-of-the-century Catholic Encyclopedia prohibited lying), in addition to those whose absence in the bishops' pastoral is noted here.

16 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, Washington, D. C., 1983.Google Scholar

17 Pius XII, Address to XVIth Congress of the International Bureau of Documentation on Military Medicine, 19 October 1953, in Discorsi e Radiomessaggi XV 422.Google Scholar

18 Booth, Alan, Not Only Peace (New York: Seabury Press, 1967), pp. 73f.Google Scholar Cf. Luther, Martin: “One must keep peace as long as one can, even though one must buy it with all the money that would be spent on the war or won by the war” (“Commentary on Psalm 82,” Works, vol. 13:56).Google Scholar

19 Tucker, Robert J., The Just War: A Study in Contemporary American Doctrine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960).Google Scholar

20 Childress, , “Just-War Criteria,” pp. 52ff.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 41 ff.

22 “14. Military necessity, as understood by modern civilized nations, consists in the necessity of those measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war.

“15. Military necessity admits of … such deception as does not involve the breaking of good faith either positively pledged, regarding agreements entered into during the war, or supposed by the modern law of war to exist. Men who take up arms against one another in public do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.

“16. Military necessity does not admit of cruelty. … It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor the wanton destruction of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and, in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult” (Lieber, Francis, “General orders 100, 1863,”Google Scholar in Friedmann, Leon, The Law of War: A Documentary History (New York: Random House, 1972, p. 6).Google Scholar

Full analysis of these lines would disengage several firm criteria, some formal and some substantial, which “necessity” may never overrule. The twofold reference to modernity and the general moral preachment at the end of Art. 15 show Lieber's awareness that the line he takes is not unanimous. His concentration on the limits of deception is striking.

23 The Law of Land Warfare, FM 27–20, Washington, Government Printing House, 07 1956, p. 4.Google Scholar

24 Taylor, Telford, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), pp. 34ff, 61f, 137, 143Google Scholar; excerpted in Wakin, Malham, ed., War, Morality, and the Military Profession (Boulder: Westview), pp. 424ff.Google Scholar

25 Wasserstrom, Richard, “The Laws of War,”Google Scholar in Wakin, , War, Morality, and the Military Profession, pp. 451 ff.Google Scholar

26 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 231.Google Scholar

27 Johnson, James Turner, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitations of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Can Modern War Be Just? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; “Historical Tradition and Moral Judgment: The Case of Just War Tradition,” Journal of Religion (1984), pp. 299–317.Google Scholar

28 Langan, John S.J., “Pastoral on Peace and War: Reactions and New Directions,” Theological Studies, 46 (1985), 80–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Hollenbach, David S.J., “Within Nuclear Deterrence: The Moral Debate Continues,” Theological Studies, 47 (1986), 117–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 The present argument has been expanded from a few pages (64ff) in Yoder, J., When War Is Unjust (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1984)Google Scholar and from a paper presented to the Society of Christian Ethics in Philadelphia, January 1984. The expansion has benefited from numerous critical comments, especially by James T. Johnson.

31 Cf. above note 14.