Dove, the Fig Leaf and the Sword

The Revd Canon Alan Billings is an Anglican priest and a former Director of the Centre for Ethics and Religion at Lancaster University. In recent years he has taught the ethics of war to chaplains to the forces at the UK Defence Academy, Amport, and on military bases in England and Germany.

This highly informative, well-researched and systematic approach to historically changingChristian views around war and peace is an excellent overview that does not flinch from alsofacing the contentious contemporary context. Alan Billings is well placed to tackle this theme,being an Anglican priest, theologian, ethicist and occasional lecturer to military chaplains.Highlighting historical tensions and change-points within Christianity over the ethics ofwar, heacknowledges his own position by contending that Christianity was never a "pacifist"movement in an absolute sense, even though it commits its followers to seek for peace, andtherefore military action may be contemplated in certain circumstances as a "cruel necessity".He then skilfully navigates us through four phases of Christian thought beginning withChristianity’s earliest approach which renounced violence and largely took a pacifist approachup to Constantine (The Dove). He moves to Christianity’s second thoughts which largelyaccepted the necessity of violence and developed the JustWar tradition fromConstantine to theReformation (The Fig Leaf). He asserts the third change-point as the embracing of violence in arighteous cause, covering the post Reformation and the rise of the nation-state to the tragedy ofthe FirstWorldWarwhere this approach stumbles and then stops at the end of the SecondWorldWar (The Sword). The great names, and the greatest name, are all here—Thucydides, Plato,Cicero, Aristotle, Jesus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Grotius and even the Anabaptists getmorethan a mention! It is a succinct, sharp and erudite survey.The contentious debate is reserved for the contemporary context. In the fourth section—Return of the Dove?—the recovery of Just War and the more recent questioning of itsusefulness are debated with vigour in which Billings argues that Christianity will and shouldcontinue to change its mind over military operations and war. Following and adaptingNiebuhr, Billings argues for a Christian realist position, acknowledging that any discussion ofethics must work with the realities of power or the ethic will either fail or remain irrelevant todecision-makers.Indeed, with moral ambiguity more present than ever in the complexities surroundingmilitary operations and war in the twenty-first-century context, a Christian realist positionthat accepts a measure of pragmatism to bring the best or least worst out of situations, is anecessary reality according to Billings. He argues that the Just War tradition in itself is justnot enough in today’s context; especially with a state deciding to take preventive action tofrustrate what it thinks may be a future possibility. He highlights the Middle East in thisregard. Indeed, this position will hold that Christianity will mostly change its mind aboutoperations and war, depending on the choices available to a nation-state at any given time.This applies to the combination of motives and reasons behind the more recent emphasisupon pre-emption and prevention; humanitarian interventions; regime change and theprevention of terrorism. The choices of when to intervene militarily in humanitariancircumstances or respond to a violent movement rather than a nation-state are cases in point.If adult theological education is about serious thinking, this highly readable, informative andcontentious book will deliver on whichever side of the debate you find yourself. With a lighttouch, Billings brings additional thinking, especially in the twenty-first-century context, to thetensions that Christianity has with military operations and war. One thing is clear. Billingsbelieves Christianity must engage both ethically and realistically if its message is going to haveany relevance in the arena of war and the spectrum of other military operational options withthose who bear the weight of making those life-changing and responsible choices.