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What Would Jesus Do
(about Saddam Hussein?)

Dr. Roger Bergman
Director Justice & Peace Studies Program
Creighton University

From the Sermon on the Mount to the Ethics of War

A version of this article was first published in the Creighton University Magazine, Summer 2003. NFP member Roger Bergman is a member of the Nebraska Humanities Council Speakers Bureau and is available to speak on the same topic as the article. He can be contacted at rbjps@creighton.edu.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, candidate George W. Bush was asked what philosopher had most influenced his thinking. A born-again Christian, then-Governor Bush replied, “Christ.” He didn’t elaborate on the specifics.

But if President Bush were to have an imaginary colloquy with Jesus, as Hillary Rodham Clinton reported having with her hero Eleanor Roosevelt, what might Jesus say to the President about the challenges facing the United States after September 11, 2001? What might Jesus say about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism, a dictator’s penchant for weapons of mass destruction, or Iran’s nuclear threat?

Would he preach today as he did in first century Roman-occupied Palestine that his followers are to love their neighbors as themselves, even if those neighbors are enemies, and even if those enemies are terrorists? Would he preach turning the other cheek and forgiving seventy times seven to the families who lost loved ones on 9/11? Or would he support ordering tens of thousands of troops to the Middle East to wage “preemptive” war at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and more than 30,000 lives?

What follows are images from the Gospels and insights from the Christian tradition that might help us clarify our thinking, even if, like Thomas Jefferson, you prefer to think of Jesus as a moral teacher and exemplar rather than a miracle-worker.

The New Testament contains no treatise on the subject of war but it does portray Jesus as a peacemaker. Perhaps the most compelling image is of Jesus’ response to the mob which brought an adulterous woman before him, hoping to expose his growing religious authority as a fraud. What would Jesus do? He knelt down and doodled in the sand. Why such surprising behavior?

Perhaps we should have asked, What would Jesus not do? He wouldn’t confront the angry crowd head on, on its terms. He wouldn’t puff himself up with all his moral and rhetorical might and lambaste the accusers or the accused. He didn’t make himself big. He made himself small. He did the unexpected, the mysterious (but very ordinary). He hunkered down. He stalled for time, perhaps praying for inspiration. Without so much as a single word, he took charge. He rewrote the script. No one threw the first stone.

And the rest of the story is, quite literally, scripture. The tables were turned. The angry accusers became the shame-faced accused. The scared accused became a sacred icon of rescue, reprieve and release. Jesus made peace where there could have been ugly, religiously sanctioned violence. Nothing miraculous or supernatural, nothing you or I couldn’t have done. Maybe the greatest tool for peacemakers is imagination and surprise.

But what about that turn-the-othercheek business? If Jesus isn’t around to get us neatly out of scrapes as he did for the woman caught in adultery, do we have no choice but to roll over and play doormat, and maybe end up dead? Did Jesus really counsel nonresistance to evil, as some translations of Matthew 5:39 indicate?

Not so, according to scripture scholar Walter Wink, in his little book, Jesus and Nonviolence. How could Jesus bring salvation from sin if he didn’t resist and overcome it? Wink suggests that Matthew 5:38-41 (part of the Sermon on the Mount) is the key to understanding how Jesus would have us resist evil so that God’s will might be done and the kingdom made present on earth. First, “offer no resistance to the evildoer” is better translated, do not return evil for evil, violence for violence. But how then are we to respond when aggression is coming our way?

Why, in Matthew’s version, does Jesus specifically counsel turning the other cheek when someone has struck you on the right? Because, according to Wink, that suggests you have been slapped, backhanded, by a right-handed person. You have been put in your place, as Roman would have done to Jew, master to servant, husband to wife, parent to child. Jesus is offering his advice in the hard case where a person of lesser status and power is being reprimanded by his or her ‘better.’ Why offer the left cheek? Because that would require, from a right-handed person, a blow with a fist, mano a mano. Because that would say, “If you want to strike me, do not presume my inferiority. I resist, but I do not stoop to your violence. I am your equal in dignity.”

But what about “If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well”? This time the imagined scene is a court of law, perhaps the village gate. The elders are gathered to hear the case of a creditor against a debtor who is in arrears. A tunic or outer garment has been given as collateral, which suggests why the debtor needed a loan in the first place—he’s so poor the tunic is his most valuable possession, serving not only as his coat but probably also as his bedroll. That’s why passages in both Deuteronomy [24:10-13] and Exodus [22:25-26] prescribe that the creditor must return the garment each night, so that the poor debtor won’t be without protection against the night’s cold.

But now a creditor is demanding that the tunic be handed over permanently, and Jesus counsels the debtor, give him your cloak or inner garment as well. With perhaps the whole village watching, strip yourself and show everyone just how greedy the rich lender really is. Strip him of his respectability. In that culture, says Wink, nakedness would have been as shameful to the beholder as to the one unclothed. Again, the socially inferior and presumably powerless person has trumped the status of the oppressor, and done so without violence, which might have backfired anyway.

And who could press you into what kind of service for one mile? Even today milestones can be spied on ancient Roman roads in the Holy Land. That’s so a centurion, a Roman soldier, would know how far a Jew could be legally conscripted to carry his heavy field pack. One humiliating but bearable mile, but no farther. What would Jesus have you do? “Go with him for two miles.” On your own initiative, force the centurion to break the law or beg you to put down his gear, maybe forcing him to chase after you. Now who’s in charge? Now who’s in trouble?

Wink calls the strategy demonstrated in these three little scenes “Jesus’ third way,” neither flight nor fight, but a kind of “moral jiu-jitsu” — neither nonresistance nor violent resistance, but nonviolent resistance — whereby the oppressed transforms the dynamics of oppression, lifting up his or her own dignity while exposing the pretense of the oppressor.

It’s what Gandhi, inspired in part by the Sermon on the Mount, called satyagraha, soul-force or truth-force, and to which our unfortunately negative term “nonviolence“ really doesn’t do justice. What are the weapons of the peacemaker inspired by Jesus’ third way? In defense of human dignity, we have at our disposal imagination, insight, presence of mind, surprise.

But do these tactics always work? Might some situations be too far gone for these nonviolent weapons to be effective? What would the Samaritan do, as the influential Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey once asked, if he had arrived on the scene between Jerusalem and Jericho not after but while the beating was going on? How would he demonstrate compassion even to an enemy and so attain salvation if on-going brutality was the scene facing him?

Presumably Jesus would have the Samaritan try every nonviolent means possible. He would plead, yell for help, try to distract the assailant, insert himself between the aggressor and his victim, throw sticks—even beat him with a stick—all in a non-lethal manner. Perhaps if he were a honey merchant he could pour his inventory all over the bandit in hopes of sweetening him up and slowing him down. Talk about surprise!

But what if this guy were a real sociopath (and a behemoth besides) and just became further enraged? What if it became clear that such interventions would only lead to two brutalized bodies or even two corpses instead of one? What if my neighbor-whois- the-aggressor can only be stopped from killing my neighbor-who-is-the-victim by delivering a potentially fatal blow? What would the Samaritan do? Would Jesus permit the coup de grace, if there were no other way? Could there be any grace, any love, in such an act, however necessarily but reluctantly performed? Is killing in defense of the innocent ever God’s will?

It is often pointed out that Jesus did not defend himself against unjust accusation and lethal violence at the hands of the collaborationist Jerusalem authorities and the representatives of imperial Rome. Granted. But that is not our question. Would Jesus have used lethal force to defend his friends or an innocent stranger against unjust attack?

I do not know. I wish Jesus had left clearer instructions. I do know that this is one of the thorniest questions in Christian ethics. I do know that by and large the early Church adopted the position of nonresistance when persecuted. Some of the early saints and theologians were what today we would describe as pacifists, as they believed that soldiering and discipleship were incompatible. The very first model of Christian holiness was martyrdom.

But it’s one thing to abjure self-defense so as to imitate the passion of Christ, quite another to refuse to defend an otherwise defenseless neighbor. This was the state of the question for St. Ambrose of Milan and St. Augustine of Hippo in the fourth and fifth centuries, after Christianity was first legalized in 313 and then established as the state religion of Rome in 380.

It has not escaped the notice of modern Christian pacifists that the Christian just war tradition originated when discipleship and citizenship first became competing loyalties. They would call the Constantinian revolution a fall from grace. They would say that loyalty to worldly empire won out over loyalty to the kingdom of God made visible whenever Christians give witness to it with their lives.

But other Christians, indeed the church’s mainstream tradition since the time of Augustine, and including Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, propose that there may be tragic occasions when lethal force may or even must be used to defend human life against aggression. Justice is the value that distinguishes permissible killing from impermissible murder. The commandment “Do not kill,” as interpreted by the Catholic Church and all other churches except the pacifist traditions such as the Mennonites and Quakers, is not absolute. It prohibits murder (the directly intended destruction of innocent human life) but not all killing.

No fuller official account of this Christian perspective on war and peace can be found than in the U. S. Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter of 1983, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response. Four assertions set the stage for a lengthy discussion. The first echoes Wink’s objection to “offer no resistance.” Christians, say the bishops, have no choice but to resist evil, including unjust aggression. The only choice is how. Second, the bishops insist that there is a presumption against violence and a preference for nonviolence as a response. But third, in extreme and tragic situations, that presumption may be overridden and lethal force used as a last resort. And fourth, such force must be limited by the very justice it seeks to defend.

Making use of the thinking inherited from Augustine, Aquinas, other theologians, and the modern popes, the U.S. bishops articulate seven criteria, all of which must be met if going to war is to be morally justified.

1) There must be just cause, and only the defense of human life and rights against unjust aggression qualifies.

2) There must be right intention, the pursuit of peace and justice, and not, for example, the humiliation of the enemy.

3) There must be comparative justice on the side of the defenders, but there must be no illusion of absolute justice, no temptation to a crusade or holy war ideology.

4) There must be a realistic expectation of positive proportionality between the benefits to be attained (and harms avoided) and the harms to be inflicted.

5) There must be a reasonable hope of success, lest lives be lost in vain.

6) War may be entered into only as a last resort, after every reasonable nonviolent approach has been tried and found ineffective. And finally,

7) Only competent authority, those with formal responsibility for the common good, may make such momentous decisions. (But in a democracy, that gets none of us off the hook.)

These criteria, known as jus ad bellum (the law or justice of going to war) are complemented by another category, known as jus in bello (the just conduct of war). Not only the war as a whole, but each battle, strategy, and tactic must adhere to the criterion of proportionality. Right intention should also figure as an in bello as well as an ad bellum criterion. And, especially relevant in this age of weapons of mass destruction, innocent citizens in the enemy state must not be targeted. That would be murder. This is the well-known principle of noncombatant immunity or discrimination. If the cause is justice, if the whole point is to protect innocent human life, then it matters not which side those lives are on. A justified war can become unjust if these criteria are not observed.

The criteria of proportionality and discrimination have led some to believe that a just war in the contemporary context is impossible. The letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops, for example, has been described as advocating what has been called “nuclear pacifism.” They cannot imagine how nuclear weapons could be used in a limited, proportionate, or discriminate way. Just war, maybe; nuclear war, never.

With the Persian Gulf war, however, sophisticated weapons guidance technology seemed to have taken the argument in the opposite direction. So-called “smart bombs” can be targeted at military facilities and away from civilian populations with considerable precision. That, of course, does not eliminate “collateral damage,” a euphemism for unintended civilian casualties, but it does promise to limit it.

On the other hand, as Notre Dame ethicist George Lopez has pointed out, precision guidance also makes possible the targeting of civilian infrastructure — public services — upon which the military depends. This is exactly what transpired in the Gulf war. According to Lopez, ten months after the armistice, “almost as many Iraqis… had died from the results of the bombing as died during the six weeks of actual fighting.” By the end of the next year, “more than a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians died from the lack of clean water and sewage disposal, and the breakdown of electrical service to hospitals.” Because of the ensuing epidemics, this amounts to a form of indiscriminate biological warfare. One might well ask, what did we think was going to be the result?

Pope John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical letter Centisimus Annus, declared, referring to the Gulf war: “No, never again war, which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred, thus making it all the more difficult to find a just solution of the very problems which provoked the war.”

Having lived under the totalitarian oppression of both the Nazis and the Communists, John Paul II can hardly be described as having been naïve about worldly realities. Rather, one of the contemporary realities that seems most to have impressed the Pope was the decisive role nonviolence played in bringing down communism in Europe. His own role in the fall of the regime in his Polish homeland is justly celebrated. The Catholic Church can also take credit for playing a significant role in the nonviolent ouster of the dictators Marcos in the Philippines and Pinochet in Chile.

Nonetheless, the Pope also favored humanitarian military intervention in Bosnia, East Timor, and Central Africa to disarm the aggressors and to establish peace. His attitude toward force was obviously complex. That’s why Jesuit ethicist Drew Christiansen has called John Paul II a “just war pacifist.” While not absolutely ruling out the use of force as a last resort in defense of human life, he might well now be thought of as having been, in the last decade of his life, along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the Dali Lama, both Nobel Peace Prize recipients, one of the world’s most ardent advocates of nonviolent resistance. The most compelling statement I have ever come across about modern war and peace is that “after Hiroshima, just war can never be the same, and after Auschwitz, pacifism can never be the same.”

But what would that look like?

Just-war-pacifism, Fr. Christiansen’s term for John Paul’s position, is, of course, a logical contradiction. One cannot simultaneously endorse an absolute and a relative presumption against the use of force. On the other hand, perhaps what John Paul II was pointing us toward is a third alternative that is only beginning to emerge in the examples — such as the Solidarity movement in Poland, chronicled in A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (both the book and the three-hour PBS documentary series by the same name), which I highly recommend.

As much planning, preparedness, discipline, and courage would be required to wage nonviolent resistance as now goes into military operations. Such a transformation obviously represents a long-term vision. In the meantime, the just-war tradition provides Christian citizens and all people of good will with a substantial ethical perspective by which to enter into public debate about U.S. military policy and conduct.

What would Jesus do about tyrants like Saddam Hussein? What should we do? Maybe we’re only beginning to imagine an answer.