The full interview is available on the Kentucky Today Podcast. Below is Andrew Walker’s answer to one of the questions of the interview. See link below to the entire Q&A article.
Explain what Just War Theory is.
Just War Theory is one of those issues kind of at a macro level where we think about how Christianity really has been the moral backbone of the western order. Just War Theory, as commonly conceived, is kind of the moral taxonomy that our modern military still relies upon to this day. They’re borrowing and they are indebted to a Christian framework that is known to have kind of begun with the works from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
There are more or less three macro-level pillars to Just War Theory. There’s the idea of what you call, and I’m gonna use the Latin phrases here, jus ad bellum, which is the, the justice of going to war. Do you actually have the right cause to go to war?
Then there’s jus in bello, which means justice in how you’re actually conducting the war itself.
And then third, there’s a final condition called jus post bellum, which is looking at, are you restoring conditions of justice and peace after the war is over?
All that to say, the Just War Theory that our society is using is coming from a Christian framework, which is a neat way of saying our faith really does matter, not just as a private reality, but as a macro social-level reality as well.
See full article.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was published by Kentucky Today. Andrew Walker is associate dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and associate professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology.
