I’m not a soldier. I’m glad I’m not in Afghanistan right now, away from my family and being shot at every day. I see it unlikely that I will encourage either of my sons to enlist. Nevertheless, if I were a young man in 1940, I would have signed up – no doubt about it. There is something very very deep in a man’s being that enables him to fight. True, soldiers are often the pawns of jealous and foolish leaders, spilling blood like a young child who knocks over his glass of milk at the dinner table during a fit. Still, I don’t think this makes all battle witless. It still takes more wits than anything a man can put his hands to.
Philosophy cannot omit from its tenets the phenomenon that man must be ready to die in the war against an enemy. Any philosophy which glosses over your duty or mine to die for a cause is eyewash.
-Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Soul of William James, p.30
I feel this way whenever I read theologians that advocate radical non-violence. There are quite a few of them amongst Girard scholars. It doesn’t ring true to me. It seems unnaturally dismissive to relegate all violence to something apart from God. At the very least, he let himself be described as a warrior at times, riding on a white horse. A theology that has no place for ass-kicking is not biblical, orthodox, and probably not Trinitarian (though I’m not the best one to explain how that might fit in.)
There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I have yet to closely read Schwager or many of the people on the other side of the fence on this. I just know that when I do, I will need to wrestle with some way to resolve this tension. When Solomon said there is a time to kill and a time to heal (Ecclesiastes 3), I don’t think he was advocating dualism, as if all killing must come from Satan – notwithstanding the fact that a heck of a lot of it does.