Fallen — Preface

Sun Tzu speaks of heaven and earth.^[1] Musashi’s mastery culminates not in the sword but in the Buddhist Void.^[2] Bruce Lee titled his life’s work Tao — not as metaphor, but as declaration.^[3] Eastern thinking about combat is intrinsically tied to Eastern philosophy. Strategy begins in worldview. Technique follows from conviction about the nature of reality.

And why not?

Combat is, after all, that one human activity most likely to force questions of ultimate meaning. When life is on the line, abstractions become concrete. The stakes of mortal combat make questions of existence, purpose, and moral order not merely relevant but unavoidable. The Eastern masters understood this. They did not separate the question of how to fight from the question of what is real.

The West did.

Beginning roughly with the Enlightenment and accelerating through the rise of materialism, Western military thought reduced warfare to politics, culture, or pure mechanics. Clausewitz gave us war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”^[4] — a definition deliberately stripped to mechanism, with the metaphysical question of whose will ought to prevail excluded by design. Keegan offered war as a cultural activity, shaped by geography and social organization rather than by anything so unfashionable as theology.^[5] The strategists who followed gave us decision cycles, kill chains, and targeting methodologies. All useful. None complete.

Keegan is worth pausing on, because his objection anticipates ones you may already be forming. He argues that different cultures wage war in radically different ways — the horse peoples of the steppe, the naval empires, the ritualized warfare of Mesoamerica — and that these differences are better explained by material culture than by any grand theory. Fair enough. I do not deny that culture shapes the expression of conflict. A Mongol horse archer and an Athenian hoplite fight differently for reasons that are plainly material. But the principles governing their conflict — deception, economy of force, initiative, the exploitation of weakness — recur across every one of Keegan’s cultures. They recur because they are not cultural inventions. They are features of the created order, as constant as gravity and as indifferent to the preferences of those who discover them. Culture shapes the instrument. The laws of conflict shape the outcome.

Questions of ultimate meaning — why conflict exists, what it reveals about human nature, whether it has a spiritual dimension — were ruled out of bounds. The theology was discarded; the statecraft was kept. And so the Western world produced an enormous body of literature on how to fight, and almost nothing on what conflict actually is.

This severance was not inevitable. It was a philosophical choice. The Christian West once had a robust theology of conflict. Augustine argued that it is “the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars.”^[6] Aquinas codified conditions for the justified use of force. The medieval synthesis held theology and statecraft together in a single frame. Modernity shattered that frame — not because it failed, but because the Enlightenment decided it was unnecessary.

The result is an incomplete account of conflict. A purely material or political theory of war cannot explain why human beings fight over things that have no material value. It cannot account for sacrifice, for martyrdom, for the persistent sense that some wars are righteous and others are wicked. It has no category for the enemy who is not flesh and blood.

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This book fills (or attempts to) the gap.

Not a theology of war in the academic sense — not another treatise on just war conditions or another argument for pacifism — but a theology through which war, and all conflict, becomes intelligible. The operating framework is this: all conflict is fundamentally spiritual, rooted in the creature’s will differing from the Creator’s will.

Before I lay out my presuppositions, let me lay out the strongest objections to what I am about to do. There are at least three, and they deserve to be heard at full strength before I answer them.

Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder have argued, forcefully and at length, that nonviolence is not merely one implication of Christian faith but is “at the very heart of our understanding of God.”^[7] Christ revealed God as nonviolent. The Cross is the Christian’s only posture toward conflict. On their account, a Christian book that treats combat principles as intelligible within a Christian framework is not merely wrong — it is a category error. The faith and the sword belong to different kingdoms, and to mix them is to betray the gospel.

Here is the problem with that position: it requires a Bible that does not exist. The God of Scripture is not passive in the face of rebellion. He drowns Pharaoh’s army in the sea. He commands the conquest of Canaan. He strikes Ananias and Sapphira dead for lying to the Holy Spirit. He promises, in the end, to tread the winepress of His wrath alone. This is not accommodation to fallen human categories. This is revelation of divine character. God wages war. Not reluctantly, not as a concession, but as an expression of His justice. Hauerwas and Yoder must reckon with a God who says “I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh”^[8] and then explain how violence is foreign to His nature. They cannot do so without either allegorizing the texts into irrelevance or redefining “violence” until the word means nothing.

The question, then, is not whether God engages in conflict. He does — comprehensively, across both Testaments, with no apology. The question is whether we are ever authorized to participate, and if so, under what conditions. I distinguish between conflict as a result of evil — which it always is — and conflict as an activity that is always evil — which it is not. God Himself makes that distinction. When He commands Israel to fight, the fighting is not sin. When He forbids it, to fight is rebellion. The morality of the act depends entirely on whether the will behind it is aligned with His. I will develop this fully in Chapter 7. But the Hauerwas-Yoder objection fails at the root: it presupposes a God who does not fight, and that God is not the God of the Bible.

From the opposite direction comes Reinhold Niebuhr, who would not accuse this book of being too martial but of being too confident. Niebuhr argued that collective human behavior is governed by power dynamics that resist reduction to individual moral categories, and that “an ethic of pure non-resistance can have no immediate relevance to any political situation.”^[9] His challenge is subtler: not that a theology of conflict is wrong in principle, but that discerning God’s will in the fog of actual conflict is harder than any book can make it sound. Groups are messier than individuals. The righteous cause is rarely as clear on the ground as it looks in the outline. Nations that believed God was on their side have committed atrocities with clean consciences. How do you keep a framework like mine from becoming just another justification for whatever violence the powerful want to commit?

This is the strongest objection in the book, and I will not pretend it has a comfortable answer. The history of Christendom is littered with men who claimed divine authorization for wars that served nothing but their own ambition. The Crusaders who sacked Constantinople were confident God was with them. So were the inquisitors. So were the colonizers. Niebuhr is right that the claim “God is on our side” is the most dangerous sentence in any language.

But notice what his objection actually proves: not that a theology of conflict is impossible, but that getting it wrong has catastrophic consequences — which is precisely why getting it right matters. Niebuhr’s critique is a warning against self-deception, not against the framework itself. The answer to the abuse of divine authority is not the abolition of divine authority; it is the harder work of submitting to it honestly. That requires Scripture, not instinct. Not national interest. Not the confidence of the man with the bigger army. I do not claim that discernment is easy. I claim only that the framework for discernment exists in the revealed will of God, and that without it, we are left with nothing but power and preference — which is precisely the world Niebuhr describes and despairs of.

I believe in the God of the Bible as the Creator and Sovereign of the universe. I believe in the existence of spiritual reality as concrete and vibrant as the physical reality we all currently inhabit. Both realities operate according to order rather than chaos and contain moral right and wrong as defined by the nature of God Himself.

I believe in the cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. This is not a battle between two equal and opposite forces, as dualists would have us believe, but is a rebellion of a creature against his Creator. God has already vouchsafed the ultimate triumph of good. However, we have victory without a final cessation of hostilities, and we find ourselves in that in-between time where God has some purpose for the allowance of continued attacks by the enemy of mankind.

Every single conflict — from the young child who argues with their sibling, to the husband and wife who cannot see eye-to-eye, to the mugger who attacks someone at gunpoint, to the nations that become embroiled in world wars — every single one is an outworking of the fact that there are two wills at work in the world: God’s will, and not God’s will.

There is a third objection, more academic but no less serious. William Cavanaugh has argued that the very distinction between “religious” and “secular” violence is a modern invention — a construct that serves the liberal nation-state’s monopoly on legitimate force — and that there is no transhistorical essence of “religion” that can be separated from “secular” phenomena.^[10] On this view, framing all conflict as “fundamentally spiritual” imposes a religious category onto phenomena that resist such classification. It risks baptizing political violence as cosmic struggle, giving every war a divine mandate it does not deserve.

Cavanaugh is half right. The sacred-secular divide is artificial. I agree with him completely on that point. But we draw opposite conclusions from the same observation. Cavanaugh argues that “religion” is not a coherent category, and therefore we cannot say conflict is religious. I argue that everything involves will, and all will is either aligned with or opposed to the will of the Creator — therefore all conflict is religious, whether the participants recognize it or not. The problem is not that I am imposing a religious category onto secular phenomena. The problem is that the category “secular” is itself the imposition. There is no neutral ground. There is no conflict that is “merely political” or “merely personal.” Every act of will participates in the larger rebellion or the larger restoration. Cavanaugh’s concern about baptizing political violence is legitimate, and I share it — the answer is not to deny the spiritual dimension of conflict but to submit our discernment of it to Scripture rather than to national interest.

Though we experience attacks physically, every battle also has an unseen, spiritual side. I argue for the preeminence of the spiritual side of the conflict. This primacy is such that we may lose the physical battle, and yet enable an otherwise impossible spiritual victory. At its base, all conflict is a spiritual conflict.

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The principles themselves are not new. What Sun Tzu observed about deception, what Clausewitz observed about friction, what Boyd observed about tempo — these are natural laws of conflict that transcend culture. I argue that they are created laws, discoverable features of a universe authored by a sovereign God, and that they operate across every mode of conflict: spiritual, mental, verbal, and physical. Geffrey Whitney wrote in 1586 that “even war has its laws.”^[11] He was not speaking of the conventions of men. He was speaking of the order woven into creation itself.

We do not invent these principles. We discover them. And their universality — their stubborn recurrence across centuries, across cultures, across every scale of human conflict from the fistfight to the world war — is evidence not of human cleverness but of divine design.

What may be new about their presentation here is their relation to one another, and especially their relation to existence as a whole. I intend to show that the same principles operate in spiritual warfare, in the contest of ideas, in verbal persuasion, and in physical combat — not by analogy, but by identity. The same natural law. Different modes of expression.

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A note on scope. When writing about something so basic to the human experience as conflict, you will invariably deal with philosophical issues that have come up again and again throughout history. To write exhaustively about the philosophy — were such a thing even possible — would by its very nature encapsulate the entire history of every discipline in which humans have been engaged.

That is not the goal of this work.

The goal is to present an investigation into the deeper nature of conflict in general, and combat in specific, and to do so within a Christian-theistic framework. I hold that all human systems will contain error where those systems vary from those presented in the Bible, or where the Bible is silent and we wander into unbounded musings. Still, these musings are useful where they advance the conversation. My aim will always be directness and brevity. As I hope to show throughout the rest of this work, the best we can hope for in this life is to take decisive action — better something made which may be flawed than nothing awaiting perfect execution.

If you find yourself disinclined to agree with my views of the spiritual nature of battle, you can safely skip my first few chapters and move on to my examination of the physical principles of combat. Though, I fear that by doing so, you will deprive yourself of the opportunity to see the universal pattern of these principles, which spans realities.

So, as not to risk creating one of those long prefaces that everyone simply skips on their way to the first chapter — onward.

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1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Lionel Giles (London: Luzac & Co., 1910), Chapter 1, “Laying Plans.” The five constant factors — Moral Law, Heaven, Earth, The Commander, Method and Discipline — open the treatise. Available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/132 and MIT Classics: https://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html ↩︎

2. Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings (1645), “The Book of the Void.” Trans. Victor Harris (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1974). ISBN 0-87951-018-8. “In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.” ↩︎

3. Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Burbank, CA: Ohara Publications, 1975). ISBN 0-89750-048-2. Lee’s deliberate use of Tao in the title signals the inseparability of his martial art from Taoist and Zen philosophy. ↩︎

4. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75. Originally published 1832. The Howard-Paret translation is the standard English scholarly edition. ISBN 978-0-691-01854-4. ↩︎

5. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). See especially Part I, “War in Human History,” 3-60, where Keegan argues that war is “not the continuation of policy by other means” but a cultural activity. ISBN 0-394-58801-0. ↩︎

6. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 7. Trans. Marcus Dods. Available at New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm. The Dods translation (1871) is in public domain. The critical Latin text is in the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vols. 47-48. ↩︎

7. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 72. ISBN 0-268-01554-6. The phrase “at the very heart of our understanding of God” appears in Chapter 4, “The Church and the World.” See also John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). ISBN 0-8028-0734-8. Yoder’s argument is most concentrated in Chapter 12, “The War of the Lamb.” ↩︎

8. Deuteronomy 32:42 (ESV). The Song of Moses, in which God Himself describes the violence He will inflict on those who oppose His people. See also Isaiah 63:1-6, where God treads the winepress of His wrath alone — “I trampled them in my anger and trod them down in my wrath; their lifeblood spattered on my garments, and stained all my apparel” (v. 3, ESV). And Revelation 19:15, where Christ returns with “a sharp sword” to “strike down the nations.” These are not isolated proof-texts; they are woven into the fabric of both Testaments. ↩︎

9. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932; repr. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), xxv. ISBN 978-0-664-22474-5. The quote about non-resistance appears in the Introduction to the 1932 edition. Niebuhr’s full argument develops across Chapters 1-3, where he distinguishes between individual and collective morality. ↩︎

10. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-19-538504-5. Cavanaugh’s central argument is in Chapter 2, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” 57-122, where he demonstrates that no consistent definition of “religion” can separate it from “secular” ideologies without arbitrary line-drawing. Publisher page: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-myth-of-religious-violence-9780195385045 ↩︎

11. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, and other Devises (Leiden: Christopher Plantyn, 1586), Emblem 178, “Etiam bellum suos leges habet.” The phrase translates: “Even war has its laws.” Whitney’s emblems are available in digital facsimile through the Penn State University Libraries’ digital collection. See also the modern critical edition: John Manning, ed., The Emblems of Geffrey Whitney (New York: AMS Press, 1989). ISBN 0-404-62277-8. ↩︎