Chapter 6: The Ends of Conflict

We have established what conflict is — the opposition of wills. We have established where it came from — the creature's rebellion against the Creator. We have established the thesis — all conflict reduces to God's will versus not-God's will. We have identified the adversary and his methods.

Now we ask: what is conflict for? What is it trying to accomplish?

The answer is simpler than you might expect, and more dangerous.

The Imposition of Will

Though there are many reasons for engaging in conflict, there is only one purpose. The purpose of conflict is to impose your will on another.

The person who raises their voice at someone because of a slight — real or imagined — is trying to enforce their will to see justice done. The man who hits someone to protect his pride is using physical force to impose his will. The nation that invades, and the nation that resists that invasion, are each trying to impose their own will to govern as they desire. The person who seeks vengeance, the person who covets material possessions, the person struck by a sudden desire to cause harm — these are all expressions of one entity's will seeking dominance over another's.

Clausewitz codified this in his definition of war: "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will."^6.1 He was describing armies and nations, but the principle scales down to every human interaction where wills collide. The child who throws a tantrum is attempting to compel his parent to yield. The spouse who withholds affection is attempting to compel compliance through deprivation. The mugger who draws a weapon is attempting to compel the transfer of property. Different scales. Different tools. Same purpose.

"But what about defense?" someone will ask. "Surely the person defending themselves is not imposing anything."

They are. The defending nation imposes its will to govern itself. The person who escapes an attacker imposes their will to survive. The man who shields his family from harm imposes his will to protect. Resistance is not passive. It is an active assertion of will against a contrary will. As I noted in my original outline: conflict has two immediate ends — "to impose one's will on another, or to resist the imposition of that will." But even resistance is imposition. The person who resists is saying, in effect: My will to remain free is stronger than your will to dominate me, and I will impose that freedom on this situation whether you consent or not.

There is no posture in conflict that escapes the will framework. Even surrender is a choice — the will to live imposed over the will to fight. Even retreat is a choice — the will to preserve resources imposed over the will to hold ground. Every action in conflict is an expression of will. The only question is whose.

Hans Morgenthau, the father of political realism, would object that I am making a trivially true claim while missing what actually matters. Morgenthau argues in Politics Among Nations that international conflict is driven by the rational pursuit of power defined in terms of national interest.^6.2 Power is the currency; will is merely the motivation to spend it. From this view, saying that conflict is about "the imposition of will" is like saying commerce is about "the exchange of goods" — technically correct but explanatorily vacuous. What matters, Morgenthau insists, is the structure of power, not its spiritual origin. States act in self-interest, and moral categories are post-hoc justifications.

Morgenthau is not wrong about the structure. Power matters. Material advantage matters. The balance of forces shapes outcomes in ways that pious intention cannot override.^6.13 But "national interest" is itself a will — the collective will of a state to preserve and extend itself. Morgenthau's Realpolitik does not escape the will framework. It simply refuses to evaluate will against a transcendent standard. And in refusing, it loses the ability to distinguish between the nation that defends the innocent and the nation that devours them. Both are pursuing their "interest." Both are exercising power. The difference — the only difference that ultimately matters — is whether the will behind the power is aligned with God's will or opposed to it.

Morgenthau's framework gives you the mechanics. It cannot give you the morality. And mechanics without morality is how you get efficient genocide.

The Two Categories

Since good is alignment with God's will and evil is anything not God's will, every conflict must fall into one of exactly two categories.

Good versus Evil. One participant's will aligns with God's. The other's does not. Only the side aligned with God's will is justified — and only that side, regardless of which side prevails on the field.

Evil versus Evil. Both participants' wills oppose God's. Neither is justified, regardless of their reasons, their grievances, or their sincerity. Two thieves fighting over stolen goods may have legitimate complaints against each other, but neither stands on righteous ground.

There is no third category. Good versus Good is a logical impossibility. If both parties are truly aligned with God's will, there is no conflict, because God's will does not contradict itself. Where two apparently righteous parties come into conflict, at least one of them is mistaken about their alignment — or both are.

Karl Marx would reject this taxonomy entirely. For Marx, the operative categories are not good and evil but bourgeoisie and proletariat. "The history of all hitherto existing society," he and Engels wrote, "is the history of class struggles."^6.3 Conflict is not creature-versus-Creator. It is worker-versus-owner. The spiritual dimension is a narcotic — religion as "the opium of the people"^6.4 — that dulls the pain of exploitation while doing nothing to address its material root.

We addressed Marx's metaphysics in Chapter 4, but his challenge has a sharper edge here. Marx is not merely claiming that material conditions cause conflict. He is claiming that the very categories of "good" and "evil" are tools of class oppression — moral language deployed by the powerful to justify their dominance and pacify the dominated. When I say that only alignment with God's will can justify conflict, the Marxist hears: only those who control the interpretation of God's will get to decide who fights and who dies.

That is a real danger, and it must be confronted honestly. History is glutted with examples of powerful men using divine mandate to justify wars that served nothing but their own appetite. The conquistadors, the slave traders, the architects of Manifest Destiny — all claimed God was on their side. Marx's suspicion of moral language wielded by the powerful is not paranoia. It is the justified rage of people who have been lied to by men with Bibles in one hand and swords in the other.

But suspicion of abuse does not invalidate the thing abused. The fact that men have used "God's will" as a bludgeon does not mean God's will does not exist. It means discernment is hard, and the consequences of getting it wrong are catastrophic — which is exactly what Niebuhr warned us about in the Preface, and exactly why the framework requires Scripture rather than instinct as its basis. The Marxist critique identifies a real pathology: the corruption of divine authority by human ambition. The Christian answer is not to abolish the category of divine authority but to submit to it more honestly than the conquistadors ever did.

The feminist IR theorists — Cynthia Enloe, Ann Tickner — raise a related objection from a different angle. They argue that traditional conflict theory, including Clausewitz's, is built on masculinized assumptions about power, sovereignty, and the state.^6.5 War is not a metaphysical contest of wills but a product of patriarchal structures that valorize dominance and marginalize care, cooperation, and human security. The "imposition of will" framework, on this account, universalizes a male experience of conflict as the norm and renders invisible the ways that women, children, and marginalized communities experience and resist violence.

The critique correctly exposes how fallen human systems distort conflict. Patriarchal structures do valorize dominance. Militarized cultures do marginalize care. These are not features of God's design — they are corruptions of it. But the feminist critique presupposes a standard: what should human relations look like? "Care, cooperation, and human security" are not self-justifying values. They require a ground. The Christian framework provides one: human beings, male and female, are made in the image of God, and the proper ordering of their relationships is defined by His character — which includes both justice and mercy, both strength and tenderness. The feminist critique identifies real corruption but cannot supply the norm against which that corruption is measured without appealing to something beyond material power relations. We supply the norm. It is God's will, revealed in Scripture, and it condemns the patriarchal distortion as fiercely as any feminist could wish.

The postmodern objection is the most radical of the three. If there is no knowable "God's will" — if all truth claims are socially constructed power plays — then the Good-versus-Evil framework collapses entirely into competing assertions. Every crusade and every jihad has claimed divine mandate. The framework provides no falsifiable mechanism to distinguish genuine alignment from self-serving assertion.^6.6

The epistemological difficulty of knowing God's will does not negate its existence. A patient may struggle to read an X-ray, but the fracture is still there. Scripture, general revelation, and the witness of the Holy Spirit provide the epistemic access — imperfect in application, but real. The abuse of a truth claim does not invalidate the truth. It proves the truth is powerful enough to be worth corrupting. Counterfeit money is evidence that real money exists.

The Hidden Battle

Behind every visible conflict — the raised voice, the clenched fist, the army on the march — there is an invisible one.^6.14 There is one primary conflict being played out on a cosmic scale: the conflict between God and the Enemy. All other conflicts, both large and small, serve to advance or resist this hidden war, which is, for the most part, concealed from our immediate perception.

Paul states it without qualification: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."^6.7 The visible combatants are not the real combatants. The geopolitical struggle is not the real struggle. The real struggle is spiritual, and the visible conflict is its physical manifestation.

This has a staggering implication for understanding the ends of conflict. If the real war is spiritual, then the real victory is spiritual too. And this means that physical defeat is not necessarily ultimate defeat.

It is difficult to fathom, but there are times when an apparent defeat in the physical world may effect a great victory in God's plan. The supreme example is the Cross itself — the most catastrophic physical defeat in history, and the most total spiritual victory. Christ was arrested, tortured, and executed. By every metric the ancient world recognized — power, honor, survival — He lost. And in losing, He accomplished the redemption of the world. The imposition of His will (salvation, reconciliation, the defeat of sin and death) was achieved not despite His physical defeat but through it.

"Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army," God told Jehoshaphat. "For the battle is not yours, but God's."^6.8 The ends of conflict are not always what they appear to be. The battle the combatant thinks he is fighting is not always the battle God is waging. The physical outcome is real, and the suffering is real, and the dead are really dead. But the ends of the hidden battle may be utterly different from the ends of the visible one.

This does not make suffering acceptable. It does not make defeat desirable. It means that the Christian combatant must hold two realities simultaneously: the physical battle matters, and there is a battle behind the battle that matters more. We may lose the physical fight, and yet enable an otherwise impossible spiritual victory. At its base, all conflict is a spiritual conflict — and its ends are measured on a scale we cannot see.

The Clausewitz Reframe

One final point, and it is the bridge to everything that follows.

Clausewitz famously wrote that "war is merely the continuation of policy by other means."^6.9 If our thesis is correct — that all conflict is rooted in the creature's will differing from the Creator's will — then Clausewitz's formulation must be reframed. War is not merely the continuation of politics. It is the continuation of spiritual rebellion by physical means.

Politics itself is a mechanism for managing competing wills in a fallen world — the collective negotiation of whose desires prevail, conducted through institutions, laws, and social pressure rather than through force. War is what happens when that negotiation breaks down and raw imposition takes over. But the wills that drive the politics, and the wills that drive the war, are the same wills that have been in rebellion against God since the garden. The political context is real. The economic context is real. But they are proximate frames around an ultimate cause.

Liddell Hart corrected Clausewitz's emphasis on destruction with a broader definition of the strategic objective: "The object in war is a better state of peace — even if only from your own point of view."^6.10 And Sun Tzu, centuries before either of them, identified the highest expression of the principle: "Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."^6.11 Breaking resistance without fighting is the purest form of imposing will — so total that the adversary's will collapses before the physical contest even begins.

But notice: even Sun Tzu's "supreme excellence" assumes the imposition of will. The goal is not the absence of conflict. It is the resolution of conflict so completely that violence becomes unnecessary. The will prevails. The question — always the question — is whether the will that prevails is aligned with God's, or opposed to Him.

Lincoln understood the deeper mechanics. "Public sentiment is everything," he said at Ottawa in 1858. "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."^6.12 Lincoln was describing the verbal mode of conflict — the imposition of will through persuasion rather than force. But the principle is the same. Will imposed through sentiment, will imposed through policy, will imposed through arms — the end of conflict is singular. The mode varies. And it is to the modes of conflict that we now turn.

Sources and notes

1. 6.1

   Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Col. J.J. Graham (London: N. Trübner, 1873), Book I, Chapter 1. Available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1946

   ↩

2. 6.2

   Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 7th ed., revised by Kenneth W. Thompson and W. David Clinton (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 29-35. ISBN 978-0-07-289539-1. Morgenthau's core thesis: "International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim."

   ↩

3. 6.3

   Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 473. ISBN 978-0-393-09040-6.

   ↩

4. 6.4

   Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction" (1844), in The Marx-Engels Reader, 54.

   ↩

5. 6.5

   Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). ISBN 978-0-520-27999-3. J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). ISBN 978-0-231-07539-4.

   ↩

6. 6.6

   The postmodern critique of foundational truth claims draws from Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980). ISBN 978-0-394-73954-1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; corrected ed. 1997). ISBN 978-0-8018-5830-7. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ISBN 978-0-521-36781-4.

   ↩

7. 6.7

   Ephesians 6:12 (ESV).

   ↩

8. 6.8

   2 Chronicles 20:15b (ESV).

   ↩

9. 6.9

   Clausewitz, On War, 87.

   ↩

10. 6.10

    B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Meridian, 1991), 338. ISBN 978-0-452-01071-1.

    ↩

11. 6.11

    Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter III ("Attack by Stratagem"), trans. Lionel Giles. Available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/132 and MIT Classics: https://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

    ↩

12. 6.12

    Abraham Lincoln, First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, 21 August 1858. Transcript available at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm

    ↩

13. 6.13

    Kenneth N. Waltz's three "images" of war — human nature, state structure, and the international system — provide the most rigorous framework for multi-level causation of conflict. Each level has its own logic, and Waltz argues that the international system's anarchic structure is the most determinative. The Two Wills framework does not deny Waltz's levels; it adds a fourth, beneath all three: the spiritual condition of the wills that animate persons, states, and systems. See Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (1959; repr. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). ISBN 978-0-231-12537-8. See also Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd ed. (London: Frank Cass, 2001), ISBN 978-0-7146-8197-8, who demonstrates that strategic thinkers across cultures — Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Mao — converge on certain truths about conflict's purposes and ends, a convergence more readily explained by natural law than by coincidence [paraphrased].

    ↩

14. 6.14

    The Enemy has been a master of low-intensity conflict and fifth-generation warfare for millennia. The longer he is able to keep the conflict bubbling under the surface — not allowing it to rise to the level of open warfare — the more endemic the conflict becomes to the society. The war which finally springs from such a peace as this is devastating beyond compare to all human institutions. See Jonathan Batteas, personal journal, "Colin Gray's War and Peace" (2024-01-31).

    ↩