Chapter 7: Authority and Justified Conflict

We are a bloodthirsty people.

Even in the Church there exists a romanticized view of violence — a reflexive reach for the sword, a desire to be the warrior rather than the martyr. It is one of the most dangerous impulses in Christendom, and it must be confronted before we can say a single useful word about justified conflict. Because the question of when we may fight is inseparable from the question of under whose authority we fight, and that question has a harder answer than most Christians want to hear.

Authority as Authorship

All one needs to do to understand the source of authority is look at the root of the word. Authority comes from authorship. The author of a thing holds the right to define it, direct it, and dispose of it. If I wrote a book, I have the right, as the author, to define what I meant when I wrote it. Others have the right to guess at my meaning, but my explanation overrides theirs because I am the author. If they want to espouse something different, they can write their own book.

God is the Author of creation. He therefore holds ultimate authority over it — over nations, over governments, over the individual. This is not a metaphor. It is the ontological claim beneath every other claim about authority. All derivative authority flows downward from Him, whether the bearer acknowledges the source or not.

Paul states the principle without qualification:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.^7.1

Daniel confirms it: "He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings."^7.2 Jesus confirms it to Pilate's face: "You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above."^7.3 The Roman governor who was about to order the execution of God incarnate held his authority from the very God he was condemning. That is how deep the principle runs.

Jacques Ellul, the French legal scholar and lay theologian, objects here with the most radical challenge in the Christian tradition. Ellul argues in Anarchy and Christianity that all political power is demonic in origin — not merely corrupted but constitutionally fallen.^7.4 Romans 13 is descriptive, not prescriptive: God uses the State, but Christians should not serve it. When Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in the wilderness temptation, Jesus did not dispute Satan's ownership.^7.5 He rejected the offer. Ellul concludes that the Christian stance toward the State is permanent suspicion and non-participation. To bear arms for the State is to serve the wrong master.

Ellul is right about the danger. He is right that the State can become demonic. He is right that Christians have an appalling track record of sanctifying state violence. But his reading of Romans 13 cannot survive the text's own language. Paul does not say the State merely exists by God's sufferance. He says it is "instituted by God" and that the ruler is "God's servant" who "does not bear the sword in vain."^7.6 The Greek diakonos — servant, minister — is the same word used of Christ's ministers in 2 Corinthians 6:4. Paul is not grudgingly acknowledging a necessary evil. He is identifying a divinely ordained function.

Oscar Cullmann navigated this tension better than anyone. In The State in the New Testament, Cullmann demonstrates that the early Church held two truths simultaneously: the State that serves God's purposes is the same State that crucified Christ.^7.7 "Thus in the cross of Christ the relationship between 'Christ and Caesar' stands at once in the beginning and at the center of the Christian faith."^7.8 The disciple of Jesus had to fight on two fronts — refusing both the Sadducean capitulation to Rome and the Zealot overthrow of it. The State is real authority, genuinely delegated. And the State is capable of becoming the Beast of Revelation. Both are true. The Christian lives in the tension.

The Narrow Grounds

So when is physical combat justified for the Christian? The answer is narrower than our bloodlust would like.

There are really only two circumstances in which God's revealed will prescribes battle as the correct response to conflict:

First: as an agent of government. The State bears the sword as God's servant: "For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer."^7.9 This includes law enforcement, military service, and the execution of justice. But not all military campaigns qualify as just. The just war tradition — codified by Augustine, systematized by Aquinas, refined across centuries — imposes three conditions: the authority of the sovereign, a just cause, and right intention.^7.10

Augustine identified the real evils in war with devastating precision: "The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like; and it is generally to punish these things that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars."^7.11 Read that carefully. The evil is not in the killing under authority. The evil is in the interior disposition — the desire that drives the will. A soldier who kills out of duty and grief does not sin in the same way as a soldier who kills out of rage and pleasure. The act is the same. The character behind it is not. The Character-Desire-Will-Action chain applies even in combat.

Hugo Grotius, the father of international law, grounded the right of war in natural law — which, as a Christian jurist, he identified with divine law accessible to reason.^7.12 James Dubik, a retired Army lieutenant general, argues that just war theory must account for what he calls the "moral agency of strategic leaders" — the reality that decisions about war are made under uncertainty, with incomplete information, by fallible human beings whose intentions are always mixed.^7.29 War is permissible when it enforces rights that cannot otherwise be vindicated. But the right is always bounded. Even in war — even with the State's full authority behind you — you may not kill indiscriminately. The law of armed conflict (codified in the Geneva Conventions and operationalized in the US military's FM 27-10 and the DoD Law of War Manual) embeds the just war tradition into military doctrine: military necessity, distinction between combatants and non-combatants, proportionality, and the prohibition of unnecessary suffering.^7.13

The US Army's oath of enlistment binds the soldier not to a president or a general but to the Constitution itself — "to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."^7.14 The Constitution is the authority, not any individual officeholder. This creates the possibility of lawful disobedience to an unlawful order, which aligns precisely with the chapter's framework: authority has limits defined by the source of that authority. The soldier who violates the rules of engagement has exceeded his delegated authority. He has gone "beyond the authority God has given" — even within the institution authorized to bear the sword.

Second: in direct defense of life. Self-defense is sanctioned in Scripture and in civil law. Genesis 9:6 simultaneously establishes the sanctity of human life and the mandate to protect it: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image."^7.15 The very passage that forbids murder authorizes lethal defense — under authority, in protection of the image of God.

The preciousness of human life is not an evolutionary accident. As Rex Applegate noted in his manual on hand-to-hand combat, "Human life is precious."^7.16 But preciousness does not spring from nowhere. It is not an attribute we would apply to dust, nor would we attribute it to evolved organisms defined by their cosmic ephemeralness. The only underpinning that makes killing different from eating or sleeping is the imago Dei — the image of God stamped on every human being. Without it, killing is just biology. With it, killing is either sacred duty or monstrous sin, and the difference depends entirely on authority.

"He Bids Them to Die for Him"

Here is where the chapter must become uncomfortable.

Remember: God does not bid His followers fight for Him. He bids them to die for Him.

Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.^7.17

Jesus said this to Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, minutes before His arrest and hours before His execution. The disciple wanted to fight. The Master said no. And then He went to the cross.

The New Testament pattern is not crusade. It is martyrdom. The apostles went to their deaths — Peter crucified upside down, Paul beheaded, James killed with a sword. The early Church conquered the Roman Empire not by force of arms but by force of witness. Tertullian's observation stands: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.^7.18 Christians are called to expect persecution, not to prevent it: "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."^7.19

Bonhoeffer understood this. "When Christ calls a man," he wrote, "he bids him come and die."^7.20 He meant it literally. And then — in one of the most agonizing moral decisions in Christian history — Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. The theologian who wrote The Cost of Discipleship became a conspirator who accepted the guilt of participating in a plot to kill a head of state. Not because he believed it was righteous. Because he believed it was necessary, and he was willing to bear the guilt before God for acting against a State that had become demonic.^7.21 Eric Metaxas draws the parallel to the contemporary American church: the same moral failure that Bonhoeffer identified in the German church — silence in the face of gathering evil — is repeating itself wherever the Church mistakes comfort for faithfulness.^7.31

John Howard Yoder would say Bonhoeffer was wrong — that the cross, not the conspiracy, should have been his answer. Yoder argues in The Politics of Jesus that Jesus's rejection of the sword was not situational but normative for all who follow Him.^7.22 The cross is the model of Christian political engagement: absorbing violence, not inflicting it. Romans 13 describes the State's function, not a license for Christians to participate in it. The "sword" of Romans 13:4 is Caesar's instrument, not the Church's.

Hauerwas extends Yoder further: the Church exists as a counter-polis whose very refusal to kill is its political witness. "The question is not 'when may Christians kill?'" Hauerwas argues, "but 'what kind of community does killing produce?'"^7.23 Just war theory, he contends, has functioned historically not as a restraint on war but as a permission structure — a way for Christians to feel righteous about doing what fallen human nature was going to do anyway.

Ronald Sider's compilation of primary sources from the first three centuries demonstrates that the early Church's positions on killing were more diverse than either side of this debate typically acknowledges. "Some scholars have argued that the early church up until Constantine was largely pacifist. Other scholars have vigorously rejected that view. And there is still no scholarly consensus."^7.30 The honest engagement with this ambiguity is itself a form of fidelity to the tradition.

I take both Yoder and Hauerwas more seriously than most advocates of just war theory do. Their exegesis is rigorous. Their historical critique is damning. And their question — "what kind of community does killing produce?" — should haunt every Christian soldier. But their position requires the Christian to accept annihilation rather than resist, and it requires every nation to refuse defense rather than fight, and it requires us to tell the mother shielding her child from a murderer that her faith forbids her from using lethal force to save her daughter's life. At some point, the theology must survive contact with reality. And this is where Shie Perle's anguish enters the room.

The Warsaw Ghetto

We could have defended ourselves, not let ourselves get slaughtered like stupid oxen. Had all Jews just run into the streets, had we all just climbed over the ghetto walls, had we all flooded the Warsaw streets carrying knives, axes, even stones — then maybe they would have killed 10,000, 20,000, but they would never have killed 300,000! We would have died with honor.^7.24

Shie Perle was one of the most talented writers in Yiddish literature. He wrote those words in the Warsaw ghetto, watching his people led to industrialized slaughter. His conclusion was bleaker still: "If a community of 300,000 Jews did not try to resist, if it exposed its own throat to the slaughterer's knife, if it did not kill one German or one Jewish collaborator — then maybe this was a generation that deserved its bitter fate!"

The Christian answer — we are called to suffer — sounds obscene in the face of this. Tell Perle that Jesus said to put away the sword. Tell him that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Tell him that losing the physical battle may enable a spiritual victory. Tell him these things while the trains are running to Treblinka.

This is not a contradiction to resolve. It is a tension to hold honestly. The Christian must acknowledge that telling a person in the ghetto to submit to slaughter feels different from telling yourself to submit. The theology does not change. But the cost of applying it is not distributed equally, and any framework that pretends otherwise is not honest — it is comfortable, which is worse.

What I can say is this: the justified use of force exists precisely because of situations like Warsaw. The two narrow grounds — government agency and defense of life — are not restrictions designed to keep Christians passive in the face of evil. They are permissions designed to ensure that when force is used, it is used under authority, with right intention, in defense of the image of God. Perle's call to resist was a call to defend life — and on the framework I have presented, it was justified. Three hundred thousand people made in the image of God were being fed into a machine designed to erase that image from the earth. To resist that machine is not rebellion against God's will. It is alignment with it.

But the tension remains. Because the same Jesus who told Peter to put away his sword also told him: "In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."^7.25 The victory is assured. The suffering is real. And the Christian combatant must navigate between the two with a sword in one hand and a cross in the other, never entirely sure which one the moment requires.

The Euthyphro Problem

There is one more objection that must be met, and it is the oldest in philosophy.

Is conflict just because God commands it, or does God command it because it is just? This is the Euthyphro dilemma, applied to war.^7.26 If the former — if God's command alone makes a thing just — then the Canaanite conquest and the Warsaw ghetto operate under the same logic: authority authorizes whatever authority authorizes. If the latter — if justice exists independent of God — then authority-as-authorship loses its force, because the standard of justice is separate from the Author.

The Christian answer is neither horn of the dilemma. God does not command arbitrary things and call them just. Nor does He submit to an external standard of justice. God's commands flow from His character, which is justice. He is not under the law. He is the law's source. His commands are just because He is just, and He is just because that is His nature — not a standard imposed from outside but the eternal, unchanging character from which all standards derive.

This means that "God wills it" is not a blank check. God's commands are constrained by His own character — and His character is revealed in Scripture. The Crusader who shouted Deus vult while sacking Constantinople was not exercising divine authority. He was exercising human ambition dressed in divine language. And the distinction between the two is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of careful, humble, Scripture-soaked discernment — the very thing Niebuhr warned us is harder than any book can make it sound.

God established both government and the Church.^7.27 They operate in different spheres and exercise different authority. The government enforces civil law; the Church proclaims moral law. The government bears the sword; the Church bears the Word. When the government acts within its delegated authority — protecting life, punishing wrongdoing, defending the innocent — it acts as God's servant. When it exceeds that authority — claiming sovereignty over conscience, demanding worship, or committing the very injustice it was ordained to prevent — it becomes the Beast.

The Christian's task is to discern which is which. And the only instrument adequate to that discernment is the revealed will of God in Scripture — not national interest, not cultural sentiment, not the confidence of the man with the bigger army.^7.32 Milton understood this at the level of speech itself: truth does not need the State's protection from falsehood, because truth wins in open contest. "Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"^7.28 The corollary for justified conflict is direct: if truth is self-vindicating in the verbal mode, then the suppression of speech — by State or by Church — is not a defense of truth but a confession that the suppressor does not trust it.

Sources and notes

7.1
Romans 13:1 (ESV).

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7.2
Daniel 2:21 (ESV).

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7.3
John 19:11 (ESV).

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7.4
Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988). ISBN 978-0-8028-0495-6. Ellul's central thesis is that all political power is inherently fallen and that the Christian's posture toward it is critical non-participation.

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7.5
Luke 4:5-7 (ESV): "And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, 'To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.'" Jesus rejects the offer but does not dispute the claim.

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7.6
Romans 13:4 (ESV): "For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer."

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7.7
Oscar Cullmann, The State in the New Testament (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956). Available at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/stateinnewtestam00cull. Cullmann's thesis: the State is neither divine nor demonic in itself but becomes demonic when it claims absolute authority.

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7.8
Cullmann, The State in the New Testament, 24-25.

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7.9
Romans 13:4 (ESV).

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7.10
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q.40, Art. 1 ("Of War"). Available at New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3040.htm. The three conditions: (1) authority of the sovereign (auctoritas principis) — "it is not the business of a private individual to declare war"; (2) just cause; (3) rightful intention.

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7.11
Augustine of Hippo, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, XXII.74 (c. 400 AD). The passage is widely anthologized; see Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 4 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). Available at New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/140622.htm

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7.12
Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace), 1625. Books I-II on the right to wage war; Book III on conduct in war. The standard modern English edition is the 1925 Francis W. Kelsey translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press / Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).

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7.13
U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Defense Law of War Manual (Washington, D.C.: Office of General Counsel, June 2015; updated December 2016). The four principles — military necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity — are stated in Chapter I. See also FM 27-10 (superseded but historically foundational) and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

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7.14
10 U.S.C. § 502: "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

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7.15
Genesis 9:6 (ESV).

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7.16
Rex Applegate, Kill or Get Killed: A Manual of Hand-to-Hand Fighting (1943; repr. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 2007), loc. 13. ISBN 978-0-87364-084-4.

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7.17
Matthew 26:52 (ESV).

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7.18
Tertullian, Apologeticum, 50.13 (c. 197 AD): semen est sanguis Christianorum. The standard Latin text is in the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol. 1. English translation available in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885). Available at New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0301.htm

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7.19
Matthew 5:10 (ESV).

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7.20
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), trans. R.H. Fuller, revised by Irmgard Booth (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1995), 89. ISBN 978-0-684-81500-8.

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7.21
Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010). ISBN 978-1-59555-138-2. Metaxas traces Bonhoeffer's journey from pacifism to conspiracy, arguing it was the ultimate expression — not abandonment — of costly discipleship. For a more critical academic treatment, see Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). ISBN 978-0-8006-2844-2.

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7.22
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), especially Chapter 12, "The War of the Lamb." ISBN 0-8028-0734-8.

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7.23
Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 43. ISBN 978-0-8010-3929-4. See also The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). ISBN 0-268-01554-6.

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7.24
Shie (Yehoshua) Perle, quoted in Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 193, 195. ISBN 978-0-253-34911-7.

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7.25
John 16:33 (ESV).

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7.26
The Euthyphro dilemma originates in Plato, Euthyphro, 10a. For modern treatments applied to divine command theory, see Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God, rev. ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990). ISBN 978-0-87975-578-0. Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), ISBN 978-0-19-515371-9, provides the most sophisticated Christian response: God's nature, not God's arbitrary will, is the standard.

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7.27
Genesis 9:5-6 (government's authority over life); Matthew 16:18 (the establishment of the Church).

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7.29
James M. Dubik, Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). ISBN 978-0-8131-6841-1. Dubik's military practitioner perspective fills the gap between the theoretical treatments of Walzer and the theological treatments of Augustine and Aquinas [paraphrased]. For a concise primer on the tradition, see Eric Patterson, Just War Thinking: Morality and Pragmatism in the Struggle Against Contemporary Threats (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). ISBN 978-0-7391-2157-2.

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7.30
Ronald J. Sider, The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 13. ISBN 978-0-8010-3630-9. Sider, who grew up in the Anabaptist (pacifist) tradition, compiles every extant early Christian text relevant to killing and war — an invaluable resource for honest engagement with the tradition's diversity.

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7.32
John Lovell — a Christian combat veteran — articulates the framework of the "warrior poet": the conviction that martial skill and theological depth are not competing vocations but complementary ones. The Christian is called to be both a spiritual warrior and a person of peace — capable of violence, choosing restraint, and knowing the difference between the two callings. See John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021). ISBN 978-0-310-36268-1 [paraphrased]. See also Neil T. Anderson, The Bondage Breaker (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1990; rev. ed. 2000). ISBN 978-0-7369-0867-5. Anderson's practical framework for spiritual deliverance — identifying the lies we believe and replacing them with truth — provides the pastoral application layer that complements the more theoretical treatment of spiritual warfare in this book [paraphrased].

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7.31
Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church (Washington, D.C.: Salem Books, 2022). ISBN 978-1-68451-323-8. Metaxas's thesis: the American Church today is repeating the pattern of the German Church in the 1930s — choosing silence and institutional preservation over prophetic witness [paraphrased].

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7.28
John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing (London, 1644).. The full passage: "And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing." Available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/608

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