The Sacrifices of War

Stanley Hauerwas, one of the most distinguished and surely most interesting Christian thinkers of the modern era, has been in the middle of this moral and theological fray for decades, arguing in various ways that being a Christian means never killing others in war. His new collection of essays, War and the American Difference, is his latest effort to show what it would mean to abolish war, and what it would mean to really live as Christ lived, and to live in the faith and knowledge that Christ’s coming has changed everything. In fact, the central argument of the book is that war has already been abolished, because in Christ we have a way—the only way—to live in peace in the face of the world’s evils.

The essays are provocative, cutting, and filled with interesting nuggets of existential insight into the condition of man and the meaning of faith. And Hauerwas is, in general, charitable to his opponents, be they Martin Luther, C. S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Paul Ramsey. But the larger argument—that we can live as if war has been abolished and that faith in God requires that we live that way—is morally unconvincing and at times morally perverse. And his claims about America as a nation addicted to the sacrificial system of killing and dying that is war, as ìndeed meaning September 11 and the wars that followed to sustain its identity, are at times offensive in the extreme.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/03/the-sacrifices-of-war