In talking about responses to atrocity, does it help to import religious ideas? Does the invocation of religious concepts give voice to otherwise inarticulate intuitions? Does the language of religion have the power to cast peculiar light on dark places here? These are the questions that this chapter will seek to address.

Good answers pay close attention to the terms of their questions. We begin, therefore, with an analysis of two terms: “atrocity” and “religion.” In common usage, “atrocity” refers to a kind of killing of human beings. If it is used to indicate the killing of nonhuman animals or the nonlethal maltreatment of human ones, then that use is secondary, analogous, and weaker. An “atrocious” killing is, of course, an immoral one. It is unrestrained, excessive, and merciless. More exactly, it is indiscriminate, taking the lives of noncombatants – women as readily as men – of infants and the elderly as easily as adults. Further, an “atrocity” is large in scale, involving the deaths of many. The “many” here could be a race – as in genocide – but need not be. They could also be a village or even a family. Since it would not normally describe the killing of a series of individuals by a peacetime criminal, it follows that “atrocity” typically points to the killing of many people in a single event during a war.

The career of the doctrine of just war in British churches since the Second World War has been mixed. In some quarters it has enjoyed revival and development, but in others it has suffered doubt and suspicion. The task of this chapter, then, is to demonstrate past and present growth, to track the roots of current scepticism and to comment on what these imply for the future role of the churches in public debate about peace and war.

The development of the doctrine since the Second World War

During the Second World War just war doctrine was alive in the minds of some prominent members of British churches: for example, the Roman Catholic philosopher Elisabeth Anscombe explicitly employed its criteria in her 1939 essay, ‘The Justice of the Present War Examined’. In the Church of England of this period, however, acknowledgement of the doctrine is harder to find. Traces do appear in the writings of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, when he stipulates that Christians should enter upon war, not out of hatred for the enemy, but only with the intention of restoring a just peace; and when he makes use of the principle of double effect to argue that airmen who aim their bombs at factories and harbours cannot be blamed for any civilian deaths that might result, since these were not directly intended.

It cannot be said that earliest Christianity was pacifist. Certainly, Christians were criticized in the second century a.d. for abstaining from military service, and there is no record of any Christian author of the period approving of participation in battle. However, since Christians were subject to intermittent persecution by the state until the early fourth century, it is difficult to say whether their military abstinence was a result of moral principle or political alienation. And while in the third and fourth centuries some theologians expressly condemned military service on the part of Christians, this in itself could be taken to suggest a Christian presence in the army; and other evidence indicates that such a presence was growing from the end of the second century onward.

Following the conversion of the emperor Constantine in a.d. 312, and Christianity's subsequent toleration and gradual privileging, Christian participation in public office increased – and with it the need to reckon with the (tragic) necessity of using force to maintain the good of public peace and to assert the good of justice. Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa, was one of the earliest to develop a rationale for the Christian use of force, and it is mainly from him that the Christian theory of “just war” stems.

THE PROPHETIC FEEBLENESS OF NEO-KANTIAN CHRISTIANITY

The best way to grasp the driving convictions of someone's thought is often to identify what he is thinking against. When understood as a response, assertions that initially appeared abstract and anaemic now acquire vital significance. So it is with Karl Barth's theology and ethics.

The liberal Protestant heritage into which Barth was inducted had been decisively and variously shaped by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). One of Kant's legacies was the tenet that specifically religious acts - that is, of prayer and worship - are idle distractions from the true, moral content of Christianity; and by 'moral' here is meant the fair treatment of other rational human beings. All that is valid in religion is reducible to morality; and morality is reducible to the performance of one's duties to one's fellows.

In the intellectual hands of Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), the social dimension of Kantian morality – the kingdom of ‘rational ends’ or intrinsically valuable individuals – was combined with the Gospels’ notion of the Kingdom of God to produce a Christian ethic with an emphasis on community. What made this ethic Christian was Jesus’ moral teaching about the brotherhood of man (to use a phrase characteristic of one of Ritschl’s disciples, Adolph von Harnack (1851–1930)), not his religious teaching about the redemptive activity of God the Father. What was valid in Christianity was its affirmation of human duty and community, not the actions of divine grace. This is one reason why Ritschl and his followers may be fairly described as ‘neo-Kantian’.