So all those who killed during war should not have done so? The fall of man allowed evil to reign in this world should we not raise up arms to defend against such evil? If I were to kill a person who barged into my house and threatened my family God would look down upon me? All I did was protect what He blessed me with?
Is this addressed to me? You'll note that I didn't say you can't defend your family/household.
You claimed Scripture says we are to do so, I asked where.
As for this question: "So all those who killed during war should not have done so?"
My answer: I think there are valid arguments to be made for Just War Theory.
The chief operating principle should be that yes, war is bad and killing is bad. When occasion arises where it becomes necessary to take up arms to prevent greater evil, that is arguably justified. But we ought to make a huge distinction between a justified use of violence to prevent greater evil and viewing war and killing as morally righteous when done in the name of the State.
Let's take the American War for Independence as an example. From a human vantage point, the colonists were seeking independence to overthrow what they perceived as the tyranny of the British Crown, they wanted self-rule for themselves and were willing to kill to achieve it. The British, on the other hand, sought to maintain the claims of the Crown over the colonies, as the colonies were regarded as the rightful possession of Britain and the Crown.
Try to be objective for a moment, set aside nationalistic sentiment, from a purely objective perspective was either side "the good guys"? Or did both sides believe instead in the justness of their cause?
Now let's hypothesize for a moment, let's say the indigenous people who live within the borders of the United States were to desire self-rule, regarding American claim over their ancestral lands a tyranny. And they took up arms of rebellion against the US government. Their desire is self-rule and independence and freedom from tyranny; the US government would in turn view the lands conquered and settled within the last two centuries the rightful property of the United States and would fight to hold onto those lands.
If you support the colonist's right for independence and self governing, would you also support the indigenous people's the same? Would you argue that the British were a legitimate tyranny, but deny that the United States as not a legitimate tyranny?
What I am really trying to get at is this: We often determine who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are in an armed conflict entirely based on the arbitrary circumstance of nationalistic identity. Where we were born.
In the Seven Years War there were a number of players, but let's just consider the British and French. Who were the good guys and who were the bad guys?
The simple reality is that there is most often, in most conflicts, neither a righteous cause nor a moral side; instead wars are fought over land and resources; and it is merely the sinful lusts of men desiring power.
Sometimes, however, a conflict does arise where there is a clear and present danger. At the risk of employing Godwin's Law, the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the Nazi war machine which desired "lebensraum" for Germanic peoples, involving the conquest of territory and the extermination of Jews, Slavs, Romani, and other "undesirable" people was a clear and present danger for the whole world. Hitler represented a rare specimen of immense evil that demanded action--because inaction would be the same as collusion.
It's why a pacifist, like Pastor Bonhoeffer, was willing to involve himself in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Which is how he ultimately earned his martyr's crown.
But that is the exception, not the rule.
Not every armed conflict is a justified one. Not every war is a justified war. Most wars are unjustified. Most conflicts are nations rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom. And we are oft to excuse "our side" simply because it's our own. We can see this even in the United States today in the lingering feelings between North and South over the Civil War. Robert E. Lee was a traitor who fought for the evil cause of the enslavement of human beings, and yet he is a celebrated general in the American South; because in the South the narrative of the war was changed during the Jim Crow era to be about "States' Rights" rather than the perpetuation of the institution slavery (the given cause according the states which sought to leave the Union and which sparked the war in the first place).
As a "Yankee" the narrative of the American Civil War seems obvious: One side split from the Union because it believed that holding human beings of African descent as slaves because of the innate "inferiority" of black people was a sovereign right; the other side sought to maintain the Union, and eventually made the war about the abolition of slavery a driving factor. But a person from Dixie may view things rather differently. I therefore might argue that the war became justified when the cause was about ending the evil institution of slavery, and the South's cause was inherently and innately evil. But would the conflict be justified if it was merely about maintaining the Union, after all Lincoln also suspended habeas corpus and upended the First Amendment right to freedom of the press--that's not a good look. But compared to the evil abomination of slavery, it seems significantly less evil.
And so, at this point, I'd really just be going in circles and repeating myself.
I consider the nature of war to be an intrinsic evil. But there may arise circumstance where the use of violence may be justified for the purpose of curbing and preventing greater evil.
A Christian may, therefore, by circumstance have to do the unthinkable: Take up arms. But to imagine that the taking of human life could ever be regarded as itself righteous is a deep rejection of the core doctrines of the Christian faith and a deep violation of God's Law, for He commands as paramount above all things that we love our neighbor as ourselves.
-CryptoLutheran
