Adult Education: The Bible and Just War Thinking

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Fr Austin returns to this perennially important topic, with the hope that our thinking about it can be aided with some tools drawn from the thinking of Augustine and other greats, who were themselves thinking about war in terms shaped by the Bible. A good but challenging book on the subject is Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited.

This week, Fr Austin will try to explicate the notion of “discrimination.” War employed as an extraordinary means of executing justice must, almost by definition, intend to discriminate between innocence and guilt. This is what is meant by recognizing the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, for instance. The 20^th century, which saw the introduction of the airplane into warfare, was the occasion for the development of this principle of discrimination, but the principle had long been part of Christian thinking about war

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