Adult Education: The Bible and Just War Thinking

Today, Fr Austin begins a six-week revisiting of “just war,” starting with the basic orientation of Christian thought here. It is not about determining which wars are just; and it is certainly not a theory. Rather, it is a Christian tradition of practical reasoning about war that sees it as an extension of ordinary judgment, and subject to the same restraints as the ordinary judgments of the state. We get a little bit of Augustine and Aquinas this week, and, as a curious sidebar, a look at 1 Samuel chapter 14, particularly verse 6: “it may be . . .”

A good but challenging book on the subject is Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited.

• Theology Events