Curtis and “founding friend” David French explore Christianity and armed conflict. Viewed through the prism of the Ukraine War, they explore Christian just war theory. David, a former Army lawyer, walks through the moral and theological origins of the law of armed conflict. Curtis emphasizes the differences between the institutional purpose of the state and the church when it comes to war. Applying those principles to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they discuss the necessity of Ukrainian resistance and the importance of American aid.

Please enjoy this conversation, which covers a variety of topics relating to the church today:

This excerpt of the above conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

CURTIS CHANG:  If you haven’t thought about war before war is imminent, you too are very likely to be swept along and be unprepared for how to think about it, how to respond to it, how to pray about it, how to act in it. 

I have firsthand experience with what happens when Christians and church leaders are unprepared to think about war. 

Back in 2001 I first joined the pastoral staff of my church, the River Church Community.  A few months later, 9/11 happened and about a month after that, American planes were bombing Afghanistan, American special forces were on the ground in Afghanistan. Everybody was talking about it at the time. 

As a pastoral team, we gathered together. “Well, what should we say? How should this affect our Sunday service?” 

It was striking just how paralyzed and mumbly everybody was. We knew we should say something, But no one on the team had an articulated way of how to think about the church in a time of war. The best people could mount was an admonition to pray for peace. 

“Okay, that’s great but that’s a very mumbly prayer,” I said.  “What kind of peace? Peace with a Taliban in power? Peace with a Taliban defeated?” 

There was this struggle about what to say.  People were not only mumbly but conflicted. After all, a few months prior, the senior pastor had preached a sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:38 says, “You have heard it,” this is Jesus’ words, “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. But I say to you, do not use violence to resist evil.” 

Since the pastor had just preached on this a few months ago, how was he supposed to reconcile that sermon with the fact that our country was now at war? 

If we didn’t say anything, it was clear what was going to happen: we were going to cede the formation of our people’s views on this massive political event to secular media, to secular political forces. Half of our church was going to go more left-leaning Bay Area progressive and go against war: make love not war kind of stream of culture. And the other half was going the “God bless America and our troops” stream. 

If the church said nothing, this issue framing would fall to the culture.  This is happening in our church today. 

None of the senior pastors felt equipped to preach about how to think about the war, so it fell to me, the guy who had just arrived a few months earlier, I was tasked with preaching on the most important topic in the world and to make sense of it for our church. I’m not saying this to give myself acclaim but to illustrate how unprepared the church was. 

That state of unpreparedness is the norm, it’s not the exception.

David, what do you think is a state of preparedness in the church among Christians to make sense of war?

DAVID FRENCH:  I have a similar story.  I walked into church after 9/11 in rural Kentucky.  There was no real ambivalence. But later, after Osama bin Laden was killed, I walked into another church and everyone on the pastoral team had this deer in the headlights look.

How do you deal with the fact that the whole country was essentially celebrating the killing of another human being? There’s a lot of “deer in the headlights” looks when it comes to this kind of topic for a lot of understandable reasons.

We’ve had the blessing of not having to think through major great power conflicts for a while. There are very little readily available resources for Christians to think through these issues. I have an advantage because of my military background and specifically the area of the things that I did for the military. I was an army lawyer, a JAG Officer, and one of the absolute elementary aspects of becoming a JAG Officer is learning not just the legal arguments about war but the moral arguments about war.

There would be no law of war in the absence of moral argument about war. And so the law of war, which was my job, is rooted in millennia of moral arguments including arguments deeply influenced by Christianity.

CURTIS CHANG: There’s a lack of resources so David, that’s our job today is we’re going to provide a resource. We’re going to try to help Christians make, that’s our job at the Good Faith podcast: to make sense of the world. 

And today, we’re going to try to help Christians make sense of a world at war.