"You can't understand the human race without understanding its passion to have gods." David Marr on religious belief in Australia
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Just war and just peace: trying to be just

Greg Clarke

Justice itself

Everyone knows what justice is, but no-one knows how to bring it about. Everyone has some sense of justice, but our ability to enact it is thwarted. Everything gets in the way—our selfishness, our jealousy, our prejudices, our lack of insight, our age and stage of life, our family.

But capital 'J' Justice—Infinite Justice, as President Bush originally named his War on Terror before having his mind changed by offended Muslim clerics—would seem a remote ideal for human beings.

Justice is the one concept that can't be deconstructed, says philosopher Jacques Derrida. In fact, it is easier to point out injustice than to assert precisely what is just; suggesting that Justice will always elude us. Justice threatens to be a metaphysic, to be real, to be the ultimate explanation and goal, but remains just outside our grasp. It's the value to which a secular society finally appeals, and yet the appeal is for something the shape of which we find hard to imagine.

Would it have been just to leave Saddam Hussein to rule Iraq unchallenged by appalled onlookers? Was it just to do great damage to Baghdad and much of the rest of the country in the task of stopping Saddam? Is it just for a foreign nation to occupy Iraq and rebuild it? What would a just outcome in Iraq look like--and just for whom? 		 
  What would a just outcome in Iraq look like−and just for whom?  

The rule of law and the Just War tradition

The most successful approach to seeking justice that human beings have come up with is to live by the rule of law. That is, we have constitutions which establish legal statements for the good of the community as a whole, and authorities who enforce those laws. It isn't a perfect way of doing things, but it is about the best thing we have come up with.

There is such a set of laws and regulations about what would constitute a reason to go to war, and how war ought to be carried out. It is known as Just War Theory or Just War Tradition. These laws—they are actually questions in this case—seek to outline what would be required for a war to be just. They start from the position that there is a kind of war that can be just—a position that is by no means accepted by all.

Before I go on to outline Just War tradition, and to explore its strengths and weaknesses, can I say this: justice on its own is a fearful concept, for all human beings are morally fallible, broken-hearted, sin-ravaged shells of their glorious selves as God created them. If justice were administered to us, there would be no innocents. No one would stand.

What we need is justice mingled with mercy. This is the true path to peace. From a Christian point of view, the event in which justice and mercy perfectly intermingle is the death of Jesus the Christ, where God punished sin, but did so mercifully through the willing sacrifice of his only son. At this moment justice is served, mercy delivered, and peace given.

This is not to deny or avoid the real issues of justice, war and peace. As a Christian, I would want to hold on to the notion that peace with God that has been won by Christ on the cross, a peace that is available now, even in the midst of war, and can never be taken away since it is a peace that the world cannot give−so it hardly has the right or power to take it!

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