Nuclear weapons: the two debates

...chdiocese of Boston...

...This ecclesial question, in turn, leads to decisions about personal witness...

...Christoph Bertram begins a recent Foreign Affairs article with the observation that "arms control as a concept for international order and as a tool for restricting military competition is in deep trouble today...

...J. BRYAN HEHIR (Father J. Bryan Hehir is Associate Secretary for International Justice and Peace at the United States Catholic Conference in Washington and a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston...

...There is more than one legitimate response to the basic question, but only one response can be held by the same person...

...The religious debate moves on these three levels...

...An even more striking clash of (Continued on page 159)Church/world watch (Continued from page 135) perspective concerns the use of nuclear weapons...

...there are two debates, one religious the other secular, which seldom intersect...

...What is not as visible in the religious debate are the issues which divide the secular protagonists...

...In the religious debate the concept of arms control (as well as its more ambitious analogue, disarmament) is presumed to be self-evidently useful...

...The code words of just-war and pacifism symbolize the centuries of moral debate, even if they do not capture all the complexity of this long argument...

...from Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis to Commentary and International Security...

...Agreement that war was a moral, not a purely technical, problem did not yield a unified moral response in Christian theology...

...The religious debate has both historic roots and new manifestations...

...Part of the complexity is that the moral analysis of war has consistently moved beyond moral issues to ecclesiological questions...

...In contrast to Murray, Professor Stanley Hauerwas of Notre Dame defines the community of the church, not the public order, as the first object of the church's teaching...

...In the secular debate the utility of arms control is now being assessed in a framework shaped by Edward Luttwak's Commentary article "Why Arms Control Has Failed" and Leslie Gelb's defense of the concept in Foreign Policy, cast in the modest terms of "The Future of Arms Control: A Glass Half-Full...

...Today the moral map is more complex...

...The best scholarly work on the just-war ethic has recently come from Protestant authors, some of them in the peace tradition...

...Shaping the specific positions taken on SALT, the Persian Gulf, or Central America there is the irreducible moral question of whether the taking of human life for political purposes can be justified...

...Pipes and Burt now hold significant positions in the Reagan administration...

...There has always existed another approach which focused not on the quality of the public debate but on the specificity of the church's witness to peace...

...From the Reformation until Vatican II, historians could neatly divide the religious debate between Catholic just-war teaching and Protestant pacifism as found in the historic peace churches...

...The product of this renewed interest appears regularly in religious and secular periodicals: from America and Commonweal to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy...

...In the Catholic community academic interest and activist witness have created a constituency of Catholic pacifism...

...In the religious debate, a strong and solid consensus has formed against any use of nuclear weapons however limited...

...Murray's description accurately specified a major concern of Catholic teaching on war: the desire to shape the atmosphere of decisions taken on the use of force...

...one's view of the role the church should play in the nuclear debate shapes a perspective on which actions and activities are the most effective modes of Christian expression...

...The ' determination of what to do about the gap - if anything - will rest on how one sees the role of the church, how one relates moral arguments to technical data, and how one interprets religious effectiveness in the political arena...

...It is not a moralist's quibble to look for a principled answer to this dilemma...

...The religious debate understandably occurs in terms of specific issues, but just behind the issues lie the traditional categories, whether explicitly invoked or unconsciously appealed to by the participants...

...Examining the causes of the trouble reveals some of the basic differences of perception in the religious and secular debates about nuclear weapons...

...It is possible to sort out the questions in each discussion without pretending to solve them...

...In the secular debate today, restraint of the arms race must be explicitly justified before it can be pursued...

...War is too serious an issue to be left either to the generals or to flaccid moral argument...

...Twenty years ago the late John Courtney Murray described the church's role on war and peace as setting the right terms for public policy debate...

...In addition, two of the predominant possibilities of war today, nuclear conflict and revolution, have reshaped the classical questions of the moral debate...

...The opportunity should be exploited...

...The relationship between questions of war and peace and the role of the state pushed the moral debate on war into the realm of church-state relations, the nature of the church, and finally to choices about forms of personal Christian witness...

...The moral question of warfare has engaged the Christian community since the patristic period...

...People equally convinced of the need to reverse the ravaging arms race can and do divide on the moral, ecclesial, and witness questions...

...In spite of a common problem, it is misleading to speak of a single debate...

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...An equally significant part of the religious debate is the ecclesial issue of whom the church addresses in its teaching on warfare...

...The destructive capability of nuclear weapons has produced a constituency of nuclear pacifists who blend just-war analysis with a pacifist conclusion regarding nuclear weapons...

...The point here is not to say that their views go uncontested or are in control of the secular debate, but to point out that the very strength of the religious consensus against the use of nuclear weapons may shield us from seeing that the view is being challenged in powerful terms...

...Whether one finds the disjunction of the religious and secular debates a reassuring sign that the churches have not been co-opted or a disturbing sign of a blind spot in the religious approach to political questions, the distance between the debates should at least be noted...

...The secular debate is marked by Professor Richard Pipes's reflections, again in Commentary, on "Why the Soviets Think They Can Fight and Win a Nuclear War...

...The persistence of radically unjust socio-economic structures has led others, otherwise inclined to a nonviolent witness, to find justification for the use of force as a last resort in situations like Somoza's Nicaragua, Ian Smith's Rhodesia, and now El Salvador...

...Such themes lead in turn to Richard Burl's comment that the stagnation of the SALT process "provides an opportunity for unfettered thinking about American nuclear options during the coming decade and beyond...