The article explores the notion of combat in Protestant just war thinking, taking the story of David and Goliath as a focus to survey ethical, hermeneutical and historical aspects. Combat emerges as a mediate term between uncontrolled, irregular and excessive violence and technocratic annihilation of the opponent. Potentially being disclosive of the divine, combat may be part of the just war tradition that sits in between various modern forms of pacifism and holy war or crusading. The article is divided into three parts. First, it shows how within current debates combat has largely disappeared. Second, it briefly explores how Protestant theologians past and present have interpreted and might incorporate Old Testament sections on war and combat into their political theologies. Finally, the question of holy war and crusading is revisited.
This essay develops vulnerability theory as a normative framework for defence and security ethics in a nuclear age. Building on Sean Coyle's Natural Law, Ethics and Human Vulnerability (2025), it argues that vulnerability – understood as a universal and ontological condition of human and political life – reorients just war reasoning from the management of force to the governance of shared insecurity. On this basis, the essay advances three claims: (i) Vulnerability supports a sufficiency-based approach to nuclear deterrence that rejects both abolitionism and maximal deterrence; (ii) it reframes security in terms of multilayered and interdependent threats – including cyber disruption, infrastructural fragility and informational manipulation – thereby grounding resilience as a moral obligation within a whole-of-society approach; and (iii) it establishes a strong ethical presumption against the proliferation of lower-yield, substrategic nuclear weapons. In doing so, the essay maps a course between the assertive realism of Rebeccah L. Heinrichs's Duty to Deter (2024) and disarmament-focused approaches, while extending just war reasoning to include the distribution and management of vulnerability across societies and generations. It notes along the way convergences with Oliver O’Donovan's critique of deterrence detached from political order, situating resilience within a broader account of the common good.
This article examines how the magisterial and radical reformers of the early sixteenth century thought about war, political authority, and soldiering. Both Luther and Calvin held that all vocations, including the magistrate's and the soldier's, carry equal dignity before God, and both worked within a two-kingdom framework. Both also drew on the just war tradition while innovating within it. Luther limited just cause to defense, rejected crusading and religious war, and defended conscientious objection and resistance to unjust authority, yet said little about conduct in war. Calvin gave unusual weight to last resort and right intention, allowed wars to defend allies and armed resistance to tyrants through representative bodies, and linked natural law to Scripture. The Anabaptists, shaped by persecution, took a different path. They oscillated between revolutionary violence, as at Münster, and pacifist separation. Hubmaier was a rare exception who supported the magistrate's sword. The Schleitheim Confession called the sword “ordained by God” for magistrates but “outside the perfection of Christ” for believers. Menno Simons grounded Anabaptist nonresistance in the Sermon on the Mount. The article concludes that the era broke with medieval tradition on the sword and set up a Reformed-Anabaptist divide over war that persists today.
Combatant moral equality is commonly presented as the “orthodox” view within the just war tradition. This article shows that it is neither a first principle nor foundational orthodoxy of just war as some contend. It was not present in Augustine. It found its initial expression, but with a Godly foundation, in the chivalric tradition. Grotius secularized the laws of war, accepted the possibility of combatant moral independence from the justice of the war, but denied that combatants on both sides could be moral equals. Vattel presented combatant moral equality in its current form and explained it as necessary for the sake of peace among the society of states. The moral equality of combatants (MEC), then, results from an amalgamation of various historical developments in just war thought. Specifically, it follows from the fact that states, as the highest authority in international politics, accept simultaneous ostensible justice, in order to enable symmetrical rules of warfare that allow states to honor the law even during war.
Classical Protestant ecclesiology sought to uphold the ordered, public authority of the church while preserving the freedom of the individual Christian. A twofold concern over illegitimately binding the conscience and usurping the believer's personal responsibility constrained the church's authority to issue specific ethical judgments. In the case of war, the results could lead one of two ways: either deferring to the judgment of political authorities or to the private judgment of the individual. In either case, the authority of the church to render a public judgment qua the church was left unsupported. In the aftermath of World War I, a number of Protestant theologians sought to reclaim the church's public authority in political affairs, especially in matters of war. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's thought signaled a turn toward concreteness within Protestant social ethics that shaped the trajectory of twentieth-century Protestant ecumenism. The American theologian Paul Ramsey came to oppose this development, arguing that Protestant church leaders had abandoned the ecclesiological vision of the Reformation. This essay explores the theological tensions and motivations underlying these diverse accounts and considers how Protestant thinking about just war is necessarily bound up with reflection on the nature of the church and its public ministry.
