Religion, World Order, and Peace: Christianity, War, and Peacemaking

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All religions need to examine how they contribute to the common good, which includes more people than those who follow a particular religion. The United Nations Secretary General's recent invitation to all religious and spiritual leaders to examine how they contribute to creating a culture of justice and peace for the world community provides an ideal opportunity for that examination. A central part of that culture for Christians is their attitudes toward war and peacemaking. Those attitudes have evolved dramatically over time, especially in the last century.

Christianity has gone through many changes with regard to war and peacemaking, beginning with the first few centuries when Christians refused to join Rome's Imperial Army, to the first elaborations of the Just War doctrines beginning in the third century, to the Crusades in the medieval period, and to the present day when the largest single group of Christians, Roman Catholics, officially have made the criteria for a just war more difficult to meet than ever and have begun to elaborate the requirements for peacemaking. Among themselves, however, the world's over two billion Christians continue to disagree on these matters, with some groups supporting preemptive military …