In this article, I intend to explore the normative relation(s) between “God” and “war.” A bit more precisely, I intend to explore the normative relevance of theistic conviction to the proper employment of military violence. Even more precisely, I intend to explore the relevance of theistic conviction to the proper employment of military violence as judged by the so-called Just War Tradition (JWT). Properly interpreted, I take the JWT to provide the best available account of the morality of war. The JWT is not perfect and is bedeviled by serious problems, but it is the best available nonetheless. So, when I reflect on the morality of war, and thus on the normative relation(s) between religion and war, I do so from the perspective of the JWT.

Now this might seem to portend a very brief discussion. As we will see in detail, contemporary adherents typically construe the JWT in resolutely secular terms. Perhaps in order to compensate for its religious prehistory, most insist that the JWT has outgrown its religious provenance and may not be used to legitimate a crusade, a jihad, a holy war, or anything of the sort. In so doing, they align the JWT with the commonplace, endemic to contemporary liberal democracies, that religious wars and religious justifications for war lay far, far beyond the moral pale.

The story would recapture the trace of Judaism, particularly the mystical Jew, in the early literature of international law—I think most readily of Gentilis' obsession with Judaism—a Judaism that seems at once the law that revelation and redemption replace and the mysticism that law and state refuse. Paradoxically enough, we find here our own complex relationship between law and religion exactly mirrored in the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

This article examines the relationship between the Jewish laws of war and international law. As Kennedy notes in the opening quote, one way of understanding the relationship between Jewish laws of war and international law is as part of the relationship between international law and its “other.” Kennedy defines Jewish law as mystical, and in so doing he asserts that Jewish law is different in form than state law/international law. Kennedy's opposition of Jewish law and international law is not accidental. It is a direct consequence of the history of international law. As Mutua has noted “[i]nternational law claims to be universal, although its creators have unambiguously asserted its European and Christian origins.” From this point of view, international law has “universalized” its particular origins with the consequence that any non-European or non-Christian tradition is not universal and is the “other.” This fact leads Kennedy to argue that international law has ignored (among many other things) the traces of religion, mysticism and Judaism in its history in its quest to claim secular universality.

Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to identify in the constant central core of Christian faith, despite the inquisition, despite anti-Semitism and despite the crusades, the principles of human dignity, tolerance and freedom, including religious freedom, and therefore, in the last analysis, the foundations of the secular State.

A European court should not be called upon to bankrupt centuries of European tradition. No court, certainly not this Court, should rob the Italians of part of their cultural personality.

In March, 2011, after five years of working its way through various levels of national and European courts, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights decided that a crucifix hanging at the front of a classroom did not violate the right to religious freedom under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Specifically, Ms. Soile Lautsi had complained that the presence of the crucifix violated her and her children's right to religious freedom and that its presence amounted to an enforced religious regime. The Grand Chamber, reversing the lower Chamber's decision, held that while admittedly a religious symbol, the crucifix also represented the cultural heritage of Italians.

A widely held view on the purpose of criminal law is that it is designed to maintain social order. Assuming this view to be correct, how does criminal law achieve its purpose? The standard answer is by deterring crimes through the threat of penalties, and by incapacitating or rehabilitating criminals so that they cannot or will not engage in future crimes. Sociologists, however, have a somewhat different answer: criminal law maintains social order by branding deviant behavior as criminal. Society, it is argued, is constructed through opposition and contrast: it creates and preserves its identity, its distinct structure and unique shape, by emphasizing the differences between its own characteristics and practices and the characteristics and practices of the Other, the deviant. Deviance, in this view, is essentially a relative phenomenon. The definition of deviance, which changes from era to era and from place to place, is just that characteristic which society designates to establish, through it and in contrast to it, its identity and boundaries. Whatever the society, the deviant in that society is one who “represents the forces excluded by the group's boundaries,” informing society “as it were, what the evil looks like, what shapes the evil can assume.” In doing so, the deviant shows society “the differences between kinds of experience which belong within the group and kinds of experience which belong outside it.”

A former police chief and a criminologist confirm a famous remark by Margaret Mead when they write: “The initiation of restorative reforms is often based upon the conversion of one key professional in a criminal justice agency.”

New Zealand district court judge Fred W.M. McElrea personalized this rule in his account of how he stumbled on a restorative procedure in the case of a young man in Auckland, who was a Maori and son of a bishop, and who confessed to the crime of robbing a woman's purse. She happened to be a Quaker, and she appeared in court as a gesture of friendship for the offender. When the time came for sentencing, McElrea wondered out loud if there were a way for the young man to be monitored, without imprisonment, by some competent person who knew him. At that, Douglas Mansil, local Presbyterian minister, also present in the courtroom, stood and volunteered his services. Mansil had been the longtime “streetwise” pastor of a congregation in that Auckland neighborhood, known for furnishing the courts with more than a few youth offenders. Together with the Quaker victim of the crime, he kept track of the young man and reported regularly to the court. It was the beginning of McElrea's dedication to restorative justice (RJ) for young offenders in New Zealand. He and other judiciary leaders pay tribute to the influence of Howard Zehr's visit to New Zealand (NZ) in 1994 and Zehr's book, Changing Lenses, which McElrea first read during a sabbatical leave at Cambridge University. Zehr's book and his work in the U.S. had great impact on New Zealand legal officials, many of whom, like McElrea, often give him credit for inspiring shifts to RJ in their thinking about law, judicial process, and ethics.

Nineteenth century jurists sought to make law a science like any other. They believed that the law was not an unprincipled mass of archaic and contradictory rules, nor an extinct body of Latin words that should be venerated in a church reliquary and seldom studied. Rather, they said that it was time for law to take its place in the university and to be dissected under the microscope of scientific analysis. It was by these methods that law's fundamental axioms would be uncovered—which would in turn explain the relationship of all its parts to the whole. And with the right set of principles, new data could be effortlessly incorporated into an ever-growing scientific taxonomy of the law.

This mode of thinking dominated both European and American legal jurisprudence in the mid- to late-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, although it went by different names. One fundamental thread ran throughout—the law was not unprincipled, but logical. It could be reasonably explained and rationally ordered. This paper demonstrates that Rabbis Isaac Jacob Reines and Moses Avigdor Amiel, two important Jewish thinkers living at the turn of the twentieth century, saw Jewish law, or halakha, in the same light. Although Reines and Amiel may not have been directly influenced by secular jurisprudence, many of the elements of this classical legal science provide an interesting parallel to the answers these two thinkers gave to some of the oldest problems of Jewish law. Most notably, the way in which Reines and Amiel explained the connection between the Torah's oral and written components, as well as the way in which they asserted the internal coherence of halakhic jurisprudence, was similar to the legal formalism of their contemporaries.

Wolfhart Pannenberg is considered by many to be one of the preeminent living Protestant theologians. Now retired, Pannenberg's active career spanned almost five decades. From 1968 to 1994 he was Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich; previously he taught in Mainz and Wuppertal in Germany. Pannenberg has published prolifically, culminating with his three-volume Systematic Theology. Even in retirement, Pannenberg has continued to publish extensively, producing several volumes over the past decade. He has lectured in the U.S. on numerous occasions, and many of his books and articles have appeared in English translation. In this country, Pannenberg is generally associated with the theology of hope, a now-dated movement that was characterized by an emphasis on eschatology and the proleptic anticipation of the future through the events of history. But that association reflects only a limited aspect of Pannenberg's lengthy career, one since eclipsed by the further development of his thinking and concerns.

The breadth of Pannenberg's interests is vast. In addition to his concentration on the classical themes of theology, he has explored other subjects from a theological perspective, among them sociology, science, nature, anthropology, politics and ethics. Over the course of his career, Pannenberg has repeatedly addressed questions of law and jurisprudence, beginning with essays in the early 1960s and continuing up to a publication that appeared in 2004. For the most part, these writings consist of thematic essays, a form Pannenberg has used extensively for a wide variety of subjects. In addition to these essays, portions of Pannenberg's larger works treat law and jurisprudential themes, though as subsidiary topics. His continuing concern with law reflects his view that law is strongly tied to ethics, an area to which he has devoted more attention after he completed his Systematic Theology. Taken together, Pannenberg's writings on law constitute a coherent and reasonably well-articulated theory of law, though one that has unfortunately received limited attention, and no sustained exposition in English. Nonetheless, because of Pannenberg's prominence, and because of his incisive analysis, his work on law deserves attention in this country as well.