What I am saying is that it behooves us to be humble and patient; to not be credulous or quick to go along with the spirit of the moment, be it against or for the war; and to instead focus on the things that scripture reveals Christ and his apostles instruct us to be busy about.

“In view of the prevalent opinion in America that soldiers are, of all persons, the least capable of discussing military matters and that their years of special training is [sic] nil compared to the innate military knowledge of lawyers, doctors, and preachers, I am probably guilty of a great heresy in daring to discuss tanks from the viewpoint of a tank officer.” (Gen. George S. Patton)[1]

If the late general were serving today, the quote in the epigram would read ‘innate military knowledge of journalists, politicians, and theologians’; for the present strife in the Persian Gulf has brought forth the opinions of such people on the matter more robustly than the Southern forests have brought forth pollen. That journalists should have an interest is not surprising, for it is their trade to wax ignorant about every matter under the sun (the few competent, modest practitioners of the trade excepted). But that theologians should get into the act is disappointing indeed, all the more as those that do so are conspicuous for their competence in their own field.

Brian Mattson is one of our more astute observers of ecclesiastical and theological affairs: his review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (“A Children’s Crusade”) is probably the most thorough critical demolition of a poor book I have ever read in any field, and he has cast some much needed skepticism toward the Aquinas craze which is leading men astray (most recently, Ryan Hurd). I have before me some of Mattson’s recent musings upon the Iran War, and he is not keen on it, suffice it to say. Nor are various others, whom the historian Miles Smith references in his “The Iran War Among the Magisterial Protestants” at Ad Fontes.

Of the merits of the particulars of Mattson, et al.’s opposition I am not particularly interested here. Rather, what interests me is that so many Christian commentators are so keen to give their opinions about the affair, to include often opinions not only upon the morality of the war or about its effects upon the church, but also upon the military and political aspects of the situation (as the conduct, strategy, and war aims of the Combined Force). It is not clear to me that such considerations are within the proper realm of Christian reflection.

I don’t find a single instance in the New Testament where the apostles scouted the tactics of the Roman legions, nor otherwise opined on martial affairs or how they might affect the church. Soldiers are enjoined to eschew coercion and discontent (and by implication, looting and mutiny, Lk. 3:14), and Christ forbids his disciples to take up arms in his service (Matt. 26:47-52; comp. Jn. 18:36); yet it would appear to have been a fine thing for the church when the prone-to-extreme-brutality Roman forces delivered Paul by threat of arms when the Jews would have lynched him (Acts 21:27-36), when they subsequently protected him from the Jewish conspiracy to murder him by ambush (23:12-35), and when they forcibly prevented the mariners from deserting Paul and the other passengers when his ship was wrecked near Malta (27:30-32). Christ’s main purpose in prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem was to warn his disciples, not to give a lecture on war ethics; thus also when he said that prior to his coming “you will hear of wars and rumors of wars” and “see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place” (Matt. 24:6). His interest was the conduct of his people, not that of the relevant combatants (vv. 15-19). And I notice as I scan the text of the New Testament that I find no wars that are either praised as just or denounced as needless and immoral. War and soldiering are regarded as facts with whose consequences believers must deal, not phenomena for them to protest, regulate, or try to abolish.

Contemporary Christians seem much more interested in offering judgments upon the both the morality of the war and its relative prudence or lack thereof, in which they delve so far into the minutiae as to consider questions of strategy and what might best be called, I suppose, operational efficiency, i.e., how well our efforts are working to achieve our stated aims. They are keen on the behavior of the combatants, whether terrorist groups or sovereign nations, and dare stand in judgment of them when it is not apparent Christ has called his church or people to do so. When they object to people urging us on to war or making themselves the tools of the government in parroting its claims, I concur they have a just complaint.

But when they turn about and do the opposite in reverse, warning against or denouncing the war, they commit the same error. The war is not our business. It is a matter of nature and of natural entities (the states of Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) which God has providentially ordained for his own purposes, even, perhaps, purposes of destruction: “The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble” (Prov. 16:4).

The war is not an ecclesiastical matter. The church is of grace and is concerned with the things of Christ’s kingdom, not those temporal affairs of men which are so often beyond our ability to even understand, much less to influence meaningfully. Many men have spoken beyond their competence and concerning matters in which they are not in a position to judge accurately or fairly. If you’re a theologian you’re not getting the latest intelligence assessments, but are acting off of information reported, in the main, through the internet. How can you know any reports of casualties or damage are accurate? It’s not like you can go conduct bomb damage assessments on the ground or have reconnaissance planes or satellites at your disposal to do so.

And it’s not like the average theologian or minister can, sitting in his own office, always determine if a video or photo of a building being blown to smithereens is recent and took place in Iran rather than, say, years ago in the Iraq War. Thus also photos of aircraft Iran claims to have downed or counts of mines it claims to have laid in the Strait of Hormuz. And even to the extent one can conclude something is real, that doesn’t necessarily say anything about the effectiveness of the Iran campaign as a whole. The people who assess such questions for a living (or rely on them) seem rather prone to disagree widely about the results of such assessments. Hence the armed services’ Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress says, concerning assessing the effectiveness of battle damage assessments (BDA) of aerial bombing, that “the BDA process was only a limited success” (PDF p. 277) and “it is possible the levels of damage never will be known with precision” (177).

But one might say that the prospects of success have a major (if by no means exclusive) bearing on whether a war is just or prudent. Peter Leithart, in his musings on the subject of whether the Iran War is just, published on the war’s tenth day, argued that way, asking “do we have reasonable expectation of success?” He admitted, further, that “it’s difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not” (i.e., what I just argued in the previous two paragraphs), and then proceeded to rely upon the opinions of others to say “it seems the U.S. is in danger of depleting our munitions before we gain a decisive victory” and “we seem to have underestimated Iran’s military capability and determination, especially after Khamenei’s death, while overestimating the Iranian opposition’s appetite for a coup.” And from such ‘seeming’ conditions, buttressed by a couple tweets and the opinion of a “geoecon analyst & Engineer, working on the chessboard between Emerging Tech, Economy & State Power” on Substack, he concludes that the answer to the question of “does the U.S.-Israel assault on Iran fill the criteria of Christian just war theory?” is “a decided ‘No.’”

He rendered such a judgment a whopping ten days in, and when the specialists at the US Air Force have, on the basis of enormous amounts of aerial bombing since WW2, concluded that assessing the effectiveness of an air campaign is a difficult, uncertain art that yields mixed results while a conflict is ongoing. I shall elide that very few wars in the course of history had a predictable outcome ten days in, including many that produced good things: victory in WW2 was a far from certain thing for the US on Dec. 17^th, 1941. I shall (mostly) elide further that Leithart and many others seem to have an awful modern, convenience-based notion of just war in which efficiency is the key element. That is, that a war can only be deemed ‘just’ if it is very easy and wraps up very quickly, and entails none or very few casualties and fiscal expenditure. I daresay some seem to think a war just only if it ends in a ceasefire before hurting our domestic affairs (as the stock market and consumer pricing), and with little or no meaningful change from the status quo ante bellum, except perhaps some useless agreement that will be neither honored nor enforced a few years hence. Even by that former criteria practically no war is just, least of all many of those that have mattered most.

No, the irksome thing in all this is that when you opine outside your proper field, you risk undermining your authority and credibility within that proper sphere. You also risk widening that sphere permanently and utterly distorting the proper concerns and topics of discussion of Christian teachers and churches. And more than a few have done or are doing that very thing. That’s nothing new – the Revolutionary and Confederate Wars in particular caused problems for the churches – but neither is it helpful or right.

In saying all this I am not defending the current war. I simply do not know if it is prudent, do not think it wise to opine on the matter publicly till more can be known, and do not think it is a question of Christian fidelity. To support, ignore, or oppose it in the proper forums, as at least one Presbyterian ruling elder has done at a non-Christian organization’s site, is a civil question about which believers may differ without impugning the integrity of their confession as such. (To make dubious or false claims in so doing would however impugn one’s integrity; and alas, there is never a shortage of false claims and nonsense whenever there is a war going on.)

What I am saying is that it behooves us to be humble and patient; to not be credulous or quick to go along with the spirit of the moment, be it against or for the war; and to instead focus on the things that scripture reveals Christ and his apostles instruct us to be busy about. Christ did not even denounce the Romans when he was told “about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices” (Lk. 13:1), which act of desecration would have been performed by the occupying Roman forces.[2] He did not regard it as making the whole Roman conquest and occupation immoral and illegitimate, much less as commending believers to protest or resist in any way, but rather used it as an opportunity to call the lost to repentance. Should we today not do likewise, praying for peace, for protection to the innocent and fellow believers, and for wisdom and justice in the hearts of those whom God has given civil power in the respective lands involved, while also refraining from sharing our opinions about the Iran War’s economic, diplomatic, political, and military aspects?

Tom Hervey is a member of Friendship Presbyterian Church in Laurens County, SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation, and helped modernize Volume I of James Hervey’s classic dialogue on evangelical faith, Theron and Aspasio, available now at Monergism.

[1] The Unknown Patton by Charles Province, p. 159.

[2] The incident in view is mentioned only here in extant historical literature of the time. It is not clear whether the Galileans were insurgents or zealots (perhaps associated with that Judas the Galilean whom Gamaliel mentioned, Acts 5:37) who were killed in battle with the Romans or after being taken captive, or if they were non-combatants who were simply murdered; if this occurred while preparing to sacrifice or in the act of so doing; or where the deaths and sacrifices occurred. At a minimum it involved desecration of the bodies (a crime punished by potential court martial today) and sacrilege, and probably also some form of murder.