War and the Just War: A Christian Perspective
Gary Fisher
Revelation 6 describes war as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, “Come!” And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that people would kill one another; and a large sword was given to him. (Rev. 6:3–4, NASB)
This rider described in Revelation does not bring death, destruction, and war with him. All that is needed is for him to remove peace from the earth. This peace is a gift of God and once it is removed, humanity quickly rushes in with war and destruction. Peace with other peoples and nations is not the natural state of nations and politics. My entire career has been shaped by conflict and the preparation for conflict. I am through and through a combat chaplain. I have served for thirty years since my oath of commission on the Bridge of Nations at Bob Jones University, and my service has taken me from the conflict in Bosnia/Kosovo through Iraq and Afghanistan to the nearly global conflicts that we have today.
The modern age has been significantly shaped by war and conflict. Since World War II there have been very few days without war. The nations of the world spend 2.24 trillion dollars on war each year, as of 2022.
War brings devastation. We all have been watching what is happening with the war in Ukraine and most recently the conflict in the Middle East with Israel and Hamas in Gaza. According to widely broadcast reports, thirty-one thousand people have died in the conflict in the Middle East. I have spent my career as an Army Chaplain in a mighty war machine whose mission is to fight and win our nation’s wars. I have been sought out to be the moral voice for the conduct of just war principles to my commands throughout the years and during deployments in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. I serve now in the U.S. Army of the Pacific (USARPAC) whose mission is to avoid war by preparing for war. If we are to avoid war, we must present a complicated, robust, and overwhelming problem set to our adversaries, so they choose not to achieve their strategic ends by armed conflict.