The Silence of God and the Witness of the Christian Soldier through Kenosis

Abstract

The moral status of soldiers as agent-instruments of polities has been long debated among Christians. Recognizing soldiers’ moral vulnerability, Stanley Hauerwas has argued for a pastoral rather than a missiological shape of what Oliver O’Donovan has called evangelical counter-praxis through a Christian’s participation in war. To reframe the complications of this dilemma, this essay argues that the Christian soldier has the potential to actively witness the love of Jesus Christ through a kenotic repudiation of one’s unwillingness to kill. Through an interpretation of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, a correspondence between the Christian soldier and the apostate-cum-martyr Fr. Rodrigues is arguable through an act of paradoxical faith in Jesus, where killing the enemy becomes an imitation of his self-emptying on the cross for the sake of others. Christian soldiers may find self-understanding, healing, and forgiveness by naming their acts truthfully with the intention to move through confession to gratitude and a deeper love for God and neighbor.

1. Introduction

In the fifth chapter of War and the American Difference, “Sacrificing the Sacrifices of War”, Stanley Hauerwas throws into sharp relief an often-overlooked problem in the moral analysis of war (Hauerwas 2011a). Rejecting any historical narrative that would justify moral value for the sacrificial practice of war, Hauerwas proposes that “any alternative to war must be one that sacrifices the sacrifices of war” (Hauerwas 2011a, p. 57).1 The whole so-called “moral” enterprise of war, which draws forth virtues like heroism and sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself, must be overturned, not only for the sake of the world, but also for the sake of the soldiers who are asked and encouraged by their countries to make “the ultimate sacrifice”. Moreover, the notion that the renunciation of one’s own life is the most dear and costly sacrifice is incomplete; soldiers give up much more than that. Hauerwas argues:

I think it is a mistake, however, to focus only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill. It may seem odd to call the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill a “sacrifice”, but I want to show that this sacrifice often renders the lives of those who make it unintelligible.

(Hauerwas 2011a, p. 61)

Asserting this, Hauerwas proposes that one of the greatest and most underrecognized evils of war is the demand that combatants forswear their freedom to not kill.

Killing results in a most unnatural state of requiring men and women to alienate themselves from their fellow human beings and from their own self-understanding in Christ as witnesses to his life. Hauerwas writes:

To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence—and certainly it is right for silence to surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take. Those who kill, even when such a killing is assumed to be legitimate, bear the burden that what they have done makes them “different”.

(Hauerwas 2011a, p. 67)

Soldiers know the gravity of their actions and struggle under the weight of their consequences, often failing to find means to self-integration and reintegration within their former communities.2 This can be especially difficult in the context of the Christian Church, as Christ’s words and actions in the gospels consistently seem to reject recourse to violence as a means to realize the kingdom of heaven. By highlighting this evil consequence of war, Hauerwas would have Christians realize that in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, they no longer need to offer themselves as sacrifices in war. In the supreme sacrifice of the cross, war has been abolished, and the Church can protect soldiers from further personal disintegration by no longer validating sacrificial demands rendered unnecessary by Christ upon them.3 In the context of his realized eschatology, Hauerwas’s claims are compelling. Christians who take seriously the efficacy of the Paschal Mystery must recognize the changed context in which a Christian is called to live in the communion of the Church.

Looking at the world on the eschatological horizon, there is still much to trouble the conscience of Christians who recognize the continued pervasiveness of moral evil and innocent suffering as one awaits Christ’s second coming. How is a Christian to live responsibly and love his or her neighbor when violence and injustice demand God’s intervention? In a review of Karl Marlantes’s What It Is Like to Go to War, Hauerwas admits, “We cannot ignore the reality that those committed to nonviolence may have to watch the innocent suffer for their conviction” (Hauerwas 2011b, p. 37). Where pacifists like Hauerwas confidently trust in the effective witness of the Church through a “pastoral shape” of what Oliver O’Donovan terms “evangelical counter-praxis”, others seek to realize this counter-praxis in a “missiological shape” that “assumes the secular form of judgment—not a final judgment, but judgment as the interim provision of God’s common grace, promising the dawning of God’s final peace” (O’Donovan 2003, p. 6). The account of this interim judgment is frequently articulated and analyzed in the Christian just war tradition.

Interpretations of the just-war tradition have mostly centered on the rectitude of policy decisions by state authorities to initiate and conduct armed conflict in the interest of the common good. Too few, however, move into any in-depth investigation of the particular agent-instruments of those policy decisions in the theatre of armed conflict—the soldiers themselves. Although just war is conceived as a political act of the state for securing a more perfect peace and the common good, one cannot ignore the question of the moral agency and self-understanding of the soldier. Truly comprehensive just war analysis must help combatants make sense of their moral commitments and duties to both God and country and arrive at a stable ground of self-integrity.

As Hauerwas makes readers aware, the psychological and spiritual self-integrity of the soldier, especially the Christian soldier, is fragile. Ambiguity as to what degree the soldier is responsible for actions taken in the capacity of his office often clouds the moral landscape.4 In addition to this ‘fog of war’ are the specific responsibilities a soldier has to his comrades on the line, family and friends on the home front, as well as concerns for innocent third parties and even the enemy. As Preston Jones and Cody Beckman discovered through a series of interviews with Christian combat veterans, “Just war theory means nothing to a kid from Harlem now walking through a minefield. The finer points of pacifism cannot help a twenty-three-year-old helicopter pilot trying to extract wounded comrades while under enemy fire” (Jones and Beckman 2009, p. ix). What is more necessary than another systematic investigation of the ethics of Christian participation in combat is a new vision for looking at the moral act of a Christian soldier and a hermeneutic for interpreting that vision that can help him understand his experience in a way that does not create ambiguity regarding his relationship with Christ in killing. What is needed is a true way for a soldier to identify his actions, even killing, with Christian participation in realizing God’s will on earth.

Centered on the psychological and spiritual self-understanding of the soldier, I do not intend that this essay provide a new paradigm, nor justification for an existing paradigm, of just-war analysis. It stands in tension between the well-established positions of Stanley Hauerwas, whose concern for and reflections on the tragic lack of proper care for the modern soldier inspired this study, and that of Oliver O’Donovan, whose commitment to active evangelical counter-praxis through the interim judgment of war understands the moral possibility, and even requirement, of authentic Christian participation in combat. Both scholars provide compelling and possibly complementary visions for authentic Christian witness in the ambiguity of the current eon between Christ’s first and second coming. This tension, instead, can provide the context for creative pluralism regarding the role and participation of Christians in the mediating of God’s justice while they await the eschaton.

To illustrate this tension and the dilemma faced by Christians regarding combat participation, I will investigate an analogous situation in literature faced by the protagonist Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence.5 His situation closely parallels the psychological and spiritual dilemma which confronts many Christians regarding their participation in war. Confronted with the dilemma of (1) apostatizing in order to end the suffering of tortured Christians in the midst of the Japanese persecutions of the Edo period or (2) refusing apostasy at the expense of his own life and more importantly the lives of the other Christians, Endo’s account of Rodrigues’s turmoil in discernment and his action’s intention can serve as a useful hermeneutic for viewing the psychology and spirituality of Christian soldiers’ discernment and intention.

Using Endo’s narrative, I argue that the Christian soldier has the potential to actively witness the love of Jesus Christ through a kenotic repudiation of his unwillingness to kill. Through an act of paradoxical faith in Jesus, killing the enemy becomes an imitation of his self-emptying on the cross for the sake of others. Christian soldiers can understand themselves as participating in a morally praiseworthy act of martyrdom, even in killing, by means of naming their acts truthfully with the intention to move through confession to gratitude and a deeper love for God and neighbor. The well-intentioned act of a Christian soldier has the potential to ‘speak’ in a world awaiting its eschatological fulfillment in Christ and break the silence of our powerlessness before the evil which Christ has definitively defeated, but which still pervades the world until he comes again.

2. The Command to Love and the Problem of Killing

The example and teachings of Jesus Christ found in the New Testament enjoin Christians to imitation/participation in love of God by means of the life and death of Christ until the final judgment. Central to Christ’s example and teachings in the scriptural tradition, are notably passages from the temptation of Jesus at the beginning and end of his ministry (Mt 4:1–11; 26:36–42; Lk 4:1–13; 22:39–46), the Sermon on the Mount and Plain (Mt 5–7; Lk 6:20–49), and the ‘New Commandment’ (Jn 13:31–35) (Hays 1996).6 Faced with exhortations to put one’s trust in God’s power and will alone, to love enemies and pray for persecutors, and to love others as Jesus loved us, it is difficult to square away permissions for violence and killing with the message of peace, love, and forgiveness that Jesus bears.

This discomfiture makes itself acutely felt in the experience of Christian soldiers, who know these injunctions well. In Jones and Beckman’s study, most Christian veterans interviewed were unable to imagine Jesus’s involvement in war as a combatant. Because of this inability, they relate that “for Christian warriors, combat means, in some way, putting Jesus aside. It means putting one’s soul in a lost-and-found department for a while…” (Jones and Beckman 2009, p. 27). A result of the bracketing of this relationship with Jesus, Christian soldiers easily adopt the notion that ‘war is hell,’ an acutely felt absence of God. Worse, after participating in something that is in their minds wholly un-Christlike and knowing that ‘hell’ is the consequence of moral condemnation, some veterans find themselves unable to forgive themselves, feeling that God could never forgive them for what they have done in the conduct of warfare (Jones and Beckman 2009, p. 34). The faith that brought many soldiers to the personal knowledge of Jesus’s command to love and forgive others seems to condemn them in their cooperation with the anti-imitation of Jesus in the infernal enterprise of war.

Despite the experiences of soldiers like these and the plethora of scriptural injunctions that seem to prohibit not only killing, but violent resistance of any sort, many doctors of the Catholic Church have accommodated occasions for justified killing, particularly in the context of war. St. Augustine, in City of God, clearly establishes the grounds for exceptions to the divine command against killing, where the authority of God through legal ordinance or direct communication of permission to an individual reigns supreme and demands obedience. In those cases, the person submitting in obedience is not properly the agent of the act of killing, but is an instrument of that authority’s policy, or the sword of the sovereign (Augustine 1984, I.21, p. 32). Thus, those who soldier under proper legal authority or follow a direct divine command do not themselves kill but are instruments of God’s divine will in the created order, and therefore meritoriously serving and loving God. St. Thomas Aquinas carries forward the Augustinian tradition, identifying the three criteria of: (1) sovereign authority, (2) just cause, and (3) right intention for war to be just and treating the question of war, not in his treatise on justice, but that of love (Aquinas 1948, II-II, q. 40, a. 1, pp. 1353–4). In the tradition of these two great doctors of the Catholic Church the command to love does not forbid violence and killing in war, but sanctions and requires soldiers fulfill their duty to serve the authority exercising the will of God, or at least seeking the common good.

Today, a strand of the just war tradition from Augustine and Aquinas that remains intelligible in the eschatological perspective of Hauerwas is the just-war analysis of Oliver O’Donovan. His account of just war, like Augustine’s, eschews the notion of self-defense as a justification for war, unlike many other contemporary theorists because, “The classic just-war thinkers could not think of it in that way, for they thought that the antagonistic structure was itself morally problematic for Christians. There was an evangelical duty (or, from another theological position, an evangelical counsel) of non-resistance to evil” (O’Donovan 2003, p. 22). A Christian does not go to war out of self-interest or self-defense, but rather as a political act of “judgment as the interim provision of God’s common grace” as noted earlier. Interpreted thus, O’Donovan believes that acts of war can be interpreted as acts of love, “providing, in the first place, the judgment of which the injured neighbor stands in need, but not excluding love for the injured neighbor’s enemy at the same time” (O’Donovan 2003, p. 28). Just war analysis, conceived in this way, provides the greatest hope of relieving the paradox of the command to love and the soldier’s act of killing in war—understanding it as instrumental neighbor love to render justice to aggrieved innocents until God renders final judgment.

The research of Jones and Beckman, as well as the theology of Hauerwas, stands in condemnation of the vulnerable position of soldiers, yet the persistence of the Christian just war tradition suggests that there might be a way for a Christian soldier to participate in war without sinning and without requiring even a temporary lacuna in his relationship with Christ. The accounts of Augustine, Aquinas, and O’Donovan do not forego the question of love in war but place it paradoxically at the center of that enterprise. This love is not a self-love, but a love for God and neighbor in hope and humility before God’s final pronouncement of justice. Is there, then, a vision for and interpretation of a soldier’s experience that might see soldiering as imitation/participation of the life and death of Jesus? In an unusual, but fitting analogue, those reflecting on the morality and self-integrity of a Christian soldier may find inspiration in a work of historical fiction. In the literary work of a Japanese Roman Catholic struggling with self-identity through the story of an apostate missionary priest, Christian soldiers may find a way to understand and voice their faith in Christ, even in the seeming silence and absence of God in the ‘hell’ of war.

3. Paradoxical Witness to Christ’s Love in the “Silence” of God

Written in post-war Japan by the son of a Japanese convert to Roman Catholic Christianity, Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence is deeply informed by the author’s struggle to make sense of a perceived incompatibility between his Japanese cultural roots and Western Christianity.7 He feels like the persecuted Japanese of his novel, living “a double life of public denial and penitential private affirmation of Christ and Christianity” (Higgins 1985, p. 417).8 Much like his [anti-]hero Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues, and, I will argue, the Christian soldier, Endo is forced to struggle with competing moral claims on his self-identity and only comes to personal integration through a new understanding of and identification with Christ crucified. Jean Higgins writes:

The God that emerges in Silence is clearly a God more of act than of word, but act that is expressive of quiet, meek, co-suffering rather than power and might. Endo, in fact, makes his point in paradox: the power of Christ lies in his very powerlessness, his fullness in his nothingness.

(Higgins 1985, p. 424)

In writing Silence, Endo is able, through his character, to break the silence of self-alienation and give voice to a grateful confession of God’s love for him and the willing response in imitation/participation in Christ’s act of self-emptying for others. In this way, Endo, Rodrigues, and the Christian soldier find a voice to name themselves and their action despite the perceived silence of God in their respective struggles.

In Silence the Jesuit missionary Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues comes to the Japanese mainland with great enthusiasm to seek news of the rumored apostate priest Christavao Ferreira and to minister to the crypto-Christians of the islands. He is soon betrayed by a cowardly apostate Japanese-Christian named Kichijiro. Despite his capture, Rodrigues holds fast to his glorious images of Christ and the dignity of his forthcoming martyrdom. However, after seeing the torturous execution of peasants on his journey to Nagasaki he begins to think, “but the martyrdom of the peasants, enacted before his eyes—how wretched it was, miserable like the huts they lived in, like the rags in which they were clothed” (Endo 1969, p. 120). Soon after he is interrogated by a local magistrate who leads him into further doubt and self-alienation when asked, “Father, have you thought of the suffering you have inflicted on so many peasants just because of your dream, just because you want to impose your selfish dream upon Japan. Look! Blood is flowing again. The blood of those ignorant people is flowing again” (Endo 1969, p. 134). Forced to confront the consequences of the conflict between his missionary zeal and the claim of the Japanese authorities, Rodrigues reaches out in prayer to God, only to feel the silence of God.

Soon he is confronted by the very man who occasioned his journey: Christavao Ferreira, in a black kimono, now answering to the name Sawano Chuan. In a series of exchanges, Ferreira tries to convince Rodrigues to apostatize as he did, claiming the fruitlessness of any resistance and uselessness of any action. Rodrigues spurns the apostate priest but begins to doubt his own conviction and missionary spirit. Within a couple days, he is paraded through the streets and brought to the magistrate’s office in Nagasaki. In the course of his ‘dark night’ there, Rodrigues complains of incessant snoring from nearby prisoners that will not let him find peace and rest. Ferreira tells him that this noise he hears is not snoring but in fact the groans of Christians suspended above a pit of excrement slowly bleeding to death.

The climactic exchange between the two priests reveals not only an account of their explicit debate, but also the implicit discernment happening within Rodrigues. Ferreira informs Rodrigues that as it is now, so it was when he was captured. Ferreira reveals further:

For three days, I who stand before you was hung in a pit of foul excrement, but I did not say a single word that might betray my God… The reason I apostatized… are you ready? Listen! I was put in here and heard the voices of the people for whom God did nothing. God did not do a single thing. I prayed with all my strength, but God did nothing.

(Endo 1969, pp. 167–68)

He continues:

Now they are in the courtyard … Three unfortunate Christians are hanging. They have been hanging since you came here … When I spent that night here five people were suspended in the pit. Five voices were carried to my ears on the wind. The official said, “If you apostatize, those people will immediately be taken out of the pit, their bonds will be loosed, and we will put medicine on their wounds.” I answered: “Why do these people not apostatize?” And the official laughed as he answered me: “They have already apostatized many times. But as long as you don’t apostatize these peasants cannot be saved”.

(Endo 1969, pp. 168–69)

The unfortunate Christians now hanging despite their apostasy cry out for help and only Rodrigues’s act can seem to resolve it. Still, Rodrigues rebukes the seemingly perfidious Ferreira saying, “And you … You should have prayed …”, but Ferreira’s response further complicates the now-collapsing ideological privilege of Rodrigues, as he rejoinders: “I did pray. I kept on praying. But prayer did nothing to alleviate their suffering … I know it well, because I have experienced that same suffering in my own body. Prayer does nothing to alleviate suffering” (Endo 1969, p. 169). In the course of the trial, Rodrigues’ personal experience of witnessing the suffering of his brethren creates a tension that demands resolution. There is increasing awareness that there is no way to sustain his position outside the possibilities of apostasy or complicity with the death of innocents.

Rodrigues has become exhausted, and his resistance beleaguered. In the midst of the inner turmoil that he senses in Rodrigues, Ferreira chides him one last time:

You make yourself more important than them. You are preoccupied with your own salvation. If you say that you will apostatize, those people will be taken out of the pit. They will be saved from suffering. And if you refuse to do so. It’s because you dread to betray the Church. You dread to be the dregs of the Church, like me.” … For a moment Ferreira remained silent; then he suddenly broke out in a strong voice: “Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them.

(Endo 1969, p. 169)

Just before being presented with the fumie, a framed icon of Mary and the Christ Child on which Christians would step to signal the renunciation of their faith, Ferreira says to Rodrigues:

Now you are going to perform the most painful act of love that has ever been performed… Your brethren in the Church will judge you as they have judged me. But there is something more important than the Church, more important than missionary work: what you are now about to do.

(Endo 1969, p. 170)

As Rodrigues slowly and painfully lifts his foot, the image of Christ in the fumie calls out to him saying, “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross” (Endo 1969, p. 171). As Rodrigues steps, a cock crows in the distance.

In the weeks the follow, Rodrigues is remanded to his new position serving the Japanese court, as Ferreira does, by identifying Christian artifacts and writing tracts against Christian error. In this time, he continues to reflect on what he has done. He examines his motivations, thinking, “As Ferreira spoke to me his tempting words, I thought that if I apostatized those miserable peasants would be saved. Yes, that was it. And yet, in the last analysis, I wonder if all this talk of love is not, after all, just an excuse to justify my own weakness” (Endo 1969, p. 175). After an interlude, the story concludes with a final encounter of Rodrigues with Kichijiro, who has come to him secretly for confession. Faced with his betrayer and reflecting on the moment of his own seeming betrayal of Christ, Rodrigues speaks with the face of the fumie in his memory. Rodrigues and Jesus make the following exchange:

--“Lord, I resented your silence.”

--“I was not silent. I suffered beside you.”

--“But you told Judas to go away: What thou dost do quickly. What happened to Judas?”

--“I did not say that. Just as I told you to step on the plaque, so I told Judas to do what he was going to do. For Judas was in anguish as you are now”.

(Endo 1969, p. 190)

Contemplating what happened then within him, Endo writes:

He had lowered his foot on to the plaque, sticky with dirt and blood. His five toes had pressed upon the face of the one he loved. Yet he could not understand the tremendous onrush of joy that came over him at that moment.

(Endo 1969, p. 190)

In the midst of an act of paradoxical love and seeming mortal sin, Rodrigues finds that Christ has broken the silence to console him. He shares that consolation with the fellow apostate Kichijiro, giving him absolution. Moreover, he concludes: “Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him” (Endo 1969, p. 191). In some way, Rodrigues comes to understand his action as an authentic witness to Christ’s love even in his denial of him.

Endo’s account of Rodrigues in Silence creates a tension for readers attempting to understand Rodrigues’s act and its effect on his identity. Despite the hopeful words of the conclusion, still echoing are Rodrigues’s earlier doubts whether “all this talk of love in not, after all, just an excuse to justify my own weakness” (Endo 1969, p. 175). How is one to understand the true nature of Rodrigues’s act? Can that same understanding be analogously applied to the Christian soldier who kills in war? To that end, Darlene Weaver in The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life provides a framework for evaluating the moral act of the Christian with her own helpful reflection on Rodrigues in Endo’s Silence. Central to the notion of fidelity to God and one’s own self-understanding in light of that faithfulness is what Weaver calls “truthfulness before God”, a task of a lifetime and a grace that brings a human person into the reconciling love of God (Weaver 2011, p. 131). This gift demands and enables (1) confession, (2) gratitude and (3) charity. As the Christian names his actions truthfully, one should see those three fruits in his words and works. Likewise:

Accordingly, we do not name human actions truthfully if we do not refer them to God and if we do not concretely locate them in the world God creates, redeems, and sustains. Naming our moral actions is the task of discovering what we can about the truth of our actions as involvement with God and the goods of creaturely life.

(Weaver 2011, p. 143)

The task and challenge of naming acts truthfully is always to aim for and assess our actions with love of God as our final end for them in light of intermediate ends of the created world at which they also aim and through which they pass.9 Weaver takes seriously the complexity of assessing moral acts in the created world, while maintaining singular focus on the necessary end of all Christian acts in the love of God.

To illustrate this process of naming acts truthfully, she examines the case of Rodrigues in Silence. In no way can one avoid naming Rodrigues’s act as apostasy, and thus assessing the act to be immoral by its very naming. However, in his own inner struggle of discernment and experience of Christ’s communication to him, Rodrigues understands the act in such a way that refers the act of apostasy to a self-identification with Christ, the one on whom he “tramples” and rejects. Rodrigues is scrupulous in his reflection on that act before, during, and after that action, questioning the motivation for apostasy, worried that it may not be selfless, but selfish. Still, Weaver concludes, in light of the narrative:

Rodrigues’s unbelief operates within his explicit faith in Jesus Christ. His struggle with God’s silence prior to his apostasy suggests that he clings to some ‘normative conception of goodness, truth, right, love, salvation,’ and so forth, with which he tries to deal with God, a conception of God’s silence calls into question and that the message Christ delivers from the fumie overthrows. Rodrigues’s apostasy is arguably a confession of Christ’s lordship, on that is inclusive of naming his fall as such. He is made to deal with God’s love and his love and accordingly comes to affirm the identity of the truth Christ witnesses and of Christ himself, the crucified one.

(Weaver 2011, p. 155)

Rodrigues’s act of apostasy is not comprehended by that term alone. In it lies a deeper reality only uncovered when examining the interior disposition toward Christ as the proper end of all action.

Examining it for signs of the graces of confession, gratitude, and love, his complete act is more perfectly apprehended. By vetting his intention in the aftermath, questioning whether he steps on the fumie for love of neighbor or out of weakness, Rodrigues is confessing to put his relationship with Christ aright. This includes even the confession of resentment in the moment of Christ’s seeming absence. By doing so he accepts responsibility, preparing himself for gratitude. Although resentful, by confessing his strained relationship with God, he is freed for the reexamination of that act with new, honest eyes. When he relives the act, he feels not sorrow, but joy. That joy is grounded solely in Christ, and only comes when Rodrigues recognizes that he is not alone and never was alone, always sustained even in perceived absence and silence of God. He finally moves from gratitude to the sustained—even deepened—love for Christ and the world Christ saves. He is able to participate in the graced life of God by providing of the same sacrament of forgiveness and God’s self-presence to Kichijiro as he himself has experienced, with confidence that God lives in him and witnesses through his very life.

For Endo’s account of Rodrigues and the rehabilitation of the seeming immoral act of apostasy to find an analogue in the act of a Christian soldier’s killing, it too must possess the signs of confession, gratitude, and love. Soldiers must be able to name accurately what they have done in taking life from another human being with all attendant value-judgments and come to avoid evasion of responsibility. They must be able to express gratitude for their contingent and limited power to effect good to others in the world, testifying to Christ’s sufficiency. Finally, the Christian soldier must find a means to participate in the life of Christ in and through their actions and the aftermath. These conditions may seem too long to satisfy given the kind of act killing is. However, “What we may learn from Rodrigues’s apostasy is that a fall from grace may be a fall into grace” (Weaver 2011, p. 155). If an apostate can find justification in Christ, the same should hold true for Christian soldiers in the act of killing. Not every Christian soldier immediately has this permission, but like Rodrigues must arrive at it through an active construction of self-understanding with love of Christ as the end for all action. The best way, I argue, to understand the proper moral act of the Christian soldier, and help him name truthfully what he does, consists in kenosis, or self-emptying. Through the lens of voluntary, conscious renunciation of self for love of God, a Christian soldier can gain a sharper vision of the meritorious nature of his act and the sanctifying identity in relationship to Christ which he has in imitation/participation with him.

4. Conceptualizing the Kenosis of Soldiers

From the analogous account of Sebastian Rodrigues in Endo’s Silence and Weaver’s proposal for truthfulness before God and naming moral actions, one arrives at the question of how to name the act of a Christian soldier. Naming the act occurs in a complex, value-laden moral world, and it involves a prejudgment of the act. Naming is an exercise of analogical imagination, not only helping us understand the act itself but also shaping the agent as a person. Naming rightly is matter of promoting the common good. To name truthfully requires and enables confession, gratitude, and charity. In this section, I propose that a possible way to name the act of the Christian soldier is martyrdom, a witness to Christ in one’s analogous act of kenosis. Exploring the key passage of Philippians 2:6–11, I believe that Christian soldiers can find a narrative therein with which they can identify and relate their actions to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross in a new, surprising way. Through faithfulness to Christ in the struggle against evil by placing the love of neighbor before love of self, and through the self-emptying act of his unwillingness to kill for God’s glory, a Christian soldier might find identification with Christ’s own self-emptying of his eternal, divine nature by submitting to death, and, in fact, grow in deeper relationship with Him through this paradox.

4.1. Fidelity to Christ in the Struggle by Placing Others before Self

Paul prefaces his account of Christ’s abjection and exultation first with an appeal at the end of the previous chapter to remain steadfast in the faith of the gospel, not deterred by opponents. There is the context of antagonism and conflict between those within the spirit and mind of Christ and those without, and, “Paul appeals for the kind of steadfastness that comes from closed ranks in a line of battle” (Byrne 1990, p. 793). It should not be surprising that Paul and those writing in his tradition, employ martial imagery here, as is done in 1 Thessalonians 5:8, 2 Corinthians 6:7, Romans 6:13–14, Ephesians 6:10–18, and others. The use of the imagery is a powerful metaphor in line with apocalyptic imagery of the warrior-Messiah in the Jewish imagination of that time. Even if the imagery of the Christian as militia Christi, is to be understood primarily as metaphor for spiritual warfare, it is hard to justify its exhortatory use throughout the Pauline corpus without admitting that the early Church retained the notional possibility of Christians participating in temporal war under the authority of God (Harnack 1981, pp. 34–35).10 The context of Christ’s kenosis in the Paschal Mystery is itself grounded in the conflict in which Christ was engaged and the suffering that results in one’s struggle for fidelity to God’s love and goodness in yet unreconciled world (Byrne 1990, p. 794).

As Philippians 2 begins, Paul makes a second appeal not only to steadfastness, but also encouragement in the Spirit, compassion, and mercy, from where Paul draws his strength as well. He then cautions the community, “Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but [also] everyone for those of others” (Phil 2:3–4, NABRE). Put in other terms and connected to the discourse on love in 1 Corinthians 13, “For Paul, Christian love flows from the free disposition to unseat concern for self as the driving force of life and replace it with a practical concern for others” (Byrne 1990, p. 794). As one investigates kenosis in the Christological hymn, the context is a practical one, to place the well-being of others before concern for self in imitation of Christ, “solace in love”, and “participation in the Spirit” (Phil 2:1).

A frequent problem noted in Jones and Beckman’s study relevant here is that “Christian combatants relate their belief in a God who presides over the world in a general way and yet, in the context of war, allows for seemingly unmitigated freedom” (Jones and Beckman 2009, p. 41). This freedom allowed would seem to license any and all means by both sides because of God’s seeming withdrawal from the field of battle. Were Christian soldiers given to examine their position from the perspective of kenosis, there opens the possibility of viewing their situation as one of donation for others and, “Self-giving therefore also means to stand in solidarity with those who stand under such ultimate judgment as well” (Kilcrease 2010, p. 30). It stands to humanize the situation and keep relationships to God, neighbor on whose behalf the soldier advocates, neighbor whom he fights, and others in perspective. Also, regarding this freedom, participation in war understood in O’Donovan’s terms as missiological evangelical counter-praxis does not guarantee victory for the just cause in the attempt to participate in the interim judgment of God. It is vulnerable in the conditions of the world and liable to overwhelming violence. Nor does O’Donovan’s theology make victory at all costs an end of missiological evangelical counter-praxis. According to his theology and the Pauline account of kenosis in Philippians, any evangelical counter-praxis is under regulation by Christ and, “[i]t cannot possibly issue a licence to avoid defeat by all possible means” (O’Donovan 2003, p. 10). In this world still awaiting God’s final judgment when justice will finally and definitively be rendered, Christians are called to act in fidelity and discipline to Christ’s command to put others’ interests first with eschatological hope, knowing that often those actions lead to the cross.

However, this does not mean that in the face of possible defeat in the interim that one must resort exclusively to the passive “pastoral” evangelical counter-praxis” of pacifists like Hauerwas. Surely there is powerful witness in that form of Christian action in fidelity to Christ’s gospel, a witness that can lead to a type of kenotic witness that properly identifies itself with Christ’s sacrifice of his very life on the cross for love of the world and refusal to submit to means and ends of the temporal authorities. In this way, many pacifists will be martyrs to Christ. However, O’Donovan argues that if pacifists think that martyrdom in this way is active witness, and the duty of the Christian, they are wrong. He writes:

The possibilities of active witness to God’s peace are not exhausted until we have exhausted them, which we will not have done if we have not explored them. In this context, as in all others, the duties which confront us do not begin with martyrdom; they end with it, when we have gone as far as we are permitted to go, done as much as we are permitted to do. Martyrdom is not, in fact, a strategy for doing anything, but a testimony to God’s faithfulness when there is nothing left to do.

(O’Donovan 2003, p. 10)

Instead of moving directly to martyrdom as a passive resistance to evil by refusing to participate and capitulate to it as understood as violence, O’Donovan necessitates the exploration of other means, equally faithful to Christ’s regulation and understood in the light of his cross, but possibly admitting violence. If confession, gratitude, and charity are present in the Christian’s act, it can possibly be a possibility of active witness within what on is permitted to do. Because of those regulations, Christian may still pursue the common good for love of Christ and neighbor, and in this way actively witness, serve as martyrs in their own role, by dying to unwillingness to kill.

Not only this, but any act of kenosis, especially Christ’s, both in his incarnation and crucifixion, must be properly viewed on the horizon of eschatological fulfillment. As Oliver O’Donovan argues that war can serve as an active form of evangelical Christian counter-praxis to the antagonistic praxis of duellum, it must be seen as “judgment as the interim provision of God’s common grace, promising the dawning of God’s final peace” (O’Donovan 2003, p. 6). Understood in this way, kenosis and war are compatible with regard in their respective claim to only anticipate the perfection and fullness for which Christians and the world await. In the meantime, each practice has a value in demonstrating human impotency to overcome the evil it confronts, yet still courageously engages in the uncertainty of its present success yet hopeful assurance of its ultimate success and vindication in Christ’s second coming:

This ultimate act of self-donation also presupposes the coming ultimate act of wrath and judgment. If sin and wrath lead to the increase in grace and self-donation then the final and ultimate act of self-donation (the literal giving of the divine being to humanity in the form of the incarnation) must coincide with the coming of the great and final event of wrath and judgment.

(Kilcrease 2010, p. 30)

This is much in line, as well with the Augustine’s understanding of the waging of war itself, where men do not fight because they hate peace, rather they seek a peace that better serves the interest of their polity (Augustine 1984, Book XIX.12, p. 866). Where the interest of the polity is the common good, war can be understood not as contrary to peace, but instrumental for a more perfect peace. Soldiers, therefore, might not be viewed as confounding the project of witnessing to the kingdom of heaven on earth, but rather realizing the reign of God in the world and in themselves by the very emptying of what is most dear to them in imitation of Christ for the sake of love of God and neighbor.

4.2. Subjection of the Will and Its Desires for the Glory of God

The Christological Hymn has a very familiar two-part structure consisting in Christ’s voluntary humiliation and consequent exaltation by God. In the emptying, he accepts an authority above himself that subjects him to indignities even unto the very surrender of his life as we read:

Who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.

Rather, he emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

coming in human likeness;

and found human in appearance,

he humbled himself,

becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross (Phil 2:6–8).

The relationship of voluntarily subjecting oneself to the command of others, submission to indignity, and relinquishing of life is easily found in the experience of a soldier. However, there is also in this stanza a tripartite structure and linguistic pattern identified by Michael Gorman that highlights concession (2:6a), then negation (2:6b) and finally affirmation (2:7–8) in the same passage. Christ is presented as having the power and status of God but refusing to exploit it for personal gain or self-interest, instead making a selfless act on behalf of and for love of others (Gorman 2009, pp. 16–17). Jones and Beckman point out in many interviews that, “Warriors speak of the shedding of blood for the benefit of others and of dying for a cause greater than oneself; they speak of combatants being men of sorrows who are acquainted with grief” (Jones and Beckman 2009, p. 47). Hauerwas noted that “the greatest sacrifice of war is not the sacrifice of life, great as such a sacrifice may be, but rather the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill” (Hauerwas 2011a, p. 56 [italics added for emphasis]). Christian soldiers can self-identify with Christ thus. Even though a soldier holds within himself a personal unwillingness to kill, he knows his proper and complete subjection to God. He can choose to empty himself of that unwillingness to kill for God’s sake and undergo the trials of confronting death of oneself and the others, including the enemy on the battlefield, whom he ought to love.

The goal of that emptying is God’s glory. Paul writes in the second half of his hymn:

Because of this, God greatly exalted him

and bestowed on him the name

that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that

Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:6–11).

God works through Christ’s emptiness and gifts him a name to be revered for God’s own glory. The glory of any true kenosis is not the one being emptied, but the one filling the emptiness. Therefore, if a soldier is to understand kenosis as means to participate in Christ, he does not do so for his own nor his nation’s glory. To be sure, as Gorman points out at the end of his discussion on cruciformity as holiness as theosis, “Nationalistic, military power is not the power of the cross, and such misconstrued notions of divine power have nothing to do with the majesty or holiness of the triune God known in the weakness of the cross” (Gorman 2009, p. 128). He does, however affirm, “kenosis and crucifixion are intimately expressive of the missio Dei in the world, because the divine being and act are inseparable” (Gorman 2009, p. 38). Although aligned with Hauerwas, and explicitly committed to non-violence as the way to live in present tension and anticipation of eschatological fulfillment, Gorman’s account of kenosis as an expression of God’s mission in the world might suggest a way to understand a soldier’s account of his participation in the divine mission for God’s glory.

Although most soldiers could have recourse to define their act truthfully as kenotic self-emptying, there are some who by natural predisposition would be disqualified. For a Christian soldier to appeal to kenosis as a means of imitation/participation in the self-emptying of Christ for the sake of the world, there must be a sacrifice for the sake of the other entailing the emptying of one’s will for God’s glory. There must be some suffering of self-alienation from one’s being and source of being in order to be filled with reconciling grace by God in truthful confession of one’s act intended lovingly. In his own way, Stanley Hauerwas notes this as a problem in his proposal to care for soldiers by sacrificing the sacrifices of war. He knows that some may not suffer from the act of killing and may not want to sacrifice unwillingness to kill. He writes, “Of course, I am not suggesting that every person who has killed in war suffers from having killed. But I do believe that those who have killed without the killing troubling their lives should not have been in the business of killing in the first place” (Hauerwas 2011a, pp. 61–62).

I cannot agree more, but for perhaps different reasons. As Lt. Col. Dave Grossman pointed out in his study On Killing, there are approximately two percent of soldiers who are “natural soldiers”, without the same resistance to killing that the vast majority of men possess. This doesn’t necessarily make them sociopathic, but “the presence of aggression, combined with the absence of empathy, results in sociopathy” (Grossman 1995, p. 183). Though there are some naturally aggressive men with empathy who are, as he calls them “metaphorical sheepdogs”, it is not a sacrifice of self to kill for the love of others. Their behavior would not qualify as a kenotic witness because the act of killing is not a sacrifice of personal unwillingness to kill, but a fulfillment of one’s own desires apart from the voluntary imitation of Christ’s emptiness on the cross. They fail to fulfill the exhortation of St. Augustine, “Let necessity, therefore, and not your will, slay the enemy who fights against you” (Augustine 1887). The particular kenotic witness of these men and women, as Gorman would want to maintain for all persons, must lie rather in the repudiation of any violent act (Gorman 2009, p. 159).

Strangely, in arguing the kenotic validity of the sacrifice of unwillingness to kill, one must affirm a complementary call to the witness of the pacifist his potential for authentic martyrdom. O’Donovan writes, “Suffering and martyrdom mark the point at which the possibilities of true judgment run out within the conditions of this world. They are necessary components of Christian practical reason, because they demonstrate the vulnerability of the praxis of judgment, and so protect it from serious misunderstanding” (O’Donovan 2003, p. 9). There is complementarity in the vision of evangelical counter-praxis and the kenotic nature of both the pacifist’s and the Christian soldier’s participation in it as members of the same Church seeking the same relationship with Christ. Kenosis provides the grounds for true discipleship imitating Christ through a struggle against evil for the sake of others by emptying oneself of self-interest and serving as an instrument of God’s will to God’s glory.

5. Conclusions

Through the narrative of Shusaku Endo on the kenotic witness of Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues, the Christian soldier can find a vision for grappling with his self-identity relative to Christ and his Church. First, Darlene Weaver pointed out in her investigation of Rodrigues that his self-understanding is centrally determined by his role as priest (Weaver 2011, p. 155). Likewise, one must be aware that a Christian soldier will assess and name his action primarily as by his role as a soldier. Considering any moral agent’s embeddedness in a world of colliding values where named actions already carry moral significance and are interpreted analogically by that agent who forms himself actions aimed at a perceived good, the soldier’s situation comes into greater focus. Second, the figure of Rodrigues, like the Christian soldier, is aware of the complex context of competing values and conceptions of good which they inhabit. Writing about the difficulty of reconciling Eastern and Western cultural differences in Silence, John Netland also noted that, “Christians are citizens of two worlds: the material world of human cultures to whose varied Caesars Scripture acknowledges temporal allegiances, and the already-immanent-yet-to-be-consummated kingdom of God” (Netland 1999, p. 179). Soldiers feel that tension of competing values acutely. In the just war tradition, soldiers attempt to sustain that tension for the sake of both a temporal common good and an eternal divine good realized in eschatological hope in and fidelity to Jesus’s gospel. Too often, though, the tension is too great, and soldiers, like those interviewed by Jones and Beckman, lose hold of the kingdom of heaven just as Rodrigues seemed to.

Both Rodrigues and the Christian soldier are forced to act when God is silent and must be responsible agents in a world awaiting God’s judgment and transformation. Like Rodrigues, soldiers often wish the world were otherwise, and that Jesus could speak and let his will be done. In interviews, soldiers, when asked what Jesus would do, say, “He would put out his hands, say ‘peace,’ and the fighting would stop”, or “He would make it stop. He’d say, ‘Be still” and the artillery wouldn’t work any longer” (Jones and Beckman 2009, p. 25). But Jesus is not present in this way and seems silent to them. At that moment, a transformation can take place in a soldier’s self-understanding, as it did for Endo’s priest:

“But as Rodrigues sees his mission begin to fail, as he experiences the inexplicable silence of God while the most faithful Japanese Christians are being tortured and killed before his eyes, the face of his Christ begins to blur. A face more earthy, a face marked by human suffering, takes its place.”

(Higgins 1985, p. 422)

In that earthy face, a face marked by suffering, a soldier, like Rodrigues, might come to identify themselves more closely with Jesus. In as much as Jesus would say ‘Peace’ or ‘make it stop’, soldiers might use the last of their freedom to do what they could to that end, even if it meant sacrificing all that was their own, including their unwillingness to kill.

Reinhold Niebuhr declared that “every man is also in some sense a crucifier of Christ” (Niebuhr 1986, p. 102). In final words of God’s Hiddenness in Combat, Preston Jones and Cody Beckman reflect on that statement, saying themselves that, “Warriors, perhaps like the centurion at Golgotha, know this better than anyone” (Jones and Beckman 2009, p. 54).11 I have sought to present a vision through which Christian soldiers might understand their experience, even in the act of killing, as a participation in and witness to Christ’s effective and redeeming kenosis. Despite the fact that the centurion, a soldier, had the first-hand experience of killing, crucifying Jesus, the same centurion was the first to profess faith in Jesus’s divinity crying out, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mt 27:54; cf. Mk 15:39; Lk 23:47). The soldier knows the demands of taking up his cross, both nailing others to it and simultaneously being nailed to it himself. The gravity of that knowledge is a heavy cross to bear.

Christian theology must respond to men and women who knowingly look for a means to name their acts in truthfulness and speak of it through service as soldiers. These persons have experienced moral injury, a phenomenon well-documented that is more than mere post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD), but rather an existential wound to their relational identity with God and other persons.12 There exists a place for them in the Church through their missiological evangelical counter-praxis, just as there is a place for pacifists in their pastoral counter-praxis. Philip Porter has recommended the institution of penitential rites for returning soldiers to seek healing, wholeness, and forgiveness in line with traditional practices found in Christian history (Porter 2022). Out of his pastoral approach to witnessing to gospel Hauerwas responds to those who have killed during the course of trying to actively witness the gospel in the context of war and have suffered for it:

Christ has shattered the silence that surrounds those who have killed, because his sacrifice overwhelms our killing and restores us to a life of peace. Indeed, we believe that it remains possible for those who have killed to be reconciled with those they have killed. This is no sentimental bonding represented by the comradeship of battle. This is the reconciliation made possible by the hard wood of the cross.

(Hauerwas 2011a, p. 69)

Although I dare say he would reject the proposal presented in this essay, I hope he might recognize that for those committed to the just-war tradition, with eyes fixed on the eschatological horizon, a Christian soldier might find that the very sacrifice he was asked to sacrifice—his unwillingness to kill—might unite him even more closely to his Lord, witness to the love of God and neighbor, and sow the seeds of the peace of kingdom of heaven so desperately desired for both himself and the world.