Jihad and Justice: Christian Just War Theory

There are three specific similarities between Christian and Islamic conceptions of just war: legitimate authorization, just cause, and right intentions. This week we’ll begin our comparison of these two religious points of view by examining the Christian conception of just war.

Augustine was one of the first Christian theologians to offer an in-depth and philosophically robust examination of the nature of the state and its relationship to Christianity, as well as the response of the Christian to war. His ideas influenced the fairly young Christian empire and provided the basic framework to later theologians and scholars to work within as they clarified and explicated Christian political theory. Augustine’s ideas were so influential that they still were being appealed to well into the thirteenth century. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas readily refers to Augustine as he lays out a broad and concise systematic theology. Aquinas had a heavy impact on his age and on the development of theology and politics in the coming years. Both Augustine and Aquinas are valid sources to turn to in a study of Christian political and war theory because of the strong impact they both have had on Western thought—Augustine as the one who laid the broad foundation for the following generations to build upon, and Aquinas as the master who crystallized many subjects by bringing them into one unified whole.