Every once in a while, a truly special book comes down the theological pike: a book both scholarly and well-written, a book that stretches the imagination, a book that changes the state of a discussion, if it’s taken with the seriousness it deserves. The late Servais Pinckaers’ Sources of Christian Ethics was such a book. So was N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Now comes Nigel Biggar’s In Defense of War (Oxford University Press). Biggar’s careful moral reasoning offers a model that, if followed, would deepen and mature the Christian discussion of the ethics of war and peace. And, if I may say, his book
Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford and director, there, of the McDonald Center for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, is not well-known to American readers, save among that shrinking band of Catholic and evangelical thinkers who take the classic just war theory seriously and work to develop it in light of the realities of 21st century politics and technology. He is no ivory tower don, however, and in the bracing introduction to his book, he lays his cards squarely on the table:
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