Transcript

Jessica Andrews: Thank you very much for being here, all of you. I’m going to introduce our presenter for this session. He is Dr. J. Warren Smith, the Associate Professor of Historical Theology here at Duke Divinity School. He’s interested in the history of theology, broadly conceived, from the apostles to the present, but his primary focus is on patristic theology. Dr. Smith’s current project centers on the theological foundation of Ambrose of Milan’s teaching on the life of virtue, and he’s taught previously on the ascetic virtue of Gregory Nyssa.

Dr. Smith is also a United Methodist elder from the North Georgia Annual Conference. He lives in Durham with his wife, Kimberly Dowdy, who is a school social worker, and their children, Catherine and Thomas. His session today is titled “Redemption and PTSD,” asking the question, “What different does the gospel make to men and women suffering from PTSD. He will examine how the biblical narratives can bring redemption by reframing the way the we think about the trauma of war.

[applause]

Warren Smith: First let me extend a welcome to all of you who are new to Duke. If you are new to Duke you need to also understand that this used to be the chapel, so you can see why we’re very grateful for our current chapel. I come to this time with a great sense of humility. When Logan invited me to speak, he made very clear to me that the purpose of a workshop was not for the presenter was not to come across as the “expert” handing down opinion from Mt Sinai. Rather, the sense is that I am to start a conversation. So my hope is that I will not talk too long, but in fact, put out categories so that we can simply have a conversation on this subject.

Let me explain basically what the subject is. The reason I am quite content to say, “I am not an expert”: my area is historical theology, which means I study the development of Christian thought from the apostles to the present. I do not have—either by professional experience or by personal experience—knowledge of PTSD, nor have I served in the military. I am proud to say that my grandfather was a doughboy in World War I, and for my 10th anniversary my wife had a shadowbox [made] with his regimental pennant and his dog tag and a picture of him in his uniform, and I hold that with great pride. My father was a conscientious objector during World War II and I am also proud of him.

Militarily: myself, I was a pacifist at one point, and then, now, siding on the Just War position. I have been an amateur student of military history. So, it is in that context that I come to the material. I also come as one who’s been a pastor, and so one of the questions fundamentally for me is, “All right, how does theology hit the ground running in terms of the church’s ministry to soldiers, and specifically those soldiers experiencing PTSD?” That’s the basic question. You know the way we all phrased the question in middle school was to ask the teacher teaching algebra, “When are we ever going to use this”? So in a sense, I’m saying, “How does a Christian theology of salvation, how does our soteriology, impact the way we minister to soldiers with PTSD?” That’s the basic project.

The way I’m going to begin is to setup a conversation between two people: Jonathon Shea, on one hand, and David Kelsey, and then ultimately appeal to the position of an Augustinian understanding of salvation and the human condition as providing language which I hope will frame the question. Now it’s my job to be clear; however, every now and then, I might fall into “theology speak” a little too much. If I do, feel free to stop me. The object is clarity.

I begin with Jonathan Shea, whose name has been spoken about or alluded to, but whose position hasn’t gone into great detail. Jonathan Shea is a psychiatrist—an M.D./Ph.D.—at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston, and for much of his career he’s treat Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD. He wrote a very influential book called Achilles in Vietnam, and the basic premise of the book is—he asks—he says, “You know, the Iliad is a very strange book. It is about a warrior hero (Achilles) who is consumed with rage: rage against his commanding general, Agamemnon; rage against his enemy, the Trojans—specifically Hector; rage against his colleagues who have betrayed him.” And Shea poses the question, “What would happen if we re-read the Iliad through the eyes of a soldier’s experience?” So he wants to say, “You can learn a lot. And then Homer articulates the experience of moral injury in this context.

Now, to understand his position, it’s basically this: the Greeks had a notion of themos. Themos refers to those social norms which function for us as the individual’s expectations of what they should give society and what society should give to them. It is, as he puts it, “our sense of what’s right.” It is, if you will, that social contract we have with one another in which we agree that this is how we’re going to get along with one another; these are the conditions. Whatever differences exist, these are the limits and the rules which will govern our interaction. 

A very basic example of themos would be what we’ve learned in elementary school: that if you have to stand in a line waiting for something, you stand in that line and you don’t break ahead; you wait your turn. But what happens when someone does trespass? Whether it’s in the elementary school cafeteria, someone breaking the line. Whether it’s all the rest of us sitting where we should in a traffic jam and they decide to go through the emergency lane. Whether it’s being in a bank line, waiting interminably, and someone decides they should go to the business window even though it’s closed. And what happens? They have trespassed themos; they have trespassed our sense of what is right. And what happens?

We become angry—an instantaneous sense of righteous indignation that they have betrayed us. They have trespassed. Notice that the anger is all out of proportion to the offense done. It’s a minor infraction, and yet we feel intensely grieved by it. What happens when you have that same sense of violation? Put that in the intense situation of a combat zone or a firefight. If you feel betrayed how much more intense is the anger? And the reason for the anger is both a sense that the transgression reflects a hubris—that somehow you’re above the law, that you somehow you don’t have to conform to our standards. And also it’s a betrayal of a covenant.

One example that Shea gives of that experience of betrayal—this is in a combat situation on page 78 and 79. This is a firsthand account from one of his patients of such an experience in which the rage of indignation let loose.

We landed in hot LZ. It was the beginning of Union 2, just before I got shot. The chopper just didn’t want to land and I got pushed—they pushed me! It was about fifteen feet off the ground and I landed so deep in mud that I could not move. I was getting fire on from all over the place. I didn’t even know which way to hide—I couldn’t move! That was when I started hating the fucking government. It was about a week or two into Union 2, I was walking point. I had seen this NVA soldier in the distance. We were approaching him and he spotted us. We spread out to look for him. I was coming through a strand of grass and heard noise. I couldn’t tell who it was: us or him. I stuck my head into the bush and saw this NVA hiding there and told him to come out. He started to move back and I saw that he had one of those commando weapons—you know, with a pistol grip under his thigh. And he brought it up and I looked straight down the boor. I pulled the trigger of my M-16 and nothing happened. He fired and I felt this burning on my cheek. I don’t know what I did with the bolt of the M-16, but I got it to fire and I emptied everything into him just as I saw blood dripping on the back of my hand. I just went crazy. I pulled him out of the paddy and carved him up with my knife. When I was done with him, he looked like a rag doll that a dog had been playing with.

Even then I wasn’t satisfied. I was fighting with the medical foreman trying to take care of me; I was trying to get at him for more. I felt betrayed by trying to give this guy a chance, and I got blasted. I lost all my mercy. I felt a drastic change after that. I just couldn’t get enough. I built up such hate I couldn’t get enough damage.

Where is the element of betrayal? The sense of betrayal is: the government sent me into war to kill, and they armed me with an M-16, and here I am in the moment of ‘to kill or be killed,’ and the damn M-16 doesn’t work. So there’s a sense of being betrayed by the government that poorly equipped me. But then he tells even more disturbing stories of men who’d been in combat situations, who’d been sent to kill an enemy only to discover that the people they just butchered were not soldiers but noncombatants and the attack was based on faulty intel. And for that they were given a medal. It’s a sense that moral injury is being complicit in the failure, the breakdown, of themos.

And so, Jonathan Shea gives this conclusion: “Is betrayal of what’s right essential to combat trauma? Or is betrayal simply one of the many terrible things that happen in war: aren’t terror, shock, horror, and grief at the death of a friend trauma enough? No one can conclusively answer these questions today; however, I’ve come to strongly believe, through my work with Vietnam veterans, that moral injury is a part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they have returned to civilian life so long as what’s right has not been violated.

What’s particularly interesting for me, as a theologian, is the way in which Shea links this assessment of the relationship between PTSD and moral injury with the responsibility—or failure—of the Church in our teachings. And he makes three key arguments.

Shea says that it is in Jude-Christian monotheism that you have the creation of the moral world-view, which sets up the crisis of moral injury. And by that he means this: the Western sense of things, of what’s right, is based upon our belief in God, who has two key qualities. One, God is the source of a moral order as creator, and therefore God is the one who gives meaning to the life of the individual. But second, this God is a loving God who, if he allows us to suffer at all, does so as punishment under the banner of truth and righteousness. In other words, the idea that God creates the moral world, the moral vision, which is operative in most soldiers when they go into battle.

But second, when soldiers see themselves acting unjustly in war, then the soldiers feel cut off from God. And when they feel cut off from God, they feel that they have now lost their moral worth before God and other people. But there is another option: when people see the horror of war, and begin to doubt the existence of God, well, to doubt God’s existence is to knock the legs out from under the chair. They now lose the very foundation, what Paul calls, “the foundation of our being, the ground of our being,” which is the source of our moral order and the source of our own sense of worth.

So, Shea’s position drives us home to consider... he’s thrown down the gauntlet. He has posed to Christianity a challenge that we have to take seriously, namely, how do we as clergy articulate the gospel in a way that will bring redemption to soldiers suffering from PTSD?

In order to unpack this, we need to have a sense of what is meant by the term “redemption.” One of the great theological lights of the last 40 years has been Yale professor David Kelsey. David Kelsey is a brilliant theologian and a very clear thinker. And Kelsey wrote a small book called Imagining Redemption, in which he says our basic problem, is that the vocabulary of redemption—or ‘to redeem’—is ubiquitous in Christian speech. We find the language in our hymns, in scripture, in our sermons, in our liturgy. Yet if you button-hole anybody, whether they’re lay or clergy, and say, “What does the word redeem mean?” most of them will have a very pregnant pause. Well, they will have a pause that’s not pregnant at all because they won’t know how to answer the question.

So David Kelsey wants to give an account of what redemption looks like. He says, when we ask the question, “how does God redeem us?” what we are essentially asking is, “What earthly difference does Jesus make in the concrete circumstance of people’s lives?” In other words, he wants to take our understanding of salvation and say salvation is not something that is relegated to the sweet by-and-by. Rather, there is something about the work of Jesus, which alters significantly the experience of people in the broken here-and-now.

To illustrate how Christ brings redemption even in the midst of great suffering, he poses a scenario: he tells the story of a broken experience of a father and son. The son’s name is Sam. What he doesn’t say is that he is the father in the story. When Sam was seven years old, that summer he developed a cold. The weekend of July 4th the cold developed into pneumonia. When, that particular day, he suddenly was not getting enough air and his lips turned blue, his parents rushed him to the emergency room. They ended up having to do a tracheotomy and put him on a ventilator.

Eventually, he was able to breath eon his own, but still he wasn’t doing well, and eventually went into a coma. He was in a coma and in pediatric ICU for four months. Eventually he came out of the coma and they sent him off for rehabilitation because he was paralyzed and was recovering all of his faculties. And eventually Sam went home. But when Sam got home, he was not the little boy who had gone into the hospital. Sam’s personality had been radically altered; he was now an aggressive child. He was a child whose humor was bitter and mean-spirited, and he also had a strong sense of being a victim. Soon he began to show signs of having seizures—some of them real, many of them faked. And it had a wary, demoralizing effect on the family, until finally his mother could take it no more, and she took her life, leaving David Kelsey to care for Sam and the rest of his children.

So David Kelsey uses this scenario and says, “What earthly good does Jesus do for Sam and his family?” and Kelsey’s answer is this: he says, “Because Jesus is God’s act of giving a promise—the promise that the world, in all of its brokenness, will not always be broken. Because Christ is the promise of a new creation, which is inaugurated with the resurrection, there is a promise of healing which now frame the experience of Sam and his father.

This is what Kelsey says (it’s the second passage on your handout):

The sheer fact of God’s promise can make a redemptive difference for Sam’s family, I suggest, because it can completely change the context of Sam’s family—the effect of Jesus present as God’s act of promise making it like the reversal of the relationship between the foreground and the background in a painting. In the scene defined by Sam’s family, after Sam’s illness, the family’s situation is in the background. It both defines and frames the scene that is the context of each of the people within it [I think he meant ‘foreground.’]. Within that context, Jesus’ presence is accented—or foregrounded—as God’s promise. At the same time, Jesus is present in the scene. If, however, Jesus’ presence in the family’s life is, indeed, God’s eschatological promise, the background and foreground are reversed. Jesus’ presence as both promise and inauguration of the new creation places Sam and his family in new and profoundly different context—a profoundly promising context.

What Kelsey means is this: when the promise of the new creation, and the healing that accompanies, comes with Christ, that reframes—or re-contextualizes—the way in which the individuals who are experiencing suffering reconceive of their crisis, reconceive of the trauma that faces them. It’s the difference between someone who has news that they suffer from a terminal disease and that there is no recovery in this life, over-against those who receive the news, “There is a treatment, and the prospects are real for a real recovery.” The latter—the hope of recovery—reframes the way they experience the threat to the life. So, too, the hope of resurrection and healing in the resurrection reframes the way Kelsey and his son were able to think about their experience of suffering.

All right, those are the conceptual tools. But the question that it begs that I want to turn to now is this: If Shea is correct—that PTSD is caused, at least in part, by a sense of betrayal of what is right—and if Kelsey is also correct—that the Gospel brings redemption in the ‘here-and-now’ by reframing the brokenness and the horror of life within the context of Christ’s new creation—then our pastoral question is this, “How may the Gospel reframe a soldier’s experience of war in a way that can bring healing to the life of ‘now.’ Let me suggest—let me throw out a few ideas about the way in which theology and our soteriology reframes the way we think about PTSD, reframes the way a soldier might see him- or herself in the context of the new creation, and how that might be liberating.

The first thing I need to say is that reframing should not come at the end, but you’ve got to front-load the process. In other words, I always say this, if I have to preach a funeral, there are two ways it can be experienced. For folks for whom their baptism, their religious experience, is not really informative of their view of themselves, their identity, or their world—if it doesn’t constitute their worldview—there is little I can say from the pulpit that is going to bring them comfort in the time of their bereavement. But, if I have a family for whom the life of faith and the hope of resurrection is fundamental to their sense of identity and a hope that guides their expectations, then my words come off not as hollow or trivial statements of piety, but as reminders of God’s profound promise—the very promise in which they have staked their lives. In the latter case, that funeral homily can speak words of healing and comfort in a way that they can’t in the first case. Therefore, the best we can do (and this was exactly the point made last night, and I thought it was spot-on), we need to be preparing our soldiers who are getting ready to go in harm’s way—we need to prepare them theologically to think about the work they are going to be engaged in.

Now, so what might that look like? How might we prepare them both beforehand and after? The first thing we need to do is provide an alternative to the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is essentially is what one could call the religion of Job’s friends. You remember when Job has the experience of losing everything—everything except the wife who tells him, “Curse God and die!” His friends come to him and say, “Well, you know, I’m sure you must’ve done something; you just don’t know it. Look hard enough and you will see that God is punishing you for some reason.” Prosperity gospel very much has a similar message. The prosperity gospel says that God wants you to flourish, to prosper. Therefore, if you have faith and if you live a righteous life, then God will bless you and you will be healthy, wealthy, and wise. If you are sick, it’s because you have too little faith. If you are having financial problems it’s because you don’t believe enough. But it also means, if you suffering—well, God wants prosperity, and God wants victory, and it provides no language for thinking about defeat or suffering in the face of defeat.

So what’s the first way we need to reframe the experience of suffering? To see it not simply as, “You have failed and God is punishing you.” But we need to reframe it in terms of the cross, which holds the fundamental message that the one who was supremely righteous suffered most unjustly. As Jesus said in the farewell discourse in John’s Gospel before Jesus was betrayed, “If the world hated me, they will hate you as well.” It changes the picture. It says that in a fallen and broken world, don’t expect that righteousness is the guarantee of security or prosperity. In fact, the more righteous you are, the more likely you are to be hated by the world and to experience suffering. Therefore, I think this begins to change the picture because no longer have this simplistic view which says, “If I am faithful, nothing bad will happen to me. If I am suffering, it must be because I have failed.” I think that’s the first step in reframing the discussion.

The second is also what I see in Augustine’s theology about the character of the State and peace. Augustine, in his work City of God, says that both the city of God—the kingdom of God—and the city of Man have a common end, and that is peace. But what constitutes peace and justice in both is radically different. You see, Augustine’s a fascinating figure because he fully believes that it is a good thing that Christians now possess political power. That is far preferable to being in the position that the Church was under Diocletian at the beginning of the 4th century during the second period of mass persecution of the Church.

But Augustine is no triumphalist. He was not like those who believe, “Put Christians in power and life will be good! We will establish the Kingdom of God on earth.” Rather, what Augustine realized was that there will only be so much justice in this world, but there will never be perfect justice until the age to come. And, therefore, notice how that changes his understanding of what the purpose of military service is. It sort of lowers the bar. It says, “Don’t think that by going into battle you are engaged in transforming the world and making it a just place. You may make it a little less unjust, but don’t think you are in a crusade that’s going to radically change the world. There is going to be no justice and no peace in this world until Christ returns and establishes his kingdom.” Therefore, the best we can do is begin to put restrictions on the degree of injustice that’s spread. That seems to be a limit.

But also, then, it’s out of that that he reframes the moral activity. Notice how—this is in the third and fourth passages. I was very pleased that Elise made the point that she did; Augustine is often described as the “Father of Just War Theory.” Augustine, well, he lived in a day in which there wasn’t a separation between theologian and pastor. The works he wrote that inform the Christian Just War tradition very often are texts which arise in response to pastoral questions. He was written letters by men of great power who were struggling with the tension they felt between being a Christian and also having to exercise coercive power.

Here is an excerpt from two of the letters. The first is a letter to Darius, who was commander of the Roman forces in North Africa and who negotiated a peace—a short-lived peace—with the Vandals. Notice what Augustine’s approach is:

Those warriors are indeed great and worthy of singular honor, not only for their consummate bravery, but also for their imminent fidelity, by which enemies previously unsubdued are conquered and peace obtained for the state. But it is still a higher glory to stay war by a word than to slay them with the sword. For those who fight—if they are good men—doubtless seek peace; nevertheless, it is through blood. Your mission, however, is to prevent the shedding of blood. Yours, therefore, is the privilege of averting that calamity which others are under the necessity of producing.

Notice his point: War arises only out of necessity, and the necessity has as its goal peace. His point is, one is judged not by bravery in-and-of-itself, but the quality of the bravery is measured by the end for which one is striving. And, therefore, the bravery to restrain the use of power is to be even more highly regarded than the exercise of violence to achieve peace. 

But then, in the next passage—and this is written to Count Boniface, who is essentially the Roman Consul General in North Africa:

Peace should be the object of your desire. War should be waged only as a necessity, and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace. Therefore, even in waging war, cherish the spirit of a peacemaker, that by conquering those whom you attack you may lead them back to the advantages of peace. Let necessity, therefore, and not your will, slay the enemy who fights against you, as violence I used toward him who rebels and resists, so mercy is due to the vanquished and the captive—especially in the case in which future troubling of peace is not to feared. 

Augustine’s point is this: the greatest horror in war is not the act of killing, but it is the moral destruction of the soul that comes from blood lust. But the second thing is—he makes the point—even in the context of being ‘soldier,’ you are called by God to be an instrument—to be a peacemaker; to be God’s instrument of peace even in the midst of war.

I wrote a letter—a Veterans Day letter—to an old friend, one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever know, who served in Vietnam as a First Lieutenant during ’67–’69, and who suffered from PTSD. And I wrote him and I said, “I think war is the exception that proves, or tests, the rule Paul is promising, that ‘all things work for good for them that love the Lord.’ I think it challenges in that it calls soldiers to believe that God, even in the midst of the hell of war, can use them to convey his mercy. And I think if we reframe the mission of Christian soldier in combat in those terms, how does that change the way we think about the way as Christians we carry out the unpleasant duty—the necessity, of killing?

Let me stop there. I want to have time for response. Essentially, do these categories—the sense of, the gospel as reframing the experience—do you find that useful in any way? Yes, sir!

Attendee 1: [Indiscernible] ...one thing that’s always trouble about this idea is, when I talk to actual warriors, no matter how pious they may be, I find that few of them find they’re able to maintain that attitude in the midst of heavy combat. So I reflect on the realism of this advice—you get it from Augustine; you get it from Luther; you get it from practically everyone who’s been Christian, none of whom have actually been warriors. So I often wonder about whether this is actually consoling advice when it comes to people who have to do the deed.

Smith: Good, good. Here’s one way I think of it: I cannot imagine, in the midst of a fire fight that you are having charitable thoughts toward the people you’re firing at. I saw recently a documentary in which soldiers who were on one of the fast boats in the Mekong Delta describe being suddenly under fire, and they just opened up on the bank. They didn’t know who they were firing at. And only later did they realize it was a VC hiding near a village to draw the fire to decimate—not “decimate,” decimate means one in every ten die; this was a whole village, wiped out. In that context, I don’t think there is a way in which—you’re carrying out the act of killing. Emotionally, you cannot be loving as you’re running the baronet through them or blowing their head off. I think that’s right. Where Augustine is concerned is where you can function as a peacemaker is when you can be—after the fighting has stopped, do you look at the enemy and view them as ‘gooks’? Or do you see them a child of God and a minister to the person suffering, to the enemy suffering.

I mean, one of the things Augustine says—and Augustine would’ve loved the rebuilding of Europe because he’s very much—he says, “War should be carried out in a way that will secure a peaceful relationship with people after the fact. So in other words I will distinguish what happens in the firefight and what happens, sort of—when the fighting is—when there is a lull and you are actually faced with an enemy who is vulnerable. Do you show your mercy? And in showing the mercy you are both being God’s vehicle, but you also, even in the midst of what hell, you are being imago Dei, you are being the image of God—a merciful God—to your enemy.

So I think that’s the way I would cast it. Now, if you press me, say, “Going back to that scenario you read at the very beginning. The guy lost all sense of mercy.” What causes some people to go into a berserker state, which is sustained, and what causes some people to ‘snap out of it,’ as it were? That I don’t know. It’s one of those cases. I think what the what the ideal does—and I think this is one of the things I think Augustine does nicely—is that there’s a way in which it’s sort of lowering the bar. It’s saying, “Look, you’re going to go do ugly things. Let’s not be deluded. War is hell. It is contrary to God’s ultimate purpose, but in the midst of you can still be an instrument of grace. And it’s a call to live in that tension. And I think part of the problem is we don’t prepare people well enough because we don’t say, “Here’s the tension we’ve got to live with.” And it’s far better to be conscious: “OK, I’m going to be experiencing this tension” than naively thinking—having some other view, which is a less complex view, of the relationship between being Christian and being a soldier.

Attendee 2: As a Christian chaplain, how do you share and bring this moral framework and yet still be relevant to your soldiers under you who are agnostic, atheist, and protecting their rights from religion?

Attendee 3: Can you restate the question?

Smith: Sure. The question: how do you provide a moral framework to help soldiers who are under you as a chaplain who are agnostic or atheist, or not Christian?

Attendee 4: I might be able to help a little bit with that. I was a chaplain—

Smith: Yes, please!

Attendee 4: —and under Article X of the Constitution, he’s not there to support the religious freedom of being atheist. He is under his church and under his government, and he provides religious service for those that want that religious service. And that sort of gets into a little bit of a sticky situation when you have people saying, “Well, that’s imposing on my freedom not to practice that religion.” Which is why you have a spectrum of chaplains from every end. The return chaplain mentioned that sometimes it can get a little unbalanced in some of those disciplines, so you tend now to have more of a religious right sort of position. But in all situations in this, chaplains are very sensitive and have been taught so, and I don’t think they infringe of those that are agnostic or atheist.

Warren: I think there is actually a parallel—though not—there’s a parallel, though not exact—in the civilian pastoral. Someone comes to me who is a “non-believer” or of a different religion and they want to talk to me. On the one hand, there is a way in which I can say, you know—it would be perfectly appropriate for me to say, “All right.” You know, fundamentally it seems to me, as a chaplain, you have a commission and ordination to be God’s love to the person in the office, to mediate God’s presence. And that may be by saying nothing. But, you would also say, if someone asks your opinion, you can say, “All right, I’m Christian, and from my perspective, here’s how I think about this problem.” Which to me is being very honest. It’s saying, “Look, this is my perspective; I’m not claiming it’s the only one.” We may in fact believe, you know, believe in the primacy of—the priority of—Christian claims. But nevertheless, you say, “Well, here’s my opinion; take it for what it’s worth, you know, and if you don’t want to hear it, so be it.” But I guess that’s the way I’d respond. I’d be very interested to hear what others who have been chaplains in the military would say in response to that question.

Attendee 5: When I first got to Vietnam, one of the units I served with, the guys were cutting the ears off the enemy and keeping them as souvenirs. And I just got them in formation and said, “I don’t care if you keep whatever military gear they have, but I would like you to give me all their private possessions—like their wallets and pictures of their families, and money and stuff, and give that to me—so I can collect it and return it to their families in the North. Within two weeks they stopped cutting off the ears of the other soldiers because they were looking at the pictures, they saw these people who had families and that they were human beings, and they could no longer de-humanize the enemy. You know, both the atheist and the Christian stopped doing it. I had two hundred guys fallen; we had a service before I brought them down to the Red Cross—international Red Cross—in Saigon. And almost everybody came to that service, even the atheists, because they really felt that they had done something by returning those private, tiny things, that was in some ways salutatory [sic] for all the destruction they had caused. So, that didn’t [indiscernible] much.

Smith: Here’s a question I want to pose, would be: one of the points that was made last night is how important unit morale is, and the example of praying together before going out. And I guess the question that I would find very interesting would be, what happens to the unit morale—say you have a company, or a platoon of mostly Christian but one or two strong non-Christians? You know, if the group gathers for pray, I guess my question would be—I mean I could imagine the objection could be made that gathering in a way that singles out the non-believers could in fact be counter to the unit morale. I don’t know. How do any of the rest of you think about that sort of thing?

Attendee 6: You see a lot of examples of it. I can tell you of a website: militaryreligiousfreedom.org.

Smith: Oh, okay.

Attendee 6: They are a group that exists to try to stamp down confessional religious practice at a military base.

Attendee 7: There’s been a controversy about praying in Jesus’ name, especially in formation, but I’ve prayed in a lot of formation, and they don’t have to end in prayer in Jesus’ name. Because the soldiers that are there, they have to be there. If they choose not to be there, they’re guilty of a crime, and that’s punishable by the uniformed code of military justice. So putting them in situations where they might be offended by my prayer also puts them in a position [indiscernible]. I think that’s very difficult to juggle. I ask a lot of my friends who say if they have to pray in Jesus’ name, I tell them, “It’s too bad they can’t pray the prayer our Lord taught us.”

Attendee 8: I have another question. What I think, for me, and arguably for a lot of us who think of the idea of a ‘just war’: the just lists of criteria, and [indiscernible], and Latin words, etc., comes to the mind slowly—can we recover from the Just War Tradition to the pastoral focus that Augustine and Gerome and Ambrose initially had with it? Is ‘just war’ still a resource for pastoral care?

Smith: I’m going to be speak heresy.

Attendee 8: Yes, sir.

Smith: Read more Augustine, less Thomas. Folks, and if you will get that joke. I think Thomas is not writing—Thomas Aquinas, who does so much to articulate Just War criteria—he’s not writing the pastoral way. I think if you look at Augustine, Augustine is writing more so; same thing with Ambrose. It becomes less a matter of theory to guide commanding officers and more about—in terms of policy-making—and more about, “how do you guide the soldiers at the very small, micro level?” So I think that’s one thing.

The other thing I would say is: discussions of justice. Ultimately, ‘just war’ is going to be about how you conceive of the limits of justice in the world. One of the problems that we have, but of course in Latin, the word “justice,”—iustitia would be translated both “justice,” and “righteousness.” And so it creates—it conflates them, as opposed to a sense that you find your [indiscernible]—you imagine a distinction from justice and righteousness. An action may be just, within certain parameters that restrain a degree of violence; but whether or not we would think of it as righteous and holy—that’s another issue.

Therefore, I think a lot of the question gets back exactly at your point. That first and foremost, the pastoral focus is a holy disposition apart. And I think one way to address that is in the context of praying for enemies. How do you pray for your enemy? And do you make a habit—however hard it is? And very often—I’ll go ahead and say, I never realized what a poor Christian I was until I discovered how hard it was really to pray for and to love some members of my own family (in-laws). And those of you who are married get that I’m not joking.

But, [indiscernible]: act in faith until you’ve got it. That habit, that discipline, is going to be formative in ways that [indiscernible] always.

Andrews: I need to pipe in real quick. We are slightly over time, so if we—one last question. I hate to cut it off. One last question and then—

Attendee 9: I’m sorry, can I go back just to the beginning of the subject? I am a soldier, [indiscernible], I’m an ordained minister, I’m not a chaplain. I’m a staff sergeant and I’m a squad leader. When people talk about praying in public or anything like that—I think the concept that people have that they can sit and preach to a bunch of soldiers who aren’t Christian is going to be the way to do it is foolish. It’s ridiculous. Maybe in some older contexts it worked; I can tell you it doesn’t now. So, soldiers who already identify themselves as Christians have chaplains to go to, they have chaplains services to go to. The thing that either as a member of the ranks or as a civilian that you’re going to do that’s positive is going to be in the individual relationships you have with people.

Everyone in my unit knows I’m a Christian; I get called “Reverend,” “pastor,” “God boy,” “padre”—I make no secret of it. I don’t make myself boisterous, but I tell people who work for me or with me that I pray for them. I don’t make a big production of it. I let them know it, and if they ever want to come to me about anything they can. And people do. And I’ve heard a lot more confessions over beer than I have in chapel. And those are the places where you’re going to make a difference in people’s lives who don’t already identify themselves, who have confession they can go to and chaplains they can go to.

Smith: I think you’ve put your finger on a point of clear overlap between civilian ministry and ministry of the chaplaincy. People come to Christ in relationships. And those relationships start in some of the strangest positions. Rarely is it in the formal position of the revival meeting in which someone gets the call to the altar and they make it. It’s really out of relationships. And so I think the sense of both Christian who is chaplain and the non—the presence, the witness in relationship. [indiscernible] One last question, yes!

Attendee 10: I want to pick up on: a lot of the focus has been on, and rightly so, individual and personal ministry. Yet part of the challenge that moral injury creates is the very isolation and separation from community. So what corporate practices should we be engaging in, so that we unities of formation not being dictated by Western notion of individualism and the guilt is not the soldier’s alone? There is a social failure that has taken place— 

Smith: —corporate sin.

Attendee 10: That’s right. And how many of our congregations have engaged in public prayer for our end as well? We talk about the soldier praying for enemies. Have they been formed in faith communities which have also done it? Or even struggled in their confessions that, “God, you commanded we pray for enemies. We don’t want to, and we can’t, and we don’t know how.”

Smith: I had a kid in my youth group, who—one year we were going to take up money for Heffer Project: you buy a cow and send it over to support communities. And, of course, there were brochures, and they’re brochures of Southeast Asian children. I had one child who absolutely would not do it, because they were the enemy. This was in 1990, 15 years after we pulled out from Vietnam. She wasn’t born then. So I think that goes to forming things up front.

I had the dubious distinction of teaching a class on the day of 9/11. And I decided not to cancel class. But I knew—and I always begin with prayer, so the question was how to pray. So, in the prayer, it was for the people in the buildings, families, and the terrorists. And it’s—I think the more we do that, and I think if we pray for our leaders by name, will that change the [indiscernible] political language right now?

On that thought, I’m going to end—let me end with a word of prayer. This prayer, speaking of how you speaking about the sacrifice of soldiers: a couple years ago, when Duke setup the memorial that’s right next to the Divinity School for the two soldier who died in Iraq, I was asked if I would do the—give the prayer. And so it was very much a case of, “Okay, how am I going to express this? How am I going to frame this theologically?” So this is after—this is my stab at doing that. Let us pray.

Eternal God, our heavenly Father, by the power of your Word and in the grace of your Spirit, you created the world and established it to be a place of peace, where each person may use the gift of freedom to cultivate the talents that you have given us for the up-building of the commonwealth, that, individually and collectively, your people may flourish materially, culturally, and spiritually. For this reason you blessed the peacemakers, whom you are pleased to call your children. Who, through law and diplomacy and military service, promote a just peace among the nations and oppose the unjust ambitions of those states and factions that would release the forces of chaos and violence to impose their will upon other peoples. As we remember the women and men who serve in all branches of the service, who gave up the comforts of civilian life to endure the privations and misery of combat, ultimately giving up their lives in the service of their country, fill us with humility and gratitude for the labors and sacrifices of these your servants; that we, who today enjoy the blessings of life and security which they gave up may honor them by rededicating our lives to the promotion of a society worthy of their sacrifice, where justice shall roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Amen.