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Book Review: Alexander Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics

Cliff Williamson’s study of the Falklands War connects back to the first chapter, since he begins by retracing the historical connections between the Conservative Party and the CofE, long dubbed ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’. Although accompanied by outright dissent regarding Thatcher’s economic policies, the Church’s toned-down, circumspect assent to the Falklands War perhaps exemplifies what is often expected to be the attitude of just war ethicists: Yes to the war, but No to triumphalist hubris. Nevertheless, this could not cover up a fundamental discomfort about what seems now like an anachronistic colonial war. Archbishop Robert Runcie’s Thanksgiving Service after the victory was seen as insufficiently triumphalist. And even though Runcie had been Thatcher’s personal choice as Archbishop and they had known each other at Oxford, she mentioned him not once in her memoirs – ‘there were no great church things during my time’ (quoted on p. 183). Peter Lee’s final chapter unfortunately goes no further into the present than the 1999 Kosovo War, though his recent (highly recommended) analysis of moral debates on Iraq, Blair and the Illusion of Morality (2011), leans into this chapter. Lee shows that in the 1990s the Church of England (much in tune with e.g. the German Evangelical Church) largely embraced the UN and its legal procedures (p. 191). This almost reflexive, occasionally positivist deferral to international secular authority at times is a comfortable Ersatz to explaining ‘Judge not, that you be not judged’ without straightforward pacifism. Hence, since the mid-1990s moral arguments for the Responsibility to Protect and ‘humanitarian intervention’, even against international law, have challenged the Church on its own turf. (This challenge became more pronounced during the 2003 Iraq War, where the choice was given between a global[ist] legalism and an antinomian American empire thriving on oil and weapons.) On one hand, the book’s focus on the relationship between England’s established Church and the British state allows for acute observations: that closeness between them was won at the cost of committed church membership and even of the church’s ‘prophetic voice’; or that there are pitfalls in moral arguments about sacrifice, lesser evils, and unquestioning obedience. On the other hand, there is a tendency simply to state the obvious: that the Church was not a homogenous block of opinion. Perhaps this historical plurality of voices shows that there is no straightforward historiographical answer to the question of who or what, or even where, the Church of England actually is. This said, there is a continuing need for greater historical awareness of its nature and position visà-vis the state, especially when the ‘just war theory’ is invoked today. This collection of essays provides a valuable historiographical gateway into twentieth-century wars that presently continue in various new guises. It is highly recommended.