more gentle, merciful, and humane, way to think about a war's rationale, than any language of "permission."

Furthermore, this account understands the just war mode of deliberation to be not essentially an exculpatory moral algorithm, applicable by just anybody. Rather, just war thinking is a narratively enframed interpretive matrix that both offers a picture of the world and proposes how to live within it, and requires properly formed-morally and religiously-agents to enact it. The tradition situates particular moral actions within a rich theological narrative frame in order to understand properly where you stand-what necessities are forcing your hand, and what judgment you stand under.

The just war tradition is best understood not as a distinct and selfsustaining tradition but as part of a Christian political theology of justice and judgment. As Frederick Russell puts it, Augustine's own account is not so much a systematic theory as it is really "clusters of ideas grouped around the central theme of sin and punishment."18 Just war theory, that is, is part of a larger theological worldview which begins from a vision of human life as tragically, irremediably corrupted, and it describes one facet of how humans should participate properly, or least improperly, in life so conceived. God's justice and judgment are beginning to be worked out in history, the tradition insists, and we are to inhabit history as the site where and medium whereby that judgment and justice are deployed. The just war tradition depicts us as necessarily part of the world, and as such part of the awesome and horrendous unspooling of God's providential judgment on the world. Here as elsewhere, the just war tradition is part of a larger theology of history as providential.

This affirmation of providence is paired with a realistic assessment of human sin. So just war theory is not only based on the "Christian universalism" of egalitarianism and universal concern that lies at the basis of international law, as many point out; it is also based on that other, less palatable, Christian universalism, unacknowledged in international law but even more basic in international relations: the universalism of sin. Just war theory emerges out of an account of human fallenness; without it, just warriors may delude themselves into assuming that they are ever other

18 Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 25. See also Gregory Reichberg, "Just War and Regular War: Competing Paradigms," in Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers, ed. David Rodin and Henry Shue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 193-213; see 198-99 on the disappearance, after Aquinas, of discussion of intention as a concern in the tradition, and see 212 for the idea of the warrior as executor of justice as a "normative ideal" that disappears after Suarez.

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Just War and the Theology of Evil

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