Vera Brittain, authoress of 'Testament of Youth' but perhaps better known as the Buxton born mother of former politician Shirley Williams, was featured on BBC 1 on Remembrance Sunday.If anybody had the right to become the raving pacifist that she did, it was most certainly her. Her much loved brother Edward, her fiance and two extremely close friends died in World War One and she saw first hand as a nurse the horrors of the wounds so tragically inflicted upon a generation of idealistic young men.
The phrase 'the futility of war' has been much heard over the last week in the approach to our remembering the fallen and it was certainly not absent in this programme.
There can be futility in war - indeed futility in many wars and aspects of wars - but the term itself cannot be used as an objective fact in isolation or as a generality as that can never be more than an unsubstantiated opinion or value judgement.
Terrible as war is, and essential that it be that we should try our utmost to avoid it, it is not always the simplistic fact of being a matter of our own choice as postulated by the pacifist. To oppose particular wars will often be legitimate, of course.
Pacifism is in itself an extremely simplistic philosophy and consequently one which I have great difficulties in respecting.
Where the pacifist offers to work in the danger area helping the wounded and the victims of war, I am prepared to revise that judgement on them as individuals.
I have prepared many students for RS exams and this is a topic which has been much debated in a Christian context.
The usual examination question is "Was Christ a pacifist." After considering the whole of Scipture rather than carefully selected chunks, I would venture to suggest that He was not.
