January (Web-only) 2007

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1. Many Christian pundits willing to say war is unjust, but few talking about troop increase
Call it an escalation, call it a temporary surge, call it whatever you want, but it seems clear that there's a new approach—in Jim Wallis's rhetoric on the Iraq War. "The war in Iraq was unjust; to continue it now is criminal," he writes in his latest online column. "There is no winning in Iraq. This was a war that should have never been fought—or won. It can't be won, and the truth is that there are no good solutions now—that's how unjust wars often turn out. … [W]e have already failed in Iraq." Wallis did not directly state that Bush should be charged with a crime.

Kudos to Wallis for being one of the few religious leaders directly addressing Bush's plan to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. Over at Newsweek/The Washington Post's On Faith blog, Richard Mouw Miroslav Volf, and others are calling the Iraq war unjust, but are not talking about the troop increase. (In fairness, they weren't really asked about it. The question was: "President Bush is preparing this week to send more troops to Baghdad. Do you believe there is such a thing as a 'just war'? Is the Iraq war 'just'?")

Associated Baptist Press asked several past supporters of the Iraq war whether they still support it. Charles Colson and Richard Land declined to respond directly, but Daniel Heimbach, professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, was willing to say the war "was and continues to be, in retrospect, justified or justifiable" on the basis on enforcing the terms of Iraq's 1991 surrender. Heimbach didn't directly address the troop increase, but offered this calculus: "If it gets to the point that continuing to fight ...