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"Remarkably, as Bell points out, this theological justification of killing in war does not permit one to kill in the name of self-defense. Christian participation in war is not born of vengeance toward the enemy for the sake of self-defense, but can even be construed as a form of enemy-love. The condoning of just war is, for Augustine, “born of the hope that evil persons might learn from the example of Christians what is to be valued truly and that through the patient goodwill of Christians they might be prompted to repent, reform, and restore the peace” (30). Far from an exception to Jesus’s call to love one’s enemy, just war is enemy love by means of a “kind harshness” (Quoted in Bell, 31). It is “kind” in that it seeks the repentance and reformation of the enemy; it is harsh in that it is a form of punishment against the will of the enemy. It is in this framework that Augustine can call Christians to “be a peacemaker, even in war so that by conquering them you bring the benefit of peace even those you defeat” (Quoted in Bell, 31)."

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Although Bell draws from other sources, including important medieval and Protestant developments of the just war tradition, it is Augustine’s original vision of just war as a form of Christian discipleship that Bell ultimately hopes to retrieve for the church. Before Bell explores other key thinkers in the just war tradition, he provides a short but highly significant treatment of the popular conception of how the doctrine of just war relates to the Christian moral life. In this section, Bell goes back to the original question stated above: is just war a compromise of Christian convictions, a fall from an “original righteousness” (24)? Many Christians, even those who stand in support of the doctrine of just war, nevertheless answer yes to this question. Many Christians simply begin from the assumption that, as Bell puts it, “Jesus preached an ideal of love and peace, but in this world of sin it is not possible to live according to that ideal” (32). Although Christians might appeal to Augustine to make this claim, the influential Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr is probably more responsible for such an assumption. The problem with the Niebuhrian view, according to Bell, is that it views just war as a kind of necessary lesser evil. In a world of sin, Christians must forgo God’s call to live righteously and accept the inevitability that war, though evil, is necessary to limit greater evils from occurring.