John Howard Yoder

And I think it's worth drawing this out because it obliges us to look beyond the glib, self-contained tenets of just war theory, just war analysis, to truly grapple with what they actually mean and what they entail for the military personnel or the civilians who are tasked to live and die and sometimes also killed by these tenets.

So I think bringing experience into the picture, to paraphrase John Howard Yoder, is a way for me of being honest and just worth thinking.

So I would argue, I suppose, that some awareness of the experience of war is necessary to ground our understanding of the ethics of war, which is vital if we want our just war theory to be action guiding.

You mentioned memoirs in your remarks.

Liberation theologies championed some of these changes, which prompted conservatives to come off the sidelines and get involved.

For instance, in 1972, the Mennonite ethicist John Howard Yoder published The Politics of Jesus, inspiring many evangelicals to get involved in the public square.

This shift influenced theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, who argued that the spiritual and political spheres should remain separate nonetheless.

But the influence of these theologians was eventually drowned out by evangelical political movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.

Though not a Wesleyan, Barth shares many sensibilities with both Arminius and Wesley and is worthy of closer examination by all who deem themselves students of the Word of God.

H. Richard Niebuhr by Stan Ingersoll.

His brother, Reinhold, was more publicly known as a pastor and ethicist, but H. Richard Niebuhr was esteemed as a theologian's theologian for the quality and depth and range of his insights.

They were sons of Gustav Niebuhr, an immigrant pastor in the German Evangelical Synod of North America, later the Evangelical and Reformed Church.