The advent of the end of the second millennium is unlikely to be greeted, in the historic Christian churches, with the mixture of enthusiasm and alarm which heralded the end of the first. Quite apart from the inroads of ‘de-mythologising’ and ‘existentialising’ before which traditional eschatology has lost ground, the number symbolism of biblical apocalypticism simply does not lend itself to two thousand years in the way believers with misplaced literalism applied it, in fear and awe, to the completion of the first thousand years of the agôn between the Gospel and the world. On the other hand, consider some presumptive ‘signs of the times’: the possibility, admittedly controverted, of eco-catastrophe; the ever-present threat of nuclear war—the more pressing as smaller powers, with less to lose and weaker traditions of rational policymaking, acquire weapons of mass destruction; the victories of secularist materialism which, it seems, only the Islamic powers will challenge—courageously as to substance, injudiciously as to mode; the creation of a medical technology that can encompass, at the ends of the life process, the manufacture of some human beings and the safe disposal of others; the new disparity between the technical means to feed the hungry, never before present, and the political will to do it. These provoke thought, and, in any case, the ending of a millennium reminds the Church of her faith conviction that, in this world, the human project is essentially limited in time.

Recent just-war discussion over the Gulf Crisis has focused attention once again on what are, by now, the familiar mysteries of that particular rosary: just cause, last resort, proportionality, legitimate authority, right intention. Bishops and theologians who cite the theory in order to justify military actions consistently fail to recognise that the cultural vantage points from which they conduct their calculus cannot be guaranteed free of distortions which render their solemn judgments as erroneous on a moral plane as calculations of the position of the stars taken from within the earth’s atmosphere are on a physical plane. In both cases observations vital for a correct analysis are ‘refracted’ through a medium which distorts the information without telling prima fade that it is doing so. The assumption that the just-war theory can always be adjusted to accommodate ‘advances’ such as in the technology of modem weapons systems or the status of the U.N. fails to take any notice of the complexities of modem communications and their impact on the set of perceptions and judgments crudal to the conditions of classical just-war theory.

There are numerous problems involved in trying to describe this dilemma: ‘mass media’ are by no means a trifling difficulty for just-war thinking, nor do they lend themselves to simple, hasty analysis. But even if only the contour of some of the issues can be described it may still become clear that what is required now is the application of a more critical hermeneutic to just-war theory.

‘Sir, is it to us that you are addressing this parable, or to all men also?’ Peter asks this question of Jesus at almost exactly the mid-point of Luke’s gospel. The question alerts us to the importance of audiences in this gospel. A reading of the received text as a literary whole discovers that a ubiquitous and significant sense of audience distinguishes Luke’s gospel. Jesus’s mission defines itself in Luke’s gospel through a dynamic relationship with his audiences, and the evangelist’s project of witness, of instruction of conversion, too, accomplishes itself through the creation and manipulation of audiences.

From its outset Luke’s gospel acknowledges a sense of audience as well as asserting a care for purposeful narrative structure. The gospel is introduced by a formal prologue to ‘most excellent Theophilus’, who was apparently undergoing or had recently undergone instruction in the faith.

Things that have been accomplished among us are the marvellous events of the life, death and resurrection of Christ which have led to the rise of the new Christian church of which Luke’s Theophilus is, or aspires to be, a member.

Just Deterrence by the ‘Pembroke Group’—a ‘distinguished group of civil servants, servicemen, service chaplains, theologians and academics’ to quote the blurb—claims to be about ‘Morality and Deterrence into the Twenty-First Century’. Actually it is about the morality of nuclear deterrence as practised by NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Inevitably, therefore, the book has the character of an epitaph. Of course the corpse of East-West deterrence is still twitching. Nevertheless, old-style deterrence is to all intents and purposes defunct. As Saddam has shown, new-style deterrence is about something very different. Today the question Hugh Beach’s contribution poses is all too relevant: could anything be worse than a war?

Just Deterrence is not a great book, like Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, or Finnis, Grisez and Boyle’s Morality and Realism. For reasons beyond the editors’ control, it is not a strikingly apt intervention as was Walter Stein’s Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience in 1961, but neither is it perniciously muddle-headed, like Michael Novak’s Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age. Like Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence edited by Geoffrey Goodwin in 1982, (with which it has much in common, including certain authors) it has some very closely argued chapters, and others which are certainly stimulating if, in the end unacceptable; together with yet others which are, to my mind, badly wrong. As an epitaph, it is well worth scrutinising closely as we peer at what is written for our edification on the gravestone of the Cold War.