Many of you will be heading for Iraq. I have never been a soldier myself, never been tested under fire, never faced hard choices between duty and feeling, or duty and conscience, under deadly circumstances. I will never know if I have the courage to be shot at, or to shoot back, or the discipline to do my duty knowing the people who dispatched me to kill—or be killed—had no idea of the moral abyss into which they were plunging me.

In the midst of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism, my fellow chaplains and I often talk with service men and women who are trying to make moral sense of their military service. This is an important quest on the part of these volunteer warriors who are fighting a different kind of enemy than did armies of the past. They must find their moral way through new applications of the laws of war, Geneva Conventions, and rules of engagement. Most chaplains are wise enough to not offer easy answers, and many join with their soldiers in an ongoing search for moral and ethical clarity in this controversial war. Some Christians, however, have found a biblical “smoking gun,” a passage of Scripture that seems on the surface to clearly give soldiers a “moral code” of warfare. This text of choice is Romans 13:3-4. Without presenting an in-depth biblical analysis, in this article I will argue that the use of Romans 13:4 to forge such a moral code for soldiers is at best a misapplication of Scripture, and it can actually be ethically dangerous.

     In seminary, I heard countless slams on his preaching style. I was lectured in cheap, pithy platitudes that “seeker services” were an oxymoron, if not “Satan-friendly.” Saddleback Sam, the name Dr. Warren gives to the “target audience” to whom he ministers, was a joke, a marketing ploy to reach a certain kind of person who could bankroll a certain kind of ministry.

Many of us still occasionally daydream that we’re someone else, someone we admire who has accomplished something we’ve always wanted to do. If you are an occasional daydreamer or pretender, I challenge you to pretend, to put yourself in the place of an Iraqi mother or father.

     When pollsters knock on my door, they will find that as a physician I am against capital punishment, ultimate fighting, and cockfighting because they run counter to our sense of being a civilized society. But the disconnect between what I will watch and what I claim I am for is more common than most of us care to admit; I blame the camera.
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     So I immediately sent them down a less direct road and asked them to give me a definition of justice. Replies varied, but we finally agreed that, at least within the body politic of our culture, the Latin account of justice which is sum cuique—that is, “to each what is due”—was adequate in terms of fairness and, in terms of punishment, or retributive justice. People should get what they deserve (though this distinction may or may not contain problems, let the reader be aware that this in an introductory course in religion).
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The story concerns Quayle’s dogged pursuit of the truth behind the mysterious death of his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), who might have been involved in an affair with another man. The circumstances of her death were suspicious. On the surface, she was apparently killed by a band of robbers on an isolated road where she should not have been. She and her purported lover, a black doctor with whom she collaborated in health services for the poor, had often traveled together, and on this occasion they were checked into the same hotel. Justin cannot believe the innuendoes his embassy colleagues were spreading about her.
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