The Psychology of War

SBL 2007 Harold Ellens

The third conference I attended was SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), which meets concurrently with AAR (American Academy of Religion). This is a very broad ranging conference with thousands of people attending from a variety of religions, primarily Christian but also Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu, with a few atheists thrown in for good measure. There are such sessions as Buddhist Philosophy Group, African Biblical Hermeneutics, Greek Bible, LGBT/Queer Hermeneutics, Q, Mormon Studies Consultation, Book of Acts, Use of Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation, and Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible: Inter-Species Sex and Other Relations.

The first session I went to was Warfare in Ancient Israel. My introduction to SBL was immediate as the first speaker got up and almost immediately said just war was inhuman, monstrous, and satanic and that Yahweh was psychotic because he acted in the human realm on the belief that it was the battle ground of a cosmic struggle against an evil god, a cosmic struggle which actually does not exist. The second speaker then got up and started talking about how monotheism is inherently violent and the only way past it is to reject it, which led him to secular humanism. Welcome to SBL!

The first speaker, J. Harold Ellens, argued strongly against any idea of just war theory and rejected the biblical god. What was needed was a new conception of God, as the loving and nonviolent god. The biblical model of war is “obscene”. One point he made was that war works best when it dehumanizes the enemy, such as the derogatory nicknames given to the enemy (Japs, Huns, etc.). When this kind of dehumanizing is removed, war is then less effective.  His solution? National models that absorb insults instead of using violence, and more statesmen than politicians. But when nations do have to go to war as a necessary evil, then they need to be on a crusade. They should seek to terminate oppression, and as Clausewitz said war is only ethical when it is total war and the very will to fight of the enemy is targeted. Ellens gave several commendable examples, one of which is Sherman’s march to the sea. As one of the questions afterwards noted, there is quite the contrast between the beginning and end of this presentation by Ellens.

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