Distinguishing Theology from Ethics: A Critique of Waging War

Whereas an ethical critique of war appeals to an ethical principle, typically that is against humans being harmed, especially the innocent, a theological critique can be based on a divine degree or on the nature of the divine in contradistinction to human nature as anything but. That is, a distinctly theological critique of war itself or people who wage war is typically based on some obfuscation of the divine and human wherein the latter has sought to appropriate divine nature or attributes to what is in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, human, all too human. Although Kant’s “kingdom of ends” formulation of his categorial imperative looks a lot like Jesus’s Golden Rule, for example, offending rational beings by treating them only as means to one’s own goals is distinct from offending God by violating the divine command of universal benevolence, or “neighbor love,” which is Jesus’s second commandment, which is like unto the first (i.e., to love God). Having probably just now lost, or “blown away,” just about every normal reader, I want to illustrate my point of distinguishing the ethical from the theological by analyzing pertinent comments made by Pope Leo, the first Midwestern (Illinois) pope, in April, 2026.

Referring to the war inflicted on Iran by the U.S. and the state of Israel, the pope referred to the “delusion of omnipotence.”[1] The pope could have been referring to the hubris of power that had fueled Israel’s Netanyahu into the delusion that committing a holocaustic genocide against the people of Gaza was a just and proportional reaction to the attack by Hama in which only about 1,200 Israelis died. The prime minister even said that Israel’s deity had been good in helping Israel in being able to inflict a Nazi-level of atrocity on the Gazans. The ease with which a human is willing to hurt other humans is indeed troubling; to bring a deity into the equation in a favorable light, as the U.S. Secretary of Defense did on the U.S. attacks on Iran and Netanyahu did on Gaza surely must boggle the mind of any rational or genuinely religious person.

The pope’s deliberate use of the word, omnipotence, was no accident, for that word denotes a uniquely divine attribute that human beings do not have because none of us is all-powerful. Relative to a Creator, any creature is of relative power. It is not as though the vast majority of us are under the delusion; some people with low self-esteem even become sexually aroused by having their limited power showcased by a dominating sex-partner as if being intentionally harmed and even humiliated were deserved. People who set aside a room as a dungeon may even crave powerlessness relative to the power of another person, which is just as problematic in its own way because we are all made in the image of God and thus are worthy of some self-love. Even though we are far from omnipotent, we creatures are nonetheless worthy of being loved. It is out of love for the self-deprived dungeon-lovers that efforts can be made to help them out of their plight so they feel comfortable in their own limited, justified power and thus come to love themselves. Guiding a person into the light of healthy self-love and away from the darkness of selfishness and self-inflicted pain without any benefit to oneself evinces genuine love consistent with Christian agape. Our species is indeed capable of other-regarding, selfless love, which is antipodal and thus antithetical to self-centered love, which is actually selfish greed.  

Whereas the Jansenist Pierre Nicole wrote scathingly of self-love, Augustine had maintained that self-love of the image of God within is salubrious theologically. Such self-love is not that to which Pope Leo referred when he said of the warmongers waging war against Iran, “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!”[2] The pope was trying to guide President Trump away from selfish self-love to love as benevolentia universalis. The idolatry of self is the placing of oneself above love directed to God. Such misordered concupiscence enables monetary and political greed and even war as a way of obtaining more, the love of which is the definition of greed.

Both “omnipotence” and “idolatry” are distinctively theological, or religious, words; they are not in the lexicon of ethics because the words are sourced or related back to the divine, which transcends the created realm, whereas ethical principles do not unless they are part of a divine command. This is precisely the decisive way in which the theological is distinct from the ethical. Put another way, God’s omnipotence (i.e., being all-powerful) means that God cannot be limited to one of our ethical theories or principles unless God itself has commanded them. As sure as we may be that our ethical principles are solid, they are not eternal in themselves. Rather, they are manmade. As such, they are of the created realm unless they are commanded by God. To insist nonetheless that religion reduces to ethical principles, as Unitarian Universalists typically have done since the 1970s, is thus to engage in self-idolatry.

In his remarks, the Roman Catholic pope was proffering a snapshot of the idolatry and the related delusion that distinguish warmongers far from the divine. A Nietzschean pathos of distance separates the bullies from a deity of compassion and self-giving, agape love. I’m sure the pope would appreciate being backed up by Nietzsche, the author of The Anti-Christian whose father and grandfather were Lutheran ministers, but the pope and I are fellow native Midwesterners from Northern Illinois so I’m sure he would forgive me in the very unlikely event that he reads this essay—though whereas he is a White Sox fan, I am an avid Cubs fan, but no one—not even a pope—is perfect.  Hence the distinction between the creature and the Creator! To obfuscate the two, or, even worse, to put ourselves above the condition of being and reality, is superbia writ large—nothing less than arrogance on stilts during a sell-deserved flood—in the bloated self-love of self-idolatry in contradistinction to selfless love even and especially for those who reject us, for even children of lesser gods share in being (God being perfect being) and thus, according to Leibniz, deserve to be loved in spite of themselves. If the pope was placing Trump and Netanyahu in their place, as situated relative to God rather than to their own hyper-egos, out of love rather than just anger (which would be justified), then the pope could get a sense of God’s perspective, albeit limited as per the perspective of a mere creature. I hope I have demonstrated why this is qualitatively different than the adoption of a distinctly ethical perspective, which in turn is human, all too human.

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1. Nicole Winfield, “Pope Leo XIV Denounces the ‘Delusion of Omnipotence’ He Says Fuels the US-Israeli War in Iran,” APnews.com, April 11, 2026.
2.Ibid.

Selfishness and Damnation on the Boston Subway

Imagine a crowded, standing-room-only subway car during rush hour in Boston, Massachusetts. Even though many riders are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his own seat. It would be difficult upon seeing such a blatant display of selfishness not make certain assumptions about the man’s values and character. I did, twice on Boston subway trains, as I stood looking at one young man, and then another on another train about a month later who was doing the same thing. Because many of the train operators in Boston ignore their training by slapping the brake lever backwards all at once rather than gradually just before abruptly stopping at a station-stop, standing can be perilous. Once I found myself running through half of a trolley car to re-establish my balance because the driver had applied the brakes too abruptly.  The inconsiderateness for the riders could easily be inferred, and from that, we could say that the reckless employees suffered from the vice of selfishness. The same can be said of the drivers’ supervisors, for whom the word accountability was not in the English dictionary. With so much selfishness delimiting intending benefits to others that are intended by one’s decisions and actions, moreover, a dysfunctional organization and even an enabling society can be inferred. Some Christian theologians have sought to relate the ethical vice of selfishness to the religious sin of self-love, which as Pierre Nicole made clear in the seventeenth century, is mutually exclusive with Christian love from compassion. Even amid such clear relationships, the ethical and religious or theological domains should not be fused as if the two domains were actually one. To view selfishness self-love as containing both ethical and theological implications and yet hold that the two domains are qualitatively different—each having its own unique aspects—is the goal.

Selfishness is the manifestation of self-love that is oriented teleologically to the person’s exclusive benefit (i.e., private benefit). Although other people may benefit too, that is not within the selfish person’s purview. Typically, selfishness cuts off benefits going to other people and even a society as a whole. The vice is thus at odds with compassion, which fuels benevolence, because even if other people benefit, that byproduct is not motivated by a selfish person. Only such benefits as are in the self-interest, and thus  benefit, of a selfish person fall within one’s intentionality. That is not compassion.

A continuum from the ethical domain to that of religion may seem easily constructed; people of bad character are likely to go to hell rather than heaven. If the kingdom of God preached by Jesus in the Gospels is entered in this life by heartfelt acts of compassion to one’s neighbors and detractors alike, then people who are only concerned about themselves benefitting will not enter that spiritual state. As solid as this argument is, it is also vital not to constrain God’s omniscience (knowledge) and omnipotence (power) to fit within our ethical principles and theories. A figure such as Abraham might take a decision that is the inverse of compassionate—attempted murder of his only son—because God has decreed that Abraham sacrifice Isaac. To be sure, Abraham’s intent to make the sacrifice could hardly be considered selfish, but at the same time it is harmful rather than compassionate. God’s knowledge and power so surpass our own that we should take care in judging a selfish person soteriologically; salvation is up to God, not us.

John Calvin, a Protestant reformer in the sixteenth century, held that by absolute sovereignty, God has predestined an elect who are saved. Although he viewed wealth as a sign of God’s approval of the elect, it was not until the next century that Calvinists considered industriousness to be a Christian virtue.[1] Being rich could be an indication that, whether one is selfish or not, one is already saved among God’s elect. All this contradicts Jesus’s statement in the Gospels to the rich man that unless he gives up his fortune, he would not enter the kingdom of God; it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Furthermore, wealth as a sign of divine favor leaves out the divine favor that could be supposed to be lavished on monks such as Cuthbert and Godric of Finchale, who lived intentionally impoverished lives so to be worthy of being saved. Wealth as a sign of divine favor also flies in the face of the preachments of such religious notables as St. Francis of Assisi and Luther, both of whom can be interpreted as attempting to apply brakes to the emerging and maturating Christian pro-wealth paradigm in their respective times.[2] As a species of selfishness, greed—the desire for one’s own gain—is difficult to reconcile with neighbor-love as compassionate benevolence. A greedy, selfish person who claims to be saved by the blood of Christ on the Cross because Jesus died for mankind as if the person’s debt to God is already paid flies in the face of the claim made both by Paul and Augustine that God is love. To be in union with God thus requires that a person loves, and selflessly (agape) at that. In short, free-will must voluntarily chose compassionate love for a person to be among the elect. In fact, Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the New England theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, claims in his book on holiness that the essence of the kingdom of God is kindness and acts of compassion oriented to the humanity of people who dislike one or whom one dislikes.[3] Such humane compassion is two degrees of separation from selfishness.

Even so, self-love and selfishness can be distinguished. Not only is the former term theological whereas the latter is of the domain of ethics; self-love, unlike selfishness, can include the intention and effort that benefits be extended to other people without instantiating compassion. In his book on virtue, Edwards himself distinguishes selfishness from “compounded self-love,” which differs from simple self-love because benefits are intentionally extended to other people rather than limited to oneself.[4] Similarly, Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century Jansenist Catholic priest and theologian, claims that the inherently sinful self-love can nonetheless be cleverly manifested as courtesy—but not interior kindness!—to other people because more can be gotten from laying out honey than from the stinginess of selfishness. Had the subway passengers moved their respective backpacks so someone standing could sit down to withstand the primitive, inconsiderate operation of the trains, perhaps a person who might have been useful might have sat in the suddenly empty seat. To clear off a seat with the intention of benefitting can be distinguished from having compassion for a passenger trying not to fall over or even be thrown forward in the train-car at the next station-stop. Hopkins, Edwards, and Nicole were all very clear in averring that even if self-love can have intentional beneficial consequences for other people, which are of course in the acting person's self-interest, the root is still a sin, and a sin is not identical to a vice or any unethical decision or action. Sin is utterly incompatible with compassion that resonates either from love directed to God (i.e., caritas) or selfless love (i.e., agape).  Self-interest, which is selfishness oriented to a goal, and is based in ethics rather than theology, is incompatible only with the second type of Christian love, agape. Even so, exercising such (wholly religious) agape love can be very unethical. In the religious (but not ethical) domain, ethical scruples should not get in the way of obeying a divine command.  

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard distinguishes the universally-accessible moral domain from that of the divine command that only Abraham receives.  What is attempted murder (of Abraham’s son, Isaac) in moral (and legal) terms is a sacrifice in religious terms. Both domains are valid in themselves and their respective meanings, and they relate to each other, as in the story of Abraham, but attempted murder and religious sacrifice are qualitatively different. This point is also clear in the Book of Job, as Job is a righteous man and thus does not deserve to be made to suffer by the devil even as a test sanctioned by the Old Testament deity. Abstractly stated, divine omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful) means that divine command cannot be constrained by human ethical principles. Regarding the five Commandments that have ethical conduct, it is explicitly based on divine command, and thus on divine will, and thus is not a constraint on the deity. This does not mean that the ethical itself is theological in nature.

So, while it is tempting to relegate a selfish person to hell as a sordid reprobate, especially as selfishness is antithetical to benevolentia universalis, which in turn is a manifestation of “God is love” in Christianity, both our own finite nature as judges and the distinction between acting unethically and obeying a divine command, and, moreover, being saved, mitigate against making such a hasty and wholly convenient category mistake that superimposes that of the creature onto the Creator. It could be that the man on a crowded subway train puts his backpack on the seat next to him because suffers from PTSD or is autistic. Even such a simple justification, which separates our ethical verdict from God’s judgment on the man’s selfishness, can easily pass by mere creatures such as homo sapiens.  

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. See also the author’s related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). The first text is of the non-fiction genre for the general educated reader, whereas the second text is of the academic genre. Ironically, God’s Gold not only contains additional chapters, but is also an ideational improvement on God’s Gold, especially concerning the concluding chapter of both books. A Christian apologist, for instance, would prefer the conclusion of God’s Gold, which hinges on the Logos in answering a critique of anthropomorphism from David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Sometimes better ideas reach a general readership rather than cloistered, over-specialized academia.

2. Ibid.

3. Samuel Hopkins, An Enquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).

4. Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1960).

Transcendence in Hindu Bhakti

Edwin Byrant, a scholar of Hinduism who spoke at the Bhakti Yoga conference based at Harvard in March 2025, discussed the transcendence that is in bhukti devotion to a Hindu deity, such as Krishna. Such transcendence can end a person’s transactional approach in trying to please a deity in exchange from beneficial grace from the deity’s love. Both the steps and definitions of bhakti reveal the salience of transcendence in loving devotion to a deity.

The steps of Bhakti Yoga begin with a person recognizing one’s own suffering. We want to put an end to our own suffering. The first step is to recognize that there is a higher power: a power higher than oneself. There is order in the cosmos, so there must be a higher power that is ordering the universe. We are naturally self-centric, but we should be able to recognize that we are not the cause of the order of the universe. Therefore, the recognition of a higher power—an intelligence that is omnipotent—includes an acknowledgement that none of us is that higher power. The next stage is surrendering to it. Then, a person can look to the higher power manifesting in one’s life. Ultimately, love is the gift that comes from the outside. When it is given, then the transactional element is ended; the person forgets oneself in loving a deity. The focus is on trying to attract the deity’s grace. As such grace is transcendent, and thus beyond our power and knowledge, and thus our efforts to please, we can only attempt to attract a deity’s attention and get lost in the loving itself.

Transcendence can be gleamed too from definitions of Bhakti. The Sanskrit word, bhakti, is a verbal noun (i.e., something you do): an action that connects. In the Bhakti Sutras, several definitions are given. They boil down to seva, which loosely translates as service. It is to try to please. It is not selfish.  So, bhakti includes engaging in acts to please the other. To purify the selfishness and please the beloved. Minds can only manifest thoughts, and this is not sufficient to know how to please an entity that is transcendent. Part of surrendering is acknowledging our limitations.  So, we look to religious experts, such as gurus, and religious texts, such as the Puranas and the Bhagavad-Gita, on which a guru should be based, for even gurus are human, all too human.

By its very nature, transcendence goes beyond the limits of human cognition and perception, so even a succinct, well-organized explanation or account of transcendence itself or that which is posited as transcendent should be recognized as limited. For example, it may not be clear how surrender to a higher power implies or even is compatible with devotional love, at least from the perspective of the world in which we live. Such utter dependence as a creature such as Man can recognize in one’s relation to the Creator, which is the basis even of existence itself, may involve or admit a distinctly theological love that is qualitatively different than interpersonal love, which is based in social psychology. This is not to claim that the former kind of love cannot relate to the latter—only that the former cannot be derived from the latter. We may be so used to projecting the love we feel in our own realm onto the love that a deity has and that we may direct to a deity that we could scarcely recognize or even conceptualize of distinctly theological love. It would follow that any definition of bhakti can only be provisional, and yet any given definition is improvable. Transcending transactionalism, for example, is just part of the process in coming to terms with what Hindu bhakti really is, as sui generis rather than projected devotional love.