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BY WILLIAM A. HOLMES

I admire Christian non-pacifists who can express respect for the pacifist position. Reinhold Niebuhr was such a person. For all of his rigorous critique of pacifism, Niebuhr was an ardent advocate of the pacifist contribution. In 1940, he wrote, We who allow ourselves to become engaged in war, need the testimony of the absolutist against us, lest we accept the warfare of the world as normative, lest we become callous to the horror of war, and lest we forget the ambiguity of our own actions and motives and the risk we run of achieving no permanent good from the momentary anarchy in which we are involved.

However, as one who deeply respects the pacifist position, I want to argue that the Bush administration has offered an appropriate response to the terrorist acts of Sept. 11.

The just war tradition can be traced to Augustine, who grappled in the fourth century with the undeniable fact that Christian teaching challenges any resort to violence. Augustine opposed wars of aggression and aggrandizement, but he further believed that there were times when the resort to force may be tragically necessary. This has meant that on occasion, Christians, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with strong presumptions for peace and non-violence, decided to sin bravely for the greater good.

Niebuhr knew pacifism could only achieve its goal when those who are resisting have a potential ally in the consciences of their opponents, as with the case of Ghandis struggle against the British.

Niebuhr considered absolute pacifism to be a very sentimentalized form of the Christian faith, as well as a dangerous intervention in pragmatic politics.

My own choice of non-pacifism in the war against terrorism is a pragmatic choice, predicated on the belief that Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network would not likely desist in their jihad against the United States, even if our response to Sept. 11 was a nonviolent, nonmilitary response. Such a conclusion finds me inextricably involved in sinful compromises, but no more so in fact, I think even less than were I to choose the pacifist position.

For all my misgivings, I am convinced that the United States has no choice but to treat the murders of thousands of civilians as an act of war. President Bush, whatever his limitations, has risen to the occasion, and led the nation in a response that Christians can support as a just war.

Our lifestyle patterns of conspicuous consumption and our inordinate hogging of the worlds resources continue to have devastating repercussions for that one-out-of-every-three people on this planet who do not have enough food, and the one billion that are literally starving. But the sum total of these, and other U.S.-caused injustices, does not add up to a compelling justification for the September attacks against this nation. It is simplistic and naive to argue that on Sept. 11 the American people got what we deserve.

Failing to understand the psychopathology behind terrorism is failing to understand the tremendous certainty and security provided by the Talibans fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and their traumatic sense of loss when old absolutes and certainties are threatened by the modern world. It is a condition similar to the experience of a white racist who finds cultural identity and financial advantage in segregation and is therefore threatened by integration.

I conclude as I began, with a sense of genuine indebtedness to those who hold the pacifist position. Although I believe their absolutism places them beyond the historical crucible where we are meant to live, they continue to remind me of the truth of Niebuhrs paradox: human sin is inevitable but not necessary. Or, to say it one more time: The hope for all of us, pacifists and non-pacifists alike, is in the grace of God.

 The Rev. William A. Holmes is a retired clergy member of the Baltimore-Washington Conference.