The following is a quote from an article in the April 9th edition of the National Catholic Reporter. The article is titled: "Why is the Catholic church moving away from just war theory?" Its author is Terrence Rynne.

"...The just war theory, on the other hand, ignores the New Testament. It is an ethical discipline that came to us from the "pagan" Cicero by way of St. Augustine. It approaches the problem of war and violence using natural law thinking and does not measure up to the call to positive peacemaking that we find in the New Testament."

This is a radical re-conceptualization of human conflict, and it will be even more radical if it moves forward. It is radical in the root meaning of the word in that it strikes at the very foundation from which the theory arises. If the former foundation is removed and replaced with a substantially and substantively different foundation, we will end up in a very different place by a very different route.

Re-evaluation and refinement of the just war theory with the possibility of outright replacement may be but one moral principle requiring such a review and examination.  So much of the Church's thinking on Natural Law and the use of a Natural Law argument in support of moral thinking and decision making rests on pre-Christian philosophers and medieval science. It is well past the time to use New Testament teachings as the basis for Christian morality. Is it not also time to move forward and incorporate the knowledge and science acquired by the human community over the past millennium into those contemporary principles guiding individual and corporate acts of and by the members of this same community?