I loved this book when I first read it years ago for a college classroom, and I would like to use it immediately for adult church members who take the Bible as ground and authority for faith. Aukerman takes one significant passage of the Bible after another and insightfully brings out meanings clearly in the Bible which speak precisely to the contemporary world (he does this rather like the close readings of Erich Auerbach in Mimesis). This may be the best book I have ever read on the issue of a Biblical view of war and peace. Timely, urgent, readable, timeless.

A probing analysis of international politics which forces Christians to re-examine the assumptions we all have about the true meaning of peace. Aukerman is clearly an independent evangelical thinker in the purest sense -- he cannot be claimed for the left or right; rather, he shows that true Christians stand as a witness against the world's politics when such politics call us to kill one another. If only half of the so-called "Christian ethicists" in the world would read this book, the Church would be much better for it.