It’s Tuesday and Christmas is quickly fading behind us. Don’t forget that while Jesus is the Reason for the Season, he deserves our attention 365 days a year.

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that one of the things I am preoccupied with is the use of violence and the proper time for it—especially as a Christian. In yesterday’s Broadside I laid out a number of questions that we all need to be asking ourselves as we watch the cultural rot destroy our ordered liberty, including the election heist of 2020. One of those questions was, “Am I willing to take up arms to defend my freedom or to remove from power those who would take my freedom from me?”

In asking that question I am not saying that I think a violent uprising is unavoidable, nor am I advocating for one. But I do think that one is possible and perhaps may even be required if we’re to keep the liberty our Founders intended for us. Therefore, it is better to wrestle with that question and settle it now while it can be done in relative peace.

A resource that I have found very helpful in shaping my own thinking is a lengthy article written at The Stream by Jason Jones and John Zmirak called, God, Guns and the Government: A Paper to Send Your Pastor: Why the Right to Bear Arms Is a Natural Cause for Christians. You will need a good 45 minutes to read the whole thing, but it is completely worth that time if you’re trying to reconcile your Christian faith with participating in a violent action.

I can’t summarize a treatise that long in a short blog post, but let me give you three major points (or “pillars” as the authors call them) and offer one take away I found most helpful for myself.

Pillar #1: Natural Law and Human Dignity Dictate a Right to Self-Defense

Here the authors focus on what “natural law” is and what the most basic of human rights “in a fallen, violent world” must be. They conclude,

It must be that of self-defense against violence. Whether some aggressor aims at killing us, committing some grievous harm such as rape, or seizing our labor and its fruits, we feel intuitively that we as persons have the right to defend ourselves. And our family members. You might say that this claim arises from our animal nature, and this is true. As embodied spirits, we hearken to the call of the flesh at dinnertime, when “nature calls,” and when we decide to marry.

Pillar #2: Biblical Precedent and American History

For believers, this is the most relevant section of the paper. Here the authors look at pacifist philosophy and find it wanting in terms of biblical or historical support. They cite several examples of biblical figures using violence or laws allowing it. For instance,

One of the earliest biblical passages of relevance here is Exodus 22:2–3: “If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no bloodguilt for him; but if the sun has risen upon him, there shall be bloodguilt for him.”

[…]

In other words, a victim of crime may employ immediate, direct force on a thief while the thief is engaged in his crime, but he may not capture and execute the thief later, acting in lieu of the legitimate authorities.

They also reference Jesus using a whip to drive money-changers out of the temple which “would fall under our legal definition of assault.” They note, too, that Jesus did not condemn the Roman centurions he interacted with for being part of the Roman military or demand that they leave that profession.

Perhaps the most useful part of the entire discussion under Pillar #2 is their answer to the question, “What about collective self-defense against tyranny?” Be sure to read it.

Pillar #3: Assaults on Religious and Personal Liberty

Here they look at the “contrasting experience of Yazidis in Iraq and Syriac Christians in northeastern Syria in the face of savage religious persecution by ISIS” and then conclude,

Religious groups that argue for gun confiscation are using their own texts and traditions tendentiously and selectively, showing that their real allegiance is to the state over the individual. This omnicompetent state replaces the Church, and perhaps even Christ, as the locus of loyalty and trust, just as a this-worldly utopia replaces the Kingdom of Heaven in “Social Gospel” writing and activism. Faithful traditional Christians should reject this collectivist idol for solid theological reasons, just as American citizens should resist it for constitutional ones.

One of My Take Aways

Under Pillar #2, under the heading, “Christians Defending the Innocent,” I find one principle in particular that rings true to me. Jones and Zmirak write,

[E]arly Christians relied on Old Testament precedent and natural law reasoning to determine how Jesus’s words should inform our ethical practice. As Kopel notes, an important exception was St. Ambrose, who held that Jesus’s words prevented a Christian from fighting in his own self-defense but stipulated that one may and even must use violence in defense of other, innocent third parties (such as one’s family or friends). Ambrose’s pupil St. Augustine rejected this position, seeing it as irreconcilable with the obvious implications of natural law. St. Thomas Aquinas later argued that self-defense was perfectly justified but should not aim intentionally at killing the offender, though that could be an acceptable, if unintended, side effect.

One of my professors in seminary told the story of walking up on a man who was threatening a woman on a street in a foreign city. Seeing a glass bottle laying at the curb, he picked it up by the neck and broke it, then used the jagged remains as a weapon to chase the offender off. When we asked him why that was “OK” he said, “Because Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek was directed at me. I can’t turn the cheek for them.” It is entirely permissible to defend the weak and innocent from evil.

I hold that we have the right to collective self-defense against tyranny and against personal threats. There’s more to be learned, but the full article at The Stream is a good place to start for those of you who are on the front end of thinking it through.

[Image: U.S. Capitol Rotunda via Architect of the Capitol]