Personal update: I’m still fighting my sinus infection. Got some stronger antibiotics now, and am trying to rest a lot. I had to take the garbage out today and get some groceries, and I consider those things an achievement.
I have more to say about the Charlie Kirk atrocity. I will try not to be influenced by the fact that I had to unfriend someone on Facebook today, because of a startlingly ugly comment.
[Decompress]
OK. I’ve written on this topic before – either here or at the American Spectator Online – but that was a long time ago, and I suppose public awareness has faded.
Here’s my proposition – the Golden Rule is a command, not a strategy.
I see people (to my considerable distress) saying things like, “Well, Charlie tried talking to ‘em. You see what he got for it. Now it’s time to give ‘em a taste of their own medicine.”
Many of these people even profess Christian faith.
They appear to be operating out of the common belief (buttressed by way too many well-meaning Christian children’s stories) that doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is a strategy for achieving peace. If you’re nice enough to your enemy, this theory assumes, they’ll soon grow ashamed of their meanness and start being nice in return.
Friends, this is never promised to us.
Jesus attaches no promise to this command. It was delivered to disciples who were mostly destined for martyrdom. Their enemies would not change their minds about them for about three centuries. Until then, the Christians practiced the Golden Rule without a lot of reward, just because it’s right.
The fact that Charlie Kirk suffered martyrdom in return for kindness and civility does not mean the Golden Rule hasn’t worked. It’s working just fine. God was glorified in Charlie’s life and death, in ways we can’t even guess.
We are not called to win battles, or elections, or the culture. We’re called only to be faithful. The results are in God’s hands.
“How can we protect society then?”
The answer to that is in Jesus’ teaching about God and Caesar. I saw historian Tom Holland discussing this recently, in a video clip online. He pointed out that when Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” He was initiating an historic innovation. Never before in history, anywhere, had civic life been separated from religion.
Luther’s teaching of the two kingdoms builds on historical Christian thought. The individual Christian is responsible for living as a disciple. His realm is grace. The king or magistrate bears the sword and bears the responsibility to punish evildoers. His business is law and punishment.
A Christian individual can legitimately defend himself, and certainly defend his family, but declaring war or taking revenge or making reprisals are forbidden activities.
Please, please. Do not dishonor Charlie’s legacy by taking up the sword. Leave it to God. The tribute Charlie Kirk would wish from you is to do as he did – declare the love of Christ to our enemies.
And if they keep killing us, we keep on loving them.
Very well put.
Yes — and thanks. I do think Charlie Kirk’s death will inspire some Christians to speak pout in appropriate ways thought this may be uncomfortable for them.
I just ran into a quotation from that Lutheran critic of his Lutheran State Church (of whose work I have read far too little), apparently from 1848: “The tyrant dies, and his rule is over. The martyr dies, and his rule begins.”
I have the sense that there is an extensive literature of Christian theological reflection over the centuries – nearly over a millennium if one dates John of Salisbury’s Policraticus to 1159 – on tyrannicide (having had, but sadly never yet read, a copy of John Dickinson’s 1927 translated selections) – with, apparently, some famous pre-Christian reflection in Cicero’s De Officiis (which I have also not- yet? – read).
I get the impression that assorted (post-)modern ideologues who are usually dedicated to denying any idea of ‘nature law’ or of ‘justice’ as other than a ‘human construction’ seem to wrap various aspirations to murder assorted people in a cloak of their targets being ‘tyrants’ or ‘tyrannical’ as if that were somehow something ‘truly just’ rather than an exercise of the sorts of will-to-power they seem usually to posit as basic.
Oops – left out Kierkegaard’s name in my first sentence – though I suppose one might easily guess it!