- Why War is Incompatible with Christian Ethics
- Why Capital Punishment is Incompatible with Christian Ethics
- Why Killing in Self-Defense is Incompatible with Christian Ethics
- Why Abortion is Incompatible with Christian Ethics
A Right to Self-Defense?
Most people in our culture would say that killing an assailant in self-defense is the most obviously justified form of violence. Obviously, we have a “right” to defend ourselves, don’t we? If an evildoer is trying to kill us, then it seems like we have no choice but to kill them in order to prevent this, and no one could blame us for doing so.
It might surprise many modern Christians to learn that, even after the Church departed from the teachings of the early Church Fathers about violence and came to accept the violence of war as a necessary evil, most Christian thinkers continued to condemn killing in self-defense as forbidden for Christians. Killing in war, they (wrongly) believed, could be justified as an act of love for the innocent people Christians were protecting from the enemy army. Killing an enemy in order to protect one’s own life, on the other hand, could not be similarly justified by such an appeal to love of neighbor; it was a completely self-serving act. Thus, far from being the most obviously justified form of violence, killing in self-defense is actually less justifiable than killing in war (And, as I have argued previously, Christian just war theory is extremely dubious and problematic).
But don’t we have a right to use violence to protect ourselves? As I have argued previously, the idea of human rights is incompatible with Christian ethics. The Gospel does not call the followers of Jesus Christ to ask, “How can I stand up for my rights against this other person?” Rather, the Gospel calls us to ask, “How can I show God’s love to this fellow human being, knowing that Jesus died and rose again for their salvation just as much as He did for mine?”
Our Lord commands us to love our enemies (Matt 5:44; Luke 6:27, 35). It is impossible to maim, kill, and destroy our enemies and at the same time to love them. We must seek to do good to our enemies, no matter how much they seek to harm us. Presumably, if someone is an evildoer who is trying to murder us, then they are not a Christian. If we kill them, then, we will be sending them straight to Hell, which cannot possibly be good for them.
The implicit assumption behind the idea that I have a “right” to kill in self-defense is that other people’s lives are less valuable than my own. This is a false and demonic assumption. All human beings are created in the image of God. All human beings are equally valuable. God calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Lev 19:18; Mark, 12:31). This means that I must regard my neighbor as having just as much value and worth as I have. I have no “right,” then, to assume that I am justified in sacrificing the life of an assailant in order to preserve my own.
But surely, someone might object, the life of a murderous evildoer is less valuable than the life of a good, upright Christan; surely the world will be better off without them and with me in it. But I cannot actually know this for certain. I am not God. I do not know the future. Perhaps this evildoer, after murdering me, will repent and become a Christian. Perhaps they will then become a great evangelist and be the means by which God will save many souls. Perhaps the world really will be better off if I die and they live. The apostle Paul was a violent evildoer who persecuted the Church before God turned him into the greatest evangelist the world has ever seen (I Tim 1:12-16). God can do the same thing with violent evildoers today, transforming them by His grace into valuable participants in His Kingdom. I do not have the right to play God and to kill someone based on my own speculation that things will be better off with them dead and me alive.
The Nonviolent Option
But, someone might object, are we really supposed to just stand there and let people kill us? The assumption behind this objection is that using lethal violence is the only option we have to deal with a violent assailant. But this is not true. There are other options. We can attempt to reason with them. We can flee. We can use nonviolent force to push them away so that we can make our escape.
These nonviolent methods will not always be effective. But the same is true of violent methods. Attempts to kill an assailant will not always be successful. In fact, they might just make the situation worse. I might fire at the assailant and hit an innocent bystander. I might enrage the assailant, leading them to kill others and not just me. I might wound or kill the assailant, but they succeed in killing me anyway, resulting in a greater amount of evil than if I had just let them kill me.
The other problem with using lethal violence in order to deal with an assailant is that I may believe they intend to kill me, but I cannot know for certain that they actually are going to do so. If I kill them, then I have with certainty caused their death merely in order to prevent my probable death. A certain death is a worse evil than a probable death.
But what if I am in a situation where I know with complete certainty someone is trying to kill me and the only way to prevent this is to kill them? Even in this case, the Christian must choose love and nonviolence. They must choose to die rather than to kill. Through the hope of the resurrection of the dead and of eternal life in God’s new creation, Christians have been freed from the fear of death. This is what empowers us to follow Jesus and to be obedient to Him, no matter the cost. This is what empowers us to choose to love our enemies, even when it means we have to suffer and die. For Christians, killing an assailant in self-defense is not an option, no matter the cost.