Should Christians Use A Gun? <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
What Would Jesus Have Us Do?He'd Protect the InnocentBy Andrew Longman
 
Communists are very upset with a column I wrote insisting teachers should be allowed to defend their students against raving lunatic foreigners armed with illegal weapons.  Our foreign friend had filed the serial numbers off of his guns, which, if we pass new laws against it, will fail to happen in the future.
 
One doesn't care what communists think.  They are irrelevant.  But what did concern me was a caller, Charles from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Florida, to Janet Folger's Faith2Action radio show.  He identified himself as an ex-Christian, and his arguments seem confused, I respond to the gentleman because his points could not be rebutted in the time available and because many Christians share his views.  Where the conscientious Christian goes, there goes the nation because, on earth, the people of Godly conscience are those who set our moral benchmarks.  Whether or not they are agreed with is beside the point – the moral reference, the high water mark, is established in this country by what God fearing people will accept or reject.
 
The caller's concern was common.  Doesn't Jesus, who advocated turning the other cheek, inherently oppose Christians carrying firearms?  Doesn't Jesus, the prince of peace, desire that the average citizen not be carrying a deadly weapon?  The caller pointed out that Jesus told Peter to put away Peter's sword when the cabal came to arrest Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.
 
Christian confusion on this issue, not the secularist or communist confusion, is the reason we have mass killings.  If Christians could work through this issue in coherent theological fashion, the public moral culture could be united on it and we could get this problem into a history book and out of the cable news cycle.
 
Because I am addressing my Christian brothers views, I wish to be respectful. His views
matter.  The caller's position, though Biblical, is wrong…but it has merit.  It is partially correct, derived from some understanding of God's Word, and yet has key missing pieces.  It is worth noting that observant Jews commendably don't have any confusion on these issues.  Largely the confusion arises in understanding the difference between the personal and the public in the New Testament.
 
The Old Testament gives the Christian laws and themes for the governance of public and national life.  The judiciary, armies, nations, war, public order and law – these are all set forth in the Tenach and God completely covered them there.  The New Testament, on the other hand, deals with the personal.  It is focused on intimacy between the individual and God himself.  There is a reason the New Testament is about soul salvation, ecstatic miracles, and eschatology – God hadn't covered that as much in the Old Testament.  He sketched it in preamble, but it was only Messiah himself who could preach on those in fullness.
 
The Tenach rebukes Israel, the archetypal God-relating nation, for letting their swords go into disrepair and vanish.  Christians often miss this when they start in on the issue of gun control because they desire, rightly, to put the teachings of Jesus as supreme.  They are focused on beating their swords into plowshares – a reference to the eschatological reign of Christ.  They kind of ignore the national life rules in the Old Testament.  But that is a mistake. In every single place where the New Testament is silent on an issue, the Old Testament still applies.  Jesus said so: that not one jot or tiddle of the Tenach would disappear until the consummation of time was completed.
 
The New Testament clearly records that the power of the sword is given to the ruling authority in order that the ruling authority wield it against evil doers.  Most Christians, especially touchy-feely ones from relativist denominations, are totally unaware that the New Testament reaffirms what the Old Testament states: that the government is given power by God to kill criminals and God expects the government to wield the sword so that the innocent are protected.
 
Our problem fighting evil in our society comes from whiny Christians with weak, feminized, consciences who confuse the concepts of personal affection with public order.  Your mother wouldn't put to death someone in her living room because this would rightly violate feminine and personal affection.  But this familial, relational, emotion becomes projected onto the public sphere and onto theology wrongly. "I just couldn't stand to hurt him!" becomes "eliminate the death penalty for serial murderers".  But  public sentiment must not be allowed to be the same as the interpersonal sentiment because when that confusion happens, public order and the protection are sacrificed.  We've made the public into the personal, and turned the personal into publicity.  This inversion of spheres leads to turbulence.
 
The caller missed something else.  He saw Jesus telling Peter to sheath his sword and heard the maxim that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.  It was spoken in the context of what kind of a King Jesus was meant to be.  Peter, do you not know that My Father would put at my service 12 legions of Angels?  The point was that military soldiers exerting force with weapons could expect to face military men of the opposing forces exerting force with weapons.  Peter had been drafted into King Jesus' army and was expected to live and die by orders, not by earthly military operations, not by earthly weapons in earthly conflict - Jesus was not an earthly King.  This was fitting because Peter was the founder of the Christian church. Jesus was telling Peter that the Church is not a military organization and the Gospel wasn't to be advanced by the sword.  But that is completely unrelated to whether God ordained government, or the government ordained deputy, to use a sword against evil armies, terrorists, or criminals.  Was Jesus advocating police, militias, or governments disarm?  No. Was he advocating all individuals disarm?  No.
 
Peter carried a sword around with him right up until the moment Jesus was crucified.
Jesus never told him to get rid of it.  All Jesus did was to tell Peter - don't use a sword to attack God's plan.  God wanted Jesus on the Cross.  Peter didn't. 
Swords are neither good nor bad.  The question is – are they subject to right authority?  Does the user of the sword respond to his proper mission? Indeed, God commends the proper use of deadly force in many places in the Bible – including the New Testament.  And in the end King Jesus returns wielding? A sword.
 
The sword was the personal weapon carried by the individual and the symbol of legitimate authority.  If the New Testament had been written today "sword" would have been rendered "gun". If Jesus was really a liberal who wanted to give peace a chance, why did his #2 man wear have a Glock strapped to his side when they went to Jerusalem? 
 
In our American context -the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution -  the founding fathers recognized that the Bible gave the state deadly authority and that proper use of it  was essential to stable and good government.  Evil people exist and often, in order to protect and defend the innocent, deadly force must be used. The first two clauses are often missed in this –
 
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"
 
Who is this well regulated Militia?  They are the citizen-soldier, the minuteman.  The person who is subject to the laws of the land and desires and exerts the protection of the constitutional order.  A militia, by definition, is not the army.  A militia consists of the citizenry which can be raised into an army in times of need, but which in its daily life is other-than the army.  Notice that the phrase does not say "police".  Police do not exist primarily to secure the authority of the state.  They exist to fight crime.  This amendment is superbly written and it embodies an important idea.
 
The idea is that the individual, rightly governed from within by the Gospel of God, can and does become a defender of the Judeo-Christian constitutional order.  He becomes a defender of freedom, of the independence of the nation, when he is deputized according to law, whatever that governing law may be, and when he then acts not for himself but for the security of all.  Connecticut echoes this in the state bill of rights.
 
"Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state"
 
The citizen to defend the state?  Remarkable.  And there are more echoes of the same:
 
"The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence" --Massachusetts.
 
The lists go on and on, but the principle is clear.  The right to keep and bear arms is not just for hunting.  It is not just for self-defense.  It is so that the state will be secured from acts of terror and insurrection.
 
Secularists are terrified of individuals acting as evil madmen.  They think that giving a gun to anyone turns everyone into an evil madman.  I think, possibly, it is because they believe themselves to be evil madmen?  But note it's exactly the opposite which is true.  Evil madmen behave politely when everyone is armed because they know that 90% of us are not madmen.  You may have profound disagreements with your colleague across the hall, but when a nut case walks in with a machine gun, you are going to be united in stopping the nutcase. 
 
Secularists try to argue today that the existence of the US Armed Forces means we no longer need a militia, because we are outstandingly secure.  But the obvious wisdom of the Framers is met in the blunt military threat of terrorism and the utter need for armaments to meet that challenge, diffused through the country.  No one knows where a terrorist may strike, but a trained and armed populace could thwart many terrorist attacks.  At least Virginia could have been safe yesterday.
 
The Christian must realize the authority of the state is given to the lawfully arms-bearing individual via the 2nd amendment.  Everyone in America is considered, as a matter of citizen-duty, to be a potential member of the well-regulated militia.  The well-regulated militia was considered a necessity by the founding fathers, not for maintaining the sovereignty against foreign powers alone, but against insurrections, terrorism, public madness, mass killings, etc.  A state is destroyed if rampant violence continues within it. Police forces cannot possibly address all such situations because they are called only after the acts of violence have already occurred.  What did the legions of squad cars accomplish at Virginia Tech?  They took notes and filled out reports on the first two murders.  Then they brought body bags to the next thirty.  With a heads up, two dead, and a killer on the loose they could do? Nothing.  They are the police – they are not a well regulated militia.  And if ever there were a need for the citizen militia to be a defense against terrorism, yesterday was the day, and Blacksburg was the place.
 
The program's caller suggested police and military be allowed to carry weapons but that Christians shouldn't want individuals to.  He misunderstands both the New Testament and the 2nd Amendment.  The 2nd Amendment extends to the citizens of this country, by law, the authority of the state to act with armaments, provided that people do so in and through a well-regulated framework of duty and behavior that conforms to the defense of the public and sovereign order.  The New Testament extends power to the state to wield the sword against evil doers, to use deadly force against murderers and etc.  The Old Testament and New are in perfect agreement that the protection and the defense of the innocent are the business of righteous individuals and the purpose of the state.  The state is given the stewardship by God to wield the sword, and the state has legal authority to deputize whom it desires.
 
If Virginia Tech Professor Liviu Librescu had carried weapons lawfully under concealed-carry laws and had fire-arms training in how to protect and defend his students, not only would he probably be alive and many students saved, but he could have had something more effective than his body with which to defend innocent people.  That's not his fault – he died a hero protecting his kids from a hail of bullets.  It's the fault of the state and colleges of Virginia who pushed the laws that killed Prof. Librescu.
 
A person who is prepared to use deadly force to defend you inspires respect.  A teacher carrying a gun is also likely to be spoken to with respect and deference.  There are raging and violent places that the conversation just doesn't go – and that is all to the good. For some people, Liviu Librescu would have inspired respect simply because he was a Holocaust survivor.  For other people, evil ones, they need to see the gun.
 
So I appeal to Christians.  You have a responsibility given to you by God to support the defense of the innocent.  Schools are currently duck ponds for raving lunatics.  Jesus, who instituted the power of the state and gave it the authority to wield arms, expects the citizens of this country to protect its children.  He is expecting that legal arms, under the power the law gives, be carried and used to defend innocent life because that is what "the sword" is for.  Rightly used, the vast majority of decent people use it to protect the defenseless from evil whackos.  If the sword is distributed throughout the population – the vast majority of whom want to live a good and decent life – then the evil people are going to be more respectful and tread lightly. If they don't, they'll know that instead of 90% of the population being defenseless duckies, 90% might pull a 9mm from their purse and stop the problem.
 
Finally, Christians will rightly raise the question, "What about turning the other cheek?"  Jesus told his disciples not to resist an evil person but to allow that person to strike them on the other cheek if the first was hit.  Notice carefully: he is speaking to his disciples about what the evil person is doing to them.  He did not say, "If an evil person hits your child with a sword, give them your other child too."  He said that if they are going to attack you, the believer who will go straight to heaven if you die, let them be evil.  He did not give a blanket absolution to cowards for failure to defend others.  And that makes all the difference.  If a Christian is alone on the street, armed with his .45, and he gets attacked by a mugger, I think it is an entirely reasonable theological position to leave one's gun in one's holster and receive the beating out love for Jesus.  But if there are any other people, especially women or children, who might lie in harms way from the criminal, then the individual Christian is no longer just an individual.  He is part of the American well regulated militia, a protector of the public order. Failure to protect the innocent then becomes cowardice.  And cowardice, along with adultery and fornication, is listed in the Scriptures as a sin which is punishable by being damned to hell.
 
The world can only follow where the people of God go; believers are the light of the world. Christians must adopt the courageous moral position, dethrone private emotional-logic from public rule, and accept duty as protectors and defenders of the innocent in an American legal system, which has deputized them to keep and bear arms.
 
The lives of all American children depend on it.