When Love Demands Violence

by Stuart DiNenno

There are times when refraining from violence is not an act of love, but the abandonment of the innocent. If force alone can stop an assailant, the man who refuses to use it cannot claim to have clean hands while allowing harm he had the power to prevent. Christian meekness forbids vengeance, but it does not excuse cowardice or indifference; when violence is necessary to preserve innocent life, love itself demands it.

This distinction has nearly disappeared from modern Christianity. Liberalism has so weakened Christian thought—even among most of those who call themselves conservatives—that many now regard every deliberate use of physical force as contrary to Christian morality. Because the Old Testament Scriptures repeatedly present the use of force in defense of the innocent as righteous, they can maintain this judgment only by treating its moral teaching as though it had been set aside under a later dispensation in which such force is forbidden.

Of course, this does not mean that every Old Testament command binds Christians in precisely the same manner. The ceremonial ordinances foreshadowed Christ and passed away in their fulfillment; Israel’s judicial laws likewise ceased to bind as the civil code of that nation, though their “general equity” remains. The moral law, however, was neither abolished nor weakened by Christ, for it rests upon the unchanging character of God and continues, as summarized in the Ten Commandments, to define man’s duty to God and his neighbor.

Nor have the histories of the Old Testament lost their authority. The New Testament declares that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning” (Romans 15:4), and Paul says that the events recorded in Israel’s history “were our examples” and “are written for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:6, 11). Hebrews 11 presents the mighty deeds of the Old Testament saints as works of faith, while James and Peter point Christians to the saints of old as examples of godliness (James 5:10–11; 1 Peter 3:5–6).

The change from the Old Testament administration to the New did not turn conduct once praised as righteous into sin. What belonged to Israel’s temporary constitution must be distinguished from the moral principles that endure, and necessary defense plainly belongs to the latter: the Old Testament repeatedly honors men who used force to defend themselves and others, while the New Testament nowhere condemns them for it.

Abraham supplies the first unmistakable example, centuries before Moses. When Lot was carried away captive, Abraham did not wait helplessly for some public authority to act; he armed the trained men of his own house, pursued the captors, and brought back Lot with the other captives and their possessions (Genesis 14:14–16). Melchizedek then blessed Abraham and praised God for delivering his enemies into his hand (Genesis 14:19–20). This was no act of private vengeance, but armed intervention by the head of a household to rescue his kinsman.

Moses followed the same course when he saw an Egyptian beating one of the Hebrews. He struck down the Egyptian and delivered the oppressed man (Exodus 2:11–12); Stephen later explained that Moses “supposed his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them” (Acts 7:23–25). The Israelites did not yet recognize him as their deliverer, but his first act on their behalf was to intervene by force when he saw one of his brethren suffering wrong.

Centuries later, Nehemiah did not answer the threat against Jerusalem with pious wishes. He commanded the men of Judah to fight for their brethren, sons, daughters, wives, and houses (Nehemiah 4:14); the people prayed and set a watch, armed men guarded the weakest places in the wall, and the laborers kept their weapons at hand while they worked (Nehemiah 4:9, 13, 16–20). Their trust in God did not excuse neglect of the means He had provided, for the defense of their households demanded preparation as well as courage.

Such deeds cannot be dismissed as regrettable features of a cruder age, for the New Testament itself places fighting men among the heroes of faith. Paul names Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and David, declaring that through faith they “subdued kingdoms,” “waxed valiant in fight,” and “turned to flight the armies of the aliens” (Hebrews 11:32–34). At Keilah, David sought the Lord, led his men against Philistines who were robbing the threshing floors, and “saved the inhabitants of Keilah” (1 Samuel 23:1–5). He later praised God for teaching his hands to war and strengthening him against his enemies, and thanked Him for deliverance from violent men and from the hand of foreigners (Psalm 18:34, 39, 47–48; 144:1, 7, 11).

Yet the law of Moses draws a sharp boundary around this right. A householder who killed a thief breaking into his house at night incurred no bloodguilt, but if he killed the thief after sunrise, he was guilty of bloodshed (Exodus 22:2–3). The man in view was not a magistrate carrying out a sentence; he was a private householder facing an intruder, and in the darkness he might have no means of knowing whether the intruder threatened property alone or the lives of those within. He could meet the danger with the force required to stop it, but he could not kill when the circumstances did not require it. The same principle applies whenever an attack is underway and the civil authorities cannot or will not intervene in time: a private person may use the force necessary to stop it. Though this statute no longer binds as part of Israel’s civil code, the justice expressed in it has not expired.

Scripture does not leave the defense of others as a matter of personal preference. When Haman’s decree exposed the Jews throughout the Persian Empire to destruction, they gathered together “to stand for their life” and struck those who sought to destroy them (Esther 8:11; 9:2, 5, 16). The inspired history records their armed resistance as deliverance, not unlawful vengeance, while Proverbs 24:11 commands the rescue of those being drawn unto death. The man who has power to intervene is not praised for standing by while the innocent are destroyed.

Christian love does not weaken this duty; it deepens it. Because Christ laid down His life for us, John writes, “we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16). Love is more than a kindly disposition toward a neighbor in danger; it may require a Christian to place his own body between the victim and the blow.

A man may choose to bear an injury rather than resist it, but he has no right to make that choice for another person entrusted to his care. A husband and father owes protection to his household, and the same burden rests, according to their several offices, upon those charged with a congregation or any other body of people. Necessary defense is therefore not merely a right exercised for one’s own benefit, and hope that the blow will never fall is no answer for ignoring a known danger.

Christ Himself told His disciples, as they prepared to enter a hostile world, “he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one” (Luke 22:36). Whatever else His words may mean, they make it impossible to say that possessing a weapon was itself forbidden. When Peter later drew his sword against those arresting Christ, the Lord rebuked him because His death was appointed and His kingdom was not to be advanced by force (Matthew 26:51–54; John 18:10–11, 36). Christ condemned Peter’s use of the sword on that occasion; He did not condemn every use of a sword in necessary defense.

Nor does Scripture abolish the public use of force. When soldiers asked John the Baptist what repentance required, he condemned their abuses without commanding them to desert their calling (Luke 3:14). Paul declares that the civil ruler “beareth not the sword in vain,” but serves as “the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13:4).

The magistrate, however, bears an authority that does not belong to a private man. A private man may stop an attack, but once the danger has passed he may not seize the office of judge and punish the offender; punishment belongs to the civil authority after guilt has been established. That same authority must defend the people committed to its charge against invasion and public violence, for a nation no less than a household has the right to protect its own.

The sword does not become righteous merely because it is wielded by the civil government. War must be undertaken by lawful authority upon a just and necessary occasion, and its conduct remains answerable to the moral law from beginning to end. No appeal to military necessity can sanctify cruelty or excuse the deliberate killing of those who present no threat.

Christ’s command to “resist not evil” and to turn the other cheek is often made to bear a meaning it cannot sustain (Matthew 5:39). He forbids personal retaliation; He does not command a man to offer his neighbor’s throat to the assailant. Paul preserves the same distinction when he forbids Christians to avenge themselves and, only a few verses later, identifies the magistrate as God’s avenger against the evildoer (Romans 12:19; 13:4). Defense stops threatened harm, whereas vengeance punishes after the threat has passed; a private man may undertake the former, but the latter belongs to the civil authority.

A Christian may accept persecution rather than deny Christ, and he may yield a right of his own for the sake of peace. Martyrdom, however, is the voluntary surrender of his own life; it gives him no warrant to surrender another person to an assailant. If he has both the power and the duty to intervene, standing aside is not self-sacrifice.

The force used in defense must be governed by the threat. A defender must have sound reason to believe that the danger is real and must take care not to strike the innocent; once the assailant has been restrained or has withdrawn, his right to continue using force ends. Defense seeks to preserve life, not to vent anger.

Property presents a harder case, for the eighth commandment requires its protection while Exodus 22:2–3 shows that a threat to property may also become a threat to life. A man may not hunt down and kill a thief merely to recover goods after the danger has passed, but if the thief threatens his life during pursuit or recovery, he may use the force necessary to defend himself. The taking of life is then justified by the threat to life, not by the loss of property.

The Reformers spoke of necessary defense without the embarrassment common among their modern descendants. Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) taught that the fifth commandment includes a man’s natural duty to defend his family, neighbors, and countrymen by force when necessity requires it. Appealing to 1 John 3:16, he insisted that men must be willing to hazard their lives for those committed to their care; he called the use of Christianity as an excuse for neglect “flatly unnatural” and dismissed men unwilling to risk even a limb for their wives and children as “dainty fools and effeminate hearts” (The Decades, Second Decade, Sermon 5).

The great reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) laid the same obligation upon every man who had power to help. The commandment against killing condemns not only the man who wounds his neighbor, he taught, but also the man who could “prevent, resist evil, defend and save” him from bodily harm and refuses to do so. In his exposition of the seventh commandment, Luther carried that obligation into the protection of his neighbor’s property (Large Catechism, Fifth and Seventh Commandments).

The confessions produced during the Reformation era did not soften this teaching. The Westminster Confession of Faith, produced by Protestants in seventeenth-century England, teaches that Israel’s judicial laws continue to bind according to their “general equity” (19.4), and it declares that Christians serving as civil rulers—whom it calls magistrates—may lawfully wage war upon “just and necessary occasion” (23.2).

The Westminster Larger Catechism leaves still less room for evasion. Christians must preserve their own lives and the lives of others by “just defense thereof against violence” and by “protecting and defending the innocent” (Question 135); necessary defense is among the circumstances in which life may lawfully be taken (Question 136), and the property of others must be preserved, along with one’s own, “by all just and lawful means” (Question 141). Those who bear authority within a family are also forbidden to expose or abandon the persons under their care to “wrong, temptation, and danger” (Questions 124, 129–130).

Necessary defense is not a relic of an inferior Old Testament morality, but a duty imposed by love itself. Christian meekness may lead a man to surrender his own safety, but it gives him no right to surrender those whom God has placed under his care; when an innocent person is threatened, he may be required to risk himself and meet violence with the force necessary to stop it. To stand aside when he has the power to defend the helpless is not forbearance, but cowardice masquerading as meekness and a failure to love his neighbor.