Excursus on Non occides

I've been using and enjoying Hauerwas and Willimon's The Truth About God fairly extensively for the study on the Decalogue. It's a good book, with many thought-provoking and insightful points. However, their chapter on the commandment against murder, while intriguing, seems self-contradictory.

Their point regarding 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' is that God simply and without any exceptions prohibits the taking of life. For too long, they argue, Christians have spent all their time on this commandment trying to find justification for self-defense and just war, only to complicate a law God never meant to have complicated. The truly obedient response to the command, then, is that of pacifism.

While this is immediately counter-intuitive in many ways, I tend to think they do have a point. By all means, the overriding concern should be for life. And if you spend all your time studying the command trying to figure out how to justify your closet full of assault rifles, then you probably have missed the point.

But this desire for simplification ironically complicates things. The ultimate point of the commandment, Hauerwas and Willimon maintain (and I agree), is that we should do all we can to protect and encourage life. What, then, is the ethical behavior to take when life is in danger of being destroyed? If I see person A about to take the life of person B and I am in a position to prevent the taking of person B's life, but do nothing, am I not in a small way complicit in the loss of person B's life? If, by my actions, I allow the destruction of life, am I not ultimately transgressing the commandment?

I suppose one could respond by saying that while doing nothing to protect person B's life may be bad, actively taking the life of person A is still far worse. Better, one could say, to do nothing and potentially allow the taking of life than to consciously choose to take life. But, if the difference between the two is a matter of degree then at what point does the passive become worse than the active? Is actively taking the life of one (murderous) person still worse than passively permitting the loss of 5 (innocent) persons? What about 20? 50? 100? 1 million?

A desire to uphold life, no matter what, is commendable. Pacifism fails, I think, because it ultimately becomes a commitment to the principle of upholding life, rather than a commitment to actually upholding life. It becomes a blind obedience to a derived abstract principle, rather than a desire to uphold the lives of the people in situations one might find oneself in, however complicated those ethical choices might be. It might be that proper obedience to the commandment in some situations dictates defense by violent means.

January 20, 2005 12:01 AM
2 Comments

In Judaism there is at least a traditional injunction that if one seeks to kill you, you should kill him first.
But how do they square the absolute prohibition on killing with the fact that the Torah prescribes the death penalty for certain sins? (Not all which are murder.)

Pondered by David Gerstman at January 20, 2005 05:10 AM

What David refers to, if I may add, is called a "rodef" (lit. chaser); the case presented in the Talmud is exactly as you have described: "If I see person A about to take the life of person B and I am in a position to prevent the taking of person B's life..." the Talmud rules that one is obligated to kill B to save A.

I would also say that the type of questions you are contemplating are not the purview of exegesis alone, but should be considered within a legal framework.

Pondered by Greg at January 20, 2005 10:42 AM