Modern History - 2nd year



Modern History

The supreme moral principle which bears on the knotty questions surrounding the Christian and war is that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. This principle, derived explicitly from our Lord's command, (Matthew 22:39), summarizes the Christian's obligation to his neighbor—an obligation elaborated in the second table of the Ten Commandments (cf. Romans 13:9).

The single commandment from that second table most obviously relevant to the questions at hand is, of course, the sixth: "You shall not kill." But what, exactly, does the sixth commandment prohibit? Does it prohibit all taking of human life? Does its stark and simple form imply that taking another human's life is always and everywhere immoral? Or, rather, does it prohibit only the wrongful taking of human life? Does it starkly and simply imply that all murder is wrong?

An examination of the Hebrew verb in Exodus 20:13 is not immediately conclusive. Though a few translators, and many interpreters, have rendered it "murder," suggesting that the commandment is directed not against all killing, but only against all wrongly motivated killing, the verb itself (r_sah) is elsewhere used in the Old Testament for even unintentional, apparently accidental and unmotivated, killing (Deut. 4:41-3; 19:1-13; Josh. 20:3, etc.). This might lead one to think that if, in the eyes of God, not only murder, but also "involuntary manslaughter" is always wrong, then surely no war stands much of a chance of being pleasing in God's sight.

The only thing we are so far safe in assuming is something we already knew before studying Exodus 20:13, viz., that murder, no matter what Hebrew verb we may be translating, is nowhere countenanced in the Old Testament. To take another human life for the wrong reason is, clearly, always wrong. Both the sixth commandment and the Lord's summary command which includes it ("Love your neighbor as yourself") plainly proscribe at least murder.

The question at the heart of the Christian-and-war issue is, however, whether every killing, including every killing in wartime, is an instance of murder. Does the Old Testament, particularly, regard every killing as wrong killing? As we have already seen above with respect to Numbers 35:30, (many additional passages could be adduced), it does not. Does the Old Testament, then, regard every killing in war as wrong killing? Again, clearly not. The Old Testament documents report that the Israelites were sometimes commanded by God to destroy God's enemies by the sword. The books of Joshua, Judges, and particularly I Samuel abound with examples of such commands. These incidents have troubled the church for centuries. Some early and enduring heresies have sprung from what their founders took to be intolerable implications about the nature of the Old Testament God found in these incidents. Surely, we who confess a Reformed doctrine of biblical inspiration are not ready to scrap or to explain away these troublesome passages about the war-like God of the Old Testament. Still this does not tell just what relevance they have, in the ...