Day: February 19, 2018

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

Christians have a theological view of the world that is given us by the Holy Scriptures. Our epistemology, that is what we believe is true and why,
is predicated upon our conviction that the 66 books known as the ‘Holy
Bible’ is inspired, inerrant, sufficient, and true. In the overarching
worldview through which we see history, current events, and the world at
large, Christians have room to accommodate the notion of evil. In fact,
a primary doctrine of Christian theology for thousands of years has
been the core belief that man is essentially bad. Mankind is a race of
fallen creatures, suffering from the disease of wickedness which we have
inherited from Adam. This negative anthropology is as much the heart of
our religion as the solution to such a problem, who is Jesus. If we
weren’t inherently bad, we wouldn’t need a Savior who is inherently
good, who could reach into time and space and give us new natures that
aren’t depraved.

Paul wrote it best in Romans 3, in which he painted an abysmal picture of the heart of man:

This view of mankind as essentially evil is in stark contrast to the
collective wisdom of our modern age, which holds to John Locke’s tabula
rasa theorem that man is born with a blank slate. Locke’s hypothesis was
a departure from classical Christian thought that man is born evil. It
is peculiar, then, that the American Founding Fathers considered so
heavily the work of Locke when designing our system of governance, which
is contrastingly formed upon the Christian notion that people are
naturally evil.

The Federalist Papers 51 addressed the topic of human depravity in
relation to government head-on, and the famous quotation is most often
attributed to James Madison:

The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It
may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be
necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government
itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were
angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men,
neither external nor internal controls on government would be
necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men
over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the
government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to
control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary
control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the
necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Human nature, according to the Federalists, was inherently wicked.
Because mankind does not consist of angels, it must have government.
Because government is comprised of men, government must be limited,
because even the governors are wicked. Therefore, the Founders saw fit
to install a form of government in which the wickedness of man is
checked and balanced at all levels, both for the governed and for the
governors.

However, 21st Century American society has largely abandoned the
negative Christian anthropology and adopted an indomitably positive
anthropology that believes men – in general – are innately good. So
then, when tragedies happen like what occurred this week at a Parkland,
Florida public school, Christians and secularists have startlingly
different perspectives on the problem and thus, the solution.
Secularists have no theological framework to accommodate for the notion
of evil. Postmodern in philosophy, secularists don’t believe in an
absolute truth, and without absolute truth, there’s no such thing as
immutable morality. With postmodern philosophy, what is “right” and
“wrong” becomes little more than subjective opinion. Likewise,
secularists have no theological framework to accommodate for evil
because they are evolutionist in their biology. If there is no God,
there is no Law Giver, and if there is no Law Giver, there is no law.
And if there is no Law, there is no “evil,” in any real or meaningful
sense. Therefore, both philosophically and biologically, secularists
have to find different reasons for mass murder besides sheer wickedness.
Christians, much more easily, call such behavior “wickedness, sin,
depravity, or evil.”

For secularists, there must be some reason why this gunman murdered
17 innocent people other than that he is evil. Facts that have surfaced
which lead one to believe the shooter was paranormally influenced by
Satan, such as the Daily Mail reporting
he heard the voices of demons or that he cut himself and banged his
head against the wall, are dismissed by secularists as nothing but
mental illness. Testimonies from classmates that he was “dark,” “evil,”
or “demonic” are quickly overlooked as synonyms for “crazy.” And while
the use of prescribed psychotropic drugs is a clear common denominator
among almost all mass shooters – including this one – our secular
society assumes that such prescriptions are the source of the problem
and not a mere symptom of it.

For other secularists, the problem isn’t only mental illness but it
is a crime-investigation system that is dysfunctional. The FBI was
warned that he publicly stated on YouTube that he was going to be a
school shooter, and they didn’t forward the concern on to the local
field office that could investigate further. His Instagram account was a
vocal cry for help. He conducted training exercises with a supposed
White Nationalist group. He bragged about hurting animals. He had taken
ammunition and other contraband to school. He wasn’t even allowed to
school with a backpack because of the obviousness of his threats. He was
abusive to his girlfriend. He was expelled for fighting. He was a
“Peeping Tom,” a stalker, and stopped his mental health treatment. He
has a sibling who has suffered from mental illness. If someone could
compile a list of warning signs, the gunman’s page would set a record
for “should have seen this coming.” In fact, his classmates are on
record as vocally supposing it was him even during the shooting.
For anyone paying attention to the failure of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, they might include “law enforcement incompetency” as
another reason why this tragedy occurred.

For even more secularists, the problem is the easy access to
firearms. Like so many other mass shooters, this gunman chose as his
weapon the most widely-owned rifle in America, the AR-15. It is a black,
scary, and ominous looking rifle. For many, it doesn’t matter that this
rifle has the same functionality as any semi-automatic rifle that is
commonplace in more than forty million homes. It doesn’t matter, to
many, that this carbine has no better functionality to kill than most
hunting rifles. To those secularists, the problem isn’t that the gunman
was evil; it’s that the gun itself was evil. Oddly enough, even a
secular society can see evil within inanimate objects, even though they
aren’t capable of seeing evil within the hearts of men. This is because
for secularists, there really is no “heart” at all in an evolutionary
view of humanity; there is only the brain, and that brain isn’t evil
(because evil requires a good, and good is subjective), but it must be
mentally ill. So then, Parkland Florida students and certain members of
the community are shouting “shame on you” to legislators for not doing more to curb Second Amendment freedoms because to them, it’s the guns that are the problem.

However, for Christians, we recognize that sometimes the problems in
someone’s head are nothing but an extension of the problems in someone’s
heart. We recognize that some people are wicked, and they don’t shoot
up innocent people because they’re driven to by madness, but by sheer
hatred. More often than not, these mass murderers commit their crimes
with cold calculation and forethought in a way that a truly mentally ill
person is incapable. Their minds are functioning at high capacity; it
is their soul that is ill.

Likewise, Christians recognize that if one evil man is a danger, then
a hundred wicked men are even worse. We recognize that a society
without a means to protect itself from a government that is more wicked
than this mass murderer, it will lead to only more carnage but on a much
more massive scale. We recognize that the words of Madison are still
true, that it’s because of the evil of human nature that the Citizenry
must always be prepared to curtail the power of a government that is
comprised of men, who from time to time are capable of extreme
wickedness. We, as Christians, are not blind to world history, in which
an unarmed Citizenry has been murdered far more efficiently and
methodically than this gunman could ever have imagined. This man’s
offense pales in comparison to that of Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler,
Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Pasha, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Yahya Kahn and
those mass murders conducted by countless warlords and despots even
today, in smaller numbers and more easily overlooked because of their
unfortunate impertinence to American life, but far more orderly and
successful than any school shooting in the United States. We believe
that evil on a small scale should not overshadow the possibility of evil
on a large scale, perhaps even conducted by a legally constituted
government.

It is the negative Christian anthropology that allows us to blame
certain actions upon the not-overly-simplistic reality of evil that
makes us unwilling to give up our only earthly defense against it, which
is the use of force. Because we recognize that there will always be
wolves, we refuse to turn ourselves into unarmed sheep. For the
secularist who believes ultimately that the government is the closest
thing to God in the world, they hold out optimistic hope that with
enough laws and government control, tragedies will not occur. In doing
so, they tragically overlook the reality that more times than not, the
government itself can be a far greater evil. We Christians believe that
evil will be in this world until Jesus comes in his fullness, and until
then, we have to be realists and prepare ourselves to confront it.

From a Christian worldview, the ownership of weapons is a necessary
protection against evil. While it is true that Jesus told Peter to put
away His sword because he must be crucified for the sins of the world (Matthew 26:52), he told them that very night to buy a sword in advance of their coming persecution (Luke 22:36). While Jesus’ exhortation that we turn the cheek from insult (Matthew 5:39)
has been taken by pacifists (defined by JD’s dictionary as “those who
let others die for their lives and liberties”) to be the locus classicus
text for passive non-resistance, a robust theology of persecution
reveals that the thrice-holy God has indeed called his people to
self-defense, protection of the innocent through violent means, and
promotion of the general welfare through war. There is no logical reason
to believe that God’s call to arms throughout Scripture has been
abrogated in this current dispensation, for God does not change (Malachi 3:6) and his Word is immutable (Hebrews 6:17).
Furthermore, the call to martyrdom that we see repeated throughout the
New Testament does not imply that our death for the sake of the cross be
a peaceful surrendering of ourselves over to injustice or voluntary
death.

A thorough analysis of God’s divine hand guiding the body-politic of
ancient Israel reveals an understood right of self-defense. We are to
deliver the innocent from those that seek them harm (Proverbs 8:4). While murder is clearly prohibited (Leviticus 24:16-17), the taking of a murderer’s life is not prohibited and neither is it murder (Genesis 9:6). The qualifying distinctions between killing and murder are found in places like Exodus 21, Numbers 35, and Deuteronomy 19.
In the commonwealth laws of Israel, delivered by God, one had the right
to take the life of one breaking into their home in the night (Exodus 22:2).
The general equity of this Old Testament law (to use words from the
London Baptist and Westminister Confession) – that is, what is moral,
universal and perpetual in nature – is that it is morally acceptable to
take the life of one who will harm the innocent.

Even though our enemies are not flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12),
the same is true for the Israelites as they were rebuilding Jerusalem’s
walls, when they were instructed to arm themselves for potential
conflict (Nehemiah 4:17).
The realization of spiritual enemies did not negate the reality that
there might be some people in need of a good killing, and God’s people
were to be prepared to fight back. When Haman’s plans went awry because
of Esther’s obedience, God’s people were instructed to kill those who
sought their lives (Esther 9:2-5). When Abraham’s family was in jeopardy, he raised an army and killed their captors (Genesis 14:14-18) and was later blessed by God for that action.

David’s hands were taught to operate a lethal weapon by God (Psalm 18:24). And while we do not trust in our weapons, but in God (Psalm 44:7),
this presupposes the ownership of weapons. On any given day, I may
carry a number of different lethal weapons, but my trust is in God that
they will fire properly, hit their target, or in God’s kind providence,
I’ll find their use unnecessary.

Although we are, indeed, sheep sent out to wolves, the Good Shepherd
never intended and neither does he ask us to provide a pacifistic buffet
of mutton for any wolf that would seek to devour us.

So then, it is because of these deep-seeded differences in
theological worldviews that we Christians refuse to be disarmed. We
recognize that evil people will always do evil things and that they will
find ways (guns or not) to accomplish such things. So then, recognizing
the reality of evil, we’ve chosen the best course of action to repel
that evil in the temporal realm; chiefly, this means having the right to
keep and bear arms, a right our Constitution says, “Shall not be
infringed.”