Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

Thou Shalt Not Kill: God’s Lordship Over Life

A.The Reach of the Commandment: Three Burning Issues

The Sixth Commandment concerns nothing less than life or death. Although we speak of “a fate worse than death,” this Commandment addresses living or dying itself, a theme even more “final” than honoring parents, adultery, and the subjects of the other Commandments of the Second Table of the Decalogue. Hence, this Commandment confronts us Christians with fundamental and wide-reaching issues.1 In this first section we simply name, without attempting to resolve, three moral debates today. Each of these “burning issues” directly involves humans killing other humans. Of course, we will also soon confront the issue whether this Sixth Commandment prohibits all killing or only murder, which by definition, is unjustified taking of a human life.

We Christians cannot deal simplistically with this Commandment. Overly simple would be just to say: the Commandment prohibits murder. Capital punishment, killing in a justified war, self-defense are not murder but are tragic but justified taking of human life. So the Sixth Commandment presents no moral problem to Christians today. How nice, if we could deal with our moral dilemmas by a simple distinction between murder and justified killing.

This way of interpreting the Commandment “do not kill” may satisfy some Christians today. But it certainly does not satisfy many Christians and many non-Christians. For example, the European Union allows no country to join its membership if they still practice capital punishment. A government member of one political party in Germany declared that in dealing with Iran’s threat of producing a nuclear bomb, Germany must explicitly remove military action against Iran from its range of policy options. In Europe, the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive military attack on other nations is widely perceived as deeply immoral, as pouring oil on the fire of international terrorism, indeed as morally outrageous, violating even the century-old tradition of justifiable war. In short, the secular, humanistic moral ethos that pervades Western Europe today rejects killing of any kind, even forms of killing that Christians traditionally accepted as justified.2 Further, secular Europeans look aghast at the current religious scene, dominated by Fundamentalist Christians, Hindus, Jewish, Moslem and even Buddhists. They link terrorist violence with organized religion, not only in Islamic Fundamentalism but also in Evangelical Christianity and in Zionist Jewish circles. Many ask whether organized religion, especially monotheistic religions, i.e., those worshipping one God, such as Islam, Judaism and Christianity, are inherently prone to violence, because of their monotheism. Does believing in One, True God justifies believers to kill unbelievers? In the Crusades and in the Inquisition, Christians answered, ‘yes.’ And many modern people have walked away from the churches for this reason. In the light of this, we contemporary Christians, in our witness and mission to our contemporary world, must avoid simplistic answers to the meaning of the Sixth Commandment.

In the next three subsections we identify three current “burning issues” which directly involve killing. Our aim is not to resolve these issues but to sensitize ourselves to how people today relate the substance of the Sixth Commandment

Capital Punishment

One question has accompanied every generation that has known the Sixth Commandment. What does this Commandment actually prohibit?

One viewpoint is that this Commandment prohibits one person, either as individual or the corporate person of the State, from intentionally taking another human life. For people holding this viewpoint, any act of killing another person 3 is wrong, for whatever reason.

The immediate implications of this absolute prohibition of taking another human life are, as well known: strict or sometimes called, “vocational” Pacifism. Vocational Pacifists reject any form of lethal force, i.e., the application of force that could kill another person. Historically, vocational Pacifists have rejected capital punishment, killing another in self-defense, and participation in warfare. This moral position was maintained by some groups of the “Left Wing of the Reformation,” i.e., groups in the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation, such as Mennonites. Luther and Calvin did not share this moral position. However, some members of Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and Roman Catholicism have supported religious Pacifism, not just so-called “Left Wing” Protestants.

The contrasting moral position is that the Sixth Commandment prohibits unjustified taking of human life; i.e. prohibits murder. In contrast to murder, the unjust taking of human life, this view holds that killing another is justified in specific circumstances. These circumstances include justifiable war, self-defense of oneself and of those dependent on one, e.g., family members, and capital punishment.

Therapeutic Abortion

A second contemporary burning issue related to the Sixth Commandment is whether so-called elective abortion4 violates the Commandment not to kill. In 1973, The Supreme Court, by majority decision, stated that the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution, providing for protection of privacy, implies that a woman’s decision whether or not to abort her fetus falls within the circle of her right to privacy and, in principle, neither the Federal nor State government may prevent her from exercising that right.5

An argument which defenders of elective abortion some time give for the morality of ending of a pregnancy is that an elective abortion can be a kind of self-defense by the pregnant woman. Although the fetus is not attacking the mother, the mother perceives the condition of motherhood, or perhaps of being pregnant, as such a threat to well being that she is morally justified in taking steps to protect herself. Of course, the usual moral defense for elective abortion today is that the fetus is not a person (because “person” means a self-conscious, agent of his/her own actions), and the Constitution, and the western moral tradition, protects only persons not every living being. 6

The most extreme “Pro-Life” proponents, on the other hand, condemn abortion for any reason, even if continuing the pregnancy would inevitably risk or kill the mother. Most “Pro Life” proponents, however, take a less extreme position. Their stand is that when the pregnancy directly endangers the physical life of the mother or when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, abortion, though tragic, is morally justified. In practice, today, abortion can be legally performed in the US at any time during the pregnancy and for any reason.

Mercy Killing

A third burning issue is Euthanasia or Mercy Killing. A useful way to discuss this whole area is in terms of preventing suffering. Is it morally right to kill another person or to kill oneself to prevent suffering? A growing moral consensus favors what is already legal in Holland and Belgium : physician-assisted , voluntary suicide. Some more radical advocates of the rightness of killing to avoid suffering would extend killing to persons who are not longer or not yet able to freely will their own deaths, e.g., hopelessly senile persons, persons in a permanently vegetative state or pre -born or newly born infants with lethal and painful genetic defects.

Most hold that the intentional ending of a patient’s life, without his or her foreknowledge or permission, is an act of unjustified killing. However, many today believe that if a competent patient repeatedly expresses his or her will to die, if this intention was consistently stated in a health care directive, such as a Living Will, it is morally justifiable to give that patient a lethal injection in the name of mercy, i.e., to avoid suffering which the patient finds “intolerable.” 7

Anyone reading the daily newspaper discussions of “mercy killing,” is aware however, that many reject the practice of physician-assisted suicide or other kinds of killing on behalf of persons in order to prevent their suffering. Some object, on various grounds, to physicians being legally required to perform this mercy killing. Another objection is that killing competent patients in the name of mercy easily slips into killing non-competent patients. Others argue that the logic of the principle of “avoiding intolerable suffering” easily or inevitably includes grounds, e.g., financial burden, which the State might give to allow or even require certain persons to be killed. This occurred in Nazi Germany.

Hovering over and pervading these three contemporary “burning issues” is the prohibition against killing stated in the Sixth Commandment. Without exaggeration one can say that much of the “cultural wars” we experience today between “conservatives” and “liberals” involve these issues and, therefore, involve the Sixth Commandment. If nothing else, identifying these current issues shows how central to human individual and social life these Commandments of the Second Table of the Law are and how quickly this Commandment confronts us with hard moral issues.

B. Three Concepts of Justice

Killing another person, for instance in self defense, is an act of one person against another, or, with capital punishment or in killing in war, is act of a corporate body, the State, against individuals. Thus, killing, whether justified or not, involves two fundamental kinds of relationships: one individual in relation to another individual or the community (the State) in relation to an individual or the individual in relation to the community. The moral principle that “governs” these basic human relationships is justice. Therefore, the Sixth Commandment directly connects with justice—its meaning, its forms and its applications. We see the connection between justice and killing immediately in the question whether the Sixth Commandment prohibits any killing or only murder, i.e., by definition, unjust killing. As an act by the whole community against one of its parts, e.g., capital punishment, or as an act of one member of society against another, e.g., self-defense, killing involves the distinction between justice and injustice. Therefore, our wrestling with the Sixth Commandment must engage the theme of justice. The ethical traditions within Christianity and within moral philosophy generally have distinguished three aspects or kinds of justice: distributive justice, commutative justice, and restitutive or retributive justice. As background for discussing the Sixth Commandment in the Bible, we will briefly define these three kinds of justice.

a. Distributive Justice

Distributive justices (Thomas Aquinas : iustitia distributiva) is the norm by which each member of the society receives from the community, as a whole, what is due him or her. In a family, for example, distributive justice obligates the parents to love each of their children equally. In a society distributive justice would require the State to grant each member of the society “equal protection before the law.” The Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the US Constitution, defining “Right to Due Process of Law” and “Rights of Trial by Jury, Counsel” embody the principle of distributive justice.

The assumption behind distributive justice is that after taking account of individual circumstances and claims, each person must be treated equally. In the famous Supreme Court decision that declared “separate but equal” schools in the US unconstitutional, the basic principle applied was the norm of distributive justice. In the United States each child has the constitutional right to a free, public education. The Court found that “separate but equal” schools for Blacks and Whites were separate but not equal; that Blacks were receiving an inferior education in the segregated schools they were allowed to attend, and that being separated physically from the majority of their fellow Americans was in itself unjust.

The relevance of Distributive justice, as a moral and legal norm, to the Sixth Commandment is justice always involves some idea of equality, the equal treatment of people. Killing, whether as an act of the state, or as an act of one person against another, must meet this principle of equality, if is to be considered moral.

b. Commutative Justice

Commutative justice deals with relations between and among individual members of a society or a group. Commutative justice obligates each individual to treat other person in the society, group or community “equally, ” or “fairly.” “Equality” and “fairness” is defined as granting another what is “due” that person. Thus, a bank or real estate agent who denies a person a loan or refuses to show a person a piece of property for sale because of that person’s race or religion violates the principle of commutative justice. A hotel owner who refuses to give a room to a person only on the grounds of that person’s ethnicity or race or color also violates the principle of commutative justice, the norm of equal or fair treatment. Commutative justice also concerns “corporate individuals”, such a business or corporation, as well as individual persons. For example, a state or national law against cartels8 protects smaller companies from unfair competition that arises when a group of companies make secret agreements that endanger the competitive ability or even existence of companies not part of the cartel.

c. Retributive/Restitutive Justice

A third kind of justice, retributive justice, is directly relevant to the Sixth Commandment. States that still carry out capital punishment may give several reasons why capital punishment is morally right. One is that lethal punishment removes from the society permanently a person who has proven by his/her actions to be a danger to other members of the society. A second reason given is that the threat of being killed by the State deters people from capital crimes.9 But a third reason is that punishing a person who has injured another human being is inherently just. If a person hurts another person, they should pay a price. If they murder another person, the fair price is their own life. The State should institutionalize a set of sanctions that require and allow a wrongdoer to “pay their debt to society, ” and that debt may be forfeiting their life.

Some argue that the only measures the state should take against convicted criminals are ones that protect society and provide for and promote the rehabilitation of the criminal. For this view, protection and rehabilitation are the only reasons for imprisonment. These persons declare punishment to be immoral, even a “primitive” act. The notion of punishment is morally wrong, these people hold, and capital punishment is always unjust and immoral. The state has no right to kill one of its own members; capital punishment violates the principle of distributive justice. The state owes its members support of life, not destruction of life.

Others hold that the notion of retributive justice is meaningful and important. If a person has injured another person, restitution should be made and the perpetrator should suffer some punishment for their wrongdoing. If a person steal from another and is caught, the state rightly requires the criminal to return what he or she stole. If a person injures another by willful negligence, the state rightly requires not only the perpetrator to pay medical costs but to pay a penalty for “pain and suffering.” These negative sanctions are not simply to educate the wrong doer or to deter people from wrongdoing. They are measures of retributive justice, a means by which the wrongdoing pays a debt he or she owes to his or her victim and to society.

Defenders of capital punishment also appeal to the principle of retributive justice. A capital crime is one in which one individual unjustly destroys the physical life of another person. One interpretation of retributive justice is that the debt such a criminal owes is the forfeiture of his or her own life. The principle of equality here is embodied in the equation between the destroyed live of the victim and the death of the murderer.

The relevance of retributive justice to the Sixth Commandment is obvious. If retributive justice is an ethically right principle, it would be a ground for arguing for capital punishment for capital crimes. Citing retributive justice may not be a sufficient argument; it may be outweighed by other and contrary arguments. But it would be a valid moral argument. And if capital punishment is morally acceptable, then it might not violate the Sixth Commandment. The fact that societies in which the majority of citizens are Christens have, for centuries, legalized capital punishment demonstrates that capital punishment along with killing another in defense or in justified war has been thought by many to not violate the Sixth Commandment.

C. The Sixth Commandment in the First Covenant

Anyone who reads the Old Testament with any attention will be immediately struck by a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, the Sixth Commandment forbids killing. “Thou shall not kill.” On the other hand through the pages of the Old Testament, we read of God’s laws requiring of the killing of Israelites who have violated this or that divine commandment, including ceremonial laws. Moreover, the Old Testament relates instances where God is described as the one who punishes a wrong doer with physical death.10 And, God authorizes the Covenant People, the Israelites to make war against the nations living in the Promised Land and indeed to wipe out the whole population of these nations, men, women and children. Is the Old Testament witness to God’s will hopelessly contradictory? How can we begin to make sense of this contradiction?

a. All Life Belongs to God

We begin to make sense of this apparent contradiction in the Old Testament by recalling that God is the creator of all human life and therefore has absolute rights over each human life.

The Creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis come from differenent sources and different times in Israel’s history. But one idea the two creation accounts have in common is that they concern human life in general, every human life. When these creation accounts speak of God creating man and woman, the meaning is humanity in general, not just the human life of Israelites. These creation sagas describe God as the creator of human life generally, just as God’s covenant with Noah concerns the whole creation, the whole world, not just the land of Palestine or the people of Israel.

Implicit in the idea of God as universal creator, the one and only creator of all living things, is that God enjoys the absolute rights over every human life. God is the creator of all life; therefore, God is lord over all life. This principle, the Lordship of God, underlies all the Commandments. Indeed, the first four Commandments: To worship God alone; to make no graven images; to not take the Lord’s name in vain and to keep holy the Sabbath are all ways Israel acknowledges God as Lord, the Lordship of God. However, each of the Commandments of the Second Table also must be interpreted from the standpoint of God’s Lordship.11 We must remember that each Commandment and the Decalogue as a whole is a Word from Yahweh, an expression of God’s will, and thus an expression of God’s Lordship.

b. Clarifying the Apparent Contradiction in Scripture

Keeping out eye on this principle of God’s absolute Lordship over all human life sheds light on the apparent contradiction we named at the beginning of this section. The apparent contradiction is that in the Sixth Commandment, God prohibits killing. Yet, throughout the Old Testament, God orders the Israelites to practice capital punishment, to kill the inhabitants of the Promised Land into which Yahweh is leading them, and God directly kills Israelites who violate His Commandments. Starting from the principle of God’s absolute lordship over all human life helps us makes sense of this apparent contradiction.

God’s Lordship over Israel includes God’s election of Israel as God’s covenant partner. From this special role in God’s plan for creation, it follows that no Israelite may destroy the life of another Israelite except at the command of God. Indeed, the life of every Israelite stands directly under the lordship of God. The life of every Israelite belongs to God, not to any human being. To kill a member of the Covenant People is to assault God’s rights, God’s honor and God’s promises and purposes for His Covenant People. Therefore, the meaning of the Sixth Commandment is that no Israelite may murder another Israelite, i.e. kill a fellow Israelite nor may kill any another person except according to God’s sovereign command. 12

God does command Israelites to kill fellow Israelites for certain causes, such as parents offering their children as sacrifices to Moloch, a pagan God. That is a “capital crime,” according to God’s will, and God commands the Israelites to kill a fellow Israelite who commits this offense against God’s will. This also is logical, given the absolute priority and sacredness of God’s Commandments and Ordinances.

That God has absolute claim over all human life, including the life of every Israelite, also explains, at least at logical level, can demand that the Israelites destroy the populations of the peoples inhabiting the Promised Land. The logic resides in the assumption that God’s will is sovereign; that God wills to give Israel the Promised Land; and that the destructing of the existing population is required for this to happen.

c. Admitting the History of Christian Violence

The reader will, of course, note that I am repeatedly saying that the principle of God’s absolutely sovereign will makes all this killing logically plausible. Given the premise that what God wills is the highest norm, these kinds of killings and prohibitions against killing are logically coherent. Without a doubt, these accounts of God commanding the killing of the peoples in the Promised Land, of God giving commands that Israelites be killed for committing certain ceremonial and moral transgressions, and of God directly causing the death of Israelites, offend us very deeply at the moral level. Throughout modern times, people’s moral conscience have been deeply offended at the violent Yahweh described in the Old Testament. Very early in the church, associated with the name Marcion, theologians rejected the vengeful, violent God of the Old Testament in favor of the forgiving, gracious God and Father of Jesus Christ. Thereby Marcion and his later followers drove a wedge between the Old Testament and the New, a wedge that the Christian community historically has rejected. Christian theology has not wanted and should not want to oppose the First and the Second Covenant, the Old and the New Testament. Rather, Christian theology has more consistently interpreted the Old Testament and the nature of Yahweh in the light of God as revealed by Jesus Christ. This allows Christians to not take certain accounts of God’s actions in the Old Testament as normative for their understanding of God, while at the same time understanding the New Testament and the Church as a positive continuation of God’s people Israel and their witness to God. Still, however, many in and outside the churches, especially now, when the link between religion and violence is present on the front pages of every newspaper, are morally shocked by the stories of the violent God of the First Covenant.

In the pages of the Old Testament, very little evidence exists of moral objection to Yahweh’s violent actions, ordinances and orders to the People of Israel.13 Probably through the Middle Ages both Jews and Christians had such an exalted sense of the holiness of God’s sovereign will, that these violent aspects of the Old Testament were not perceived as morally offensive. With the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth century, and the radical critique of religion that followed, the God of the Old Testament is measured by the norms of a forgiving, worldly human-centered worldview.

Christians cannot honestly relegate violence and killing by God and in the name of God to the religion of Israel or to the “Old Testament.” Through the centuries, Christians, in the Crusades, practiced violence against Moslems livings in the Promised Land. Christian leaders have allowed the State to practice violence in the Inquisition against Jews, heretics and witches, all in the name of God. Christians today, therefore, cannot pretend to have clean hands and point the finger at Jews, Moslems, Hindus or Pagans as being violent while Christians are always peace-loving and peaceful. We Christians must accept the violence of our own history as we address the contemporary world with our witness to and our faith in God the Father of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

D. The Sixth Commandment in Jesus’ Teaching. Two Challenges from the Sermon on the Mount

In previous essays in this series we have spoken of the Commandment as it appears in the New Testament before we studied its meaning in the Old Testament. The reason was that Christians read the Old Testament in the light of the New Testament. Therefore, in previous essays we aimed at letting the New Testament set the framework for understanding the Old Testament.

In this essay we discussed the Sixth Commandment in the Old Testament before we turn now to the New Testament. We have not abandoned our interpretative principle that Christians should try to understand the First Covenant in the light of the Second Covenant, the “New Testament.” In fact, however, Jesus discusses the Sixth Commandment in terms of a contrast to his own teaching. We will see, of course, that Jesus does not reject the Sixth Commandment. On the contrary: Jesus cites the Sixth Commandment approvingly, for instance in his dialogue with the “rich young man.” Also St. Paul (Romans 13:9) and the author of the Epistle to James (2:11) cite the Sixth Commandment approvingly.

Yet in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus contrasts his teaching to “what was said to those of ancient times.” In each case, Jesus contrasts his teaching with one of the Commandments from the Second Table of the Decalogue. Therefore, we thought it right to discuss the Sixth Commandment in the Old Testament first and only now turn to the teaching in the New Testament.

1.

Matthew 5:21 “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool’, you will be liable to the hell of fire.”

i. The first step in interpreting this teaching of Jesus about the Sixth Commandment is to identify its Sitz im Leben, i.e., its basis in Jesus’ teaching as a whole. Biblical scholars agree on one thing: the Kingdom of God was the center of Jesus’ teaching and his own sense of mission and identity. The Kingdom of God, in Jesus’ teaching and in the New Testament as a whole, is life lived under and according to the Rule of God, i.e., the will of God. What is that will of God? Christians look to Jesus, himself, his teaching, his actions, his relations with his disciples and with others, and especially his relation to God, his Abba, Father, to discern the will of God. Christians see the Kingdom of God not so much as a set of rules but as a lived obedience to God’s will, supremely embodied in Jesus of Nazareth.

Keeping this center and heart of Jesus’ teaching in mind, scholars also agree that the Sermon on the Mount, both in Matthew’s and in Luke’s versions, gather into one place some of the key teachings describing how people should live, how they should treat each other, how they should think of themselves, and what they can expect from those outside of the believing community, if they “follow Jesus” and place themselves under the Role of God and in God’s service. This helps explain the radicality of teaching in these collections of Jesus’ teachings and the powerful spiritual impact of these sections of the New Testament on later generations, both inside and outside the church.

The New Testament was written by believing Christians, not by Jesus or by nonbelievers. Therefore, we should expect that the Sermon on the Mount, as a literary unity in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels, should set Jesus’ teachings in the framework of the earliest Christian community. So, for example, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is portrayed as teaching the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples, not to people in general. A second indication that the earliest Christians for themselves gathered the sayings of Jesus that form the Sermon as a literary unit, is how Jesus speaks, in the verses we are studying about the Sixth Commandment, about insulting “a brother or a sister.” Here “a brother or sister” refers to a fellow disciple. Again, verses 5: 23-24, referring to being reconciled with your “brother or sister” before offering your gift at the altar, refers to the fellow believer. Remembering that the verses about the Sixth Commandment are found in the Sermon on the Mount, and that these verses consist of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God and are gathered together by the earliest disciples for the Christian community, sets them in the right context for interpreting their meaning.

ii. With what we have just said in mind, we can interpret Jesus’ teaching about the Sixth Commandment in Matthew 5:21-24. We discover in this section of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount a repeated pattern. “You have heard it said…but I say to you.” This pattern reveals how Jesus is contrasting how people should behave under the Rule of God, which is now coming into force in Jesus’ life and presence, in contrast to how believing Jews lived according to the Commandments and Ordinances of God in the Old Testament, or how these were modified and adapted by later Jewish teachers.

In these verses Jesus says that although “the people of old” were commanded not to murder, life under God’s direct, in-breaking rule, stands under another norm, a norm not just about an act of murder but a norm that relates to inner attitude of animosity or enmity. When people are living according to God’s rule, they will not hate, insult, curse and be angry with other people. Indeed, they will not relate to God at all (they will leave their gift at the altar) but first be reconciled with their estranged neighbor and then return to worship God. Thus, as commentators of the Bible have said, Jesus teaches that when God’s rule comes fully into effect (has fully ‘broken in’) not only should there be no murder but there should be no enmity, hatred, contempt, etc.

Notice that Jesus’ teaching here and in the other passages we will examine, is not saying that his followers are already acting this way, i.e., relating to each other without enmity, contempt or hatred. Were that so, Jesus probably would not have had to teach his disciples on the theme of hatred or contempt. Rather, Jesus is simply stating how humans in God’s Kingdom should, would and will behave when the Kingdom of God is fully present in the world.

iii. We should not ignore objections often raised about Jesus’ teaching on anger. One objection is that some accounts in the New Testament display Jesus as angry. An example is the account of Jesus’ indignation at “his Father’s house” being turned into a “den of thieves” or Jesus’ anger at the religious leaders who criticized him for healing on the Sabbath. Another objection is from the side of psychotherapists and psychiatrists. They usually hold that anger is a deep-seated emotion that inevitably arises in a person and sometimes for good reason, i.e., when they have been unfairly treated. If Jesus’ teaching in these verses has the effect of Christians generating guilt in themselves and in others for feeling angry, psychotherapists think this is unhealthy. They hold that people should not deny or suppress their anger. They should acknowledge their anger and relate to that emotion constructively. One mature way of relating to one’s anger, they say, besides recognizing and acknowledging it, is to seek its cause, either in one’s own immature reaction to an event or a person, or as a legitimate reaction to a real insult to one’s own or another person’s well –being.

For example, to become angry when another abuses one, physically or verbally, or to become angry when another person is unfairly discriminated against, are righteous reactions of anger. Thus, a mature reaction to legitimate anger would be efforts to change the destructive actions of others or a destructive set of relationships. In no case should anger simply be denied or suppressed, therapists say. Therapists do not teach that anger is always legitimate and they teach that some reactions to feelings of anger are themselves destructive or unproductive. However, no one should feel automatically guilty or “un-Christian” for feeling the emotion of anger. Anger can be legitimate and healthy; and, Christian parents should not make their children feel guilty for feeling such anger.

A third objection to Jesus’ teaching here is that everyday life is not like Jesus requires. In real life, people murder other people; people show contempt to other people, curse them and do not seek to be reconciled to their enemies. The objection here is that Jesus’ teaching is idealistic, unrealistic, “other-worldly” in a bad sense, utopian, and for these reasons, useless.

This last objection is easiest to meet. Of course people do not live fully according to the will of God. God’s Rule does not hold sway over human life completely. Jesus does not teach that the Rule of God had fully arrived and that people are living according to the Rule of God. Jesus is teaching the patterns of human behavior and attitudes that correspond to the full presence of the Rule of God and calling his followers to live a pattern of life that often contrasts with and evokes the opposition of the surrounding society. .

The objection that Jesus showed anger also finds a plausible response. If we grant that Jesus is denouncing an unrighteous action or pattern of behavior , then we can say that Jesus’ anger was a righteous indignation, an anger that the Lord felt when God’s honor or will was being grossly misinterpreted or ignored.

The objection from the side of the psychological sciences is more nuanced and substantial. Granting that Jesus condemns in the Sermon an unrighteous anger allows Christian teaching to acknowledge the insights of modern psychotherapy about anger as correct and important. Christians should certainly acknowledge that some anger is unrighteous. For example, when I don’t get what I want, I feel anger. But perhaps what I want is selfish and unjustified or not part of God’s providential plan for human life. But there is a righteous indignation. When people mistreat other people, Christians should feel anger. How they and anyone else reacts to that anger is a second question. Christians can and should agree with psychotherapy that sometimes anger is not only natural but justified; it is not always sinful to feel angry, and suppressing and denying anger can be destructive; it can cause the “steam” of anger to express itself indirectly and destructively.

b. Matthew 5:38 Do not resist one who is evil.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”

This teaching, also gathered into the literary unity of the Sermon on the Mount, also relates to the Sixth Commandment. Jesus contrasts the lex talionis, the law of retributive justice which requires ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and a life for a life’ with human relations marked by nonresistance to evil and positive response to people’s demands on one’s resources. Thus, the pattern of this teaching is the same as that of Jesus’ teaching about murder and anger. The law of retribution marked Yahweh’s Commandments as transmitted to Israel through Moses. Scholars point out that the lex talionis was actually a moderation of an ethic of revenge. The ethic of revenge allowed that in retaliation for a murder, the avenger could wipe out the perpetrator’s whole family. The lex talionis , by contrast, shifts entirely the basis for retribution. If the basis for vengeance is the unlimited damage that hatred against another could wreak, the basis in the lex talionis is the principle of equality, namely, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Jesus, however, teaches that those standing fully in the Rule of God should not resist evil at all, should accept abuse, should give to anyone who asks, should always “walk the extra mile” no matter who demands this or whatever the reason.

In trying to understand Jesus’ teaching and its bearing on the Sixth Commandment, we should remind ourselves that Jesus is describing the norms of those standing fully under the Rule of God in their lives. He is not describing how people ordinarily behave; he is not describing how his disciples presently were behaving. Indeed, the only example that Christians could point to would be Jesus’ own passive acceptance of abuse and violence against himself, the violence that led to his death. The Acts of the Apostles describes Stephen not resisting those who sought to kill him and describe, indeed, his praying for his enemies as Jesus did. If Jesus, himself, did not teach nonresistance of evil, I am inclined to think the earliest Christian community formulated this moral teaching based on Jesus’ own example of nonresistance to evil and his praying that his Father forgive those who killed him. Jesus, himself, acted as one who stands fully in God’s Rule.

Here is also the place to acknowledge with respect and admiration the Christians who have attempted to follow Jesus’ teaching of not resisting evil. These are the pacifists from principle, the vocational pacifists, referring to their choice of this behavior as a calling, a vocation. These are Christians who, in Jesus’ name, allowed themselves to be mistreated to the point of martyrdom for the sake of Christ and God’s Rule. These are the people who have lived sacrificially for others, even for those others whom the rest of the world have considered unreasonable and undeserving of being helped. They loved their enemies as Jesus commanded.

I think the ultimate ground and basis of Jesus’ teaching against resisting evil is clear from Jesus’ teaching associated with his instruction about loving the neighbor. (Matthew5: 43-48) In connection to the command to pray for those who persecute you Jesus states very clearly the reason for acting this way, namely imitation of God. God forgives, God “makes the sun rise on the just and the unjust”; therefore, those who have entered the rule of God should act as God acts, not destroying sinners but loving sinners.

Taking Jesus’ life and ministry as a whole, we can say that God’s way of dealing with sin and evil was not to crush it, eradicate from the world. God’s way, in Jesus’ Passion and Death, was to allow evil to work its wrath on the Son of God, and for Jesus to absorb this evil and take it up into the life of God. Jesus showed that one can remain in right relation to God, loving and honoring God with the whole heart, mind and strength, even when evil is allowed to unleash its fullest destructive force. Jesus overcomes evil not by removing evil from the world but by demonstrating in is own life and death that one can love God in the face of evil. In this respect, Jesus removes all fear from life, if the key to true life is being in right relation to God. 14

The majority of Christians, however, have not followed the radical pacifist application of Jesus’ teaching. While honoring those individual believers who have tried to image in their nonresistance, God’s own treatment of evil persons, the majority of believers have held that resisting evil, even to the degree of lethal force, is morally right in certain circumstances. The problem the majority of Christians face is that the principle of not resisting evil collides with another Christian principle: to love the neighbor as the self. To love the neighbor as oneself means, for the majority of Christian, that one does not stand passively by when a neighbor is being assaulted. The majority of Christians believe that it may be morally responsible not to resist evil when that evil is directed only against oneself. But when the evil is directed against the neighbor, or against those dependent on one for protection, like one’s children, then they think the believer is morally right to resist evil. Jesus himself confronted the Jewish religious authorities when they condemned his healing on the Sabbath. This criticism of the religious authorities was not a physical, violent resistance of evil but it was resisting of something Jesus perceived as evil.

The majority of Christians through history have also distinguished between individual private behavior and public authority. Following teaching in the New Testament, for example Paul’s teaching in the Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 13, Christians held that the state was God’s minister in punishing wrong doers. The state, i.e., the government in power, has the responsibility of protecting its citizens, both within the boundaries of their jurisdiction and from attack from outside those boundaries. If the individual Christian may choose to allow evil to work its destruction on him or her as an individual, most Christians have thought that the State may not allow evil persons or forces to destroy the citizens in its boundaries.

If not resisting evil meant allowing every living thing that threatens human life free rein to work its destructive power, it follows logically that trying to stamp out the Aids virus or the Bird-flu virus is morally wrong. Even if someone argues that Jesus prohibits lethal force against other human beings, and not floods or flowing lava, bacteria or viruses, they then have to explain how the state or even the individual is morally justified in not resisting a persons who could be prevented from murdering other people.

For this reason, most Christians have developed ethical arguments for going to war for justifiable reasons, for self-defense in the name of love for one’s God-given life, for defense of one’s children, as a moral responsibility of parents and for defense of law and order in the prevention of crime. Even the convinced pacifist would be hard put to argue that the Allies in the Second World War should have allowed Hitler’s military machine to exterminate all Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped and anyone else they thought unworthy to live. Pacifists are also hard put to say that a person randonmly shooting people in the street should not be stopped, even if it requires applying lethal force.

Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount radicalizes the Sixth Commandment. In one place, Jesus deepens the meaning of “killing” to include the thoughts, attitudes and words that “kill.” In his teaching about not resisting evil he is teaching that applying force against evil doers contradicts the essence of Christian perfection, manly God’s example in relation to evil. Nevertheless, Christens have held that the State or a parent ought not to imitate God’s nonresistance of evil when this would result in evil persons inflicting suffering and death on innocent people. Another command of Jesus, and of the Old Testament, to love the neighbor, requires in some tragic situations that believers contradict the way God dealt with evil in the life and death of Jesus.

E. Three Voices from the Christian Tradition

As we Christians attempt to relate to the Ten Commandments today, we are not alone. A history of Christian thinking about the Decalogue exists, because every generation of Christians consider themselves under the authority of God’s self-revelation in the First and Second Covenants, i.e., under the Word of God in the Bible. In every generation, thoughtful Christians tried to make sense of the Ten Commandments for themselves and for their own time. Christians today will probably not find everything that past Christian thinkers said about the Ten Commandments useful for them But Christians today would be irresponsible not to review what some of the greatest Christian thinkers have said about the Sixth Commandment.

A. St. Bonaventura (Thirteenth Century)

In this series of essays on the Ten Commandments I have regularly examined St. Bonaventura’ thoughts about each of the Commandments. We recall that St. Bonaventura stood in the tradition of Western, Latin scholastic theology. The theologians of that tradition —the other best-known being Thomas Aquinas—wanted to integrate Christian thinking and the best wisdom from Greek and Roman philosophy. They also had in common a desire to think systematically, i.e., to interconnect Christian beliefs about God with Christian moral teaching. Their theology was marked by an ancient Greek sense of what ‘scientific thinking’ was, namely, to lead ideas and effects back to prior more basic principles and causes. All of these characteristics led them to make distinctions, which to many later people who had less confidence in human rationality, seem too subtle and, indeed, artificial.

We have noted that Bonaventura wrote about the Ten Commandments in response to a request from his fellow Franciscan monks. They asked him to explain the Ten Commandments to them. Therefore, the form of St. Bonaventura’s writing on the Decalogue is that of “Collationes”, what we might call talks or lectures. His discussion of the Commandment against killing is found in his Sixth Collatio.

Those who have read my previous essays in this series may recall that St. Bonaventura understands all of the Ten Commandments under the principle of justice. The first Table of the Commandments presents four Laws that should govern what we owe God—to worship God alone, to not make graven images of God, to not take God’s name in vain and to honor the Sabbath. The Second Table of the Law also expresses the demands of justice, i.e., the kind of behavior we owe to our neighbor. Justice to our neighbor has two forms, Bonaventura tells us. The first and more important is our constructive duty to honor and support our neighbor, and this is summarized in the positive wording of the Commandment to “Honor Father and Mother.” The other kind of justice we owe our neighbor is to avoid hurting him or her. Bonaventura says that these last Commandments pertinent ad innocentiam, i.e., pertain to innocence; i.e., they define what we should not do to our neighbor, so that we don’t make ourselves guilty in relation to him and her. These distinctions within the idea of justice, then, set the framework in which Bonaventura interprets the Commandment against killing for himself and his fellow friars.

Bonaventura’ Wide Interpretation of “Killing.”

When Bonaventura starts spelling out the meaning of the this Commandment we see right off that he thinks “killing” means more than deliberately destroying the physical life of one’s neighbor. The literal act of killing is only an extreme form of a more general “nocere” , to injure. We can “kill” a neighbor not only by “deed” but also by “word” and by “thought.” 15 Bonaventura explains why this expanded meaning of “killing” is correct. When we ask what our neighbor means by his or her “life” we realize they mean not just their physical existence, although this is the underlying substance of other good things in life. By their “life” people also mean living well, their well-being. Therefore, this Commandment must be interpreted to prohibit attacks against the neighbor’s physical life but also to support and protect his or her safety and their good standing in the society. We might see here that St. Bonaventura is preparing his hearers for his interpretation of Commandments against stealing, against false witness and against adultery.

Thus, we certainly can’t charge Bonaventura with failure to make necessary distinctions, and he then goes on to distinguish three kinds of perverse actions against our neighbor. One is physically injuring our neighbor, a second is injuring a person who is joined to our neighbor and for whom the neighbor is responsible; and a third is attacking the life support system of our neighbor.

However, the focus of this particular Commandment is attacking the neighbor’s physical life, killing in the literal sense. And here Bonaventura must deal with a major problem. In fact, in his time, as for centuries since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion, Church teaching has blessed capital punishment and killing in war. Moreover, the Church has exempted priests from being subject to capital punishment. Does the Church and Christians ignore God’s Commandment against killing?

Bonaventura puts such a criticism in the mouth of a group he calls “The Manichaei.” The Manicheans were a religious group active in the early centuries of the church. St. Bonaventura learned about this group from St. Augustine, the great Church Father writing in the fifth century. In any case, Bonaventura names them as raising several criticisms against the Church. One is that the Church, in affirming the State’s right to carry on war and perform capital punishment, contradict this Commandment against killing. Also they criticized the Church for, thereby, flouting two of Jesus’ teachings, “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword” and “do not resist evil.”

St. Bonaventura tries to meet these “Manichean” criticisms by making a distinction. He distinguishes someone who kills ut homo, as a private individual, and one who takes the life of another ut minister legis, as a minister of the law. To kill another as a private individual always involves moral guilt, but different degrees of guilt, depending on the circumstances. If one kills another by accident, he or she incurs the least guilt. If one kills another in self-defense, but could have fled the situation and thus avoided killing, one incurs more moral guilt. If one kills another out of cruelty and vindictiveness, then one is fully guilty of murder. This last form of one individual killing another is what the Commandment really intends to prohibit. This is Bonaventura’s basic response to the charge that the Church approves of killing. No, says Bonaventura; it approves only of killing done for love of the law. It condemns killing as a private person.

Bonaventura also distinguishes two different motivations for taking the life of another. When an officer of the State carries out a legal act of killing, i.e., capital punishment, it is important that he does so with the right intention. The officer acts with the right intention, when he “habet animam iustum” , has a just soul; that is, when he acts not out of vindictiveness or desire of revenge (non libidine vindicate) against the criminal , but out of respect and love of the law, (sed amore iusititae).

What does Bonaventura say in response to the “Manichean” criticism that the Church ignores Jesus’ teaching not to resist evil? He depends on the same distinction he has just made. The key issue here, writes Bonaventura, is motivation. If evil is resisted amore iustitiae, from a love of justice, it is bene licet resistere malo, it is right to resist evil.

What Can Bonaventura Teach Us?

Reviewing St Bonaventura’s treatment of the Sixth Commandment is useful for three reasons. First, his is a representative voice. Bonaventura states what has become the standard Christian teaching, in both the western Roman Catholic Church and in the Protestant Churches. When the legitimate authority of the State does killing in a justifiable war or legalized capital punishment, and when the officer of the State acts with a just motive, i.e., love and respect for the Law, then this taking of human life is just and does not violate the Sixth Commandment. When an individual acts, not as an officer of the State but as a private individual, and when his or her act of killing is motivated by cruelty and vindictiveness, it is murder and prohibited by this Commandment. This is the standard Christian teaching, the “mainline” Christian teaching, except for vocational pacifist Protestant groups (such as the Mennonites, Society of Friends and Amish) and individuals in other Christian traditions who are vocational pacifists.

Second, St. Bonaventura’s teaching about this Commandment is useful because his teaching is not simplistic but nuanced. He tries to take account both of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and of different kinds of circumstances in human life involving killing. Thus, he tries to deal with Jesus’ teaching about not resisting evil and Jesus’ statement that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword. To the first he applies his distinction between justified and unjustified killing and says that the State has a right to resist evil. He identifies differing degrees of guilt when one kills in self-defense, between killing in self-defense that could be avoided by fleeing and self-defense that is unavoidable.

Third, St. Bonaventura’s teaching on the Sixth Commandment is worth studying because Bonaventura sets his teaching on the Second Table of the Decalogue in a larger ethical framework. We saw that this larger ethical framework is justice: the Second Table of the Law, including the Sixth Commandment, states the demands of justice toward the neighbor; the Commandments of the First Table of the Law state the demands of justice (what is owed to) God. Of course, someone could object that justice in the sense of “what one owes to another” is not the right or final framework for understanding God’s relation to humans or ours to God, since forgiveness transcends simple justice. Someone could also object that medieval theology’s attempt to coordinate Greek and Roman theories of justice with biblical revelation leads to false teaching in other ways. This may be so. However, at least Bonaventura has a larger theological/ethical framework for understanding the individual Commandments. This satisfies a criterion of excellence in any theology: that what one teaches is not haphazard and disconnected but coheres in some larger, plausible framework.

B. Martin Luther (Reformer of the Sixteenth Century)

Martin Luther’s teaching about the Sixth Commandment is important for at least two reasons. First, he was the greatest single figure in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. His teaching set a basic pattern for how Christians in the ages after the Reformation into modern times understood the Sixth Commandment. The writing on the Decalogue we focus on in this essay was written in 1520 when Luther had just began to express his basic teaching that the only basically good work that renders humans pleasing to God is faith, a thankful and trusting acceptance of the reconciliation God offers in and through Jesus Christ. Good works, meaning acts of serving the neighbor, will follow naturally and will be properly motivated. We detect this basic teaching in each of Luther’s statements about each of the Commandments.

Second, Luther’s own position about the relation between state authority and the church was important for later Christian history and especially for later Protestant Churches. We will see influence in the next section, when we discuss Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Lutheran teaching about “the two kingdoms.”

In his Sermon on Good Works,16 Luther says that this Commandment is very short but contains a lifetime’s worth of moral application. Its positive meaning, Luther says, is the virtue of “gentleness” (Sanftmuetigkeit). Luther follows closely Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, at which we have already looked. Two kinds of “gentleness” exist. One is the easy kind, directed toward those who are nice to us and don’t want to injure us. The real virtue of gentleness, on the other hand, is what Jesus requires in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus and this Commandment require gentleness against those who wish us evil, our enemies. It requires not just that we not kill our enemies but that we don’t seek revenge against them, that we don’t curse them or try to injure them, even when they rob all that is precious to us. The deepest meaning of the Commandment, thus, is love of one’s enemies.

If this second sort of gentleness is what the Commandment requires, the believer will have more than enough to do to try to meet its demands. Why, then, asks Luther rhetorically, does the church (Luther, of course means the western, Latin church of his time) not concentrate on these moral requirements instead of directing church members to “good works” which Jesus never commanded, such as hearing masses, loafing on church holidays, repeating prayers, adorning clergy in gold regalia , and founding ever more churches. Here, we hear the voice of Luther the reformer.

However, continues Luther, we should not be “gentle” to those who violate God’s honor and disobey his Commandments by injuring God’s creatures, i.e., our fellow human beings. By this, Luther meant the believer should support the State when it punishes evildoers and commit crimes. Thus, Luther lays the foundation for a later Protestant theme, distinguishing between the way the State should act against evil persons and how the individual believer should act toward his or her neighbor who acts evilly against him or her. The State is charged with enforcing God’s moral will, punishing evildoers. That is God’s will for the State. The individual believer, however, should be ready to show gentleness toward those who wrong us as individuals, even to the point of suffering on behalf of our enemies. This distinction between God’s will through the State and God’s will through the individual believer developed into the “Two Kingdom’s Doctrine. In the next section we will see its profound influence.

C. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Twentieth Century)

Who Was Bonhoeffer”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 and was murdered in Flossenberg concentration camp in April, 1945, a few days before the end of the Second World War. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor. He was born into a professional family (his father was a well-known psychiatry professor in Berlin), grew up in cosmopolitan circles, was well -educated, was musically gifted and traveled and lived abroad more than was usual for Germans of that time. He was one of the most promising young theologians of his generation.

As Hitler and the National Socialist Party came to power in the 1930s , and as German troops invaded Poland and France, a division occurred in the German Lutheran Church. The majority of German Lutheran bishops, pastors and lay persons believed that Hitler and National Socialists promised hope to a Germany crippled by the severe penalties imposed by the Versailles Treaty, ending the First World War, and to a Germany impoverished and threatened with social chaos by the Great Depression of the years after 1939. This group became known as “The German Christians.” A smaller group of bishops, pastors and laity rejected Hitler’s teachings in Mien Kampf and the policies of National Socialism. They, with the help especially of Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, established the Confessing Church (die bekennende Kirche) , a network of pastors, congregations and theological study centers, which openly criticized and opposed both Hitler, National Socialism and the so-called “German Christians.”

Bonhoeffer and the Commandment Against Killing

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in March 1943, took part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This attempt failed; Bonhoeffer and others in the plot were arrested and first put in a military prison in Berlin and then sent to concentration camp. There, as US troops advanced toward Berlin in the final weeks of the war, he and others, including other family members, were executed.

That Bonhoeffer was willing to participate in a plot to kill Hitler is what makes him worth studying in this essay on the Sixth Commandment. How could he justify his act given the Sixth Commandment?

Bonhoeffer’s opposition to Hitler and National Socialism began over the Nazi policy against Jews. The National Socialists began by excluding peoples of Jewish ancestry from all public offices. The German Christians began to expel any church member with a Jewish parentage from the Christian church, even if they had been baptized and converted to Christian faith. Then Jewish businesses were subject to vandalism. Later, Nazi policy was to round up all Jews and to imprison them. Finally, the Nazis began the “Final Solution”: the attempt to exterminate all Jews within the lands under their expanding control in Western and Eastern Europe.

Bonhoeffer, whose brother-in-law was a Jew who had converted to Christianity, held that any Jew who was a baptized member of the Christian church was a Christian and that his or her membership in the Church may not be opposed. Indeed, Bonhoeffer taught that expelling baptized Jews from the Church was heretical and separated those advocating this policy from the church itself. Thus, Bonhoeffer’s first position was strictly based on his doctrine of the Church and who belonged to it. Later, as Nazi policy moved toward imprisonment and extermination of all Jews, Bonhoeffer supported all persecuted Jews, not just Jews who had become members of the Christian Church. He managed to obtain a post in the German Intelligence (Abwehr); and from that post obtained forged passports for Jews trying to flee Germany.

Bonhoeffer’s theological standpoint which led him to take part in the March, 1943 plot to assassinate Hitler might best be explained by referring to Bonhoeffer’s idea of “cheap grace.” Cheap grace was allowing oneself to take God’s forgiveness for granted without struggling with basic moral dilemmas that faced people in real life. Discipleship, following Jesus Christ, had its cost. One of Bonhoeffer’s books, some collected writings about ethics, gathered by Eberhard Bethke after Bonhoeffer’s death, was given the title “The Cost of Discipleship.” Bonhoeffer deeply believed that anyone who was in a position to try to stop Hitler’s evil policies should do so. If this meant opposing “duly elected”17 political authority, and even direct killing of another human being, then taking this guilt upon him was part of costly grace, the cost of discipleship. Once, another believer challenged Bonhoeffer with Jesus’ statement “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword”. Bonhoeffer responded that Jesus’ statement was true and that in some situations a Christian must bear the burden of that truth in his or her own life.

Bonhoeffer’s moral struggle about whether to take active part in a plot to kill another human being was intensified by a special feature of Lutheran theology. Luther himself , and especially later Lutheran theology developed what in English is named the “Two Kingdom’s Doctrine” (in German, die Zwei Reiche Lehre). This doctrine holds that God’s one rule over the world has two aspects: God’s rule over those who stand outside the Christian Community and God’s rule over the members of the Church. Over the world outside of the Church, God rules by God’s Law, both God’s specially revealed Law, e.g., the Ten Commandments, and the natural moral law which God makes known in innate in each person’s mind. The state authority is responsible for applying this divine law, in its duties to promote peace and order in society. In the Church, and especially between and among believers as individuals, however, the law of love should rule, i.e., the norms of forgiveness, forbearance, service and gentleness.

This doctrine of “the two kingdoms” was in part a Lutheran attempt to apply chapter 13 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans to social and church life. In that chapter, St. Paul wrote “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed and those who resist will incur judgment.” Paul in this chapter says more, but I have quoted enough to show the reader that this passage could lead to a very high respect for civil authority. In the Lutheran tradition, and in most other Christian traditions as well, civil authority was looked on as serving God, as instituted by God. The Lutheran tradition, exemplified in this doctrine of “the two kingdoms” especially, tended to distinguish sharply the two realms and concluded that the individual believer had no right to try to meddle with, much less violently overthrow, duly elected civil authority.

Another tradition also existed in the church, a tradition derived from Greek and Latin political theory, namely the right to rebel and violently overthrow a tyrant. By definition, a tyrant ruled not for the welfare of the people, no matter how he was chosen to rule. Even Lutherans recognized the doctrine of the right to oppose and even kill a tyrant (Tyrannenmord). For many German Lutherans in the 1930’s, however, whether Hitler was a tyrant was by no means clear. He had not begun his wholesale round up of Jews. He had revived Germany’s economy and found employment for many unemployed German men and women. He had held high moral values of family, hard work, service to the nation—values which Germany traditionally held in high respect.

Bonhoeffer and his allies certainly did conclude that Hitler was a tyrant and that that to eliminate him would be morally right, even if it involved killing another person, which was never an guiltless act. Noteworthy, however, is the following event. After the war, the German city of Bielefeld began renaming some of its streets. The city fathers had no problem honoring another German pastor, Carl Schneider, whom the Nazis had imprisoned and killed. But they refused to rename any street after Bonhoeffer. Why? Because Bonhoeffer had risen up against political authority, and Carl Schneider pastor had not.

What Bonhoeffer Teaches Us

Bonhoeffer’s moral struggle with the Sixth Commandment arose form his specific time and place in history. Bonhoeffer, it is well known, took with deep seriousness his responsibility to live his life as a Christian in Germany.18 Every Christian will confront the demands and interpret the demands of the Sixth Commandment in his or her own time and place. Its meaning and application will depend on a Christian’s society, his or her place in that society, his or her opportunities to act in that society, and so on. As a leading Church theologian and leader, and as one who had important contacts outside of Germany, Bonhoeffer had an intense, existential moral burden regarding the Sixth Commandment.

Second, Bonhoeffer teaches us that applying the Sixth Commandment to his time and place costs moral struggle. In his wrestling with the Sixth Commandment he experienced no cheap grace. He decided to share in the plot to kill another person and he knew that murder was against God’s will. He knowingly brought guilt upon himself. But he thought he did the right thing and, today, most Christians rightly honor his Christian witness and moral courage.

Conclusion

Our purpose in this essay is to open up the meaning of the Sixth Commandment for us, as Christians, today. We admitted right at the beginning that the scope of this Commandment was wide and deep; it concerns nothing less than life and death.

Our first step was to identify three contemporary “burning issues”, capital punishment, therapeutic abortion and euthanasia that directly involve killing and therefore the Sixth Commandment. Besides underlining the contemporary relevance of the Commandment, naming these three issues also showed how complicated applying the Sixth Commandant is today.

We deepened our background for understanding and applying the Commandment by reviewing three aspects of justice: distributive, commutative and retributive justice. Justice concerns giving people what is due them, and every act of killing touches directly the issue of what we owe our fellow human beings.

With this background established, we examined first the Old Testament and then the New Testament teaching. Our goal was to understand the Sixth Commandment in the context of the whole witness of the Bible, especially in the light of Jesus Christ as the fullest revelation of God’s will.

Our final step in this essay was to examine three Christian writers who wrestled with the Sixth Commandment. We chose them from three very different eras: St. Bonaventura from the Middle Ages, Luther from the Reformation and Bonhoeffer from the twentieth century. Our goal was to let their teachings and lives illuminate the meaning of the Commandment for us today.

After these steps, what might we take away with us from this study of the Sixth Commandment? We limit ourselves to stating for us the essential point.

The key to understanding the Sixth Commandment meaning is God’s Lordship over all human life. God, in this Commandment, prohibits killing a fellow human being. The Christian tradition, as well as the Jewish tradition, have always distinguished between murder and justified killing. Both traditions have held that the Sixth Commandment prohibits murder but , under certain conditions, allows killing.

The basis for both views, i.e., prohibition of murder and allowing killing in certain circumstances, is that human life belongs to God. God is the Creator; God alone is Lord of human life. Because no human being, including one’s own self, or one’s children, belongs to one, murder is always wrong, always contrary to God’s will. Killing another human being is never allowable for reasons of another person’s individual anger, desire for revenge, or for any reason based in the individual or even based in the State. To take innocent life is to rob God of what belongs to God. The only basis for allowing killing is when the act of killing corresponds to what God has commanded.

In the Old Testament, God, commanded the killing of Israelites for numerous offenses against God’s stated will. Indeed, God himself actively punishes, by killing, according to Old Testament accounts, Israelites who violate His divine will. And, God permits, indeed commands, that Israelites kills people occupying the Promised Land, which God has willed to give Israel.

We saw that some Christians justify killing for reasons that they consider would correspond to God’s will, e.g., for self-defense, for capital crimes and in a justified war. Other Christians disagree with this view and their clearest representatives are Christians who are vocational Pacifists. Most Christians today, and probably most Jews today, would not accept as morally right many acts of killing that are commanded in the Old Testament law, e.g., killing a woman taken in adultery and the wholesale killing of persons who presently occupy lands God has promised to the Jews. Jews, Christians, and others who share the belief that God is Lord of life will disagree over what killing is in accord with God’s will. Christians will have to live with disagreement over. Thus, Christians will continue to struggle within their own conscience and among themselves and with other morally sensitive persons over such issues as capital punishment, killing in self-defense, warfare and the deliberate ending of human life to end useless suffering on behalf of another person or themselves.

What Christians can agree on is that God is Lord of all life, and especially of human life. No human life is at another person’s disposal. We have no right to destroy what belongs to God, a human life. That life, including our own, does not belong to us. We did not create it; we, ultimately do not sustain it. God’s Lordship over each human life is what makes each human life inviolable, protected against the whim and wishes of every other human being.

From this core principle—that God is the Lord of every human life—it follows that not only is every human being prohibited from willfully destroying another human life but it follows that in honor of God we are to promote, protect and provide for our own lives and that of others. We honor God by caring for what God has created and what God loves. The Commandment prohibits murder. But that prohibition is grounded in God’s sovereignty over human life. We honor God therefore by protecting, promoting and providing for the life over which God is Lord. This is the positive implication of the Sixth Commandment.

David A. Scott, Ph.D.

Murnau, Germany

February, 2006

1 For example, when the “rich” so-called “First Word” sacrifices little to relieve widespread starvation and epidemics that decimate the “Third World ” ; or when industries destroy the environment for future generations ; or when parents smoke near their small children, do they break the Sixth Commandment ? John Calvin, the great Reformation theologian, among others, taught that the meaning of each Commandment consists not merely in what it explicitly prohibits, in this case the act of murder. Calvin held that the Commandments positively require of believers all actions that further the opposite of what is prohibited. If murder is prohibited, therefore, the Sixth Commandment implies Christians should promote and protect human life whenever, wherever and however possible. Are the Christian churches conspicuous among the groups, institutions and organizations of the world for doing this?

2 Christians can point out that many who morally condemn capital punishment in the US, in China and in several other countries, also strongly support elective abortion and assisted suicide. Thus, the consistency and coherence of modern secular, humanist “ethic of life” is very doubtful. Nevertheless, Christians cannot ignore that many morally sensitive and well-educated people find traditional Christian teaching about state-authorized killing, i.e., capital punishment and killing in war, morally wrong. The European Union would not, on moral grounds, accept the US as one of its members.

3 Even more radical is the prohibition of intentionally killing any living being. In Hinduism this is represented by the notion of “Ahimsa”. The strict Hindu, Buddhist and Jain believer, seeking to obey this moral principle, will strain his or her drinking water through a napkin, so as not, inadvertently, to kill a gnat floating on the surface of the water. Of course, if we accept that bacteria and viruses are also living things, we would be hard put to understand how this prohibition against killing any living thing could or even should be honored.

4 An elective abortion is contrasted to a miscarriage. An elective abortion occurs when the mother freely acts to destroy, for example, through a surgical intervention, the life of the fetus she is carrying, so that she will no longer be pregnant.

5 This Supreme Court decision, Rowe vs. Wade, did impose certain restrictions dependent on the age of the fetus. In this section we use the phrase Therapeutic abortion. “ Therapeutic”, in its Greek root, means healing. But in the current abortion debate, “therapeutic” is used to distinguish abortion by intentional destruction of the fetus from miscarriage. When “ Pro-choice” advocates expand the meaning of “the welfare of the mother” to include any subjective wish of the pregnant woman to end her pregnancy, the word “therapy” is taxed to the limit, if not misused. This debate, however, is filled with questionable use of the English language. “ Termination of pregnancy” is often used rather than the harsher sounding term “abortion.” Opponents of “therapeutic abortion” use the term “killing one’s baby,” which also prejudges precisely the issues at question.

6 My purpose in this section of the essay is to identify current ‘burning issues” that relate to the Sixth Commandment. My purpose is not to write an essay on the morality or immorality of abortion, or euthanasia or capital punishment. Therefore, I do not assess the strength of the moral arguments defenders and objectors to these acts give.

7 Again, identifying these burning issues is the purpose of this section. Therefore, distinguishing different kinds of mercy killing, e.g., passive euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, or direct killing is not necessary, as it would be in a full discussion of this key issue of medical ethics.

8 In business, a cartel is a group of businesses that agrees to control production, prices or some other factor that prevents competition from a business not belonging to the cartel. Cartels are often secret agreements and are considered to be an unjust business practice. .

9 That the death penalty deters people from murdering other people is often rejected as untrue. Statistics are produced showing that states having the death penalty have higher murder rates than those who don’t have the death penalty. Two comments, in passing: It seems impossible that defenders or opponents of this argument can ever know the interior motivation of murderers at the moment they murder. Second, that threat of penalties do deter breaking the law is patently true. Those who doubt that can ask themselves why they slow down to the speed limit when they spot traffic policeman.

10 An example is Yahweh’s destruction of the families of Korah, Dathan and Abiram as a proof of Moses’ divine mission. See Numbers 16:23ff. Another example is God’s plague which killed “14, 700” rebellious Israelites, and would have killed more had not Aaron made an atoning sacrifice. See also the terrible divine threats in Leviticus 26:14 ff.

11 In the previous essay of this series, dealing with the Commandment to Honor Father and Mother, we emphasized the theme of God’s Lordship. What is the ground for honoring parents? Surely the primary ground is that God created human kind male and female; that as male and female, God created humanity in God’s image; and that in following God’s command “to be fruitful and multiply,” which is also a blessing of God, humankind images the Lord God by exercising stewardship over the earth. Therefore, children should honor father and mother, because in honoring father and mother they are honoring God’s way of ordering order the human creation, and much of the subhuman, creation according to male-female complementarity, and to give to men and women working cooperatively, responsibility for care for and stewardship of the creation. This teaching is directly relevant to the current debate in the western churches over the theological, pastoral and liturgical assessment of homosexual relationships.

12 We mention, only in passing, because it is too complicated to examine in detail, divine instructions to Moses concerning the establishment of cities of refuge and legislation concerning what we would call acts of manslaughter. See Numbers 35:6ff.

13 However some evidence of moral rejection of God’s punishment is evident, as in cases where Moses charges God’s punishing will as too extreme. An example is the story of Moses praying to God and God’s changing his will about punishing the people of Israel and the story of Moses and Aaron beseeching God to be more lenient in His punishment of the complaining Israelites, Cf. Numbers 16:22ff.

14 See the remarkable and convincing exposition by Arthur McGill of the meaning of Jesus death in relation to violent evil. Suffering: a Test of Theological Method (Philadelphia: The Geneva Press, 1968), especially Chapter 5

15 Bonaventura writes about “perversitate operas; falsitate sermonis; and improbitate voluntatis Collatio 6, paragraph 3.

16 Luther’s Sermon on Good Works (Sermon von den guten Werken) , written in Spring, 1520, is not really a sermon in our modern sense. It is a treatise about good works, and its form is Luther’s commentary on each of the Ten Commandments. Luther also interpreted the Ten Commandments in his Larger Catechism and in his Shorter Catechism..

17 For German Lutheran and Roman Catholic reaction to Hitler, it is important to remember that Hitler was duly elected to office of Chancellor.

18 Before his own life was endangered by the Nazis,, Bonhoeffer was invited to live and work a second time time in New York City. He could have avoided the war entirely. Indeed, Bonhoeffer did go to the States. Once there, however, he immediately returned, saying that he could not in good conscious work for the renewal of Christian life in Germany after the war if he had escaped the fate of his fellow Christians in Germany during the war.