Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are going to continue our discussion of means and ends by taking a look at some specific instances and evaluating those. Since a lot of what we talked about has been kind of theoretical and philosophical, thought that it would be good to end out this season by trying to kind of apply the concepts and see how it works in the real world. So let's go ahead and dive in. I remember a few years ago, probably like maybe seven years ago, when I was a deacon and before I came to the conclusion of nonviolence.

I remember that as a diaconate, we had a discussion of having individuals who had carry permits for weapons. And so we knew that there were people on the diaconate as well as other people in the church who carried guns. And that was a good thing in our minds. We didn't purposefully have people who carried guns but as the discussion went, we all liked that there were people in our congregation who had guns. My parents' church, I know, is is probably about the same size, maybe it's a bit bigger, maybe like 500 people and they actually will have crossing guards and police officers, I guess do they probably hire through the city who come out and carry guns as as kind of security.

I know that that different churches kind of handle things differently. A lot of churches down here will have people who have individual permits to carry weapons and bring weapons to church. And you'll have some churches that hire out security. And then there are a lot of churches which might be too small for security and maybe don't have anybody, but wouldn't be philosophically or theologically opposed to somebody carrying a gun to church. So there there are lots of different scenarios, but by and large, I think most churches in my area would be pretty okay with somebody carrying a gun or with having protection at church.

When I think about that right now and when I see it, when our kids go to my parents' church and I go there and you kind of see it displayed, even though at my church it's still the same way, it's just that that people kind of hide their weapons. At my parents' church, when I see guns displayed at the church, it feels really weird to me now. It feels odd to think that I I worship this God of self sacrificial love who was murdered by by the state and while at the same time visibly showing our enemies or or potential enemies that, hey, if you try anything, we'll kill you. Just feels weird. It doesn't prove anything, it just feels strange.

It's kind of this conflicting imagery. But for for some churches, this isn't really even hypothetical. I know that there are several examples, but one example within the past couple years was a church in Texas where a gunman was killed after he started going on a shooting spree. Now when I think about that church, I can say on the surface that I'm happy about the outcome. Know, there are an untold amount of lives which were saved by killing this one life.

He was clear clearly had killed people, had clear intent to kill more people, and by the by the death of this one man, I know that the lives of at least several were saved. But at the same time, I don't really like what it does for the image of Christ. Now granted, nobody in The States is going to think anything of churchgoers having weapons. It's a very American thing to stand up for your rights and for self defense. And so if if somebody gets killed at church, people aren't gonna really think anything of it.

But that right there seems to be the problem to me. It's very American and nobody would think that there's anything different about the church in regard to the enemies of the church. That seems to be a problem. Now, I I want to foil this instance of armed defense with the story of Polycarp's murderdom. As as the story goes, Christians were under heavy persecution during the time of Polycarp, but Polycarp hung around.

He hung around the city. After a while, after a bunch of strong and consistent urging from his followers, he did eventually move to a farm outside of the city where he was eventually discovered by the state. When Rome discovered Polycarp, Polycarp didn't fight or yell, but instead, he actually invited the Romans to eat with him and he requested that he get an hour to pray, you know, give me an hour to pray before I go with you and why don't you have a meal with me? Polycarp was then led away without fighting where he was eventually burnt at the stake. Here's a here's a quote from one of the stories that I found claiming to recount the martyrdom of Polycarp.

Quote, Observers that day were shocked by the contrast between Polycarp's martyrdom and the deaths of non Christians they had witnessed. They beheld the same faithful discipleship in Polycarp's death that characterized his life, a humble acceptance of God's will, praise of God in the most extreme trial, and a joyful, unwavering commitment to Christ even when faced with death. Okay, so now we have two stories in our minds. We've got a shooter goes into a Texas church to kill people, maybe specifically Christians, I don't know why exactly he picked a church target of opportunity, but he goes to kill a bunch of Christians. Then you have the story of Polycarp, who even though he was one person, he represents what was going on at that time in Rome, where many people were being martyred.

And Polycarp faces martyrdom, just in a in a significantly different way. Now thinking about our series, the discussing the means and the ends, and and how those two things go together. I'm thinking about this series along with these two images. I want to contrast those, and I want to try to think about them and and put all of these pieces together. So here's here's how it seems to me.

The first story of self defense in a church makes me feel really good as an American. This is an example of guns used to stop legitimate injustice. There's not really a question of whether this person is innocent or guilty, the intent isn't in question, there's, you know, there's really one end in sight, he's going to kill however many people he can until he either kills himself or gets away, right? So, self defense and you are saving more lives than are being lost. That seems like a good thing, and I love that as an American, that our individual freedoms allowed somebody to be, some evil to be stopped.

But at the same time, thinking about killing someone, even an enemy, and especially during your religious service, just seems a bit off. It feels odd to think that an attacker is almost guaranteed to get shot by multiple guns when he goes into a church, especially in Texas, because we all know that Christians are packing and ready to take him down in places like Texas in the South, more so than they would be in other places. Like, we just know that Texans, and especially Texan Christians, are going to be ready to kill their enemies. Now compare that to Polycarp, who was representative of most early Christian encounters with violence. He certainly took precautions by moving to a secluded farm, though it did take him a little bit of time to even agree to that.

And many Christians in the early church hid in the catacombs. They had vetting practices for their church services and yeah, we know that they took some precautions to secure their lives, yes. But what we don't see done or approved of is to meet violence with violence. Instead, what we see with Polycarp, again, who is representative of the other Christian martyrs of this time, he met force with courage and love, recognizing that his life was not of utmost importance. Yes, his life was important enough to seek security, he wasn't just throwing his life away, and would not advocate self harm.

But his life was not so valuable that it was worth compromising the teaching of Christ. It was not worth compromising the humanity and value of another, even if that other was a Roman enemy. Now, we don't know the overall influence that the martyrs had on the church directly, and you know that on this podcast, I really don't like talking about results to a certain extent, I mean, do like talking about them because a lot of times, the results end up being in the favor of non violence, you know, whether it's group non violence and which we're gonna talk about next season and how regimes are brought down more effectively through non violence. You know, we do find that non violence tends to produce better results, longer lasting results in a lot of situations. But, I don't like talking about results because it's just, not a Christian moral ethic to talk about results.

That's not what determines what the right thing is to do. You determine what's right to do, and often, that ends up leading to the best ultimate results, but the results, it's a cart before the horse thing to look at results to justify things. Nevertheless, let's talk about them just a little bit here. We don't know what the results are because of martyrdom, but it does seem from the evidence that we have, like patient self sacrificial witness significantly changed the culture. Tertullian himself thought that such sacrifices were vital to the Church.

He has this famous quote where he says, The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, right? When the martyrs die, almost like Jesus saying that, you know, unless a grain of wheat die and fall to the ground, you're not gonna have produce, you're not gonna be able to create, to recreate, to populate. And Tertullian says that of the martyrs, right? Unless martyrs die and fall to the ground and their blood not be spilled, then the seeds aren't gonna spread. It's the martyrs that are the seeds of the Church.

Now, that's Tertullian saying that, I'm not aware of this being a vast conversation, there might be other quotes that I don't know about, but I think it's insightful, I think it helps to make sense of what happened because there's really not much that makes sense of what was happening other than that Christian distinctiveness in such a crazy way was something that people noticed and wanted something of, whereas modern Christianity, especially in The United States, is something that lacks distinction and that people aren't willing to sacrifice for. There's just something distinctive and captivating about a community which is willing to sacrifice itself and be vulnerable, and which views other, even enemy, as valuable. While the church shooting in Texas doesn't appear to have any direct result of people crying out against the church, and in fact, I don't know any non Christians who would condemn the congregants for their self defense, Again, that's kind of, that's perhaps the point, is that neither Christian nor non Christian looks at that and says, Wow, that was unique. You know, that was something that only could be explained by the love of God. And you just don't find too many ways in which the American church is able to be distinctive in that type of way, and distinctive from other groups.

I mean, even, so take the issue of abortion, right? You might say, well, that's kind of a distinctive issue, and maybe it is, there are lots of Republicans who have had abortions and would be for abortion who are fine accepting that, they don't really care. They'll take the party and they don't mind latching onto abortion with that. But the way that we try to resolve that is through the state, like we grasp at power, we grasp at change in the same way that the world does, right? We latch onto our one party and they try to appease us in all the ways that we want appeased because we're a solid group, we're a good sized group, and there's really not much distinctiveness.

And we talked about this before with, you know, the film The Drop Box. What if we had a culture that put ourselves out like that Korean man who whose whole life is about saving children? We really live cush lives and we have these these kind of pet issues that we latch onto and we try to go about resolving them in the same way that the world tries to resolve their pet issues, and that's just kind of the way it is, we're not distinctive. So I would say that while this is not an opportunity here, with talking about self defense at church, this is an opportunity for the church to act uniquely and differently in love, And that's something that we need to think about before we hire armed guards. Now I know some would argue that this is this is different.

We should of course submit to persecution in, like in the case of Polly Cart by the state, a little jab here, unless it's a taxation or representation issue, or something important like that, you know, which requires revolution. But Romans thirteen tells us to submit to government, right? If some random person comes in to kill us and doesn't clarify that this is for religious reasons, that's different. When they went to kill Polycarp, it was because he was a Christian. When some random guy comes in to kill people at a church, that's not persecution for the sake of Christ, that's just senseless, senseless and gratuitous violence.

In no way would my dying at church by random violence be something that advances the Kingdom of God. So how would I respond to that? Well, obviously, I think the whole Romans 13 thing is a double standard because most Christians who invoke that are all over the board in terms of what they approve of and disapprove of. We talked about that a little bit in the the Just War series. I talked about that in season one, in in the Romans 13 episodes, and I'm planning on doing a season on government, maybe two seasons, three seasons from now.

So we'll talk a bit more about that if you're unclear as to my stance on that, but yeah, Christians are all over the board. They want to invoke Romans thirteen when it's convenient, and they ignore it at other times, and you just don't find many consistent applications of it. So I'd argue that Romans 13 is largely invoked by self interest. But even if you want to say that we'd submit to governing authorities for religious persecution because then we'd be bearing that persecution for Christ, then that seems to be making a sacred and secular distinction. It's kind of like saying, We will love our enemies and die for them if Jesus' name is on the line.

When the government creates law against Christians, then when they kill us, everyone will know that it was for Christ, we died for Christ. And so, we have to love those enemies. It's almost like a pragmatic sort of love. We'll love them because everybody's gonna know if we don't that we weren't following Christ. Because the government brings Christ's name into it, we kinda have to do the right thing.

Yet somehow, if we get killed at church by a non government official, somehow our actions there aren't a reflection on Christ and His teachings. And we'd also see a similar logic at home. If I get killed in my home, I mean, theoretically, like, shouldn't my neighbors know that I'm a Christian? Shouldn't other people who know me know that I'm a Christian? I get attacked in my home and either die or end up killing somebody, that is going to be known and yeah, my actions, whatever action I take, if I decide to shoot somebody, my actions are going to be seen and it's known that I'm a Christian and those two things are going to be put together.

And again, in our society, maybe people don't really think that much about, they wouldn't say that I'm morally wrong for doing that, but they're surely not gonna think that there's anything distinctive about the way that I handled things. So it's a little bit confusing to me how our action of enemy love is contingent upon, at least in the eyes of a lot of conservative Christians, it's contingent upon which enemies are attacking us, and whether or not it's clear that our willingness to suffer for our enemies is tied directly to our faith. So ultimately, American Christianity would never be like the early church. There's no way that my group, conservative evangelicals, would lay down our arms, even and especially if the government came after us. So, we like to talk a big game about the government coming at us and submission to government, but you know, look our embracing of Independence Day over taxation, that was largely just to pay for the wars that we were, or the Indian wars and protection and all that stuff.

But, I mean, though that aside, we're willing to have an armed revolution for taxation and some representation issues. There's no way we would submit to a government who was like that of Niros or Diocletian's or China, North Korea, whatever. We just wouldn't do it. We don't have that moral basis to be able to do such a thing. We like to talk a big game and say that that's what distinguishes the early church from us, is that somebody comes into my church randomly and shoots up, of course I'm not gonna submit my life, but if the government does it, we would.

And that's just not true. We wouldn't, we wouldn't do it for the government either. And I would say that we especially wouldn't do it for the government. If you look at what a lot of conservative evangelicals say about protecting their guns, you know, over my dead body, well, the way that we talk about the government and revolution and all those sorts of things, we are very against big government and we would take nothing, we would not take that at all. So I think this whole conversation is really a moot point because, yeah, there's just no way.

We talk big and it's vacuous, it doesn't mean anything. So in the end, Tertullian's quote sticks with me quite a bit, and I wonder, and this isn't so much looking at conservative evangelicals at this point, looking outward for myself and being able to look back on my history and my group and critique it. You know, this is now looking at me. It makes me wonder why we, why I am so averse, why in my mind, it's so hard to imagine planting the seeds of the church, planting it in the way that Tertullian talked about, through self sacrifice, through my blood. I don't think violence is the only place that we see that.

We fail to sacrifice self the way that the early church did through finances as well, through communal living, through the way that we sacrifice ourselves for others and treat each other. So this is a bigger issue than self defense in terms of physically attacking those who are aggressing physically. It's also our refusal to do good in other ways and to fail to do violence in other ways that we can do violence. So, why am I averse to planting the seeds of the church? And I think it's because many days and in many hours of those days, it's because, you know, I haven't truly been pollinated with the Gospel and I'm a tree that bears no fruit.

There are lots of times that that's true. Now, thankfully, hopefully this isn't a tooting of my own horn, but this is a accurate self reflection, I hope. And I think it is because talking with other people who are invested in my life, I think they would say the same thing. But my life has started to bear more fruit, and it's more true that I have fruit more often now than I used to. But I'm still recuperating, I'm still recovering from some significant baggage that Western Christianity has instilled into my life.

There's some pretty deeply rooted bad aspects of Western Christianity, American Christianity, in ways in which that it just isn't like Christ. And so, mean, nominal Christianity is huge in The United States and I think that we're averse to planting the seeds of the Church, by and large because as a Church, we haven't been pollinated with the Gospel, or trees which bear no fruit. And the Bible tells us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, to that that judgment starts inside the church, that we need to snatch brothers and sisters from hellfire, which means that as a brother and sister of somebody else, I also need to be willing to hear the appeals of others who are trying to snatch me from hellfire. There's a lot in the Bible on works, not as our salvation, but as evidence of it. And we don't like that type of message because it sounds works based, sounds like salvation is works based.

But, you know, Jesus says to build our house on the rock and the rock isn't Jesus, it's His teaching, that's what He says, it's His teaching. Now, to obey His teaching, we have to believe in Him, of course, right? So Jesus is the ultimate thing in which we put our faith, but Jesus says that, If you do these things that I tell you, then you are building on the rock. Works are huge in Christianity and you don't have a life of following Christ, of discipleship if you're not following Christ. Go figure.

So, let's all take this time. I know it's nice to be able to look outwardly and condemn our group or other groups, but let's start our reflections with ourselves. Hopefully you can use this episode as a catalyst to do that. Because ultimately, if we're not pollinated with the Gospel and we're not bearing fruits, then where there are no fruits, there are no seeds. That's all for now.

So peace, because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.