Good Christians Need Not Own Guns
BY Herschel Smith
5 years ago
The activists come from different backgrounds: Claiborne is an evangelical author and anti-violence activist. Martin is a Mennonite pastor turned blacksmith. Both of them believe in the necessity of a “Christian response” to the American gun violence crisis. The tour was planned to coincide with the pre-Easter season of Lent, when many Christians reflect on the sanctity of life.
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First Claiborne read aloud a prayer that he had written to commemorate the event.
“Dear God, we thank you for giving us a perfect world, and we ask forgiveness to the mess we’ve made of it,” he said.
This is an odd theology and he’s on the horns of a real epistemological dilemma. On the one hand, the world if perfect, but on the other hand, we’ve made a mess of it. But if we’ve made a mess of it, the world wasn’t really perfect after all because that evil had to come from somewhere. He hasn’t fully theologically dealt with the effects of the fall in Adam and federal headship and original sin.
Nonetheless, I think he’s a liar. I think he doesn’t really believe a word of that. I think he locks his door at night, and I think he still wants police to be armed.
He is welcome to comment on these pages and prove me wrong.
On April 8, 2019 at 9:09 pm, MTHead said:
Who do these people think their imitating? Christ wasn’t a passivist. He was a warrior following orders. and when he told his disciple to arm themselves at the last supper. who do these men think he was talking to?
When Christ said some would say, “we’ve done miracles in your name.” and he will tell them to go away, he didn’t know them.
I think we know some of them now.
On April 9, 2019 at 8:53 am, Fred said:
You want to kill me because I profess the name of Jesus then crucify me in the town square right now, I demand it! You pull a knife while I’m in the dollar store checkout line? NOT the same thing.
How does it glorify the LORD to allow yourself, for example, to be tied up in your living room and forced to watch your young daughter be gang raped and sodomized and dismembered and then you get shot in the head? How does this, for an extreme example, bring honor to Christ?
I’m getting pretty tired of the conflation between dying for your faith to the glory of God and willfully allowing yourself and your family to be a victim of a criminal. Paul going to Rome knowing he would likely die and Peter refusing to be crucified right side up; these died for the LORD that you might be made the sons of God. These men died for evangelizing Christ. I find no account in the Holy Bible or anywhere in antiquity where Christians allowed themselves to get gut stabbed and their purse taken by a common criminal who knew nothing of their faith, or any other such example. In fact, general passivity is contra indicated in the Holy Bible, that the LORD kept many a believer alive by that believer’s active participation so that they might be fully used for the later purposes set forth before the foundation of the earth to bring glory and high honor to a Holy Righteous Christ, not to die some pitiful and wasted death in a cold parking garage at the hands of somebody who’s never heard the gospel and wouldn’t know if you were a Christian from an ox cart.
It’s a stunted, single order level, non critical way of thinking to presume that Christ allowed the Sanhedrin to claim His blood upon themselves and their tribes for anything other than Judgment. He didn’t do it as a general statement on the means and modality of how to comport yourself as a man in a dead and fallen world. He died for the saving of souls that His Father, your Father, might be glorified. He said so, Himself.
What judgment and who is it upon if you allow your wife to be killed by common criminals? How does this equate to Holy God getting glory and the witnesses receiving the knowledge and understanding of the truth of the conviction you have in your faith by dying for claiming Christ? Judgment be upon you for failing to preserve life except where it bring glory to God for the saving of souls, as our LORD gave example.
Dying for your faith and dying because you refuse to accept that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament and that His law is immutable, He is unchanging, is slack on your part. You bring disgrace to Christ when you allow death where you could have stopped it.
It’s a blood covenant, to be the light of ALL that is right and good and true in the LORD, a covenant that is under judgment always. Grace is for God’s glory not your general license to deny aspects of the Law of God. You proclaim yourselves to be deficient, morally bankrupt in ability and will to stand before Holy God as the man, head of your family, chief defender, moral and spiritual leader of your tribe when you declare that you will not defend your family from rogue agents, highwaymen and yes, even from the State. Pitiful. I was going to say that you are none of mine, but I come under conviction. I would say that it’s very difficult to claim you as a brother and I suspect that you spend much time listening to the devil.
DYING FOR A RETARDED UNDERSTANDING OF THE ENTIRETY OF THE LAW OF GOD IS REPROBATE! DYING FOR THE NAME OF CHRIST JESUS IS GLORY!
On April 9, 2019 at 9:27 am, Fred said:
“Dying for your faith and dying because you refuse to accept that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament and that His law is immutable, He is unchanging, is slack on your part.”
This should have had an ‘or’ or a ‘not’ or something. You get what is meant; dying for your faith not slack, ignoring the entirety of the law of God is slack. I tried and failed to make a distinction. Forgive me.
On April 9, 2019 at 9:53 am, Dov Sar said:
Amen and amen to Fred? Mind if I copy this and give it to my Amish friends?? You communicate this fact better than anyone I have heard to date. Thanks!
On April 9, 2019 at 10:55 am, MTHead said:
Thanks Fred!
On April 9, 2019 at 11:23 am, Fred said:
Glory be to God the Father where it rightly belongs. Anything good is by Him, all else are my failings.
Sure, Dov Sar, it’s freely given but please do something about that sentence where I contradict my own point as it could cause confusion. I would add that I have a general admiration for the Amish as they may have rightly identified the system itself as operated by the Beast and therefor subsequently refuse to participate, excepting, as you indicate, general passivity in the face of this knowledge as not being a further correct understanding the Holy Texts.
I personally would approach an Amish with a much less aggressive manner of speaking, at least initially. Please indicate that this is not directed at them personally or as a group but more to the hirings of the American Church, but application can be made where truth be told.
On April 9, 2019 at 3:02 pm, Dov Sar said:
Thanks, Fred. Will do.
On April 9, 2019 at 3:06 pm, Donk said:
@Captain, the church is UCC, http://unitednewhaven.org, the first pic on the flash roll on their landing page is the rainbow flag. Included in their mission statement, “…Been “Open and Affirming” of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons since 1989.” All one needs to know.
On April 10, 2019 at 2:13 am, Fergus said:
What a bad joke these fools are. Didn’t Jesus instruct his followers to beat their plowshares into swords?
On April 10, 2019 at 2:36 pm, Gryphon said:
Another “Church” that is one of those 501c (tax exempt) “Corporations” under the “Uniform Commercial Code” of the false corporate ‘government’.