I've been working on this one a while. Finally got it dusted off…

While I believe in absolute truth, I don't believe it's easily ascertainable. One of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of religion is that sometimes things are viewed as absolute truth when they are not. (Many of them, arguably, are not true in any real sense at all.) In fact, although and again I believe that absolute truth exists, it resides between (or beyond) the extreme poles of arguments which are the products of Man; the poles where embattled factions claim absolutism rests. You say it's absolutely black, I say it's absolutely white, but the absolute truth is that it's a gray neither you nor I have ever considered—perhaps a gray neither of us can even imagine. It's almost unavoidable that from time to time we each end up arguing some favorite topic to the point of extreme, which most likely drifts us away from truth even if we pass the truth, unnoticed, along the way of our argument. This is a long way around the block to get to the mailbox, but hopefully the anecdotal parallel I am about to draw herein is worth the trip.

Several months ago a (temporarily, at least) crazed man walked into a church service and began shooting people, until he was stopped by a member of the church who worked "security" at the congregation. She shot the man, and if I recall he ended up killing himself once she had shot him. What intrigued me about the whole thing was the amount of discussion her actions raised in certain blogs I frequent. Some of the arguments in favor of pacifism at all costs seemed, to me, to become so extreme that otherwise very methodical, reasoned writers were saying things that just didn't seem to make sense. For example, one of them was something like, "[Well if I was there, I would have tried to bump into the guy, knock him over, tackle him, but not shoot him.]" As I was reading that one, I was thinking that if you're really a pacifist, then isn't running into the guy, knocking him down, overpowering him, out of the question? What if you knocked him over, he hit his head on a pew, and died from the wound? Is that manslaughter? Killing? Murder? I understand that the risk of harming somebody in this way is hardly comparable to that of putting a bullet or two into their torso, but if you're going to engage in the argument far enough to say we should never strike back, never repay violence for violence, then shouldn't you let the gunman be? Isn't a punch or a kick or a body-blow violence, not to the same degree as shooting, but violence non-the-less? And if it is violence to a lesser degree, then is there not room to argue that the guard's shooting of the assailant was violence, but not to the same degree as the assailant's? Don't get me wrong; I'm a big proponent of striving for non-violence, but where do you draw the line? An interesting thing about the posts to me was that the writers are very much anti-killing (if not, perhaps, against all forms of violence)—a goal I am aligned with and respect—and in order to be completely committed to their view, they also say no to abortion, no to capital punishment, and no to war. This is an admirable, consistent approach to my mind, but it's intriguing to see the lengths to which these writers will go to try to uphold this consistency. There is no allowance in their minds, that I can tell, for violation of this code in any circumstance. I cannot help but feel that such an extreme has crossed through the gray of mysterious truth, and wandered into the black and whiteness of (well-intentioned but insufficient) human reasoning. Granted, both of the major writers I'm thinking of would stop short of passing judgment on the security guard, or anybody else in similar circumstances; to their credit, each writer is far too mature and reasoned in his faith to think that his views are the standards of God's mind. But still, in a way it seems to me that people this thoughtful should recognize the limits of absolute declarations. As far as I'm concerned, you just can't say—well, rarely can you say— "This is the way it is. Always. Period." Life isn't like this, especially when we're trying to second-guess God. To my mind, I just can't over the idea that allowing an innocent to be killed is all that far removed from doing the killing yourself. I understand the whole "better to be the hunted than the hunter" thing, but even a cornered rabbit will fight back against a coyote, given the chance. So what's my point? I don't think taking a life, in and of itself, necessarily makes you a killer in a moral sense. I think being an offensive killer is different from, for example, killing in defense. Killing isn't killing isn't killing. There are many circumstances, many possible motives, involved in it. Robbing and killing for a thrill is not the same as killing in self defense (at least, I don't think so). Capital punishment is different than both of those, and euthanasia is different from all of them. Killing in anger is different than killing in fear. Beating one's wife and kids to death is different than a woman taking a kitchen knife and killing the man who is beating her baby to death. All take a life, but all are different. My opinion.

And yet, if you choose, you can say all are equally wrong because killing is killing, is always wrong. You can choose to slice and dice your semantics and theology this way; which is to say that you're choosing not to slice and dice them very much. To open the concept up to a more general application, one I've written about before, such moral stands are highly dependent upon the level at which a person defines them. Some would accuse me of moral relativism for my view of killing, and certainly if they define this area of morality simply, at the high level of "ending a life by your own hand," then I am indeed being relativistic. It's the same turn I pushed when I asked if simply knocking somebody down or kicking them to stop their shooting is violating the ideals of pacifism; in that case I just took the definition one level higher for my own purposes. Other examples of this would be the difference between taking morphine for a surgery versus using it regularly as a drug addict, and the difference between stealing bread because you're starving versus stealing a stereo because you covet it. So morality is, really, largely in how we define things. I consider this to be true. If that makes me a relativist, then so be it. My only question to the charge would be, "I'm a relativist? Compared to who?"

To the mailbox, now that I've gone around the block? My recently expressed views on wealth and poverty are open to scrutiny according to the aforementioned; no doubt about it. I never got around to saying so terribly explicitly, but I recognize this is true. I have a particular way of slicing the issue, and many others disagree. And certainly, this is one of the reasons I say we shouldn't judge. In the end, who knows whose slices are any better than anybody else's? This is also why I say that matters of faith are just that: matters of faith. I tend to conclude that it is not where the slices are made, but rather in what spirit, with what motive and with what heart, the knife is wielded.

Finally, it never hurts to realize that sacred texts often speak in terms of ideals, and we each carry around our own pets in our pockets. Is the Christian path ideally one of voluntary poverty for the sake of others? Is the Christian path ideally one of turning the other cheek so as to never take a life? Is the Christian path ideally one of perfect moral purity? I tend to think the answer to all three is yes. Certainly, a biblical case could be made for all three. But life is practical, and most of all messy. Ideals remain ideals because they are unobtainable. It seems to me the grander ideal of the Christian path, and the one that is quite ingenious, is that love and grace and mercy triumph over all the mess, and the ideal of love and grace and mercy is one that is met through its very own nature. Someday I'll have to post an elaboration on that.

Concluding remark? Borrowing again from one of my favorite quotes, God does not call us to succeed in meeting ideals; God calls us to be faithful in pursuing them. Poverty, non-violence, purity: three ideals I would accept as foundationally Christ-like and admit that I pursue too feebly. Thanks be to love, grace and mercy, while I struggle in my weakness to pursue all these things more fully. And this is the positive way of looking at my posts in question, the posts of the pacifists, and other posts like them. We are each promoting particular ideals, and we help one another engage these ideals in a challenging way. What there is no room for is judgment, bitterness or fighting between us. Love, grace and mercy trump all, and so we share the latter as the ideal that binds us together as Christians no matter what we carry in our pockets.