PART IV

 

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT

 

Chapter I

 

 

 

ITS SIGNIFICANCE

 

1.  Murder in the Bible

 

(a) The place occupied by murder in the Old Testament is notorious, and many find it excessive: executions, slaughters, wars, succeed each other in a manner both nightmarish and disgusting.  Murder undoubtedly plays a much larger part in its pages than does stealing, lying, lack of respect for parents, and even sexual offences.  Yet it is not at all certain that murder was the most widespread or frequent of sins, so one is tempted to conclude that of all the transgressions from the second table of the Decalogue the Old Testament saw it as the most serious and odious.  Some of these murders may have been committed with a good conscience by just men, who on occasions were even convinced that they were obeying God's express command, but this does not alter things at all: the writers of the Old Testament felt that murder, whether individual or collective, was a thing so serious in itself, having such repercussions, that they evidently refused to spare us any episode involving it, any detail however horrifying.

 

This impression is confirmed by the fact that the first sin committed after the Fall is the murder of Abel (Gen.  4), which can scarcely be mere coincidence: the elemental, the supreme crime is indeed murder‑and this crime of Cain's is referred to twice more, in verses 23 and 25, so deep was the impression it made.  Just before the flood God's anger against mankind is again because 'the earth was filled with violence,' which clearly means acts of murderous violence, since it is only against this crime that God puts Noah on guard when he leaves the Ark (Gen.  9:5‑6).  The extreme insistence on this one crime in the Noachic commandments is also striking: no other act is clearer evidence of man's unbelief, pride, and rebellion.  This is also why, no doubt, the sixth commandment is placed at the top of the second table, opposite the first, as if these two were respectively the most important of each table‑as indeed, for common sense as well, murder is the worst offence against another person that can be committed. 

 

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Passing to the New Testament, we find that the background to Jesus' life is also strangely full of killing.  Soon after his birth Herod 'seeks to destroy Him' and 'slays all the children in Bethlehem' (Matt.  2:13 and 16).  He begins His ministry at a time of brutal murders, including the violent deaths of the two false Messiahs (Luke 13:1; Acts 5:36‑37).  The shadow of death hovers over His own daily existence; it seems as if everybody would like to 'liquidate' Him: 'the Jews' (John mentions twenty‑six times their intention of putting Him to death), Herod (Luke 13:31), the Pharisees (Matt.  12:14), the priests (Matt.  27:1), and finally Pilate (Matt.  27:26).  Several times, as we have seen, His enemies try to capture Him in order to kill Him.  These plots against His life are an oppressive refrain throughout the Gospels.  In His teaching He constantly refers to His imminent death, whether simply foretelling it (Matt.  16:21), alluding to it indirectly in His parables (Matt.  21:38), or foreshadowing its spiritual significance (John 10:11; 12:24; Matt.  26:28).  His friend John the Baptist is put to death, which seems to affect Him greatly (Matt.  14:10‑13).  His disciple Lazarus risks meeting the same fate (John 12:10).  He Himself is condemned to death instead of a well‑known 'robber' or assassin[1] (Mark 15:7; Acts 3:14), and is crucified as if by chance between two other such brigands (Mark 15:27): crucifixion itself was a form of punishment which the Romans introduced into Palestine in an attempt to stamp out the fanatical nationalist 'resistance' which was waging a continuous guerilla warfare against them.[2]  There is no need to stress here the importance of the 'murder' of Jesus; but after His resurrection death again hangs over His disciples (Acts 5:33): Stephen is stoned to death (Acts 7:59) and James is beheaded.  The greatest of the apostles, after having himself been a murderer (Acts 8:1; 9:1), is threatened with death from the day after his conversion (Acts 9:23), and this lasts the whole period of his ministry (Acts 23:12).  According to tradition both he and Peter died martyrs' deaths at Rome, and how many others after them (Rev.  6:9)!

 

So if there is one commandment which was constantly being violated during the events which marked the birth of Christianity, it is the sixth.  The Gospel was preached under the sign of murder, one might say; and it is dominated by that Cross which was the supreme murder.  It is not by chance that the world has been saved on the occasion of that commandment being broken.  Among those of the second table, it is indeed the commandment thrown into the sharpest relief

 

Jesus warns His disciples that they will be hated and put to death

 

 

 

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on His account (John 15:18‑20; 16:2; Matt.  10:20‑21 and 28); but He protests in advance against the murderous rage which will be directed against Himself and them (Matt.  23:29‑37); and when one of them succumbs to the contagion of this violence, Jesus severely rebukes him, reminding him of the inexorable law that violence breeds violence (Matt.  26:52).  Satan, He says, is at work in every murder, for Satan 'was a murderer from the beginning' (John 8:44); and it is under his influence that murders and all that defiles man comes out of man's heart (Matt.  15:19).  That is why Jesus confirms this commandment with all the others (Matt.  19:18), and even widens its meaning, since being angry with or insulting a person is likened by Him to murder (Matt.  5:21‑22), as is merely not healing when you have the chance to do so (Mark 3:4).

 

Nor is there in the apostolic writings, any more than in the teaching of Jesus, the slightest trace of indulgence towards murder, which is expressly mentioned in the various lists of sins or crimes excluding from the Kingdom of Heaven those who commit them (Rom.  1:29; 1 Tim.  1:9; Rev.  9:21; 21:8; 22:15).  One of the characteristics of the Beast is that it kills Christians (Rev.  13:15; 18:24; 19:2).  The apostles also proclaimed the validity of the sixth commandment (Rom.  13: 9; James 2:11); like Jesus they declare that the man who kills is possessed by Satan; like Him, they warn Christians on no account to render themselves guilty of this crime (I Peter 4:15), and even that anyone who hates his brother is a murderer (I John 3:15).  The agreement between the Epistles and the Gospels is complete.

 

Throughout the New Testament, then, there is no truck with murder, no qualification or casuistry about it, no special dispensations for committing it.  It seems almost unthinkable that a Christian who abides strictly by the message and affirmations of the New Testament can deliberately kill a man.  'For this is the message which ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.  Not as Cain . . . who slew his brother' (I John 3:11).

 

(b) It may be objected that according to the New Testament God Himself caused men to die (Acts 5:5 and 10; 13:23); that Jesus in His parables represented Him as a king who destroys His enemies (Matt.  12:7, etc.); and that in Revelation, as in the parables describing the Last Judgment, it is specified that God causes His enemies to perish more or less terribly.  So the deduction is that as God has killed, we have the right to kill.

 

But Jesus Himself never killed, either by natural means or by

 

 

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supernatural (John 8:11; Luke 9:55; Matt.  26:53); and He is our example, having been incarnated partly for this purpose (John 13:26; 13:15; Eph.  5:1‑2; Phil.  2:5; 1 Peter 2:21; 1 John 2:6).  It is by His own obedience to the Law that He is an example for us.  And I would repeat that it is not for men to anticipate the Last Judgment, which will be the work of God alone (Rom.  13:19; 1 Peter 2:23; Rom.  14:10).

 

The apostles, it is true, saw the hand of God in the mysterious deaths of Herod and of Ananias and Sapphira; but the whole of the Bible declares that nothing happens on earth without God's will; it is He that causes life and death alike (Deut.  32:39; 1 Sam.  2:6).  Not a sparrow 'shall fall to the ground without your Father,' said Jesus (Matt.  10:29); and Pilate could not put Him to death without the power having been given Him from above (John 19:11); it is impossible that anything should escape God's directing hand.  So no normative character can be attributed to these deaths willed by God; if He 'willed' the death of His Son (Matt.  26:42), that certainly does not mean that men had the 'right' to crucify Him.  For after all, God is God, and I am a sinner, a creature of God's: how shall I judge Him.  If I suggest that 'God has also killed' I am condemning Him; so this objection is literally blasphemous.

 

In killing above all, man takes the place of his Creator.  Perhaps the words italicized may cause surprise, so I will elaborate: it cannot be by chance that man's rebellion against God reached its climax in a murder, that of Golgotha; for we must give its full meaning to the terrifying refrain of the first apostolic preaching: 'Ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain ...  ye killed the Prince of life ...  by the name of Jesus of Nazareth whom ye crucified ...  Jesus whom ye slew and hanged on a tree ...  (Acts 2:23 and 36; 3:15; 4:10; 5:30; 7:52; 10:39; 13:38, etc.).  As Jesus had to feel abandoned by God and become a symbol of God's curse (Matt.  27:46 and Gal.  3:13), so He had to suffer from men the worst of their faults against love.  The horror of the crime of Calvary comes not only from the quality of its victim, but also from the act itself.  Men had dared do what David himself would not do, raise a hand against 'the Lord's anointed' (I Sam.  24:6 and 7); this shows the bottomless abyss of human sin.  It means, too, that in face of the Crucified we must discover the terrible seriousness of murder: God could not brand more clearly the act of killing.  Yet traditional theology seems to have been inclined, whether intentionally or not, to minimize this vital fact: the Son of God was killed.

 

 

 

ITS SIGNIFICANCE

 

2.                Does the Sixth Commandment Condemn Only Individual Murder?

Christian 'militarists' will tend to fall back on the following line of defense: 'The sixth commandment concerns individual murder, not war, nor even the death penalty pronounced in accordance with the country's laws.  It is a fallacy to bring up the problem of war in connection with this commandment.'

 

(a) There seems no doubt that the expression 'thou shall not kill' refers explicitly to individual murder.  The Hebrew word is used exclusively for this, I am informed, and is not a general condemnation of all taking of life, for the death penalty certainly existed in the Old Testament: see Exodus 32:27, where immediately after promulgation of the Ten Commandments Moses commands every man to 'slay his brother ...  his companion ...  his neighbor and where a different Hebrew word is used for 'slay.’  It is indisputable, and I do not dispute it, that the sixth commandment in its verbal expression, means 'thou shall not commit individual murder.’  But it is far less sure that its moral and religious significance does not extend beyond that: so serious a problem can scarcely be solved categorically by mere etymology.

 

The Old Testament, and Moses himself, may have intended no more than this, but once more we must qualify such an intention both because of the various texts I have already quoted which seem to imply a condemnation of war itself, and also because in anything to do with murder the men of the Old Testament went by the lex talionis, 'an eye for an eye,' as expressed in Genesis 9:6 and in the Pentateuch generally, more than by the sixth commandment.  They apparently failed to realize that this commandment does not include the lex talionis.

 

Moreover, they may well have carried out many of their bloodthirsty punishments and waged their religious wars from a sacrificial concept of murder, a concept which at that time overcame the requirement of the sixth commandment, but which lost its meaning with the New Covenant, since Christ offered Himself in sacrifice for sin once and for all.

 

Anyhow, the Old Testament can never be normative in the sphere of ethics.  We are only interested here in the Christian morality, and that is true for the sixth commandment as for the others.  If we tried, for instance, to understand the seventh commandment exclusively in the light of the Old Testament, we should arrive at some very strange conclusions.  The men of the Old Testament no more saw that commandment as condemning polygamy than they saw the sixth as

 

 

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condemning the death penalty.  Yet Jesus said, 'Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time....  But I say unto you .  .  .’  Certainly He did not abolish the law; it is just that He alone fulfillled it; and His interpretation must surely be decisive.

 

(b) It is clear that most of the Ten Commandments condemn acts and attitudes with a far wider range than the particular and characteristic act which they explicitly mention.  Who would claim, for instance, that the second allows the worship of painted images, the fifth allows a lack of respect towards a grandfather or the king, the seventh allows incest or homosexuality, the ninth slander and lying?  The Decalogue is obviously aimed at fundamental faults, which it evokes by citing a particularly striking and odious form of each.  To cling to the letter of the commandment without appreciating its spirit or deeper significance, is surely the typical error of the Pharasaical Rabbinism which Jesus denounced (Matt.  15:4‑5; 23:16‑24‑) Mark 3:4; 11 Cor.  3:6).  Anyone who argues that war is sanctioned because the commandment says only 'Thou shall not kill,' ought in good logic to argue equally that rape, polygamy, and prostitution are sanctioned because the commandment says only, 'Thou shall not commit adultery.'

 

Moreover, if the sixth commandment is concerned strictly with individual murders, it has nothing to say to ninety‑nine per cent of mankind; whereas if it also condemns 'moral murders,' like anger and hatred (as is usually admitted), then we are no longer in the sphere of a strictly literal interpretation, and must also admit that there is more to it than ordinary 'murder.’  It is doubtless not mere chance that makes the Church go on translating the commandment as 'Thou shall not kill,' not 'Thou shall not murder.’  And if the airman releasing his bombs on a town is not 'murdering' people, one wonders what he is doing.  There are quibbles on words which can only provoke disgust, like the Pharisaical discussions on ritual observances which Jesus condemned in Mark (7:11); nor should we be like the man who 'avoided' eating meat in Lent by calling his roast beef carp.

 

All this still does not prove that the sixth commandment condemns participation in war; but it does prove that the argument from the word used for 'kill' is invalid for our basic problem.  The commandment is not concerned only with individual murders.

 

(c) It is profoundly disturbing to find that while the Christian Church for centuries (since Constantine) has given an extensive interpretation of the other commandments in its theology and its

 

 

 

ITS SIGNIFICANCE

 

 

catechistic teaching, it has always interpreted the sixth only in a restrictive Way.  Christian tradition is unanimous in seeing the seventh as a condemnation of any sexual act out of wedlock, the eighth as a condemnation of all stealing, even indirect, the ninth as a condemnation of any kind of deceit in a court of law.  It never makes restrictions for these commandments, and only for the sixth says categorically: 'Nevertheless, there are cases where it is a Christian duty to kill; there are cases where the Christian must commit an act which at the very least looks strangely like a murder.'

 

The embarrassment of the wise men of the Church is very striking when you go through the catechisms on this point.  Some delicately pass over the question of war in silence, no doubt because it is a thing which would be beyond children's minds.[3]  But others, foreseeing the objection which even a child will scarcely fail to make, try to justify defensive war,[4] Using Most high‑minded euphemisms for it.  Here, for instance, is Lehr: 'The Christian should also hate war....  But let him not think himself exempt from the duty of defending his country in its hour of danger: in any case, to take up arms is often a contribution to the maintenance of peace.'[5]  Charles Babut also raises the problem of war in connection with defending one's country: 'The Christian will be ready, if called, to sacrifice his life to defend it.  But his patriotism will have no hate or savagery to it.'[6]  Wilfred Monod is both more honest and more embarrassed: 'War started by an invader is only murder committed wholesale; and what makes so tragic the task of those who defend their homes is the fact that they cannot resist the aggression without themselves inflicting death.'[7]  De Pury at one stage expressed the surprising sentiment that 'if the State is led to kill (death penalty, the just war), it is obeying, not disobeying, this commandment, and is protecting human life';[8] but in his eighth edition (p.  75) he admittedly has more qualifications: A war which is intended to defend a people's law or life is no longer a disobedience of the sixth commandment.  Modem war, however, by its universal character and the means it uses, involves so much disorder and oppression that it brings no solution and only increases injustice.’  All these catechisms admit, by their silence or their `justifications,' that there are cases where the Christian has a duty to kill his brother.  None of them admits that there are cases where the Christian has a duty to disobey any of the other nine commandments: no dispensations for adultery; no exceptions for stealing; no conditions made concerning false witness,

 

 

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or the respect due to parents.  But there it is: with the sixth commandment alone the Church for centuries has given a restrictive interpretation.

 

Yet Jesus expressly gave an almost absolute extension to this commandment (Matt.  5:21‑22), exactly as he did for the seventh (Matt.  5:27‑28), and for the other precepts of the law in the next verses.[9]  If anger and insult can be considered as murders (and this is what Jesus said), how can murder in the service of one's country be radically different from individual murder?  Indeed St.  Cyprian, who died in A.D.  258 (before the Constantinian heresy), was already writing: 'If a murder is committed by an individual, it is called crime; but if it is committed on the State's order, it is called courage' (Epistles 1:6).  Jesus said: Not only must you not kill, but you must not even be angry with your neighbor All the New Testament says the same.  But the Church, by contrast, declares: 'You must not kill in your own interests, nor even be angry with your brother; but if the State calls you to fight your country's enemies, then it is a different matter: do your duty, that is to say‑kill as many of them as you can.  You are not disobeying God's Law.'

 

(d) Some may say that of course the sixth commandment is the only one which implies important exceptions, because it is the only one directly concerned with the sphere of the State; and that as usual I am not giving the State the place which is due to it.  But what makes them think that only the sixth commandment is directly concerned with the State?  In the days when the Soviet State authorized children to deny their parents, increased the number of abortions, encouraged divorces, confiscated the kulaks' estates, extorted 'confessions' from 'traitors,' and got the peasants' support by promising them land; in the day when the Nazi State urged children to denounce their parents, piled up its victims in camps of slow death, organized human stud‑farms, encouraged the looting of non‑Aryan houses, gave a free hand to its political police, and made Lebensraum a motive and a justification for its policies‑was all that outside the scope of the last six commandments?

 

If this point is conceded, we are back at the same inexplicable inconsistency as before.  If stealing is still stealing and lying is still lying when the State is involved, why are the murders it commits not murders?  Is the State's morality so fundamentally different from the individual's that it has the right to do what it condemns in the individual citizens?  This would be to put it in the terrain of nineteenth‑century German philosophy, which we have seen to be

 

 

 

ITS SIGNIFICANCE

 

incompatible with the Gospel.  Why, anyhow, should an act change its nature merely by ceasing to be individual and becoming collective?  We are back at the traditional State‑idolatry, which I have already exposed sufficiently.  You cannot maintain that murder carried out by the State is not murder without falling into such idolatry; for such a proposition assumes that the State is not subject to God's Law.

 

Again, where exactly would you draw the line between cases where the State 'is not killing' when it kills and those where it is killing?  When the Soviets 'liquidated' enemies of the people, when the Nazis sent Jews to gas chambers, were they killing or just defending their State against its enemies?  When the Nazis massacred the inhabitants of Oradour, was it murder‑or a 'law of war', a crime‑or a necessity from 'the order of conservation'?  And which was it when they shot hostages, tortured, sterilized, carried out medical experiments on their prisoners?  Even where the State is concerned, the boundary between murder‑crime and murder‑duty is very hard to trace.  I know an American Christian who in 1944, at the time of the break‑through at Coutances, was in command of an armored detachment which had penetrated deep into the German lines; he told me that on that day he ordered the shooting of the German soldiers his detachment had captured, because he had to continue his advance at all costs and could not possibly deal with prisoners.  It is obvious that any judgment on border‑line cases will depend wholly on ideological or juridical ideas which have nothing to do with the Christian Revelation.  We are in the realm of the relative, the arbitrary, where anybody at all may be a 'war criminal'.

 

But some think that killing in war is disobeying the sixth commandment only for the soldiers of an aggressor; while citizens 'defending' their country are not guilty of murder.  Even if this were a sound principle, and you could decide quite certainly who was the aggressor, it would still lead to absurdly relative judgments.  For instance, let us imagine the trenches 'somewhere in France' in 1917: French and German soldiers are facing each other, carrying out exactly the same work of death; and this has been going on for three years: we are asked to believe that on one side they are criminals and on the other they are faithfully carrying out a sacred duty.  And the air raids on Warsaw and London were crimes, while those on Dresden and Hiroshima were imperious duties of conscience?  No, the tragic reality goes far outside the best juridical formulas.  Can the Church really do nothing else, when faced with war, but to deliver such

 

 

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hollow formulas, which have little apparent connection with reality and none at all with the Revelation?

 

To sum up: although the word used in the sixth commandment means 'murder,' the commandment in itself still implies a general condemnation of all attacks on human life.  No human creature is exempt from obedience to this commandment, the State no more than any other;[10] the Son of God scrupulously submitted to it Himself.  War cannot be put outside its competence, for to make war a separate case you have to introduce excessively subtle and farfetched distinctions: there is no clear line between an individual and a collective murder, a criminal and a lawful murder.  The Gospel knows nothing of such discrimination.

 

3.  Political Significance of the Sixth Commandment

 

This is the sole aspect which is controversial, and it is also at the heart of our present problem; so I shall enlarge only on that, not on the commandment's spiritual and moral significance, about which theologians are generally agreed.

 

I would merely say that from a spiritual viewpoint it warns me that 'God wishes me to honor Him as Master of life and death, by not attacking my neighbor's life, but rather by respecting and protecting it: killing is an attack on the work of His grace.'[11]  For not only am I defying God by destroying the man He created in His image, who despite His sin is the masterpiece of God's creation, but I am flouting Jesus Christ who died for every human being.  By killing a man, I make it impossible for him to recognize his Savior, to answer His call, to live for Him and glorify Him.  I deny the Good News, I challenge the God of Jesus Christ.

 

From a moral viewpoint in the sixth commandment, as in the four after it, God is defining more exactly what is meant by loving my neighbor first of all, and in any case, to respect his life.  He warns me that I kill my brother not only when I physically cause his death, but also when I attack his life by indirect means, by hating him or being angry with him (Matt.  5:22) or even contemptuous of him.  Thus, 'the true way of observing the sixth commandment is to do all we can to preserve, support and promote our neighbor's life.'[12]

 

Coming now to the commandment's ' political significance, I must first repeat that according to Romans 13:4 the State was made for man, not man for the State.  The political authorities have been 'established' by God to protect man, taking this expression in its full and general sense.  The State must not forget that it is a 'creature' in

 

 

 

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the service of men, and therefore of human life.  Killing is the exact opposite of its mission.[13]

 

The State's situation can be compared here with a doctor's.  A doctor too is at the service of life, though he may sometimes be terribly tempted to exploit life, notably to do experiments allegedly useful for the progress of medical science.  The doctor who deliberately sacrifices the lives of human beings to abstract scientific research is violating God's Law.  So is the State which deliberately sacrifices human lives to maintain an economic or political r6gime.

 

Humanity's unhappiness comes from this age‑old frenzy to destroy men on the pretext of saving Man.  Since the beginning of time God's creatures have been immolated in the service of false gods: political idols or delusive abstractions.  It is the characteristic of paganism to glorify, at the expense of an actual neighbor the abstract values and causes for which men are urged to slaughter other men.  But the Decalogue with its sturdy good sense, dissipates these murderous chimeras; it recalls to the State that the destruction of human life is a means which cannot be justified by any end.  God's Law strips the State of its claim to be a high priest presiding over human holocausts, forbids it to adorn itself with the sanguinary embellishments of Moloch.

 

It is also remarkable and significant that Jesus Himself was sacrificed because of the State, seeing that Caiaphas told the Sanhedrin, the Jewish political authority of its time, 'Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not' (John 11:50).  So, to be rid of the Son of God, the Sanhedrin sacrifices Jesus' life to the doubtful interest of the people; it violates the sixth commandment on the false pretext that this is the only means of saving Israel from a brutal repression by the Romans (John 11:48).  Jesus was willing to identify Himself with the countless victims of wars, with all those who have been deliberately sacrificed to the Political Necessities and Social Duty, to the millions of human beings who have been slaughtered and constrained to slaughter each other by being more or less persuaded that their deaths would be serving Justice and Law.  By His readiness to become the victim of such a belief, Jesus unmasked its monstrous falsity, and showed His disciples in advance that they could never adopt it themselves.

 

'To such depths of wickedness are men led,' writes Calvin, commenting on the words of Caiaphas, 'who without fear of God take their counsel more from their carnal sense than from the Word of

 

 

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God, and believe it will be useful for them when they do something which is not permitted by the author of all good things, the killing of an innocent man....  Let us learn therefrom never to separate what is useful from what is lawful, seeing that nothing good or happy can be hoped for except by the blessing of God ...  which is promised not to the wicked and rebellious, who ask help from the devil, but to the faithful who walk simply in their ways....  A people is no better preserved by the unjust and wicked death of an innocent man, than a man's whole body is preserved when only his throat is cut or his stomach has been run through.[14]  Of course, Calvin is here referring only to an innocent man's death, and this is why he had Michel Servetus burnt.  But in modem war the vast majority of those you kill are innocent; so that the quotation from Calvin fits in very well with my purpose.  The State cannot be at man's service without being at the service of human life.

 

According to the Scriptures, a political order conforming to the will of God is one where, among other things, human life is respected and protected.  'God alone has the right to dispose of a man's whole life and existence,' the Synod of the Berlin Evangelical Church proclaimed in April 1950.  'A State is defending man's dignity and liberty only when it respects this sacred right belonging to God.[15]  Murder is always a major disorder, because it is a violation of God's Law.  We know today, as Calvin did not, that the burning of Servet was a disorder; what would Calvinists give that this fire had never been lit!  When the State kills, it is contributing to disorder, even if apparently, according to human wisdom, it is limiting disorder.  By killing, it adds an extra disorder to those it claims to be putting down.

 

.  The sixth commandment has another relevance to politics which will lead us to the same conclusion.  We have seen that if constraint is indispensable to the State for carrying out its function, the degree of violence or cruelty implied in the use of this constraint is by no means a matter of indifference.  There is a certain limit beyond which that constraint ceases to contribute to order in society.  When the State is too brutal, it becomes itself a factor of disorder.  The spectacle of what goes on in totalitarian countries is an obvious demonstration of this.  Our government perhaps has the right to order that a factory occupied by strikers be forcibly cleared, but when people are killed in this police operation, everyone feels that the State has failed and that the disorder is aggravated, not diminished.  For in the sight of God a human life has more value than a factory or a juridical principle.  It is the same with the State's constraint as with certain toxic

 

 

 

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drugs, which are useful in small doses but lethal in strong doses.  But where do you find this fine the State must not pass?  Without going into the problem of torture, I believe the line is given us by the sixth commandment, which properly ‑signifies this: when the State reaches the point of killing, it has already passed the degree of violence allowed it for maintaining order in the society it has charge over.  By killing, it increases disorder and injustice, whatever its declared or secret intention.  Whether it lets itself be maddened by fear, or is clever enough to adopt Caiaphas' aphorism (e.g.  when making war), the State betrays its true mission by shedding blood. It abuses its power, imagines that it is protecting, but is really destroying.

 

(c) The moment has come to consider an important and delicate aspect of our problem: are you not also an accomplice to killing when you see someone threatened with death and do not come to his rescue?  If you stand by and watch someone have his throat cut you are surely participating to some extent in the murder of which he is the victim?  And is not such complicity by abstention a disobedience of the sixth commandment almost as serious as the murder itself?  Yes, I will say straight out, all that is perfectly true.  Non‑intervention by an individual or the State when faced with a murder is cowardice, surrender, participation in the murder.  It is also a way of killing.

 

But this instinct to try to stop a person being killed, an instinct felt so deeply by any normal man, is more evidence of the sacredness of human life.  You see a man who has got his enemy on the ground and is lifting a knife to finish him off; without hesitating for a second you dash in to stop that armed hand.  It may be a criminal trying to murder an innocent man; but it may equally well be the aggressor who is about to receive the blow, the criminal to whose aid you are flying; and still you are glad to have intervened in time.  Even if you see a wretched woman preparing to kill her drunken and brutal husband, who has long been subjecting her to the worst outrages and sufferings, you will still intervene, I fancy, even if you say to yourself deep down: 'Though he'd only have got what he deserved.’  Yes, human life is sacred, one cannot allow it to be destroyed: God has said so.

 

But admitting this, let us take good care about how we intervene to protect a threatened human life.  If we take concrete examples, we must not leave them in the air, and there are two possibilities in the case of the man with the knife.  Either you won't have a weapon on

 

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you when you suddenly see an attempt at murder‑which is clearly far more probable‑and then you intervene with your hands, and perhaps your feet, trying to separate the man on top from his victim, to get the knife out of his hand, or at least stop him bringing it down.  Either you succeed, or you do not; perhaps the man will turn on you, will wound you with his knife.  Even if he kills you, you will have done your duty, and have saved the victim if he has had the time to run away while the other man was dealing with you.  If not, your sacrifice will look as if it served no purpose.  But in all that there is no moral problem.

 

The difficulty begins if you do have a weapon on you.  If you kill the aggressor (assuming now that he was in fact the aggressor), are you sure you will have done right?  The court will acquit you, honorably even; but before God will you not feel a murderer nevertheless?  You have tried to stop a man killing another man, but if you yourself have killed one, where is the advantage?  You have committed the very crime you wished to prevent.  Better that the criminal should die rather than his innocent victim, you may protest; but surely such a judgment is very hasty and relative.  What you ought to have done was to save the victim without killing the criminal.  'Should you kill,' Pascal asked, 'to stop there being wicked men?  That is to make two instead of one; vince in bono malum.'[16]  You may say you could not have done otherwise, but that is just the question which is likely to haunt you for the rest of your life: was killing him really something you couldn't have avoided?

 

Note, too, that this is a particularly simple case, in that we have supposed a man who is plainly the aggressor attacking a man who is innocent and passive.  But as soon as you consider cases more realistic, because they are more like war, where you try to intervene between people fighting already, it becomes still harder to justify the death you may cause to one of the contestants.  Here are two men quarreling at a bar; after abuse they come to blows; suddenly they draw their knives, threaten each other, and inflict injuries.  If you intervene with your weapon to defend the one you think has been attacked, are you defending a victim, or merely making a fight for two into a fight for three?  And if you deal a mortal blow to the one you presume to be the aggressor, will you claim to have defended an innocent who was going to have had his throat cut?  You should have intervened, but without killing, and the murder is still a murder‑, you are likely to come out of the court less honorably than in the previous case.

 

 

 

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It is certainly a duty to defend someone whose life is threatened; otherwise you are an accomplice to his death; but that is by no means a good enough reason to believe yourself exempt from the duty of respecting the sixth commandment.  The real problem consists in defending your neighbor without killing your other neighbor Self‑defense is only legitimate in the sight of God when it is not murderous; and this applies to peoples as well as to individuals.  The sixth commandment shows us the 'strait and narrow way' between two crimes: it forbids us to kill a man or to let him be killed.

 

To conclude on this point, I absolutely agree with the commentary on the sixth commandment given by the Scottish Confession of 1560, quoted by Karl Barth: God orders us to 'protect the life of the innocents, resist tyranny, help the oppressed,' and forbids us to 'tolerate the shedding of innocent blood when we could stop it.'[17]  Probably the authors of this text saw it as an implicit justification of defensive wars, but I gladly accept it in its explicit formulation, even seeing it as a formal condemnation of war: for how can a Christian claim to be protecting the lives of the innocent if he begins destroying the lives of other innocent people?  How can he claim to be resisting tyranny if he begins exercising a tyranny as brutal and odious as the other?  How can he help the oppressed if he becomes an oppressor himself, helping the oppressors on his side?  How can he stop the shedding of innocent blood if he contributes to the shedding of innocent blood?  Common sense agrees with God's law in crying out: do not use high‑sounding hypocritical euphemisms to gloss over a mutual slaughter which is nothing but a collective criminal madness.  Murder does not protect anything, it destroys.

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

 

THE DEATH PENALTY AND THE POLICE

 

 

BUT the State is obliged on occasions to apply the death penalty, and consequently it has also the right to kill the soldiers of an enemy State which threatens it in criminal so fashion.’  This objection, intended to legitimize war, rests on a syllogism the premises of which are disputable: war is like the death penalty, the death penalty is legitimate, therefore war is legitimate.  What is such reasoning worth?

 

(a) First, is it sound to compare war to the death penalty?  After all, in civilized countries where it still exists,[18] the latter is reserved in principle for criminals whose crime is defined by law.  Impartial judges, having, that is, no personal interest in the matter under judgment, deliver a verdict only on the guilt of the accused according to the directions of the law.  If the court's sentence implies the death penalty, the executioner, who is also completely uninvolved till then, will carry out the execution impersonally.  The guilty person alone is put to death; his wife, children, and friends are not hanged or guillotined with him.

 

But in the case of war there is no international law to guide men, although treaties and great legal principles are invoked on both sides.  There is no definition possible of the criminal, or even of the aggressor, when each side, like quarrelling schoolboys, shouts at the other: 'You began it!' Each side is convinced of its own rightness and that it is the other side who are criminals, because their governments have subjected them to intensive propaganda, biased and often deliberately dishonest.  They slaughter each other on a vast scale, without regard for any moral law, limited only by the fear of reprisals.  It is not criminals who are killed, but women, children, old men, and soldiers whose sole reason for marching is that they are threatened with death if they refuse, exactly like those on our own side‑and who would declare that they are criminals ?  In war every nation in its madness tries to administer justice itself by any and every means.  Every government is at once judge, party to the dispute, and executioner (what an executioner!).  They do not seek the triumph of

 

 

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Right, but their right.  And when the carnage is over, despite the hypocritical proclamations of the conquerors, it is not law which has triumphed, but brute force.

 

The death penalty is intended to inspire a salutary fear in those who might be tempted to commit a crime; but war has no educative aim: it is a senseless disaster which leaves the survivors panting with hatred and fear.  Neither morality nor justice nor right nor civilization has gained anything by these monstrous orgies of destruction.  No real value has been protected.  War cannot be compared to the death penalty, and even if the latter should be legitimate, it would be absolutely no reason for considering the former so.  War is far more like a pitched battle between rival gangs than it is like the death penalty.

 

(b) 'But if the State has the right to put a criminal to death, then the sixth commandment does not apply to it so rigorously; and once you make an exception for the State in this, may it not have the right also to kill in war (defensive war, of course)?' Well, let us make sure that even the death penalty is legitimate from a Scriptural point of view.

 

Calvin, who sees the magistrate as charged by God with the mission of making the world obedient to the rule of the Decalogue, falls into a serious inconsistency on this.  After writing: 'Here arises an important and difficult question, whether it is not forbidden by God's law for any Christian to kill,' he still concludes by asserting the legitimacy of the death penalty.  Chenevi6re tries to explain Calvin's position thus: 'In other words, the commandment applies only to ordinary citizens, and by no means to the magistrate, who is subject to a different rule.'[19]  Calvin claims, in effect, that because they are entrusted with instruments of divine justice, magistrates tare not at all subject to common law in this respect.'[20] But this only pushes the difficulty further back, for are there then two moralities ?  And to what other rule is the magistrate subject?  Where does Calvin find the strange dispensation he grants the magistrate, and what is its scriptural basis?

 

Of course the magistrate does not behave exactly like ordinary citizens, of course it is his business to punish criminals.  But has he the right openly to violate God's law, of which he is supposed to be the guarantor?  But the individual murders from self‑interest, it may be objected, whereas the magistrate puts to death to safeguard justice.  Yes, that is very often true, but unfortunately not always.  In fact, it is seldom completely true, for 'justice' is always defending, more

 

 

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or less, certain privileges, and if killing is a violation of God's law, it will remain so, however disinterested.  In any case, to reject such a conclusion, arguments with more weight than Calvin's would be needed.  Moreover, how can the State hope to ensure respect for the Decalogue if it is itself ready to violate that rule?  The authority of those who say, 'Do as I tell you, but don't do as I do,' has never been very great.[21]  The least one can say is that the State is faced here by a terrible dilemma.

 

Barth would make a clear distinction between homicide as a just punishment and murder as criminal killing.[22]  But was the killing of Jesus murder or homicide?  From one point of view Pilate had the right to ensure the maintenance of the pax Romana by suppressing Jesus, a trouble‑maker.  This is only one example showing the inadequacy of this 'scholastic' distinction, for in the most 'justifiable' homicide there is always an element of murder.  Despite Barth, I don't think there are cases, however rare, where the Church can tell men that 'if they must kill then, they are not murderers.'[23]  The whole of Barth's theology seems in contradiction with such words, and whatever you call killing, it does not alter the facts.  Let us now seek instruction from the Scriptures.[24]

 

We have seen that the Old Testament uses and even abuses the death penalty, notably as a sanction against many crimes which today we should find it barbarous to punish in such a way.  It seems, however, that these penalties were not put into practice as strictly as one might think from reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy.  Not all children rebelling against their parents were stoned to death (Deut.  21:21), nor everyone guilty of adultery (Deut.  22:22): far from it.  All these terrifying threats of capital punishment scattered through the Pentateuch must doubtless be treated with circumspection.  Moreover, according to Genesis, God Himself was opposed to Cain, the murder of his brother, undergoing the death penalty according to the lex talionis: 'And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him' (Gen.  4:15).  There is surely a serious breach here in the theory of the death penalty; but in any case the Old Testament can only be normative for us by reference to the New Testament.

 

What do we learn from the New Testament on the death penalty?  We have already seen that the only two texts which might possibly be invoked in its favor the episode of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1) and the punishment of the incestuous man (I Cor.  5:5), cannot in fact justify it from a Christian point of view.  Nor without sophistry

 

 

 

THE DEATH PENALTY AND THE POLICE                 183

 

can Jesus' words to Peter after his arrest: 'Put up thy sword again into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword' (Matt.  26:52).  For Jesus did not say, 'They ought to be put to death,' and still less, 'You, my disciples, ought to take it upon you to carry out such an execution.’  He did not give His authority to a juridical principle,[25] and He certainly did not charge His Church with the duty of seeing it was respected.  He stated a fact, 'they will perish by the sword,' and rightly warned Peter that violence always breeds violence and therefore never 'leads anywhere.’  Tertullian has more of the truth when he says that Jesus 'by disarming Peter, disarmed all soldiers.'[26]  Let us at any rate say, 'all Christians.'

 

There remains Romans 13:4: 'For he (the magistrate) is the minister of God to thee for good.  But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.’  Calvin naturally sees this verse as justifying the death penalty: 'The magistrates must with force and violence put down the presumption of the wicked, who refuse to be governed by the laws, and must inflict punishments for their offences, such as the judgment of God requires.  For He says notably that they are armed with the sword, not only for dignity or display, but to strike the evil‑doers....  And here is a notable passage to prove the power of the sword.  For if the Lord, by arming the magistrate, also committed to him, and ordered, the use of the sword; then whenever he punishes evil‑doers with death, thereby executing God's vengeance, he is obeying God's commandments.  Let those who say it is bad to shed the blood of evil­doers go and plead against God.'[27]

 

Very well, we will plead against God‑in the name of Jesus Christ.  This one verse from Paul's epistle cannot stand against the whole of the New Testament.