The issue is not just the Second Amendment but how the Christian is to live as a symbol of the kingdom of God in a world racked by violence. In cities where gun violence ruins families and churches and communities and the lives of far too many. How does the Christian live in this world? Can the Christian own a gun? And, Should the Christian own a gun?
The author of the last chapter is David Lincicum, professor at Notre Dame University,
in God and Guns: The Bible Against American Gun Culture, edited by Christopher B. Hays and C.L. Crouch.
He has eight theses, which put the whole book into a summary statement:
1. Technologies extend the range of moral choices and possible actions available to the user.
2. A person wielding a gun has an enlarged range of Possible actions before him or her at any time, including the option to fatally shoot another human. Thus, the choice to carry or wield a gun should be conceived as a conscious decision to extend one’s moral capacities to include killing instantly.
3. The action of killing instantly, or attempting to do so, can be undertaken with a variety of motives (self defense, aggression, greed, intervention in a violent conflict) and so can be morally valu.ted in different ways. But humans act under the influence of passions, basic emotions, and dispositions that incline us toward one course of action or another.
4. Above all, the New Testament envisions the Christian life as a via crucis, a following after the one who was subjected to violent mistreatment and did not resist in return. The call to the imitation Christi means nothing if not this.
5. The Gospels depict Jesus himself as prohibiting acts of violence even in self-defense and speaking against being seized by the fear of death, which he considered only a penultimate reality.
6. At least in part, the New Testament’s prohibition of self-defense or self-preservation depends on the eschatological suspension of the quest for justice or retribution: that is, the conviction that things will be put right not in the present evil age but in the age that is to come, and not by human will but by God’s unerring restorative judgment.
7. The New Testament does not know the Enlightenment language of “rights,” but speaks of authority (in Greek: exousia) delegated by God to be used in the interest of human flourishing. Even then, in situations of the conflict of goods, the apostle Paul recommends privileging love over a private good and draws a stark distinction between the permissible and the commendable.
8. Nowhere does the New Testament envision the state and its laws as superseding the example of Jesus, or the common tradition of the church. The state cannot allow the Christian to do something Jesus forbids. Rather, the New Testament casts the assembly of believers as the determinative body of moral action, a countercultural community whose symbol is the cross.
And his concluding thought:
So can a Christian own a gun? In these reflections, I have argued that the broad shape of the New Testament’s vision of bodily life in this world militates against that possibility. The Christian should be a signum amoris, a sign of love, marked by contrast, rather than an armed reflection of the armed world. The gun is a temptation to become a kind of powerful self, with the capacity to kill instantaneously. This is an arrogation of power that the New Testament’s witness does not support, even in self-defense.
As an Australian looking in from outside, I shake my head in disbelief that we christians even question these issues. Personal ownership of such weapons only multiplies the possibility of injury and death, whether unintentional or deliberate. Why would a follower of Jesus see that as a good thing?
Ownership of guns here is tightly controlled for the benefit of the community. If you’re not a farmer, a vermin shooter or a sportsperson, you’ll have to justify your need to acquire a weapon. And you’ll only be allowed to acquire a type of weapon that suits your specific need. And we like it that way!
However, I’d differentiate between private ownership of weapons and governmental ownership. Paul accepts that government has a role to enforce the rule of law and punish wrongdoing. So I have no issue with authorities (police, armed forces) having weapons, as long as their use is tightly controlled.
I was a serious scripturally and theologically based Christian pacifist for about 42 years. I finally realized that defense of the innocent was a legitimate reason to use a gun and even own a gun. I got to this realization from backing up through accepting Christian participation in war possibly being justified as the more loving thing to do (depending on the circumstances!). Likewise, having a weapon with which one might protect the innocent may be the more loving thing to do (given appropriate training, expertise, and some very particular circumstances!). I think this perspective is just as biblically rooted as the pacifist view.