Preston Sprinkle's Non-Violence Argument Summarized and Critiqued

Preston Sprinkle has a concluding blog post where he summarizes his pacifist argument.  It's a good, clear, summary, free from unnecessary polemics and distractions.  It gets to the heart of his Biblical case for pacifism.

Much of what he says is a summary of his book which I responded to and critiqued at great length in a series of posts already.  Anyone who hasn't read that series in its entirety might want to do so because I will not be repeating myself at length.  (I address almost all of his current arguments and others, including the Sermon on the Mount in the link above).

But I'll try to respond to some of the propositions he advances which go beyond the book or are central to his case.

Sprinkle: There is a certain logic to stuffing every murderer and pedophile and thief in a gas chamber, and this might lessen crime and make society a better place. But this doesn’t mean it’s the Christian thing to do. The whole “love your enemies” nonsense pretty much throws a wrench in that engine.

Preston Sprinkle on the Killer at the Door

It's hard to follow the logical structure in this latest post.  It's not clear what the central issue is that is being debated between Sprinkle and Wilson.

Sprinkle says that his main problem is with militarism:

My main problem is with the underlying spirit, which believes that power and violence is the way that evil is overcome. A spirit which proclaims:
      Of course we should carpet bomb terrorists.
      Of course we should kill people on death row.
      Of course we should take out the bad guys with as much force as necessary.
      Of course Christians can kill other people if it’s in war. (American Christians, that is.       Christians in other countries don’t get the same pass.)
It’s not our reluctance to use violence as a lesser of two evils—which acknowledges that it’s still evil. Rather, it’s the eagerness with which we think that violence is the best way to deal with evil, which is exemplified in American Christianity’s fascination with military might. The bigger, the badder, the better. Military historian Andrew Bacevich recently said: “Were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals, militarism in this…country becomes inconceivable.” 

The issue is with militarism--the underlying spirit of militarism.  But it's not clear to me to whom Sprinkle is referring or his intended audience.  The series of "of course" statements suggests he's referring to people who are confident in the claims that follow.  I would be one of those (depending at least on how one disambiguates those somewhat ambiguous statements).  I'm confident, because I've thought about the issue a decent amount, and the evidence against doesn't outweigh the evidence for.  I've never seen a good argument for pacifism and not for lack of trying.  But what's wrong with being confident based on your evaluation of the evidence?  Sprinkle too seems pretty confident.  One can be confident that it's sometimes permissible to use violence while thinking that violence is a last resort; one can think that violence is to be used as a last resort only when one has good evidence that it would be worse not to use violence in the particular situation.

But perhaps it's not confidence with the issue but eagerness.  Eagerness to choose violence as the best way to deal with evil.  Here again I wonder who in particular he has in mind or how many in his audience thinks this way.  Of course we know hotheads who have a penchant for violence, but how many are reading his blog?  I don't know any politician on either side of the aisle who thinks that violence is always or even usually the best way to deal with evil.  (He occasionally talks about the death penalty--which I've discussed before--but the death penalty is rarely used).  Like most issues, it depends on the circumstances.  Very few think that it's better to use violence if an equally good non-violent solution is present.  The debate, then, is over the empirical facts and whether violence in such-and-such circumstances is the best, final option rather than alternatives.  For example, would it be better to let ISIS continue to implement its destructive will on its defenseless victims, or does justice call for military action by the U.S. and/or NATO?  If the latter, will airstrikes be enough to stop the spread of Isis combined with strategically places special forces units, or must there be another ground invasion?  Failure to act could result in at least as much destruction.  Reasonable people can disagree about the likely outcomes.  The answers aren't always obvious.

Then the discussion takes an odd turn:

You want to use violence to defend your family in the rare (yet real) case that someone breaks into your home preprogrammed solely to massacre your wife and kids? Fine. Heck, in the heat of the moment, maybe I would too. But this isn’t the main problem. [my emphasis]The problem is that our posture toward our enemies and method of dealing with evil looks no different than the world’s. How we think about taking care of the person busting down our front door is only the tip of the iceberg.

In any case, let’s go ahead and dive into the well-known scenario thrown at pacifists to see if its ethic is worth its salt. My friend Nicolas Richard Arndt will stand in for our questioner who wants to show that pacifism doesn’t work in the real world. His name is really long, so we’ll just go with his initials (NRA). 

What would Sprinkle do if someone attacked his family?  Maybe defend his family.  Okay, fair enough.  It's not always easy to say what you would do.  (Though, I know what I'd do--defend my wife and defenseless kids with whatever force is necessary).  Then he switches back to posture--matters of the heart so to speak.  So what's at issue?  What Preston would do or matters of the heart? Or the morality of pacifism?

What follows after that is a long hypothetical conversation between Sprinkle and an NRA friend where Sprinkle changes the scenario.  It's again about what Sprinkle would do.  He'd use nonviolence to stop the attacker.  He doesn't have a gun.  What if he did?  He's shoot the gun out of his hand (maybe).  He'd pray. And so forth.

What is the point of this dialogue?  Is it to help us see what Sprinkle would or would not do?  He already said he might use violence in the heat of the moment; I see no reason not to take him at his word.  So what's the point of the long dialogue?  It looks like an extremely long red-herring fallacy.  It appears to serve no purpose other than to distract the reader from the issue of what one should or should not do if a violent criminal invaded one's home and mortally threatened one's family.

Finally, he wraps up the discussion by saying:

I don’t live in a theoretical world; I live in a world turned upside down by a God who justifies the ungodly and calls us to love our enemies.

What would I do if someone tried to harm my family? I’ll disembowel him before I slit his throat with a dull knife. But the question isn’t what would I do, but what should I do. 

So he would use violence.  Or is this tongue-in-cheek?  At any rate, what he would do does not matter.  The question is what he should do.

I agree!  (Then what was the point of the long dialogue?)  What one needs to get clear on is what should be done.  That way if one does find oneself in a similar situation, or finds oneself drafted in the military, or finds one's kid inquiring into whether he should go into law enforcement, one isn't having to think about what one should do in the heat of the moment and one is mentally prepared to do what one thinks one should do or refrain from doing what one thinks one shouldn't.

Sprinkle says he doesn't live in the real world.  He doesn't like this hypothetical scenarios of unlikely situations.

Of course we all live in the real world--the actual world.  But we also think about hypothetical situations, many of which never become actual.  What should I do if I flunk out of college?  What should I do if I ask this girl to marry me and she says no?  Who should I vote for if it's Trump vs. Hillary?  What should I say to my son if he wants to enlist in the Army?

Most cops and military personnel never fire a single shot in combat.  But they prepare both mentally and physically to do what they should and avoid what they shouldn't in the event that they are called upon to do so.  The relative unlikelihood only makes a difference in how much thinking and training are to be invested.  If a situation is very unlikely and not very important, less thought and training is to be invested; the more likely and important, the more thinking and training should be invested.

Matters of life and death are important.  Some thinking and weighing of arguments is a worthy investment even if the situations being thought about are unlikely. The stakes are high whether you act or refrain from acting.

Here's a real life situation, not a "theoretical" hypothetical (whatever that is): An impressionable student reads Sprinkle's book on nonviolence and pacifism.  He has a Christian father and relatives who are police officers.  They are sensible folk with no spirit of militarism.  They think that their calling is to bring salt and light into the police force.  They seem to be above average policemen.  The student, though, starts to question whether his relatives are Christians or at least good Christians.  Would the police force be better without them?  Should they find a new career?  Were they wrong about their calling?  How should he now relate to them?

These are questions worth thinking about.  Arguments for and against are worth weighing.  I find Sprinkle's discussion on the matter of police unclear.

For more on the issue see my post on Sprinkle's chapter on the attacker at the door.

Preston Sprinkle on Good Guys With Guns

The last time I wrote a critique of Preston Sprinkle's pacifist argument was a couple years ago, regarding his book on the issue.  Now Preston is taking on gun ownership and gun control, so perhaps it's time to dust off the old critical canon and fire off a blog post or two.

The latest is an exchange with Doug Wilson (I know nothing about Mr. Wilson other than what is posted in the exchange).  I think Sprinkle is on more solid ground than Wilson with respect to some of the Biblical passages discussed, e.g., the sword passage in the Bible described here, though I think Sprinkle ultimately has an unseemly dispensationalist view on killing and violence when dealing with the Old Testament.  At any rate, I don't have much to say about that post on Bible passages other than this. As with science, so with Biblical exegesis: theory is underdetermined by data.  What that means in science is that there is always more than one possible explanation for the data.  Determining the best explanation cannot be done solely by looking at the data.  The same is true with Scriptures.  Doctrine cannot simply be read off of Scripture.  Rather one has to take all of one's available evidence including evidence for how one ought to interpret Scripture.  Sprinkle does this in practice, in fact, appealing to law enforcement officers and FBI statistics elsewhere to make his case.  Yet he hasn't engaged in many philosophical critiques of pacifism.

I do have a few things to say on this post on good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns which goes beyond the Biblical data.  It's short, so the interested reader should read the whole thing first.  Commentary below the fold.

On Jeff Cook's Latest Post on Same-Sex Sex

I have numerous thoughts on the Biblical claims made by Cook but I assume Preston will address all of that in short order.  Here are thoughts on some of the other things he says in the latest post:

Theoretically, however, deontology and virtue ethics are mutually exclusive. Deontology judges the morality of an action based on the action’s adherence to a set of rules; virtue ethics judges whether one is acting from and seeking to exhibit certain character traits. One theory for gauging “what is good” aims at rule following, the other aims at becoming a certain kind of person.

Three Views on Hell and Hermeneutical Principles

Here are three views on hell:

1. Everlasting punishment.  Some people are punished forever.
2. Annihilationism: No one is punished forever but some are annihilated.
3. Universalism: (it comes in different varieties but here is the most plausible view by my lights) Some people are punished in hell for a finite time, then are saved and go to heaven.

My study of what the Scriptures say on the issue (and Biblical scholarship) suggests to me that 1 and 3 have perhaps a slight edge over 2 but that 1 and 3 have equally strong cases to be made.  By a study of "what the Scriptures say on the issue" I mean what they say fairly explicitly on the matter without taking everything said in the Bible and drawing lots of inferences (e.g. that God is loving, loving in the Scriptures entails this and that, etc.)

So what to think?  Well one could be agnostic on the matter.  The Bible just isn't clear so, who knows. But perhaps we can do better.

Here are some alternative ways one might come down on one side of the issue:
1. As I previously alluded to, consider what the Bible says as a whole about other things (love, justice, God's nature, etc.) and derive some probabilistic conclusions from premises from what else we know from Scripture.
2. Take into account what we know about God through personal experience.
3. Consider philosophical arguments about the nature of God, perfect justice, perfect love, punishment, etc.  In short, invoke perfect being theology.
4. Consider the weight of tradition and the fact that the Church is the "pillar and ground of truth" [this might be a species of 1 and 3 so for this post I'll ignore it]

It appears that options 2 and 3 are off the table (and perhaps 1 as well) for my friend Preston Sprinkle.  In a recent series of posts on the issue of hell he says:

Review of Preston Sprinkle's Nonviolence Book

A good while ago I promised a final post on Preston Sprinkle's book, Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence, with links to the entire series of posts.  I now make good on that promise and give a few final thoughts.

First Post: Introduction
Second Post: Meaning of 'Violence'
Third Post: Double Effect
Fourth Post: The Sermon on the Mount
Fifth Post: CHRISTIAN Pacifism
Sixth Post: Attacker at the Door
Seventh Post: Just War Theory
Addendum #1: On Good Guys With Guns
Addendum #2: Killer at the Door
Addendum #3: Non-Violence Argument Summarized/Critiqued

My primary objection to Sprinkle's pacifist case runs as follows:

Just War Theory in Sprinkle's Book "Fight"

This is the penultimate post in my series on Preston Sprinkle's book, Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence.  I plan to have one more post with links to all the previous ones.

Since I've already expressed my objections to what I take to be the core, Christian pacifist arguments of the book, much of what I've said before will apply to the appendix on Just War Theory--the theory which holds that some wars are just and traditionally lays out seven criteria, all of which should be upheld for a warring party to be on the whole just.  Theorists disagree about the precise criteria, but Sprinkle's list is a fair enough representation: (1) Just Cause, (2) Right Authority, (3) Right Intention, (4) Reasonable Chance of Success, (5) Last Resort, (6) Proportionate Means, and (7) Noncombatant Immunity.  Consistent with the rest of the book, Sprinkle thinks Christians should not fight in wars.  Since I don't think his case in previous chapters for total nonviolence for Christians is convincing, I remain resolved in my belief that there is merit in the traditional Just War Theory (which is really a family of theories). Nonetheless, I will take up a few passages from this section and reply to them for good measure:

Jesus's Example and The Attacker-at-the-Door in Sprinkle's Book "Fight"

This is the sixth post on Sprinkle's book Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence.  Since I've already dealt systematically with what I take to be the major issues of the book, I now begin to finish off this series by turning to a few miscellaneous passages that have been overlooked thus far.

#1: Violence and Jesus's Example

Sprinkle's Pacifist Reading of the Sermon on the Mount

This is the fourth post on Preston Sprinkle's book, Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence.

I think Sprinkle's strongest argument for his version of pacifism is probably his argument from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, which shouldn't be all that surprising since this is one of the key passages used by most Christian pacifists.  Sprinkle does his best to mitigate the seemingly obvious cases where violence is permitted in the Old Testament, but he seems to concede (a bit reluctantly perhaps) that certain acts of violence and killing were indeed permitted in Old Testament times.  But Jesus changes things, and changes things radically.   Jesus's pacifist position is so radical, Sprinkle's section in Chapter 7 ("Love Your Enemies") is titled "Outrageous Nonresistence."

Problem #1 with Sprinkle's Interpretation:

Sprinkle's book and the Meaning of "Violence"

This is the second post on Preston Sprinkle's book, Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence.

Since Sprinkle's book advocates a Christian case for nonviolence, it is important to get clear on what the definition of violence is with which he is working.  He gives his definition on pp. 30-32.

He begins with Stassen and Westmoreland-White's definition: "Violence is destruction to a victim by means that overpower the victim's consent."  Sprinkle remarks that, of all the definitions he's read, he likes this one the most (he then goes on to make an adjustment or two and gives his own definition which we'll get to in a moment).

What is it to "overpower the victim's consent"?  This is an odd phrase.  If I consent to your punching me in the face, and you punch me in the face, have I overpowered your consent?  If you're asleep and don't consent to being punched in the face, have I overpowered your consent if I punch you in the face?  Perhaps they mean that violence is the destruction (Sprinkle says they mean "harm") of a victim in cases where they have not consented to be harmed.  This is close to the Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of violence:

a. The exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; action or conduct characterized by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom.

The OED's second (and following) definitions, however, leave out anything about consent and just focus on harm.  Here is the second definition:

 b. In the phr. to do violence to , to do violence unto (or with indirect object): To inflict harm or injury upon; to outrage or violate.

So even though the phrase about overpowering consent is odd, I still think this first definition he offers of "violence" is plausible.  But Sprinkle does not settle on this definition.  Here is what he goes on to say about violence (we should note that he confines himself in the book to physical violence for matters of space and ignores psychological violence):

"I also want to modify the previous definition ever so slightly by adding a statement of intent.  In other words, an act of violence may not actually destroy the victim but is trying to destroy him or her. There are various activities, therefore, that could be violent--corporal punishment, mixed martial arts, etc.--but don't necessarily have to be.  It depends on the intent.
So for the sake of this book, I will use the term violence to refer to: a physical act that is intended to destroy (i.e. injure) a victim by means that overpower the victim's consent."

This is a narrower definition of violence than the previous one.  It's narrow because "violence" does not ordinarily imply anything about intent (in only one of the OED definitions that I came across does it mention anything about intent, the first definition above with the phrase "so as to," though even this is ambiguous).  One can witness a violent collision in football or a violent collision between two cars but have no idea about the intent involved.  In general, we can know that a collision was violent without knowing what the intentions were behind the violent collision (perhaps the car collision was an accident).  Another example closer to the subject of the book: a man takes a lot of drugs and gets so out of his mind that he goes on a violent rampage killing all sorts of people he doesn't know.  He is so high that he is barely conscious of what he is doing.  He had no intention of killing people when he took the drugs and while on the drugs he believes that he is in a video game and isn't intending to do violence to anyone; nonetheless, it is he who commits terrible acts of violence.

So Sprinkle is using the term "violence" in a narrowly defined way that is somewhat unconventional, employing both a concept of intent as well as consent.  "Violence" throughout the whole work will have to be understood as this term of art.  Of course, there's nothing inherently problematic with introducing a word as a term of art which means something slightly different than it would outside of its current context.  But there are a couple dangers: (1) Unless readers are frequently reminded that the term "violence" has a unique meaning, casual readers of Sprinkle's work will get the impression that (for example) when the Bible condemns certain acts of "violence" ("violence" as a term of art) that the Bible is thereby also condemning acts of violence (that is, violence regardless of the intent or consent).  (2) There is a danger that the author himself will slide from saying that (for example) the Bible condemns "violence" (the term of art) to violence (regardless of intent).

The general impression I get from reading "Fight" is that Sprinkle does not remind the reader enough that what is under discussion is (supposed to be) violence in his sense rather than the ordinary sense and many readers will thus likely conclude that violence (in the ordinary sense) is almost always wrong.  Nonetheless he does remind the reader of this from time to time, so perhaps I'm being too picky.  A greater problem, however, is that Sprinkle himself seems to sometimes forget the definition of violence he started out with and slides into discussing violence in the ordinary sense, and this is problematic for his argument.

Here are just two examples:

Preston Sprinkle's "Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence"

This is the first of a series of posts I intend to write on Preston Sprinkle's book "Fight."  The posts will be critical but I want to begin by saying a few positive things about the book before I begin my criticisms.

First, I should begin by saying that I am friends with Preston.  Or, if only hanging out with him and talking to him as seldom as I have aren't enough for our relationship to count as one of friendship, perhaps I should say that I am confident we would be friends if we were in closer proximity to one another.  I like Preston and we agree about way more than we disagree about.  And we have similar interests outside of academia.  I like Preston!  I just disagree with him about some key things in the book.

Second, I think his book is well written and ably covers a lot of ground.  His survey of the Bible and Church Fathers on the issues of killing and violence are interesting and his interpretations are not obviously false.

Third, I think he achieves his aim of writing a book for both scholars as well as non-scholars, but especially the latter.  His style is conversational enough that non-scholars should find the material both interesting and readable.  In addition, the book is well organized.

Finally, the book is fairly nuanced.  Preston is careful to refine his view when needed, and he presents and responds to a number of important objections to his view.  All in all it is a good book and one which counters an uncritical outlook by some Christians who don't take seriously what the Bible and Christian teaching have to say against some forms of killing and violence.

Having said all that, I do think there are some problems worth considering.