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.

Pacifism and Nonviolence

I have seen some Christian pacifists recently aver that Jesus advocated an ethic of nonviolence.  I have written extensively on the blog about pacifism and nonviolence in the past, most notably here.

Pacifism comes in various forms, but let us take the paradigm as our model which is the view that no one (or at least no Christian) should kill another human regardless of the circumstances.  And let us understand violence as the OED's primary definition of "violence":

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

One point that is seldom addressed is the fact that pacifism and nonviolence are not coextensive.  Neither of the following propositions are true by definition:

1. If pacifism were true, then no violence is permissible.
2. If no violence were permissible, then pacifism is true.

Start with number one.  One tells us that if pacifism were true, then one should never perform a violent act.  But it does not follow from the proposition that all killing is impermissible that one should never inflict injury upon someone else or damage property.  Even if pacifism were true, it does not follow that it is impermissible for one to destroy weapons intended to be used for terror or that it is impermissible to injure a terrorist.

Turn to number two.  Two tells us that pacifism follows from the impermissibility of violence.  Yet this does not follow, for one could nonviolently kill another person by giving him an overdose of morphine.  Euthanasia is a form of nonviolent killing (sometimes at the request of the one being killed).

So those who hold that Jesus teaches both pacifism and an ethics of nonviolence have not a singular but a dual task of proving both pacifism and an ethics of nonviolence, since the one does not necessarily follow from the other.

The Early Church Pacifists: Not so Fast

Glenn Peoples on the Fathers and the Early Church

Eye for an Eye: Whole World Blind?

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.  But pacifism makes the whole world full of bad guys and corpses of good guys.  Better blind than dead.

Of course there's a via media which I've alluded to before.

What Should Be Expected of Phil Robertson?

In response to the previous post JT Tweets:  Robertson was unwise, didn't reflect the gospel & lacked any nuance in that interview...and I don't think I'm a "leftie."

I agree, JT is not a "leftie."  But I don't agree that his interview had no nuance. For instance, he does say at one point that he'd prefer to sit down with people and have a Bible study and lead them to Jesus than go in guns blazin'.  Clearly his idea of conversion is not conversion by the sword.

Was what he said unwise?  Well, it was certainly not prudent if one of his goals was not to create a media firestorm in response to "convert or kill."  It was unwise insofar as Robertson is not a learned theologian, lacks significant nuance in his approach, and so forth.  But why should we expect Robertson to talk like a theologian?  Why should we expect someone who has been afforded the education and upbringing that Robertson has been afforded to talk like an educated scholar?  I think people have a right to make a fuss over what comes out of Phil Robertson's mouth only if it's reasonable that he's being willfully ignorant or saying things that are obviously false which are being taken seriously by the general public so as to lead them astray.  And I doubt any of that is the case.  If you want to blast Hannity or Fox News for taking someone like Robertson seriously in a news interview, go for it.  If Fox News wants to be taken seriously for journalism, it's fair game to criticize them for interviewing a Phil Robertson.

Does what he said not reflect the Gospel?  Well, he doesn't make reference to I Corinthians 15 (though he does mention leading people to Jesus).  Is going to war inconsistent with the Gospel?  In a certain sense, yes, since there will be no war in heaven.  In a certain sense, no.

 

 

Convert Them or Kill Them

Here we are again, listening to the media and social media blowhards fuss about Phil Robertson's latest PC-heresy.  The lefties are coming out in droves to make sure we realize that Christianity is no different than Islam, Islam is a religion of peace, and conservative kooks are so dumb that they are basically like ISIS/L.  So what DID Robertson say?  Here it is:

"In this case, you either have to convert them—which I think would be next to impossible—I'm not giving up on them, I'm just saying either convert them or kill them. One or the other."

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 Book "Fight" and CHRISTIAN Pacifism

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

An alternative title which would have been just as fitting is Fight: A Case for Nonviolent Christians.  For Sprinkle's pacifism condemns violence for Christians, but he leaves open the possibility that certain acts of violence may be permissible for non-Christians.  Here are a few quotations to make good on that last claim:

"So far, I've argued that killing is wrong and therefore killing the attacker is wrong.  In other words, killing is a moral absolute: Christians should never do it" (p. 222).

"The big question, of course, is whether a Christian can use violence as a police officer.  No, I don't think he or she can" (p. 248).

 Now, some interpreters say that Jesus's Sermon doesn't apply to governments, only to individuals.  There is certainly some truth to this.  After all, Jesus doesn't preach His Sermon to the Roman Empire or the American government.  However, the Sermon does apply to all citizens of God's kingdom, and it should saturate all areas of life. It would make no sense to say that the Sermon on the Mount is fine for individual Christians--even better for the church--but that it doesn't apply to Christians in the government" (p. 140).

"Romans 13 does not speak of Rome's warfare policy against foreign nations, but of its police and judicial action toward its own citizens.  Paul's phrase "bear the sword" (v. 4) refers to police action within a government's jurisdiction, not warfare outside its territory (p. 167)...Paul says that God's wrath and vengeance are carried out through Rome, and he has just commanded the church not to carry out such wrath and vengeance.  Vengeance is God's business, not ours.  We don't need to avenge evil, because God will.  And one way that God will is through governing authorities" (p. 170).

"In Genesis 9:5, God seems to allow the death penalty for murder" (p. 42).

"While God allowed Israel to participate in some wars, He never allowed His people to revel in the carnage the way their neighbors did" (p. 68).

Now, I don't want to give the impression that Sprinkle has a settled view with respect to the morality of non-Christians killing (or committing acts of violence more generally).  He is pretty coy about this issue, and this is one of the places where I wish he would've been clearer and would've said whether he thinks some non-Christian violence is permissible, impermissible, or that he's agnostic about the matter.  At any rate, what is pretty clear is that he thinks that Christians are called to forego all violence even if, perhaps, non-Christians are not.

Why, though, should we think that such an important moral demand is not universal?  Child sacrifice, stealing what one doesn't need to survive, adultery, murder, and so forth are all universally impermissible--no one should commit such acts.  Why think that violence isn't permissible for Christians but might be permissible for non-Christians?

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 "Fight" and Double Effect

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

In a prior post I discussed how Sprinkle's definition of violence includes an intent to harm and I mentioned how he appears not to stick with this definition throughout.  I ended by briefly noting how a discussion of the "Principle of Double Effect" would have mitigated this problem.  Here I want to discuss that principle and how it bears on his book.

The Principle of Double Effect (its earliest robust formulation often attributed to Aquinas) holds that some action A that has some evil E as a consequence is (at least) permissible if and only if the (a) action is itself neutral or good (b) there is some good G intended (c) E is not disproportionately evil compared with the goodness of G and (d) E is not intended as an end or a means of bringing about G.

Clause (a) rules out actions which, by their very nature, are evil.  Clause (b) rules out there being no good intention.  Clause (c) rules out cases where the evil consequences of an action outweigh the good. And clause (d) specifies that an evil not be intended as the means to the good or an intended result of the action. This last clause, though, allows that E is the means (or a means) to bring about G, but E cannot be intended as a means of E.

Now consider the following two cases where the Principle is applied:

Case #1: Harvesting organs
Dr. Smith knows that Jones will not survive unless he has another heart and a liver.  Sally has a good heart and Mary has a good liver.  Dr. Smith murders Sally and Mary so that he can harvest the organs for Jones.  The action in this case was not permissible.  It violated clauses (c) and (d) and probably clause (a) as well (depending on how the action is to be described).

Case #2: Upping the Speed Limit
Governor Smith is considering whether to sign or veto a bill upping the speed limit on certain roads.  He receives good evidence that upping the speed limit from 60 mph to 65 mph will increase the state's economy.  In addition, 95% of the population are for it.  Nonetheless, he also has good evidence that upping the speed limit will result in 20-30 more traffic fatalities per year.  After weighing the costs and benefits, Governor Smith signs the bill, intending the effect of improving the economy and pleasing his constituents while foreseeing (in all likelihood) that there will be more traffic fatalities but not intending either those fatalities or that the legislation as a means to that end.  Governor Smith has acted in way that is at least permissible (but perhaps has also acted justly).

I believe in the Principle of Double Effect, in part because I'm a deontologist and think that one's intentions matter and not just the consequences.  In addition, because so many of our actions/inactions do have foreseeable evil effects (like the one above), rejecting the principle would seem to me to result in moral paralysis, wherein moral deliberation about whether to act or not would become darn near impossible.

Application to Sprinkle's "Fight":

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.