What Jewish and Christian teaching says about defending your own life

There is a strange idea loose in modern life that the most moral thing a person can do when attacked is to be a good victim. Be quiet, be compliant, wait for the professionals, and if the worst happens, be admirably passive about it. Nobody who holds that view applies it to a child in a burning house or a stranger in a river, where we expect action. Only when the endangered life is your own does hesitation get dressed up as virtue.

The older tradition says otherwise, and it says so in the oldest sources the West possesses. Before the Second Amendment, before Locke, before the common law, there was a body of Jewish and Christian teaching on the question of whether a person may defend an innocent life with force. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is worth setting out carefully, because the right to arms rests on something deeper than a clause.

The claim and its terms

Let me state the claim precisely so that no one can say I am arguing something larger than I am.

The claim: The Judeo-Christian moral tradition holds that the use of proportionate force to defend innocent life, including one's own and one's family's, is morally permitted, and for those responsible for others is sometimes a duty. Because a right to keep and bear arms exists chiefly to make that defense possible, the right has moral roots older than any statute.

Three terms need defining. Innocent life means a person not engaged in aggression. Proportionate force means force reasonably necessary to stop the attack and no more. Duty means an obligation that falls on someone who has taken responsibility for another, such as a parent, a husband, a shepherd or a magistrate.

What the claim does not say matters just as much. It does not say that violence is good. It does not say that every believer must take up arms, and it does not say that a Christian who refuses to resist is wrong. It says that the tradition permits resistance, and that those who deny the permission are making an argument the tradition itself does not make.

The argument in four premises

One. Scripture treats innocent human life as bearing the image of God, and the prohibition on murder follows from that.

Two. Scripture and its earliest interpreters distinguish murder, the unjust taking of innocent life, from the killing of an aggressor in defense of the innocent.

Three. Later Jewish and Christian authorities, rabbinic and scholastic, developed that distinction into a settled doctrine of defense with conditions: necessity, proportion and right intention.

Four. A civil right to the means of defense is the practical condition for the doctrine to mean anything, since a duty to protect the innocent is empty if the law disarms the one who bears it.

If the premises are true, the conclusion follows. Let me take them in turn.

Exodus 22:2: the house-breaker

The passage everyone reaches for first is in the Book of Exodus, in the laws that follow the Ten Commandments. In the King James translation, Exodus 22:2 reads: "If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him." The next verse adds a qualification: "If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him."

The rabbinic tradition read the pair of verses as an ancient lesson in presumption. A man who breaks into a house at night, in the dark, must be assumed to be prepared to kill if he is resisted, because the householder cannot see him, cannot know his intent and cannot be asked to gamble his family's lives on the burglar's good manners. In daylight, when the householder can see what is happening and perhaps summon help, that presumption fades and the law demands more restraint. The details of that distinction vary among interpreters, and I do not wish to overstate their agreement. The principle is plain enough: the law of Moses did not require a man to submit to a night intruder.

The principle in the Talmud

The rabbis stated the principle in a sentence that became proverbial. The Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin, records the teaching that if someone comes to kill you, you should rise early and kill him first. The idea is known as the law of the rodef, the pursuer: a person who is pursuing another with intent to kill may be stopped, if necessary by killing him, because the pursued life takes priority.

Note what the principle is not. It is not permission for vengeance, and it is not a licence to kill the thief who runs away with your television. Jewish law limited the doctrine: the pursuer must truly be threatening life, and the rabbis discussed the duty to use lesser force where it would be enough. That concern for proportion is the same one the common law and modern statutes share.

The tradition also placed the burden on the third party. A bystander who could save a life by stopping the pursuer and does not has violated the command in Leviticus 19:16 not to stand idly by the blood of one's neighbor. Self-defense, in other words, was not merely tolerated. Defense of others was commanded.

Scripture beyond the law

The narrative books supply pictures that the law describes in the abstract. When the Jews rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, they were threatened by neighbors who plotted to attack. The book records, in the fourth chapter, that those who built did so with one hand at the work and the other holding a weapon, and that Nehemiah armed families by posting them behind the wall with swords, spears and bows. His exhortation to them is to remember the Lord and to fight for their brothers, their sons, their daughters, their wives and their homes. A defensive posture was not a failure of faith. It was part of the job.

The Proverbs, in the twenty-fourth chapter, instruct the reader to rescue those being led away to death and not to stand aside, which is the same duty of defense in the language of wisdom literature.

The New Testament is where the matter becomes harder, and I will not pretend otherwise. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:39) Jesus says not to resist an evil person and to turn the other cheek. At the Last Supper, according to Luke 22:36, he tells the disciples that the one who has no sword should sell his cloak and buy one, and when they present two swords he answers that it is enough. Interpreters have argued about that verse for centuries; it may be a literal command to carry arms or a figurative warning about the hostility ahead. I read it, with many others, as at least evidence that the disciples' possession of swords was not itself a scandal to the teacher.

Augustine and Aquinas

The great Christian thinkers worked these texts into a doctrine, and it is worth being fair about the order in which they did it.

Augustine was cautious. In his dialogue On Free Choice of the Will, he distinguishes between killing from a love of things that can be lost against one's will, such as one's possessions or even one's life, and killing from the right motives. He worried that a person who kills in defense of property or of bodily life shows a love for those things that is disordered, and he is more comfortable with defense by public authority than by a private person. That is a minority position in the later tradition, but the pacifist reader should know it exists and that Augustine takes it seriously.

Thomas Aquinas turned the question into an argument that has been the standard treatment for seven centuries. In the Summa Theologiae (II-II, question 64, article 7) he asks whether it is lawful to kill a man in self-defense, and answers that it is. His reasoning is the principle of the act with two effects. A single act may have two effects, one intended and the other beyond the intention. A man who defends himself intends to preserve his life, and the aggressor's death is not the intended end but a side effect of the necessary means. Aquinas then adds the limit: the act is unlawful if it is out of proportion to the end. If a man uses more violence than is necessary, it is unlawful; if he repels force moderately, the defense is lawful. And note one further point of his: it is not necessary to salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense in order to avoid killing another, since a man is bound to take more care of his own life than of another's. He also holds that a private person may not intend to kill; that belongs to those with public authority acting for the common good.

That is the doctrine in outline: permission, with conditions, and, as the Catechism later states, a grave duty when the life at stake belongs to someone you are responsible for.

The Catechism

The Catholic tradition summarized the doctrine in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraphs 2263 to 2265. Paragraph 2263 states that legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition on murdering the innocent, because the intention is not to kill, and it invokes the double effect Aquinas described. Paragraph 2264 says that love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality, so it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life, and that someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow. It adds the limit: if a person defends himself with more than necessary violence, the defense is unlawful, but if he repels the attack moderately, it is lawful. Paragraph 2265 says that legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for the lives of others.

That last sentence is the one I would underline. The Church does not describe defense of one's family as a regrettable permission. It describes it, in a case such as a father's or a mother's, as a duty. A tradition that says that cannot coherently be asked to approve of a law that leaves the duty unfulfillable.

Protestant sources agree in substance, though they speak with less central authority. The reformers, Luther and Calvin among them, taught that the civil magistrate bears the sword to restrain evil, and the confessions of the Reformation churches accepted defense of the innocent as lawful. I will not give you chapter and verse beyond that, because I would rather say less than say it wrong; the reader who wants the details should consult the confessions of his own church.

Locke and the law of nature

The tradition's most important handoff to the American Founding was through John Locke. In his Second Treatise of Government, written in the 1680s, Locke grounds the right of self-preservation in the law of nature. A man may defend his life against an aggressor, and the aggressor, by declaring a design against another's life, puts himself in a state of war and forfeits the protection he would otherwise enjoy. Locke adds a reason the Founders understood: the right of defense does not depend on the existence of a magistrate, because the magistrate cannot always be there.

That is the road from Exodus to the Declaration of Independence, whose first paragraph speaks of rights that are unalienable and endowed by a Creator, among them life. William Blackstone, whose Commentaries were the standard legal text in the colonies, called the right of personal security one of the absolute rights of individuals and described the right to have arms as an auxiliary right that serves to protect them. And in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court wrote that the inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right. The line from the Hebrew Bible to the Bill of Rights is not a straight one, but it is a line.

The strongest objection: the pacifist

The best argument against this essay is the pacifist argument, and I want to state it as a pacifist would, not as a caricature. A follower of Christ is told to love his enemies, to pray for those who persecute him, to turn the other cheek, and to put up the sword, since those who take the sword perish by it. The early Church, many historians note, was reluctant to bear arms. Mennonites, Quakers and others have borne witness for centuries that Christian love is incompatible with killing, and that the willingness to suffer rather than to kill is the highest form of faithfulness. These are not cowards. Many of them have paid dearly for their convictions, including conscientious objectors who served as medics under fire.

I answer with respect, in four points.

First, the pacifist position is a vocation, not a universal rule. The Church has honored those who are called to it, and the tradition of the just defense has honored those who are called to protect. Both traditions exist within Christianity, and neither has been declared heresy by the other.

Second, the texts that pacifists cite speak of personal injury, of being struck, sued or compelled, where the speaker is the one who suffers. Turning your own cheek is a different act from turning the cheek of a child. Jesus's command is addressed to my response to an insult, and it does not say that I may stand by while another is murdered. The tradition's duty of defense is about the third party.

Third, even if a believer chooses non-resistance for himself, he cannot make it the law for others. A pacifist may decline to own a gun. He has no claim to be protected from the choice of his neighbor who sees a different duty. A free society leaves each conscience its own territory.

Fourth, and this is a matter of plain consequence, the refusal to resist is not the same as the absence of harm. A policy of universal passivity is a policy under which the aggressor wins. The tradition has never held that the aggressor has a claim on the outcome.

What this does and does not prove

I am not claiming that the Bible has a position on magazine capacity, waiting periods or the licensing of carry. It does not, and those are questions for legislators and courts who must weigh them under the Constitution. I am not claiming that every person is morally obliged to own a firearm; some people should not, and many reasonable people choose other means of protection.

What the tradition does show is the moral ground on which the debate stands. If defense of the innocent is good, and sometimes a duty, then a law that makes defense impossible, as opposed to regulating its manner, stands in conflict with the moral order the Founders took for granted. A right to arms is not an invention of a lobby. It is a modern expression of an old duty to guard the lives of those you love, and it is no accident that the same people who treasure the one tend to value the other.

For more on the history of the right, see the equalizer, why a firearm matters most to the smallest person in the room, Blackstone's fifth auxiliary right and how it shaped American thinking on arms and How often Americans use guns in self-defense and why the estimates differ. For the faith side of the argument in a related field, A Muslim inmate's half-inch beard and the 9-0 ruling against Arkansas shows how the Court treats conscience, and Eight Myths About the Bill of Rights That Civics Classes Keep Repeating corrects some common errors about the amendments themselves.

The case in brief

1. The Hebrew Bible permits resisting a night intruder, and the rabbis built the rule of the pursuer, who may be stopped to save the pursued, with proportion as its limit.
2. Aquinas and the Catholic Catechism (paragraphs 2263 to 2265) hold self-defense lawful when moderate, and sometimes a grave duty for those responsible for others.
3. Locke carried the tradition into the law of nature, the Declaration and the legal learning of the Founders, and Heller names self-defense as central to the Second Amendment right.
4. The pacifist objection is serious and honorable, but it is a personal vocation that cannot be made a law for third parties or for a child's defender.
5. The tradition does not settle any gun regulation, but it does settle that defending the innocent is a good, and that a free people may not be stripped of the means.

What you can do: read Exodus 22:1 to 3 and the Catechism paragraphs 2263 to 2265 this week, then talk about them with your family or your congregation before the next time the subject comes up in the news.