On Violence
Stone Choir
Stone Choir
4.8 • 585 Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2024
⏱️ 141 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hosts
‘The life of man upon the earth is warfare, and he is born to trouble, as surely as the sparks fly upward.’ — Job 5,7
We live in a fallen world. We can speak of a perfect world — and that is assuredly our goal and our destination, as Christians —, but the realities of this world cannot be ignored — Christians are not exempt from living in the world. From the very beginning of our species — when wicked Cain rose up and slew righteous Abel —, violence has never left our shadow. Although it was most certainly not part of God’s original or intended design for Creation, violence is just as certainly part of its fallen state.
It is not that violence is itself a good; rather, it is that violence is sometimes required to protect the good. When a man enacts violence upon a home intruder to defend himself, his wife, his children, and his goods, he is using violence toward a righteous and morally praiseworthy end. Throughout the pages of Scripture, God Himself uses violence against His enemies — from the genocide of Canaan to the Final Judgement, God employs violence consistently and constantly. Although violence will be absent from the new Creation, it will never be absent from this fallen one.
As Christians, we must not condemn violence qua violence for to do so would be to condemn God, which is apostasy; rather, we must know how to apply wisdom to these matters so that we align our actions and our beliefs with what God has commanded — and He both proscribes and prescribes violence, depending on the circumstances.
It is also necessary for the Christian, in order that he might act in wisdom, to understand the law — to understand the differences between and among things like advocacy, incitement, and fighting words. These are not trivial, unimportant, or tangential matters, for the life of man upon the Earth is one of conflict; even times of peace are seldom entirely free from violence, and they are often ephemera. A man must always do his duty, and at times that duty may demand violence — the police officer who protects his city, the soldier who defends his nation, the housefather who defends his home.
We are not and cannot be more moral than God, and of Himself He says:
“The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is His name.”
Show Notes
- Brandenburg v. Ohio
See Also
Parental Warnings
The word “ass” is used once at ~01:39. The term “pissed off” is used once around the same time.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm I'm Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. |
| 0:41.7 | And I'm still, whoa. |
| 0:44.3 | On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing something that has been going on in the world, |
| 0:50.0 | something that's been accused against us repeatedly, including very recently, that is the subject |
| 0:55.9 | of violence and the advocacy of violence versus the incitement of violence and various other |
| 1:02.1 | forms. So today we're going to be talking for a couple hours entirely about violence. |
| 1:08.5 | And we're going to have a somewhat lengthy preamble here to be very pedantic |
| 1:13.4 | about what it is that we are and are not saying because people are sloppy with words. And so |
| 1:19.2 | there are times when we will get into things definitionally where some people think that we're |
| 1:23.7 | being autistic, which is a stupid criticism. We're being precise because the words |
| 1:29.0 | matter. And so I didn't even realize that this was going on until this past week, until the |
| 1:36.1 | controversy that arose that precipitates initially the thought, and we'll get into a little bit |
| 1:41.4 | of the details, but not too much. But I realized that in the past couple of years when lying pastors and other false Christians |
| 1:49.3 | have slandered and accused Corey and me of advocating slavery or advocating genocide or advocating this or that, |
| 1:59.5 | it never occurred to me that in one very, very narrow sense, |
| 2:04.5 | they were not lying, but what they were doing was lying by connotation. And so here's what I |
| 2:12.4 | mean by this. That's not an admission of anything evil, by the way. And so this is going to be |
| 2:17.2 | an episode where you could very easily clip probably any 60 seconds and turn us into the bad guys because we're talking about something very difficult. But when you take the whole argument, it's like, well, yeah, that's clearly what's actually going on. |
| 2:30.3 | Advocacy is different than incitement, is different than encouragement. So one of the things that we do |
| 2:41.1 | on Stonequire very frequently, we encourage people to go to church and to read the Bible. We |
| 2:46.4 | exhort people to do the same. You might even say that we incite people to do the same. |
| 2:52.8 | And those three words all have slightly different connotations, but at the same time, they're synonyms. |
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