IS THERE A TIME TO KILL?


September15th 1997


The next issue, Number 17, will appear on October15th 1997.





This question was raised by a lady I know; she is a Minister of the Kirk and she was referring to the famous passage in Ecclesiastes (Ch 3 1-8, with particular reference to verse 3 "(There is) a time to kill and a time to heal ..............

She seemed to me to be inviting the affirmation that there is truly no such thing as a time to kill.

Let us suppose, I think fairly, that she was referring to human life rather than to life of other species and let us assume that "kill" refers equally to taking one's own life as much as to taking another human life.

It is clear that this minister's apparent leaning, towards affirming that there is truly no such thing as a time to kill, is contrary to traditional Christian practice. The sixth commandment has been disregarded routinely by believers (as well as by others of course) and is indeed flatly incompatible with Ecclesiastes 3:3. The church, in most of its main branches, acts on Ecclesiastes rather than on the Decalogue. Practically, we all do so.

Many Christian authorities currently support capital punishment and agree that there are sound criteria for waging Just War - which, of necessity, entails killing people without regard to their individual innocence or guilt.

In the past, Church-authorised killing has been even more in evidence than is now the case. The church did not shrink from killing heretics, did not shrink from visiting war on the infidel, has revered people who have de facto committed suicide by refusing to renounce their faith (knowing that a martyr's death would result from their tenacity and indeed that such a self-procured death would be celebrated by the faithful).

A Bible-based view of life clearly does not shed much light on my friendly minister's question. Can the godless view do any better?



First let it be admitted that secularists have been just as murderous as anyone else. (Incidentally, the example often quoted - that of the Nazis - is not relevant here; the leading Nazis, including Hitler himself, were Catholics and were, I understand, never disowned by the Church during their years of power. The other example of perceived atheistic murderousness - that of Stalin - is sometimes denied on the ground that he was educated in a theological seminary but this is disingenuous; Stalin became an explicit atheist long before he became actively instrumental in the deaths of millions. Hitler was not an example of atheistic murderousness; Stalin was).

Believers and unbelievers alike have been, and continue to be, perfectly willing to kill and ever ready to make excuses for so doing. The question arises - are these excuses ever any better than mere excuses, are there sound reasons for killing human beings, is there ever, properly speaking "a time to kill" ?

Yes, I claim that there are times to kill and we ought to say so honestly - because that is what most of us think. It is true that good people regret the moral imperative sometimes to kill but it is also true that good people can, should, and often do, act on regrettable moral imperatives.

Times to kill might include capital punishment in some appropriate cases. Mass serial homicidal maniacs, in many instances, kill themselves and we should give them the credit for ending their own lives and, that being so, we ought to have been willing to execute them anyway. It is unbecoming to anti-capital-punishment people to be glad when a homicidal maniac commits suicide simply because it lets them off the capital punishment hook.

The classic criteria relating to just war - formulated by the church - are, briefly:

1) Do not go to war until peaceful resolution has been attempted unsuccessfully;

2) Do not go to war inviting certain defeat;

3) Use only minimal force to achieve victory;

4) Treat your defeated enemy with magnanimity.

These are very sensible criteria - a pity they are not acted upon more conscientiously. They make good secular sense; Biblically speaking, they are Ecclesiastes-based rather than Decalogue-based.

As for abortion, that is an age-old practice to which the church has objected only recently.

A secular liberal view of abortion might well be that a pregnant woman has right to seek abortion; a more radical secular liberal view (which, it happens, I take) is that a pregnant woman has a duty to procure abortion UNLESS both of two conditions are met, viz, that she really wants the child and that she can truly see her way to its having a fair chance of being supported properly until majority. If she cannot meet these conditions with reasonable confidence then she will be risking bringing an unloved uncared-for baby into the world - and that is a risk she should not take with what is, after all, somebody else's life.

If we amend Ecclesiastes very slightly to read something like "there is a time to kill (the foetus) and there is a time to carry (the foetus) to term" then we are not far from the liberal secular view of abortion. Of course, there is no known version of Ecclesiastes that says this but to say it is, perhaps, a possible reading of Chapter 3 verse 6 - " ... a time to keep and a time to cast away ... "

That last line of thought may be, I grant, a bit thin but the very essence of the liberal secular view of another life/death issue - euthanasia - could hardly be put better than "there is a time to kill and a time to heal."





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