‘‘Killing in the Name of God’’
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William T. Cavanaugh
The Lord God said ‘‘You shall not kill’’ and yet those who profess to
be bound by these words do a lot of killing. Indeed, we are told, one
of the most fundamental contemporary threats to world peace is the
conviction of some that God not only does not forbid them to kill,
but positively commands them to do so. Commentary on the war in
Iraq and the ongoing ‘‘war on terrorism’’ often implies that a major
source of the violence is religion, specifically the fanatical conviction
that God commands acts of violence against the unfaithful. In common opinion in the West, killing in the name of God is subject to the most thoroughgoing distaste and reproach. In the ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ worldview,
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a dichotomy is established between religious
violence and secular tolerance. Secular societies still must resort to
violence, but it is the kind of controlled and rational violence necessary to contain essentially irrational religious violence. In this view,
killing in the name of God is always an outrage; killing in the name of
the secular nation-state can be necessary and praiseworthy.
In this essay I will argue precisely the opposite: killing in the name
of God is the only type of killing that could be legitimate. I will arrive
at this conclusion by examining the commandment against killing in
the context of the rest of the Decalogue and the biblical treatment of
violence. I will consider the biblical conviction that life is God’s alone
to give and to take. We are perhaps accustomed to applying this
conviction to other of the ‘‘life’’ issues: abortion, euthanasia, capital
punishment, genetic engineering, and so on. I think we are less
accustomed to applying the conviction that God alone is the Lord
of life and death to the issue of war. I will focus on war because it is
so timely and because too much of Christian reflection on war is
based on applying just war criteria in abstraction from the crucial
theological question of God’s command.
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