Violence in Christian preaching addresses the destructive power of sin manifesting in harm, conflict, and injustice among humans. Illustrations often contrast worldly brutality with God's call for peace and righteousness, drawing on themes like the dangers of anger and the pursuit of holiness (James 4:1-3; Zechariah 8:16-17). It challenges believers to confront both external violence and internal strife with faith and truth.
A couple in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, were watching the news -- and got into an argument. The fight escalated when the husband slapped his wife, and she retaliated by smashing a jar over his head. So what spawned such a rage? “The violence on the news was disconcerting to the woman,” said an Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman.
________
Surrey Now newspaper
Last week I took my young sons to see a movie seething with implicit sex and violence. No explicit sex scenes were shown, and blood and gore was absent, but the subtext of raw violence and animal sexuality was everywhere. And the film was rated G.
We were, of course, in the theater watching Disney’s release of “Earth,” a nature documentary with spectacular visuals and a kind of forced narrative about polar bears, elephants, whales, caribou, cranes and an all-star cast of creatures. Some of the creatures die.
Newsweek magazine warned parents that, despite its G rating, EARTH could be disturbing to children. There’s no splattered blood, but a baby elephant wanders away from his mother, a pride of lions take down an elephant, and so on. The film shows a slow motion cheetah-antelope chase with the motion slowing further as the predator catches his prey and places his paws around its face. It was reminiscent of the staircase scene in “Gone with the Wind.” We don’t need to see what happens next to get what happens next.
The EARTH producers told Newsweek they tried to defang the most disturbing parts of the film, but, well, that’s the way nature is, red in tooth and claw.
That’s why I, as a Christian, am thrilled to see both sides of the dilemma for Disney. It is human to acknowledge both the beauty and the horror of the reigning natural order. It is human to cringe in the face of its cruelty and to sit in open-mouthed awe at its glory.
The Scriptures tell us both. The creation has been frustrated since the primeval insurrection. Human rule has been overturned, supplanted with a rule by the craftiest of the beasts (Genesis 3:1). Since the dragon is himself a predator (indeed a murderer) he has no interest in exercising benevolent dominion over the beasts. Fallen humanity, reflecting its snake-god, has become animal-like, captive to instinct and appetites. We acknowledge the beasts but only to emulate them and to worship them (Romans 1).
The Creator, therefore, subjects the creation to a “futility” under which the creation groans “the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). But even this is subjected “in hope” (Romans 8:20). God gives humanity, after the flood, the flesh of the beasts for food, but he does so by simultaneously putting the “fear of you and the dread of you” (Genesis 9:2) within the instinctual center of the animals. This is to show that animals are not mere fodder for humans, to be harvested simply like grain. The fear of man in animals is to signify that the image-bearer is now, in some sense, a twisted interloper in this order. It also gives the animals, as my fellow Mississippian Jerry Clower might put it, “a sporting chance” in the arena of hunter and hunted.
The sense of sadness at the starvation of an elephant or the mutilation of an antelope is not simply the sentimentality of post-Bambi American culture, although, to be sure, some of it is. We’re supposed to feel a certain kinship with the animals. That’s why the bloody sacrifice of birds and bulls and lambs among our ancestors could correspond with what was to happen at the Place of the Skull.
Being reminded of the wildness of the wild kingdom can be a helpful reminder to followers of Jesus. This universe is not the way it’s intended to be. It is bloody, violent and often chaotic. We do not, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, yet see all things under the feet of humanity. But, “we see him who was for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death” (Hebrews 2:9).
“Earth” is G-rated. Earth is not.
What does Judges 4-5 mean to abused women who fought back?
Danielle was lying on her living room couch in Betty Boop pajamas, reading a book, when a man kicked in her front door. He had just been involved in a drug deal gone bad, and he was enraged. He demanded Danielle’s money.
Danielle remembers asking, “Why are you doing this?”
He answered, “Because I can.”
By the end of the night, Danielle had been strangled nearly to death multiple times. She’d managed to grab a Ginsu bread knife and land one blow to the man’s leg. She’d watched as that one small cut — miraculously — seemed to slow the assault against her, and she’d watched her kitchen fill with blood from that one wound on his leg. Danielle had called 911, and when her assailant’s heart stopped she’d been talked through how to give him CPR for 17 excruciating minutes. When help finally arrived, the man was dead.
Danielle went with the police — shaky, swollen, but willing to answer all their questions. At the end of the night, she was charged with first-degree murder and told that she could get the death penalty for killing the man. The reason? He was her boyfriend.
“If a stranger had did what he did. . .” Danielle pauses and shakes her head, the end of the sentence lost somewhere in her disappointment and disbelief. I knew the end of the sentence. The story has become familiar.
Finishing for her, I say, “If a stranger had done what he did, it would have been considered self-defense.”
I had been a chaplain at a women’s prison for a year before I realized that almost every woman I met who was doing time for murder had killed an intimate partner who had been abusing her for years. Some were serving four-year sentences for manslaughter, others were serving 15 to 20 years for first- or second-degree murder, and still others were in prison for life. Two of my congregants began their incarcerations on death row, having been given death sentences for killing men who actively tried to kill them first. I can still remember feeling shock, confusion, and a righteously sized anger as I learned that these situations were not considered self-defense.
This wasn’t always the case. In Women Who Kill, Ann Jones explains that until the 1970s, battered women who killed their abusers were often acquitted on grounds of self-defense or insanity. But as the rising rate of incarceration dovetailed with a wave of publicity surrounding the prevalence of wife-battering, prosecution of such crimes began to shift. The publicity about domestic violence had been meant to increase public awareness of the issue and garner sympathy for women’s resistance. But in a sickening irony, the affirmation of women’s agency warped into a suspicion of women’s motives. If women were killing in order to get away from abuse, the argument went, they should be punished to the full extent of the law.
In Convicted Survivors: The Imprisonment of Battered Women Who Kill, Elizabeth Leonard explains that self-defense law allows someone to use “reasonable force” when she believes herself to be in “imminent danger.” The force used in defense must be proportionate to the force used in the attack against her and must be the “only means of preventing harm.” At each of these points, women’s typical modes of self-defense are disqualified. Women who ultimately kill their abusers have learned from years of experience that they are no match for their partners. Research shows that men are able to kill their partners with their hands and feet, beating and kicking them to death. Leonard explains that in intimate homicides, beating and strangulation “appear to be exclusive to male offenders.” When women defend themselves against such attacks, the use of a weapon is necessary, reasonable, and proportionate. Yet the courts repeatedly rule that the use of a weapon disqualifies battered women from invoking self-defense.
Women are also denied the use of self-defense by a discrediting of the “imminent” nature of the threat against them. The argument goes that they could have escaped, that lethal force was not the only option open to them. Women often kill their abusers when they are asleep, incapacitated, or in a temporary lull between violent acts. In Justifiable Homicide: Battered Women, Self-Defense, and the Law, Cynthia K. Gillespie notes that even something as simple as the existence of a door in the room in which an attack occurs has been used to argue that a woman could have, should have, escaped, and therefore her use of force to defend herself was not a necessary act of self-defense.
The Bible does contain an example of a woman who killed a violent man in exactly the same patterns by which abused women today fight back against their abusers. Jael kills Sisera in her home, while he is asleep, with the use of a weapon. And she is lauded for it.
I first offered this interpretation of Jael at the women’s prison in a class called Prison and the Bible. We were crowded into a circle of 25 women in a double-wide trailer that serves as both our school and our chapel. We had placed a small podium at the front of the circle, and a woman named Bella had just shared her story aloud, a story similar to Danielle’s. I made my way to the podium, and we opened our Bibles to Judges.
Judges 4 introduces the reader to Sisera by telling about his violence. Sisera had “cruelly oppressed” Israel for 20 years, such that she was crying out to God for help (4:1). The story then cuts to a courtroom drama involving a judge named Deborah. Between trials, Deborah calls for military leader Barak and tells him that if he will go up against Sisera, God will deliver Sisera’s army into Barak’s hand. But Barak seems to know how difficult such an attack would be. He is out of his depth. He is scared. He asks for Deborah to join him in the fight. Deborah responds, “Very well, I will go with you. But because of the way you are going about this, the honor will not be yours, for the Lord will hand Sisera to a woman” (4:9, NIV).
Sisera brings 900 iron chariots to battle. Israel has no such strength, but she stands to fight anyway, desperate for these 20 years of oppression to end. And we are told that the Lord fights with and for Israel. As she stands to fight back against great odds, the Lord goes ahead of her and routs Sisera’s army. We are told that all the troops of Sisera fell by the sword that day; not a man was left (4:16).
Except Sisera himself. The leader, the most powerful one, the one we are told has been oppressing Israel, slips away on foot to the tent of his ally Heber the Kenite. But Heber isn’t home. Jael, Heber’s wife, goes out to meet Sisera and invites him into her tent. Sisera asks for water. Jael gives him milk and covers him up. Sisera tells her to stand by the door while he sleeps and protect him. Jael obeys. She stands watch as he falls asleep. Then she “picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died” (4:21).
The Bible says that when Jael killed Sisera, God subdued Israel’s enemy (4:23). Jael does not do what is expected of her. She violates hospitality. She violates her husband’s alliances. She violates gender roles — one of very few women in the Bible to kill anyone at all. Jael keeps her own counsel. She chooses to kill a violent oppressor, and by her act Israel “grows stronger and stronger” (4:24).
Jael’s crime meets all of the conditions for a conviction of first-degree murder. Her deliberate use of a deadly weapon, the tent peg and hammer, establishes a clear and premeditated intent to kill. She is in no imminent danger, as it has been defined in America’s courts, because Sisera is asleep and she is in her tent with access to a doorway (4:20). Indeed, the poetic rendering of Judges 5:25 suggests Jael may have intentionally administered a soporific. Sisera asks for water, but Jael gives him chem’ah, translated “cream, fat, or butter,” and covers him up, encouraging him to sleep. Her use of deadly force is not proportionate, since no force has, as yet, been used against her. Furthermore, the text indicates that Sisera can reasonably expect safety because Jael’s husband has an alliance, literally shalom, with the King of Hazor (4:17).
On these grounds, Jael could have easily been condemned to death in our courts. But instead of condemning her the Bible tells Jael’s story a second time, this time in the form of an epic poem. It is as if the text knows that Jael’s actions are open to misinterpretation, and so the text is explicit. Jael’s actions are worth singing about. They are the actions of God working in her. The poetry of Judges 5 erupts with praise, “Most blessed of women is Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite! Most blessed of tent-dwelling women!” (5:24).
As I proclaimed in that double-wide trailer, “Most blessed is Jael!” the room fell silent. The silence stretched on and on, until one woman, another lifer who was also in for killing an abusive partner, sighed aloud. “This world would be a lot different if people called us blessed,” she said.
Judges 4–5 works through a cycle of pretelling, telling, and retelling the story of Jael. The reader is prepared for Jael to drive a tent peg through Sisera’s skull because Deborah has predicted it as the means by which Israel will be saved. To pre-dict something is to say it in advance, and such saying does not need prophetic skill. Indeed, battered women killing their batterers can be said in advance, predicted, simply because it has continued to happen — again and again, according to the same patterns, with the same risk factors, after multiple calls to law enforcement — for centuries. Jael’s story is not only talked about before it happens, it is also retold after the fact. Deborah and Barak join together to sing Jael’s song (5:1). In singing it, they offer an interpretation. Every life is precious. Every death to be mourned. But if one person continues to flout such truth, God will fight against him for the safety of God’s people — through government, through the stars in the heavens, and through tent-dwelling women, housewives like Jael (5:19–24).
According to law professor and attorney Victor Streib, 53 percent of the women on death row in the United States in the year 2000 were there for killing abusive partners. Many more are serving life sentences, often with the story of their past abuse having never gone on record. Bella, the woman who shared her story for the first time that night in the double-wide trailer, says that her main regret looking back is not having stood up and told the story of her abuse at her trial.
________
Sarah Jobe is a prison educator through Duke University Divinity School and a prison chaplain through Interfaith Prison Ministry for Women.
TIME magazine carried a story about a man who is also on a mission of redemption. Along the way this man has survived fifty-three gun battles. His name is Bill Tomes. Tomes roams the streets of the toughest neighborhoods in downtown Chicago. His mission is to share God’s love with the gang members, drug pushers, and prostitutes that he finds there. And fifty-three times so far, Bill Tomes has stepped into the middle of a gang gun battle, but he’s never suffered even a scratch. Bill believes that God called him into this work, and so he trusts that God will protect him, even when the bullets are flying all around him.
Fifteen years ago, Bill was trying to decide what to do with his life. Although he was not a religious man, Bill stopped by a church to pray over his decision. As Bill knelt in the church, he passed out. But as he was losing consciousness, he says he heard God talking to him. The voice gave him only one instruction: “Love. You are forbidden to do anything other than that.”
Bill began giving away all his possessions, because they had lost all meaning to him. He also began hanging out in violent, rundown neighborhoods. At first, the local gangs took a vote as to whether Bill should be killed, but once they saw the kind of work he was doing, they decided instead to protect him.
So every day finds Bill Tomes out on the streets of Chicago, offering love and support to anyone who needs it. He hands out friendship and advice, gives people rides to the store, buys them food, bails them out of jail, listens to their problems. He has even comforted the dying. Once Bill came upon a young gang member who had been shot and left to die in the stairwell of an old building. Bill held the young man and told him about God’s love. It may have been the first time that anyone had told this young man that he was precious and loved. And the young man drifted off to a peaceful death in the arms of someone who cared about him.
Bill Tomes is not a timid man. Why? Because he is driven by love the love of Jesus Christ. Bill Tomes is not a timid man. Why? Because he is a man on a mission -- a mission that gives him spiritual power.
===========
Original article (the magazine hardcopy is dated April 20, 1998, p. 34-37):
"In The Line Of Fire," by Ron Stodghill II of Chicago, Time Magazine, Aug. 24, 2002,
It’s a chilly night on Chicago’s Near North Side, and Bill Tomes is sitting comfortably in the warm interior of his silver Buick Park Avenue. Playing softly on the stereo is his favorite cassette, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic’s Saint-Saens. For a moment, at least, the melody seems to have transported him away from this place he calls the “killing field,” an eerily barren patch of inner-city landscape that glows starkly in his headlights.
Tomes -- or “Brother Bill,” as he has come to be known -- has seen some of his best friends murdered on this field. The victims are not pals from his college days at Notre Dame or buddies from the well-to-do Evanston neighborhood where he grew up. They are mostly the hardened souls of the Gangster Disciples, their Vice Lord rivals and a tally of cross-fire casualties who lived in the wretched Cabrini-Green housing projects* just a mile or so from Chicago’s gleaming downtown.
There is Charles Dorsey, dead at 27; Elbert O’Neal, 24; Aron Buckles, 21; Derrell Ellis, 16; Laquanda Edwards, 15; Laketa Crosby Rodgers, 9; and Dantrell Davis, the youngest, shot to death at 7. Tucked away at home, Brother Bill has a black leather attache case packed with more than 100 obituaries of these, the young and the dead, now gone from his flock.
Fifteen years ago, an extraordinary epiphany drew William Wylie Tomes Jr. to a series of Chicago housing projects, including Cabrini-Green. Since then, as a Roman Catholic lay worker, he has embraced the people of the projects as if they were family and tried to steer them off the path to an early grave. As a consequence, Brother Bill is perhaps the only outsider who can walk freely through the 15 buildings that make up Cabrini-Green or penetrate the paranoid, often vicious circle the gangsters have built around themselves.
“What up, Brother Bill!” a voice booms outside the car. Brother Bill gets out of the car and hugs the boy. “You da man,” the boy says, his shoulders hunched in the cold as he awaits customers for the crack cocaine and heroin he is peddling.
“Naw, Dee, you da man,” Brother Bill belts out in his best street drawl. “Always will be.”
Everyone in Cabrini-Green, it seems, knows Brother Bill, 63. He is a difficult man to overlook, his 5-ft. 11-in., 220-lb. frame clad in a trademark flowing, sky-blue cassock made from hundreds of tattered denim patches. That robe has become an understood symbol of peace and humility in this place with precious little of either. Fifty-three times, by his count, he has waded into gunfire in order to stop it. Fifty-three times, the gunfire has stopped. And 53 times, he has emerged unscathed.
He talks trigger-itching assailants into putting away their guns and going home to their families. He sits beside wounded gangsters who hope to die and persuades them to live. And he insists that there is nothing special about him or his accomplishments. “I’m an ordinary man on an extraordinary mission,” he says.
Inevitably, Brother Bill, whose small stipend of $20,000 is funded by the nonprofit Catholic Charities, has his critics. But not many. Some say he goes too easy on gangsters who recount their murderous acts to him without fear of betrayal, who borrow money from him and never pay him back, who curse, smoke and drink around him as if he were one of them. “He gives all his attention to the wrong people,” gripes a Cabrini resident.
Brother Bill doesn’t subscribe to tough-love theories. He believes that gangsters will not change their ways simply through fear of prison or even the carrot of education or employment -- but only by viewing themselves as under the light of a divine presence. He doesn’t preach; he loves. His vulnerability, his willingness to put his life on the line, his unconditional offering of acceptance and forgiveness and, yes, love are a constant source of astonishment for men and boys weaned on hate and rejection. “I think he’s an angel,” says a 22-year-old Vice Lord. “I really think God sent him here.”
Lessons, though, walk at their own pace. And Brother Bill can hardly trumpet a major victory over gang violence. True, Cabrini-Green enjoys more spells of peace than it has in years. And some hard-core gangsters have managed to break away to find jobs and move from the projects. Nonetheless, in a city with an estimated 125 active criminal gangs with as many as 70,000 members, Cabrini-Green remains the most entrenched subculture around of poverty, drug use and gang violence. So much so that the Federal Government has begun, in piecemeal fashion, to simply tear the place down.
But Brother Bill keeps only one stat: souls saved. And he tries to save them with one small act of kindness at a time. When a rusty green Ford sedan pulls up, he senses that Dee has become distracted. A customer has arrived. Dee hugs Brother Bill and walks off. Then he turns around and yells back, “Yo, I need a ride to the courthouse Monday. Can you gimme a lift?”
Brother Bill nods a yes and gets back into his car. Driving off, he turns up the volume of Saint-Saens. As rain and snow come down hard on the windshield and the classical music begins a crescendo, the old Catholic missionary looks suddenly weary. He is still recovering from a recent triple-bypass heart operation, and he’s been told the prognosis is not good. “People think I’m a fool,” he says, “but I love these guys -- all of them. I know that many of them have done some really bad things, even killed people. But no matter what, I won’t turn my back on them.”
Brother Bill is standing with the gang members on their usual gathering spot outside a building in Cabrini-Green, the place where drug users looking for marijuana, crack cocaine or heroin can always find it. The air is frigid but charged with the warm sound of horseplay and laughter.
“The first time I got shot, I cried like a baby,” says Paris, a flamboyant 21-year-old. “And I didn’t care who saw me -- I just cried.”
Pat, another gang member, chimes in: “When that bullet goes into you, it hurts like nothing you’ve ever felt before.” Says another: “It burns like hell -- like fire.”
“Every time I take a bullet, I only have one request,” says another gang member softly. “And that’s for a cigarette. I always smoke when I get shot.”
The group laughs uproariously at memories of their brother sprawled and bleeding on the sidewalk, puffing a Newport. The stories help break the monotony of the gang’s three-hour security shifts, in which they look out for cops and frisk customers entering the building to score.
Brother Bill listens to the stories with mixed amusement and empathy. He knows too well the whistling sound of a bullet that misses. As he listens, he can’t help recalling his life-altering experience 15 years ago -- one that hit him with all the force of all the bullets he has since survived.
“I was trying to decide between two good job offers when I stopped into St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Church to think things through,” he recounts. “When I knelt down, everything turned fuzzy except the face of Christ on a painting near the altar.” The image at the altar issued to Tomes the first of several direct orders that would haunt him for the next three years:
“Love. You are forbidden to do anything other than that.”
Tomes has told this story, about the first of what became a string of epiphanies, hundreds of times, and always with the same sense of genuine astonishment. Until that moment he had never thought of himself as a particularly religious man. Born in a middle-class home in Akron, Ohio, and raised in Evanston, he stood out as a gifted artist and athlete. He received Jesuit training at Loyola Academy before attending Notre Dame, where he studied English and philosophy and received a bachelor’s degree, then two years later a master’s in counseling and guidance.
Tomes spent the next 15 years working as a counselor for Catholic Charities. He characterizes his life back then as quite ordinary. “I liked to drink with my buddies and date women,” he says. He also had a penchant for material things. In nine trips to Europe, where he interviewed psychiatrists in 18 countries for a planned doctoral dissertation, Tomes built a valuable collection of Russian artifacts. During that time, Tomes never abandoned his own artwork: he has sketched life-size portraits of every Notre Dame football coach from Jesse Harper to the current Bob Davie, each of which hangs today in the Fighting Irish athletic office.
By 1983 Tomes was fresh off a two-year hiatus to pursue his art. He returned to the work force with two lucrative job offers, one as a therapist in a hospital and another as an executive trainee with a major airline.
The question of which job to take led him to the church, where he first heard what he describes as the voice of Christ: “I’ll lead; you follow,” repeated three times. And then: Don’t be afraid; “give all your trust.”
“At the time, I didn’t understand what there was to be afraid of,” he says with a trace of irony. “I do now.”
Over the next few months, Tomes says, he received more messages. One was “You must forgive everyone, everything.” Another was “Judge not, and you will not be judged.”
He picked up a Bible and found this verse staring him in the face: “Take nothing with you for the journey.” Two times the next day, he came across the same passage in different parts of the Bible.
A local priest told him those scriptural commands required that he give up his worldly possessions. “I thought he was full of it,” Tomes says. But he kept running across that sentence in other religious volumes. Finally Tomes gave in -- and gave away his televisions, his radios, his Russian artifacts and even his bedroom. “I moved into the basement of a friend’s house and slept on cardboard.”
That year Tomes was asked to take on the role of youth minister for a parish and work with the street gangs in the surrounding projects of Henry Horner Homes and Rockwell Gardens. At the time, the neighborhood was rife with killing between the Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples. On Tomes’ first day in the projects, he was snubbed. Some gangsters threw rocks at him. On his second day, the gang voted in council whether Tomes should be killed, but decided that his intentions were only positive and that he should be protected rather than removed. The gangsters also accepted a couple of Jesuit volunteers, who were along to help Tomes.
It didn’t hurt either that Tomes, only an average hoopster, managed to impress the gangsters on the basketball court. “Once, I shot the ball, and it was clearly going left of the basket, but curved and went straight through the net,” he says. “God was definitely helping me.”
A year after Tomes began working in the West Side projects, his labors caught the attention of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago, and he expanded Tomes’ purview to include gangs throughout the city.
The phone calls usually come at night. The voice is always low, distressed, the tone conspiratorial. A Gangster Disciple or Vice Lord assigned to murder informs Brother Bill that warfare is on the horizon, that just moments ago he was instructed to kill a rival gang member. “I don’t wanna shoot nobody, and I don’t wanna die, Brother Bill,” the voice whispers. “Please come over here. Nothing’s gonna happen if you’re here. Help me, man.”
When fighting erupts, Brother Bill has his routine down pat. From his Evanston home, it’s a 35-min. drive to Cabrini. En route, he pulls on his robe and begins prayer. Upon arriving, he walks briskly to the scene, where the shooting has usually already begun. His pale blue robe aflutter, he stands in the center of gang gunfire. He says he can hear the crack of guns from snipers in the buildings as well as see shooters running on the ground or ducking in and out of entryways. But thoughts of his safety never cross his mind. He understands that he can be killed, but he knows this is the core of his work, and he feels an absolute peace. Sometimes gang members scream out angrily, “Get out the way, Brother Bill. Move!”
It doesn’t work. “No, I will not,” Brother Bill tells them, “because I love you.”
Quickly the shots grow sporadic. Early last spring, after gunfire had shattered the windows of dozens of apartments, children ran out onto the balcony chanting, “Brother Bill, make the peace! Brother Bill, make the peace!” He heard, as did the shooters. Three more shots were fired that night, and peace was declared. “It’s like if Brother Bill is willing to take a bullet because he loves you that much, it makes it harder for you to hate the other side,” says Antonio, a 26-year-old gang member. “I think that’s why the shooting stops.”
Several times a year, Brother Bill takes a group of gangsters to Notre Dame, to football and basketball team practices and games. The gang members guest-lecture to students and faculty at the Center for Social Concerns and university workshops. “They treat us like movie stars,” says Paris. “I like going down there and telling them what our life is like and learning about theirs.”
In one case a Gangster Disciple scheduled to execute a rival returned from his dinner with the Fighting Irish basketball team too guilt-stricken to go through with the murder. Others simply take a liking to a life not spent looking over their shoulder. Brother Bill has other gambits too. Realizing that many gangsters spend countless nights holed up in apartments watching sports on television, he recently introduced them to a foreign concept: the sports bar. Initially they turned to Brother Bill to guide them on unfamiliar turf. Nowadays they freely go to Champions near O’Hare Airport and the Alumni Club in downtown Chicago to watch their favorite teams.
Brother Bill has helped a few gangsters on the road to employment -- one now works as a freight-elevator supervisor, another as an electrician -- but most aren’t interested in the regimen of daily employment or in earning a minimum wage, and that’s not how Brother Bill keeps score either. As the outside world rolls on, William Wylie Tomes Jr. continues to cruise the projects in that silver Park Avenue, conducting his nonjudgmental, never-ending search for his people.
And wherever he finds them, his message is the same as it was a decade ago, when he discovered a 21-year-old gang leader bleeding to death in a dark stairwell from four gunshots to the chest. As the faint siren of the paramedics’ vehicle sounded, too far away, Brother Bill spoke softly into the ear of the young man the last words he would hear on this earth:
“God made you. He loves you. He wants you to be with him forever.”
________
* "Cabrini–Green" became synonymous with the problems associated with public housing in the United States. It was torn down in 2011 and replaced with mixed housing.
Les Snodgrass, pastor of The Door Christian Fellowship Church in Melbourne, Florida, said a man had attended church services before, but wasn’t a regular. Then, while Snodgrass was delivering a sermon, the man stood up and showed a gun, allegedly pointing it at Snodgrass’s mother’s head. “I tried to divert his attention away from my mother,” Snodgrass said. “I kept calling out to him, ‘Johnny, Johnny, what are you doing?’”
As he talked to the man, Snodgrass worked his way closer, then lunged. “I just pushed against the wall with all my might,” he said. “I had him by the shoulders, and as soon as I did that, my son leapt from the platform into the air and pounced on him. He punched him twice in the head.” Snodgrass’s wife then held a stun gun to the man until police arrived.
John Grace faces 21 charges, including robbery. “I gathered my family at the church, and we all held hands and prayed and forgave him on the spot,” Snodgrass said. “But he will face justice and should.” [1]
Editor Randy Cassingham adds the comment: “Forgiveness and justice: not mutually exclusive.”
________
1. WKMG Orlando
Daniel Blackwell’s wife cooked him a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. Then she took a bite out of it. Her 55-year-old husband was enraged and went down into his basement. Soon after, she heard shots being fired. She went down to check on him and saw him surrounded by guns and ammunition.
She went back into the kitchen and three more shots were fired, making holes in the kitchen floor near where she was standing.
She ran out of the house with her children and called the Baltimore police. When they arrived, Blackwell barricaded himself in the home for a three-hour-long standoff. He finally surrendered peacefully.
Blackwell is now facing attempted murder charges. Police are having him evaluated for mental illness and to find out why he was so enraged about his grilled cheese sandwich.
Because of prior assault convictions, Blackwell is not legally allowed to own guns in the first place. He faces multiple charges.
________
Tribune Media Wire
Jerneen Green, 42, and her niece Tia Parrado, 18, were playing a game with other family members in Green’s Stock Island, Florida, home. Parrado told sheriff’s deputies that during the game, Green accused her of stealing money and attacked her, allegedly hitting her in the mouth with a piece of wood, stabbing her in the ear with a screwdriver, and biting two of her fingers. A family member broke up the fight, and Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded. Green was arrested on suspicion of felony aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and held on $20,000 bond. She has multiple arrests and two prior convictions for battery-related charges.
The game they were playing: the home edition of Family Feud.
________
Florida Keys News
A young thug named Fernandinho had been a legend in the poorest neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro. His gang earned three hundred thousand dollars a month from drug sales, and perhaps even more from protection rackets. He had had many close calls with the police but they had never managed to capture him. In one attempt, a hundred armed policemen backed by two helicopter gunships and an armored personnel carrier came after him but he escaped by leaping from rooftop to rooftop. He was now the most-wanted fugitive in Rio, a city with one of the highest crime rates in the world.
Then Fernandinho became born again through the ministry of a Pentecostal preacher. He banned the practice of spiritism and African religious rituals in his neighborhoods. At 6:00 every evening, a pastor’s prayer is broadcast through the narrow alleys. Fernandinho had “Jesus Cristo” tattooed on one of his forearms in big letters and soon his neighborhood was covered with religious graffiti. The community swimming pool he had built now had a sign above it saying “This Belongs To Jesus Christ.”
Religious posters decorate the walls of his home. Fernandinho said he prayed a great deal and he even prayed for his enemies. As if to demonstrate the truth of his claim for a reporter, he closed his bedroom door, went to the edge of his bed, and got down on his knees. He prayed like a child, with his hands clasped, his eyes closed, and his lips moving in murmured prayer. He went and found his Bible and, sitting in front of the reporter on his bed, he opened it to a page where he had a tassel marker, about a quarter of the way in. He said that he was determined to read all the way through.
Fernandinho is saved. But he is still a thug. Even though he had reportedly ordered his gangs not to carry out “violent” crimes, at least four informants had been executed by them.
Reporter Jon Lee Anderson pointed out the contradiction between Fernandinho’s religious faith and his continued life as a drug trafficker. He asked him, “For you, where is the dividing line between right and wrong?” Fernandinho smiled, and said, “Who’s deciding?”
The grief of parents and loved ones of the 20 children and six adults murdered in a school in Newtown, Connecticut, is beyond words. Yet, even in the face of such an unbearable tragedy, Christians must speak.
We will have to speak in public about this evil, and we will have to speak in private about this horrible crime. How should Christians think and pray in the aftermath of such a colossal crime?
We affirm the sinfulness of sin and the full reality of human evil
First, we must recognize that this tragedy is just as evil, horrible and ugly as it appears. Christianity does not deny the reality and power of evil but instead calls evil by its necessary names -- murder, massacre, killing, homicide, slaughter. The closer we look at this tragedy, the more it will appear unfathomable and more grotesque than the human imagination can take in.
What else can we say about the murder of children and their teachers? How can we understand the evil of killing little children one by one, forcing them to watch their little friends die and realizing that they were to be next? How can we bear this?
Resisting our instinct toward a coping mechanism, we cannot accept the inevitable claims that this young murderer is to be understood as merely sick. His heinous acts will be dismissed and minimized by some as the result of psychiatric or psychological causation, or mitigated by cultural, economic, political or emotional factors. His crimes were sick beyond words, and he was undoubtedly unbalanced, but he pulled off a cold, calculated and premeditated crime, monstrous in its design and accomplishment.
Christians know that this is the result of sin and the horrifying effects of The Fall. Every answer for this evil must affirm the reality and power of sin. The sinfulness of sin is never more clearly revealed than when we look into the heart of a crime like this and see the hatred toward God that precedes the murderous hatred the gunman poured out on his little victims.
The 20th century forced us to see the ovens of the Nazi death camps, the killing fields of Cambodia, the inhumanity of the Soviet gulags and the failure of the world to stop such atrocities before they happened. We cannot talk of our times without reference to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, Pol Pot and Charles Manson, Idi Amin and Ted Bundy. More recently, we see evil in the impassive faces of Osama bin Laden and Anders Behring Brevik. We will now add yet another name to the roll call of mass murderers. His will not be the last.
Beyond this, the Christian must affirm the grace of moral restraint, knowing that the real question is not why some isolated persons commit such crimes but why such massacres are not more common. We must be thankful for the restraint of the law, operating on the human conscience. Such a crime serves to warn us that putting a curve in the law will inevitably produce a curve in the conscience. We must be thankful for the restraining grace of God that limits human evil and, rightly understood, keeps us all from killing each other.
Christians call evil what it is, never deny its horror and power, and remain ever thankful that evil will not have its full sway, or the last word.
We affirm the cross of Christ as the only adequate remedy for evil
There is one and only one reason that evil does not have the last word, and that is the fact that evil, sin, death and the devil were defeated at the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. There they were defeated conclusively, comprehensively and publicly.
On the cross, Christ bore our sins, dying in our place, offering Himself freely as the perfect sacrifice for sin. The devil delighted in Christ’s agony and death on the cross, realizing too late that Christ’s substitutionary atonement spelled the devil’s own defeat and utter destruction.
Christ’s victory over sin, evil and death was declared by the Father in raising Jesus from the dead. The resurrection of Christ is the ground of our hope and the assurance of the final and total victory of Christ over all powers, principalities and perpetrators.
A tragedy like this cannot be answered with superficial and sentimental Christian emotivism or with glib dismissals of the enormity and transience of this crime. Such a tragedy calls for the most Gospel-centered Christian thinking, for the substance of biblical theology and the solace that only the full wealth of Christian conviction can provide.
In the face of such horror, we are driven again and again to the cross and resurrection of Christ, knowing that the reconciling power of God in Christ is the only adequate answer to such a depraved and diabolical power.
We acknowledge the necessity of justice, knowing that perfect justice awaits the Day of the Lord
Charles Manson sits in a California prison, even now -- decades after his murderous crimes were committed. Ted Bundy was executed by the state of Florida for multiple murders but escaped both conviction and punishment for others he is suspected of having committed. Anders Behring Brevik shot and killed scores of young people in Norway, but he was sentenced to less than 30 years in prison. Adolf Hitler took his own life, robbing human courts of their justice, and Vladimir Lenin died of natural causes.
The young murderer in Connecticut took his own life after murdering almost 30 people, most of them children. He will never face a human court, never have to face a human accuser, never stand convicted of his crimes and never know the justice of a human sentence.
But even as human society was robbed of the satisfaction of that justice, it would never be enough. Even if executed for his crimes, he could die only once. Even if sentenced to multiple life sentences to prison, he could forfeit only one human lifespan.
Human justice is necessary, but it is woefully incomplete. No human court can hand down an adequate sentence for such a crime, and no human judge can restore life to those who were murdered.
Crimes such as these remind us that we yearn for the total satisfaction that will come only on the Day of the Lord, when all flesh will be judged by the only Judge who will rule with perfect righteousness and justice. On that day, the only escape will be refuge in Christ, for those who knew and confessed Him as Savior and Lord. On that day, those who are in Christ will know the promise that full justice and restoration will mean that every eye is dry and tears are nevermore.
We grieve with those who grieve
For now, even as we yearn for the Day of the Lord, we grieve with those who grieve. We sit with them and pray for them and acknowledge that their loss is truly unspeakable and that their tears are unspeakably true. We pray and look for openings for grace and the hope of the Gospel. We do our best to speak words of truth, love, grace and comfort.
What of the eternal destiny of these sweet children? There is no specific text of Scripture that gives us a clear and direct answer. We must affirm with the Bible that we are conceived in sin and, as sons and daughters of Adam, will face eternal damnation unless we are found in Christ. So many of these little victims died before reaching any real knowledge of their own sinfulness and need for Christ. They, like those who die in infancy and those who suffer severe mental incapacitation, never really have the opportunity to know their need as sinners and the provision of Christ as Savior.
They are in a categorically different position than that of the person of adult consciousness who never responds in faith to the message of the Gospel. In the book of Deuteronomy, God tells the adults among the children of Israel that, due to their sin and rebellion, they would not enter the land of promise. But the Lord then said this: “And as for your little ones, who you said would become a prey, and your children, who today have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in there. And to them I will give it, and they shall possess it,” Deuteronomy 1:39.
Many, if not all, of the little children who died in Newtown were so young that they certainly would be included among those who, like the little Israelites, “have no knowledge of good or evil.” God is sovereign, and He was not surprised that these little ones died so soon. There is biblical precedent for believing that the Lord made provision for them in the atonement accomplished by Christ and that they are safe with Jesus.
Rachel weeping for her children
The prophet Jeremiah’s reference to Rachel and her lost children is heartbreaking. “Thus says the LORD: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more’” (Jeremiah 31:15). Like Rachel, many parents, grandparents and loved ones are weeping inconsolably even now, refusing to be comforted for their children, because they are no more.
This tragedy is compounded in emotional force by the fact that it comes in such close proximity to Christmas, but let us never forget that there was the mass murder of children in the Christmas story as well. King Herod’s murderous decree that all baby boys under 2 years of age should be killed prompted Matthew to cite this very verse from Jeremiah. Rachel again was weeping for her children.
But this is not where either Jeremiah or Matthew leaves us. By God’s mercy, there is hope and the promise of full restoration in Christ.
The Lord continued to speak through Jeremiah:
Thus says the LORD: “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work, declares the LORD, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy. There is hope for your future, declares the LORD, and your children shall come back to their own country,” Jeremiah 31:16-17.
God, not the murderer, has the last word. For those in Christ, there is the promise of full restoration. Even in the face of such unmitigated horror, there is hope.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
In light of recent mass shootings, however, this right of the people to keep and bear arms has come under heavy fire and heated debate.
The current White House Administration and several recent polls seem to suggest that most Americans favor stricter gun laws. Oddly enough, at the same time, national background checks for retail firearm sales (which are performed every time someone buys a gun at a gun shop) have surged to new heights. Ammunition sales are also setting records as states report dramatic increases in the number of concealed-carry licenses being issued. Despite the apparent desire for more gun control, the firearms industry is booming.
So, what are the concerns for Christians in this debate over stricter gun laws? Does the Bible say anything about the right to bear arms?
Is Self-Defense Biblical?
According to conservative leader and Wall Builders founder David Barton, the original intent of the Founding Fathers when writing the Second Amendment was to guarantee citizens “the biblical right of self-defense.”
Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794), a signer of the Declaration of Independence who helped frame the Second Amendment in the First Congress, wrote, “... to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them...”
As many of the Founding Fathers recognized, Barton believes that “the ultimate goal of the Second Amendment is to make sure you can defend yourself against any kind of illegal force that comes against you, whether that is from a neighbor, whether that is from an outsider or whether that is from your own government.”
Obviously, the Bible does not specifically address the issue of gun control, since firearms like we use today were not manufactured in ancient times. But accounts of warfare and the use of weaponry, such as swords, spears, bows and arrows, darts and slings were well-documented in the pages of the Bible.
As I began researching biblical perspectives on the right to bear arms, I decided to speak with Mike Wilsbach, the manager of security at my church. Wilsbach is a retired combat veteran who also teaches personal defense classes. “To me the Bible couldn’t be clearer on the right, even the duty, we have as believers to self-defense,” said Wilsbach.
He reminded me that in the Old Testament “the Israelites were expected to have their own personal weapons. Every man would be summoned to arms when the nation confronted an enemy. They didn’t send in the Marines. The people defended themselves.”
We see this clearly in passages like 1 Samuel 25:13:
And David said to his men, “Every man strap on his sword!” And every man of them strapped on his sword. David also strapped on his sword. And about four hundred men went up after David, while two hundred remained with the baggage. (ESV)
So, each man had a sword ready to be holstered and used when required.
And in Psalm 144:1, David wrote: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle...”
Besides instruments of warfare, weapons were used in the Bible for the purpose of self-defense; nowhere in Scripture is this forbidden.
In the Old Testament, we find this example of God sanctioning self-defense:
“If a thief is caught in the act of breaking into a house and is struck and killed in the process, the person who killed the thief is not guilty of murder.” (Exodus 22:2, NLT)
In the New Testament, Jesus sanctioned the use of weapons for self-defense. While giving his farewell discourse to the disciples before going to the cross, he instructed the apostles to purchase side arms to carry for self-protection. He was preparing them for the extreme opposition and persecution they would face in future missions:
And he said to them, “When I sent you out with no moneybag or knapsack or sandals, did you lack anything?” They said, “Nothing.” He said to them, “But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.” And they said, “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” And he said to them, “It is enough.” (Luke 22:35-38, ESV)
Conversely, as soldiers seized Jesus at his arrest, our Lord warned Peter (in Matthew 26:52-54 and John 18:11) to put away his sword: “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
Some scholars believe this statement was a call to Christian pacifism, while others understand it simply to mean in a general sense that “violence breeds more violence.”
Peacemakers or Pacifists?
Rendered in the English Standard Version, Jesus told Peter to “put your sword back in its place.” Wilsbach explained, “That place would be at his side. Jesus didn’t say, ‘Throw it away.’ After all, he had just ordered the disciples to arm themselves. The reason ... was obvious — to protect the lives of the disciples, not the life of the Son of God. Jesus was saying ‘Peter, this is not the right time for a fight.’”
It’s interesting to note that Peter openly carried his sword, a weapon similar to the type Roman soldiers employed at the time. Jesus knew Peter was carrying a sword. He allowed this, but forbid him to use it aggressively. Most importantly, Jesus did not want Peter to resist the inevitable will of God the Father, which our Savior knew would be fulfilled by his arrest and eventual death on the cross.
Scripture is quite clear that Christians are called to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), and to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:38-40). Thus, any aggressive or offensive violence was not the purpose for which Jesus had instructed them to carry a sidearm just hours earlier.
Life and Death, Good and Evil
A sword, as with a handgun or any firearm, in and of itself is not aggressive or violent. It is simply an object; it can be used either for good or for evil. Any weapon in the hands of someone intent on evil can be used for violent or wicked purposes. In fact, a weapon is not required for violence. The Bible doesn’t tell us what kind of weapon the first murderer, Cain, used to kill his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Cain could have used a stone, a club, a sword, or perhaps even his bare hands. A weapon was not mentioned in the account.
Weapons in the hands of law-abiding, peace-loving citizens can be used for good purposes such as hunting, recreational and competitive sports, and keeping peace. Beyond self-defense, a person properly trained and prepared to use a firearm can actually deter crime, employing the weapon to protect innocent lives and prevent violent offenders from succeeding in their crimes.
In The Life and Death Debate: Moral Issues of Our Time, leading Christian apologists James Porter Moreland and Norman L. Geisler wrote:
“To permit a murder when one could have prevented it is morally wrong. To allow a rape when one could have hindered it is an evil. To watch an act of cruelty to children without trying to intervene is morally inexcusable. In brief, not resisting evil is an evil of omission, and an evil of omission can be just as evil as an evil of commission. Any man who refuses to protect his wife and children against a violent intruder fails them morally.”
Now, let’s return to Exodus 22:2, but read a little further through verse 3:
“If a thief is caught in the act of breaking into a house and is struck and killed in the process, the person who killed the thief is not guilty of murder. But if it happens in daylight, the one who killed the thief is guilty of murder...” (NLT)
Why is it considered murder if the thief is killed during a daytime break-in?
Pastor Tom Teel, an associate pastor entrusted with overseeing the security personnel at my church, answered this question for me: “In this passage God stated that it’s okay to protect yourself and your family. In the dark, it is impossible to see and know for certain what someone is up to; whether an intruder has come to steal, inflict harm, or to kill, is unknown at the time. In the daylight, things are clearer. We can see if a thief has come just to swipe a loaf of bread through an open window, or if an intruder has come with more violent intentions. God does not make a special dispensation to kill someone over theft. That would be murder.”
Defense, Not Offense
Scripture, we know, does not promote vengeance (Romans 12:17-19) or vigilantism, but it does allow believers to engage in self-defense, to resist evil, and to defend the defenseless.
Wilsbach put it like this: “I believe I have the responsibility to defend myself, my family, and my home. For every verse that I have used as a case for defense, there are verses that teach peace and harmony. I agree with those verses; however, when there is no other alternative, I believe I am charged with the responsibility to defend.”
Another clear basis for this idea is found in the book of Nehemiah. When exiled Jews returned to Israel to rebuild the Temple walls, their leader Nehemiah wrote:
From that day on, half of my men did the work, while the other half were equipped with spears, shields, bows and armor. The officers posted themselves behind all the people of Judah who were building the wall. Those who carried materials did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other, and each of the builders wore his sword at his side as he worked. (Nehemiah 4:16-18, NIV)
Weapons, we can conclude, are not the problem. Nowhere does the Bible forbid Christians from bearing arms. But wisdom and caution are of the utmost importance if one does choose to bear a lethal weapon. Anyone who owns and carries a firearm should be properly trained, and know and carefully follow all safety rules and laws pertaining to such a responsibility.
Ultimately, the decision to bear arms is a personal choice determined by one’s own convictions. As a believer, the use of deadly force would be applied only as a last resort, when no other option is available, to prevent an evil from being committed and to protect human life.
It took a religious revival to save one of the nation’s first secular universities. Given the state of our college campuses today, it’s a history lesson worth learning.
Before his death on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson left explicit instructions on what the epitaph on his tombstone should read: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, & Father of the University of Virginia.”
Yet within a few years after his death, his beloved University of Virginia was in deep trouble, and what would wind up saving it would have been a shock to its founder.
As Carlos Santos and Rex Bowman tell us in their book, “Rot, Riot and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America,” Jefferson’s vision for UVA was that of an “academical village” and a “forward-looking community with no religious affiliation.” It was to be a place where “Virginia’s best minds could go to study with the world’s best scholars.”
But within a few years after its founding, UVA was none of these things. As Santos told Public Radio’s “Backstory,” the level of violence at UVA during its first decades is difficult for the modern mind to fathom. The young men attending school in Charlottesville had “hair-trigger tempers” and the slightest insult was to set off fights that employed every conceivable weapon: teeth, fists, rocks, knives, firearms, and even bombs. One student even murdered a professor!
As Santos told “Backstory,” every attempt by the faculty to reign in the culture of violence and disorder “failed miserably.”
The violence at UVA literally brought Jefferson to tears and had him, as well as the faculty, concerned for the future of the university. It called into question Jefferson’s controversial vision of a secular university where the pursuit of truth would be unencumbered by religious dogma. Virginia taxpayers questioned whether their money should go to pay for this failed experiment.
Obviously, UVA survived and went on to thrive. But why? Because, as UVA historian Peter Onuf put it, UVA students didn’t get enlightened — ”they got Jesus.” The Second Great Awakening swept through Charlottesville and changed the university’s culture.
Even though some students were still “acting out,” Onuf says there was also “the beginnings of a new culture on the campus–a more evangelical, religious culture.”
The irony of evangelical Christianity saving Mr. Jefferson’s university is not lost on Onuf and the other historians at “Backstory.” Ironically, shortly before his death, Jefferson said that “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.”
But his rationalist deism was not up to the task of taming the unruly passions of young men. It was Christianity that, as Onuf tells us, “finally [succeeded in] creating that kind of serious student that Jefferson had been looking for . . .” It took “serious Christians” to do the kind of “serious thinking” Jefferson had in mind.
A lot has changed since then. Colleges and universities are trying their hardest to limit or even eliminate Christian expression on campus while, at the same time, dealing with epidemics of binge-drinking and even sexual assault among their students. While Jefferson didn’t live to see the impact of Christianity on his beloved university, today’s college administrators have no such excuse.
It’s also a reminder of why we should never stop praying for revival. The first and second Great Awakenings changed the course of American history. Why should we doubt that a third one would do the same? So, pray, my friends, for revival.
________
Copyright (c) 2014 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Everything we make is available for free because of a generous community of supporters.
Donate