Rod Dreher and Ben Witherington are among the many voices rightfully admiring the Amish practice of pacifism and forgiveness surrounding Carl Robert’s deadly assault on Amish school girls in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Thirteen year-old Marian Fisher’s attempt to offer her own life to save the others was truly Christ-like. The Amish community’s loving outreach to Roger’s family is inspiring.
Dreher says:
A serene Amish midwife told NBC News on Tuesday that this is normal for them. It’s what Jesus would have them do. “This is imitation of Christ at its most naked,” journalist Tom Shachtman, who has chronicled Amish life, told The New York Times . “If anybody is going to turn the other cheek in our society, it’s going to be the Amish. I don’t want to denigrate anybody else who says they’re imitating Christ, but the Amish walk the walk as much as they talk the talk.”
In the same vein, Witherington says:
This friends is real Christianity. Christians do not retaliate. They do not seek revenge, for the Bible says that vengeance should be left in the hands of the Lord. In fact they do quite the opposite. They offer forgiveness even to their tormentors. They seek peace at the least and reconciliation at the most with those who revile them, harm them, kill them.
Witherington and Dreher idealize, at least to some extent, the Amish as a model for all Christians. I, too, admire the Amish and believe that there are lessons that other Christians can learn from them. With the Amish, however, one gets a package approach to life. The values by which the Amish live are part-and-parcel of their way of life. They have withdrawn themselves from the larger community, taking little from it and taking no responsibility for it. Fair enough, even though I believe that alternative communities like the Amish live under the protection of the host culture to a larger degree than they understand. The Amish are at least trying to be consistent in their practice of pacifism.
Despite the fact that the Amish don’t defend themselves and don’t ask for others to defend them, society has an obligation to defend them anyway. If the police had become aware of Roberts plans, they had an obligation to stop him. If he didn’t stop voluntarily when challenged, they had an obligation to use as much force as necessary – even deadly force. If Roberts had not killed himself, the police had an obligation to apprehend him, by use of force if necessary. The courts had an obligation to try him in a court of law and, if found guilty, to impose by force such punishment as the court acting under the laws of Pennsylvania might direct. One of the purposes of government is to protect the innocent.
If an officer of the law could have saved the lives of those five girls by using his hands, his baton or even his sidearm, should he or she have done so? Absolutely. Can a Christian be an officer of the law? Again, the answer is “yes.”
We live with one foot in the kingdom of God and one foot squarely in a fallen world. The Augustinian-Lutheran “two realms” construct may have its problems, but it is infinitely more helpful in constructing a social ethic than Wesleyan “entire sanctification.” Love for one’s neighbor not only demands that we turn the other cheek, but that we take upon ourselves the responsibility of protecting our neighbor – even if that task wounds our tender consciences. I have no illusions that the use of force is ever pretty or perfect, but it is sometimes necessary.
Like monastic communities in the church after Constantine, the Amish provide a necessary counterbalance to secularism. The question, however, is this: does God require Christians to opt-out of the world and live in the relative purity of isolation, or does God expect us to live as responsible citizens of the kingdom of God within the structures of this fallen world? I’m not sure that it’s a matter of “either-or”; rather, it’s a matter of one’s vocation.
Marian Fisher and her Amish brothers and sisters remind me of the personal sacrifice of love to which Christ calls all believers. It does not follow, however, that this is the only type of action which faith might require. We live in two realms. We live in the already and not-yet. We are simultaneously justified by Christ and enmeshed in a world of sin, and there is no way to eliminate the tension between those two realms. Fortunately, God’s gracious act in Jesus Christ doesn’t demand that we get it right in this world; rather, it’s premised on the fact that we won’t. We can, however, trust that he got it right – and that he will make it right.
Mitchell Lewis 