Oh woe is the way for the Christian committed to non-violence. Even your friends call you “grossly immoral”!
There is, of course, a small minority of people known as pacifists who reject violence altogether. Their courage and firmness of principle, often in the teeth of public revilement, are much to be admired. But pacifists are not just people who abhor violence. Almost everyone does that, with the exception of a thin sprinkling of sadists and psychopaths. For pacifism to be worth arguing with, it must be more than some pious declaration that war is disgusting. Cases with which almost everyone would agree are boring, however sound they may be. The only pacifist worth arguing with is one who rejects violence absolutely. And that means rejecting not just wars or revolutions, but refusing to tap an escaped murderer smartly over the skull, enough to stun but not kill him, when he is about to turn his machine gun on a classroom of small children. Anyone who was in a situation to do this and failed to do so would have a lot of explaining to do at the next meeting of the PTA. In any strict sense of the word, pacifism is grossly immoral.
Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, p. 183-184.
In this short, witty, sprawling book, Eagleton takes on the ten major objections to why anyone should ever thing the last of the schoolmen, Karl Marx, still has relevance for the world we live in. If this is political apologetics, then Christian evangelists could learn alot from how broad the references are, how comfortable Eagleton is in moving between disciplines and fundamentally, how enjoyable the book is as a book.
Still and all Terry, there is a kind of pacifism that locates its source not in some purity of thought, but in the purity of action of a Jewish carpenter. That pacifism is fascinating without being grossly immoral but more to the point: it is in harmony with the very nature of created reality.
Your Correspondent, Always preferred C to C++ because he believes in a classless society