The gruesome murder of Deborah Samuel Yakubu by Islamic radicals in Sokoto State few days ago has reignited the age long debate on what Christians should do when attacked and killed by aggressive enemies. Should they fight back or fold their arms, go on their knees and intercede for their killers?
The fact that Deborah’s killing like so many other religious killings in Northern Nigeria appears to have the tacit support of highly placed Northern elites makes not just the debate but the call for such debate an urgent one. Many Northern leaders are clear on their position: there is only one fate for anyone that blasphemes Prophet Mohammed (PBUH): DEATH. So if you are in Northern Nigeria and you love your life, stay out of anything that has to do with Prophet Mohammed, simple!
This would have been easy enough only that the person who decides what is blasphemy in this case is not a competent Sharia court but Islamic mobs who can pounce and kill anybody they like under the pretense of blasphemy. For instance, Islamic scholar, both within and outside Nigeria are still debating whether the so called blasphemy by Deborah is really blasphemous.
The ideal scenario in a secular state like Nigeria would have been to allow the constitution and the security agents to take their course in matters like this rather than resulting to self-help. However, like the Sokoto tragedy has clearly shown, Nigerian Constitution and security agencies are incapacitated in the face of blood thirty marauding and Islamic radicals. So what, what happens what Christians are murdered in this manner in the name of blasphemy.
Answering this question as a Christian is not as simply as it appears. It requires going through the Scriptures and Christian tradition (Christian heritage) to see how other Christians who have found themselves in similar situation handled the matter. We begin with the scripture first.
The Scripture on Violence and Peace
Unfortunately, the Bible does not speak with clarity on the issue of violence and peace as it does on, say, the issue of adultery fornication. At the root of the problem of violence for Christians is the complexity of the Bible on the issue. Bainton (1960, 53) has rightly said that “every one of the subsequent Christian attitudes to violence and peace (pacifism, Just war and crusade) relied on the Bible.” We just compare two passages for an illustration:
(1) Hammer your ploughshares into swords; your sickles into spears (Joel 4: 10)
(2) These will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles (Isaiah 2:4).
Such Biblical ambivalence indicates only a small part of the dilemma one encounters all over the OT and NT on the issue of violence and peace. Libraries are filled up in the efforts to resolve this issue but the polemic is likely to continue. However, over the centuries there have been three Christian approaches to violence.
Christian Pacifism
Pacifism is essentially, the refusal to participate in or support violence. Christian pacifists ground their position primarily in the life and message of Jesus. Jesus taught his members to love their enemies and to give no violent resistance to evil. How can his followers then kill or support killing? At a deeper theological level, Christian pacifists such as Yoder (1965, 28) argue that the Christian narrative of the Cross/Resurrection reveals that the real power in the universe is found in redemptive suffering rather than redemptive violence. We resort to force because we yearn to make history come out right but Jesus already demonstrated that the way you make history come out right is through laying down your life rather than taking the lives of others.
Two variations within pacifism are worth noting. Some pacifists have interpreted Jesus as requiring non-resistance to evil. Others, looking at Jesus’ whole life, including the Cross itself, view him as offering nonviolent resistance to evil. He did battle, one might say, but he did not resort to evil to wage war against evil. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Rom 12: 21).”
The fundamental question pacifists ask is: show us from Scripture, how you can claim that Jesus is Lord and yet not follow his teachings or the example of the early church, which was convinced that participation in violence is incompatible with fidelity to Jesus Christ.
Christian Crusaders
In 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II declared that some wars could be deemed not only a bellum iustum (just war), but could, in certain cases, rise to the level of a bellum sacrum (holy war). Claster (2009) characterizes this as a “remarkable transformation in Christian ideology of war”, shifting the justification of violence from being not only “just” but “spiritually beneficial.” Murphy (2008) examined the Christian concept of Holy War, asking “how a culture formally dedicated to fulfilling the injunction to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ could move to a point where it sanctioned the use of violence against the alien both outside and inside society.”
Urban made the Holy War possible by drastically altering the attitude of the Church towards war. Hitherto, a knight could obtain remission of sins only by giving up arms, but Urban invited him to gain forgiveness “in and through the exercise of his martial skills.” In the 12th century, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: The knight of Christ may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently; for he serves Christ when he strikes, and saves himself when he falls…. When he inflicts death, it is to Christ’s profit, and when he suffers death, it is his own gain.”
Grounded in a peculiar convergence of tendencies in Joshua and Revelation, the crusade ethic slips the constraints against violence offered by both pacifism. In the crusade ethic, the cause is literally holy; it has a transcendent validation. This transcendent validation is known not by reason but by revelation, often mediated through a prophet or religious leader. The adversary has no rights, and restraint is no virtue because the enemy is not just our enemy, but God’s enemy. The criterion of last resort does not apply and the war need not be winnable−to fall in a holy cause is a moral victory, the surest path to heaven and blessedness.
Going through this list we come face to face with the very jihad-mentality that appears to be the motivation of those who killed Deborah. For the Muslim, like the Christian, has the holy war in its tradition. The tragedy is that some in the Muslim world have pulled jihad out of the pantry and are now teaching and practicing it. But we need to be aware that crusade tendency is not entirely absent from Christianity today. Perhaps it is hard to gear up to kill people without investing our cause with holiness and theirs with evil. Crusade thinking must be viewed as a perennial and dangerous temptation rather than an ancient vestige of the Christian past.
Christian Just War
The Just war approach is the attempt to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable use of armed forces. The approach conceives of how the use of arms might be restrained, made more humane and directed towards the aim of establishing peace and justice. In broad terms, Christian Just War approach holds that Christians must not love violence. They must promote peace whenever possible and be slow to resort to violence. But they must not be afraid to do so when it is called for. Evil must not be allowed to roam unchecked.
Summing Up
What is clear from the forgoing is that neither the Scriptures nor Christian tradition offers Nigerian Christians clear instructions on what to do in the face of a resurgent and murderous Islamic fundamentalism. But the question on what Nigerian Christians should do when their members are gruesomely murdered by Islamic fundamentalist has become so urgent that it has to be answer if we do not want to have many more cases of Deborah in the coming months and years. I leave you with this suggestion from G. Weigel (1983, 13): the Scripture is neither PACIFIST nor CRUSADING; the scripture is the word of God, and not to be used polemically for our partisan purpose. God surely does not will the destruction of his creation by human perversity and sin; we are commanded to be the stewards of creation, not its executioners. The way we go about this is left for us to decide. This decision is the responsibility Nigerian Christians must rise up to before it is too late.
