As the public conversation continues around guns and legislation, though lawmakers at the Federal level have explicitly said they will do nothing, there continue to be comments from well-meaning people of faith that are unhelpful. Recently, I have witnessed a large collective of offerings around the theme, “Only Jesus can fix the evil we are experiencing.” Such a statement is one theologians would call “eschatological,” meaning it is focused on the return of Jesus as the end of all things. These thoughts display a reliance on the active work of God in order to save us from ourselves, and highlight a need for God’s grace.
While it should go without saying, I must offer the usual framing before I get to my real argument. I recognize that we are a creature in need of God’s grace. I affirm that it is the work of Jesus in my life that has brought me into a reconciled relationship to God, not against any necessarily overt work on my part but as a product of my self-centeredness which is easier than seeing the world through God’s eyes. I proclaim, as a Christian, that I affirm the reconciling work that will happen when God “makes all things new.”
However, the comments like I highlighted in the first paragraph, are lazy.
In words such as those, no matter how meaning, they betray a nihilism inherent to evangelical thinking around guns and violence. They implicitly affirm a view of the world where human beings have no agency over evil, and no recourse but to endure pain. They are the logical extension of “thoughts and prayers;” words that have come to be a signifier of a cynical worldview that nothing can change, and so there is no reason to try. While they are attempting to affirm the power and place of God in the world, they do so by neglecting the actual witness of Scripture, and history of our faith.
The Bible is never cynical.
The Church is rarely helpless.
The texts from which we draw our faith pain a vibrant image of a God, and a people, on the move. The people of the Torah were not nihilistic in their search for God’s promises. The writers of the Wisdom literature preached more than simply waiting out the dark valleys of life. The Prophets were not resigned to the neglect of God’s people. Jesus did not endure the abuses of the religious and political orders of his day. And Paul did not allow the Church to remain callous towards the suffering of those around them.
While I will note that Jesus told us we would suffer for our faith, indiscriminate and faceless evil was never on the table. Jesus healed lepers, raised the dead, protested materialism in the Temple, and ridiculed the religious and political elite. The text does offer an image of doing all these things from a position of weakness, but never allows complacency on the part of those who call themselves by the name of Jesus.
Because of that, the Church has spoken out against injustice again and again. Christians created an entire movement to reform social orders during the late part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries. Church communities were the rallying point for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Many Church leaders were vocal opponents to Apartheid in South Africa, leading international divestment movements to put pressure on the government.
Today, we face a similar calling. Though there are numerous movements to be a part of in our society all vying for justice, this is one to which I am speaking. I do recognize that the struggle against evil in the world is a never-ending conflict, we can not be cynically complacent. God did not create guns. No firearm was ever lowered down on a cloud in a ray of sunlight for human beings to take up. We made that gun. Humanity can do something about the proliferation of violence. There is no good reason why we can not do something about them now.
There might be political reasons.
There might be reasons of tradition.
But not of these reasons are necessarily good reasons.
Human beings have a great deal of agency in their own existence. While many believe that we are living in a time that is more dangerous than ever before, and decry that people do not leave their homes unlocked any longer, this is not true. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that we are living in the safest time the world has ever known. This shows that we have done a great deal to make the world a better place. It also lets us know that we can do more.
We can do something about guns.
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