Love, Law, and War in the Old Testament

 

        In between their regular insults of me, the Latter Day Saint Peace Studies group on Facebook asked: How do you reconcile the Old Testament God with Jesus of the New Testament? They ignored my response but it’s worth reading here:

        It’s funny you ask this because it shows a point I’ve made for years, that pacifists have to discount scripture, and can't wrap their minds around a God that uses violence. Patrick Mason and David Pulsipher in their book offered convoluted theories about divine violence that relies on texts that called God a terrorist. Or they suggest that you rely on modern scholarship that disputes the "historical reliability" of the Hebrew Bible. Other pacifists call God schizophrenic over the destruction of 3 Nephi 8.

        The top line summary for those that don’t ignore the nature of God argue that violence is regrettable but sometimes necessary and even exhibited by God. With that point of view Divine violence isn't "incongruous" with a merciful God but part of his character.

        Christians for thousands of years thought they should have a peaceful and conciliatory heart, more representative of the New Testament, while showing enough love for their neighbor to wield the sword and stop their slaughter, which is more like the Old Testament. 

        In fact, God commanded Noah after the flood that "by man shall the blood [of murderers] be shed." As explained by Dennis Praeger in his commentary on the Hebrew Bible: When you compare the flood to similar stories you see a God that is imminently concerned with morality and justice. But you can't rely on eventual love and justice from God. You're commanded to use the death penalty, just as God exhibited in the flood.

        Abraham is blessed a prince of peace (Genesis 14:18-20), but he didn't lift a standard of peace or bear three trespasses before he launched a sneak attack as supposedly required by Doctrine and Covenants 98. Praeger in fact, called Abraham a righteous man of war.

        In Exodus 21, a chapter after the Ten Commandments, God gave laws concerning justifiable homicide. That's why a better translation of the Ten Commandants is "thou shall not murder." The text in the two chapters literally describes justified homicide. The Exodus laws give protection to slaves and offers a route to emancipation that was incredibly progressive for its time.

        This law is often diminished as "an eye for an eye." But the law was fairly progressive because often society would seek a scape goat sacrifice. As in, someone that took your eye would have the eyes of their entire household forfeited. Thus it was more more just that only the person who committed the crime would suffer punishment. Moreover, unlike society at large, the penalties didn't vary between the eye of a noblemen or the eye of a commoner. Everyone was treated equally. Finally, few actually took an eye as punishment. There were financial penalties and fines that acted as substitutes. Even in the Old Testament, the whole world wasn't blind. (Thanks to Dennis Praeger for the extensive and enlightening commentary.)

        Overall the journey to the land God chose for his servants is the basis for the City of God and just war described by Augustine.

        Augustine and Aquinas (as well as Captain Moroni if you look closely enough) discussed the ambush in Joshua 8:2 and found Christlike reasons to support ambushes. If it was for a just cause like defending your people, just like Christ withheld some information leaders may move in secret.

        Even the most problematic chapter, Deuteronomy 20 tells us to "proclaim peace" and provides an off ramp to deescalate violence. (Ironically, I only noticed this after reading the Muslim father of international law, Al Shaybani.) The chapter says "thou shalt utterly destroy,” but in practice told the people to lift a standard of peace and give both sides a chance to accept peace.

        The text doesn't focus on justifying violence. It commands you to love your neighbor, (Leviticus 19:18) and through stories like Lot and his guests, or by command in Exodus, strangers and foreigners are to be treated with hospitability and respect.

        The stories of the patriarchs give us extensive lessons in how to be peaceful and recognize the regrettable, but just use of the sword. Unlike pacifists, the above attitude doesn't need to diminish God or ignore the Hebrew Bible to do it. It enhances our understanding and appreciation of God, and we should study the Old Testament more carefully. 

Just War Theory in the Age of Political Violence

My recent article, Just War Theory in the Age of Political Violence has just been published at Public Square Magazine. I'm happy to take part in a very important conversation when so many people feel justified in taking the law into their own hands. The article is an edited version of this post from several months ago. 

I hope you enjoy reading it. If you like my ideas please consider purchasing one of my books linked in the top left. 

The Church Doesn't Need Your Panic: My Guest Post at Times and Seasons

      

  I wrote this piece in response to a pervasive pattern of despair. Since I was responding to a specific Times and Seasons post I submitted it to them as a guess post and they were gracious enough to post it. You can read it here and its republished below: 

        I read Johnathan Green’s post and because the underlying flaws have been repeated at least three times over the past year, I thought it was worth a substantive response, and it was too long for comments. There’s a lot of heat, hyperbole, and moral posturing in his post, but very little that holds up under scrutiny. I take strong exception to his exaggerations, false equivalence, and the assumption that his political lens should dictate the Church’s actions.

        Screaming “Nazi” louder is not an argument. He treated “warning signs” as functionally equivalent to moral certainty. Using German terms to dress up Nazi comparisons doesn’t make them more persuasive, it just adds rhetorical heat without light. As a result, much of his post rests on false equivalence and superficial similarities rather than serious analysis.

        He said in point three that the Church should “ignore the administration,” yet the post itself spends thousands of words obsessing over it. That contradiction matters, because point four revealed the underlying assumption: that the Church should function as an arm of his political views. I used to think that way too, that the Church should take a forceful position on every partisan controversy. That was twenty years ago and frankly, I grew up. The Church is not my political representative. It teaches principles that allow members to vote, persuade, and act in the public square on their own responsibility.

        He’ll probably respond that his post was a “strategic” argument about institutional survival rather than personal fixation. But strategy still reveals priorities. When every hypothetical risk is filtered through one political diagnosis, that diagnosis becomes the guiding authority, functionally replacing the Church’s own judgment with Green’s.

        The Church’s primary concern is ministering to the members it already has. We saw this in its restrained statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine: as strong as possible while preserving its ability to support members and maintain its global mission. That same logic applies here.

        There’s also an implicit claim throughout that Green knows better than the prophets and apostles. If God had a direct, binding political message about Donald Trump, I assume we would have heard it from them. He defined “threats to the Church’s mission” in a way that mirrored his political hysteria.

        He appealed to Abinadi and Bonhoeffer to argue that prophets speak in principle rather than names. I can name a half dozen instances in the Bible where prophets directly name the wicked ruler but let’s go with his point. He went further and treated his interpretation of those principles as if it carries the same moral authority as prophetic judgment. That’s the move I’m rejecting.

        Points five and six repeated the same demand in softer language: he wanted the Church to endorse his position. It hasn’t, because its mission is ministering, not issuing grand political declarations that satisfy a political minority from a single country within a global church. He might claim he only wanted the church to act when faced with a clear red line, but that red line just happened to be what Green’s political beliefs say it was.

        He framed this as setting “red lines,” not seeking endorsement. But those red lines did not come from institutional revelation, global consensus, measurable harm, or even a consensus of LDS national security professionals—they came from his own political risk model. Calling that a moral threshold doesn’t make it one.

        Phrases like “surveillance by a corrupt, vindictive, unchecked personalist autocracy” read less like analysis and more like a political Gish gallop. Voters clearly weren’t persuaded by that framing. Yelling it louder won’t change that.

        He correctly noted that “getting upset over someone else’s silence is actively harmful,” yet most of the post is a sustained complaint about the Church’s silence. That tension ran through the whole piece.

        Point seven genuinely made me laugh. My life is fine under this government. I voted for border security, strict immigration enforcement, and a strong foreign policy. Inflation has stabilized, gas prices are reasonable, and I have the sense that someone is finally in charge. That calm is not a luxury based on my race, gender, or class. Unless a person lets it through their own hysteria or misdeeds, the government doesn’t affect much of your life.

        The discomfort Green described felt less like lived reality and more like a self-reinforcing media spiral: every action is filtered as sinister, which heightens anxiety, which then seeks out more bad news.

        His Gish gallop in the comments about there only being “one side” shows the harm of that cycle. Screaming “concentration camp”, “starving children”, and “torture”, might feel morally righteous or advance a partisan case, but it also heightens anxiety and escalates conflict. In short, it hurts as much as it helps.

        The healthier response is simple: consume less political media, touch grass, respect differing views, and count your blessings—basic Church principles. Screaming, “but he’s a nazi” when you’re asked to calm down and show respect is a ludicrous substitute for reasoned engagement and more of the problem.

        Green insisted that the Church shouldn’t threaten its own mission but repeatedly argue that it should adopt his political mission. “You should be appalled” isn’t a neutral principle—its Green’s emotional filter presented as moral obligation. To people who don’t share it, this comes off as unhinged, and even deranged, not persuasive.

        Green’s Trump–King Noah comparison is another false equivalence. Noah wasn’t elected. He raised taxes to intolerable levels; Trump reduced them and talks about tariff rebates. Noah imprisoned and tortured dissidents; Trump enforces immigration law, including against violent criminals. You can oppose that policy, and perhaps think it’s immoral, but calling it tyranny by analogy doesn’t make it so.

        Green claimed Trump and his supporters “rejoice in bloodshed.” As a former Marine and military analyst, I find that condescending—and a reflection of the privilege of living in peace and security. Wanting a strong defense and feeling pride in providing it is not rejoicing in bloodshed; it’s more like Captain Moroni rejoicing in the welfare and protection of his people.

        You might claim some of Trumps military actions are fascistic. But debates over presidential war powers found in Article II Section II of the constitution have been a feature of our government since Thomas Jefferson. Not part of a fascist dictatorship.

        When Green invoked Abinadi, he placed himself in the role of calling both fellow saints and Church leaders to repentance for not opposing Trump as he thinks they should. That circles back to the same contradiction: he says the Church isn’t political but then condemns it for not being political in the right way.

        He’ll say this is about obedience versus resistance under tyranny, not about Trump. But that only works if the premise, that we are already living under something functionally equivalent to tyranny, is established. He assumed the premise; he didn’t demonstrate it.

        Point 15 mentioned many recent, good talks. But scriptures should be used to examine our own conduct, not to bludgeon fellow members. If we’re staying in the Book of Mormon, Alma’s work of knitting hearts together in unity, even with love towards our fellow enemies, seems the better model.

        I agreed with one line in point sixteen: “Anticipatory despair is not a form of resistance.” That’s the clearest and strongest sentence in the entire post. The answer to despair is more time with family, friends, and neighbors, not arrogantly browbeating them into repentance for voting differently than you.

        Finally, the insider language such as “cringe resist libs” and “MWEG moms” doesn’t clarify anything. That insider framing is telling. It signaled that his argument was aimed less at persuading a broad body of saints and more at rallying a politically fluent in-group that already shared his sense of impending catastrophe.

        The Church has survived lynch mobs, federal invasion, disincorporation, KGB surveillance, and Hitler—it will survive this political moment too, without Green’s help. His post amplifies anxiety, casts fellow members and leaders as moral failures for not sharing his political conclusions and confuses personal panic with institutional necessity. Inflating warning signs into moral certainties and treating his interpretation as Church directive does nothing to build unity, influence policy responsibly, or foster understanding—it is simply noise. If we are serious about clarity, faithful witness, and real community, we need charity and reason, not labels, hysteria, or overreach. 

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Throw Granny in Front of the Bus: The Ethics of Violence in Gaza

        

        Many people claim that all violence is equally wrong, as if harm alone defines morality, but this is a misunderstanding; violence must be judged by context, intention, method, and purpose, and failing to make these distinctions obscures the difference between deliberate terror and defensive action, which is why comparing Israel’s military campaign to Hamas’ attacks demonstrates how moral evaluation depends entirely on circumstances and objectives.

        This is precisely why, in my military ethics class, we spend time on examples that force students to confront how intent, circumstances, and foreseeable outcomes shape moral judgment.

        One example we use is the case of the grandmother and the bus. Imagine you are standing on a street corner and a grandmother is about to be struck by an oncoming bus. You push her out of the way, she breaks her hip but survives, and you are rightly called a hero. Now imagine an almost identical situation, except this time the bus is a few seconds earlier and the grandmother is still standing near the curb. You push her, she breaks her hip, falls into the street, and is run over and killed. You are now a villain.

        The physical action is the same, a grandmother being pushed. The injury is nearly the same, a broken hip. Yet the moral evaluation could not be more different. The difference lies entirely in context, intention, and the relationship between the act and its outcome. Ethics has always understood that harm alone does not determine moral guilt, and anyone pretending otherwise is either unserious or willfully evasive.

        This distinction matters when discussing Israel and Hamas. There is a profound difference between deliberately moving through civilian neighborhoods like Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be'eri, burning families alive, including infants and children, beheading civilians with garden tools, and taking civilians hostage to torture, starve and kill them, and conducting a military campaign in one of the most densely populated urban environments on earth against those same terrorists who use their own people as human shields and deliberately embed themselves in churches, hospitals, and schools.

        In both cases women and children die, and that fact is tragic, but tragedy does not erase moral distinctions. One campaign is targeted butchery pursued for the sake of terror itself. The other is a state under siege attempting to dismantle an enemy that openly celebrates rape, torture, and slaughter, while trying, however imperfectly, to protect its own population and limit civilian casualties under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Complaints about Israeli settler violence or other Israeli imperfections are largely attempts to obfuscate that difference and function as apologies for terrorists rather than serious moral analysis.

        The goals, attitudes, and methods used by the two parties remain entirely different, despite both using violence, and those differences matter. Israel’s use of force and the resulting deaths of Gazans are regrettable, they are still just in the moral sense because they are directed at stopping future atrocities and defending a population from an enemy that has made clear its intent to repeat them.

        Ultimately, the responsibility for the suffering of Palestinian civilians lies with Hamas. Israel’s campaign is imperfect, as all wars are, and many of the alleged crimes attributed to Israel rely on casualty figures and narratives produced by wildly Gazan sources and uncritical and even propagandist international organizations. Even where mistakes occur, a mistake made in pursuit of a just cause is morally different from deliberate evil.

        Hamas deliberately uses its own people as shields, operating from hospitals, schools, and residential buildings precisely because civilian deaths serve its propaganda goals. Despite this, Israel takes measures that are historically rare in urban warfare. According to John Spencer at the Modern War Institute, Israel has fought the most careful war in history. Israel provides advance warnings of operational zones, allows vaccination campaigns for children, and according to the United Nations itself facilitates the entry of millions of tons of food into Gaza. Israel possesses the military capability to kill the entire population of Gaza several times over, and supposedly seeks their genocide, yet it continually restrains itself and conducts a limited campaign aimed at dismantling a terrorist organization while simultaneously providing aid to the very population that organization endangers.

        In a perfect world violence would not be necessary, but we do not live in that world. In the end, recognizing the moral difference between deliberate terror and measured military defense is not a theoretical exercise but a practical imperative; Israel’s campaign is imperfect and tragic, but it is conducted with restraint, guided by the goal of protecting its citizens and dismantling an enemy that celebrates mass murder, while Hamas’ violence is indiscriminate, celebratory, and aimed at civilians, and anyone who refuses to distinguish between the two fails to grapple with the realities of war and the obligations of moral judgment, and the only responsible stance is to condemn the perpetrators of terror rather than those who act to stop them.

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