But if we commited apostasy in that situation, we would be destroying any chance to testify to the faith. Didn’t God send His only Son to be crucified for the sake of the entire world?
Your ideas depend on several appallingly questionable assumptions.
First of all, condemning the villagers to torture would have far
more potential to destroy their openness to the faith than saving them, because in their agony, they would inevitably perceive the stubborn believer as horrifyingly cruel and apathetic for letting them suffer willingly.
This, not feigned apostasy, would ruin any chance that they would listen to the believer for the rest of their lives.
Who’s to say His plan is to ask us to save the villagers… in a very temporal way? Consider the torturers. Perhaps God’s plan is to save them. And by committing apostasy, you’re telling those men - and the villagers - that the God you preached isn’t worth relying on in your darkest hour.
Your second mistake - this situation would
not be “
your” darkest our - it would be the villagers’.
We have the authority to embrace our own suffering and give up our lives for Christ. If you were told, “Renounce Christ or
you
will suffer and die,” then the right choice would be martyrdom; hopefully we would all have the grace to choose it.
In the example given, however,
the villagers have no choice. They may or may not
want to be martyrs. And if they die against their will - if they
personally would want you to commit apostasy so that they could live, if they preferred earthly life to martyrdom for Christ,
then how could they possibly be martyrs? If they’re not in a state of grace before this event occurs and if they have no conversion experience during their torture, you may very well be condeming them to
hell by your stubborn insolence.
Committing apostasty is quite likely the worst choice - the betrayal of your God will not only breed arrogance and triumph among your captors, but also doubt among your flock.
If you stop for a moment and simply take the time to realize what torture
is, and then imagine wretched howls of agony and despair coming from innocent men, women, and children, then I think you’ll realize that your captors are, in a sense, forcing you to betray God
either way.
And that brings up another point - it’s
so easy for some of you to casually type from the comfort of your homes, in front of your familiar computer screens, that you would condemn the villagers to torture and death.
If you were actually
in that situation and
saw the torture and
experienced the horror of it all, you would suddenly realize that it isn’t
nearly as black-and-white as you presume.
I think the greatest act of faith would be defending your faith. God may very well provide for the safety of the villagers, as long as you do the best thing you are capable of doing.
How can the “best thing”
possibly consist of being reckless with the lives and souls of unbelievers? Again, this isn’t
their choice; the assumption on the part of some of you that this is
the villagers’ opportunity to be martyrs reveals that you’re not thinking about what it means to be a martyr (I mean, the villagers aren’t even believers yet! They’re going to die for a cause
they don’t care about yet) and worse,
you’re rewriting the situation to make it simpler than it really is.
Not good at all.
mistfall:
Your argument assumes that words are indeed empty and that actions taken against symbols are indeed trivial; and further assumes that suffering and death are the ultimate evils.
His argument does
not assume that words are
necessarily always empty and that actions taken against symbols are
inherently trivial.
He simply assumes that it’s
possible for
some actions in
some circumstances to be meaningless - surely you don’t deny that?
And a situation like this one
undoubtedly qualifies as part of the category in which you’re being manipulated so horrifically that your actions are stripped of any real,
willful meaning.
I ask all of you to imagine for a moment that you’re a villager who has just heard about Christ and doesn’t know or care about Him yet.
Which will make you more likely to turn away from Christ?
His messenger paying no heed to your innocent children’s howls of agony? Or his messenger renouncing Him with
obvious insincerity in order to save you and your family?
