Again, I think that people are making much too great an effort to ‘excuse’ a Christian for abjuring his/her faith.
And we need to be aware that this is precisely the sort of ‘fuzzy thinking’ that is meant to make us be swayed toward relativism and indifferentism and rationalization.
It doesn’t matter if the ‘gunman’ is holding a gun to our head, to the head of our child, our spouse, our parent, Mother Teresa. . .the issue is
not (as some seem to imply) that we can
only ‘sacrifice’ our own selves and that somehow, if the question is put as ‘renounce Christ or somebody else will die’, we are **obligated **to ‘renounce’ because the other person’s life is worth ‘more’ than our words.
Squirming around with "but you don’t really ‘mean’ to renounce, you’re only saying it to get the gunman to put the gun down’ is again semantics. And making all sorts of inferences like "the gunman knows you don’t really mean it but he’s doing it for a political statement etc’. is again, just so much red herring and window dressing.
Either we believe in God, or we don’t.
If we believe, we either profess our faith. . .or we renounce it.
There isn’t a middle ground. There isn’t a conditional, ‘well, I believe in God but I will cross my fingers and lie if the situation warrants and God will understand and forgive me if I even have sinned and probably I haven’t because after all I am being forced to do this.’
Thousands and thousands of people throughout history have been given this choice. . .and they have been in just such ‘horrible’ circumstances. They’ve known that they --or their father, mother, husband, wife, child will die if they affirm their faith in Christ. And they have done so knowing the price they pay.
Do you remember Columbine? Do you remember the one young woman who was approached by the gunmen and asked if she believed in Christ? Here is a young woman in a situation in which I’m sure most of you would say that, hey, she’s YOUNG, she’s scared, God will understand, all she had to do was say ‘no’. . .
She said ‘yes I believe’ and they killed her. I suppose many will think she died for nothing, and wonder at the ‘waste’ when she could have just ‘believed in her heart’ but rejected with her lips and thus be alive today. . .
And I wonder how she must be feeling knowing how few people seem to find, not even the courage now, but the actual DESIRE to affirm their faith in God. Because it seems to me that many people on here don’t even think that stating faith in God in a situation like the above is even NECESSARY, let alone courageous. And that saddens me.
