So I see from the Internet that John Piper set off a flurry of reactions and responses to his gun post. I refer to the one in which he discouraged Christians from packing heat, you can imagine how that went over. For my readers in the UK, yes, this really is a thing. Some churches have debates over open or closed communion. Others over here have debates about open carry.

Now this all comes from John Piper being so darn controversial. John is a friend, but if I have said it to him once I have said it to him a hundred times, “John, you shouldn’t be so controversial. You should try to be more mild and soft-spoken. Try to imitate my mellow groove.”

Okay, so maybe not a hundred times. And maybe my mellow groove is busted.

But seriously, John is a friend and so (before differing) I want to begin by defending him against a glib accusation that is easy to level in debates like this, but which really goes wide of the mark. In his post, he envisions a scenario in which his wife is being assaulted, and tries to answer the question whether it would be all right to shoot the assailant.

“I do not know what I would do before this situation presents itself with all its innumerable variations of factors. And I would be very slow to condemn a person who chose differently from me.”

But what we do know from John’s article is that he wouldn’t have a gun on him as he made the decision what to do. Now here comes the glib accusation. It is easy to say — as some have said — that leaving this open to question is not very “manly,” and that a true husband from ‘Merica would place a tight grouping of at least three holes above the assailant’s right ear.

John is actually doing something very different, and he is doing it in a very masculine way. He is a biblical absolutist, and he is pursuing a tight, systematic, rational argument from the text of Scripture. Differing with his argument, as I do, is not the same thing as answering him. In the meantime, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that John will go wherever the argument requires him to go, and he will submit to the text, whatever it says. We need more of that, not less.

Layering different aspects of masculinity like this reminds me of a story. Once a truck driver, who had a mild and unassuming appearance, was eating breakfast at a roadside cafe. While he was eating, an evil-looking biker gang of five entered the cafe. They saw at once that he was an unprepossessing man, and so they started to mess with him. They dumped salt in his eggs, rumbled his hair, stole some of his silverware, and so on. The truck driver said nothing, and simply attempted to finish his breakfast. When that proved to be something unlikely to happen, he got up quietly, paid his bill, and silently walked out. The bikers began to laugh uproariously, with one of them sitting on the abandoned stool to mimic the truck driver’s mousy little responses. Then one of them said to the cafe owner, “That guy sure wasn’t much of a man, was he?” The cafe owner nodded his head in agreement, while looking out the front window. “You got it. And he is not much of a truck driver either — he just ran over five motorcycles.”

The lesson is that there are different ways of gauging masculinity. Sometimes you have to look for different things. Make sure you are looking in the right spot.

So then, with the preliminaries over, let me say four things about all this.

First, full disclosure. I may or may not own multiple guns that the authorities may or may not know about, and I also decline to reveal when I might or might not be willing to carry, or under what circumstances. How’s that for full disclosure?

Second, when John assembles, as he does, many passages that outline what demeanor Christians ought to have, it is not enough to produce a verse from the Old Testament allowing a homeowner to shoot a midnight intruder (Ex. 22:2), and then conclude that an appeal to “turn the other cheek” doesn’t “mean that.” Quite so, and I do in fact agree. But what does “turn the other cheek” mean? When does it mean it? When do we apply it? Exegesis of “turn the other cheek” that results no one ever having to actually turn any cheeks ought to be suspect exegesis. This much is, I believe, irrefragable.

If we zero out the many passages that John assembled, if we explain them all away, we really are leaving too much room for carnal swagger. I would want to leave room for the Exodus homeowner to be armed, but for him to be spiritually armed as well — liberating him on certain occasions not to use the weapon he lawfully has. John used the example of the missionaries murdered by the Auca Indians — but we should not forget the fact they had firearms they choose not to use. In short, they were armed martyrs.

Third, there are macro-paradigm issues involved in all this. One time John Piper was asked about some of my doctrinal monkeyshines, and he replied that he thought I was mistaken. But he also added that it was just the kind of mistake that he would expect a Presbyterian to make. This is exactly the same kind of turnabout thing. John is a Baptist, and consequently has a very different take on the relationship of the Old and New Testaments than I do. Or, to take another example, he has a different understanding of God’s law than does, say, Joel McDurmon. This will necessarily shape what passages he gathers in order to make his argument, and the same goes for those debating him. The use of different quarries will result necessarily in different kinds of houses.

So I really don’t object to a debate about Christians arming themselves. Since millions of us have already done so, we might as well investigate what the Bible says about it. But as we do, we need to have some foundational preliminary debates first. Otherwise we will just wind up playing one more round of paradigm bumper cars.

And fourth, rather than getting into a debate about the leaves and twigs, I would like to make just a few observations about the trunk. Let me return to the passage from John’s article that I quoted earlier.

“I do not know what I would do before this situation presents itself with all its innumerable variations of factors. And I would be very slow to condemn a person who chose differently from me.”

We oftentimes assume that the ultimate test of commitment is what you are willing to die for. I think this is a fair way of evaluating commitment, but it is not the only way. Another way of measuring commitment is to ask a dedicated Christian what truths he would be willing to kill for. And you can take this same kind of standard, mutatis mutandis, and bring it into the fellowship of the church. What kind of truths would you be willing to excommunicate for?

The reason I think John simply wants to have a serious argument, a serious discussion, a real debate, is his statement that he would be “very slow to condemn a person who chose differently from me.” Not only would he be slow to shoot the assailant, he would also be slow to “shoot” the one who shot the assailant.

So John is not wanting to create a quasi-pacifist enclave. He is wanting to have some people engage with him in a real debate, with everything on the table, in order to find out what Scripture requires of us. I believe we need to do this because most of us don’t know yet. We have many Christians who are not yet straight on the authority of the Old Testament. We have many others who are not yet straight on the authority of the Sermon on the Mount. We have a mere handful who see Deuteronomy and the Sermon on the Mount as integrated parts of the same moral system, grounded in the character of God. We are sorting this out while living among shrill secular progressives who are gunophobic — clear misogunists all — and strident secular conservatives who are “happiness is a warm” gunophiles. And then God in His sovereign determination decided to throw some radical jihadists into the mix. And every stroke that God lays on us is as much to say, “Time to study your Bibles!”

So instead of creating hypothetical situations where an assailant is attacking your family, let’s create a different kind of hypothetical. Let us say that a member of John Piper’s leadership team shot and killed someone who was violently assaulting his wife. The prosecutor refused to touch the case because he said it was an open and shut case. The response was well within the law, and the force used to stop the assailant was not disproportionate. Let us also say that the man who did this believes that he did the right thing, the only thing that he could have done under those circumstances. He is not apologetic at all. In short, he had a gun on him, and he had that gun because he disagreed with John’s entire approach as outlined in the article. Now what?

So how do we answer these questions? To the law and to the testimony! But we will have to talk about a lot more than guns.