Pants on Fire

I stumbled upon this article from Bodie Hodge of Answers in Genesis from a couple months back.  It asks the classic yet seemingly simple question of whether it's ethical to lie to Nazi soldiers in order to save a hiding Jewish family.

For most of us, including the vast majority of Christians (which I'll get to in a moment), I think that this is a pretty easy answer - the simple act of lying is nowhere near as unethical as directly endangering the lives of innocent people.  Amazingly, AIG disagrees:

The most common example sent to me was envisioning the Holocaust and being placed in the position of lying to potentially protect someone’s life. Like most, if placed in such a difficult situation, it would be very difficult. In fact, I could never be sure what I would do, especially if it were a loved one.

Ah, it would be much easier to endanger the life of someone that you didn't know very well.  Good to know.

But consider for a moment that we are all already sentenced to die because we are sinners (Romans 5:12). It is going to happen regardless. If a lie helps keep someone alive for a matter of moments compared to eternity, was the lie, which is high treason against the Creator, worth it?

It would be like sitting in a cell on death row and when the guards come to take your roommate to the electric chair, you lie to the guards and say you don’t know where the person went—while your roommate is hiding under their covers on the bed. Does it really help?

So there we have it.  Knowingly causing the death of one or more innocent people is insignificant to offending God.  As he points out, scripture is pretty clear on these priorities, after all.

I don't think I need to explain in much detail what's so wrong with this worldview.  Thankfully, Hodge himself admits that such an action seems wrong to him, and that he's not at all certain what he would do if he found himself with such a choice.  I sincerely hope that he never finds himself in such a position, and that if he does, he chooses the ethical course, and discards his God's wishes entirely.

He offers some other examples:

Stephen in Acts 6–7 preached Christ, and men came against him. This culminated with a question by the high priest in Acts 7:1 who said: “Are these things so?”

At this point, Stephen could have done a “righteous lie” to save his life so that he could have many more years to preach the gospel. However, Stephen laid a long and appropriate foundation for Christ—then preached Christ. And they killed him.

Obviously, I strongly doubt that this story took place exactly as it is portrayed.  If we give it the benefit of the doubt, however, I still think that it's a pretty easy answer, especially considering that Hodge concludes that good came from Stephen's death - his martyrdom to the Christian cause.

Martyrs can be a source of great good, if a person's life is given in service to a worthy cause.  The Revolutionary War, the Civil War and abolition of slavery, various civil rights movement, etc. are all good nominees for such causes.

I don't think that making people Christian is such a cause.

To put it bluntly, Stephen lost his life for almost nothing.  Whatever positive effect could have occurred as a result of his death, I conclude that such hypothetical benefits are not greater than his worth as a person, and the lives of his family and friends.

I find it telling that Hodge specifically states that the good that would have come from Stephen lying to save his own life would come from his continued preaching and proselytizing.  There's no mention of Stephen's own worth, or the effect on his loved ones.

Also, do I even need to say it?  While we (arguably, potentially) have a right to choose to be a martyr, even in a cause of questionable worth, we clearly have no right to martyr other people to our cause.  He could have even responded to the Nazis-hunting-for-hiding-Jews example with something about the value of those lives as martyrs to the cause of rallying support for the Nazi's defeat.  He doesn't, though, he only considers the value of their lives vs. his religious doctrine.

Later in the article, even more disturbingly, he himself has to resort to lying outright about a passage in Exodus, to desperately try and prove his point that God always condemns lying, even to save innocent life (!).

In summary, Pharaoh has decreed to the Hebrew midwives that they put to death all male children that they deliver.  They disobey, and when Pharaoh asks them why the cock they've got all these newborn Hebrew cocks running around, the midwives tell him that the Hebrew women are just giving birth really, really fast, too quickly for the midwives to show up.  God wholeheartedly approves of this falsehood, and blesses the midwives for it by multiplying the Hebrew people.

Hodge claims that the midwives did not lie.  His alternate explanation of the passage is that the midwives simply told Hebrew women that their sons would be in danger unless they managed to give birth very quickly, on their own, without a midwife, and they somehow managed to do so.  Okay, okay, stop laughing.  He also suggests that the midwives just took a really long time to get to a woman in labor.  Of course, this would also mean that the midwives basically lied to Pharaoh (can anyone really claim with a straight face that deliberately dragging their feet and then claiming that Hebrew babies are like greased lightning would not be completely deceptive?).

Both possible explanations suffer from one glaring drawback, hence the clear fact that Hodge has lied about what the Bible says; the Bible passage clearly states that the midwives didn't simply show up late:  "But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive."

This leads me directly to my main point - the Bible contradicts itself on this matter (no surprise there, I suppose . . .), but we have a Christian who, I think, knows what's right, as shown by his hesitation to hand over an innocent family to be murdered.  However, he has concluded with all his rational faculties that the opposite is true - that lying to Nazis is a greater evil than letting an innocent family die.  People, both religious and nonreligious alike, are quick to point out that many people would oppose gay rights based on their own bigotry regardless of whether they had religious doctrine to fuel it.  That is absolutely not what we have in this case - Hodge has reached this grossly immoral conclusion exactly as a result of his religious doctrine.*

*Note that this last paragraph is completely philosophical in nature, and actually only represents what I sincerely hope to be the case.  It is entirely possible that Hodge is, in fact, a violently bigoted closet-Nazi anti-Semite.  I suppose we'll never know . . .