Morally Obligated?

[fluke]

This might be a question Randy Ingermason can answer off the top of his head, but a message I saw on another board made me think about this.

If you could travel in time, would you be morally obligated to prevent disasters (or at least save lives from those disasters), stop dictators from rising to power, prevent assassinations, etc.?

As an example, what if you did go back in time, feeling morally obligated to kill Hitler before he becomes dictator, plunges the world into war and starts genocide? But then your conscience says you have to find another way. So, you put the gun down and travel further back in time. Then in a field in 1918 France, you keep an allied ground gunner from firing the shot that kills Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.

Manfred, being from the Prussian nobility and almost worshiped by the Germans for his 80 air-combat kills, is then in place to become Chancellor of Germany instead of Hitler in 1933.

I'm not thinking of writing a story based on this yet. It's just a question... for now.

Frank Luke

[Christian Soldier]

This goes back to an ancient dilema: can you change the past? Really? Who says that you wouldn't kill Hitler, go forward in time, and it turns out that you killed Rudolph, Adolph's twin brother... the nice, sane one who was GOING to become chanceller? We have no way to know. Only God knows, and I personally like it that way.

Boiled down to a single sentence: don't mess with time... you'll be saner...-est

[Teskas]

Sort of a temporal version of the Prime Directive....

I never bought that Prime Directive nonsense. If you somehow found yourself back in time, you would still have to behave as the human being that you are, with a Christian perspective of the world.

You would not cease to have moral responsibility simply because space-time was out of whack. So, you would oppose Hitler's rise to power by doing all you could, according to the law of God, to prevent it.

As human beings, we are not asked to guarantee outcomes. We are only asked to act rightly. God takes care of the outcomes.

[Christian Soldier]

This is true... but what crime had Hitler commited before his election? What had he done deserving death prior to that?

[Teskas]

Most Germans, when Hitler was elected, thought he was a good leader, partly because he lied so convincingly, and partly because they wanted to believe. Those who supported Hitler, particularly in the face of his antisemitism, were children of the lie. And we all know
the identity of their father.

You may recall that Hitler spent time in jail before his election, and before that was engaged in gangster tactics aimed at destabilizing the government of the day.

He was already a criminal, but whether he deserved death is not the issue.

If you knew Hitler was going to obtain power, and you had foreknowledge of how he was going to achieve it, you could create systems which would thwart his bid. You don't necessarily need to be an assassin. But, whatever your options, you would have the moral duty to oppose him.

Whatever you did, however you attempted to change what happened to Germany, you need only act rightly. God would be taking your acts into account as part of His Divine Plan.

As Alfred North Whitehead put it, "God guarantees in principle that which remains opaque."

[J Jack]

The problem with this is, what if we needed the whole war to lead us in some direction. Like new leaps in medicine and science that change and save lives. Maybe killing Hitler would alter the entire course of human history, maybe even opening up to some even worse dictator who gained power because the Germans needed a leader. If a new leader arose that united even more countries but was stopped by Hitler, maybe we would be much worse off with them. So many different things can happen when someone messes with time. The whole grandfather paradox comes into effect all of a sudden. Maybe I'm only here because of the war and Hitler was in a way a catalyst to my birth. You never know what could happen when you play with time like that.

[mongoose]

I'm not sure I get where y'all are coming from, assuming you base your views on something Biblical. If we were germans during the rise of Hitler, we could certainly protest and whatnot, even as pacifist Christians in America protest Bush's policies. But that's the extent of our Biblical interference. Once he's in place as the civil authority we're obligated to submit to him and to pray for him, though there's no injunction to support civil authorities.

there's a couple basic Biblical principles at work here. First, as Christians, we're prohibited from attempting to hurt people, and called upon, rather, to show them love. We could get into a discussion of just war, and whether or not there's any situation in which Christians are called to, or permited to kill, but I think it's more instructive in this instance to just assume that we should avoid that at all costs. The question, then, would be whether or not we're supposed to make exceptions for really aweful people like Hitler. I honestly don't see the difference between killing someone like him, and killing anyone else.

You might look at the long term results, and assume fewer people would have been killed if Hitler had been killed earlier. In-fact, this is one of the biggest arguments posed in favor of using Special Operations forces to do assasinations and kidnapings of despotic rulers and enemy military officers. But the American public as a whole, not to mention those who take Christ's teachings on peace seriously, have decried such practices are moraly reprehensible (for better or worse). That and, as has been mentioned, we don't know what the long term repercussions would be of removing one dictator. Take Iraq. We removed Saddam Hussein. Did things really get better? What if we hadn't occupied? There was considerable worry that his son would replace him, his son being worse than he was. What would have happened in Germany?

And secondly, given the assertion that all authority is put in place by God, we ask why and how and for what purpose did God put Hitler in place? If we tried to remove him ourselves, as followers of Christ, then, would we be disobeying God? (for me the answer is an obvious yes.) Consider what God did with that. It was because of Hitler's genocide of the Jews that Western Europe and the United States finally gave them a sympathetic look, and allowed them to move in and occupy palestine. Without the Holocost, would the state of Israel have the support it currently has from the U.S.? Would the state of Israel even exist?

I do not propose in any way to justify any evil that has been commited, only to assert that our role as followers of Christ, relative to evil, is only to state that it is wrong and to pray against it and for what is right. It is not our role to try to use force of arms or violence to change civil authority. This principle would remain the case regardless of the time, place, and situation.

[Christian Soldier]

I would have to say that, were such a situation to occur, I would have to consult with God and follow what He says then... and I have no way of knowing what that may be.

[myrthman]

I wonder what would have happened if, instead of killing Hitler when traveling back in time, we took a salvation tract, got into a relationship with him, and led him to Christ and then spent years discipling him in the Bible (perhaps the time travel is one way and this is an all-or-nothing mission trip). He'd still be the man God put into authority but he'd have a new purpose for applying that authority. Then again, with the other suggestions already posted (medical advances, etc), perhaps it's true that only God has the wisdom and power to mess with time.

[Therin]

Now THAT would be something! Maybe instead of opressing the Jews, he could have shown them their Messiah.
In my opinion, even if messing with time is possible, it is impossiblee to mess up God's plan. So even if some guy tried to go back and kill Jesus before it was time, he would fail. Likewise, anyone trying to stop the crucifiction would be fighting a losing battle. Since God is omniscient and omnipotent, no mere human could override his divine plan.

[tranehess]

My idea for a book I'm planning is the opposite: Instead of having an obligation to change history for the better, my people are under an oath to keep from changing it! They have to go back in history under the least invasive methods possible to counteract a terrorist who is intent on changing things to his advantage.

[Divides the Waters]

christiansoldier said:

This is true... but what crime had Hitler commited before his election? What had he done deserving death prior to that?

Have you seen Minority Report? The whole notion is not time travel, but psychic law enforcement. You are incarcerated not on the crime you have committed, but the crime you are about to commit.

Similar principle, no doubt, would apply here.

[strangewind]

Mongoose, I have to disagree with you, albeit a month late. I'd have to say that we had quite a few high-minded, bible-minded men who enjoined in a little thing called the American Revolution. I think there is a pretty solid Christian argument for the preservation of the Union through bloodshed during the civil war. The 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, rightly or wrongly, places the government at the whim of of the firepower of its citizenry.

A Christian certainly has a deep obligation to wrestle with issues, to submit to authority, and to follow a peaceable Jesus. But, theoretically, if I was a German in '39 with Hitler in my sights, I humbly submit to you that I'd gun him down without a second thought (assuming my nerves didn't get the better of me, because I assure you my conscience would not.)

Again, this all very theoretical, because real life doesn't involve time travel, an our own governments are not as easily scrutinized as ones that have been sifted through in history. In Western countries, and some emerging nations, we have been Provided many means by which we might entreat the authorities.

We are encouraged to submit to authorities, but such submission can become impossible, for example, when submission to authority means the defying or denying the will of Christ in us. Our conscience, at those times, pricks us.

If Christians were to submit to all authority for any and all reasons, do you think Paul would have ever been in prison? If Christians were to submit to all authority for any and all reasons, do you think so many martyrs would have been made in the Colliseum? If Christians were to submit to all authority for any and all reasons, do you think Corrie Ten Boom would be acknowledged as Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel? I guess my point is that following Christ's orders sometimes means defying the authorities. Should not Martin Luther have simply submited to the authorities of the day, certainly the authorities of the Church?

What then, when the Christian is in authority?

The real trick is in determining when defiance of the Law is also a defiance of the Lord. I guess I'm saying that it is possible to take moderation too far! I'm pretty sure that I'll never have a moral challenge as clear as the Hitler dilemma, but if I did, I'm absolutely convinced that my Christian conscience would dictate action.

[Divides the Waters]

Romans 13:1-4 "Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities .... For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil ..."

Too often only the first part of this verse is quoted. The notion of the government "not bearing the sword for nothing" is worth exploring; the sword in those days was an instrument of war and of execution; it was not for a symbolic slap on the wrist. As with many of Paul's revelations and statements, for every yin, there is a yang.

That having been said, the early Christians submitted themselves unto the government insofar as their faith would let them. But they also defied it if what the government told them to do contradicted what God told them to do--even unto their own deaths.

There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

[myrthman]

So who is the governing authority to our hypothetical time traveling hero? Is it the enigmatic (or not) Agency that sent him back to deal with Hitler, or the Fuhrer himself, under whose rule he now finds himself? Perhaps he struggles with this very issue as he assembles his 24th century sniper rifle and sights in on a black VW waving a pair of swastika flags? I guess we're now back at the original question.