Rough Justice for Osama bin Laden

My son, now 15, aspires to be a Navy SEAL.  I have little doubt that, when the time comes (barring unforeseen circumstances), he will be able to meet the physical requirements of SEAL training.  The mental and emotional side of it remains to be seen, though  these words are not inapt descriptors of what I know of my son’s character.  (As for the parents, I’m a bit less confident we could survive that career choice, except to the extent that prayer can adequately fill all the sleepless nights.)

This morning, I sent him the following in an email.

Whether it was Orwell, Kipling, or Churchill who said, “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” the quote applies to SEALs. It’s appropriate that the last thing bin Laden saw was a rough man with an MP-5.

But just to be clear, these “rough men” my son so admires and wishes to join can’t merely be rough.  To describe them that way, and to encourage them to be only that, would be to follow Machiavelli’s advice in taking the extremities as guidance for living, to find “virtue” as revealed and displayed when men are placed in the most violent situations, situations that tend to provide distorted standards for understanding human excellence.  I’m hoping that they are, rather, “God-fearing Spartans.”

I’ve also sent my son this link , which asks a number of important questions and offers sound standards by which to judge:

I have no doubt that in this military killing the United States’ government exercised its divinely ordained task , wielding the sword to administer justice and constrain evil. I believe this to be so largely because I am one of those Christians for whom the question of the proper task and character of government cannot be answered without reference to Romans 13: “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. . . . [The ruler] is God’s servant for your good . . . . [H]e does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”

Because of this conviction, I resonate with the statements by President Obama , Secretary of State Clinton , former President Bush , and former New York Mayor Giuliani , when they say that in this killing, “justice has been done.” It will be important in the days (and years) ahead to learn more about the prudential judgments that informed this military action. What were the immediate intentions with the action: to capture or assassinate? What are the military purposes that this action will advance? Beyond just retribution, what are the proper political purposes that this action will serve? But as to the fundamental justice of the action, I suffer from no ambivalence.

He added this important reminder, one I hope my spirited son will take to heart:

I believe it is necessary for Christians to pause, and to consider the death of Osama bin Laden within the deeper perspective of human sin and divine grace. In the end, no death should give us pleasure. Another Scripture passage coming across the Twitter transom has been Ezekiel 18:23: “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?”

Earthly justice is one thing, and we’re given our capacities for discernment and indignation for a reason.  But we’re also called to love and to look for a transformation that cannot be effected by any merely human act.  Holding the Christian and the Spartan together is hard enough for us bystanders.  Let us pray for both the rough men and those in whose way they stand, the former that they not be brutalized by their experiences, the latter that they will be visited by God’s grace.