Matthew Curtis Fleischer

Chapter 40: What About Home Intruders?

From When They Give You Hell, Give Them Heaven: What Jesus' Nonviolence Means for Home Intruders, Hitler, and Politics — Part VII, "The Hard Questions." The chapter stands alone; the argument it applies is built across the preceding parts. Unpublished manuscript. © 2026 Matthew Curtis Fleischer.

A man breaks into your house in the middle of the night. He is larger than you and he is armed, and he has made plain what he came to do: rape your wife and kill your children. You have no doubt that he means it. There is a loaded gun within reach. Are you not only permitted but obligated to use it? And if you refuse, if you let him do what he came for when a single bullet would have stopped him, are you not complicit in the horror that follows?

This is the question that is supposed to end the conversation. It gets wheeled out whenever nonviolence is on the table, and it gets wheeled out for a reason: it is the hardest case there is.

Almost everything this book has argued about violence until now has run on scale and time—violence breeds violence, it fails over the long run. Those arguments are true, and in this chapter they are nearly useless. The home invasion is engineered to defeat them. It collapses the conflict down to one attacker, one moment, and one near-certain outcome, and at that scale violence often works. The bullet probably does stop him. Your family probably does live through the night.

Which means the scenario is not really asking what works but something far more uncomfortable. It asks whether you will obey Jesus when obedience promises you nothing you can see and costs you everything you love. Stripped of every pragmatic excuse, that is the only question left, and it happens to be the one at the heart of this entire book. The home intruder is not the strongest objection to my thesis. It is the purest illustration of it.

The love that makes you want to kill this man is not wrong. The fierce, unconditional, self-sacrificing love you have for your wife and children is the closest thing in human experience to the love God has for you. The problem is not that you love your family too much. The problem is that God loves the intruder exactly that much too. He gave his Son for the man kicking in your door as surely as for the children asleep down the hall. This is one of Christianity’s strangest and most offensive claims: the perpetrator is as precious to God as the victim.

Notice what the scenario has quietly done. It has made the intruder a stranger and a beast, and your family innocents, because a beast is easy to kill and a son is not. So ask a harder version of the skeptic’s question. What if the roles were reversed? What if the intruder were your own son, deranged or strung out, and the stranger were the one in danger from him? Would your first instinct be to put a bullet in your boy? Or would you try everything else first, and only then use the least force that might stop him, and even then throw your own body in the way before you broke his? That instinct you have for your own is the instinct Jesus asks you to extend to everyone. And it produces a recognizable order of response.

The first response is everything that involves no force at all. There is an enormous range of action between doing nothing and pulling a trigger, and most of it goes untried only because we were trained to reach for the weapon first. You can speak, plead, negotiate, or flee with your family. You can meet him with kindness, which sounds absurd until you remember you have been asked to see your own son in him. Stay calm and show no hostility. Tell him you will not hurt him. Ask whether he is all right, whether there is anything you can do for him. Tell him he can take whatever he wants, that you would rather lose everything in the house than see anyone harmed, including him. These are all real options, and some of them work more often than people who have never tried them imagine.[1] But I will not rest the argument there, because a skeptic can simply stipulate that none of it works tonight, and the position has to hold even then.

If words and flight fail, the second response is to put yourself between the intruder and your family. You absorb the harm rather than redirect it. You offer your own body, your own safety, your own life, in place of theirs. This is not a clever tactic. It is the plain shape of enemy love: you sacrifice yourself rather than your enemy.

If that fails, the third response is physical force that restrains without destroying. You tackle him, hold him, use a stun gun if you have to—whatever stops the attack while doing the least harm you can and nothing that maims or lasts. Yes, restraining the attacker would involve using physical force, but physical force is not the same thing as violence. You can lay hands on a man to stop him without trying to ruin him.

And then you stop. You stop short of the blow that cripples or kills. If restraint fails, you are out of moves, and if you have reached that point, you are probably already too injured to do anything but the last thing available to anyone in extremity, which is pray. What you may not do, at any rung on this ladder, is the one thing the skeptic insists is obligatory. You may not kill him.

This marks the line between forbidden and permitted physical force. Christlike love is not a prohibition on every conceivable use of physical force. It is an absolute prohibition on killing. The narrow band in between—force that stops a man without destroying him—I will call protective love, and naming it matters, because the instinct behind just war theory is not wrong. Serious people facing violent situations do need a standard to govern what they do.

The problem with just war theory is what its criteria are built to accomplish. Each one is calibrated to tell you when killing is permissible. Every criterion of protective love is calibrated to forbid it, and to drive the cost onto you instead. Whereas just war theory asks, “When may we kill?” protective love asks, “How far does love go?” and it answers: all the way to your own death, and not one inch into the taking of another life.

So if we were to list the criteria of protective love, they would look something like this: Protective love is reactive, never proactive. It answers an imminent danger already in progress, never a remote or merely possible one. It is used only after non-forceful options have been tried. It aims at one thing, stopping the attack, and never at harming the attacker. It values his life no less than your own and no less than the victim’s. It sacrifices you first and most and imposes on him last and least. It always errs toward too little force rather than too much. It never risks the lives of bystanders. It never commissions from another the killing it has renounced. And afterward, it takes responsibility for whatever harm it did cause—paying his medical bills, compensating for destroyed property, making him whole.

Every criterion on that list comes from one conviction: God’s love for the man in your hallway and God’s love for the child down the hall are the same. Kill him or cripple him, and you have priced his life below hers. Stand aside and let it happen, and you have priced hers below his. The ladder refuses both, and that refusal is what makes it expensive, because the only life it will spend freely is your own. It cannot promise that both of them live through the night. It can only promise that you will not spend one of them to save the other.

Once you refuse to price either life, the arithmetic has nowhere to go. There is no point at which enough innocent lives stacked on the other side of the scale unlock the killing, no proportionality calculation in which his death becomes acceptable once the math runs heavy enough. The criteria are flat prohibitions on certain kinds of acts, binding no matter the count. That is the entire difference between this and the cost-benefit calculus the previous chapter dismantled, and it is why protective love does not collapse back into a Christian-flavored just war theory. It does not relocate the command from your hand to your heart so you can kill a man while inwardly wishing him well. It keeps the command in your hand, where Jesus put it.

Standing aside is not the pacifist’s position but a violation of it. That is why the caricature fails: critics like to picture a Christian whose daughter is being assaulted telling her to hold still and submit, as though nonviolence meant volunteering to be a doormat. I know of no pacifist who believes anything of the kind. Holding a man back from a rape is not violence. It is protective love doing what it exists to do.

To insist that any use of physical force disqualifies you as a pacifist is to mistake where the line runs for whether there is one. Nonviolence has a bright line—you may not kill—and it is as black and white as ethics gets. It simply does not run where the critic placed it, between touching and not touching, but where this chapter drew it, between force that stops a man and force that destroys him.

Jesus himself stayed on the near side of that line: he overturned tables and drove out livestock without striking a single person—and as Chapter 8 argued, we read that scene in light of his life, not his life in light of it.

The honest test is not whether you ever touch another person. It is whether your action still loves your enemy, still leaves the door to reconciliation open, still refuses to pass the violence on. Protective love can pass that test. Killing cannot.

Now the part there is no way around. If you do all of this, if you try everything and put your body in the gap and refuse to kill, the intruder may kill your family anyway. He may kill them while you watch, while you bleed, while the gun sits in the drawer. Faithfulness offers no guarantee that obedience will spare the people you love. I do not claim otherwise. I contend that you can obey perfectly and lose everything, and the command does not change.

So why would you choose that anyway?

Start where the question has already been answered, in a garden, by Jesus, in nearly this exact situation. An armed mob arrives in the night to seize an innocent man. Peter, defending the only fully innocent person who ever lived against an unjust attack, does what the skeptic says you must do: he draws a weapon and strikes. And Jesus stops him, tells him to put the sword away, and heals the wound Peter inflicted. If lethal defense was ever justified, it was justified there, and Jesus forbade it there. The case for putting a bullet in your intruder cannot be stronger than Peter’s case for swinging that sword, and Peter was wrong.

Look closely at the reasoning the skeptic is offering, and you find it has a pedigree. Better that this one man die than that my whole family perish. One life weighed against several. The few sacrificed for the many. That is not a wild or monstrous thought but a sober, responsible calculation—the exact calculation Caiaphas made when he concluded it was better for one man to die than for the nation to be destroyed. He was not raving. He was doing arithmetic. And the arithmetic produced the murder of the Son of God. Every time we decide that a little disobedience is a reasonable price for a larger good, we are standing where Caiaphas stood.

Here is a test that cuts through it. Imagine the intruder offered you a different deal: renounce Christ, curse him, worship Satan, and your family goes free. Would you do it? Almost no Christian says yes. We understand instantly that there are things we will not do even to save the people we love, that allegiance to Jesus outweighs their survival and our own. The command not to deny him and the command not to kill are both his, and both are plain. We treat the first as obvious and the second as negotiable only because we feel the weight of the one and have trained ourselves not to feel the weight of the other. But what good is it to say you would die before denying Jesus with your lips, if you will disobey him with your hands the moment obedience turns costly? Refusing his command is its own kind of denial.

But surely, the objection runs, you have a Christian duty to protect the innocent, and refusing to kill the intruder abandons them to him. Yes, you have a duty to protect your family. What you do not have is a duty to protect them by any means necessary, including means God has forbidden. Those are two different claims, and the second has been smuggled in. Scripture commands you not to murder. It nowhere commands you to prevent murder at the price of your own obedience.

This is not a principle unique to pacifism. Even just war theory draws lines it will not cross to win—a soldier may not kill the enemy who has surrendered, however much safer that killing would make him—which is to say even the just warrior grants that some deaths must be permitted rather than prevented by a forbidden act. He and the pacifist differ only on where the line falls.

And the gap between doing evil and permitting an evil you could only have stopped by doing evil is not a lawyer’s distinction. It is the gap God himself keeps every single day. He has the power to stop every assault on earth, and he does not. We do not call him complicit. The logic that would convict you for refusing to kill the intruder would convict God for the entire history of human suffering, including the torture and murder of his own Son.

There is a sleight of hand, too, in the phrase I had no choice but to kill him. You always have a choice. What people mean is that if they want to guarantee their family’s survival, killing is the only path. That is probably true, and it concedes the entire point: survival, not faithfulness, is the thing they have decided they cannot surrender. For a Christian, faithful obedience is always available. So is martyrdom. Jesus chose it twice over, refusing the political power Satan offered him in the wilderness and the legions of angels available to him in the garden, each of which could have spared him the cross.

All of which rests, finally, on the single thing that makes any of this sane rather than insane. If bodily death is the last word, this position is monstrous. A man who lets his children die for a principle, when death is the end of them, has done something terrible. But the whole Christian claim is that death is not the last word. It is the thing Jesus walked through and came out the far side of. If the resurrection is true, then the worst the intruder can do is send your family ahead of you through a door you will follow them through. That does not make their deaths small. It makes them survivable, in the only sense that finally matters.

The skeptic’s scenario takes for granted that this life is all there is, and then acts surprised that Christianity gives an answer which only makes sense if it isn’t.

And there is another thing we do not know, our not-knowing being the whole point. We treat killing the intruder as the end of the story, the final good secured. It is the end of nothing. We have no idea what God might do with the intruder if we spare him, or with the deaths of our family members, should we fail to prevent them. The murderer Saul became Paul, but a first-century pragmatist would have killed him and strangled half the New Testament in the crib. We cannot see the chain of consequences our obedience sets in motion, which is why we were told to obey and to leave the consequences to the One who can.

Return to the ladder, because one instrument remains: the telephone. You may call the police—and the call belongs on the ladder, because it is protective love pointed in both directions at once. Toward the victim: love reaches for every protection short of the forbidden act, and this is one of them. Toward the intruder: trained restraint is his best chance of surviving the night, and arrest is the only outcome that leaves reconciliation possible. A grave forecloses everything you owe him. The call is not commanded. Scripture issues no such order, and where a gentler instrument exists—an unarmed crisis team or a counselor on call—love prefers it. But where the call serves the least-lethal outcome, love reaches for the phone.

Still, on its face, it looks like a problem. Am I not laundering the killing through Caesar, doing by proxy what I refused to do by hand? The answer is no, and it deserves explanation.

Chapter 37 found that every justification for Christian violence works by addition—each supplies the clause the command lacks. Augustine, for example, appended without authorization to “all who draw the sword.” This permission appends nothing to any command, because no command reads inform no magistrate. The commands forbid killing, avenging, and repaying evil in kind, and your hands will leave this section as bound as they entered it. Whether you may report a wrong to the enforcer God ordained is a question the commands never address, so it must be answered from what Scripture does address: Paul’s practice and Paul’s teaching.

The practice: in Acts 23, more than forty men swear an oath to assassinate Paul. His nephew brings him word, and Paul summons a centurion. That is the whole act—a report. The commander does the rest, dispatching nearly five hundred soldiers to move Paul out by night. Information upstream, discretion downstream. And five hundred against forty is not an invitation to fight but the cancellation of one—deterrence doing the work bloodshed would otherwise do. Nor is this a stray episode. It fits the pattern Chapter 26 traced—Philippi, Jerusalem, the appeal to Caesar—Paul availing himself of the state’s protection always as a defendant or protectee, never as an agent. The man who filed this report is the man who wrote that the authority “is God’s servant for your good” (Romans 13:4). He believed his own sentence.

Paul’s teaching gives the call firmer ground still. Chapter 27 showed that “leave room for God’s wrath” (Romans 12:19) is a positive instruction—step back and make space for God to handle the matter—followed a few verses later by the handler’s identity: the sword-bearing “agent of wrath” (13:4). Vengeance is forbidden to you and assigned to an instrument. The call is not a loophole in that argument. It is that argument running in real time—leaving room, when the room is your own hallway.

But not every call qualifies. Pick up the phone as the trigger you will not pull yourself—wanting the man dead, summoning officers to be the violence that saves you—and you have chosen killing by proxy. That is Peter with a megaphone, and it is forbidden. It even has a modern name: swatting, the false or inflated report engineered to bring maximum force down on its target, a crime precisely because the caller made the police his weapon. Pick up the phone as a call for protection—wanting the attack stopped, hoping the man lives, knowing the officers are free agents and God’s ordained instruments—and you have chosen a different act: a referral to the institution God ordained to restrain evildoers.

The difference between the two calls does not live unseen in the heart. It is verifiable. It shows in what you ask for: a plea for help, not an exaggerated threat meant to accelerate a lethal response. It shows in when you call: early, while restraint remains possible, and while you go on doing everything else—speaking, shielding, absorbing.

There is also a test only you can run, and you can run it before you ever dial: ask what outcome would disappoint you. If the intruder dropping his weapon at the sirens would defeat your purpose, you are calling as a trigger. If it would answer your prayer, you are calling for protection.

And it is no answer to say that force might follow your call. Faithful obedience forbids choosing violence as your means. It does not forbid every causal connection to violence downstream—it cannot, or Christians could not pay taxes, buy bread in a coercive economy, or live under a government at all.

The law has always recognized these are two acts. Legal systems the world over distinguish reporting a crime from soliciting one, and no prosecutor confuses them merely because force was foreseeable: solicitation requires intent that the harm occur; a report requires only that it be true. And the law correctly holds that a free agent’s intervening choice severs authorship of what follows—except where he did what you commissioned. The distinction was not invented for this chapter. It is codified.

I can hear the objection, because this book has trained you to raise it. Isn’t this the move I condemned in Augustine—sanctifying an act by the heart behind it? It is not. Augustine used intent to bless a violent act the actor himself performs: his hand holds the sword, and only his heart is asked to stay clean. Here intent does something narrower and legitimate. It does not sanctify a violent act. It identifies which act I am choosing—and the act I perform is a phone call, not a killing. Intent cannot turn my violence into love. But it can tell the difference between summoning an instrument and wielding one, because those are two different acts.

Nor does the permission borrow Augustine’s other move, the appeal to authority. Augustine used authority to answer “When may I strike?”—and every answer enlarged what the disciple’s hand may do. Ordination here answers a different question—“To whom has God assigned the striking, so that I never strike?”—and it enlarges nothing. A rule that never expands what your own hands may do to your enemy cannot be the Augustinian solvent. Enlargement was the solvent’s entire function.

Another objection hides behind the Augustinian one, and this book armed it. Isn’t this analysis—acts parsed, intents sorted, agency traced—the calculating mind Chapters 16 and 17 condemned? No. Chapter 17 gave the mind its assignment: to work out how best to love the enemy standing in front of you—tonight, the one standing in your hallway—and forbade only its promotion from interpreter of the command to auditor of it, from asking how to obey to asking whether obeying will pay. Every distinction this chapter has drawn asks the interpreter’s question—which act am I choosing?—and never the auditor’s—will obedience pay? Run back through the analysis and you will not find a single outcome weighed against a single command. Even the disappointment test, the closest this chapter comes to consulting an outcome, uses that outcome to diagnose your own intent, never to ask whether obedience is worth the cost.

One asymmetry remains. Chapter 26 showed Jesus taking his followers out of even invoking the courts—do not claim the legal remedy—and Paul pressing it further: better to be wronged than to sue. How can the court be closed to you over a shirt while the sword may be summoned for your family? Because the two invocations run in opposite directions. The lawsuit makes you sword justice’s claimant, exacting your remedy after the fact for your own account—the posture “why not rather be wronged?” forbids. The call asks the restrainer to interrupt violence in progress. A ledger and a shield are different instruments. The caller asks for protection, not punishment, and his errand ends when the attack does.

A last objection reaches back to the prophets. When Israel bought protection from Egypt and Assyria, Ezekiel called it adultery. Isn’t the phone by your bed the same purchase? No, because nothing is purchased. Israel was a nation transferring its security to foreign swords—a standing relocation of trust from God to chariots. The caller is a subject making a referral inside the order Romans 13 commands him to live under and fund. And the call buys nothing: it commands no one and guarantees nothing—American courts have even held that police owe no enforceable duty of protection to any particular person.[2] It is a request, not a contract. The caller remains where he stood before he dialed: in God’s hands, willing to absorb the cost if no one comes.

All of it rests on the division of labor this book has already argued. God enforces earthly justice through instruments that are not his covenant people, his use of an instrument is not his endorsement of it, and the instrument answers for its own excess.

So be precise about what your call sets in motion. The restraint you asked for is the ordained function at work: hope for it. The proportionate force that may attend it is the office operating as God ordered—never yours to perform, but not sin to summon. And the excess, if it comes, is the instrument’s act and the intruder’s choice, answered for as Assyria answered for every swing of the rod—never your selected means. You refer the wrongdoer to the institution God ordained to restrain him, and you stay in the role God gave you, bound to the cross toward that same man—which is why you will urge the responders, at cost to yourself, to take him alive.

Do not mistake this permission for an endorsement of the institution you are calling. What that institution is, and why a Christian may summon it but must not staff it, is a later chapter’s subject. Here it is enough that the phone belongs on the ladder—and that referring a matter to God’s instrument is not choosing its violence as your own.

Step back and notice what has, and has not, been asked of you. Nothing here is passive. You have spoken, fled, shielded your family with your own body, physically restrained a violent man, summoned help, and prayed, and through all of it you have refused exactly one kind of act among the hundreds available: the blow that cripples or kills. The pacifist in this scenario does an enormous amount. He simply does not do that. To call this “doing nothing” is to mistake the one thing forbidden for the only thing that counts.

None of this, I must say plainly, describes the person trapped with an abuser. As I argued earlier, Christian suffering is suffering like Christ for the cause of Christ. It never means that a spouse or a child must passively endure violence in the home that can be escaped or nonviolently resisted, and nothing in this chapter should be read to say otherwise.

One more thing, easy to miss because the scene arrives at its worst moment. The first two steps of Christian combat began long before the door was kicked in. They are the years spent being the kind of person, and helping build the kind of community, in which fewer people are ever driven to this, and caring for the ones disturbed enough to attempt it anyway. They are even, in their smallest and most practical form, the choice of what to keep in the house, since a man who keeps a gun by the bed and has not learned to see the intruder as someone God loves will reach for it before he has thought at all, and a panicked instant will become a killing.

So trade the firearm for a stun gun—stock the house with what is meant to stop rather than kill[3]—and remove the one option you must never take before the night that would tempt you to take it ever comes. Whether or not the trade would have stopped the man now in your house, it was never a safety strategy. It was what obeying Jesus already looked like.

What I have described is not a grim exception carved out of the gospel. It is the gospel applied without flinching. It loves the enemy instead of destroying him, which is the command. It treats him as a man to be reconciled rather than a threat to be eliminated, which is the goal. It refuses to answer his violence with more of the same, which is the cross. And it holds to all of that as faithful obedience whether or not it works, which is the whole of Christian ethics. This is not a separate ethic for private life. It is the one ethic of this book, meeting you in the dark.

I will end with a confession, because I have asked a great deal of you and it would be dishonest to pretend I am sure of myself. I do not know that I could do this. With a man in my house and my children screaming, I am not certain I would not reach for the weapon and try to kill him and live with whatever that made me. But I know this much: my failure would not make the killing right. It would make me a man who failed to obey a command that remained good. There is all the difference in the world between confessing that obedience is hard and pretending that disobedience is righteous, and the whole of this book lives in that difference.

So the command is as simple as it is terrible. You may die for the people you love. You were never authorized to kill for them. The cross gives you the right to lay down your own life. It gives you no claim on anyone else’s. That is the whole of it, and it is enough.

[1] Books like Yoder’s What Would You Do?, Nagler’s The Search for a Nonviolent Future, and Seibert’s Disarming the Church: Why Christians Must Forsake Violence to Follow Jesus and Change the World contain many real-life examples of the pragmatic effectiveness of these types of non-forceful responses.

[2] Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. 1981); Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005).

[3] No restraint device is entirely safe. A stun gun has killed men, and so has a tackle. The trade is not a search for a weapon that cannot kill—no such weapon exists—but for one whose design and purpose is to stop rather than to end.