There is a famous Orwellian movie I hear referenced every once in awhile - Minority Report. The movie is basically about a future world in which technology enables leaders to know who will commit which crimes before they actually happen. They are able to essentially rid the world of crime (except the crimes of the aristocrats, of course) by locking up "criminals" before they actually commit their crimes. 

The movie is similar to another common ethical dilemma in which you are a time traveler who has the opportunity to kill Hitler while he's a child. Would it be moral to kill him before he actually committed his crime, even if you were as certain as you could be of what his future held? Can the ends justify the means? Can one be guilty and justly judged before they've committed a crime?

Minority Report and time traveling assassins are all far-fetched sci-fi concepts, but the idea of preemptive justice is not far-fetched at all. As Americans, we've preemptively judged many nations through our military and many criminals through disproportionate sentencing. We drop bombs and we raise sentences based on what we know of our enemies. 

While we certainly preemptively judge on a national scale, we Americans often promote Minority Report justice on an individual scale. I mean, isn't that what self-defense usually is? If someone invades your home and you choose to confront them with a gun rather than lock your room and call the police, aren't you preparing to kill an aggressor based on the assumption that they're seeking your harm rather than your material goods? Even if one thinks the death penalty is a legitimate punishment for murder, how many cases of "self-defense" are cases in which one's life would have been taken? How many times is self-defense taking the life of someone who would have stolen or assaulted rather than killed?

I have to ask two questions, then. First, why are we so critical of Minority Report as being Orwellian when we do something similar in our promotion of self-defense on both a national and individual scale? Second, why do we hide our inhumanity behind self-defense? Many would be appalled at state execution for theft, assault, or rape, as many are even appalled at state execution for murder. Yet self-defense goes even further in that it is execution for a presumed crime. 

Self-Defense is passing the death sentence for a crime not yet committed.

Did Jesus only speak inerrantly? Was there anything about which he was mistaken? Was a perfect eyewitness for every event or could his perception ever be skewed? Did he ever get any of his math homework wrong? Did he know Bible verses perfectly the first time trying to recite them from memory, or did he have to work and try over and over again until he knew it? What does it mean to grow in wisdom and understanding if not that there is a point where we are less informed? Isn't being ill-informed sometimes/often the same thing as being errant?

When we speak of inerrancy of the Bible, we assume that it has to be so because God's words are inerrant. How is it that the written word of God must be inerrant while it seems the living word of God was certainly errant? Is it because Jesus's errant part was the human part (if you think we can dissect him like this)? Is Jesus's human nature any more prone to errancy than the non-divine human agents God inspired to write the Bible? How is it that the God-man indwelt by God's Spirit could speak errantly while the God-inspired, human authors of the Bible could write perfectly? Did God empower the human authors more than his own Son? Or does God only ensure that he speaks inerrantly for certain events - like the writing of scripture - and not for other events, like the incarnation of the redeemer?

Most people advocate the idea that life and morality are best exemplified by the avoidance of extremes. If you err in one direction, you end up being licentious, and if you go in the other direction, you end up being uptight and legalistic. The letter of the law or no law at all. Both are problems. 

But when you try to apply this concept of avoiding the extreme, you end up with a life that doesn't depict radical Christianity at all. Let's just take economics as an example. If you were to tell the early church in Acts to avoid extremes, you'd tell them not to horde their money, but also not to give their money away "unwisely." They should live modestly, but they also should make sure to save enough to put their immediate family first, to put their kids through college, and to have a safe, comfortable retirement fund to provide for their future. You certainly wouldn't tell them to share all their possessions and to give to those in need to a point that it hurts them and their families. Yet that's exactly what the early church did. 

The thing is, God's commands are extreme. So hording for self and spending in excess for self both fail to demonstrate love, just in different directions. They're both egoistic. But selling possessions, giving to the poor at cost to yourself, and sharing in common are extreme measures, but they are beautiful goods. I think we have to nuance the term "extreme" or else we equivocate on it. When we say don't go to extremes, what we should mean is that we shouldn't err to either side, either extremity, or either direction. What we shouldn't mean is that we live a life devoid of actions which are extreme and powerful. Think of it like driving on the road. When you stay in the middle - in your lane - you go at high speeds and have purpose and direction. But when you go into either ditch, you hit ruts, signs, fences, guardrails, and you slow down or crash. Extreme speed can only be maintained when avoiding the extremity of the road.

Chesterton has a wonderful discussion on this in his book "Orthodoxy." Chesterton argues that Christian virtue is not the avoidance of extremes, but rather the furious joining of two extremes. Courage, for example, comes when one counts his life as lost while simultaneously desiring to preserve his life. To only count one's life as lost is to be a suicide, while to only care about the preservation of one's life is to be a coward. Courage, like most/all Christian virtues, can only be held if one holds both extremes in the middle. The Christian life is an extreme life and we ought not to use this idea of "avoiding the extreme" to water down how we are called to live. 

I despise consequentialism - the idea that the ends justify the means. Many Christians say they despise it too, but we practice this ethic all the time. My go-to example is the 2016 election of President Trump by over 80% of those in my group - conservative Christians. "He's not as bad as the other candidate!" "We can't vote third-party or abstain because a greater evil would result!" "The president isn't a pastor-in-chief, he's a commander-in-chief." "The possibility of getting supreme court justices who will ban abortion and gay marriage justifies significant moral flaws." The list could go on. The ends justified the means. 

In my group's mind, justifying, overlooking, or dismissing "minor" evils like sexual assault, mysoginy, racism, denigration, mistreatment of immigrants, and all that stuff - it's all ok because even if we combined all those evils, they pale in comparison to the egregious issue of abortion. Abortion has killed tens of millions of humans in the past fifty years. 

One of the main problems with a consequentialist ethic is that we recognize its moral reprehensibility when we apply it to other situations. My favorite go-to example is from the book of Kings, when two mothers plan to cannibalize their children to save both of their families. From a consequentialist standpoint, murdering two kids to save two whole families sounds like the perfect moral plan. Numerically speaking, the equation is flawless. Two lives are lesser than, say, ten lives. But we recognize that such an action wouldn't be justifiable - unless, perhaps, one of the mothers was running for president. 

But let's take another example here - one which would lead to infinite quantities of good being achieved. If, as most non-Reformed, and many Reformed Christians believe, children who die before a certain cognitive function are elect and go to be with God when they die, then why not allow abortion and advocate for a theocracy in which all children of non-Christians (and perhaps wayward and mediocre Christians as well) are killed? Think of all the souls who would immediately experience bliss rather than the fires of hell? What is the murder of a temporal life in comparison to the saving of a soul for eternity? 

Of course such a thought is reprehensible because we recognize that it's evil. Regardless of the good that would be brought about - the infinite good for billions of people - we can't justify such good by participating in evil. Despite an Augustinian view one might take which justifies actions through motivations, we can't justify evil with any intent, even the best ones. 

What strikes me as particularly revolting about Christian consequentialism is that it is fine trading on other sins and evils for an unguaranteed "greater good," yet it refuses to trade on sins and evils for a known good. We can compromise morality in voting to obtain power which may or may not lead to the short and long-term goals we have in view, yet we refuse to embrace evil for a known infinite good we could accomplish for billions. If Christian morality includes consequentialist ethics, we're novices who are refusing to do great good. But if Christian morality doesn't include a consequentialist ethic, we're unfaithful subjects to the King who are determining good and evil for ourselves because we don't think our Lord is able to produce good results out of mere faithfulness. We have made ourselves kings, and in doing so, have exposed ourselves as fools.