Killing kills the spirit.

The killing of abortionist John B. "Doc" Britton by militant prolife activist Paul Hill horrifies prolife advocates dedicated to nonviolence. It's particularly dreadful to see Hill claiming Christian justification for blasting Britton and his escort full in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Hill maintains that this homicide was a defensible use of deadly force undertaken to prevent more killing of the unborn. Well, yes, I can share Hill's desire to end the unjust killings of abortion, but I can't see why an abhorrence of abortion makes his equally gruesome act of killing morally acceptable.

Hill's action is wrong not only because killing adults (as opposed to the unborn) is an illegal act. Obviously certain social practices must be morally resisted by illegal means if a strong enough case for civil disobedience can be mounted, although it's never easy to do when you're committed to a civil society governed by law.

The more basic immorality of Hill's vigilantism and the flaw in his moral reasoning stems from his blindness to the fact that a political assassin and abortionist act on the same morally unacceptable presumption. Both assume that certain human beings have the right to kill or extinguish other lives when certain conditions and future consequences are deemed to warrant it. To engage in either abortion or assassination validates the principle that an individual has a right to kill and take another's human life--in a good cause.

The key moral question to my mind is whether there can ever be justifiable homicides, apart from the most exceptional of unavoidable emergencies or the rarest of medical abortions needed to save a life. Arguments for other morally permissible killings, such as those put forth in defense of capital punishment, just war, euthanasia, or suicide, appear inadequate. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" can hardly be a command limited to the innocent, the good, our compatriots, our allies, or mature fellow citizens. Christians, for their part, have been given a stricter injunction: to forgive and love your enemies and persecutors, and to do good to those who harm you (or harm your children).

Yet despite the ban on harming one's neighbor, evil must be overcome by good. Arduous struggles to bring about the justice and righteousness of God's Kingdom must be taken up. So how can we resist evil without engaging in evil? Surely, active nonviolent resistance is a creative solution. Christian thinkers such as Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jim Douglass, and Walter Wink, to name only a few, have developed a sophisticated theology of peaceful Christian nonviolent resistance for our time.

Fortunately, Christian theological thinkers on nonviolence do not stand alone. Because of Gandhi's political successes and the increasing number of victories of other nonviolent resistance movements, a new secular field of strategic studies of nonviolent conflict has emerged. The most prominent innovator in this arena is Gene Sharp of Harvard; in his 1973 ground-breaking study, The Politics of nonviolent Action (Extending Horizons Books), Sharp catalogues 198 methods of nonviolent resistance and describes the many heretofore unheralded successes of these methods. Sharp incisively analyzes the way power operates and then shows the many ways power can be thwarted. His work has inspired other strategic thinkers, including military strategists.