Was killing bin Laden Biblical?

In the aftermath of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound, many people have been asking whether killing him is morally justifiable from a Christian perspective. Even though the answer here seems obvious, actually articulating it is still a useful exercise and may clarify some confusions.

First, it is true that only God has the authority to take a life. This is why killing is by default a prohibited action. But as with many kinds of authority, this one may be delegated to others by God. And in the Bible, we see this authority very clearly delegated to government. In the Old Testament, this is shown by the various capital crimes itemized under Israel’s penal code. In the New Testament, this is shown by the statement in Romans 13:4 that government bears the sword against evildoers as a “minister of God.”

If I hire a babysitter to feed my children in my absence or a stock broker to buy some investment on my behalf, they have the authority to do so because I gave it to them. Not because they had it originally, but because I gave it to them temporarily.

So in the case of bin Laden, a duly constituted government (ours) killed a man who had boasted of evil against our citizens and threatened more of it in the future. Killing him wasn’t just a Biblically acceptable act, it was a Biblically endorsed one. This was government doing precisely what God established it to do.

As to the question of him being unarmed in the moment of his death, the first thing to remember is that it was already justifiable to kill him, regardless. Second, ascertaining the certainty of him being unarmed under those circumstances would have been very challenging in the heat of the moment. This means that plausible issues of self-defense add onto the already justifiable killing to eliminate any real question about moral propriety. Had it been certain he was unarmed and not a threat (perhaps because he was asleep), there may have been more to be discussed. But the difference then would have been his value as a captive rather than as a corpse. Killing him in his sleep would still have been an improvement over the option of bombing the entire compound and the entailed risks to non-combatants, a choice which itself would have almost certainly been permissible to begin with.