[wideawake]

As a good steward of my wife and children

Precisely.

If, say, someone slapped me or attacked me in some other non-life-threatening way, my Christian responsibility would be to turn the other cheek.

If that same person did the same thing to my wife or my daughter instead, my Christian responsibility would be to beat them to within an inch of their life.

One has a Christian duty to submit to humiliations, indignities etc. as part of carrying one's cross. One also has a Christian duty to prevent others from being humiliated and treated with contempt and abuse.

[ColoCdn]

Yes. What occurs to the individual is secondary to our responsibility to protect, nurture, and heal others. Sometimes the way to the spiritual is through the temporal.

However, if allowing someone to harm me ultimately harms my family (through denial of my income earning ability, my love as a dad, etc.), then I am in abrogation of my commitment to them. Thus, it becomes necessary to protect myself, as a support to them.

Were I to not have these relationships, my responsibilities are freed to accept whatever denigrations come my way, in order to exemplify the Lord's love, as expressed on the cross.

[ricer1]

On occassion, I read old U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Here's a quote from the majority opinion in U.S. v. MacIntosh (283 US 605-635), May 25, 2931:

"We are a Christian people (Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S., 143 US 457, 470, 471, 36 L. ed. 227, 231, 232. 12 S. Ct. 511), according to one another the equal right of religious freedom, and acknowledging with reverence the duty of obedience to the will of God. But, also, we are a nation with the duty to survive; a nation whose Constitution contemplates war as well as peace; whose government must go forward upon the assumption, and safely can proceed upon no other, that unqualified allegiance to the nation and submission and obedience to the laws of the land, as well those made for war as those made for peace, are not inconsistent with the will of God.

Makes for interesting reading...