My story on gun control as a religious issue in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting continues to generate a lot of discussion here and elsewhere, and I wanted to follow up with two further points.

First and most important, I want to flag the citation of Christianity Today editor Mark Galli’s essay in the piece. Mark wrote to me expressing, in characteristically charitable tone and form, his objection as to how I had lifted one line from his piece on the massacre to anchor the phenomenon of Christians who wanted to focus on the spiritual dimensions of the evil act rather than policy prescriptions like gun control laws.

Mark wrote to me:

“You will note, however, that I said that gun control issues do indeed need to be sorted out by experts, some of whom we can assume are religious, some of whom are not. I never suggested that such sorting out is a distraction for believers. I merely said that in this one piece, I was interested in discussing another line of thought.”

“I was not addressing the penultimate steps we can take to check evil — something you rightly call for implicitly in your piece — but only the romantic idealism that suggests that there may be a final political solution to the problem of mass murder. With the best laws in place — laws we need to enact — we still need to trust the transcendent God when evil will inevitably happen again.”

Mark’s essay does indeed range widely, and should be read in its entirety. While I still think my article piece legitimately picked up a theme reflected in his essay, that theme was more explicit and focused in the responses of others. I certainly could have cited some others to better effect. 

The SBC’s Albert Mohler, for example, said “the moral madness of mass homicide can never be truly explained” and said Christians must focus on the hard theological questions: 

“We must pray for our nation and communities. And we must pray that God will guard ourselves from evil — especially our own evil. And we must point to the cross. What other answer can we give?”

Folks like NOM’s Maggie Gallagher echoed that view, saying laws aren’t going to “solve” the problem of evil and evil actions like those of suspect James Holmes.

And Mitt Romney himself said it wasn’t gun control laws but “Changing the heart of the American people may well be what's essential, to improve the lots of the American people.”

And of course there was the follow up story we had about Father Dwight Longenecker’s speculation that it was the Devil, or Evil, that made James Holmes do it. And that the tragedy was about spiritual combat that public policy cannot really address.

In any event, any of these examples may have been better examples than Mark Galli’s.(And, I would add, any of them were more theologically sophisticated than Mike Huckabee's or Louie Gohmert's, IMHO.)

But I do think they all represent a broader counterpoint to the “other” religious reaction, which was to highlight what believers can do – beyond the priority of prayer – to try to prevent a recurrence of such violence and to help create a culture that does not reflexively resort to guns to start or stop a killing.

And that leads to my second follow-up point, which is whether the religious debate in the aftermath of the Aurora shooting was a replay of the old “Faith vs. Works” debate, one that is often traced to the divisions that developed during and after the Reformation. (Though it goes back to the New Testament.)

Nowadays, this debate doesn’t fit into the neat Catholic-Protestant divide that some would like, and that may or may not have been a genuine divide centuries or decades ago. (Indeed, one of the great successes of the oft-maligned modern ecumenical movement has been to clarify the many misconceptions and stereotypes about the “Faith vs. Works” debate.)

Witness the fact that you had Father Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest, sparking the debate by asserting that gun control was a “pro-life” issue while other Catholics disagreed strongly.

Or that you had Baptist Bob Parham at Ethics Daily, titling a column “Faith Without Works Kills,” pointing to the lack of a policy response as strong as the prayer response from Christian leaders – including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

So is this “Policy or Evil” argument just religious folks reacting from their usual political stances — or a reflection of a genuine and important theological debate? And must it be an “either/or” or can it be a “both/and” approach?

And does Mark Galli's essay do that for us?