Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

I

"'Resist not evil,' means never resist, never oppose violence." Such is the motto, quoted from Tolstoy, with which our propagandist heads his pages. As he cites no other scholar, critic, or interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount, in support of this declaration of the meaning, the inference is perhaps allowable that the reader is expected to endow Tolstoy with a credit for scientific attainments in the difficult field of historical criticism and interpretation equally great with that which all men gladly accord to his noble disposition and sincere humanity. Whether authority as convincing can be cited for the contention that Buddha and Lao-tse taught the same doctrine of absolute non-resistance we are not competent to say. It seems at least to be beautifully expressed in the saying quoted from Buddha:

With mercy and forbearance shalt thou disarm every foe. For want of fuel the fire expires: mercy and forbearance bring violence to naught.

What Christian will deny the Christ-likeness of this teaching? What reader of the Old Testament will not hasten to add with Paul from Jewish "wisdom":

If thine enemy hunger feed him, if he thirst give him drink; for by so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.[1]

If, indeed, the duty in question be that of forbearance, all great religious teachers, whether of Christian or pre-Christian times, will be at one. "Hymns of hate" are unknown to the ritual of any religion, unless it be the ultra-modern of Prussian militarism. One must go to Nietzsche before attaining to the gospel that it is virtuous to have a giant's strength and use it like a giant. Teachers such as Buddha and Lao-tse may well have added to the well-nigh universal religious tenet of mercy, forgiveness, forbearance, the further doctrine of consistent, unqualified non-resistance. We accept it for the obvious reason that their systems of thought, which are philosophies rather than religions, contain (so far as the present writer is aware) no principle of active, but only of passive obligation. The chief end of man is for them not to achieve, in loyal service to the Creator's ideal, but to abstain and refrain, to put the brakes on life, and to teach others to do the like. According to the author of "New Wars for Old," Buddha and Lao-tse lived up to their gospel of non-resistance. Contrariwise, "The Nazarene had his inconsistent moments like the rest of us," and showed it at this point. Our propagandist is too honest to palter with the quibble of Adin Ballou, who in his "Christian Non-Resistance" argues that Jesus in cleansing the temple may have driven the money-changers from the courtyard, but that there is no evidence that he struck any one of them. With such apologetic special pleading he has no patience, preferring to give the act of Jesus its full weight in the following straightforward words:

What we have here is a well-authenticated violation of the principle of non-resistance—and why not accept it as such? The episode is chiefly remarkable in the life of the Nazarene, not for anything which it teaches in itself, but for its inconsistency with the rest of his career. Never at any other time, so far as we know, did he precipitate riot or himself assault his enemies. But this time he did—this time he failed to live up to the inordinately exacting demands of his own gospel of brotherhood. Nor is the circumstance at all difficult to understand! Jesus came to Jerusalem tired, worn, hunted. He knew that he walked straight into the arms of his enemies, and undoubtedly therefore straight to his own death. Weary, desperate, confused, he came to the temple to pray—and here, right before the altars of his God, were the money-changers—here in the sacred places, the type and symbol of that commercialized religion which he most abhorred, and which he knew was certain in the end to destroy him. What wonder that a mighty flood of anger surged up in his soul, and for the moment overwhelmed him.

In short, the weary Jesus was so irritated by the unexpected (?) sight of the traders, that he threw to the winds not only his principles, but the dictates of the most ordinary prudence, giving his enemies not only their desired opportunity, but provoking the issue at just the point where he himself had been betrayed into the violation of his own teaching. Verily, great is the insight of the modern psychologist. To the observer of the phenomena of petulance an incident like the cleansing of the temple is "easy to understand." The scientific imagination required is easily attained. One acquires it by observing the irritability of tired children. How needless, then, to inform oneself as to the historical conditions which made this great symbolic act of the Galilean prophet full of meaning to every patriot Jew that witnessed it. How needless to raise the question why every one of our four evangelists should report the act and give it the prominence they do. For our evangelists record it reluctantly, minimizing its political significance and its insurrectionary flavor. They naturally disliked to give color of justice to Pilate's judicial murder, and to Jewish denunciations of the new religion as a rebellion against established authority.

Let us then take as our point of departure this admitted "inconsistency." It is not historical interpretation, but the subjective variety sometimes self-designated "psychological" which finds it "easy" to set aside the representation of the oldest and most reliable of our sources, that Jesus was not "weary, desperate, confused," and was not in the least taken unawares, when he drove the traders from the temple; but that he planned his coup de main with careful deliberation. The evening before, says Mark, "he entered the temple and looked round upon all things." Jesus was not unaware of the conditions he would find, for they were an abuse as notorious as hateful to every right-minded Israelite. This even the Talmud attests. He was not a hunted fugitive seeking asylum at the altar. On the contrary; for weeks past he had set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem and there lift up the standard of the Son of David. The initiative was his. He had planned a new campaign for his ideal, the Kingdom of God, a campaign no longer of mere teaching but of action, and he was now carrying it to the very seat of hostile power. Long since, probably before he left Galilee, he had planned this very act, a challenge to the corrupt priestly control of his Father's house, an act as full of meaning and as deliberate as Luther's nailing of his theses to the church doors of Wittenberg.

And when the blow had been struck Jesus stood courageously by it. He met the inevitable demand of the hierocracy, "By what authority doest thou these things?" with a counter demand. Whence had the Baptist authority to inaugurate his prophetic reform, making ready for Jehovah a purified people prepared for his coming? The Sanhedrin evaded this counter demand, and answered only (as Jesus had foreseen they would) by secret denunciation of him to Pilate. But Pilate understood the case. We have the Roman governor's official interpretation of its significance in a certain superscription written aloft in Hebrew and Greek and Latin on the gibbet of an insurrectionist. This, too, Jesus seems to have foreseen.

All this was not a mere "episode." It was the culminating effort and crisis of Jesus' career, and richly rewards a just understanding. We are told that it was "inconsistent with the rest of Jesus' career." His mission, we infer, was to be a rabbi. His attempt at active leadership in achieving the Kingdom he preached was an unfortunate aberration. He should not have tried to be "the Christ," and thereby incurred a needless martyrdom. The cross is still a stumblingblock.

Strange that the evangelists who omit so much, who would have so strong a motive for omitting this particular "inconsistency" no less for their Master's good name than for the safety of the Church, should one and all record it. The disposition to minimize everything savoring of political action on Jesus' part is very marked in all our evangelists, for obvious reasons. To the evidences of this belong, for example, Mark's denial, and the fourth evangelist's explanation, of the saying about destroying the temple, together with the latter's description of the whip "of small cords" as Jesus' only weapon in the purging of the temple.[2] Are we then to admit the "inconsistency"—not casual and incidental, as conceived in this pacifistic interpretation, but deliberate and flagrant? Or may we perhaps now raise the question whether the "inconsistency" is not rather chargeable to the interpreter's account?

The interpretation with which we are dealing makes the teaching of Jesus regarding the use of force identical with the non-resistance doctrine of Buddha and Lao-tse. On the other hand, it very justly relates it to that of the great prophet of the Davidic kingdom of righteousness and peace, Isaiah, the son of Amoz. From the point of view of the historical critic the relation of Jesus' teaching to that of Isaiah is absolutely sound. But the effect of this relation is fatal to its identification with the non-resistance doctrine of Buddha and Lao-tse.

Apart from the circumstances which for the time being made non-resistance, or rather mere passive resistance, the policy of true statesmanship alike against Assyrian and against Roman domination, Isaiah and Jesus stood together upon the most fundamental point of all, unqualified, unlimited loyalty to the God of Righteousness and to his sovereignty upon earth. Their pacifism differs from that of Lao-tse and of Buddha in the important respect of having a pronounced theistic basis. Buddha and Lao-tse can preach consistently a doctrine of absolute non-resistance because their systems are destitute of the social ideal of Israel's religion, and indeed ignore the very existence of a "Power not ourselves that makes for Righteousness." Contrariwise with the great prophets of the Kingdom of God. Whether of the Christian or pre-Christian dispensation, so far as they advocate non-resistance it cannot be unlimited, because their religious aim is not merely individual but social.

The non-resistance of Isaiah and of Jesus is not self-centered but God-centered. It is bound to consider what is expedient for others, for the weak and dependent, as well as for the individual, and for the present time. It seeks the welfare of the world and of generations to come. It is always subsidiary to the paramount interest of the Kingdom of God.

Just because it regards non-resistance not as an end in itself but only as one of the divinest means to an end, Biblical pacifism can hold before men's eyes the moving figure of the martyred Servant, dumb as the lamb in the shearer's hands, while it can in the same breath commend the men of violence that take the Kingdom of Heaven by force. Christian or pre-Christian, it rests upon the foundation of utter, absolute loyalty to a world-wide Republic of God, a cosmic sovereignty of righteousness, and having this social aim for its religious ideal it can and does nourish to the highest pitch of devotion the heroic virtues of patriotism, of service and of sacrifice. The summons to the standard (not men's but God's) is ever the same. The weapon may be the sword or the cross, as the times require. Under mere self-centered philosophies such as those of Buddha and Lao-tse the contrary is true. Notoriously, where these control patriotism and all its heroic virtues tend to dwindle, approaching often the verge of extinction.

The pacifism (not non-resistance) of Isaiah hardly requires elucidation. Two or three very familiar quotations will suffice. There is, for example, the prophet's vision of a universal peace based on international law. This vision of the world's willing acceptance of the sovereignty of Jehovah's justice Isaiah shares with his contemporary, Micah, both prophets seeming to choose it as a text from some forgotten earlier pacifist.

It shall come to pass in the latter days That the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established at the head of mountains, And shall be exalted above the hills, And all nations shall flow unto it.
And many peoples shall go and say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah, To the house of the God of Jacob, And he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth law, and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem.
And he shall judge between the nations, and will be arbiter for many peoples; And they shall beat their swords into plow-shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, Neither shall they learn war any more.

Manifestly the ideal of an international tribunal as the basis of a League of Peace is not so novel as some modern statesmanship seems to conceive.

But the consistent, thoroughgoing advocate of non-resistance rejects even the coercion of magisterial and police constraint. To Russian idealism restraint of the individual as well as the national criminal is tainted with the same poison of violence. Since Isaiah is the exemplar of non-resistance he should be permitted again to speak for himself. His words seem to have a singular applicability to the land which is now testing to the limit the theory of Proudhon, the individualist of individualists, the gospel of anarchism:

For behold the Lord, Jehovah of Hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah stay and staff, The whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water, The mighty man, and the man of war; The judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder; The captain of fifty and the honorable man and the counsellor ... And I will give children to be their princes, And with childishness shall they rule over them, And the people shall be oppressed every one by another, and every one by his neighbor: The child shall be arrogant against the old man, and the base against the honorable.

But Isaiah, too, expects deliverance from these miseries of foreign servitude and domestic anarchy. He looks for the dawn of a just and lasting peace; only the means of its attainment seem strange for an "exemplar of non-resistance."

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; They that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. Thou hast multiplied the nation and increased their joy, They joy before thee according to the rejoicing at harvest-time, As men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For the yoke of (Israel's) burden, and the rod laid to his shoulder, The staff of his oppressor, thou hast broken as in the day of Midian.
For all the armor of the armed man in the tumult And the garments rolled in blood shall be for burning, for fuel of fire. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, And the government shall be upon his shoulder: And his name shall be called: Wonderful-counsellor; The-Mighty-God-the-Everlasting (my)-Father; The Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end. Upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom, To establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from henceforth even forever. The zeal of Jehovah of Hosts will perform this.

Even with the devout restraint of the closing line it must be admitted that these verses have a somewhat martial ring.

Doubtless the pacifist will emphasize the line, "The zeal of Jehovah of Hosts will perform this," taking here the view of the Pharisees, who in contrast with the fanatical nationalism of the Zealots opposed the aggressive militarism of the later Maccabees with a doctrine of quietism. Their cry was, "Leave all to God." Against the Zealot they appealed to the proverb: "They that take the sword shall perish by the sword," from which the inference is plain that if the aim be never to lose one's life one should never take weapons. But perhaps Isaiah the "non-resistant" is entitled to one more chance to prove himself not a Pharisee, even when he expects "the zeal of Jehovah of Hosts" to win the victory of peace. Fortunately he tells us how he expects the zeal of Jehovah to operate, in the doom he pronounces upon "drunkard" Samaria, the city whose luxuriant mountain-top was crowned with mingled towers and olive groves, like the fading wreaths upon the heads of drunken revellers. In contrast to Samaria's fate Isaiah has this promise for the temple-crowned hill of Zion, shadowed under its altar smoke:

In that day will Jehovah of Hosts become a crown of glory And a diadem of beauty unto the residue of his people, A spirit of justice to him that sitteth in judgment, And a spirit of strength to them that turn back the battle at the gate.[3]