Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

"'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.