Christian attitudes to evil
Christian attitudes to evil
The best way to seek answers to these questions is to look carefully at the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. They are part of the apostle’s plea to his Christian readers to respond adequately to ‘the mercies of God’. For eleven chapters he has been unfolding God’s mercy both in giving his Son to die for us and in bestowing on us the full salvation he thus obtained for us. How should we respond to the divine mercy? We are (1) to present our bodies to God as a living sacrifice, and with renewed minds to discern and to do his will (12:1–2); (2) to think of ourselves with sober judgment, neither flattering nor despising ourselves (v. 3); (3) to love each other, using our gifts to serve each other, and living together in harmony and humility (vv. 4–13, 15–16); and (4) we are to bless our persecutors and do good to our enemies (vv. 14, 17–21). In other words, when the mercies of God lay hold of us, all our relationships are radically transformed: we obey God, understand ourselves, love one another and serve our enemies.
It is the fourth of these relationships which particularly concerns us now. The opposition of unbelievers is assumed. The stumbling-block of the cross (which offers salvation as a free and unmerited gift), the love and purity of Jesus (which shame human selfishness), the priority commands to love God and neighbour (which leave no room for self-love) and the call to take up our cross (which is too threatening) – these things arouse opposition to us because they arouse opposition to our Lord and his gospel. This, then, is the background to our study of Romans 12. There are people who ‘persecute’ us (v. 14), who do ‘evil’ to us (v. 17), who may even be described as our ‘enemies’ (v. 20). How should we react to our persecutors and enemies? What do the mercies of God require of us? How should the cross, in which God’s mercy shines at its brightest, affect our conduct? Specially instructive, in the following section of Romans 12 and 13, are Paul’s four references to good and evil:
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good....
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary:
‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.’
Do not be overcome by evil; but overcome evil with good.
Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience.
This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honour, then honour. (Rom. 12:9, 14 – 13:7)
This passage seems to be a self-conscious meditation on the theme of good and evil. Here are the apostle’s four allusions to them:
Hate what is evil; cling to what is good (12:9).
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody (12:17).
Do not be overcome by evil; but overcome evil with good (12:21).
He is God’s servant to do you good...He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the evildoer (13:4).
In particular, these verses define what our Christian attitude to evil should be.
First, evil is to be hated. ‘Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good’ (12:9). This juxtaposition of love and hate sounds incongruous. Normally we regard them as mutually exclusive. Love expels hate, and hate love. But the truth is not so simple. Whenever love is ‘sincere’ (literally, ‘without hypocrisy’), it is morally discerning. It never pretends that evil is anything else, or condones it. Compromise with evil is incompatible with love. Love seeks the highest good of others and therefore hates the evil which spoils it. God hates evil because his love is holy love; we must hate it too.
Secondly, evil is not to be repaid. ‘Do not repay anyone evil for evil.... Do not take revenge, my friends’ (12:17, 19). Revenge and retaliation are absolutely forbidden to the people of God. For to repay evil for evil is to add one evil to another. And if we hate evil, how can we add to it? The Sermon on the Mount is clearly being echoed here. ‘Do not resist an evil person’, Jesus had said. That is, as the context clarifies, ‘do not retaliate’. And at the cross Jesus perfectly exemplified his own teaching, for ‘when they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats’ (1 Pet. 2:23). Instead, we are to ‘do what is right’ (12:17) and to ‘live at peace with everyone’ (12:18). That is, good not evil, and peace not violence, are to characterize our lives.
Thirdly, evil is to be overcome. It is one thing to hate evil and another to refuse to repay it; better still is to conquer or overcome it. ‘Do not be overcome by evil; but overcome evil with good’ (12:21). How to do this Paul has indicated in the previous verses, echoing more words from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus had said: ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who ill-treat you.’2 Now Paul writes: ‘Bless those who persecute you’ (12:14), and ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him’ (12:20). We are to wish good to people by blessing them, and to do good to people by serving them. In the new community of Jesus curses are to be replaced by blessings, malice by prayer, and revenge by service. In fact, prayer purges the heart of malice; the lips which bless cannot simultaneously curse; and the hand occupied with service is restrained from taking revenge. To ‘heap burning coals’ on an enemy’s head sounds an unfriendly act, incompatible with loving him. But it is a figure of speech for causing an acute sense of shame – not in order to hurt or humiliate him, but in order to bring him to repentance, and so to ‘overcome evil with good’. The tragedy of repaying evil for evil is that we thereby add evil to evil and so increase the world’s tally of evil. It causes what Martin Luther King called ‘the chain reaction of evil’, as hate multiplies hate and violence multiplies violence in ‘a descending spiral of destruction’.3 The glory of loving and serving our enemies, however, is that we thereby decrease the amount of evil in the world. The supreme example is the cross. Christ’s willingness to bear the scorn of men and the wrath of God has brought salvation to millions. The cross is the only alchemy which turns evil into good.
Fourthly, evil is to be punished. If we were to stop with the first three attitudes to evil, we would be guilty of grave biblical selectivity and therefore imbalance. For Paul goes on to write of the punishment of evil by the state. All careful readers of these chapters notice the contrast – even apparent contradiction – which they contain. We are told both that we are not to avenge ourselves and that God will avenge (12:19). Again, we are told both that we are not to repay anyone evil for evil and that God will repay (12:17, 19). Thus vengeance and retaliation are first forbidden us, and then attributed to God. Is that not intolerable? No. The reason these things are forbidden us is not because evil does not deserve to be punished (it does, and should be), but because it is God’s prerogative to punish it, not ours.
So how does God punish evil? How is his wrath expressed against evil-doers? The answer which immediately springs to mind is ‘at the last judgment’, and that is true. The unrepentant are ‘storing up wrath’ against themselves ‘for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed’ (Rom. 2:5). But must we wait till then? Is there no way in which God’s wrath against evil is revealed now? There is, according to Paul. The first is in the progressive deterioration of a godless society, by which God ‘gives over’ to their uncontrolled depravity of mind and conduct those who deliberately smother their knowledge of God and of goodness (Rom. 1:18–32). That is an outworking of God’s wrath. The second is through the judicial processes of the state, since the law enforcement officer is ‘God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer’ (13:4). In this sense, Dr Cranfield writes, the state is ‘a partial, anticipatory, provisional manifestation of God’s wrath against sin’.4
It is important to note that Paul uses the same vocabulary at the end of Romans 12 and at the beginning of Romans 13. The words ‘wrath’ (orgē) and ‘revenge/punishment’ (ekdikēsis and ekdikos) occur in both passages. Forbidden to God’s people in general, they are assigned to God’s ‘servants’ in particular, namely officials of the state. Many Christians find great difficulty in what they perceive here to be an ethical ‘dualism’.5 I should like to try to clarify this issue.
First, Paul is not distinguishing between two entities, church and state, as in Luther’s well-known doctrine of the two kingdoms, the kingdom of God’s right hand (the church) having a spiritual responsibility exercised through the power of the gospel, and the kingdom of his left hand (the state) having a political or temporal responsibility exercised through the power of the sword. Jean Lasserre calls this ‘the traditional doctrine’ (for Calvin held it too, though he expressed it in different terms) and sums it up thus:
God has charged the church with the duty of preaching the gospel, and the state with the duty of ensuring the political order; the Christian is both member of the church and citizen of the nation; as the former he must obey God by conforming to the gospel ethic...; as the latter he must obey God by conforming to the political ethic of which the state is the judge ....6
It is true that God gives church and state different responsibilities, even if it needs to be stressed that they overlap, are not directed by different ethics and are both under Christ’s lordship. But this is not really the issue in Romans 12 and 13.
Secondly, Paul is not distinguishing between two spheres of Christian activity, private and public, so that (to put it crudely) we must love our enemies in private but may hate them in public. The concept of a double standard of morality, private and public, is to be firmly rejected; there is only one Christian morality.
Thirdly, what Paul is doing is to distinguish between two roles, personal and official. Christians are always Christians (in church and state, in public and private), under the same moral authority of Christ, but are given different roles (at home, at work and in the community) which make different actions appropriate. For example, a Christian in the role of a policeman may use force to arrest a criminal, which in the role of a private citizen he may not; he may as a judge condemn a prisoner who has been found guilty, whereas Jesus told his disciples ‘do not judge, or you too will be judged’; and he may as an executioner (assuming that capital punishment may in some circumstances be justified) kill a condemned man, although he is forbidden to commit murder. (Capital punishment and the prohibition of murder go together in the Mosaic law.) This is not to say that arresting, judging and executing are in themselves wrong (which would establish different moralities for public and private life), but that they are right responses to criminal behaviour, which however God has entrusted to particular officials of the state.
This, then, is the distinction which Paul is making in Romans 12 and 13 between the non-repayment of evil and the punishment of evil. The prohibitions at the end of chapter 12 do not mean that evil should be left unrequited pending the day of judgment, but that the punishment should be administered by the state (as the agent of God’s wrath) and that it is inappropriate for ordinary citizens to take the law into their own hands. It is this distinction which Christian pacifists find it hard to come to terms with. They tend to rest their case on Jesus’ teaching and example of non-retaliation, assuming that retaliation is intrinsically wrong. But retaliation is not wrong, since evil deserves to be punished, should be punished, and in fact will be punished. Jesus himself said that ‘the Son of Man...will reward each person according to what he has done’ (Matt. 16:27, where the verb is similar to that in Rom. 12:19). This truth appears even in Peter’s account of Jesus’ own non-retaliation. When he was insulted, he did not answer back. When he suffered, he did not threaten. But we must not deduce from this that he was condoning evil. For what did he do in place of retaliation? ‘He entrusted himself to him who judges justly’ (1 Pet. 2:23). In Paul’s language, he left it to the wrath of God. So even when Jesus was praying for the forgiveness of his executioners, and even when he was giving himself in holy love for our salvation, the necessity of divine judgment on evil was not absent from his mind. Indeed, he himself was overcoming evil at that very moment only by enduring its just punishment himself.