than in apocalyptic foretellings of the coming of the Son of Man and
the near end of the world. Here is an anthology of testimonies to the
faith which a world at war to end war most needs, that man is a
spiritual being and that his proper work is "to interpret the world
according to his higher nature," and to bring the material aspects of
the world into subjection to the spirit. Other "oracles and prophecies
of loveliness and loving-kindness" in the Bible and in the world's
literature have their abiding worth, but no other of "the seers and
poets of mankind" reach humanity so widely and none so deeply.
Certain marks and tests of the Christian hope come clearly into view
in these characteristic sayings of Jesus. It is a hope not imposed
upon the mind by the outward authority of a book or even of Christ
himself, but one that appeals to conscience. Our spirit answers to it,
and our answer is not only the consent of the mind but the disclosure
of character and the choice of the will. It is a hope for which we
cannot merely wait, for we are ourselves challenged to bring it to
realization. The Christian hope is fundamentally inward, and is always
in part already experienced. Paul and John knew the mind of Christ in
this striking quality of it better than later generations. The spirit
of God is already a love that creates unity and fellowship among men;
and it is already the presence and power of divine and eternal life.
The Christian hope unites the community and the individual, and
contains the clue to the mystery that now obscures our minds. We know
that the ruthless sacrifice of individuals for the abstract idol
called the State is a denial of Christ's reverence for the human
personality. But we know also that the devotion of the soldier's life
to the cause of human liberty and right, to the destruction of the
idol of nationality and the creation of the ideal brotherhood of man,
is in accordance with that giving of life for many which Jesus taught,
and is that loss which is the true finding of life. The Christian hope
is too inward and too secure to depend on outward success. The
doctrine of physical force is judged by physical success, but not the
doctrine of love. Yet though superior to outward fortune, the hope of
Christ is certain of ultimate vindication, because it is hope in God.
It is a hope according to Christ, and for Christ's coming as the
ruling spirit in the life of humanity. But if it is a hope for Christ,
if it is Christ's hope for the coming Kingdom of God, it is a hope for
radical change, and for the sacrifice of our prejudices and customs,
our personal wishes and our material advantage.
The hope for a new world-order which is the most significant spiritual
event of our age, requires religion if it is to maintain itself and
work powerfully for its own realization. For it is the hope for a
purified human nature as well as for a changed human organization.
Christianity is the chief source of this hope, and is summoned to
prove itself equal to the task of keeping the hope high and giving it
inward energy and resource. But it will require boldness of faith and
the spirit of sacrifice, a sense of the excellence and worth of
spiritual things, and willingness to trust our own souls and the souls
of our fellow men, to trust ourselves to the instincts and ways of a
Christ-like love, if the Christian hope is to prove able to create a
new world.
IV
NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN?
BENJAMIN WISNER BACON
All forms of peace propaganda are at present justly and properly
repressed by the Government as a war measure. This has served in some
degree to silence the voice of the pacifist, but manifestly it cannot
serve to quiet the disturbed feeling in the minds of many Christians,
that to engage in war under any conditions is to come short of the
idealism of Jesus. Forcible measures produce the reverse effect, if
any.
Non-resistance, under some circumstances and conditions if not under
all, is a duty which Jesus undeniably taught. Moreover, his conduct
was fully in accord with his principles; otherwise his following could
not have maintained their unparalleled loyalty to him. The manifest
inconsistency between these non-resistance sayings (taken by
themselves) and the method advocated and used by our Government in
defence of democracy and righteousness remains ever present. The grave
extent of its inroads upon the national morale may be judged by the
circulation attained by a typical pacifistic book, whose principal
basis of argument is nothing else than these non-resistance sayings,
and which if it does not attempt to square them in all cases with the
conduct of Jesus, but rather accords to Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-tse
the merit of greater consistency, nevertheless owes all its real
effect to the fact that its author speaks as a well-known and
authorized exponent of Christian teaching, and leaves in his readers'
minds the conviction not of the alleged inconsistency, but of an
absolute and unqualified doctrine of non-resistance as supported by
both the teaching and the conduct of Jesus.
The single year 1915-1916 witnessed the appearance of no less than
five successive editions of the book entitled "New Wars for Old," by
Rev. John Haynes Holmes, and its propaganda of absolute and
unconditional non-resistance was certainly not without effect in the
military cantonments, if not among the public at large where its
influence is less easy to trace. Recently the Government itself has
given public and official warning against this type of pacifistic
propaganda; and there is only too much reason to believe that (quite
without the intention or knowledge of its authors) those eminent
pacifists, the Potsdam conspirators, have made large financial
contributions to its success.
"New Wars for Old" may be taken as representative. It is the best
example of its type. It seems to be the most effective. At all events,
it gives concrete and tangible form to that interpretation of the
teaching of Jesus which we regard as misleading and dangerous; it may
therefore well form our starting-point toward the attainment of
another interpretation, truer at once to historical fact and to the
ethical sense of the religious-minded. Recognizing the need for
meeting present conditions of the public mind by other than merely
repressive measures we may frankly face the question raised in Dr.
Holmes' book, whether the doctrine of absolute and unqualified
non-resistance, traced by him to more than one revered teacher of
pre-Christian paganism, is indeed identical with that of Jesus; or
whether, with Israel's Messianic hope, some new factor enters in, to
differentiate the Biblical ideal.
Isaiah and Jesus are for this champion of pacifism--and doubtless for
others--the two supreme "exemplars of non-resistance," and the
eloquence with which his thesis is maintained might well win an assent
which would not be granted were account taken of his authority to
pronounce upon questions of historical criticism. However, few
Americans, competent to form a moral judgment of their own, will hold
in light esteem the authority of Isaiah and Jesus. We therefore accept
the exemplars at the risk of seeing our native hue of resolution all
sicklied o'er with this pale cast of thought. But is their teaching
justly and fairly interpreted? That is the question to which we now
address ourselves.
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]
II