The use of hyperbole (deliberate overstatement or exaggeration) was commonplace in Near-Eastern cultures of Jesus’s time, and Jesus himself often used exaggerated language to drive home a point. “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). This is just one example of Jesus’s sayings that, while clearly extravagant, would not have deceived his listeners. It may well be that there is a similar touch of hyperbole in his pacifist sayings, which Jesus certainly intended to be taken seriously, even radically, but probably not literally or without qualification.
Jesus’s opposition to treating rules as rigid absolutes supports this reading. In his view, even divine commandments like “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8) must be interpreted flexibly and with an eye to core Biblical values. Contrary to the Pharisees’ approach to religious rules, which too often stressed the letter of the law over its spirit, Jesus taught that the Sabbath commandment should not be interpreted as prohibiting hungry people from eating (Mark 2:23–28), or sick people from being healed (Luke 6:6–11), or children or animals from being rescued from a well (Luke 14:5). In a powerful scene in the film, Mary Magdalene is prevented from being stoned according to the prescribed punishment for her transgression. Rules aren’t impersonal, he believed, but come from a personal lawgiver and are often phrased in broad, general language and should not be construed with wooden literalness or rigid legalism in disregard of higher values or the rule-maker’s general purposes and intentions.
Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence, likewise, lay down a general norm that must be applied intelligently in light of Jesus’s other teachings. Roughly, Jesus seems to be saying this: “Be zealous agents of peace and reconciliation; respond to hatred with love and forgiveness; when abused, be prepared to suffer hardship, loss, or indignity rather than to respond with violence or vengeance; never use force without need and never in ways inconsistent with fundamental Gospel values.” This paraphrase brings out clearly how Jesus’s sayings on nonviolence were intended as implicitly qualified general norms rather than as absolutes without exception.
Why Did Jesus Believe in Nonviolence?
We have argued that Jesus taught an extremely demanding but not absolute or unqualified ethic of nonviolence and nonresistance. On any plausible interpretation, this ethic is a deeply challenging one, not “reasonable” by the world’s standards. Jesus’s explanations for his teachings on nonviolence bring out their radical nature.
First, he says, we should respond to violence and hatred with love and forgiveness because this is what God does, and we should imitate God and seek to fulfill his will in all things, even as he himself did what he saw his Father doing. “[L]ove your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be Sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:35–36; emphasis added). Recall the beginning scenes of The Passion, where Jesus interferes with the violent resistance put up by his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Second, Jesus undermines many of the usual justifications for violence by pointing out that, with the dawning of God’s kingdom, many things that seem to be unmitigated evils are in fact blessings to those who love and serve the Lord. “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven” (Matthew 5:11–12). The thought is well dramatized in the scene toward the end of the film in which the “good” thief is promised happiness the very day of the crucifixion. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, and those who weep, for God has great things in store for them (Luke 6:20–21). Are you concerned that if you don’t respond to violence with violence, evildoers will escape punishment? God will give them the punishment they deserve (Matthew 25:31ff.). Are you worried that if you don’t fight back, you may be robbed, beaten, or killed? “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28); “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).
In short, what Jesus calls for is a radical reversal of worldly values and “common-sense” assumptions, a thoroughgoing conversion (metanoia) to a God-centered way of thinking and living. From a worldly point of view, it is an unqualified evil when a good person is robbed or mistreated, and aggressors deserve to be repaid in kind. But from a God-centered point of view, such concerns fade in importance. As Peter asks (sounding here a bit like Socrates and the ancient Stoics), “who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is right?” (I Peter 3:13). Nothing that the violent can do to a person, or take from them, can cause them deep or lasting harm if God is on their side. From a personal standpoint, therefore, all that ultimately matters is faithfulness to God—His “kingdom and His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33).
The Ethics of Nonviolence
Jesus’s willingness to endure the cross seems rooted in a profound moral faith that entrusting ourselves to God’s hands and suppressing our violent impulses will be vindicated and can play an important part in ushering in God’s kingdom. Is such trust in nonviolence promoting the cause of peace likely to be justified by unassisted reason alone? Suppose that we understand such trust as grounded in the conviction that we ought, morally, to be strongly committed to the cause of peace and nonviolence. This question can then be posed: Can standard secular moral theories undergird a strongly pacifist commitment to live nonviolently in the face of temptations to do otherwise?
Philosophers generally distinguish between two broad types of ethical theories: consequentialist and non-consequentialist. Consequentialists believe that one should always act for “the greater good,” whereas non-consequentialists believe that some acts are wrong even if they do produce the best net outcomes for everyone affected by the action. Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest in the film, reveals his commitment to consequentialism when he defends Jesus’s execution by saying, “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish” (John 11:50).
Utilitarianism is the most common version of consequentialism, and comes in a couple of varieties. Act utilitarianism mandates those individual actions that best promote overall utility (for example, the maximizing of pleasure and minimizing of pain for the greatest number). An act utilitarian would probably say, in extreme cases, it’s morally permissible, indeed morally obligatory, to torture an innocent child if that’s the only way to get a terrorist to reveal where he’s hidden a nuclear bomb. Rule utilitarianism, in contrast, dictates that there are certain kinds of actions that should never be done, even if on occasion they promote utility in the short term, because in the long term they are likely to undermine it. So the rule utilitarian would probably insist that torturing an innocent child, for whatever ultimate purpose, is morally ruled out because it’s the sort of behavior that, if practiced, will likely detract from long-term utility.
Can Jesus’s ethic of nonviolence be defended on consequentialist grounds? It’s easy to think of examples in which, say, jailing an innocent person or murdering a political opponent would promote the best consequences for everyone involved, yet Jesus’s ethic would plainly condemn such acts. When it comes to act and rule consequentialism, only rule utilitarianism holds any hope of justifying a strongly pacifistic approach to life, and only if it were based on the highly questionable assumption that no rule permitting forcible resistance to evil could promote long-term utility. This however would entail an absolute pacifism that goes beyond Jesus’s ethic and that we saw we have good reasons to reject. So whereas act utilitarianism seems to permit actions it morally shouldn’t, rule utilitarianism at best justifies an absolute pacifism that seems to yield unpalatable results.
Models of the Passion
If we take the Passion of Christ as a faithful application of Jesus’s teachings about nonviolence, and in
terpret his teaching of non-violence as identifying a moral obligation to renounce violence in most cases and in his own death particularly, then Jesus would have been obligated to do what he did, based on a duty that ruled out any right of his to refuse to do it. And if Jesus in fact was laboring under such an externally imposed moral obligation that precluded any right of his to do otherwise, then he would have been blameworthy for refusing to follow through with his mission. In the movie, when mockingly challenged to come down from the cross by the defiant thief, for instance, Jesus would have been sinful to do so. Given the extraordinarily difficult obligation that was imposed on him, though, he still might be deemed praiseworthy for doing it. We can call this the “duty model” of the Passion.
A quite different account insists that Jesus was under no obligation at all, but was perfectly free morally to avoid the cross. Jesus’s sacrifice was, on this view, an act of pure generosity and grace. Jesus is praiseworthy for having gone to the cross, for he didn’t have to in any moral sense, so he wouldn’t have been blameworthy for refusing to do so. We can call this the “freedom model” of the Passion.
Is there a principled way to split the difference and characterize Jesus’s going to the cross both as obedience to God’s perfect will and something that Jesus morally had to do, on the one hand, while also something altogether praiseworthy, gracious, and as more than just doing his duty, on the other? Perhaps there is, but we suspect that to find this synthesis we need to introduce aspects of ethics beyond just rights and duties. Surely the Passion isn’t properly understood merely as Jesus’s discharging a moral duty and thereby avoiding wrongdoing. Rights and duties are not all that ethics is about, and Jesus’s Passion just doesn’t seem reducible to such categories.
There’s another way to capture a way Jesus may have “had to” go to the cross. As God the Son, Jesus shared in divinity that, on classical interpretations, is perfectly loving. Jesus, being who he was, couldn’t be less than perfectly loving. His obedience was tested somehow in his human vulnerability and in the crucible of pain, but his divine perfection dictated he should do all he could to make the resources of God’s grace available. The moral constraints on his behavior, on this view, are internal to his character, rather than externally imposed standards. So it’s accurate to say Jesus morally had to do it, given his identity and nature, and it’s also appropriate to accord Jesus maximal praise for his willing sacrifice. Knowing that his sacrifice would make God’s grace so available, Jesus was morally constrained by his own perfection to express his love sacrificially. We can call this the “character model” of the Passion.
Where does pacifism fit in? It depends on which model of the Passion we adopt. The duty model would dictate that nonviolence is a moral obligation imposed by Jesus’s teachings and faithfully discharged by Christ himself. Applied to a nonabsolutist understanding of pacifism, it would imply that we generally have no right to self-defense, even if we retain rights to defend others. On the freedom model, in contrast, pacifism would be a purely supererogatory act, one that we are praiseworthy for performing but not blameworthy for not performing. We would be under no obligation at all to follow Jesus’s hard sayings on nonviolence, though the choice to follow such sayings would be praiseworthy. Opting out of pacifism would not be at all blameworthy. Rights to defend oneself and others would be consistent with this approach. This view conspicuously resembles the two-ethic analysis discussed earlier.
Our favored take on pacifism and nonviolence, however, follows the character model. As all followers of Jesus are called to perfection, all have been called to follow Jesus’s example and to become the kind of people for whom violence is less and less an option. To say merely that nonviolence is a moral duty or that self-defense is not our moral right is to conduct the discourse on the wrong level. Perhaps we do retain a right of self-defense. But Jesus would call us, on occasion at least, not to exercise all the rights we may have, even as he didn’t exercise all his own prerogatives, like his moral authority to assert his innocence or point out that what was happening was unjust. This is a useful reminder that rights, despite their importance, need not always dominate ethical discussions. The greater the sacrifice the more likely we may need to forego genuine rights, but Christ’s Passion teaches us that nothing we might be called to sacrifice compares with what he sacrificed for us.
Either Jesus meant to teach that we don’t have a general right of personal self-defense or that, even if we do, we’re often called to lay it aside, following his example. Recall from the movie that Jesus said nobody took his life from him, but that he laid it down of his own accord to accomplish the work to which God had called him (see John 10:18). Those inclined to affirm such rights are hard-pressed to do so on consequentialist grounds. Non-consequentialists, though, can correct what they consider to be this deficiency among the utilitarians. Seeing whether Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence can be defended on non-consequentialist grounds is more difficult, because non-consequentialist theories are so varied. Some non-consequentialists, like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and certain contemporary situation ethicists, claim that ethics can be reduced to a single fundamental ethical principle (for instance “Always act on principles that you would like to see everybody act upon” or “Always do the loving thing”). Others hold that there are several basic moral principles (“Tell the truth,” “Do no harm,” “Act justly,” and so forth) and then offer ways of prioritizing the principles to reach concrete outcomes.
In general, however, it’s hard to see how a non-consequentialist theory could do the job. All leading non-consequentialist theories accord primacy to a right of self-defense that conflicts with Jesus’s radical ethic of nonresistance. And from the standpoint of natural reason, how can such a right be denied? There are times, as Jan Narveson notes, when “it’s either him or us. And the pacifist seems to be insisting that it always ought to be us. But why? The other guy is the guilty party, for heaven’s sake!” (Narveson 1986, p. 139). So the non-consequentialist is going to have a difficult time making sense of either denials of rights to self-defense or exhortations to lay such rights aside.
Historically, of course, most advocates of radical nonviolence have been motivated by religious conviction, including Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day. Secular accounts of ethics seem ill-equipped to imbue us with the sort of confidence in the ultimate workability of such an approach and the power of love to conquer evil. In the end, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “the cross is the only justification for the precept of non-violence, for it alone can kindle a faith in the victory over evil which will enable men to obey that precept. Only such obedience is blessed with the promise that we shall be partakers of Christ’s victory as well as his suffering.”
SOURCES
Roland H. Bainton. 1960. Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace. Nashville: Abington Press.
Hans Küng. 1976. On Being a Christian. Translated by Edward Quinn. Garden City: Doubleday.
Martin Luther. 1956. The Sermon on the Mount and The Magnificat. In Luther’s Works, Volume 21, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan, translated by Jaroslav Pelikan and A.T.W. Steinhaeuser (St. Louis: Concordia).
Jan Narveson. 1990. At Arms’ Length: Violence and War. In Tom Regan, ed., Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Leo Tolstoy. 1940. A Confession, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe. Translated by Aylmer Maude. London: Oxford University Press.
John Howard Yoder. 1994. The Politics of Jesus. Second edition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Should Jesus have allowed himself to be tortured and crucified?
2. What did Jesus mean when he said “Resist not evil”? (Matthew 5:48)
3. Did Jesus believe in absolute nonviolence? If not, what was his view of violence and retaliation?
4. Would Jesus say that all wars are wrong? If not, what kinds of wars would he say are justified?
5. What is pacifism? Are there good theological or religious grounds for pacifism? Can pacifism be defended on nonreligious grounds?
About the Authors
DAVID BAGGETT is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, Pennsylvania. He is co-editor of Harry Potter and Philosophy (with Shawn E. Klein, 2004) in Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy series, and is currently working on a book entitled Vanquishing Euthyphro with Jerry Walls.
GREGORY BASSHAM is Director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life and Chair of the Philosophy Department at King’s College, Pennsylvania. A frequent contributor to volumes in Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy series, he is the co-editor of The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (2003), the author of Original Intent and the Constitution: A Philosophical Study (1992), and co-author of Critical Thinking: A Student’s Introduction (second edition, 2005).
ERIC BRONSON heads the Philosophy and History Department at Berkeley College in New York City. He edited Baseball and Philosophy (2004) and co-edited The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (2003), Volumes 6 and 5 in Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy series.
J. ANGELO CORLETT is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at San Diego State University. He is the author of several books, including Analyzing Social Knowledge (1996), Responsibility and Punishment (2001), Race, Racism, and Reparations (2003), Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis (2003), Ethical Dimensions of Law (2005), and Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues (2005). He is editor of Equality and Liberty: Analyzing Rawls and Nozick (1990) and Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Ethics.
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