From Salt and Light, this week’s featured book (ebook free for everyone).

“Away from Compromise and Shadow” was first published as an article in 1925 in Die Wegwarte, a precursor to Plough. Arnold was responding to fellow writers in the magazine – notably Heinrich Euler and Max Dressler – who had argued that in today’s world, discipleship would always entail some level of compromise.

It is not by chance that a discussion has arisen in our periodical about compromise and about the shadow with which one must come to terms, because it is there everywhere and at all times. Dormant behind this lies the fundamental riddle of life – the problem of evil and death, which concerns all serious-minded people again and again. Evil and death are so oppressive that goodness and life constantly threaten to succumb to them. In all the circles of the larger movement our readers are in touch with, that slackening of purpose – that avoidance of the either-or, as represented by Heinrich Euler and his friends – has spread in a frightening way.1

Initially, the movement at large was awakened by the coming light and turned away from compromise with today’s darkness. It was clear to those who belonged to it that there can be no compromise with evil. The word “compromise” has its origin in the language of law, and means a mutual settlement between contending parties. Well and good – it belongs there, wherever there is legal conflict. It is a settlement between opposing parties who are both fighting for, say, the same property, or it is the agreement on which a court of arbitration insists.

We, however, are concerned with the question of striving for a better justice and righteousness – that of the all-giving heart of Jesus as reflected in his Sermon on the Mount – in the place of this highest form of justice from the point of view of the law. This means that, when faced with the threat of a legal battle, we who want to follow the path of life and love will be ready to give up everything, and allow our opponents to take everything away from us, rather than compromise (Matt. 5:38–42). And we will not be subjecting ourselves to hard demands made on futile efforts; rather, we will be met by assurances of the deepest powers and given opportunities for overflowing joy and love.

The news of the new life is this: bringing joy precludes murder; love hates no one; truth brooks no compromise with deceit; the heart can remain pure only by making no concessions. For the Father of Jesus, who gives all, enters no mutual settlement with mammon, least of all in a heart that belongs to him.

In short, if we truly have joy in life, and love for all people, we will not tolerate any compromise with death, any concession to loveless indifference or murderous injustice and brutality, because the way of love reaches out to all people, touches all things, and transforms every situation. This is the essence of the new life, the message of the kingdom, the meaning of Jesus’ teachings. Here is his heart.

Every movement that comes from God will be concerned with this way of life. And whenever such a living movement of hearts dies, this way will be deserted. The process of dying reaches the final stage of death when we give up our wrestling with death, when we abandon the struggle for life and surrender, unresisting, to the shadow of death. This is the natural dying that threatens every movement, slipping into Philistinism and mediocrity, and away from the struggle to which Jesus has called us.

The fact that people try to live simultaneously on the basis of the law and on the basis of grace; that a life of nonviolence in this age is regarded as a fiction and fantasy even though Jesus himself went this way; that people fight against every uncompromising stance and then congratulate themselves for having stood up against legalism and fanaticism; that they want to say an unqualified yes to every sphere of earthly life; that they are in fact infatuated with the shadow of evil and take pains to show that one can never get rid of it, and that it basically makes no difference whether there is more or less compromise – all this shows how far they have strayed from the way.

Max Dressler shows us a salient point of the new life: that healing can come about only by experiencing love in the form of full forgiveness of sin, and that in this state, the legalistic “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” cease to be. This cannot be emphasized strongly enough. And yet it is disconcerting that he meanwhile fails to draw the only possible consequence for practical life from the experience of this love: that he who is forgiven much, must love much (Luke 7:47). As it is put elsewhere, “How can we love God, whom we do not see, if we do not love the brother whom we see?” (1 John 4:20)

Yes, there is only one way, the way of love, the love that comes from forgiveness and has its essence in forgiveness. And this way is absolute discipleship of Jesus, a way that allows for no compromise with all that is loveless in our times. Of course, this does not mean that if we are gripped by love we will never make compromises; rather, it means that the love which has gripped us can make no compromises. If we nevertheless fall for evil, this is a result of our own weakness of character. But whenever love takes hold of us again and fills us with its glowing warmth, we once more set our eyes on the highest goal and live again in accordance with the word of Jesus – that is, in the power of his perfect love and nothing else.

As the First Letter of John plainly puts it, “Whoever claims to be without sin is a liar.” (1 John 1:8) John tells us this to keep us from falling into sin. But he goes on to say that if we do sin, we have an advocate who expiates sin (1 John 2:1–2), and that whoever abides in him will not sin. If someone does sin, that person, in sinning, has not seen him or known him (1 John 3:6). “We know that we belong to God, and the whole world lives in evil” (1 John 5:19).

Those who defend sin show, by virtue of this attitude, that they have strayed from recognizing Jesus; in speaking this way, they show that they have neither seen nor recognized him.

It makes a great deal of difference whether the evil we are speaking of lies before us, as something that we are tempted to commit, or in our past, so that we can leave it and forget it. For Paul, it was essential to leave everything behind and to turn and race headlong toward the goal with his eyes set on nothing else (Phil. 2:12–14). Of course, he never claimed that he wasn’t guilty of anything – this was always clear to him, and he testified to the fact. Yet he argued that the forgiveness Christ brings means complete liberation. Because of this, Paul saw himself as a fighter who fought in full armor against all evil, and even death itself (Eph. 6:11–17).

Uncompromising love has nothing to do with softness or flabbiness, nothing to do with an attitude of resignation. On the contrary, it will make us so resolute that we will take up a spiritual fight against every power that is opposed to peace and love (Eph. 6:12). In this fight it will be out of the question to injure or kill a fellow human being, for the simple reason that no human capacity for discernment can fairly judge who is ultimately evil – who must be rejected or forfeited or killed. All the more, this fight of the spirits must be waged first and foremost within each person against everything we recognize there to be inimical or injurious to life, hostile to human fellowship, or directed against God.

If I am truly permeated with life and gripped by love, I will be a fighter to the point of shedding my blood. I will never be hard toward my fellow humans, though it may be felt as hardness when, in the passion of glowing love, I exuberantly take up the struggle against the evil I contend with in myself and those around me, and in the public square. On the one hand, my fight will be a completely private matter – one that informs my personal decisions in a deep mutual relationship between me and God alone – on the other, it will also be a public matter, because it will demand that I take a determined stand in opposition to all unjust human conditions as they are, in the public sphere no less than in private life.

My attitude, if I am such a fighter, will be erroneously regarded as moralistic or even legalistic. And yet the ethic that drives my conduct toward my fellow human beings, and my attitude to all societal endeavors and institutions, will remain clearly defined by its content – defined, that is, by its goal, which is God’s kingdom – and by the character of the Son of Man and his comrades of the kingdom; by the truth of love, and by the will of God’s heart. This will is the life of complete love, the attitude of the future world; it is the perfection of God in which we must attempt to live, because there is no other real life.

All of which brings us to the age-old topic of perfection and sinlessness. It is obvious enough that in the here and now, as we are, there is no sinless state. But the way people everywhere speak nowadays about the necessity of evil and about our common bondage in guilt unquestionably leads to something like consent to involvement in guilt. People ironically dismiss the world peace to which the prophets witnessed, the elimination of government proclaimed in John’s Revelation (Rev.17–18), and the overcoming of the present social order by brotherhood in church community; they dismiss the communal life which should be – and again and again has been – the self-evident expression of true love. In dismissing all these things, these people clearly show that in all these critical spheres, they no longer really want to take a stand against evil. They would rather avoid the great either-or that Jesus confronts us with: God or mammon (Matt. 6:24).

No wonder we have lost the clarity with which Jesus challenged us to clearly say yes or no: never something between the two, and never no when we mean yes, or vice versa (Matt. 5:37). Everywhere these days, people are turning from the way of Jesus, weakly accepting our paradoxical situation in relation to God – all they seem able to do is to say yes and no at the same time to everything. This is what we have to fight against.

A leader in our dying youth movement who tends to dissolve its decisiveness with speculative paradoxes once called out at one of our meetings, “Surely you don’t mean to wage a general campaign against all evil?” My response? Yes, this is exactly what it is all about! This is the reason that Jesus came to the world, and this is why he called us to follow him, and sent us out – so that we would take up and carry on this campaign in every field and in all things. He came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). As the Son of God, he is light, and in him there is no darkness (1 John 1:5). 

Footnotes

1. The “movement” Arnold is referring to here is the Christian wing of the German youth movement, a collective term for a wide variety of loose associations of young people that sought for societal renewal in the first two decades of the twentieth century, before the rise of fascism. Common goals included social and economic equality, the revitalization of arts and crafts and traditional agricultural methods, educational reform, and the formation of cooperatives and communes.