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

This essay was first published in Das Neue Werk in April 1921. It was written in the context of widespread political unrest across Germany.

Again and again in the life of a nation, between nations, and in the struggle between social classes, we experience violent outbursts of accumulated tensions and conflicts. These outbursts reveal the existing state of mutual exploitation and oppression, and not least of all, the savage instincts of chaotic, covetous passions. Volcanic eruptions of inordinate bloodlust, followed by merciless countermeasures, have intensified in certain quarters and spread to such an extent that it is necessary to say a clear word here.

Others may see their task in the upholding of law and order by murderous means; others may believe they are called to fight for the proletariat, for a future of justice and peace, with bloodstained fists, if necessary; others may regard their own race as a holy shrine and declare war on another. Our life is filled with a content that has deeper roots. A life task has been entrusted to us which looks further ahead. The mystery of life has been revealed to us. It has dawned upon us, because Christ means everything to us. We feel united with the whole church of Christ, in which no group or individual can live in isolation from the rest. Both the one and the other are members of the one living organism whose spirit, head, and heart is the coming Christ (1 Cor.12:12–13; Eph. 5:23). This is why the testimony of our life is nothing but the essence of his life (Gal. 2:20). He discloses the mystery of life to us when he points to the birds in the air, and to the flowers of the field (Matt. 6:26–29), when he expects good fruits only from the healthy tree (Matt. 6:17–18), and when he reveals to us the heart of a Father who sends his rain and sunshine on both the good and the bad (Matt. 5:45).

Life is growth and development. Life is the unfolding of love. Killing has nothing to do with life. It belongs to the realm of death. Violence and coercion do not belong to growth but to its stifling. The witness that has been entrusted to us is to live only for what serves and builds up life. It makes no difference whether our progress appears to be evolutionary or revolutionary. It is both at the same time – a matter of development and upheaval – because what is alive always wants to cast off that which is dying. Living means giving and bestowing whatever awakens life. Yet neither evolution nor revolution can ever fully eradicate the deepest roots of world suffering: universal guilt, and the lethal poison of evil, of hatred, covetous lust, depravity, and killing.

The new birth Jesus spoke of is brought about by organic life. It springs from the same God who is at work in all that is living. Yet in order for it to bring about a new beginning, it must also bring about a tearing down and away – a toppling of the old. It is a painful liberation, this new birth. But every individual, and humankind collectively, is in need of it.

F. J. Mears, World War 1 battlefield at night, ink and watercolor, c. 1913. Wikimedia Commons.

We believe in the new birth of a life filled with light from God. We believe in the future of love and in the constructive fellowship of human beings. We believe in the peace of the kingdom that God will bring and institute on this earth. This faith is not a matter of playing with a future shape of things that exists only in our imaginations. No, the same God who will bring about this future gives us his heart and his Spirit today. His name is I Am Who I Am (Exod. 3:14). His nature is the same now as it will reveal itself to be in the future (Heb. 13:8).

God revealed his heart in Jesus. He gave his Spirit by giving us Christ’s presence among us. In his church, the embodiment of Christ’s life, he lives the life of Jesus again and again. This church is the hidden living seed of the future kingdom. But the characteristic spirit of this kingdom – peace and love – has been entrusted to the church even now. Therefore, it practices justice and righteousness and nurtures joy, in this world and in the present age.

And so we speak up in protest against bloodshed and violence in the context of this life-witness, no matter from which side these powers of death may come. Our witness and our will for peace, for love at any cost, even at the cost of our own lives, has never been more necessary than it is today. There are those who reproach us for speaking about nonviolence, conscientious objection, nonresistance, and following Jesus in the power of his radiating love, which precludes all violence and makes it impossible for us to inflict any kind of injury on others. They say these questions are not as urgent as we make them out to be. But they are the ones who are in error – they are completely mistaken, in fact, if they think these topics are not highly relevant today. On the contrary, these issues are more urgent today than they ever were, and it will eventually become evident to all that to persevere in an attitude of loyal, unconditional love requires the utmost bravery. It requires manly courage and the readiness to die.

Jesus knew that he would never be able to conquer the earth spirit by greater violence, but only by greater love. This is why he resisted and overcame the temptation to seize power over the kingdoms of this world (Matt. 4:8–10). He proclaimed the rulership of God, which is of the present and of the future at the same time. And God’s will was present in his life – in his deeds, his words, and his suffering. This is why, in the Sermon on the Mount, he speaks of people who are strong in love, of peacemakers, of the people of the heart who will inherit the land and possess the earth, people to whom the kingdom of God belongs (Matt. 5:3–11). He took up the ancient proclamations of peace and justice which belong to the future kingdom of God. He intensified the crucial command, “Thou shalt not kill,” which rules out the taking of life in every instance, since it is the original sacrilege against life; he showed that any cruel treatment, any brutal violation of a person’s inner life, falls under the same prohibition, and that anything that injures body and soul is as wrong as actually killing someone (Matt. 5:3–11).

It is a matter of deepest regret, therefore, that so many serious-minded Christians today do not share this simple and clear witness of Jesus and early Christianity, which living, biblically grounded churches and movements in other centuries represented and proclaimed so strongly. These took an unwavering attitude and declared that participation in war and in any military profession are irreconcilable with the calling of Christianity. Certainly, that does not rule out the need for police forces, for example. Their service is more ethical than the competition of two business concerns in which only one is able to survive. But what we are concerned with here is a completely different question – the nature of the mission and testimony of Christ, the question of the church and the task it has been commissioned to do.

F. J. Mears, The Menin Road, watercolor and ink on paper, c. 1929. Wikimedia Commons.

We do not deny the existence of great evil and sin, and we do not deny that one day the world will end. But we do not believe in the ultimate power of evil; we believe that God’s realm is the final reality, and we believe in the rebirth of the earth and of humankind. This faith is not evolutionism, a belief in the inevitable ascent to ever greater, more visible perfection. On the contrary, we believe in the growth of the divine seed in the conscience, in the Spirit of Christ that leads to the rebirth of the individual, and in the fellowship of the church. But we also believe in the necessity of upheaval, the unavoidability of world catastrophe and world judgment in war, revolution, and all the other horrors of the end times, because we believe in the collapse of the depraved and degenerate world of compulsion and coercion.

This faith expects everything from God alone. It is certain, however, that God’s seed and God’s light are even at work in people – that he reveals his heart and his future kingdom in the church of Christ. Yes, it is true that the tension between the powers of Christ and of the Antichrist is also present. It can be found everywhere, also in the midst of the Christian church. And this tension will only become stronger the more radically we hold on to faith in absolute love and in what is coming in the future. But faith does not fear the collision between spiritual forces; rather, it expects and even longs for this conflict, because it knows the end must come at last, and after it a completely new world.

It is an error to think that Jesus only wanted to feed the hungry soul. Jesus concerned himself just as much with the human body. He proclaimed the same message of the future world order of peace and justice that we find in John the Baptist and the prophets of the Old Testament, just as surely and determinedly as he proclaimed the rebirth of the individual.

Because we know there are many today who no longer respond to biblical language, or are not yet able to do so, we must find new ways to share this message, as often as this is given to us. This is why we close this confession of our faith with Hermann Hesse’s thought on the word of life, “Thou shalt not kill”:

We are not yet humans; we are still on our way to humanity. Every pupil of Lao Tzu, every disciple of Jesus, every follower of Francis of Assisi, was further ahead, much further ahead, than the laws and reasonings of present-day civilization. Yet the sentence “Thou shalt not kill” has been honored faithfully and obeyed by thousands of people for thousands of years. There has always been a minority of well-meaning people who had faith in the future, who obeyed laws which are not listed in any worldly book of statutes. As soldiers they showed compassion and respected their enemies, or steadfastly refused to kill and hate when ordered to do so, suffering imprisonment and torture for this.

To appreciate these people and what they did, and to overcome doubts about us animals becoming human one day, we must live in faith. We must consider thoughts to be just as valuable as bullets or coins. The “practical” person is always wrong. The future, the idea, faith, is always right, because the power that feeds the world comes from this engine and no other.

And we who believe in the future will raise the ancient demand again and again: “Thou shalt not kill.” It is the basic demand of all progress, of becoming human.

We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. For the consistent socialist all property is theft. In the same way, all disrespect for life, all hardheartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing in the eyes of the consistent believer of our kind. And it is possible to kill not only what exists in the present, but also what belongs to the future. With just a little witty skepticism, one can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet. We kill with every step.

This is why, above all, every one of us has a personal task to do. This task is not to help advance the whole of humanity a little; it is not to work for the improvement of some institution, nor to abolish one or the other particular kind of killing. All this is good, and necessary too. But the most important task for me and you, my fellow human being, is this: to take a step forward, in our own personal lives, from animal to human.footnote

Footnotes

1. Hermann Hesse, in his magazine Vivos Voco, March 1919.