Good For Evil

Good for evil is the ethical pattern in which a person responds to injury, hatred, or persecution with kindness, blessing, prayer, and forgiveness instead of retaliation or revenge. In Scripture it appears both as a human practice commanded of God's people and as an imitation of God's own character toward the ungrateful and the wicked.

The Old Testament supplies a portrait of the practice in prayer as well as action. The text says in Psalm 35:13 that when the speaker's opponents were sick, he wore sackcloth, afflicted his soul with fasting, and prayed — a prayer he describes as returning into his own bosom, an image that interpreters take variously as unanswered intercession, grief reflected back on the one who prays, or simply the inward sincerity of the prayer. The psalm is a plea for deliverance rather than a treatise on ethics, so the good done to enemies stands alongside the speaker's appeal for God to act against them; both are present in the same poem.

The clearest teaching comes from Jesus. Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27–28 command love of enemies, blessing those who curse, doing good to those who hate, and prayer for persecutors. The grounding given is the Father's own indiscriminate generosity: he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), and he is kind toward the unthankful and evil (Luke 6:35). Luke adds concrete gestures — the struck cheek, the taken cloak, the gift to the asker (Luke 6:29–30) — and the rule that one should do to others as one would have them do (Luke 6:31), with the summary that disciples are to be merciful as their Father is merciful (Luke 6:36). The pattern is carried to its sharpest point in the words of Jesus at the crucifixion, "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34), and of Stephen, "Lord, don't hold this sin against them" (Acts 7:60).

Christian traditions have read the scope of this command differently. Historically, the peace churches — Mennonite, Amish, Quaker and related bodies — have treated the commands of Matthew 5 and Luke 6 as a binding literal norm for disciples, ruling out both personal retaliation and Christian participation in armed force. In this tradition the teaching is a mark of the church rather than an ideal reserved for a few. Catholic moral theology has commonly distinguished precepts binding all believers from counsels recommended to those seeking perfection, while allowing the state a limited role in restraining evil; Lutheran and Reformed teaching similarly distinguishes the disciple's personal forgiveness from the magistrate's office of justice, often on the basis of Romans 13. One way to read the difference is that all these traditions affirm the command and disagree about how far it governs public and coercive life; another is to see the disagreement as one about whether Jesus' words describe the character of God's kingdom breaking in now or an ethic for a specific moment. The texts themselves set no such qualifiers, which is why the debate persists.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.