Retaliation

Retaliation is the act of returning harm for harm — repaying an injury, insult, or wrong with a corresponding wrong — and Scripture consistently forbids it as a personal response while reserving final judgment to God. The prohibition is already explicit in the Law: “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people; but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). The wisdom literature reinforces it with the same reasoning: “Don’t say, ‘I will pay back evil.’ Wait for Yahweh, and he will save you” (Proverbs 20:22), and “Don’t say, ‘I will do to him as he has done to me; I will repay the man according to his work’” (Proverbs 24:29). Set against this is the plain depiction of the world that makes retaliation tempting: “In arrogance, the wicked hunt down the weak. They are caught in the schemes that they devise” (Psalms 10:2).

The New Testament repeats the command and widens it. Jesus replaces strict reciprocity with a posture of non-resistance and active goodwill: “don’t resist him who is evil; but whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39), and “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). He also ties the measure one gives to the measure one receives: “with whatever judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:2). Paul writes, “Repay no one evil for evil” (Romans 12:17) and grounds the command in God’s prerogative: “Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath. For it is written, ‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord’” (Romans 12:19). The same instruction appears in 1 Thessalonians 5:15 and 1 Peter 3:9, the latter replacing repayment with blessing. Across these passages the logic is consistent: vengeance is withheld from the disciple not because wrong is trivial but because judgment belongs to God, and the disciple’s part is love, good conduct, and blessing.

Linguistically, the phrase in Matthew 5:39 rendered “don’t resist” is from a Greek verb meaning to stand against or oppose; how broadly that opposition extends — to physical violence only, to legal retaliation, or to evil generally — is a matter of interpretation rather than of the word’s meaning. The saying about the right cheek is often read as describing an insulting blow rather than a lethal attack, though interpreters differ.

Christian traditions diverge here, and the divergence is old. Pacifist bodies such as the Anabaptist and Quaker traditions read Matthew 5:39 and 5:44 as a binding rule of life for disciples and therefore refuse both personal retaliation and participation in armed force. The mainstream Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed traditions distinguish personal vengeance, which they hold to be forbidden in every case, from the public administration of justice, which they regard as a legitimate function of the state — an appeal usually made to passages such as Romans 13 that lie outside the retaliation texts themselves. Most traditions also distinguish vindictiveness from lawful redress of wrongs through courts or proper authority, while insisting that the former is sin in any reading.

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.