Theopedia

Revenge

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

— Romans 12:19

Definition

Revenge is the act of repaying a wrong done to oneself with harm in return. Scripture forbids it to individual Christians outright: believers are never to avenge themselves but are to leave vengeance to God, who alone has the right to repay evil (Rom. 12:19; Deut. 32:35).1 This prohibition does not abolish justice. God still executes vengeance on wrongdoing, ordinarily now through the civil magistrate, whom Paul calls “God’s servant, an avenger” (Rom. 13:4).2 What is forbidden is the private, personal desire to repay evil for evil, not the pursuit of justice through lawful means.3

Confessional Witness

No chapter of the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession addresses personal revenge directly. Chapter 24, “Of the Civil Magistrate,” states that God has set magistrates “over the people, for his own glory and the public good,” and has “armed them with the power of the sword, for defence and encouragement of them that do good, and for the punishment of evil doers.”4 The chapter says nothing about private individuals repaying wrong with wrong; its witness is indirect, that the sword belongs to the magistrate rather than to the person wronged.

The Westminster Larger Catechism is direct where the confession is silent. Among the duties required in the sixth commandment is “requiting good for evil”; among the sins it forbids are “sinful anger, hatred, envy, desire of revenge… provoking words, oppression, quarreling.”3 Revenge is named as a sin against the same commandment that forbids murder, not treated as a lesser fault.

Biblical Basis

The prohibition begins in the Mosaic law itself: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18), grounded in God’s own claim, “Vengeance is mine, and recompense” (Deut. 32:35). Paul quotes this claim when he commands the Roman church, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’” (Rom. 12:19), immediately after commanding, “Repay no one evil for evil” (Rom. 12:17) and before commanding believers to feed a hungry enemy and “overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:20-21).

Jesus states the same prohibition as part of his own exposition of the law: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5:38-39), followed immediately by the command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). Peter gives the same instruction to churches under persecution: “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless” (1 Pet. 3:9).

Scripture pairs this prohibition with the positive assurance that vengeance still belongs to God, exercised now through civil government. Paul, in the same letter, calls the governing authority “God’s servant, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom. 13:4), so that leaving vengeance to God is not merely a promise deferred to the final judgment but a present reality carried out through lawful human government.2

Historical Development

Christ’s command to love one’s enemies and not retaliate (Matt. 5:44) raised, early on, the question of whether it bound every Christian or only some. Medieval Scholastic theology answered that it was a “counsel of perfection,” binding on those who sought a higher standard of holiness, chiefly monks, rather than a precept required of every believer.1

Calvin rejected this distinction at length in his exposition of the moral law. If non-retaliation were merely optional, he argued, ordinary believers would be excluded from the number of God’s children, since Christ ties the command directly to sonship: “that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:45). “What is left to us if we are excluded from the number of the children of God? According to the Schoolmen, monks alone will be the children of our Father in heaven, monks alone will dare to invoke God as their Father.”1 Calvin appealed to two patristic authorities against the Scholastic reading: Chrysostom, who argued that the nature of the motive Christ gives (“that you may be sons of your Father”) shows “these are not exhortations, but precepts,” not mere suggestions; and Augustine, who argued that the same commandment that forbids theft or adultery against a friend forbids it against an enemy as well, so that love of enemies binds with the same force as the rest of the moral law rather than as an optional extra.1 Reformed theology since Calvin has followed this reading: the prohibition of personal revenge is a precept for all Christians, not a counsel for the especially devout.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t forbidding revenge mean a Christian may never go to court or call on the magistrate for justice? Calvin distinguishes the vindictive spirit forbidden to individuals from the lawful pursuit of justice through the magistrate. A Christian “only takes the right course who, with innocuous simplicity, commits his cause to the judge as the public protector, without any thought of returning evil for evil, which is the feeling of revenge.”5 What Scripture forbids is not a wronged party’s use of lawful process but the private desire to repay harm with harm; bringing a matter before the magistrate “with innocuous simplicity” is a different act from seeking personal satisfaction.5 The magistrate’s own exercise of judgment is not private revenge at all: “the vengeance of the magistrate is the vengeance not of man, but of God, which, as Paul says, he exercises by the ministry of man for our good,” citing Romans 13:4.5

Doesn’t the lex talionis, “an eye for an eye,” license repaying harm in kind? The lex talionis of Exodus 21:24 and Leviticus 24:19-20 was a rule bounding the civil magistrate’s own punishment of crime, requiring the penalty to be proportionate to the offense rather than excessive, not a license for the wronged party’s own private retaliation.6 Jesus’s citation of the principle in Matthew 5:38-39 makes this explicit: “his followers are not to use the lex talionis to justify personal vengeance against those who wrong us,” even while Scripture elsewhere continues to affirm the state’s own authority to punish wrongdoing proportionately.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 2, chap. 8, 359-360. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Ken Magnuson, “15. Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩2

  3. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 135-136. ↩ ↩2

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 24, “Of the Civil Magistrate,” para. 1. ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, book 4, chap. 20, 651-652. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Ken Magnuson, “14. Capital Punishment,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩2