Last week ex-president Donald Trump said in a radio interview with media broadcaster and friend, Glenn Beck, that if he regains the White House in the presidential election next year, he will have “no choice” but to imprison his political enemies. And Trump reportedly has been talking lately on the campaign trail about his vengeance he will exercise against some people who were instrumental in getting him indicted four times in the past five months.
When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, his three main mottos were Build the Wall, Make American Great Again, and Lock Her Up referring to his Democratic opponent and former First Lady and Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. Taking vengeance on enemies is the way ancient societies used to operate. But Jesus taught, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5.44).
Philip Schaff (1819-1893) was a German, Protestant, eminent, church historian who is most known for his eight-volume The History of the Christian Church. I have it in my personal library. In it volume two, Schaff writes (2:370-372) under the subhead “Brotherly Love, and Love for Enemies,” which Jesus taught, “It is generally admitted, that selfishness was the soul of heathen morality. . . . Even the much lauded patriotism of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome was only an enlarged egotism. In the catalogue of classical virtues will look in vain for the two fundamental and cardinal virtues, love and humility. The very word which corresponds in Greek to humility to humility signifies generally, in classic usage, a mean, abject mind. The noblest and purest form of love known to the heathen moralist is friendship . . . on an egotistical basis, and was only possible among persons of equal or similar rank in society. . . . the return of evil for evil, was universally acknowledged throughout the heathen world as a just principle and maxim, in direct opposition to the plainest injunctions of the New Testament. . . . Not to take revenge was regarded as a sing of weakness and cowardice. . . . to return good for evil is Christlike and divine, and only possible in the Christian religion.”
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