Turn the Other Cheek – What Could Jesus Have Meant?

[ratio1]

How are they hugely different?

Eg say I don’t like to be hit. Question is what do I I do when I am hit?

First rule says do unto others as what I want them do to me. Hence I don’t hit back because I don’t want to be hit myself.

Second rule says I should hit back.

 

[ratio1]

I also like negative expression of golden rule rather than the positive.

Confucius says: do not do unto others what you would not want done to you.

This gets around the problem of someone being masochistic who likes to be hit. We certainly don’t want this person going around to hit other people.

 

[littlebird]

oops…my apologies…i forgot to offer thoughts on the “turn the other cheek” topic.

LOLOL…like if someone attacks me…im gonna just stand there with buck teeth and say…wait, i love you, maybe you can break my other arm too if you would like…

On evil in general…i cant remember which dude it was that said something like…>
" Evil exists because of good men that stand by and do nothing."

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

How are they hugely different?

Eg say I don’t like to be hit. Question is what do I I do when I am hit?

First rule says do unto others as what I want them do to me. Hence I don’t hit back because I don’t want to be hit myself.

Second rule says I should hit back.

Does it, though?

It appears to say you are permitted to hit back and would not be infringing on any law of justice if you did. That still doesn’t mean you should hit back.

There are other considerations.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t just assume the retribution for the wrongs we do won’t be justly applied to us by God.

What we justly deserve is a different question from merely presuming God’s mercy will mean no retribution.

 

[goodcatholic]

I regularly confront violence in a passive way, and it helps to look for the good in all people.

Just when we thought we had this definition sorted.
Thanks for your (name removed by moderator)ut.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

goout:

The god of the philosophers is impossible to know.

And you know that how?

Common sense.
You cannot know a set of ideas or hypotheticals, or speculations as God.
So the god of the philosphers is not a god that is knowable.

Well, no, actually.

Even if the God that philosophers speak about is something like a set of conceptualizations about God, that does not entail that the philosophers who use those terms do not know God in the second sense you speak about.

They are speaking about God, and perhaps even very accurately, albeit analogically, in an objective sense. That does not preclude them from knowing God in the same personal way that you do.

Take, for example, knowing your spouse as a person.

You may know her directly as the person you relate to, but that does NOT mean knowing ABOUT her in an objective or descriptive sense adds nothing to you also knowing her in person.

 

[HarryStotle]

I regularly confront violence in a passive way, and it helps to look for the good in all people. I have been a Street Pastor for the last ten years, we go out in the town until 3 -4 am when all the drunks come out the pubs. I am 68 and the people I feel safest with in our team, are ladies who are over 60 years old, our oldest lady is almost eighty. We go out prepared to turn the other cheek.

We saw a group of about a dozen people suddenly start fighting, …

We are always the weakest people in the mix. So far, none of us have been hurt.

God is good, and we have to keep giving thanks.

I have two points to make on your anecdote.

1. It is clear that this group of street fighters were not malevolent at heart precisely because by your group “turning the other cheek” and not being accosted, the other group demonstrated their unwillingness to act without provocation. My earlier point that “turn the other cheek” functions as a kind of strategy for determining malevolent intent is supported by your story.
2. Your experience adds another element into the discussion, which is the role of the Holy Spirit. Clearly grace is moving your group, but God’s grace was also in play because the street fighters held off from any aggressive response to your group. If they had attacked you, that would indicate malevolence. So openness or resistance to the Holy Spirit would be indicated by whether the aggressors did or did not attack after your group “turned the other cheek.”

Both of these points support my strategic threshold theory, do they not?

 

[goout]

Not “the god the philosophers speak about”
But “the god of the philosophers”
There is a difference.

 

[HarryStotle]

Not “the god the philosophers speak about”
But “the god of the philosophers”
There is a difference.

What is “the God of the philosophers” besides “the God philosophers speak about?”

Are you conjuring up some fictional entity that has nothing to do with the God that philosophers speak about but everything to do with your imagination?

Besides, there is no monolithic “God of the philosophers” precisely because philosophers are all over the map regarding what they say about God.

You are creating a straw God that no philosopher – except possibly you, if you happen to be a philosopher (which I highly doubt) – would even espouse.

 

[HarryStotle]

Just when we thought we had this definition sorted.
Thanks for your (name removed by moderator)ut.

Refer to Post 87.

 

[goout]

Here is an excerpt from Romano Guardini’s reflection on Pascal’s statement regarding the god of the philosophers:

And what is now the staggering discovery of Pascal? What is it that makes him stammer with joy? Pascal knows how to appreciate the significance of the struggle for the pure comprehension of the concept of God. He is a stranger to the modern weak-nervedness which feels that the domain of “the religious” is menaced whenever one works with concepts. His religion is not a vague “religious experience” in the modern sense of the word. But how his own experience has shown him that God is “the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants”—that he is the “God of Jesus Christ”. This means first of all that God is a person.

But let us be careful here. This word too, could be meant “philosophically”. But this is not the case. It does not in any way mean that God is “the absolute Person”, or “Personality”, but rather that he is “He”, who is so and not otherwise. Here we touch upon the essential.

When a man, hitherto accustomed to the absolute character of thought, declares: “God is This Person”, something extraordinary has come about. That which he previously maintained under the protection of the most general concepts, preserved from all finiteness, deriving from the realm of the cosmological, the ontological, or the ideal—he now ventures its entry into the domain of those concepts which stem from finite human activity, from the distinctions of human persons, from the I-Thou relationship, from history. Previously, he would have refused to do so. For it is precisely the scandal of the “philosopher” regarding religious thought, that it operates “anthropomorphically”! For this is why he rejects this way of thought, in the name of the purity of the concepts of the absolute.

 

[goout]

Here is an excerpt from Romano Guardini’s reflection on Pascal’s statement regarding the god of the philosophers:

And what is now the staggering discovery of Pascal? What is it that makes him stammer with joy? Pascal knows how to appreciate the significance of the struggle for the pure comprehension of the concept of God. He is a stranger to the modern weak-nervedness which feels that the domain of “the religious” is menaced whenever one works with concepts. His religion is not a vague “religious experience” in the modern sense of the word. But how his own experience has shown him that God is “the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants”—that he is the “God of Jesus Christ”. This means first of all that God is a person.

But let us be careful here. This word too, could be meant “philosophically”. But this is not the case. It does not in any way mean that God is “the absolute Person”, or “Personality”, but rather that he is “He”, who is so and not otherwise. Here we touch upon the essential.

When a man, hitherto accustomed to the absolute character of thought, declares: “God is This Person”, something extraordinary has come about. That which he previously maintained under the protection of the most general concepts, preserved from all finiteness, deriving from the realm of the cosmological, the ontological, or the ideal—he now ventures its entry into the domain of those concepts which stem from finite human activity, from the distinctions of human persons, from the I-Thou relationship, from history. Previously, he would have refused to do so. For it is precisely the scandal of the “philosopher” regarding religious thought, that it operates “anthropomorphically”! For this is why he rejects this way of thought, in the name of the purity of the concepts of the absolute.

And to bring this full circle, the Gospel passage in question presents a brutal challenge to the status quo way of reacting to injustice.
It is brutal to our culture and it is also starkly simple. Working philosophical circles around it tends to rob it of it’s personal probity.

 

[HarryStotle]

And to bring this full circle, the Gospel passage in question presents a brutal challenge to the status quo way of reacting to injustice.
It is brutal to our culture and it is also starkly simple. Working philosophical circles around it tends to rob it of it’s personal probity.

Perhaps it is a “brutal challenge,” and perhaps it isn’t.

Suppose you “turn the other cheek” and the aggressor continues to aggress? What then?

If your answer is to let them run roughshod over you because the supposed “brutal challenge” is to allow yourself to be infinitely brutalized, then I see no distinction between your “brutal challenge” and cowardice or mere resignation or subjugation to evil.

Now you might appeal to some vague notion of faith or trust in God, which has some plausibility because our faith in God is to be absolute, but where does the idea of being an agent for good come in?

What if the aggressor is not merely running roughshod over you, but over your family, your neighborhood, your society and the world? Would you still advocate standing by and witnessing the slaughter as merely part of the brutal challenge?

I would suggest that this dilemma resolves itself by distinguishing between situations where no other avenue remains open and so infinite resignation to God in the face of that kind of situation where it is the final option. However, I wouldn’t think the “last resort” option ought to be the “first resort” option.

Again, I will stand with “turn the other cheek” as a kind of strategy for determining the malevolent intentions of the aggressor, after which a proper response would be open to consideration.

I agree with Peterson’s view that we turn ourselves into “monsters” for the good with overwhelming capacity to defeat evil, but learn to “keep our swords sheathed,” but stand our ground, so we don’t respond in kind, but neither do we run away, nor capitulate to evil.

It is the trueness and rightness of our characters that will determine the correctness of our response.
It will be for that response and for our moral character, in general, that we will be accountable to God.

 

[goout]

goout:

And to bring this full circle, the Gospel passage in question presents a brutal challenge to the status quo way of reacting to injustice.
It is brutal to our culture and it is also starkly simple. Working philosophical circles around it tends to rob it of it’s personal probity.

Perhaps it is a “brutal challenge,” and perhaps its isn’t.

Suppose you “turn the other cheek” and the aggressor continues to aggress? What then?

If your answer is to let them run roughshod over you because the supposed “brutal challenge” is to allow yourself to be infinitely brutalized, then I see no distinction between your “brutal challenge” and cowardice or mere resignation or subjugation to evil.

Now you might appeal to some vague notion of faith or trust in God, which has some plausibility because our faith in God is to be absolute, but where does the idea of being an agent for good come in?

What if the aggressor is not merely running roughshod over you, but over your family, your neighborhood, your society and the world? Would you still advocate standing by and witnessing the slaughter as merely part of the brutal challenge?

I would suggest that this dilemma resolves itself by distinguishing between situations where no other avenue remains open and so infinite resignation to God in the face of that kind of situation where it is the final option. However, I wouldn’t think the “last resort” option ought to be the “first resort” option.

Again, I will stand with “turn the other cheek” as a kind of strategy for determining the malevolent intentions of the aggressor, after which a proper response would be open to consideration.

I agree with Peterson’s view that we turn ourselves into “monsters” for the good with overwhelming capacity to defeat evil, but learn to “keep our swords sheathed,” but stand our ground, so we don’t respond in kind, but neither do we run away, nor capitulate to evil.

It is the trueness and rightness of our characters that will determine the correctness of our response.
It will be for that response and for our moral character, in general, that we will be accountable to God.

Yes you have to evaluate specific situations according to sound moral principles.

 

[HarryStotle]

Yes you have to evaluate specific situations according to sound moral principles.

Principles?

Wait a minute!

I thought you were arguing against philosophizing or conceptualizing? Now here you are smuggling “principles” back in.

What happened to “Person” as opposed to “God” as merely the ideas of philosophers, which you claimed was insufficient?

 

[goout]

goout:

Yes you have to evaluate specific situations according to sound moral principles.

Principles?

Wait a minute!

I thought you were arguing against philosophizing or conceptualizing? Now here you are smuggling “principles” back in.

What happened to “Person” as opposed to “God” as merely the ideas of philosophers, which you claimed was insufficient?

Morality is the evaluation of human acts in relation to the objective good.
That objective good is God himself as revealed through Jesus Christ. That makes Christianity very personal.
We employ our reason in pursuit of union with God, not for it’s own sake.

 

[HarryStotle]

goout:

The god of the philosophers is impossible to know.

You cannot know a set of ideas or hypotheticals, or speculations as God.
So the god of the philosphers is not a god that is knowable.

According to the two greatest Catholic theologians and philosophers, Aquinas and Augustine, God is not knowable, neither to philosophers nor to individuals who claim to know God as he is nor, in any way, better than the God of the philosophers.

What then, brethren, shall we say of God? For if you have been able to comprehend what you wanted to say, it is not God; if you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God. If you have been able to comprehend Him as you think, by so thinking you have deceived yourself. This then is not God, if you have comprehended it; but if it is God, you have not comprehended it. How therefore would you speak of that which you cannot comprehend?
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/160302.htm

God, however, as considered in Himself, is altogether one and simple, yet our intellect knows Him by different conceptions because it cannot see Him as He is in Himself. Nevertheless, although it understands Him under different conceptions, it knows that one and the same simple object corresponds to its conceptions. Therefore the plurality of predicate and subject represents the plurality of idea; and the intellect represents the unity by composition.
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1013.htm#article12M

In other words, when philosophers speak of God conceptually or analogically they tacitly recognize and admit that their knowledge of God is mediated by their capacity to conceptualize, rather than having convinced themselves that they know God as he is in himself.

Admittedly, that requires some humility and circumspection, but both of those are sobering for the soul.

I would suppose, then, that before you disparage the philosophers for their “concepts” of God, or their lack of knowledge of God, that you remind yourself that those philosophers are being quite candid that their concepts are not God. Your “personal God,” however, is also based upon your conception of him, perhaps even a psychological projection of something of your person into infinity and, likewise, is NOT God.

So I would suggest that the philosophers have their relationship with the actual God more properly worked out than someone who thinks they know him as he is in himself, person to person, so to speak.

 

[HarryStotle]

Morality is the evaluation of human acts in relation to the objective good.
That objective good is God himself as revealed through Jesus Christ. That makes Christianity very personal.
We employ our reason in pursuit of union with God, not for it’s own sake.

So why can’t philosophizing or employing our reasoning about God not, likewise, also be used “in pursuit of union with God?”

To assume philosophizing or theologizing about God is “for its own sake” might be your assumption rather than the real motive of everyone who thinks about God in an objective sense.

 

[laylow]

Meant what he said. If someone punches you in the cheek, let him punch you in the other as well. Don’t resist evil.

 

[HarryStotle]

Never?

Jesus was a pacifist, then?

How do you reconcile the New Testament with the Old?

Perhaps you could answer some of the questions I asked in this post:

Turn the Other Cheek – What Could Jesus Have Meant? Social Justice

Perhaps it is a “brutal challenge,” and perhaps it isn’t. Suppose you “turn the other cheek” and the aggressor continues to aggress? What then? If your answer is to let them run roughshod over you because the supposed “brutal challenge” is to allow yourself to be infinitely brutalized, then I see no distinction between your “brutal challenge” and cowardice or mere resignation or subjugation to evil. Now you might appeal to some vague notion of faith or trust in God, which has some plausibili…

Specifically, those concerning self-defence and protection of the innocent or vulnerable.