Revenge Propels Forever War

Pentagon Pete just announced that the US could maintain its hostile naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz “indefinitely.” What kind of military strategy would plan on engaging in such a forever war? Answer: a military strategy based on revenge. Let’s explore the concept of revenge to see where it takes us.

“Once to every soul and nation comes the moment to decide,” are almost the words penned in 1845 by American poet James Russell Lowell. Just recently, two nations — the United States and Iran — have decided. What did they decide? They decided to discard twenty-five centuries of exquisite thought about universal justice. In its place they have substituted the pre-civil impulse to direct the course of events by the principle of vengeance. What might these national decisions mean for your and my soul?

For our pre-civil ancestors, revenge virtually guaranteed interminable warfare. For our civil predecessors, justice held out the prospect of periodic peace. So, why might a civil society today choose to revert to pre-civil revenge? Yet it has.

The new forever war between Iran and the United States appears to be a reversion to pre-civil tribalism. Strategic military objectives have been replaced with a more primitive impulse: eye-for-an-eye revenge. Revenge only propels more war. The once aspirational idea of universal justice has become a non-factor.

The current president of the United States has proudly announced his posture of domestic retribution against fellow Americans whom he deems to be adversaries. “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” That’s domestic revenge. How about international revenge? In his international war against Iran, POTUS makes vengeance his military strategy. “Every time Iran kills an American soldier, they will pay for that killing ⁠many times over."

The counter-revenge commitment of the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, is proportionately ominous. Online, he posted to the world: “Our defense doctrine is clear: eye for an eye.”

It seems clear that any Jewish or Christian influence on American nationalism has been given a pocket veto by the White House. According to the Torah, vengeance belongs to God, not to God’s people (Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19). In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus denounced revenge as ungodly. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Matthew 5:38). A few verses earlier, Jesus had announced, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice” (δικαιοσύνη) (Matthew 5:6).

When Anton LaVey published The Satanic Bible in 1969, he countered Jesus by advocating the opposite. Satanism holds that if someone strikes you, you should strike back rather than offer forgiveness. A Satanlike spirit fuels the fires of counterfeit justice, that is, vengeance. And vengeance propels war forever, much to Satan’s delight.

While the Torah and Jesus lift justice and even forgiveness as godly, anti-godly forces draw us toward vengeance. Might this be a sign that our current situation is likely to end badly?

Washington is so fogged in with the passion of vengeance that the White House has lost sight of careful military strategy, long-term international relations, the precious personhood of those dying, and the possibility of a just social order. Might this be a sign that this is likely to end badly?

In this moment of cultural crisis, the human soul is tempted to bake itself in the mundane and petty while freezing out the sublime, the transcendent, the eternal, the humane. The differentiated soul our civilization inherited from the Enlightenment is becoming de-differentiated, blind to the transcendent, deaf to the call for justice, and numb to human dignity. One way to assess this deformation of the human soul is to dub it an "axial breakdown.” This is the opposite of an axial breakthrough. Why this term? Let me explain.

The morality of family-clan-tribe in the ancient world relied on the law of the talio or lex talionis. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was the watchword. Any damage done by an enemy was thought to justify proportionate damage done to the enemy. Once the cycle of vengeance had begun, no principle could be appealed to for ending the back-and-forth, eye-for-an-eye, damage-for-damage, murder-for-murder. The justification for one more act of violence would be endless.

With the advent of city-states and empires, people from multiple tribes experimented with governing a pluralistic society. This led to the creation of a municipal police force and court system. The authority of revenge was taken away from the tribe and given to the city. Once the perpetrator of a crime was arrested, convicted, and punished, the matter was over. After that, revenge itself became a crime. The exacting of justice signaled the advent of peace through justice.

Domestically, that is. Civil justice within the city alone could not control international relations. No moral compunction prevented the polis with the stronger army from attacking and sacking a neighboring city. This is how wealth was accumulated. After murdering all a city’s inhabitants except those taken into slavery, the booty belonged to the stronger. What they called “wars” were actually raids, theft, enslavement, and murder.

Wars between ancient city-states led to the oft-repeated line from Thucidyes’ History of the Peloponnesian War (5:89), chronicling events from 431-404 BCE. “The. strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must” [δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν]. In short, might makes right. This ancient sigh of resignation was recently repeated when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recited Thucydides at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The modern world order, it seems, is reverting to something more primitive, pre-civil, pre-just.

Wars between ancient city-states were incessant for centuries until empires compelled peace through military force. The then-new political situation teased the human mind, inviting new insight into the nature of supra-tribal community. Seers and prophets within city-states opened their souls to a reality that transcends the daily compulsion to exact an eye for an eye. Might there exist in some ideal realm something such as universal justice, eternal justice? Might there be a heavenly blueprint for justice waiting to be incarnated here on Earth?

Did our Homo sapien ancestors get gobsmacked by transcendence 2500 years ago? Yes. Sometime between 800 and 200 before the common era, seers, prophets, and geniuses appeared in selected city-states. Recall Confucius (551`-479 BCE) and Laozi (c.571-? BCE) during the Warring States period of China. Call to mind Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra Spitama (c.599-522 BCE), in ancient Persia, today’s Iran. Recall the sagacity expressed in India’s Upanishads, along with Siddhartha Gautama, the Sakyamuni who became the Buddha (c.480-400 BCE). Remember the Athenian three-generation trio of philosophers: Socrates (470-399 BCE), Plato (c.428-328 BCE), and Aristotle (384-322 BCE). And integrate the divine revelation to Moses along with the prophetic judgment of the prophets in ancient Israel. Might there be parallels here? Yes. Each, in quite different ways, was gobsmacked by the power of transcendence that led to a leap in human consciousness.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers named this period the Axial Age.

“What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world [China, India, Eurasia], is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Fadce to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By conscious recognising his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence” (Jaspers, 1952, 2).

During the axial breakthrough, eternity entered time. The beyond became intimate. The inner soul received an invitation to become transformed by transcendent ordering. “During this axis moment the human psyche became conscious of the universe, the self, and human limitations,” wrote Austrian-born Stanford University philosopher Eric Voegelin. “Human self-awareness then included new awareness of the awfulness of the world and our impotence in the face of it. On the edge of the abyss, a human striving was initiated to attain liberation and salvation. Our ancestors experienced the absolute depth of themselves and sought clarity of the transcendent” (Voegelin, 1957, 20). With the revelation of the transcendent, the human soul added fathoms to its depth.

Perhaps most clearly articulated in ancient Athens, the revelation of ultimate reality indicated that justice is an eternal verity. Not revenge. Justice.

Furthermore, justice is universal. Lady Justice wears a blindfold. We all kneel before her in equality. “The theoretical breakthrough in each axial case led to the possibility of universal ethics,” wrote my University of California colleague, the late Robert M. Bellah. “The reassertion of fundamental human equality, and the necessity of respect for all humans, indeed for all sentient beings. And yet in each case these assertions came out of living communities whose religious practices defined who they were and whose stories were essential to their identities” (Bellah, 2011, 606).

This does not mean that post-axial societies immediately became more moral. They could have, even if most did not. What the axial breakthrough means is that the human race received from God the possibility for principled social institutions to become an empirical actuality. It meant that the eternal order of justice could become politically incarnate should we human beings grasp the moment to decide. During the axial breakthrough, a garden was fertilized within which human dignity, equality, inclusivity, freedom, and justice under the law could flower.

For those of us who have just re-read Homer’s Odyssey and watched Christopher Nolan’s grandiose film of the same title, we are quickly reminded of the cultural breakthrough that followed in fifth-century Athens. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are civil, to be sure, yet still pre-axial. In Homer’s period, revenge reigned in both soul and society.

That’s Homer. What about Nolan? “Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey,” according to Daniel Sánchez-Piñol writing for The Independent Institute, “preserves one of the oldest and most enduring lessons of the Western political tradition: free societies survive only when power is constrained by constitutional rules, checks and balances, and the separation of powers.” Here is what we need to know: revenge is unconstrained while Justice is constraining. But that message comes from post-axial, post-Enlightenment Nolan. Not Homer.

Centuries after Homer came the Athenian breakthrough. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe sought to construct a new society based on the Athenian breakthrough with the exalted values of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Commitment to universal justice orders society around liberty, equality, and fraternity.

But, alas, universal justice is wispy. An occasional wind from tribal revenge easily blows justice away. The axial breakthrough succumbs to an axial breakdown.

Villanova theologian Ilia Delio marks the ancient axial period as a hinge on which history opened up to more.

“The pre-axial period was marked by a level of religious-mythic consciousness that was cosmic, cosmic, collective, tribal, and ritualistic….The axial age differed from pre-axial in that it was marked by the rise of the individual and of religious cultures.” (Delio 2023, 14).

With hope and zeal, Professor Delio anticipates an imminent second axial breakthrough, even more sanctifying than the first.

In contrast, I fear justice this side of eternity is wispy. Why, I ask, have some nations today reversed the axial breakthrough? Why are we choosing axial breakdown?

For Plato, to be irrational is to succumb to mania. That is, to go insane.

The modern Western soul, having imbibed justice as an eternal verity, views the axial breakdown as mania. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman misses what our mania has squandered.

We were a nation that was supreme in the arts of peace. We were a nation of know-how. America won its wars by doing the arts of peace right, by.building better and more stuff than other countries. By getting our act together in ways that didn’t necessarily involve fighting.

Only a maniac would squander this hard-won treasure. We see this in Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor. Reich believes the current US president is a maniac; he is irrational, amoral, and unjust. This can only end badly. For this reason, the president should be removed from office.

If he [the president] is no longer responsible for what he says or does, we should move beyond shock and outrage to outright fear. He could blow the world up. We must call on our elected representatives to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment as soon as possible, by reason of insanity.

As you can see, I’ve enlisted two alternative explanations for treating the mindset of revenge that sustains forever wars. First, revenge is inspired by Satan. Second, revenge is a form of retributive justice taken up in tribal society before the rise of civil society and before the axial breakthrough. In both explanations, commitment to universal justice would replace revenge for those who wish to be godly in both soul and society.

To be godly is to respond to the transcendent call to pursue universal justice and, in Jesus' case, even to forgive one’s enemies. The Satanic call, in contrast to Jesus, is to claim justice by reaping vengeance, by exacting an eye-for-an-eye. Might our axial ancestors have heard the divine call and sought to respond in justice? Even forgiveness? Can our soul today respond to that call too?

Forgiveness restores the relationship broken by violence. Restoration of relationships is the work of justice understood as righteousness, at least according to public theologian Andrew Mille at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.

Rather than being retributive, in returning pain for pain, biblical justice is more closely aligned with righteousness. Thus, being an ‘agent of justice’ is not concerned with pursuing retributive punishment; rather, it is seeking right relations with God and with others who are made in God’s image – and this recognises their inherent dignity irrespective of who they are or what they have done. (Mille, 2026, 14).

Before Plato’s Republic or Jesus’ Kingdom of God could become a practical political program, it had to appear within someone’s soul. This happened during the axial breakthrough. But, alas, today the axial breakthrough has entered desuetude, replaced by an axial breakdown. Delicate and wispy like a vine, the implanted vision of universal justice has grown and branched over twenty-five centuries of history’s arbor down to today. Why might apparently soulless nations turn their backs on the fruits of this vine?

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Ted Peters is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and public theologian. He has served as a professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single-volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in its 3^rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society, as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and Substack blogsite.

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Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Delio, Ilia. 2023. The Not-Yet-God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole. Mayknoll, NY: Orbis.

Jaspers, Karl. 1953. The Origin and Goal of History. London: Routledge.

Mille, Andrew. 2026. “Justice and Righteousness: A Biblical Argument against Retributive Punishment and in Favour of Decarceration.” International Journal of Public Theology 20:1:1-16. doi:10.1163/15697320-20260031.

Peters, Ted. 2017. God in Cosmic History: Where Science and History Meet Religion. Anselm Academic.

Voegelin, Eric. 1957. The World of the Polis. Volume II of Order and History. Baton Rouge, LA: University of Louisiana Press.