On the Edge of the Razor

Stephen Mitchell

This morning I cut myself shaving. Usually, I’m quite careful with my razor. It’s a safety razor—one of those grocery store luxury items that are supposed to conform to the contours of my face. But this morning my hand slipped. Lucky for me the blades are small, so they didn’t cut deeply. Razors can though. Why else would both surgeons and cutthroats wield them?

I’ve mulled over those words the last several weeks, turned them this way and that, tried them on like spectacles to see if they would help make clear what had before been fuzzy. What, I’ve asked, is the difference between loving good and hating evil? Doesn’t the love of the one imply, yea even demand, hatred of the other? Shouldn’t we be capable of both? Perhaps. But the sentiment that leads will brings us to radically different ends. The danger lies, I think, in the power of hatred to overwhelm all other emotions.

Andreas Karlstadt,* Luther’s colleague at the University of Wittenberg, provides a compelling example. Impressed by Luther’s theses, he supported him in his opposition to religious corruption. Allied with this religious corruption was a political system that oppressed the peasants. There was evil in this religious-political system, an evil that needed to be changed. But hatred of evil overcame Karlstadt; he turned radical revolutionary and lead the peasants to outrageous act of violence which led to reprisals by the authorities, who slaughtered thousands of peasants.

In Karlstadt’s hand the razor slipped, or perhaps he slipped on it. Reform became for him a revolutionary tightrope stretched over a valley of bones and sharp rocks. When he fell, the razor cut deeply, severing his life and the lives of those who followed.

As I look at my own world, I find it chillingly similar to Luther’s. Of course, we’ve no medieval church selling indulgences; we do, however, live in a world of abundant evil. From terrorism to torture, from racism to genocide, from poverty to imperialism, we need not look far to find injustices worthy of hatred. It is, in fact, quite satisfying to hate evil, to point out the failings of those in power, to denounce the oppressor. We might even need such activism to remain moral people. Too quickly though, we can be left with little but outrage which too soon becomes overwhelming hatred.

Consider our very recent history. What, if not an overwhelming hatred of perceived evil, could have led our nation which prided itself on liberty and justice for all to build, deploy, and explode weapons of mass destruction in the name of defending freedom from tyranny? What, if not hatred of the evils of our capitalism, could have persuaded the Soviets to do the same?

And consider the contemporary scene. What, if not an all consuming hatred of perceived evil, could convince the bin Laden’s of this world to turn airliners into missiles and bodies into bombs? What but an overwhelming hatred of evil could lead men to consider the torture of terrorists a legitimate act? Is it possible that nations and groups on both sides of the war on terror are acting more from hatred of evil than from love of good?

In literature too, we find examples. Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual of the Brother’s Karamazov, hated evil. But this hatred led him to complicity in the murder of his father.

The opposing ideologies of the two sides suggest further that identifying and responding to evil is a dangerous, difficult, and perplexing task. In addition to the risk that hatred will overwhelm us, there is the clear and present danger of calling the wrong thing evil—or failing to see our own.

Is it possible that Jesus understood just how difficult it is to tell good from evil? Did he know that love of good and hatred of evil, though standing as close as the blade-width of a razor, lead in radically different directions? Could this knowledge have motivated him, at least partly, to tell some of those puzzling stories in the Gospels? Could this difficulty help to explain why he said that the great commandment is to love God, followed by love of neighbor? Could he have placed these two side by side, so close together that no razor could divide them, because he knew that the first separated from the second would lead professed lovers of God to slaughter their fellow humans?

When the rich young ruler affirmed his faithfulness to the “shalts” and “shalt nots” of the law, Jesus told him to sell his goods and give the money to the poor. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus said nothing about hunting down the thieves and bringing them to justice; he merely praised the good works of the Samaritan.

In the story of the Publican and the Pharisee at prayer, the difference emerges again, razor-thin but terribly important. The Pharisee disdains (dare I say hates?) the Publican—probably for good reason—while the Publican yearns for the goodness of forgiveness. Jesus leaves no question about whom we are to imitate.

Could not this difference—between love of good and hatred of evil—provide a sliver of light to help us penetrate the mysteries of the Sermon on the Mount? What, if not love of good, could compel us to turn the other cheek? What, if not love of good, could lead us to bind up the wounds of the oppressed? What but this same love could compel us to visit those sick or in prison? What but the love that is the greatest of all good things could lead a man to accept death at the hands of his enemies rather than to strike back in violence and hatred?

I cannot claim that Luther or his followers fully succeeded in loving good. At times they may even have embraced evil. In his later writings, I recall, Luther wrote hatefully of the Jews, and he responded to Karlstadt’s peasant uprising by advocating for violent reprisal. Perhaps the bloodiest slip of the razor occurred when much of the German church acquiesced to Hitler.

As a worshiper in a Lutheran congregation, I can attest that we still struggle to love good more than we hate evil. But Staupitz’s advice is sound. It is not simple nor easy to let love rather than hate lead. But to do otherwise is to let the razor slip. Our volatile world and the blood in my sink suggest we dare not be so careless. *My use of Andreas Karlstadt is based upon his presentation in the film. The historical debate surrounding his purported violence and the possibility that the character might have been merged with the historical Thomas Muentzer is noted but not crucial to the argument of this article.

—Stephen Mitchell lives with his wife and two children in an old house in Mount Holly, North Carolina, where he teaches English, reads, gardens, and puzzles endlessly over the challenges of living peaceably.