An Era of Hyper-Vengeance.

Evangelical Mission Society, Wheaton, IL.  Saturday, March 14, 2026.                                              Theme: Theological Anthropology for Missional Engagement

Theological anthropology is central to missiological reflection and practice, since acts of gospel witness, service, and cultural engagement all rest on assumptions about human identity, dignity, and destiny. In a rapidly changing world—marked by shifting views of spirituality, ethnicity, gender, technology, and ecology—the church must embrace a biblically faithful and missionally engaged understanding of the imago Dei. This year’s Evangelical Missiological Society Conference invites reflection on the meaning of being human and on how the doctrine of the imago Dei shapes evangelism, discipleship, community, and global mission. Together we will ask: How do theological anthropology and Christian responses to debates about personhood and identity inform the theory and practice of mission?

Love in an Epidemic of Vengeance: The impact of the logic of retribution and reconciliation on the missionary task.     

Vengeance is older than reconciliation, just as Cain and Lamech are older than Abraham and Moses.  Yet retribution and reconciliation are intertwined both in Bible stories and in cultural traditions. The fervor fueling excess surges against peacemakers, who are nevertheless ‘blessed’ Jesus says. Scripture puts limits on violence as well as guidelines for peace-making. Anthropological studies of the function of feud in the structure of stateless societies also inform us about these competing cultural tendencies. As technologies of violence have ramped up the scale and scope of killing, such Biblical and cultural mechanisms often fail to stop the slaughter, and the modern state is no help. Mission fields have become killing fields. What message of hope can missionaries offer to vulnerable and subdued peoples? What prophetic message of constraint does the missionary have to warn powerful and arrogant people?    

Love, by contrast, has been around forever. We are told that God is love; three persons bound so tightly by self-giving, reaching-out, other-embracing love that the persons are indeed One.[1] We are told nowhere that humans are love; but are constantly told that humans should love God and love others.

 Cain was offended and took revenge on Abel. God warned Cain, but Cain could not control the imagined slight. Later in that same chapter, Cain’s storied descendant, Lamech, instituted excess vengeance. We are told that “Lamech took two wives,” a rather aggressive action. Lamech was the first to do this, but love seems not to have been the motive. One day, Lamech came home and boasted to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Genesis 4:19, 23-24).

 And so, the race is on, the human race to the bottom. Lamech will outdo others, even God, by getting excessive revenge. Was this serious? Just two verses later, the text says, “At that time people began to invoke the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26). Of course they did! Society was going to hell in a handbasket, and the basket was excessive retribution for perceived wrongs.

 Over the course of the Old Testament stories, revenge was limited in various ways. Though God said that he would require blood for blood (Genesis 9:5), God did not require blood from Cain, nor did he require blood from David who arranged the death of Uriah. One example of a limitation is that a person could only take “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Leviticus 24:20). Other laws further specified that people could offer compensation to deflect revenge for an offense (Numbers 5:5-10; see also II Samuel 12:5-6). In addition, refuge cities were established to provide sanctuary; another method of holding revenge in check (Numbers 35:25-28).

 Of course, evil people can take the law into their own hands in order to pursue excessive retribution. The worst case in the Old Testament is found in Judges. It is the last story in the book. A Levite went to Bethlehem to negotiate with the father of his run-a-way concubine. After several days, the Levite left with his prize. The trip back to Ephraim involved an overnight stay, so he stopped in Gibeah which is in the territory of Benjamin. A kindly old man took them in. Some of the men of Gibeah, a perverse lot, surrounded the house that night and demanded that the old man send the Levite out so they could rape him. The old man refused, the men got more violent. Finally, the Levite pushed his concubine out the door. The next morning, she was found … dead on the doorstep (Judges 19—21).

 The Levite cut her body into pieces and sent one to each of the 12 tribes. (I told you that this is a terrible story). Most of the tribes gathered to mete out justice on the men of Gibeah. However, the tribe of Benjamin took offense. After several battles, the men of Benjamin were lured out of their stronghold; the town was attacked and all the inhabitants were killed. Vengeance had chained-out so that only 600 Benjaminite men were left alive. One death led to excessive revenge and thousands of deaths.

 The people realized that they had gone too far because a tribe was about to be extinguished from Israel; a type of genocide. Through various measures, some causing more deaths, wives were provided and Benjamin was restored.

 Wasn’t there a better way? The occasion for writing the stories of Judges was to make the argument that, “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25). Yeah, like a king would solve the problem! Israel failed in that attempt—Saul, David, Solomon, and all the rest failed to build in Israel the Kingdom of God— all nations fail at that.  

 The problem of social control has long plagued mankind. Various solutions have been tried in our vast cultural experiments to reign in violence without letting the remedies themselves get out of control. The downside of vengeance is setting off a chain reaction of overkill—and that is our malady today both in fact and in our imaginations.   

 Anthropology also offers insight. My favorite ethnography was published in 1940: Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer.[2] The first time I saw the ethnographic film of the same name, tears came to my eyes. Evans-Pritchard gave us the term “segmentary opposition” for the case where a society without overarching government can maintain order by self-help, that is, by retaliation in kind. Genealogical knowledge of patriclans and patrilineages direct East African people to back the closest relative against more distant offenders.

 Max Gluckman, following E. Adamson Hoebel, who was my graduate school advisor[3], helped found the Anthropology of Law. Gluckman took up the theme and gave us the term “The Peace in the Feud.”[4] Retribution is limited in these kinds of society by institutions and customs that check the spread of violence while giving a sense of satisfaction to the offended party. One such mechanism among the Nuer was the ‘Leopard-skin Chief’ who stepped in to broker reconciliation. This ‘peacemaker’, more like a priest than a chief, held the right to curse the land of the reluctant combatants unless they settled for compensation. Cursing the land would wither the grass and endanger the herds, and nothing was more valuable to the Nuer than his cattle.

 The Nuer knew how to take care of their family and kin, and genealogical knowledge showed them who their various kin were. The circle of security was wide, but not wide enough to handle post-colonial changes.

 While I was serving as a missionary in Papua New Guinea, I noticed that people there also knew how to take care of their kinfolk, but the circle of ‘who is human and thus deserving of love’ was not wide enough. I am beginning to think that that is a problem everywhere. God gave Adam the freedom to name the animals. However, with the human touch, categories can lead to category errors. It is a failure of nuance when ethnic or religious identities take on negative meanings, and when those negative meanings are applied to everyone who is jammed into that category. That makes people think that they can justify the slogans: ‘There will be hell to pay’, ‘Show them no mercy’, or “Kill them all, let God sort them out.”

 Retribution chaining out into feuds has long been associated with New Guinea. You no doubt are familiar with the ethnographic film: “Dead Birds.”[5] The anthropologist Karl Heider gives us an account of a series of killings and payback retaliation, and we see the consequences in the film.[6]

 The complexity of retribution and reconciliation in Melanesian societies was revealed by Garry Trompf, an Australian authority on Melanesian religions.[7] I saw it in action when an escaped prisoner was killed with two shotgun blasts just 30 feet from my house in Goroka next to the yard where my 4-year-old twin boys were playing. A colleague of mine and I did not cross the fence because we heard people coming through the bush and anyone found with a victim might be held responsible for compensation. The policeman who did the shooting was gone the next day, reassigned to a town far away for fear of payback, aka bekim bek in Pidgin English.

 Trompf argues that the logic of retribution is lodged in some Melanesian worldviews in areas that we might call religion or politics, but those are not Melanesian concepts. He says, “This book unfolds on the assumption that people are reasonable in their own … culture’s terms” though it may be difficult for an outsider to see how the arguments make sense.[8] Of course, this is always true, even with people in our own culture who have varying worldviews.

 The Highlands of New Guinea are known for what is called ‘tribal fighting’ and in some cases this still exists. Each side appeals to the legitimacy of their cause. Various New Guinea cultures, and there are a thousand or more, have different means of determining who to support and who to fight in an ever-changing political context. They also have different mechanisms for diffusing and settling a fight. After the initial fury of battle, various peace initiatives may bring a truce, for a while, until the next offense sets off another chain of revenge killings.

 Trompf follows and extends Marshall Sahlins’ perceptive classification of reciprocity into direct and indirect,[9] as well as the concepts of positive and negative reciprocity. If you give us a pig, then we owe you a pig in return. If someone in your group gives us a death, then we owe you a death in return. It is imagined that that is ‘the way of the world’, and this includes the spirit world. In New Guinea, this is the “typical ancestral legitimation of revenge, because a loss to the living also vexed the dead, the latter’s concern for the prestige of the tribe usually persisting unabated.”[10] Would missionaries confirm or confront the assumption that the world works by reciprocal transactions? Did Christ act that way?

 A few Melanesian societies were moving toward larger ‘security circles’ (Trompf’s term), but this was often achieved by throwing the blame for deaths on the out-groups and increasing the prevalence of sorcery. Political change was interrupted, as in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, by colonialism.[11]

 Colonialism was justified by Europeans as a benefit to so-called ‘primitive’ societies because colonial authorities brought peace to places where they thought, following Thomas Hobbes, people lived in “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man (was) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[12] This so-called ‘real world’ could only be tamed by a powerful but enlightened despot, that is, a ‘leviathan’. Fortunately, our founding fathers rejected that idea.

 The ‘peace’ that colonial administrations brought turned out to be ‘not as advertised’. Tribal warfare was slowed only by colonial officers with guns who said, in effect, “Stop killing each other or we’ll kill you.” In the Pacific Islands, the lie was put to the claim about the benefit of outside control by the devastating battles of World War II, the guns and the bombs, including the Atomic and Hydrogen bombs that were tested over 60 times after the war in the Marshall Islands and the Society Islands.[13]

 Amongst the Nuer and other societies in Africa, as well as the Mae Enga[14] and other societies in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the arrival of AK-47s and SR-15s has changed the game. Now it is not a death of one or two and then move on to negotiations; it is mass murder. You see what is happening in East Africa and the Middle East. The world moves to excessive retaliation in a New York minute. Negotiation and reconciliation are undermined. The old colonial powers who were supposed to use their superior power to show the way have now decided instead to dominate their neighbors and to quell any internal objection.  

 We are missionaries. We would agree with John Locke more than Thomas Hobbes, arguing that more voices should be heard, that social control can be achieved without excessive dominance and vengeance.

The Old Testament puts limits. Various cultures have found ways to contain violence and work towards peace, but with no permanent solution. Oddly enough, there is a hint of the answer in the Old Testament; just one of many that we often miss.

Once the king of Aram sent an army to seize Elisha because he suspected that the prophet was exposing their attempts to surprise the army of Israel. Scouts found him at Dothan, so at night they surrounded the city. In the morning, Elisha’s attendant saw the army and ran scared to Elisha. Elisha told him to go look again. Opening his eyes, he saw the hills and mountain sides full of horses and chariots of fire.  Elisha said, “Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them” (II Kings 6: 16).

Then Elisha asked God to strike the Syrian army with blindness. Next Elisha went out and pulled an Obi-wan-kenobi on them: “This is not the city you are looking for,” he said. “I will bring you to the man you seek.” So he led them to the capital city of Samaria. When Elisha prayed that their eyes be opened, they saw that they had been captured.

The king of Israel saw an opportunity for retaliation and said to Elisha, “Father, shall I kill them?” Elisha’s answer is instructive, far-sighted, and hopeful. “No! Did you capture with your sword and your bow those whom you want to kill?” What Elisha said next leads directly to the words of Jesus, which I am sure you have been expecting. Elisha ordered the king of Israel to “Set food and water before them so that they may eat and drink; and let them go to their master.”    

What happened? “So he prepared for them a great feast; after they ate and drank, he sent them on their way, and they went to their master. And the Arameans no longer came raiding into the land of Israel” (II Kings 6:8-23). Where are the missionary prophets today who are restraining the nations?

No allegiance to any tribe or nation, not to the United States, not to the modern state of Israel, not to Russia, China, India, or Papua New Guinea; no allegiance overshadows our commitment to Jesus Christ. We pay serious attention to his teachings, including things like: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.” Jesus not only reversed the curse of the Fall, but he also reversed the claim of Lamech when he told Peter to forgive, not one time but “7 times 70” (Matthew 18: 22). With full knowledge of the Biblical and Anthropological literature, missionaries imitate Jesus because Jesus said: “As the Father has sent me, so send I you.”    What is our missionary task? This brief and inadequate study of revenge and reconciliation points us toward these conclusions:

1.      We are ambassadors for Jesus Christ, not ambassadors for the United States, nor Israel, nor any European, Arabian, African, or Asian nation. In word and deed, we represent only Jesus.

2.      Our message is that Jesus Christ, and he alone, is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant, the true Israel, the king of all nations, the epitome of God’s sense of chesed, mishpat, and tzedakah … which God feels in his gut toward all nations, not just some. “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10: 34).

3.      As missionaries, we should embody and enact forgiveness, mercy, and peace-making, as well as the other gifts of the Spirit (Galatians 5: 22-26). As ambassadors of Christ, we invite everyone, from every nation, tribe, family, and language, into the new Community of the King which is entered by repentance, forgiveness, and restoration through the blood of Jesus. The Kingdom of Heaven is not entered by ethnicity, nor by citizenship, nor by power, nor by privilege.[15]

4.      “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be arrogant but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good (Romans 12: 14-21).

[1] See my discussion of a Trinitarian concept of self in “What about the Dust? Missiological Musings on Anthropology,” in Joel B. Green, editor, What about the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology. 2004. Abingdon Press, Pp. 133-144; and the notion of a relational person in participation with our Triune God in  “Athens Engaging Jerusalem,” in J. Derrick Lemons, editor, Theologically Engaged Anthropology. 2018. Oxford University Press, Pp. 211-225.

[2] Edward Everett Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Norton. 1993 [1950]. 

[3] E. Adamson Hoebel was one of the last doctoral students of Franz Boas, the Father of American Anthropology, so I consider myself to be the intellectual grandson of Boas.

[4] Also an article. Max Gluckman, “The Peace in the Feud,” in Past & Present, 1955, No. 8, pp. 1-14; https://jstor.org/stable/649774).

[5] A film by Robert Gardener, 1963,

[6] Karl Heider, Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age, 1968. Random House.; Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors, 1967. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

[7] G. W. Trompf, Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religons, 1994. Cambridge University Press. 

[8] Trompf, 1994: 11.

[9] Actually, Marcel Mauss’ contribution in The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated from Essai sur le don by W. D. Halls. 2000 [1925]. Norton.

[10] Trompf, 1994: 58.

[11] As I have argued elsewhere: Michael A. Rynkiewich, “The Ossification of Local Politics: The Impact of Colonialism on a Marshall Islands Atoll,” in Daniel T. Hughes and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, editors, Political Development in Micronesia, 1974. The Ohio State University Press, Pp. 143-165.

[12] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 1651.

[13] See Neal O. Hines, Proving Ground: An Account of the Radiobiological Studies in the Pacific, 1946-1961, 1962. University of Washington Press. See also Robert C. Kiste, The Bikinians: A Study in Forced Migration, 1974. Cummings Publishing Company.

[14] See Mervyn Meggitt, Blood is Their Argument: Warfare among the Mae Enga Tribesmen of the New Guinea Highlands, 1977).

[15] For further discussion on these points, see Anton Deik, “Missiology after Gaza: Christian Zionism, God’s Character, and the Gospel,” in Bruce N. Fish and J. Ross Wagner, editors, Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza, 2025. Cascade Books: An Imprint of Wipf and Stock, Pp. 214-234.