As we take up our own cross we will begin to glimpse what was going on in God's heart when he chose the cross. But as Mackintosh says, that kind of love is so hard to conceive because we have not found these depths in ourselves. It is through experiencing the depths of forgiveness for our own evil and forgiving the hurt and betrayal done to us and those we love that we truly begin to understand the cross. That is why Jesus declares that the prostitute who was washing his feet with her tears understood more deeply than the Pharisee next to her schooled in theology and the Bible. It takes being broken by forgiveness to understand the cross. Without that, forgiveness seems to fly in the face of our natural understanding of justice. When I feel wronged I struggle with wanting payback. I smolder with self-righteous indignity. I feel I must defend my rights, to not let any infraction go unpunished. I believe in grace with all my heart, but it goes so much against the grain of my thinking when I feel wronged. It is painfully ironic that although I surely have my share of blame I find it hard to accept it and feel a need to defend myself, while God - even though he was blameless was willing to take all the blame upon himself for me. If anything reveals that I am a sinner, it is comparing my own reaction to being wronged with how Jesus loved his enemies, praying even from the cross “forgive them Father!”
Seeing this in myself I understand how instinctual our need for retributive justice is, and why we are so drawn to it when we face injustice and pain. That is why basing our understanding of the Atonement in the idea of payback justice is so dangerous - it is all too easy to focus on our own fleshly desire to condemn, and not on God's desire to show grace, to seek to hurt back rather than to restore. As a result we, like Peter forbidding Christ to go the cross (Mt 16:22), think we are defending God's rights when really we are standing opposed to His costly way of grace. I say this as a confession. I come at this as a beggar and a seeker and invite you to join me as we explore what it means to take up our cross and follow Christ.
I do not intend here to convince anyone of the rightness of loving our enemies. If you are like me, you may place yourself in the shoes of some hardened heart and ask “yes, but would this argument convince them”. So I ask as you read to not read for someone else, but for yourself. I assume that if you are a follower of Christ like me that you want to obey his command. In this case, what we often lack is not the will to follow, but the imagination to conceive what that might look like. Not only is love of enemies a way contrary to our nature - the stories we tell each other, the movies we watch, repetitively teach us the opposite story. Watch any action movie or TV crime and justice drama and you will be rehearsing the story of how violence and retribution makes the world whole again. In fact this story is so pervasive in our culture that it is rehearsed in nearly every movie imaginable, from Die Hard to Disney's Dinosaurs where the bad Tyrannosaurus is “accidentally” violently killed as he falls off a cliff onto sharp rocks as the hero shouts “no!” and the audience inwardly sighs “yes”. Once again evil has been erased through the violence that the scriptwriter weaves into the plot as an “accident” immediately following a speech where the villain refuses to repent. The audience has the satisfaction of murder without guilt. It is a world where it is always clear who is good and who is evil. The cute people are good, and the homely people are evil.
This recurring theme of “redemptive violence” is so prevalent in Hollywood films that it appears not only in nearly every action film imaginable but in cartoons and romantic comedies as well. It is a theme that is repeated because it works. It speaks to something in us. Some Christian writers have even suggested that the mass appeal of these movies points to the rightness of violence and revenge. By that logic however we would have to equally assume that the popularity of movies that glorify sex and adultery points to its rightness. What both of these genres in fact appeal to is our deeply ingrained carnal nature. Or more precisely, both genres appeal in a fallen way to something good in us, the human longing for love and justice, but rather than giving us stories about real love we get the lie of fulfillment through romantic adultery, and instead of telling stories of real justice and restoration we are seduced by glorifications of murder and vengeance masquerading as justice.
In order to break out of this rehearsed story, we will need to imagine another story where evil and good are a part of all of us. Where true goodness comes among us with “no beauty that we should desire him” and overcomes evil itself through humility and self-sacrificing love, In what follows I hope to present a practical vision of the way of the cross that can make sense of what at first seems so counter-intuitive to our thinking. That wont make denying ourselves or loving our enemies easy, but perhaps it will help us to begin to intelligently imagine what the way of Jesus might look like in our own lives.
CS Lewis once commented that he found the distinction of “loving the sinner but hating the sin” to be absurd. How can you separate the two? How can you hate what someone does, but not hate them? Until it occurred to him that there was one man who he had been doing this with his entire life – himself . Loving our enemies simply means loving others the way we love ourselves. It is summed up in Christ's teaching to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" . Treating others as we would want to be treated, and desiring the best for them. This entails a change in perspective: we normally define ourselves by the various social groups we identify with. Our family, our friends, our country, our ethnic group, our religion, all constitute how we define who we are. Loving our enemies is the radical widening of our definition of "us" to include even those we would call our enemies. It breaks the “us vs them” divide and joins Christ in “making the two one and destroying the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility... reconciling both to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Eph 2:14-17) . Here the least, the unwanted, the hated, all are shown grace with the goal being the restoration of relationship.
This focus on relationship is crucial. Today forgiveness is often thought of in psychological terms: receiving forgiveness so we can be healed of guilt, or, more commonly, forgiving another so we can be healed of the woulds of our past. These are true and important as far as they go, but at its core forgiveness is not only about restoring us as individuals, it is about restoring relationship. As babies we begin life as self-focused and gradually learn to see ourselves as beings in relationship as we learn to love and be loved. That relational love from our parents shapes our self-image, who we are. Our very identity as humans is found in relationship. We were created to be in relationship with God and others, and cut off from that we wither and die inside. Forgiving and being forgiven is vital to our wellbeing precisely because we are relational beings. To shut out forgiveness (both being forgiven and showing forgiveness) is to shut out love.
This does not mean there are no consequences. Forgiveness does not mean saying “that's OK”. If it were OK, there would be nothing to forgive. What it does mean that those consequences, (for ourselves and for others) are in the interest of love. That is of course easier said than done because when we are wronged our instinct is not to love the other, but to “make them pay”. Love of enemies is about moving out of an “us vs. them” perspective to seeing that there is only “us”. We should care for each other, but we do things that are hurtful, sinful, and evil, so forgiveness asks: how can we open the doors for our restitution? What can I do to break us both out of the trap of hostility? Forgiveness means being willing to allow God to use us as an instrument of love for that person, opening the door for the possibility of reconciliation and redemption. It does not ignore or condone sin but involves honesty facing the real hurt done to us, as well as facing the blame we also bear, then pro-actively working towards mending that, beginning in our own hearts.
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The Culture of Victimhood
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In our culture we all identify with the victims, but ironically no one identifies themselves as a victimizer. We all have been hurt, but none of us wants to own up to hurting others. For some reason we can easily see the most trivial speck of a fault in others, while being oblivious to the most glaring faults and hypocrisy in our own lives. This was illustrated poignantly on an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show where the topic dealt with the rising incidence of mothers and wives who abandon their families. Oprah interviewing one of these women reflected on the fact that this type of abandonment used to be something associated with men, and that in past shows they had called these men who has abandoned their families “dogs”. Her guest nodded in agreement.
“So...” said Oprah, “are you a dog too?”.
Not surprisingly her guest said she was not, because in her case there were reasons, like “not wanting to be trapped in a dull marriage” and a need to be “fulfilled”. While the guest's candid hypocrisy may make us cringe, it also tragically reflects our own blindness to our own faults and failings. Loving our enemies is about reversing that imbalance in our vision. It means both seeing the other with the same mercy we would wish for ourselves, and it is a recognition that what we most hate in others is often times a reflection of what we hate in ourselves. We project that judgment outwards onto others because if we were to actually direct it towards ourselves, it would crush us.
Our generation has very little sense of moral guilt, and perhaps because of this we have little inclination to forgive, having not experienced our own need for forgiveness. We instead see ourselves as alienated and wounded – as victims. But it stands to reason that if all of us have been hurt, that you and I are then responsible for some of that hurting others as well. Guilt is seen today mostly as a negative thing that we need to be healed of – a false sense of guilt that is debilitating. Guilt seen from the perspective of self is threatening. We feel accused, attacked, and respond either by defending ourselves or by throwing back accusations. But as we grow from a me-orientation to a we-orientation we discover that guilt (owing up to our own hurtfulness and flaws) seen from the perspective of compassion does not focus on defending ourselves, but on caring for the one we have wounded.
Compassion leads to a sense of our own fallibility and humble acknowledgment of our own need to forgive and be forgiven. Conscience is awakened in us when we recognize the results our sin has on others. In other words, being shown compassion leads to us having compassion towards others. People who know their own need for mercy in turn show mercy to others. This kind of empathy is not our nature, it is learned in relationship. We learn to love and have empathy by being loved. When I first came to Christ I was hardly aware of how much I needed mercy and forgiveness. Surrounded in a dark world I could not see my own shadow. The closer I moved to Christ, the more the bright light of his love caused the shadows I cast to deepen their contours. So now years later I am finally coming to realize more than ever how deeply I need to show others the same mercy I so desperately need. A mercy I received before I even knew to ask. In particular, my sinfulness is most revealed in my seeming inability to forgive and show mercy when I feel wronged. I need to own up to that ugliness in myself and say “I do want to love my enemies Lord, help my lovelessness. Have mercy on me, a sinner”.
In addition to the hindrances to forgiveness we have explored thus far, an additional reason we we recoil from forgiveness, is because we instinctively know the cost involved. The one who forgives takes upon themselves the pain and wrong in order to make way for reconciliation and restoration in their own life and in the world. It is difficult to let go of our hurt, but if we do not forgive, we pay a far greater price as bitterness eats away at our soul, and our future is determined by the pain of our past. Forgiveness, while costly, is active not passive, taking the initiative to bring life and healing. This was the way that God walked through when he forgave us. It is not about ignoring sin, but acting to break its hold both over us and our enemies.
In “A Grace Disguised” Gerald Sittser tells how his mother, wife, and daughter were all killed in a car crash by a drunk driver. The kind of loss that Gerald Sittser endured is devastating, and the rage, disbelief, and pain one feels are normal and healthy ways of dealing with such crushing loss. The process of forgiving someone for a wrong in many ways dovetails with the process of grieving and loss. The anger we feel is just as real and legitimate an emotion as our pain is. The problem is when we get stuck in that anger, reliving it again and again on the canvas of our minds instead of facing the loss and allowing life to go on and heal. Sittser writes of how he dealt with grief and anger together with his surviving children,
"It was the brokenness of my children that reminded me every day that they had had their fill of suffering. I did not want to see them suffer anymore. I realized that my unforgiveness would only prolong their pain. I knew that they were watching me, whether deliberately or unknowingly, to see how I responded to the wrong done to us. If I was unforgiving, they would most likely be unforgiving. If I was obsessed with the wrong done to me, they would be too...I did not want such a plague in my home. I did not want to raise bitter children. So I chose to forgive, for their sake as well as my own”
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Sittser describes the stages of grief - Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and (he adds) Binging - not as phases that he had to go through once, but as feelings and temptation he had to continually deal with that masked the real blackness and loss that he had to finally face beneath them all. He says that he will never “get over” the loss of three generations of his family, and does not even want to, but tells how he was able to find a grace disguised in his pain, a way to let the darkness transform rather than destroy, to let loss enlarge the soul rather than crush it.
"Recovery is a misleading and empty expectation. We recover from broken limbs, not amputations. Catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery. It will transform us or destroy us, but we will never be the same. There is no going back the past which is gone forever, only going ahead... Whatever the future is, it will, and must, contain the pain of the past with it. Sorrow never entirely leaves the soul of those who have suffered a severe loss... this depth of sorrow is the sign of a healthy soul... it enlarges the soul until the soul is capable of mourning and rejoicing simultaneously, of feeling the world's pain and hoping for the world's healing at the same time"
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Pain and loss can enter into our lives in many ways. Through sickness or an accident, through our being hurt or wronged by another, or through our own brokenness and folly. As with any type of loss, it is not so important what has happened as it is how we deal with it. In the same way that the shame, betrayal, and forsakenness of the Cross led to Christ's Resurrection and our redemption, loss has the potential to deepen us, open our eyes to how precious every moment of life is, to show us meaning in the darkness. This experience of allowing pain to enlarge our souls is not merely academic. It has been the tale told out of the most profound depths of human misery. Viktor Frankl, a psychologist and survivor of the Nazi death camps, speaks of how that blackness of night brought out both the best and worst in the human soul. He went on to ground an entire branch of psychology on how people can find meaning, even in the very pit of darkness. Similarly Aleksandr Solszhenitsyn writes of how in the dehumanizing Gulag of Stalin's Russia he was able to transcend death and find life, so that he could say to the astonishment of those around him, “bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”
Solszhenitsyn endured the Gulag, Frankl the Holocaust, and Sittser the loss of three generations in an instant. In the face of enduring such catastrophic suffering and loss we may be tempted to see such people as somehow “super human”, but suffering is common to all of our lives. What their stories show us is a possibility in our suffering to find a depth to life that we did not know existed before. All of us face, on big and small scales, very real pain, loss, and evil in our lives. Into every one of our lives, there comes a cross. Whether it is losing a loved one to terminal illness, the pain of divorce, or facing our own brokenness and addiction, we all experience darkness and suffering in our lives. Regardless of the cause of our suffering - whether we are enduring hardship standing up for love, or have been wronged and betrayed by someone we had trusted, or whether tragedy has struck our lives - we can go through the darkness together with Christ. Our pain can become a means of redemption. On the cross God in Christ entered into our brokenness and sorrow, and that is where we find him now, in the darkness God is there. That does not mean that when we face trouble and loss that it is somehow painless. Evil is a reality in our world. God is there in the darkness, but that darkness is real. Sittser writes,
“When we plunge into darkness, it is darkness we experience. We feel pain, anguish, sorrow, and despair, and we experience the ugliness, meaningless, and absurdity of life. We brood as well as hope, rage as well as surrender, doubt as well as believe. We are apathetic as often as we are hopeful, and sorrowful before we are joyful”
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Facing our own darkness is hard, and it is hard to be close to those who are suffering, but as we face our own pain and weakness we become more sensitive to the pain and need of others, We love more deeply, awhen we love others, sharing in their pain, the New Testament tells us something incredible happens: when we suffer for the sake of love we “share in the sufferings of Christ” . Like Simon of Cyrene we can lift the cross off of the shoulders of Christ, and carry the burdens of God with him.
"Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. (1 Peter 4:12-13 see also Ro 8:17; 2 Thes 1:5 ).
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We should not seek suffering, we should seek to end it. But there will be times, when standing up for what is right, that suffering will be unavoidable. In Christ we see that God is close to all who are grieving and burdened. God is with us in all of our suffering. But Scripture shows that there is a special solidarity that Jesus has with us when we take up the same cross that our Lord carried, when we suffer for the sake of the least, when we endure hardship standing up for love. It is in these times that we can in our darkness participate in “the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings” and in so doing “know Christ and the power of his resurrection” (Phil 3:10) . This does not mean that suffering is somehow glorified. Evil remains evil no matter how much good comes out of it. Romans 8:28 does not say that God “makes all things good”, but that “in all things God works for the good”. Despite the injustice and agony of the cross, God used it to bring about life. God can do the same with the crosses in our own lives as we take on suffering for the sake of others. Our model for this servant life is God. God is the Servant. God is the one who comes to us in our need, in the middle of our grief. God is the one who enters into the place where the world is hurting and through taking on suffering himself, overcomes it; and God is the one who calls us to follow him in the way of servant-love.
Jesus tells us to “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me” (Mk 8:34). Paul encourages believers to become “living sacrifices” by imitating Christ's humility and thinking of others above ourselves(cf Ro 12). This imitation of Christ's servant-heart leads us to bless those who hurt us (v14), not repaying evil for evil (v17), but instead overcoming evil with good (v22). Peter, speaking to those who are suffering for their witness likewise councils them to be “compassionate and humble” (1 Pe 3:8), and to “not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing” (v 9). In each of these we can see a clear pattern emerging of “participating in the sufferings of Christ” in the context of loving our enemies, rooted in imitating Christ's humility and compassion in the face of evil. We “deny ourselves” in that we take on the servant heart of Christ, not only in caring for the least in the face of hardship, but also in not retaliating to the hostility we encounter with hostility ourselves born from righteousness indignation, but instead respond to our enemies with compassion and humility, seeking their conversion as well by bearing unjust suffering.
Evil is a reality in our world. We can see its extreme forms on an individual level with child abductions, or on a mass level with genocide. We are inclined in the face of such radical evil to see the people as monsters. Initially the language of devils and demons in the New Testament does not seem to help this, until we realize that it does not say that people are demons, but that demons are demons. Those we call monsters are in fact people caught in the grip of radical demonic evil. Immaculee Ilibagiza, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, tells how the killers that slaughtered her whole family and nearly a million people over a three month killing spree were in fact people from her own village - her neighbors, pastors, teachers, and schoolmates - who had eaten dinner at her house and who she had known for years. . When a person treats others inhumanly our natural reaction is to see them as a beast as well, and justify treating them inhumanly in response. This is the beginning of a vicious cycle that like a whirlpool sucks everyone around it into its vortex – people who feel dehumanized by the violence of others in turn dehumanize them and respond with even greater retaliatory violence.
The story of Immaculee shows what can happen when our natural reactions come in contact with the risen Jesus. Immaculee hid from her killers in a cramped bathroom with nine other women for 91 days. Throughout those long torturous days and hours, unable to speak for fear of being discovered, Immaculle began to pray, facing her own fear of death and hatred of the people who she later discovered had murdered her family. But in that Hell, she also encountered God and a love so strong that she was able seek out and forgive her family's killers. She tells how the turning point was when God showed her that her killers were people too. For this reason the New Testament tells us that the real "enemy" is not any particular human, or group, or system, but the power of evil itself at work in all of our lives and our systems. Our struggle, as the Apostle Paul says, is not ultimately with other flesh and blood people or groups but against the principalities and powers of darkness in the heavenly realms that have us both in their grip (Eph 6:12). That means that we recognize that our “enemies” are humans just as we are, and that we thus work to pull both us and them out of the grip of hate that we are both captive to. Not by returning evil for evil, but by breaking the cycle with the power of goodness in the face of evil.
Loving our enemies means that we refuse to be dehumanized by others, and that we refuse to dehumanize them as well. Most of us will never have to face enemies on such a massive scale as Immaculee did. But we can learn to “deny ourselves and take up our cross” beginning even with our daily trivial struggles. As I prepared for this chapter and contemplated the idea of forgiving grievous wrongs such as genocide, I continually noticed in myself that all it took was for someone to cut me off in traffic for my own rage and self-righteousness to boil over. If Immaculee can forgive her family's killers, then surely I can forgive the “jerk” who cuts me off driving home from work (who is without a doubt thinking of me “Why wont this jerk let me merge?!”) or learn to “lose” a fight with my wife for the sake of our relationship. These may be humiliatingly trivial, but we learn to love and break the cycle of hurt for hurt by practicing it in small things.
People often object that nonviolence and love of enemies is Utopian and will not work in the real world of personal and national conflicts. In this they miss the rather obvious point that loving our enemies only makes sense in a world where we have enemies. Jesus' actions made him enemies because he fought to liberate people from dehumanization and thereby confronted the religious and political powers around him. Looking at his example we can see that loving our enemies does not mean avoiding confrontation, or always getting along with others, nor does it mean letting people walk over you. The way of loving our enemies is in fact so confrontational that governments over the ages have consistently seen those who practiced it as dangerously subversive and sought to silence them, beginning with Christ's execution under Roman rule.
Now of course a person that simply “loves everyone” is not going to be considered a threat to any government or power. But this understanding of love as harmony and warm feelings is not a biblical view of love. Love in a biblical sense is not the same as being nice, nor does it mean feelings of affection, or living in harmony. Agape love is in essence moving from being me-oriented to being we-oriented . Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. This change of perspective moves us from an endless spiral of returning hurt for hurt and push for shove into seeking a way to pull us both out of the trap of hate and blame.
Since we are to love our enemies as we love ourselves, love of enemies by definition includes a healthy love of self. It is not so much being selfless, as it is being we-oriented – moving from thinking in terms of self-interest alone to thinking in terms of our-interest, including ourselves. John Howard Yoder points out that Jesus takes this even a step further, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (Jn 13:34) with this “new command” based on the example of the servant live of Christ “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” becomes “do unto others as I have done unto you”
. Our model is not simply the reciprocity we may find fair, but the example of unmerited self-sacrificing love that Jesus showed us. We are to love, as Jesus did.
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Overcoming Evil with Good
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So far we have been focusing on the change in perspective that loving our enemies involves. To summarize, love of enemies begins with a healthy self-love and then expands our perspective from a me-focus to a we-focus. It breaks us out of destructive us-them thinking and instead tells us to treat our adversary with the same love that we would wish for ourselves. A foundation of this is humility and an acknowledgment of our brokenness and need, leading to compassion towards the brokenness and need of others. Love of enemies requires a radical change of perspective, which is why Paul in beseeching the brethren to become “living sacrifices”, says that this is accomplished by not conforming to worldly patterns of thinking but instead being “transformed by the renewing of our minds”(Ro 12:2) . We do not view conflict as the world does in terms of self-interest, domination, and force, but think with a new mind of Christ who died for his enemies.
In short, love of enemies is a change of perspective reflecting the attitude or intension of our changed minds. With that understanding in mind, we now turn to the creative application of that in our lives, to the method by which we can bring about such reconciliation of relationship. This principle rooted in this “new perspective” of love of enemies is the idea of overcoming evil with good (Ro 12:21), doing good to our foe as a way to overcome the enmity between us.
Overcoming evil with good can be seen as “acting in the opposite spirit”. Like begets like. Hatred breeds hatred. Retaliation escalates to more retaliation. Those who are hurt, hurt back. When we feel accused we seek to condemn back. When there is a spirit of fear, panic becomes contagious. We hate people who hate, and in so doing become what we hate. Reacting in the opposite spirit breaks this spiral by changing the direction. The idea is expressed beautifully in the famous prayer of St Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace
where there is hatred, let me sow love
where there is injury, pardon
where there is doubt, faith
where there is despair, hope
where there is darkness, light
and where there is sadness, joy
Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spirit of hatred, or blame, or fear that has us both in its grip. By responding in the opposite spirit we break both us and them out of its hold. It is about making the first move away from strife. Being the first to give in, the first to say “I'm sorry”. Taking a chance in “weakness and foolishness” for love.
In general we can say that love of enemies involves a change of mind and works through the principle of overcoming evil with good . Within that basic definition however there are a virtually unlimited number of creative ways of applying these principles in our lives. In the remainder of this chapter we will explore several applications of love of enemies in various situations beginning with the specific application of love of enemies that got Jesus, and those after him over the centuries, into trouble with the powers and authorities commonly known as Nonviolent Resistance to evil. Jesus gives several examples of this principle in the Sermon on the Mount: turning the other cheek, going to extra mile, giving the shirt off your back each an concrete example of overcoming evil with good within the specific circumstance of responding to dehumanizing oppression and injustice. In addition to the teaching and actions of Jesus we can see this principle in the writings of the Apostle Peter who admonishes believers to live such a good life that their enemies will “be ashamed of their slander”(1 Pe 3:16) and Paul, quoting from Proverbs, speaks of how when we do good to our enemies we “heap burning coals on their heads” (Ro 12:20) .
Paul Fiddes has identified in the way of Jesus a twofold affront to oppressive power comprised of what he calls Action and Submission
. In Action Jesus rebukes the Pharisees, defies the current understanding of Sabbath laws to heal, and takes a whip to the Temple. This is about confrontation, or what we might call “speaking truth to power” and acts of civil disobedience. Secondly, we see Submission to the consequences of these actions as Jesus is arrested, condemned, beaten, and crucified. This combination punch, first of unmasking wrong by speaking truth (Action), followed by further exposing it by refusing to enter into the violence of the enemy (Submission), acts as a powerful blow of love breaking the cycle of abuse. Nonviolent Resistance has been successful when used by Gandhi against British oppression, by Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, and more recently in ending dictatorship in the Philippines, Apartheid in South Africa, and the fall of the wall in East Germany just for starters.
Nonviolent Resistance is rooted in the principle of love of enemies, and overcoming evil with good. It is important to note however that Nonviolent Resistance is not the same as love of enemies. Love of enemies is an absolute in all cases, Nonviolent Resistance is a particular application of what loving our enemies can look like when facing oppressive and dehumanizing power. We should always ask how we can love our enemies and overcome evil with good in every conflict, but the answer to that question is not always Nonviolent Resistance. In other situations of conflict, the application of love of enemies may take on other forms.
For example, when a society is dealing with crime, love of enemies may mean working towards rehabilitation with offenders, and Restorative Justice with victims. The principle here being to ask “how can we act for the good of the other in order to end enmity?”. Rehabilitation is we-oriented because in doing good to the criminal by providing education and reform we act in our own interest as well and break the cycle of “revolving door” prisons where a criminal is released after doing their time only to land right back in jail because they were released just as dysfunctional and dangerous as when they entered. Likewise Restorative Justice acts to mend the wrong to the victims of crime which is often ignored in our impersonal criminal justice system by having criminals own up to their responsibility for the harm they have done. While it would make little sense to apply a Nonviolent Resistance model in the case of a society that is trying to right wrongs and create a good and safe community, these programs of rehabilitation and Restorative Justice are clear applications of love of enemies. So we see that love of enemies takes on different forms when dealing with different kinds of conflict.
To give another example, if I am in a fight with my wife and adopt a “Gandhi-esque” technique of letting her wrong me in order to expose her injustice, this may in fact be unloving and manipulative. I am not really loving my “enemy”, I am simply using coercion for my own self-interest. What does love of enemies look like here? Many times it has meant letting go of my pride and losing the argument for the sake of our relationship. My pride wants to “show how wrong she is” but if I can break out of seeing only what is in my self-interest and see again what is in both of our interests, I recognize how absurd the things are that I can get upset over after a stressful day. Again, love of enemies takes on its specific form in this situation rooted in general principle of asking How can we both break out of this? Love of enemies is not primarily a method to get what we want, but a solidarity and identification with the other, even when that means denying ourselves and what we want for the sake of us both.
The above example focused on the daily stresses and conflicts of a healthy relationship. What about cases of spousal abuse and violence in the home? In an abusive and violent environment it is not loving for a battered spouse to “turn the other cheek” when that means accepting abuse. The most loving thing to do in this situation is to get yourself and the kids to safety and call the police. Turning the other cheek does not mean that we make ourselves subject to the whims of others, but that we refuse to be pulled into mirroring their hurtfulness thus becoming what we hate, and instead act to break the cycle of abuse. Love of enemies is proactive rather than reactive. Rather than responding “like for like” by inflicting pain for the pain, it seeks to do good to the other in the interest of both. Sometimes doing good to another means getting them help.
As the above examples illustrate, when taken in a rigid and wooden way, “enduring suffering” can become manipulative or even perpetuate abuse. Applying love of enemies requires vigorous creativity to imagine how it can be applied in each particular situation. This is particularly difficult because the paradigm of love of enemies goes against the grain of our thinking when we are in the middle of conflict. In the heat of conflict our minds become clouded with pride and pain. We therefore need to begin imagining and rehearsing beforehand how we, in each specific situation, can do good to those who hurt us in order to bring us both towards reconciliation.
There are as many ways we can love our enemies as there are different kinds of conflicts, ranging from personal to global. The task is finding the creative application of how we can love our enemies in each specific situation. The many examples Jesus gives of turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and giving the shirt off our back indicate that even in similar situations, there are many ways to break cycles of retaliation and degradation.
The way of the cross demands to be at the center of our lives and relationships, governing how we model everything from criminal justice to international business. Jesus should be Lord of all of life, not just in our personal relationships and private moral lives. In this section we turn to explore love of enemies in the face of international conflict and war.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian was among the few German Christians who was outspoken against the evils of Hitler. Just two days after Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer warned in a radio address of Germany slipping into an idolatrous cult of the “Führer” (leader) who is really a “Verführer” (misleader) and one who mocks God himself. The broadcast was cut off while he was still speaking. Such acts of blatant defiance characterized Bonhoeffer's bold opposition to the Nazis. In an effort to avoid the draft Bonhoeffer escaped to America, but immediately expressed regret over his departure and made the decision to return to Nazi Germany. In a letter to his friend Reinhold Niebuhr he writes,
"I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people.”
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Back in Germany he joined the resistance movement within the Nazi counter-intelligence agency working as a double agent using his diplomatic access to communicate with the Allies, and help Jews to escape out of Germany. Despite being deeply committed to nonviolence, he made the agonizing decision to take part in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. For Bonhoeffer this meant making the choice to deliberately sin and risk being condemned to Hell rather than do nothing and remain personally “innocent” in the face of the massive evil of the Nazis. The Apostle Paul similarly says that he would wish himself damned and "cut off from Christ" if he could thus save his people the Jews (Ro 9:2). It surely is better to fight evil and lose our own life and soul, then it is to do nothing out of either cowardice or personal piety. But being able to justify an action does not make it just in the eyes of God. Fully accepting the guilt of his actions, Bonhoeffer threw himself on the mercy of God. He writes,
“When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace”
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Bonhoeffer refuses to allow us to resolve the question of whether he was justified or not, leaving us to wrestle with him. He is adamant that we cannot take his decision as a justification for violence (as ironically many have done using Bonhoeffer as an example to justify all wars), but instead takes the guilt upon himself. While we may understand his decision and respect his courage, Bonhoeffer insists that we cannot ultimately justify or glamorize his choice. We may justify hurtful actions like abortion or divorce or war, but that does not make them "good" or "just". If we wish to join Bonhoeffer, it must be here, in that tension, trembling before God.
We can get a glimpse into Bonhoeffers's thoughts, and what led him to forsake his commitment to pacifism by looking at the development of his theology. Bonhoeffer's classic “The Cost of Discipleship” was based on the Sermon on the Mount. On the basis of the Sermon on the Mount he had boldly spoken out against Nazi anti-Jewish policies, and sought to persuade his fellow Germans to oppose Hitler. He argued that following Christ meant loving the “sick, the suffering, those who are demeaned and abused, those who suffer injustice and are rejected”
in other words, the very people Hitler sought to eliminate. He called on Christians to follow their Lord in ““giving their honor for those who had fallen into shame and taking their shame upon themselves” fully aware that this meant facing both imprisonment and death. Bonhoeffer was eventually arrested for helping Jewish families to escape into Switzerland. At that time, the plot to kill Hitler was still in its planning phase. The assassination was attempted a year later while Bonhoeffer was still imprisoned. In “Ethics” he explains his rationale for participating in the plot. Six years had passed since he wrote “The Cost of Discipleship” and now in “Ethics” the theme of the Sermon on the Mount so prevalent in Bonhoeffer's past writing was strangely absent. What had happened? Glen Stassen suggests that Bonhoeffer's understanding of turning the other cheek in "The Cost of Discipleship" was mostly passive, a non-participation in evil rather than as a way of actively overcoming evil with good. Because of this, when he looked for a way to actively oppose Hitler, he did not find guidance in the Sermon on the Mount. One wonders what someone with the vision and courage of Bonhoeffer might have done, had he understood love of enemies as an active way to combat evil.
At the time Gandhi had just had major success with his Nonviolent Resistance against Brittan. Bonhoeffer had made plans to visit Gandhi at his Ashram in India and had received a formal invitation. As history would have it though Bonhoeffer never went. Instead he returned to Germany to join the underground Confessing church. In "The Cost of Discipleship" one can clearly see Bonhoeffer calling for Nonviolent Resistance
"The followers of Jesus have been called to peace...His Disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others... in so doing they overcome evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate. But nowhere will that peace be more manifest than where they meet the wicked in peace and are ready to suffer at their hands. The peacemakers will carry the cross with their Lord for it was on the cross that peace was made."
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Gandhi and later King where able to organize massive nonviolent resistance against violent oppression. But when Bonhoeffer stood up, he stood virtually alone. "In 1933 Bonhoeffer was almost alone in his opinions; he was the only one who considered solidarity with the Jews, especially with the non-Christian Jews, to be a matter of such importance to obligate the Christian churches to risk a massive conflict with that state” If we must place blame here, it is not with Bonhoeffer, but with the church that ignored his cries. Bonhoeffer writes these scalding words,
“The church confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and had not found ways to hasten to their aid. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers of Jesus Christ.”
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If Bonhoeffer had been able to organize massive Nonviolent Resistance it may have worked. In fact where nonviolence was tried against the Nazis it did in fact work. Walter Wink chronicles how thousands of Bulgarian Jews and non-Jews participated in massive protests and civil disobedience and as a result, all of Bulgaria's Jewish citizens where saved from Nazi death camps. Similar success was achieved through nonviolent action in Romania who refused to surrender a single Jew to the death camps, Finland which saved all but 6 of its Jewish citizens, and Denmark which smuggled 6500 of its 7000 Jewish population to safety. . Nonviolent Resistance on a massive scale might have worked in Germany, but Bonhoeffer stood alone. In the absence of any alternatives that he could see, Bonhoeffer chose trembling before God to incur guilt for the sake of his fellow man rather than retain his purity while watching them suffer. People often argue that nonviolence does not always work, but the fact is violence does not always work either. The plot to assassinate Hitler failed, and in a brutal retaliation 5000 people were killed including Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was hanged by the Nazis on April 9, 1945. The difference however is that nonviolence when it is effective leads to peace and the ending of oppression without bloodshed, whereas violence even when it is “successful” means massive killing and the shattering of countless lives in the aftermath of war. As General William T. Sherman famously said,
“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell”
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Looking at Bonhoeffer's example, perhaps we can agree on two things: First that the courage and self-sacrifice that people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer exhibit, and the idea of fighting for humanity and justice are things we can all deeply respect. The warrior mentality, the urge to protect, even the anger we feel in the face of oppression are good things. Walter Wink has suggested that rather than seeking to deny or suppress our anger at injustice, we need to embrace it, and find a way to transcend it so it becomes a force to end the cycle of hate and bloodshed,
“There is a profound longing and need for the courage, camaraderie, selflessness, heroism, service, and transcendence that many men have known only though warfare...The challenge before us today is not to obliterate the warrior mentality but to own it, celebrate, and honor it, and channel its expression into nonviolent struggles against the real threats to human survival today: starvation, pollution, despotism, racism, economic greed... what a contribution to nonviolent struggles it would make if we could learn from them the discipline, the toughness, and the willingness to face death for a higher cause that characterize the soldier.”
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For this reason, I would hope to advocate for a “militant love of enemies” that does not tolerate evil, but acts to overcome it with good. Love of enemies goes beyond tolerance because ultimately tolerance is indifference not love. Love of enemies confronts the reality of the problem and seeks to overcome it with good rather than getting sucked down into its evil and violence. Love of enemies is about fighting for what is right, and requires courage and sacrifice.
Secondly, we can all agree that the horror of war is undesirable, and that we should seek to find other nonlethal ways to deal with conflicts. War is like an amputation. There may be situations where an infection has gotten so bad that there is no alternative but to cut off our limb, but this represents a grave failure not something to glory in. Anyone who speaks of war in noble and romantic terms has yet to face the horror of the reality of war. The reality of war is not glamorous. It causes untold suffering that follows people their entire lives, crippling mens bodies and souls, tearing families apart, leaving children caught in the crossfire of “collateral damage” with missing limbs and shattered souls, destroying lives forever.
Just War criteria originally had the intent of restricting war to certain stringent conditions, but in practice Just War Theory mostly serves to justify war, re-framing it as something good and noble that God condones and endorses. Rather than trying to justify war, shouldn't we look for ways to end it by working towards real justice? Or at the very least to look for ways to reduce violence in war, applying what addicts know as “harm reduction” to war? The debate between pacifism and just war really only answers the question of whether it is ever justified to go to war. It is similar to the question of whether it is ever ok to have an abortion which has polarized and deadlocked our country. We will most likely never reach consensus on either of these issues, but what we all can agree on is that we should work towards a world where we do not need to feel forced to make such painful choices. In order to do that we need to provide real ways to deal with conflict that avert violence and end bloodshed. We need real alternatives before violence becomes our “last resort”.
But what, we may ask with Bonhoeffer, are the alternatives to violence? Twenty-three Christian ethicists, international relations scholars, conflict resolution specialists, theologians, one New Testament scholar, and a handful of Peace Action leaders, have been working for five years to create what they call "Just Peacemaking Theory". Just Peacemaking Theory goes beyond the debate of whether war is justified or not, and instead offers ways to prevent war and create peace based on techniques of diplomacy, conflict resolution, repentance, reform, and nonviolent action. They have summed these up into 10 practices that have been empirically proven time and time again to prevent wars and end conflict around the world. The practices are composed of actively working towards justice on the one hand (reducing poverty, promoting human rights), and acting to resolve conflicts and end oppression on the other. Some of the conflict resolution practices are common on an individual scale but become truly radical when applied to an international scale - making the first move and giving something in the hope of the the other responding in kind for example was instrumental in leading to the end of the cold war. Likewise, admitting wrong, repenting and seeking forgiveness is familiar on an interpersonal level, but a country repenting and asking forgiveness was virtually unheard of until Willi Brandt the Chancellor of Germany did just that in 1970 falling to his knees in Poland before the Warsaw war memorial.
These are hard and complex topics and this chapter has at best scratched the surface. It is quite a challenge to apply love of enemies to the many struggles in our world. It requires both courage, sacrifice, and a great deal of creativity to imagine how to faithfully apply the way of Jesus to conflicts on personal, societal, and international scales. Rather than resolving the issues, I hope instead to provoke us all to creatively wrestle with them as we seek to be faithful to Christ in our world
Love of enemies, admitting guilt, and forgiving wrongs are all acts that do not come naturally for us, neither on an individual nor international level. Yet it is precisely these acts of repentance and reconciliation that are so desperately needed in our world. Love of enemies is at once the most well known teaching of Jesus, and the least practiced. As G.K. Chesterton famously said, the way of Jesus has not been tried and found lacking, it has been found difficult and not tried. I say that to myself as much as to anyone else. I acknowledge my own pride and unwillingness to forgive; my own need to follow better in the way of the cross. But regardless of how difficult, foreign, or painful the way of the cross is, it is the way Jesus calls us to.
Our model for this kind of outrageous love is found at the foot of the cross. God did not wait to be appeased, but came to seek and save us while we were his enemies. The Gospel story of God loving us while we were his enemies illustrates, that nonviolence is not ignoring injustice but a way to actively seek justice by breaking the cycle of enmity with grace. The teaching of Jesus were important because they served as commentary on his saving actions, but the real focus of the Gospels is on what Jesus did, culminating at the cross where his action of loving us while we where his enemies and dying for our sins resulted in our salvation and reconciliation. In the same way we proclaim that Gospel not only with words, but much more in how we exhibit the way of Jesus by loving our enemies. Forgiveness takes the initiative. Instead of demanding appeasement and payback, forgiveness takes that pain upon itself. It cannot be said enough that forgiveness does not mean ignoring evil or saying “that's alright”. Instead forgiveness opens up the doors to let love triumph over hurt and animosity. It is an active force that makes reconciliation possible. God paid the price for our forgiveness, taking the pain and consequence of the sins of the world upon himself. Jesus has called us to take up our cross and follow in that Way. He has given us the incredible calling to participate in his sufferings. As his Body we are co-laborers in the redemption of the world.
“We may endure with him the weight of the world's woe; we may be laborers together with him; we may share with him the weight of redeeming the world... Man is an indispensable agent in the vast work of healing the open wound of the world...To us, as to Simon, is given the privilege of helping Christ bear his cross up Calvary”
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