Wainwright: CT32
Enemy Love: A Stepping Stone or A Stumbling Block?
Toward an Echthragapic Theology
Originally written for CT32, Professor Wainwright, 11/17/2010
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be [children] of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."[1]
Enemy love is one of the most difficult commands to fulfill because it asks the most of us. It asks that we examine our own hatred, prejudices, and biases and excuse those who embody them. To do so mimics the limitless love of God that has saved even us, His enemies. Becoming more like the One whose image we bear by enduring suffering love for our adversary is ingrained within orthodox Christian doctrine as well as the Holy Scripture from which such doctrine draws its authority. To seek to conform our life and being to God is known as the process of theosis, which literally means "to become god." As we recognize our reconciliation toward God, it follows that we shall reconcile with those whom we feel enmity toward. To fail to reconcile with the enemy, to refuse to love those we hate, not only disrupts our progression toward divinization, it is a direct refusal to obey the command to love, and not curse, those we persecute or by whom we are persecuted.
In this paper, I will utilize scripture, early Church writings and Christian doctrine, especially theosis and reconciliation, as evidence of this all-important task of loving those we hate to love and love to hate. To do so is necessary because we have neglected the centrality of enemy love to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I have no intention of innovating some new field of theology, but invigorating those areas of theology that seem to have slipped by unnoticed.
I will write in part theologically and in part reflectively, acknowledging the simultaneous privilege and pain I bear as a former combatant in war. The theology I hope to develop in this paper is one that favors the enemy since I was an enemy and had enemies, some of whom I had no reason to hate. In that sense, it is fundamentally a liberative theology; my larger goal will be to articulate good news for the enemy just as some theologians have done for the poor and oppressed.
I run the risk of writing selfishly, since it would seem that I am self-advocating. While some (including, at times, myself) may find this to compromise my objectivity, I would argue that we all have enemies and are enemies to others. The Christian faith is incarnate, embodied, and messy; enemy love is therefore inherently subjective. I would like to argue that such a theology is one that applies universally to each of us, since we all were once enemies of God and one another.
I. "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor[2] and hate your enemy.'"
The world calls us to hate our enemy. We are expected to curse those who curse us; "an eye for an eye is only what is fair," we are told. Nobody would expect a person wronged to respond cheerily. If one good turn deserves another, than a bad turn must certainly deserve its own as well. It would seem as though human history is colored by this tit-for-tat mentality; that one person's evil justifies another's retributive evil.
However, this mentality surrenders the world to "these things happen" fatalism. On the surface, this fulfills the exhortation of the Law, to love one's neighbors. This is why this thinking is so dangerous, it does not ask much of the hearer but to do what is expected of her or him. This is a theology of 'just enough,' though it is far from.
II. "But I say to you, Love your enemies[3] and pray for those who persecute you."
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is the first time that echthroi,[4] the Greek word for enemies, appears in the New Testament. Paul repeats the imperative to love, not curse, our enemies in his letter to the Romans; "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them."[5] Blessings and love are the dutiful response of Christians to their enemies. But what is it to bless those who we would like to bomb?
Greek writers have a number of words for love at their disposal, but the two that are most at play here are philias and agape. People tend to prefer the philic response, which is that of brotherly love. Aristotle defines the activity involved in philia as: "wishing for [people] what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for [theirs], and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about."[6] Other Greek writers equate philia with a kind of virtuous friendship.[7] We might prefer this kind of love because it is essentially utilitarian and sterile, it is made safe by its distance from the indictment of our own sin's uniformity with the sins of those who are our enemies. Therefore, Christian perfection is built not by philia, but agape. The disciple is called not to enemy-friendship, mere echthrophilia, but to enemy-love, echthragapic in nature.
Woe to us, then, for being called not to philic love, but to agapic sacrifice. "Christ bids us agape (not philia) tous echthros, because love as an emotion cannot be commanded, but only love as a choice."[8] God commands us to agape because it requires nothing less; we will not love our enemy if we are left to mere emotive incentives. God must command that we love our crooked enemy with all our crooked heart.[8] We would not do so apart from this divine imperative, and are incapable of doing so without the divine example, that "while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son".[9]
Paul's reminder is critical; in this passage from his letter to the Romans (and to us all), echthroi is passive, they were the object of God's hatred. Sin has created enmity between God and human kind. Yet God "so loved the world that He gave his only Son"[10] (emphasis added) to save His enemies, for "friendship with the world is enmity with God".[11] Jesus, the Son of God, loved his enemies, and called his disciples to be like God. John goes so far as to say that this scandalous echthragapic love is how Christians will be known; "By this all [people] will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."[12]
III. "If you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?"[13]
Both in the earlier passage from John and again in Matthew, the Greek used is agape, not philias. The Gentiles and tax collectors greet their own, they only love those who love them back. But discipleship in Jesus Christ means doing more; it means greeting in love even those that the Gentiles and tax collectors do not, those with whom we have enmity.
This alone is still not enough, as such token greetings may be mere philic expressions of an emotive love. No, Matthew and Paul each call us to agapic, sacrificial love. It is by this that we will be known not simply as Gentiles or tax collectors, but as members of The Way of Jesus Christ. As Christ loved his betrayer and his persecutors, we too shall sacrificially love those who betray and persecute us. Growing into love for our enemies is to grow in Christ, who died for His enemies and ours.
Our reward for loving our enemies "will be great, and we will be called [children] of God."[14] Luke does not hesitate to align enemy love with entering the divine lineage. The call to echthragapic, sacrificial love follows Luke's Sermon on the Plain and is reiterated immediately before the reference to being children of God; "Love your enemies… and you will be [children] of the Most High."[15]
IV. "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."[16]
This final exhortation from the selection in Matthew, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, is the capstone command of Jesus' ministry. It should be no surprise, then, that theosis is a central doctrine of Christian faith. Though we will never become God, we are nonetheless called to be like God. The whole of Christian praxis, I would argue, is that of divinization, of conforming our lives, our very beings, to God's likeness. As we engage in theosis, we become closer to the true form God created. Through Christ we are made capable of being more like the Being in whose likeness we were created. Stripped of its theological underpinnings, theosis is simply the act of being more authentically human, of picking ourselves up from the Fall.
Church fathers consistently defended the doctrine of theosis especially, since it is the bedrock of the Incarnation. Athanasius was the first to write "God became [human] so that [humans] might become god."[17] His theology of divinization would become official doctrine at the First Council of Nicea. The Nicene Creed is clear that "for [us], and for our salvation, [God] came down and was incarnate and made [human]." Thomas Aquinas quotes Augustine's defense of the Council of Nicea, as saying that "God was made [human], that [humans] might be made God."[18]
This transformation of being is, as I have stated before, a completion of our vocation as humans. We are return to that which we were before the Fall, which is only made possible through Jesus' redemptive sacrifice on the cross. We were once complete as creatures, but we are now corrupt. Most translations of the Matthew use "perfect" to translate the Greek teleios,[19] few use "complete".[20] "Perfect," however, draws to mind Wesley's Christian Perfection, but in as far as it permits the acquisition of a state of being void of "voluntary sin", it would be considered a heresy by most other traditions.
Few Protestant denominations use the term theosis or divinization, instead preferring phrases like "sanctification." Etymologically, its Latin origin is sanctificare, which stems from the root sanctus, "holy," and facere, "to make." As God is holy, we too must endeavor to become holy. Perfect, complete, and holy, in this sense, are more or less interchangeable.
Certainly God is not holy because he loved his enemies, but such enemy-love is nonetheless inseparable from the character of God. The love of enemies is not an eternal value, and is therefore not an ontological characteristic of the Godhead. The imperative to love our enemies assumes the presence of enmity, and requires the prompt of a command to redeem us to our original, holy, and complete state. Enmity was not present at the creation of the world, so God cannot be considered to have had enemies to have need of his love. The requirement to love enemies and hate enmity exists only as a result of our Fallen nature; it must be commanded as a consequence thereof. Reconciliation became requisite the moment sin entered the world, which at that moment set enmity between the image bearers and the Image themself.
V. "All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation."[21]
It is only to our enemies that we owe reconciliation. Of all the other human relationships described throughout the Bible (self, friend, neighbor, stranger, etc.), only the enemy requires reconciliation. We are to love our neighbors and the stranger among us, but only in relation to our enemy is it assumed that there is something between us that must be reconciled. We have something against our adversary, some wrong committed by either party, or both.
Jesus required that a congregant postpone the heavily ceremonial nature of the sacrifice and "leave [their] gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled."[22] Even Cain's offering was refused because the sin of envy 'crouched' at his door, which he failed to master.[23] Matthew even refers to this proverbial adversary, to whom we must be reconciled before offering our sacrifice, as a sibling. We must drop what we are doing, seek out those against whom we have a grudge, and greet them in love and offer peace. Even in Roman Catholic Mass today, the passing of peace precedes the Eucharist. Only once we have destroyed the enmity between us may we continue on the road toward God-likeness.
Reconciliation is a gift and a curse. We are privileged as image bearers to be not just reconciled, but also reconciling creatures. However, reconciling is no easy task; done properly, it is painful and humiliating. The passion of Jesus and his death on the Cross indicates nothing less. But his resurrection should give us hope. John of the Cross said of the work of theosis, "all the things of God and the soul are one in participant transformation".[24] Reconciliation is therefore a necessary process, central to the process of theosis. If we cannot forgive our enemies as God forgave his own, how may we possibly grow in unity with the Holy Spirit toward the likeness of Whom by which we were created? While some contemporary traditions would have us remotely reconciled via a detached confessor, this is insufficient in itself. Confession and reconciliation are parallel practices that must unfold in tandem, the former after the latter. Each has the same goal in mind; striving toward perfection, completion, and holiness that was modeled for us on the echthragapic Cross of Christ.
VI. Conclusion
As we reconcile with our enemies, as we greet them in love and bless them, even if they continue to persecute us, God is with us. If we refuse to accept the mantle of echthragape, if we allow ourselves to fall victim to ignorance, we interrupt our own sanctification. We place before ourselves the stumbling block of worldly enmity. To be like God, we must endure the sacrificial love that accompanies reconciliation. To think that love of neighbor is all that is asked of us by God, when we are told to be perfect as He is perfect, is self-deception. To fail to reconcile with the enemy, to refuse to love those we hate, not only disrupts our progression toward divinization, it is a direct refusal to obey the command to love, and not curse, those we persecute or by whom we are persecuted.
It is an easily neglected fact that "the solidarity with sinners we find in Jesus Christ is not only with those who are victims of the power of sin, but also with those who are in its grip as victimizers, as the perpetrators of evil."[25] The implications of an echthragapic hermeneutic are daunting; Biblical characters such as Cain, Esau, Pharaoh, Herod, and Pilate may be reimagined. In our own lives, we would have to struggle through loving abusive domestic partners, drug addicts, and belligerent police officers. We would need to do so in a way that does not grant immunity to such persons, but also is not blindly predisposed against them as such.
We must be careful, then, not to 'bury Jesus beneath the steps to Holiness.'[26] Reconciliation is a fragile affair, fraught with theological and social perils. We do not want to be reminded that Jesus, with one of his last breaths, forgave the very men who had cast lots for his clothes and driven the nails through his hands and feet. We are slow to recollect that it was one of those men, a Roman centurion, who was the first convert, confessing with all of creation as the earth shook at the words "truly this was the Son of God." Jesus celebrates enemies in parable again and again, in the form of the Samaritan[27] and the tax collector,[28] and it was an enemy of the Jews in whom Jesus recognized a faith greater than any in Israel.[29]
Our tendency has been to keep enemies at a distance and enmity close to our hearts. However, we must not let our echthrophobia fan the flame of self-righteousness, since "forgiveness by God burns like coals to the trampled conscience that holds its guilt before its eyes."[30] God forbid that we insist that sacrificial love is not for our enemies, but only the neighbor and perhaps, on a good day, the stranger among us. No, it is especially for those against whom our hearts are set. To be like God is to love as God loves, nothing less. Let us rejoice that in fact "God himself has become what we are in order for us to share in his own divine life."[31] The first brick has been laid, the first step on this journey taken. Let us be like God, let us love our enemies as we were loved even as enemies of God. The love that shines through us is truly not our own, but God's for us and for our enemies.
Footnotes
[1] Matthew 5:43 (all scripture citations are from the Revised Standard Version)
[2] Leviticus 19:18
[3] Matthew 5:44
[4] Greek Strong's #2190
[5] Romans 12:14
[6] Aristotle, Rhetoric. trans. W. Rhys Roberts, Book II, Chapter 4. Available from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8rh; Internet; accessed 09 November 2010
[7] Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
[8] Adapted/stolen from the poem As I Walked Out One Evening, by W.H. Auden (New York: Vintage, 1995).
[9] Romans 5:10
[10] John 3:16
[11] James 4:4
[12] John 13:35
[13] Mathew 5:47&48
[14] Luke 6:35
[15] Luke 6:27
[16] Matthew 5:48b
[17] Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word. trans. J.N.D. Kelly (New York: HarperOne, 1978), 378.
[18] Summa Theologiae III.1.2 (13th century)
[19] Greek Strong's #5046
[20] One notable exception is Weymouth's New Testament, and other 'common English' translations
[21] 2 Corinthians 5:18
[22] Matthew 5:24
[23] Genesis 4:7
[24] Ascent of Mount Carmel, Ch. 5
[25] James F. Kay, "He Descended into Hell," in Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostle's Creed, ed. Roger E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 128.
[26] Steven D. Paulson, "The Forgiveness of Sins," in Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostle's Creed, ed. Roger E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 250. (paraphrase)
[27] Luke 10:25-37
[28] Luke 18:9-14
[29] Matthew 8:10
[30] Paulson, 251.
[31] Trevor Hart, "Redemption and Fall," in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 198.
