A Troubling Question About Jesus' Teaching: Should we love our enemies even during a time of war?

Christian Post ^ | 04/21/2022 | Dr. Michael Brown

[V_TWIN]

I got your joke my friend......it was more of a comment for the larger group really.

I just got excited 😏

[SoConPubbie]

I tell my kids as they are becoming CCW age. If you need to use it, you will most likely be sending them to Hell.

Actually, it would be the perp's actions/choices that are sending themselves to Hell.

[stevio]

True, I want them to use it as a very last defense though.

[metmom]

Loving your enemy is hard.

However, one can still obey and pray for them.

[kosciusko51]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

[Manly Warrior]

Let us separate a national need and act from an individual need and act.

Just as it is clearly correct and needful to protect innocents from unlawful violence and crime, it is often needful for a nation to defend itself and even be offensive against an aggressor nation.

As a combat veteran I can tell you that the act of combat is much different than that of murder. While the individual warriors are required to act in concert and collectively or individually to accomplish a national requirement, the individual act is held accountable under our laws of both war and crime. Perhaps not so with others, but as a nation we do not easily tolerate the murderous on the battlefield, but certainly expect valor and fierceness against the enemy in combat.

As a husband and father, I will kill, if need be, to protect my family, I will not employ force outside that simple and concise equation of just war- unlawful force is to be met with defensive force, countervailing up to lethal force if required, and then ceased and sheathed.

As Solomon records in Ecclesiastes, the whole duty of man is to love God, keep his commandments, love your neighbor and the rest is circumstance. Paraphrasing of course.

Often, we hear of the need to love our enemies and do good to those that spitefully abuse- and I practice that as often as the occasion arises. However, the limit is clear- unlawful force is to be resisted as both a man and as a Believer. Either that force will relent, or escalate, and they are responsible for the outcome, not the innocent. Just as our laws across the several states (with exceptions, like CA/MA/NY etc) the unlawful aggressor is subject to lawful force, both by the state and by its citizens.

I’ll turn my cheek to a brother who ceremoniously backhands me, as a man subject to grace, but I will not, ever, submit to unlawful force of any kind.

Now, if we look at persecution for Christs sake alone, then that may be the place and situation to not resist and submit to such abuse, but I will have to see that a long way off before I lay down my arms and allow unlawful force to be applied to me or mine. I will not.

While not a scripture, the principle stands “evil flourishes when good men do nothing”.

We obviously are seeing that at many levels of state and federal govt. They bear the responsibility for their nonfeasance. Why do we see millions of new gun owners annually in the US? Reasonable people are seeing the writing on the wall so to speak- if govt abdicates its public duty to not allow nor tolerate unlawful force and violence, then it is incumbent on the people personally to so do.

[grumpygresh]

When you love your enemies it means that you give them the gospel and pray that they will believe it.
It doesn’t mean that your love what they do and pray for their success and happiness.

[SoConPubbie]

I understand.

My Handgun training instilled a very real sense that the weapon in my hand had the very real potential to end someone’s life and gave me the deepest respect for how serious the danger was.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: And Jesus answering said to them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marveled at him.

I observe that it isn’t recorded anywhere that Jesus told the Centurion whose servant he healed to quit his job working as a soldier for the Roman Empire.

[RideForever]

Christmas, WWI. Ardennes Forest. Germans and Americans freezing to death, together. Christmas Eve, and faint singing heard at the front lines. Troops from both sides honored white flag and shared Christmas together. Made friends they hoped they wouldn’t have to kill the next day.

[DesertRhino]

I’m trying to remember any military actions Jesus was involved in or commented on.

[mjp]

You can love him in a certain minimal way, because he has value as a living being in the image of God. But you also have the perfect right to preserve and protect your own God-given natural rights (the perfect right of self defense) in a way that may require use of force against him.

[DesertRhino]

https://youtu.be/i1Nh_3JCFj8?t=72

People see Jesus how they want sometimes. If you want war, it’s “war Jesus”.

[MurphsLaw]

C.S> Lewis wrote about that:

I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Because in Christian morals ‘thy neighbour’ includes ‘thy enemy’, and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.

…

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently ‘Love your neighbour’ does not mean ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive’. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap?
Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are.
Go a step further.
In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner….

Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him?
No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment— even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace.
…
When soldiers came to St John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major— what they called a centurion.
The idea of the knight— the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas.
War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it.
It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage— a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.
...
I imagine somebody will say, ‘Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy’s acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?’
All the difference in the world.
Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central , inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it any more. That is not how things happen . I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible. Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves— to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good.
That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sum ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us.
Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco…
C.S. Lewis

[carcraft]

I read about a Christian pastor in Hungary who was watched by the secret police. During winter nights he and his wife took hot tea to them to help keep them warm.

[carcraft]

Jesus told Roman soldiers to not abuse people, only collect what was due etc. Don’t see where he commanded them not to kill.

[Responsibility2nd]

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman seemed to understand the balance between loving your enemies:

Today... is Christmas! There will be a magic show at zero-nine-thirty! Chaplain Charlie will tell you about how the free world will conquer Communism with the aid of God and a few Marines! God has a ~~~~~~~~~ for Marines because we kill everything we see! He plays His games, we play ours! To show our appreciation for so much power, we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls! God was here before the Marine Corps! So you can give your heart to Jesus, but your ~~~ belongs to the Corps! Do you ladies understand?