📖 Table of Contents

Quick Answer

Scripture commands love for enemies, but traditions divide sharply on what that love requires in practice: whether it forbids all retaliation, permits defensive force, or is compatible with lethal violence by the state or soldier. A second fault line separates those who read enemy-love as an absolute nonresistance ethic from those who read it as a personal posture that does not govern political and military action. Below is the map.

At a Glance

Axis Debate
Scope Enemy-love applies to all contexts vs. applies only to personal, not political, relations
Retaliation All retaliation is forbidden (Matthew 5:39) vs. proportional response is permitted (Romans 13:4)
Military service Participation in war violates enemy-love vs. just war can express neighbor-love
Prayer vs. action Love for enemies is primarily attitudinal and intercessory vs. requires active material benefit
Spiritual enemies Commands about human enemies vs. whether "enemies" includes demonic powers

Key Passages

Matthew 5:43–44

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you." (WEB)

What it appears to say: Believers must love enemies, bless those who curse them, and pray for persecutors — a direct reversal of the conventional social ethic.

Why it doesn't settle it: The command is addressed to individual disciples, not to governments. Augustine (City of God, 415) and Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica II-II, Q.40) argued the state can wage war while the individual soldier maintains an interior posture of love. John Howard Yoder (The Politics of Jesus, 1972) contested this split, arguing it turns the Sermon on the Mount into a private code with no social purchase.

Romans 12:19–20

"Don't seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God's wrath. For it is written, 'Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.' Therefore, 'if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink.'" (WEB)

What it appears to say: Personal vengeance is forbidden; instead, believers should respond to enemies with material generosity.

Why it doesn't settle it: Romans 12 immediately precedes Romans 13, where Paul describes the governing authority as "God's servant, an avenger who carries out God's wrath." John Calvin (Commentary on Romans, 1540) read these as complementary: the individual renounces vengeance, the state executes it. N.T. Wright (Paul for Everyone: Romans, 2004) questions whether Paul intended them as categorically distinct domains.

Luke 6:27–28

"But I tell you who hear: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you." (WEB)

What it appears to say: The command to love enemies is fourfold — love, do good, bless, pray — covering action and speech as well as attitude.

Why it doesn't settle it: The Greek word for "love" here (agapate) is disputed. Theologians debate whether agape in this context demands self-sacrificial service or can coexist with forcible restraint. Glen Stassen and David Gushee (Kingdom Ethics, 2003) argue the passage describes transformative initiatives that break cycles of enmity, not passive acceptance of abuse.

Matthew 5:38–39

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you, don't resist him who is evil; but whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also." (WEB)

What it appears to say: The lex talionis is abolished; believers must not resist evil with counter-force.

Why it doesn't settle it: Walter Wink (Engaging the Powers, 1992) argues that turning the cheek was a form of non-violent resistance — asserting dignity rather than submitting passively. The traditional Anabaptist reading takes the text more literally as a prohibition on physical counter-force. Reinhold Niebuhr (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932) argued the standard was an "impossible ideal" that exposed sin but could not govern political life.

Psalm 137:8–9

"Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy shall he be who repays you as you have served us. Happy shall he be who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock." (WEB)

What it appears to say: Imprecatory prayer — calling down destruction on enemies, including their children — is presented without rebuke in inspired Scripture.

Why it doesn't settle it: C.S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms, 1958) argued imprecatory psalms are morally sub-Christian, retained as honest expressions of human rage rather than models. John Day (Crying for Justice, 2005) defends them as legitimate cries for divine justice, not personal vengeance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, 1940) read them Christologically — as Jesus bearing the curse — rather than as moral prescriptions.

Proverbs 25:21–22

"If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he is thirsty, give him water to drink: for you will heap coals of fire on his head, and the LORD will reward you." (WEB)

What it appears to say: Doing good to an enemy is rewarded by God and has a shaming or transformative effect on the enemy.

Why it doesn't settle it: The "coals of fire" phrase is interpreted either as causing the enemy shame leading to repentance (John Chrysostom) or as intensifying divine punishment on the unrepentant (a minority reading defended by F.F. Bruce). Paul cites this text in Romans 12:20, but scholars disagree whether he adopts either meaning or strips it of its ambiguity.

Luke 10:25–37 (The Good Samaritan)

"Which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?" (WEB, v.36)

What it appears to say: The parable redefines neighbor to include traditional enemies — Jews and Samaritans were mutually hostile — requiring active costly service across enemy lines.

Why it doesn't settle it: The parable addresses "who is my neighbor" not "who is my enemy." Some interpreters (Kenneth Bailey, Poet and Peasant, 1976) treat it as the clearest practical instantiation of enemy-love. Others (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 1996) read it as a challenge to ethnic and religious exclusion, not a direct address to the enemy-love question as framed in Matthew 5.

The Core Tension

The deepest fault line is whether Matthew 5's enemy-love ethic functions as an absolute governing norm for all human conduct — including political, military, and judicial action — or whether it operates exclusively in the register of personal, interpersonal relations while other norms govern the public order.

This cannot be settled exegetically because it is a hermeneutical question about the genre and scope of the Sermon on the Mount. Those who read the Sermon as a new social order constituting the church (John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 1983) find the personal/political split incoherent: Jesus addressed the whole person who lives in the whole world. Those who read the Sermon as describing the eschatological ideal or inner disposition of the regenerate individual (Luther's two-kingdoms doctrine, Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism) find the Anabaptist reading politically irresponsible and exegetically implausible. Each hermeneutical framework generates a different set of permissible and impermissible applications, selects different passages as controlling, and neutralizes different counter-passages. No additional data resolves the underlying genre question.

Competing Positions

Position 1: Absolute Nonresistance

  • Claim: The commands to love enemies and not resist evil are unconditional prohibitions on all counter-force — physical, military, and judicial — with no exceptions for state actors or soldiers.
  • Key proponents: Menno Simons, The Complete Works of Menno Simons (1544); Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894); John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1972).
  • Key passages used: Matthew 5:38–39, Matthew 5:43–44, Luke 6:27–28, Romans 12:19–20.
  • What it must downplay: Romans 13:1–7, which describes governing authorities as God's servants bearing the sword; Psalm 137's imprecatory prayers; Old Testament holy war narratives, which are read as either pre-Christian or typological.
  • Strongest objection: Reinhold Niebuhr (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932) argues that absolute nonresistance abandons the neighbor who is being harmed by the enemy to the violence of the aggressor, making it a form of moral irresponsibility disguised as purity.

Position 2: Just War with Enemy-Love as Interior Posture

  • Claim: Soldiers and magistrates can wage lethal war while maintaining an interior disposition of love toward the enemy; the prohibition on vengeance governs the heart, not the body.
  • Key proponents: Augustine, City of God (415); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, Q.40; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (1977); United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace (1983).
  • Key passages used: Romans 12:19–20 (personal non-vengeance) in conjunction with Romans 13:4 (sword of government), Luke 3:14 (Jesus not commanding soldiers to abandon military service).
  • What it must downplay: Matthew 5:38–39's apparent prohibition on resistance; the structural unity of Romans 12–13 that may not support the personal/political split; the historical evidence that early Christians universally refused military service for the first two centuries.
  • Strongest objection: John Howard Yoder (When War Is Unjust, 1984) argues that just war criteria have never been rigorously applied to refuse a war a Christian government has wanted to fight, making just war theory a rationalization rather than a constraint.

Position 3: Transformative Nonviolence

  • Claim: Jesus's commands describe active, creative non-violent resistance that refuses both passive submission and counter-violence; turning the cheek, giving the cloak, going the extra mile are subversive acts that expose injustice.
  • Key proponents: Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (1992); Glen Stassen, Just Peacemaking (1998); Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963).
  • Key passages used: Matthew 5:38–44, Luke 6:27–28, Romans 12:19–20; the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) as a model.
  • What it must downplay: The imprecatory psalms as morally normative; Old Testament warfare texts; Romans 13's sword language, which it tends to read as descriptive rather than prescriptive.
  • Strongest objection: Reinhold Niebuhr (Christian Realism and Political Problems, 1953) argued that nonviolent resistance still coerces and still depends on the opponent's capacity for shame, making it a form of power politics rather than a third way beyond violence.

Position 4: Two-Kingdoms Doctrine

  • Claim: Enemy-love governs the Christian in the spiritual kingdom (personal relationships, church life); in the temporal kingdom (state, war, law), the Christian acts as a public official under different norms and may use coercive force.
  • Key proponents: Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523); Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932); Robert Benne, Ordinary Saints (1988).
  • Key passages used: Romans 13:1–7, Luke 3:14, Matthew 22:21 ("render unto Caesar"), Luke 22:36 (Jesus telling disciples to buy swords).
  • What it must downplay: The structural difficulty of one person holding two identities with contradictory norms; the New Testament's absence of a formal two-kingdoms framework; Jesus's political execution, which blurs the two kingdoms.
  • Strongest objection: Stanley Hauerwas (The Peaceable Kingdom, 1983) argues that two-kingdoms doctrine enabled German Lutheran churches to offer religious legitimation to the Nazi state, exposing the theological bankruptcy of the personal/political split when the political sphere commands absolute loyalty.

Position 5: Covenantal Contextualism

  • Claim: Enemy-love commands are calibrated to different covenant contexts — what is commanded of Israel as a nation, of disciples personally, and of the church as a community differs; no single text governs all situations.
  • Key proponents: Christopher Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (2004); Gordon Wenham, Story as Torah (2000); D.A. Carson, The Sermon on the Mount (1978).
  • Key passages used: Psalm 137 (covenantal imprecation), Deuteronomy 20 (holy war laws), Matthew 5:43–44, Romans 12:19–20.
  • What it must downplay: The New Testament's apparent erasure of ethnic and national categories (Galatians 3:28); the difficulty of applying Old Testament covenantal distinctions to a global, multi-ethnic church with no territorial homeland.
  • Strongest objection: John Howard Yoder argues that covenantal contextualism grants each tradition's preferred social arrangement a covenantal warrant, making the framework functionally permissive of whatever Christians already want to do.

Tradition Profiles

Roman Catholic

  • Official position: Catechism of the Catholic Church §2302–2317 affirms the just war tradition rooted in Augustine and Aquinas; §2303 explicitly states "the deliberate hatred of a neighbor is gravely sinful," including enemies. Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II, 1965) §78 calls on Christians to work for peace and prays for "the courage to practice nonviolence."
  • Internal debate: The Challenge of Peace (1983, U.S. Bishops) acknowledged pacifism as a legitimate Christian vocation alongside just war, creating official space for both positions. Catholic just war thinkers (George Weigel, Tranquillitas Ordinis, 1987) debate whether the current CCC framework permits or implicitly forbids preemptive war.
  • Pastoral practice: Catholic moral theology distinguishes between formal cooperation in evil (forbidden) and material cooperation (sometimes permitted), allowing Catholic soldiers to participate in wars judged just by legitimate authority. Parish-level teaching on enemy-love focuses heavily on intercessory prayer rather than social action.

Reformed/Calvinist

  • Official position: Westminster Confession of Faith XXIII affirms the lawfulness of Christian engagement in "lawful wars," citing magistrates' authority. The Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 105–107 (on the sixth commandment) forbids murder but permits killing in self-defense and just war.
  • Internal debate: Neo-Calvinist strands (Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 1898) treat spheres of society (state, church, family) as having distinct norms, reinforcing the two-kingdoms logic. Karl Barth (Church Dogmatics III/4) introduced significant resistance to this, arguing that the Nazi experience demonstrated the danger of granting the state autonomous moral authority.
  • Pastoral practice: Reformed churches typically support military chaplaincy and encourage members in military service. Congregations with Dutch or Scottish Presbyterian heritage frequently identify national security as a legitimate application of the sixth commandment's positive duty to protect life.

Eastern Orthodox

  • Official position: No single binding document. The Byzantine tradition developed a rite of purification for soldiers who had killed in war — a sign that killing, even in just war, incurred ritual pollution. George Alexandrou's review of canons notes that Canon 13 of Basil of Caesarea (c. 374) recommended three years' exclusion from communion for soldiers who killed in battle.
  • Internal debate: Modern Orthodox social ethics (Stanley Harakas, Living the Faith, 1992) maintains the tradition's ambivalence toward war — neither endorsing pacifism nor celebrating just war. Russian Orthodox engagement with Russian military nationalism has created sharp disagreement among Orthodox theologians since 2022.
  • Pastoral practice: The Divine Liturgy includes prayer for enemies. Confessors vary widely on whether military service requires penance; in practice, few contemporary Orthodox priests apply Basil's canons rigorously.

Anabaptist/Mennonite

  • Official position: The Schleitheim Confession (1527), Article VI, rejects the sword entirely as "outside the perfection of Christ." The Dordrecht Confession (1632) repeats the prohibition. Mennonite Church USA's A Declaration on Peace (1991) explicitly roots nonresistance in Matthew 5 and the life of Jesus.
  • Internal debate: Contemporary Mennonite ethicists (Ted Grimsrud, Proclaim Peace, 1997; J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 2001) debate whether classic nonresistance (bearing suffering passively) should be supplemented by transformative nonviolence (active resistance). The distinction matters pastorally for survivors of domestic violence and for Christians living under authoritarian regimes.
  • Pastoral practice: Mennonite communities maintain historic conscientious objector status. Service organizations (Mennonite Central Committee) operationalize enemy-love through relief work in conflict zones, including work among populations at war with nations where Mennonites reside.

Evangelical/Non-Denominational

  • Official position: No binding confession; authority rests in pastoral teaching. The National Association of Evangelicals has not issued a binding position on enemy-love ethics. Individual figures dominate: Wayne Grudem (Politics According to the Bible, 2010) defends just war; Greg Boyd (The Myth of a Christian Nation, 2005) argues the church's identity as a peace-making community is incompatible with baptizing national military projects.
  • Internal debate: The Boyd/Grudem divide represents a genuine theological split, not simply a political one. Both cite New Testament texts. Both claim the Reformation tradition. The debate has intensified with the rise of Christian nationalism, which critics including Russell Moore (Onward, 2015) argue has collapsed the distinction between the Kingdom of God and national interest.
  • Pastoral practice: Most evangelical churches observe Veterans Day with appreciation for military service. Sermons on Matthew 5:43–44 typically apply enemy-love to personal relationships (forgiving difficult coworkers, praying for political opponents) without addressing military ethics.

Historical Timeline

Early Church (1st–3rd century)

The consensus in pre-Constantinian Christianity was categorical: Christians did not serve in the Roman military. Tertullian (On the Crown, c. 211) and Origen (Against Celsus, c. 248) both explicitly refused military service on the grounds of Jesus's commands and the prohibition on shedding blood. The Apostolic Tradition (attributed to Hippolytus, c. 215) listed soldiers among those whose profession required conversion away from their trade. This does not settle whether the refusal was based on Matthew 5's enemy-love commands, on the obligation to swear loyalty to a pagan emperor, or on idolatrous military ceremonies — the reasons overlap in the sources — but the practice was consistent. This historical data is central to the Anabaptist argument that just war theology was a post-Constantinian accommodation rather than an original Christian position.

The Constantinian Settlement (4th–5th century)

Constantine's adoption of Christianity (313 CE) and Theodosius's declaration of Christianity as the state religion (380 CE) created a situation in which the church's enemy was increasingly the emperor's enemy. Ambrose of Milan (On the Duties of the Clergy, c. 391) adapted Cicero's just war framework into Christian ethics. Augustine (City of God, 415) systematized the justification: the state is a legitimate instrument of temporal order, war can be just, and the Christian soldier can kill out of love for the social order — including, paradoxically, out of love for the enemy's soul, which unjust aggressors endanger. This synthesis created the dominant tradition that shaped Catholic and later Reformed ethics for fifteen centuries. Roland Bainton (Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, 1960) documents the shift as a genuine theological discontinuity, not a development of earlier tradition.

The Reformation and Radical Reformation (16th century)

Luther's two-kingdoms doctrine (1523) formalized the personal/political split: the Christian obeys Matthew 5 in the inner spiritual kingdom and obeys the magistrate's sword in the outer temporal kingdom. This created Lutheran political quietism — deference to the state — that would generate bitter controversy in the 20th century. Simultaneously, the Anabaptists (Schleitheim, 1527) rejected Luther's split as incoherent, arguing that Matthew 5 addressed the whole person in the whole world and that Luther's framework simply baptized conventional political power. The Lutheran/Anabaptist split on this question has never been resolved and underlies most contemporary debates about Christians in military service.

20th-Century Crisis and Reconstruction (1914–present)

World War I exposed the bankruptcy of chaplain-blessed nationalisms in which Christian nations slaughtered one another with full clerical approval. Karl Barth's Römerbrief (1919) — the "bomb in the theologians' playground" — began a reassessment of the theological legitimacy of state power. World War II intensified this: the Holocaust was carried out by a nation that was formally Christian; Dietrich Bonhoeffer participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler, complicating both pacifist and just war positions. The Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes, 1965) formally endorsed conscientious objection as legitimate for Catholics. The American civil rights movement deployed Matthew 5's enemy-love as a political strategy, with Martin Luther King Jr. (Strength to Love, 1963) arguing — against Niebuhr — that nonviolent enemy-love was politically effective as well as spiritually required. These developments have not produced consensus but have permanently expanded the range of positions considered theologically serious.

Common Misreadings

Misreading 1: "Love your enemies means you can't defend yourself."

The command in Matthew 5:43–44 is addressed to disciples in the context of persecution and insult, not to civil authorities or individuals in situations of immediate lethal threat. Just war thinkers from Augustine through the CCC have consistently maintained that self-defense is a distinct question from enemy-love, governed by Romans 13 and natural law reasoning about the protection of innocent life. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica II-II, Q.64, Art.7) explicitly permits killing in self-defense under the principle of double effect. The misreading conflates Matthew 5's address to the persecuted disciple with questions of imminent personal threat, a category Jesus does not address in the Sermon on the Mount.

Misreading 2: "The imprecatory psalms prove God approves of hating enemies."

Citing Psalm 109 or Psalm 137 as authorization for calling down harm on personal enemies misreads both genre and speaker. Psalms are prayers addressed to God, not prescriptions for believers. C.S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms, 1958) argued that the psalms' rage is morally honest but not morally exemplary — they show where humans are, not where they should be. More formally, the New Testament's explicit command in Romans 12:14 ("Bless those who persecute you; bless and don't curse") rules out treating imprecatory psalms as a positive norm for Christian conduct. Scholars including Tremper Longman III (Psalms, TOTC, 2014) note that the curses are directed at covenant enemies of God's people, not at personal adversaries, and function within the covenant lawsuit genre.

Misreading 3: "Enemy-love is the same as conflict avoidance."

Matthew 5:43–44 and Luke 6:27–28 prescribe active engagement — "do good to those who hate you," "bless those who curse you" — not passivity or withdrawal from conflict. Walter Wink (Engaging the Powers, 1992) demonstrated that each of the concrete examples in Matthew 5:38–41 (turning the cheek, giving the cloak, going the extra mile) involves an active, socially subversive response, not compliance or avoidance. The misreading is pastorally common: abuse victims are counseled to "love their enemies" as justification for remaining in dangerous situations, when the text does not require proximity to or silence about the enemy's harmful actions.

Open Questions

  1. Does Matthew 5:43–44's command apply to institutional actors — governments, corporations, armies — or only to individuals, and does the text itself provide any basis for that distinction?
  2. Can a nation claim to love an enemy it is simultaneously bombing, and if not, does the incoherence discredit the just war framework or merely refine it?
  3. Does Luke 23:34 — Jesus praying for his executioners' forgiveness while being killed — model enemy-love as compatible with the death penalty, or does it model enemy-love as incompatible with it?
  4. If imprecatory psalms are canonical and addressed to God, under what conditions, if any, may a Christian pray them today — and against whom?
  5. Does "enemy" in first-century Palestinian context denote personal adversaries, Roman occupiers, or both — and does the distinction change what the commands require?
  6. Is Reinhold Niebuhr correct that Matthew 5's enemy-love ethic is an "impossible ideal" that functions to expose human sinfulness rather than provide a political program, or does that reading evacuate the text of its direct practical claim?
  7. How should Christians navigate situations where loving an enemy (providing food, medical care, intelligence) would directly harm innocent third parties whom the enemy is targeting?

Passages analyzed above

  • Luke 6:27–28 — Fourfold enemy-love command; used by transformative nonviolence position

Tension-creating parallels

Frequently cited but actually irrelevant

  • John 15:13 — "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" — commonly cited to justify military service in defense of others; the passage describes Jesus's self-sacrifice for disciples, not a warrant for combat