Some thoughts (not my own) on loving your enemy and 'Thou shalt not kill'

I’m reading “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis (again) and as usual I find that his being one of the leading Christian thinkers of his time does not make him any less a leading Christian thinker of our time, except for being dead now.

What I mean is, the points he brings up are still absolutely relevant and important today as much as they were fifty years ago.

Specifically I was reading the chapter on Forgiveness, which talks about loving our enemies and the command not to kill and I found it pretty relevant today, so I’m posting a few excerpts from it and adding a few words of my own.

Lewis points out that when we hear the command “Love your enemy as yourself,” we assume, maybe unconsciously that we are supposed to try and think our enemies (which includes people we just don’t like) are nicer or more likeable people than they are, or try to generate feelings of affection for them, which is impossible.

But if we take the model of how to love our enemies from how we love ourselves, which is exactly what we’re told to do, it’s just not true. Most of us do think we are nice people (or enlightened, or humble, there are lots of things we credit ourselves with), sometimes, but we never think it of ourselves always. We are often extremely disappointed by our own behavior and look at some of our past actions with loathing and disgust. Often we don’t even enjoy our own company, but we go on loving ourselves nonetheless.

So the old phrase “hate the sin, not the sinner,” is very true. We are still allowed, even required to hate the things our enemies do. But we are required, just as we do with ourselves, to feel sorry for our enemies that they commit those sins and pray for their deliverance from them.

“Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery,” Lewis said. “We ought to hate them … but it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that a man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.”

A little later Lewis asks if loving your enemy means you shouldn’t punish him. Well, I love myself but don’t think I should be exempt from punishment for my sins. I would like to be exempt, but am smart enough to realize that punishment is absolutely necessary for my own sake.

“It is therefore, in my opinion,” said Lewis, “perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy … it is no good quoting ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew."

He went on to say, “War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect the 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.”

This is a pretty relevant issue in the world we live in today, where in the same town random people will come up and thank me for my service while others scream that I’m a baby killer and give me the finger, demonstrating their deep and abiding love of peace.

Of course this is his opinion. There are many Christians who don’t feel this way about it, but being both a Christian and a soldier, I have to throw my lot in with him.

Now of course someone might bring up the point that this is assuming the Iraqi soldiers we killed needed to be punished. There might even be some stupid enough to think I’m saying they ought to be punished for being Muslim.

But just like any war, the individual soldiers are not fighting to kill each other for personal or moral reasons. They may believe in their cause or they may be following orders. Very few (with the exception of Ward Churchill) will try to argue that Saddam Hussein had not committed acts that deserved punishment. Whether it was our place to do it is not for me to say.

But during the honest warfare (before the insurgents and the “win hearts and minds” campaign), the individual soldiers’ job was simply to kill the enemy before being killed by him. The same principle works on both sides.

If I’m shooting at a man, of course I don’t want to die, but I’m not going to hold it against him if he shoots back.

So there you have it.