Love Your Enemies?

In this deleted scene from Collision, Christopher Hitchens derides Jesus’ command to love our enemies:

I’m not going to love them. You go love them if you want. Don’t love them on my behalf. I’ll get on with killing them, destroying them, erasing them. And you can love them. But the idea that you ought to love them is not a moral idea at all. It’s a wicked idea.

But as Douglas Wilson (his debate partner) notes in his comments on this outtake:

In the previous outtake from Collision, his complaint against God was that God treated his enemies in exactly the way that Christopher was insisting (now) that our enemies must be treated. In short, in the previous clip, how dare God send his enemies to hell? In this clip, how dare God interfere with our attempts to send them there?

Cornelius Van Til once used the illustration of a rebellious child who needs to sit on his father’s lap in order to slap him. In order to attack God, a rebel must pick some place to stand (which necessarily must be an attribute of God’s considered in isolation) in order to be able to be critical of another of God’s attributes. These two video clips provide a perfect illustration of the technique. In this clip, Christopher uses the doctrine of justice to attack God’s words concerning love. In the previous clip, sitting at the same table, he was using the reality of God’s love to attack God’s words concerning justice.

Comments

[Ralph Gehy]

I remember Hitchens saying the same thing at a panel debate as well. I thought the same thing you are saying now. Personally living with hate seems much more unhealthy than living with love. Hitchens makes a good point that it is an impossible requirement but Doug Wilson makes a better point which is pretty much paraphrasing what Jesus says, "All things are possible with God." I also love the way that Hitchens and his contemporaries will blast God for supposed genocide when he is clearly advocating a genocide of the Muslim people. Amazing how many supporters of guys like Hitchens convienently overlook these things. Thanks for the great post.

[Billy]

One of the great things about Truth is that it's consistent.

[Jim Pemberton]

There is no love without justice and there is no justice without love. The presence of sin in the world distorts our perception by establishing conflicting practical application by virtue of the same moral imperatives and we thereby must wrestle with such pseudo-dichotomies.

[Billy]

When God punishes evildoers is he being just? Is love the motivation?

[Trent]

Why is a human bing sked to love ememes wrong, and God not ignoring the fact that he has enemies evil?

Is that not a double standard?