Obligated to Our Enemies

We're Entangled With Others, Including the Others We'd Rather Not

This is the second installment in an ongoing series on the nature of moral obligations. If the first acknowledgment with obligations is that they begin from an entangled starting point, the corollary to this is that we will be entangled with both those for whom we have affinity and those we don’t.

We began our exploration in obligations not by examining where our obligations come from, or even what grounds our obligations, but from the acknowledgment that our duties come to us 1) in forms which we did not ask for, and 2) toward those we did not choose to be obligated to. We will get to what I take to be the foundational questions of where our obligations come from, but it’s important to begin with in the middle if only because that’s how our moral lives begin. At a basic level, it’s how we learn the moral life—in piecemeal, inductively, from the ground up through our families and elders—but in a theological sense, it’s true for more substantial reasons.

We begin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, not with a sense of the a priori of our moral lives, but having lost the beginning point; by this, he means that the world of Genesis 1-2 is lost to us, inaccessible as a starting point that we can reclaim or try to emulate in our world. We don’t have some clear vision of what exactly human communion means before the Fall, in some unvarnished sense, but know the world, he writes as those living after things have fallen apart. And accordingly, for Christians, our journey to God always occurs, he says, in the midst of our enemies.¹

It’s one thing for us to consider what we owe to those lives with whom we are natally entangled: our children, our spouses, our parents and immediate family. Those with whom our existence is caught up due to birth and subsequent nurture and care have been, since time immemorial, those to whom we owe more. For it is these who gave us our very existence, who nurtured us when we were incapable of caring for ourselves, and who gave us the language to understand the world, for better or worse. The 5th commandment, on honoring our parents, has been understood by Protestant Christians as indeed the basis for political authority: political rulers are owed an analogous deference to that of our parents because they are the ones who “birth” the common world in which we all live politically.

But the world which we share generates not just familiar relationships, but strange ones, relations to strangers. We’ll turn to them perhaps next week, but before considering the obligations we have to strangers—those we do not know—I want to consider a different category of persons that we do know: our enemies.