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Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Are Christians required to forgive and even love their enemies in order to be saved? As you might expect, Christians are actually divided on this topic, but I’d argue the biblical witness is quite clear. Now, the context for this coming up, of course, is that 60 Minutes Roth Douthat recently asked the President of the United States, Donald Trump, about it.
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But I think facts come through jokes. You said, quote, I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. Let’s say you pass away. You’re entering the next life. And all you have to do to enter paradise is feel love and forgiveness for James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, anyone who you have expressed hate for over the years. Do you think you can do it? I don’t actually love the precise way that Douthat words this question, because he talks about feeling love and forgiveness, but love and forgiveness aren’t feelings.
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And I get we often use the terms in that sense, particularly talking about liking or disliking something. I did it a few moments ago when I said I didn’t love the wording of the question.
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But biblically, when Jesus talks about loving our neighbors or even loving our enemies, he means something different than that, something much more than a feeling.
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This is so important to get right, because a lot of people right now hold on to unnecessary shame, believing that they’re incapable of loving the people who hurt them. When the truth is just that they love them, but they still feel hurt or afraid or even disgusted by them.
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And that makes sense. There are people in our lives who really do hurt us, who really do act in ways that they act like our enemies.
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And Jesus doesn’t deny this. He acknowledges it. When he commands in Matthew 5, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He doesn’t say anything about our feelings.
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He talks about our concrete actions, if you prefer, our work, our works. First, first, we’re to pray for them. They might still be our enemies after that, but they’re enemies that we’re now actively trying to help.
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And similarly with love, when he says to love them, the best definition of love there is to wish the good of the other, or to will the good of the other. So again, there’s only so much that you can do with your feelings. Classically, feelings and emotions are lumped under the category of passions, passions, because they are our passive responses to things. Something happens and you feel a certain way about it. What matters here is not our passions, but our actions. Not the places we are passive and receptive, but the places where we’re active, when we’re choosing something.
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Now, having said all that, even with a better biblical understanding of love, President Trump does seem to have gone out of his way to say, no, he does not will the good for his enemies.
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He does not love his enemies. He simply cannot or will not do what Jesus is telling him to do. In fact, this is one of the differences that he described between himself and Charlie Kirk.
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He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. So I’m glad that Douthat pressed the question.
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I’m glad that he quoted Trump’s online back to him, the thing that caused him to ask the question in the first place. Because the president said that Charlie Kirk did the Christian thing and then said that he himself wouldn’t or couldn’t do the Christian thing.
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So was that just Trump speaking off the cuff in the heat of the moment?
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Or is he actually announcing to the world that no, he doesn’t love his enemies in the way scripture commands?
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Well, here’s how the president responds. Well, then I wouldn’t be real, would I? I mean, if I said to you, sure, the easy answer to that, oh, yes, I could forgive. No, I don’t think it’s an easy question at all.
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I want them to be extremely dishonest people, very bad people, very bad for our country. I love our country far more than I can love people and people like that. Is the answer no? The answer is no. I want to be honest. Before the judgment throne of God. Before the judgment.
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No, I think there were very bad people. And I dislike, I can use the word hate.
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I do hate some of my enemies. I think they’ve been terrible. Look what they put me through, the weaponization. I got indicted. I got impeached. Mr. President, you have had the most charmed and remarkable and remarkable life of any American in my entire lifetime. And you are telling me you couldn’t find it in your heart to forgive some of your enemies? After all that’s been given to you? I mean, it’s such an easy answer. All I have to do is say, yes, I can.
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Again, I don’t think it’s an easy answer. That’s why I asked you.
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Can I be honest? I probably cannot do that now. Because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will. The answer actually still remains a little ambiguous. He says he can’t do it now, but then he says he hates him and he always will.
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Now, as a Christian, that kind of answer should be very alarming. Jesus says, do this if you want to go to heaven.
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And the most powerful secular leader on earth says, nope, and I never will do it. But despite this, Trump claims that nevertheless, in theory, he is going to go to heaven when he dies because he claims to be a religious person. Well, I hope I missed. No, I mean to you. No, but I really missed. I hope I missed. I don’t know. I understand. I mean to you. I think I’ve done a good job. What do you think happens to Donald Trump when you die? Well, again. Not your memory, yourself. You mean where I go? Exactly. Well, I’m a religious person, so in theory I go to heaven. Do you think you’re going to heaven? I hope so. I don’t want to go to hell.
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Once again, the answer that the president can refuse to forgive his enemies, but he’s still going to go to heaven, despite Jesus’ seemingly clear words to the contrary, has divided Christians, particularly it has divided Protestants. Many of them have rightly pointed out that the president is speaking directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus.
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But many Trump-supporting evangelicals have come to his defense, claimed that actually, Donald Trump doesn’t even need to forgive his enemies in order to be saved, and that Roth thought that just thinks that he does because he doesn’t get it, because he’s a convert to Catholicism. For example, you’ve got tweets like, quote, Or even, quote, Nancy Pelosi is a reprobate.
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There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with Trump hating her.
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Additionally, salvation is by faith alone in Christ, not by forgiving enemies, end quote.
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Now, it might be tempting to assume that I’ve just cherry-picked some people who put their politics above their relationship with Christ, or that I’m choosing just the most radical fringe of online Protestants. But I think you’ll find, in fact, that this points to a deeper and longer-lasting problem within Protestantism that has been present from the very beginning.
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What do we make of Jesus’ seeming command that we have to do certain things, like forgiving others, if we want to be saved? Now, recall that the heart of the Reformation, the doctrine that Martin Luther himself claimed was the article upon which the church rose or fell, is the doctrine sometimes called sola fide, the idea that justification, or even that salvation, is by faith and faith alone.
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And different Protestants hold the different versions of that doctrine.
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Many of them might use the same term, sola fide, but mean different things by it.
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Some Protestants believe you literally cannot lose your salvation, that if Donald Trump, or for that matter, Nancy Pelosi, ever believed in Jesus, then no matter what they did for the rest of their life, their ticket is punched.
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Other Protestants are going to say, no, that is a distortion of the traditional doctrine. Your salvation can be lost, for example, if you don’t do the things that God commands you to do. And in the middle are Protestants who say, well, no, you can lose your salvation by losing your faith, but you’re not going to go to hell based upon any works that you do, or even works that you don’t do. Now, I want to be fair. I can understand why Protestants are confused. Because on the one hand, scripture speaks of those who commit certain sins not inheriting the kingdom of heaven. But on the other hand, it also speaks about how, by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.
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Now, St. Paul wrote both of those things, so how do we make sense of them?
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Well, for many Christians, it’s honestly easier to focus on one half of the biblical evidence and kind of wave the other half away. But with forgiving our enemies, I think the wave away gets really hard there. Because every day that we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that the Father will forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
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Now, that sure sounds like we’re asking to be forgiven only if we forgive others. And in fact, Jesus says that this is in fact exactly what it means. Saying, quote, If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you.
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But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. So what happens to us if we die in our sins? We die in our trespasses?
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Well, we go to hell for all eternity. And this is hardly the only time that Jesus spoke in this way. In Matthew 5, he says, You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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Now, you might be wondering, where in the Old Testament did God command us to hate our enemies?
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Well, nowhere. Jesus isn’t actually quoting a real biblical teaching.
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He’s instead acknowledging that then, as now, people purporting to be believers will distort God’s actual teaching on this subject.
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And Jesus sets these Pharisees straight, saying, But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.
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So again, our sonship in heaven appears to be conditioned upon our willingness to pray for our enemies.
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And in fact, this appears to be a true conditional because Jesus has explicitly said both, If you do this, you will be forgiven.
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But he’s also said, If you don’t do this, you won’t be forgiven. So he’s not giving us an unreachable ideal that isn’t really necessary for salvation. He’s saying, we must do it or else we are not going to be able to enter into the kingdom. Yet from the very beginning of Protestantism, you have Protestants who recognize that this sure looks like we have to do something in order to be saved.
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Remember, love is an action, not just a feeling. And praying for others and forgiving them, those are certainly works, even hard works. So Martin Luther insisted that actually, Jesus doesn’t mean what he seems to be saying in Matthew 6. Instead, the Father forgives our trespasses without and even before our prayer. So according to him, we just pray the Our Father so that we may recognize and accept such forgiveness.
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So we’re forgiven either way. We just want to feel the forgiveness. Well, likewise, when Jesus says that if we don’t forgive, we won’t be forgiven, Luther once again says, this is actually just for our consolation and our assurance.
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Not that it has anything to do with causing us to be forgiven. And Luther wasn’t alone here. His fellow reformer, John Calvin, seems to go even further. He explicitly says that the forgiveness which we ask that God would give us does not depend on the forgiveness which we grant to others.
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So you have, on the one hand, Jesus explicitly saying, it does, and John Calvin saying, no, it doesn’t.
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And this is actually something of a common Protestant explanation and interpretation of biblical passage in which Jesus or the apostles talk about the necessity of some kind of work for salvation. they’ll say, they’ll say, well, it’s not that the works in any way contribute to your salvation.
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It’s that if you’re saved, you’re just automatically going to do those works. In Calvin’s words, we just do them to ratify the confidence in our own forgiveness.
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And look, I want to steel man the case here. Sometimes, truly, cause and effect can be a little confusing in the biblical evidence.
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Do we love Jesus because he’s forgiven us or does he forgive us because we love him?
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Scripture seems to point in both directions. So how do we know that Jesus didn’t just mean only forgiven people are going to forgive their enemies.
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So if you don’t do it, that means you were never saved in the first place. And if you do forgive your enemies, that means you’re already saved entirely apart from forgiveness. So you can relax. Well, fortunately, Jesus gives us a parable that neatly addresses the sequence of cause and effect.
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This is a parable of the unforgiving servant from Matthew chapter 18. And I hope you’ll take a few moments after watching this to read Jesus’ words for yourself. Because there, he compares the kingdom to a king who is settling his accounts.
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And he comes to a man who owes an enormous sum of money, 10,000 talents. Now, it’s always hard to convert ancient currencies. I’ve seen estimates from 60 million denarii to even 100 million denarii. And a denarius is roughly what a common laborer made in one day. So whatever the exact number is, just recognize we’re talking about an absurdly large number.
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Now, the servant can seemingly never pay this debt off. And so he pleads for mercy. And you know what? The king gratuitously forgives him. He forgives him the whole entire debt. Verse 27 says, Out of pity for him, the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. So that sounds like a point for the Protestant view. The lord does free us and forgive us freely without us doing anything to earn it. Salvation and forgiveness, these are free gifts. But you know what? The parable doesn’t stop there. Because that forgiven servant now goes to one of his fellow servants who owes a measly 10 denarii.
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Remember, that’s 10 compared to tens of millions.
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Now, if Calvin and Luther are right, this man who’s just been forgiven is going to show the fruits of that forgiveness by naturally forgiving his neighbor. If you’re saved, good works are going to happen seemingly automatically. They’re just going to flow from the regenerate heart. And they’re going to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you are in fact a righteous person.
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But of course, that’s not what happens in the parable at all.
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Rather, the already forgiven servant refuses to forgive his brother, demanding, pay what you owe. And I would suggest two things.
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One, we can see in real life Christians who behave this way, who are not willing or seemingly not able to forgive. And two, Jesus doesn’t say, oh, I guess he was never forgiven in the first place.
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What happens instead? When the Lord hears of the unmercifulness of the first servant, he withdraws his forgiveness. The Lord giveth and now the Lord taketh away. Now, in case we missed the point of the story, that this could happen even to us, Jesus spells it out for us explicitly, saying, saying, So, we can see both that he was truly forgiven and that he really lost that forgiveness because if you refuse to love your enemies, if you refuse to forgive your enemies, Jesus is quite clear that he’s going to withdraw that forgiveness from you. Now, I know there are probably some Protestants watching this right now who think that’s unfair.
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If God gives it to us as a free gift, how can he possibly take it away just because we misuse that gift?
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But I think if you think for even a moment about a real-life gift in a real-life family, you’ll immediately understand the point.
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If I give my small children a special treat, a toy or a piece of candy, and they then flaunt it over their siblings, any good father is going to take that gift right back.
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Or later, if you buy a car for your teenager, your teenager drives drunk in it, any good parent is going to take that gift away.
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And our Father in Heaven behaves in precisely the same way. But in none of these examples would we say the gift is merited.
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You haven’t earned a car just because you drive sober. And if you think that’s how salvation works, that God isn’t allowed to have conditions to the gifts that he gives, then again, I’d urge you to read Matthew 18 in its entirety. So three final things in closing.
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First, one of the dangers here in this distortion of the free gift of salvation is that there really are some evangelicals, now admittedly, here I do mean a fringe, who think that this means we are saved even if we don’t really love Jesus.
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Jonathan Shelley, the popular online pastor who calls himself banned pastor, recently called in and debated Noah from Jesus and whatnot. And Noah asked him about this directly. But yes, it is simple faith in the gospel that saves you. Okay, do you have to love Jesus? If by love you mean follow all the commandments, then no. No, no, no, do you have to love him? I mean, he said, if you love me, keep my commandments. So if we, if you use the definition the Bible says, then no, you don’t have to love him fully.
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You don’t, you don’t have to love Jesus to go to heaven. Um, no, you don’t have to fully love him.
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In contrast, St.
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Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am, I am nothing. He doesn’t say he has everything he needs because simple faith in the gospel is enough.
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As James, as James reminds us, even the demons believe that God is one and they shudder. Simple belief isn’t enough. Second, second, pray for Donald Trump and love him.
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And pray for Nancy Pelosi or whoever you might consider your own personal enemy. Pray for them. Ask for their good from God.
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And pray as if your salvation depends upon it because according to Jesus, it does. It does. Finally, if you want more on these surprising teachings that Jesus gives us in the Lord’s Prayer, I urge you to check out this episode I did a few years ago that looks not only at forgiveness but three other surprising aspects of this prayer.
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For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.