Platitude or Command?

What this is about

The author of this site heard a sermon in which these three sentences were held up to ridicule. He gives the remarks from memory, as a paraphrase, and names no one. The preacher’s point, as he heard it, was that it is foolish to say such things without “secondary analysis”: careful thought about what they mean and how they apply.

The author’s thesis is that mocking these words as platitudes, on the strength of Proverbs 15:2, is out of step with Scripture and with the historic Church, which have always treated them as central commands of Christ. He also asked that one possibility be weighed fairly: that the preacher was aiming at a real misuse of these words.

The short answer

Whose words, and what the proverb says

Whose words? A platitude is usually a folk saying: nobody’s in particular, and worn smooth. These are not. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you” is Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:44). “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” is from Leviticus 19:18, and Jesus says that on it and the command to love God “hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:40). Paul calls love “the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10); James calls it “the royal law” (James 2:8).

Do the words become platitudes by being repeated? C. S. Lewis, in a wartime broadcast, gave the best answer: “Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” Then it becomes, in his phrase, “this terrible duty.” The words sound easy only to someone who is not, right now, trying to keep them.

What does Proverbs 15:2 say? In the Authorised Version: “The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright: but the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness.” In Hebrew the wise tongue “makes knowledge good”; the fool’s mouth “gushes” folly. The contrast is between handling truth well and pouring out what is foolish. The verse does not say that knowledge becomes foolish when it is said plainly. To use it against “love your enemies,” you would have to treat “love your enemies” as folly.

Read the verse in its chapter. Proverbs 15 is mostly about speech: “A soft answer turneth away wrath” (15:1); “A wholesome tongue is a tree of life” (15:4); “a word spoken in due season, how good is it!” (15:23); “The heart of the righteous studieth to answer” (15:28). And Proverbs has its own name for the mocker: the “scorner,” who “loveth not one that reproveth him” (15:12).

Proverbs teaches the same thing. “If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat” (25:21). “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth” (24:17). “Say not, I will do so to him as he hath done to me” (24:29). “Love covereth all sins” (10:12). “It is his glory to pass over a transgression” (19:11). The book cannot be used to dismiss what it plainly teaches.

Scripture, or folk wisdom?

Six sayings, all heard in churches. Which are in the Bible, and which are not?

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Jesus and the people who wanted a qualification

The lawyer. A lawyer summed up the Law as love of God and neighbour, and Jesus agreed. “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). He wanted a boundary. Jesus told him about a Samaritan, from a people the lawyer’s people despised, who stopped for a wounded man. Then he turned the question round: which of them “was neighbour unto him”? “Go, and do thou likewise.”

Peter. “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?” Jesus: “Until seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22), followed by the story of a servant forgiven a vast debt who would not forgive a small one.

The added clause. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus quotes something his hearers had been taught: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy” (Matthew 5:43). The second half is not in the Law. The Law in fact says to return your enemy’s straying ox (Exodus 23:4). Jesus removes the added clause: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies.”

Some qualifications explain how to obey: forgiving someone is not the same as trusting them again; it does not mean staying silent about wrong; it does not abolish the courts. Others shrink the command: only fellow believers; only those who have earned it; in your heart, but without doing them any good. The test is simple: does the qualification reduce what love asks of me toward the person who wronged me?

Jesus’ own definition of the fool. The Sermon on the Mount, which says “love your enemies,” ends with two builders. The wise man “heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them.” The foolish man hears them “and doeth them not” (Matthew 7:24–27). On Jesus’ definition, the fool is not the one who says “love your enemies” too simply. It is the one who hears it and does not do it.

What the Church did with these words

The early Church put them first. The Didache, a manual for new Christians from around the end of the first century, begins its moral teaching: “Bless those who curse you, and pray for your enemies … love those who hate you, and you shall not have an enemy” (1.3). Writers of the second century offered these words to emperors as the mark of a Christian. Athenagoras, about 177, pointed to “uneducated persons, and artisans, and old women” who could not argue for the faith but who, “when struck, they do not strike again.” Tertullian, about 212, contrasted the command with “the commonplace goodness of the world”: “it is peculiar to Christians alone to love those that hate them.”

Augustine made love the rule for reading. Anyone whose reading of Scripture “does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought” (On Christian Doctrine I.36.40). Love is the measure of any interpretation, not the thing to be measured by one.

The Church did plenty of “secondary analysis.” Chrysostom, around 390, broke “love your enemies” into nine steps, from not striking first to praying for the enemy. Gregory the Great, around 590, taught that the same truth must be said differently to different people. Aquinas worked out exactly what is required of every Christian. Luther, in 1523, drew the line that protects victims: suffer injustice to yourself, but “tolerate no injustice toward your neighbor.” Calvin said to look not at what people deserve but at “the image of God” in them. Every one of them asked how to obey. None asked whether.

The words were said at the worst moments. Stephen, being stoned: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:60). James, leader of the Jerusalem church, killed around 62: “forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The martyrs of Lyons in 177 “prayed for those who had inflicted cruelties upon them.” A platitude costs nothing. These words cost everything.

Every tradition prays them. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” It is the only line of the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus stopped to explain (Matthew 6:14–15). A congregation taught that “people should forgive” is a fool’s sentence is then asked to say it, plainly, together.

Tone, and the case for the other side

Tone. Scripture asks for speech that is “good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers” (Ephesians 4:29), and for truth spoken “in love” (4:15). Scripture does use mockery: Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, and Jesus called hypocrites “blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” But its mockery is aimed at idols and at people who say and do not. It never mocks a command of God. And ridicule sticks. A congregation is likely to remember which sentences were laughed at long after it has forgotten the careful point behind them.

The other side is strong, and the page grants it. Proverbs itself warns that a saying can wound in the wrong mouth: “As a thorn goeth up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a parable in the mouth of fools” (26:9). Singing songs to a heavy heart is like “vinegar upon nitre” (25:20). Job’s friends said many true things and God rebuked them (Job 42:7). James mocks the man who says “be ye warmed and filled” and gives nothing (2:16). And “just forgive” has been used to silence victims of abuse, protect wrongdoers and skip repentance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called that “cheap grace”: “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.” Forgiveness is not the same as trust, or reconciliation, or escaping the law.

But look at what all of this is about. Every point is a fault in the speaker: the drunkard, the friends, the talker who does nothing, the person who uses “forgive” as a weapon. None is a fault in the words “love your enemies.” Scripture’s cure is always wise use: the right moment, deeds, and justice alongside forgiveness. A preacher who named those misuses would have made the point well, without mocking the words.

Misuse, or legitimate use?

Six situations, all made up by this page. Is each a misuse of the command, or a legitimate use of it?

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What does this prove?

It is easy to claim too much for this argument, and easy to dismiss it too quickly. Six claims. Does the argument show each one?

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Check it yourself

Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.

1. 1. Read Proverbs 15. Mark every verse about speech. Then read verse 2 again.
2. 2. Read Matthew 5:38–48 and 7:24–27. Who does Jesus call wise, and who foolish?
3. 3. Read Luke 10:25–37 and Matthew 18:21–35. What did each questioner ask for, and what was he given?
4. 4. Read Proverbs 25:21–22 and Romans 12:14–21. Where did Paul get his teaching on enemies?
5. 5. One name. Do this one. Think of one person who has wronged you and whom you have not forgiven. Read Matthew 5:44 with that person in mind, then pray the Lord’s Prayer. Does it still sound like a platitude?