Who Is My Enemy? A Book Excerpt

But the manner of retelling the story of the crucifixion in Scripture invites us to see ourselves among the guilty perpetrators. "For us, sinful and limited human beings, following in the footsteps of the Crucified means not only creating space in ourselves for others, but . . . making also space for their perspective on us and on them."6 If we take seriously the New Testament's insistence that we are all broken, all need a Great Physician, all are slaves to the "power of sin," then the principle of fallibility—that is, a deep awareness that I may be wrong and need to look for my part, for our part—inevitably follows.7

A second commitment that would lead us to the practice of double vision is simply the call to love our enemies. How can I possibly love one to whom I refuse to even listen? How can I possibly love one whose viewpoint or experience I refuse to grant even a hearing?

Double Vision at Ground Zero

My wife and I made our way to New York City on a recent September 11 to observe and pray. Saint Paul's Chapel sits just alongside the World Trade Center site and was a place of refuge for rescue workers and firefighters in the days of crisis surrounding the attacks. There I came across a small note, a thank-you note from a little girl for the tireless and self-sacrificing labor of the rescue workers and firefighters. She raised the question often heard in those days about the terrorist attackers: how could they do this to us? How could they do this?—this is an important question. But unfortunately this question often becomes dismissive rather than empathetic. What if we take that question as an authentic agenda of understanding? Really, how could our enemy see the world the way he or she does? What in their experience, in their presuppositions, in their vision, could contribute to the deeds or words or actions we find so unjust and horrid? And what might they see about us, from their perspective, that we might not see?

But the rhetoric we employ to express our outrage may shut ourselves off from the possibility of such questions. To call a certain number of nations the "axis of evil," for example, precludes asking such questions as these. No one wants to talk to or try to understand "evil." Moreover, even suggesting the practice of double vision might be construed as supporting evil. It should be obvious but must be said: this practice of self-examination in response to the evil done by another in no way removes accountability or responsibility for the wrongdoing of the other. This is not the point. Rather, the point is this: if we are even to begin to make space for the possibility of peacemaking or change, then we must first examine ourselves. This is, at one level, what Scripture means when it says, "Let judgment begin with the household of God," or when those in recovery speak of "keeping my side of the street clean."

Thus, double vision requires at least these two things: first, to see things as we see them, to do our best to articulate our understanding without apology or false humility, believing it to be genuinely true and not just "true for us." But second, believing as we do in enemy love, we seek to practice that enemy love through acts of empathy—an empathy that may not agree, approve, or necessarily even tolerate, but nonetheless seeks to understand. Some sort of practice like this, I suspect, is required to keep us from the bondage of bigotry. Perhaps for that reason alone, it is worth practicing. We may, in the process, learn more about ourselves than we learn about the one we call our enemy.

Double vision is one way of practicing common folk wisdom. "Don't criticize until you've walked a mile in the other person's shoes." But such wisdom requires a substantive level of moral maturity. It is a practice important not only in the moral growth of children, for example, but also in the character required to sustain marriages and other long-term relationships. If every argument is simply a resort to one spouse discussing the faults and failings of the other spouse, there can be little hope for reconciliation. A refusal to examine one's own failures—regardless of the wrong done by the other—is typically judged to be a basic character flaw. It seems to me that such a character flaw must be addressed if Christians are to get very far in seeking to understand Muslims. And vice versa.

"You Are Doing the Very Same Things"

Note too this more general biblical observation: the apostle Paul states that when one classifies oneself or one's own group as "righteous" and another as "unrighteous," one has thereby condemned oneself. In the first chapter of the letter to the Romans, Paul categorizes all sorts of wicked behavior. A reader might be whipped into a frenzy of self-righteous indignation reading Paul's catalog of indecencies and wickedness. And then the sting: "Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. You say, 'We know that God's judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth.' Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God?" (Rom. 2:1-3).