"Love Your Enemies," the Golden Rule, and Ancient Reciprocity (Luke 6:27-35)

Abstract

The golden rule introduces a note of reciprocity into Luke 6:27-35 that seems dissonant with the instruction's inaugural command to your enemies. Rudolf Bultmann's judgment that the rule expresses naive egoism, though tenacious, is not universal; many argue that the rule surmounts crude self-interest.1 Nevertheless, interpreters of the passage have been markedly averse to viewing Jesus' command to love in terms of reciprocity, feeling that, no matter how others-oriented the golden rule's formulation, its unmistakable recourse to the of reciprocity ethics renders it morally inferior to the altruistic, unilateral stance of your enemies. By the same token, its presence here is thought to blunt the edge of Jesus' authentic ethic. This view arises from defective understandings of reciprocity dynamics. Reciprocity is in fact basic to the ethic that Luke 6:27-35 seeks to inculcate. After assessing some leading attempts to account for what seems to be a clash of ethical perspectives, we will locate the passage's moral exhortation within practices of social exchange in traditional societies, aligning these with descriptions of Greco-Roman reciprocity conventions, with particular attention to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Seneca's De Beneficiis. I We begin our discussion with Albrecht Dihle's categorical claim: von der Goldenen Regel . . . fuhrt kein direkter Weg zu der neuen, im Feindesliebegebot am scharfsten formulierten Ethik, weil sie alles Handeln vom Grundsatz der Gegenseitigkeit her bewertet.2 In the golden rule the norm that one usually receives back in accordance with what one gives or inflicts assumes the form of a prudential maxim.3 Love your enemies, by definition not predicated on anticipation of return, cannot be reconciled with the rule. The two embody sharply contrasting principles of action; your enemies in fact annuls the kind of moral deliberation represented by the reciprocity maxim. Dihle therefore accounts for the rule's presence by reading it indicatively, as describing rather than prescribing the conventional way of acting. Reciprocity calculation is then critiqued by Luke 6:32-34 and superseded by the programmatic admonition to your enemies.4 Critics, however, point to the absence of contrastive conjunctions that would justify reading v. 31 its an indicative statement.5 A further difficulty arises from the fact that in the various genres of moral exhortation maxims had the force of proofs and premises, embodying as they did principles commanding collective assent. Paul Hoffmann takes the view that Luke 6:27-35 enthalt Spannungen und Bruche, and follows Dihle s judgment that the rule's presence here is recht seltsam because w. 32-34 reject the kind of behavior v. 31 recommends. This tension was not so pronounced in Luke's Q tradition, argues Hoffmann, where sayings elaborating love of enemy (6:27a, 28b, 35c, 32-34, 29) and sayings on reciprocity (6:30, 31, 36) likely were aggregated separately, albeit contiguously. Luke in a calculated manner has combined these disparate motifs, part of his moral project of counteracting the habituation of wealthier members of his community to the friends- and class-oriented reciprocity ethic represented by the rule and to reorient them to Jesus' rigorous ethic of giving without expectation of return. By positioning w. 32-34 after v. 31, Luke creates tension between the two perspectives, the intent being that the former verses critique and surpass the latter.6 Hoffmann's solution is unsatisfying, however, because the rule is already part of the underlying tradition; moreover, the sequential arrangement of these motifs that Hoffmann proposes for Q is hardly less problematic than their redactional integration in Luke. Finally, like Dihle, Hoffmann has difficulty accounting for the imperative force of the rule.7 In Paul Ricoeur's view, the golden rule follows the logic of equivalence, whereas your enemies follows the logic of superabundance, that is, the economy of the gift. …