Learning to love

: a theological response to our polarised world

Abstract

‘Love your enemy’ has always been one of the most pressing and difficult of Jesus Christ’s commands to follow. The term ‘polarisation’ accurately describes the barriers that are faced when attempting to follow it and love one’s enemy. It denotes the tribal divides that lead to emotive reactions, self-enclosed ideologies, and embittered narratives about the ‘enemy’. This thesis explores how Christians can learn to love their enemy within polarised contexts that provides convincing reasons for doing so. It achieves this by showing how narratives underlie much of what groups believe and think as well as informing how they see, listen to, and treat each other.

After establishing this, Bonhoeffer’s theology is turned to as an impetus to propose how attention to Christs’ revelation and its effects on believers can help expose, challenge, and renarrate these ‘polarising’ narratives with narratives guided by Christ’s love. This is used as a basis to propose a model of dialogue that helps provide opportunity for believers to learn to love their enemy and find amicable and productive ways of engaging with each other across polarised differences through the identification of common aims.

After proposing this as a strategy for helping to resolve polarised tensions, the model is applied to two different types of fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism is engaged with to show how dialogue with those who share an overarching interpretative framework might help to resolve polarisation. Islamic fundamentalism is engaged with to show the effects of dialogue when this overarching interpretative framework cannot be taken for granted. These theoretical case studies will demonstrate the overall thesis that resolving polarised tensions ultimately must involve renarrating the polarising narratives that are told about each other through narratives of love. It is only by finding ways of doing this that believers can adhere to Christ’s command and learn to love their enemies by coming to see their enemies as beloved.

Date of Award	2 Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Christoph Schwoebel (Supervisor), Andrew Bartholomew Torrance (Supervisor) & Brian Brock (Supervisor)