How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace

The author is a Mennonite, which is a tradition that centers peace-making. So this book is an engagement with what real peace-making looks like. And she starts not with making peace, but with being sure we're actually doing conflict well. After all, if we're making peace, we have to start with un-peace.She goes right for the Evangelical jugular - our desire to reduce conflict to disagreement that just sort of 'hanging out together' will solve.Yes, this is the "Racism can be fixed by relationships" myth we see in films like Green Book. She illustrates brutally how believing this myth is a function of privilege. More importantly, she asks us to take the call of Jesus seriously - to stand with the marginalized and to be a true communal alternative to the ways of the Empire in which we live.You will likely throw this book across the room a few times. Just pick it back up and keep reading.

Really great exploration of an aspect of Jesus' teaching which is one of the most unique, central, and unexplored and untried.Florer-Bixler deepens the call - going for beyond niceness - to explore personal and collective love that holds anger and work for justice along with just peacemaking that aims to disrupt of evil, thus partnering with God in the removal of enemies from among us.

Melissa Florer-Bixler both tells a prescient narrative of how we got to a “gospel” that is unwilling to do the work of proactive peacemaking, and offers a call to take up that work in ourselves and our churches. This book is timeless in that the call it addresses is one to which the church has always needed to become more faithful (and always will), and timely in that it is a call we must respond to *immediately* and are becoming more aware of every day. I found it especially helpful as someone in pacifist tradition who often finds myself confused about how to activate around injustice that is deeply troublesome and angering. Highly recommended.I’ll also note that her Audible reading is great, too—it adds some tonal depth to the book, and I recommend listening to it as well.

I learned a lot from this book but overall it ends on a negative note. Society has a long way to go yet. We are not there yet!

Bought the Kindle version -- reads easily and has good formatting.This book is exceptionally timely as we see calls for unity without accountability or truth telling inside and outside the church. In her writing, Pastor Melissa Florer-Bixler examines our current situation and compares to what / how Jesus responded to foes in his day. She discusses historical truth-telling as the base and examining power structures as the important framework for naming harm. Her calls to loving enemies truly by calling them to lay down their weapons of harm to heal both the oppressed and oppressor is a needed nuance that is lacking in the binary thinking that is all too common.

Totally didn’t know this was a Pres 45 bashing book! Silly me. I thought it was about how to love and forgive your enemies and live with righteous anger (if there is such a thing) but she had one target in mind throughout most of the book. Idk. Seems a little on the nose.

I have struggled for years with wishy-washy, mealy mouthed Christians hiding their racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist rants behind Jesus’ words to love the enemy. Florer-Bixler confronts this and reframes Jesus’ words into a fierce calling out of evil into a new way of being. This is not “everyone is right and we all just need to understand one another better.” Instead it is recognizing inherent power imbalances, and looking for ways to call our enemies into the freedom of God’s Reign.

Received in good order and condition

“This is a good life: to look out for one another to see the weakest and most vulnerable as necessary for the good life. It’s a good life to forge ahead toward forgiveness in a world that demands revenge. It’s a good life to let go of oppression and to refrain from dominating other people. It’s a good life to seek reconciliation instead of persisting in our rightness or looking for a window to exact retribution.” (p.200)This is a book about Jesus’ vision for the world. Melissa Florer-Bixler (MFB) writes, with evidence of her Mennonite position, about a way of being that alerts us the ever-present nature of enemies but the need to think creatively about how we interact and behave around them. Despite her commitment to non-violence and peace the book packs a punch. So don’t come for an easy read (although it is well written) but rather a book that will give you plenty of pause for thought and, if you’re like me, more than a little discomfort.The lack of equality in the world means that if my life is largely without enemy it is likely that I am causing oppression to someone else, so a book like this brings to me of my own need for awareness.The opening few chapters deal with an awareness of enemies. Inequalities abound in the world so attempts to not have enemies are doomed, rather the challenge is to have enemies “well” and note that many western takes against retribution and justice come from a place of privilege.Chapter 4 begins to think about how anger is not to be ignored but seen as part of the process towards forgiveness. This is followed by a chapter on Mary wherein her position as model of justice seeking gets lost when we domesticate her within the Christmas story. Chapters 6 and 7 imagine new orders and ways of being, specifically looking at how violence needs to be rejected (actively and passively) while Jesus-followers look at how they restructure their notions of family to build new relationships that are not rooted in old enemy structures.Chapter 8 shows via a discussion of Jesus and the Pharisees that our enemies often come from close proximity, which of course means that we likely have the ability to work with them on a new peaceful way forward. I note that this chapter positions Jesus outside of the Pharisees, but like many who claim the same it doesn’t really know where to locate Jesus. I still think that if we read Jesus as a member of the Pharisees (although perceived rebelliously) it makes much more sense of so much of his engagements with them in his ministry. Chapter 9 follows the impact of Jesus into the early Church of Acts and how they enact Jesus’ way in the early Christian communities.Chapters 10 and 11 consider Mammon and Whiteness. I imagine these chapters will be the most “irritating” of the book for many. MFB in her style, which by this point of the book is something that you’ve decided you like or you gave up a while ago, gets straight to the point in both these chapters. I would say that both are prophetic pieces for the church in North America and serve as good introductions to both subjects. Economics and Reconciliation are core gospel issues but in such bad shape amongst the church. But the subjects are huge and MFB serves the church well here with accessible explorations of both.She rounds the book out with a look at Revelation and its hope for the future end of violence and enemies. I particularly enjoy how she then closes the book with a short sermon that takes one final swipe at, of all things, the notion of survival of the fittest. Instead she posits a view of nature that models working in harmony for all of us.For my part this book is excellent. It’s introductory, but that’s the sort of thing that is needed on the subject. She provides footnotes to guide you in some further reading if you were hoping for something a little deeper. It’s the sort of book that I could imagine a church small group engaging with and having good discussions, which makes it slightly unfortunate that there isn’t a discussion guide included with the book. But that isn’t to detract from what is a helpful and engaging book.