Is Christianity really all about love? I keep hearing that. It sounds good. God certainly loves us, and this is made most clear in the life and death of Jesus.
But over and over again, people refer me to the basic undergirding principle that everything in Christianity is about love. I think love is a command; obedience is the metanarrative of the people of God.
Allow me to be mildly facetious for a moment.
God was expressing a strange type of love when he told the Israelites to carry out genocide against the natives of Canaan.
God was expressing a strange type of love when he tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac.
God was expressing a strange kind of love when he commanded that people who disobey their parents be executed in the community of Israel. (That’s executed, not excommunicated, by the way.)
God was expressing a strange kind of love when he let Christ suffer as Jim Caviezel portrayed.
God was expressing a strange kind of love when he promised to repay injustice and sin with God-smackdown and the total loss of property and home.
God was expressing a strange kind of love when he destroyed an entire civilization except the people who built a boat as he told them to.
God was expressing a strange kind of love when he sent a hellish maelstrom of molten sodium chloride and sulfuric acid on an ancient city where people acted the way people act in my neighborhood.
God was expressing a strange kind of love when he turned a righteous man’s wife into a pillar of sodium chloride for watching this spectacle unfold.
Maybe you’re uncomfortable with this. If your God is all about love, you might not believe these stories are really true. Quaint and partially legendary artifacts from Israel’s history, perhaps, but surely not an accurate reflection of the God we profess to follow.
Maybe God is not all about love. Maybe God is jealous (like He said) when our hearts go after other things. Maybe God loves certain things and hates others (like He said). Maybe God wants us to be good rather than happy. Maybe God wants us to die to ourselves rather than to find ourselves.
Can you believe in a God like this? A God of passion and holiness and might and utter smackdown and wrath for those who defy Him? I can, and it’s scary to think about. If God so chooses, he can electrocute me through my keyboard right now. He might do it if I piss Him off. It’s happened before, with an Ark instead of a laptop. Maybe I’ll rename my laptop ark to remind myself of this.
People: God, we love you. We made this special sacrifice to show you how much we love you.
God: What the hell are you doing? That’s not what I told you to do.
(paraphrase)
Jesus was a pretty nice guy, no question. He taught lots of good things. He also made a whip out of cords and whacked at people who, in his view, insulted his Father’s temple. He cursed a fig tree. He pronounced lots of doom on lots of things and lots of people. Read the red letters near the end of Matthew.
God does not ask us to be loving people. He asks us to obey Him. Yes, he asks us (commands us, actually) to love Him, but He has made it abundantly clear (read the prophets) that this means first to obey Him, and a natural result of that is that we will generally become loving people. But we have reversed this priority, and allowed love to become more important than God, more important than obedience. May He have mercy on us all.
i dont know…
i think i see what youre getting at.
but what about “god is love” (i think that’s in 1 John somewhere??)
im notably just a novice, but in my reading of the Bible i definitely get the impression God is a good and loving God. and i _love_ the old testament.
but, we probably dont read it the same way.
but moreover, i see so many sad and self-hating people, who more than anything need to know that the One who made them loves them in a deeper way than they can possibly know.
and i just always thought jesus came to shed more light on the “law”- to love god, to love your neighbor. he did say those were the 2 most important commandments (i think– im certainly not well-read enough to engage in a scripture battle here!)
so i guess on that level, we’d just have to disagree about what’s good, what’s bad. i dont really think we’re in any danger of overdoing the love angle of it all.
Justin, I like that you are thinking “outside the box” or outside of how we like to think of God, as it were. I believe that we do forget about the God that requires obedience, if for no other reason but that we don’t see “utter smackdown” and attribute it to God these days. I do have a few observations and counterpoints.
First, if we think of God’s interactions with Israel, we should remember it was a Theocracy, so love, obedience, and consequences were very wrapped together. I noticed that your statement, “Is Christianity All About Love?,” was mainly based on examples from the Old Testament–hardly “Christianity.” The examples you gave of God’s “strange types of love” are the types of places where God had to start to work with the people he chose–the Israelites.
Some more appropriate verses to answer your question might be these that Jesus states:
“love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”
I could go on and on.
You said, “God does not ask us to be loving people.” I disagree.
Jesus said:
“But I tell to you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those that curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” (And the rest of Luke 27-36)
Love for God leads to obedience and love for others–once we love God, it will be against our new nature to want to do anything contrary. God’s “smackdown” came when obedience did not. This sounds a lot like what parents do, yet parents have immense love for their children.
You stated “Maybe God is not all about love. Maybe God is jealous (like He said) when our hearts go after other things. Maybe God loves certain things and hates others (like He said). Maybe God wants us to be good rather than happy. Maybe God wants us to die to ourselves rather than to find ourselves.”
I don’t think the statements following your first one keep God from being a God of love–I think it reinforces the fact that he is.
Even the well-known and much-quoted John 3:16 tells us that God loved us so much, he sent his son to die for us so that we would believe in God’s love for us and live forever–strange love–yes, but still love–it just doesn’t make sense to human hearts and minds.
But even after that verse, we hear that if we don’t accept this offering of God’s love in the form of his son, we are CONDEMNED, so yes…God condemns us if we do not love and act in obedience.
Hmmm…I’m tired of typing…maybe I’ll come back.
sorry to post again on this, but as im lying here in bed i am thinking, god calls us to love, this is the ultimate obedience: to love.
sometimes it looks and feels like outright obedience. i remember once, for example, reading in the psalms “in your anger do not sin… lie on your bed and be silent” and knowing that it was very much gods commandment for me, to not speak in anger, no matter how much every cell in my body wanted to go over to the offending parties and give them a piece of my mind. despite my desires, i had to just obey, and pretty blindly at that.
then i also think of “god-wrestler”- brian spoke this weekend about the syro-phoenician woman whose daughter Jesus healed, and how she didn’t accept what he said at first, and jesus told her she had “great faith”… because of how she repsonded to him, not accepting what he said at first! then he talked about abraham, moses, and of course jacob, the god-wrestler. i think god likes it when we wrestle with him too.
i dont know… its pretty cool, to think of that all together.
ok. going to bed now! 3 hours ahead on the east coast… its one am here!
I should point out that I added the line “I think love is a command; obedience is the metanarrative of the people of God” after Amy and April commented. This emphasizes that I’m not excluding love as a characteristic of God or of Christians, but saying that it’s not the core issue - obedience is.
I resonate pretty well with the “people of God” narrative, that views the church as continuous theologically, though not sociopolitically, with Israel as the covenant people.
Thanks for the comments.
Justin-
I like what you wrote, and it reminds me of my favorite verse:
(Isa 33:5-6 NIV) The LORD is exalted, for he dwells on high; he will fill Zion with justice and righteousness. {6} He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure.
I like to think of “the fear of the Lord” as a wholsome fear of displeasing him.
The conflict we feel between love and peace, and perhaps even the conflict between our own ideas of the themes of the Old and New Testaments, seems best explained by the December 4th reading of “My Utmost for His Highest” by Oswald Chambers. Here are the first few lines and a link to the rest:
“To him that overcometh. . . .” Revelation 2:7
Life without war is impossible either in nature or in grace. The basis of physical, mental, moral, and spiritual life is antagonism. This is the open fact of life.
http://www.myutmost.org/12/1204.html
Ted
Hows about:
Christianity is about dependance on God. A desperate needing of God. Obedience makes it behavioural. Oh, and no matter how hard I try I can’t be as obedient as I should be. And so I am thankful for God’s love. I rely on his mercy and loving generousity.
I’ve been mulling this over a little, and, as ever, your point is a good one. I think the issues that you’re dealing with here are complex though. I think you’re right that people do sometimes over emphasises the warm and fuzzy bits of God. Sometimes I guess this is just a way of avoiding the difficulties that come with obedience. But I think there are sometimes other reasons behind their attitude.
Imagine you?re a new Christian, and you accept that God should be obeyed, the next logical question for you is, what does God want me to do? Naturally you start with the bible, and some things in the bible need no interpretation. The fact that God is awesome and powerful is clear to all, as is the command to love God and love your neighbour. Other things do need interpreting though, and that’s where the leadership of your church comes in. However, the people who are telling you why Johna falling asleep on the boat is an allegory of the church in the west (for example), or, why grace doesn’t mean we can do what we like, also happen to be the people who are trying to build a church. They’re the same people who’re trying to run programs and keep people on board and I think that they’re sometimes perceived as having a conflict of interests. I’ve heard pastors go from bible verse, to interpretation, to announcing a new church program, to asking for peoples time/money all in the same sentence. It’s probably because they have a lot to get through and want the notices to be done quickly, but it so quick the congregation don’t know what’s hit them, they just know that if they don’t help out it’ll seem like they’re being disobedient to God. And that’s the root of the problem. I know all sorts of people who’ve basically been conditioned to think that obedience to God means obedience to church leaders.
In short, sometimes a pastor says something like:
“God hates purple M&Ms and we should be obedient to him and not eat them”
When that happens, some people hear:
“I hate purple M&Ms and you should do what I say and not eat them”.
Only, they quite like purple M&Ms, so they feel hostile towards what the pastor just said. Six months later, they’ve left that church, thrown out much of what that pastor told them, and are telling anyone who’ll listen:
“God loves purple M&Ms, because he loves all of creation. So if you want to eat purple M&Ms, go ahead.”
Hmmm, for some reason I’m feeling a little hungry now?.
I like your thoughts Justin. Perhaps as some have said you do overstate the case a little, but it helps redress the balance that seems to have got out of wack.
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
“Justice” is sometimes translated as severity. Severity is always balanced by mercy (in this translation, “kindness”). It’s an and/also kind of thing.
Although, personally, I consider myself set free from the law, which was a pedagogue, a babysitter, until Christ came. Christ’s summary of the law, “Love the Lord with all your heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself,” is the only “law” I feel bound to as a Christian. Of course, if one follows that, they won’t break any of the other ones either.
To live in fear of God is a rather sad existence, don’t you think? I think we’ve used the “fire insurance” tactic to get folks to convert for long enough. Unless you are speaking of “fear” as a kind of awe?
C.S. Lewis once described our response to God as similar to if we were told there was a tiger in the other room. A part of us would want to run away out of fear. Another part of us would want to creep up and get just a peek at this wondrous beast. We are pushed away by fear while we are at the same time drawn towards by awe.
Gimme that ol’ time religion, hell fire and brimstone….NOT!
Justin, obedience without Love is nothing more than tyranny.
I don’t think of God as a tyrant.
Good Journey,
Dan
The church ever has and ever will have to deal with its Marcionite tendencies. Popularity is always a better sell than persecution.
Thanks for the insightful comments.
I think, as many of you said, that love is the best apologetic, and probably the most appealing thing about Christianity, and that’s fine.
Jake-
I agree that we are set free from “the law,” but that means the Jewish law that we find in the Pentateuch. It seems to me that a lot of people are reading this as “we are set free from the need to obey God.” Our freedom in Christ is freedom from 1) The restrictive Jewish law 2) Sin and 3) Death. It is not freedom from obedience to God. Thanks for stoking my thinking on this one.
Fear? I think we come to trust God, and in that sense “perfect love drives out fear.” I think some genuine fear is healthy, though. It reminds us to buckle up and drive safely, and to pay our taxes even when we don’t want to.
Dan-
Totally with you on the obedience to God vs. obedience to church leaders thing. The call for obedience has been greatly abused, as you have well illustrated.
I guess I’m not arguing for the absence of love from Christian teaching, nor even the absolute primacy of obedience. If there is a metanarrative to Christianity, though, it is not love. It is God. God is the metanarrative, because God is, more than anything else. He Is. That’s how he described himself to Abraham.
When love is allowed to become the metanarrative of Christianity, a lot of the important elements become subplots that can be ignored.
Thanks for the great discussion.
Grace and peace,
Justin
On those passages you mentioned, it’s good to take a step back and remember
what physical death is. It isn’t an ending, since we last forever in one
state or another. Our culture looks at killing as one of the worst kinds of
crime - because our culture thinks eternity is a myth.
From God’s point of
view, physical death (when we become “absent from the body but present with the Lord”) is when we stop working out our salvation in a body on earth, and begin to experience eternity - either in blessedness because grace has made
us participate in the divine nature, or in torment because “Where can I go
from Your Spirit? Even if I make my bed in hell, You are there!” Death isn’t
ever punishment from God; it’s how God says “Stop; put your pencils down,”
and calls us to account.
In Abraham’s day Palestine was home to cultures that retained some knowledge
of God - Melchizedek for example. But 500 years later in Joshua’s time, the
Canaanite cultures were debased to the point they sacrificed their childern
to Molech and engaged in sacred prostitution.
So, as He did in Noah’s day,
God ended those cultures and called them to account. Judgment for Canaan
*wasn’t* physical death - that happens to everybody, even saints. But when
their lives on earth were ended they were called to account before God.
Maybe it sounds alien, but the conquest of Cannaan was even a *mercy* in a
way. How much worse, how much more inhuman and obscene and satanic might
Canaanite culture have become if they hadn’t been stopped? A Christian
friend of mine went back to using drugs, overdosed and died. We all thought
that was a mercy to him, because with the needle back in his veins in time
he would only have disfigured his soul further with violence and
degradation; we were grateful that he was called to account before that
happened.
Were any souls saved in the Flood, or in the Israelite conquest of Canaan? I
can’t say but I wouldn’t be surprised. Here on earth God judges nations -
like Israel or Babylon or Russia - but individuals He saves. The Canaanites,
and Ananias and Sappira were called to account, and the lesson we hopefully
learn isn’t to point and say “what sinners they were” but to realize we are
about to be called to account as well.
With repentance, we’ll experience the presence of God as light and warmth,
not as consuming fire.
I always think of the old testament times as very primitive difficult times where entire nations could easily wipe themselves out with a couple mistakes. Average life expectancy was less than thirty (not counting fatalities from childbirth), and the setting was the middle east–not the most hospitable area I’ve ever seen. So there were a lot of rules to keep the people from killing themselves and to keep the nation stitched together.
I’m not thinking “vengeful” when I read Leviticus 11: You may eat any animal that has a split hoof completely divided and that chews the cud.
There are some that only chew the cud or only have a split hoof, but you must not eat them.
It seems like over time, as civilization advances and people learn to take care of themselves (somewhat), the rules are changed. Less focus on smackdowns, more social and spiritual responsibilities for us.
I don’t think being a Christian is any easier than past covenants. As a modern day thrifty middle class american, my worldly kingdom is probably greater than that of most “rich men” of Jesus’ time, and woe to me if God asks me to give up my little plot of comfort and go out into the world, spreading the word to men of all nations. Sell my house? Is that really necessary? Can’t I just hang out here and spread the good word to a couple friends? Personal sacrifice? That sounds so *extreme*.
Somebody better pray for me. I’m going to need all the help I can get.
I just came across this discussion off a google search. So much of what is discussed hits right on questions that I have been struggling with.
I appreciate the intent and rigour of the discussion.
Thank you.
Justin F.
Justin,
Obedience to Jesus’ summary of the law, yes. It’s all the other hoops some put up for us to jump through that I find frustrating.
I suppose it is a matter of defining freedom. Do we want “freedom from” something, or “freedom to” become a new creation? A Christian would suggest the latter, although many people have to be set “free from” the baggage they haul around in order to be “free to” embrace the new thing God is doing.
I’m still uncomfortable with the “fearing God” bit. I suppose that’s because I tend to yoke it with the mindset that Christianity is all about my own personal salvation; getting my ticket to heaven, and a pass out of hell. Such thinking emphasizes the individual, and detracts from the communal nature of our salvation; that your salvation is yoked to mine.
Or maybe it’s because I have no interest in the next life. It is so distracting. The kingdom of God is at hand; it is the here and now that I believe matters the most to God, and so I would think it would also matter the most to us. Personally, it is only in this present moment that I encounter the living God.
I try hard to be obedient. I often don’t know how to ‘do’ that. There are obvious and easy things. More improtantly most of my life is a routine of actions that seem to small and/or benign that God’s preference is hardly clear.
It is when I am faced with decisions around life direction rather than right or wrong that obedience is difficult.
I hope I am not just going ahead eating purple M&Ms.
Good discussion. One of my theology professors always argued that the Christian association with love–at least in modern times–has been the worst thing that has happened to the faith. A lot of people who talk about God’s love use concepts of love that they have taken from somewhere else and apply them to Christian love, and, as a result, distort it. We often do the same thing with peace and justice, too: foreign concepts are imposed on the Christian framework, and what we end up advocating is something totally different from the faith we have received.
An interesting topic…
I’m not sure where I originally heard it (probably some old preacher somewhere) but this topic parallels the thought that our God is characterized primarily by holiness, not by love. It was His holiness that required atonement - that a price must be paid. His love for us is what led him to pay that price.
Hmmm…
That’s the clear, easy alternative - to posit holiness as the primary, overriding characteristic of God. But I think that can lead to just as many problems, such as rabid fundamentalism and the justification of violence and oppression in the name of holiness.
Love and holiness need to be in balance, and neither needs to be the metanarrative of the faith. We’re not pawns in a game that is all about love, and we’re not pawns in a game that is all about holiness. We’re players in a real story that God is really telling into existence. His existence is the metanarrative, the ground of all existence.
Looks like it’s time for Wordpress Blacklist, eh?
WP-Blacklist has been working for me, but I don’t get nearly the amount of traffic you guys do. However, thumbs-up so far.
However it doesn’t appear to include the option to go to the de-spam webpage in the emailed comment copy, as MT-Blacklist did. I used that all the time.