Andrew Sullivan Makes Up Jesus

In yesterday’s Love is Not Love, I quoted William Luse’s explanation of why that popular slogan makes no sense. While explaining this he mentions the once widely known as a gay Catholic journalist Andrew Sullivan’s description of a Jesus who hated rules because he was so loving.

The only way to understand the God Who is Love is to set him at odds with the law. As a practitioner of the tactic, Andrew Sullivan was a repeat offender. A case in point was a column he wrote back in 2006, before he was able to publicly admit what anyone with good sense already knew: that he was not really a Catholic. Maybe this lack of self-awareness allowed him to wear two hats at once — Scriptural scholar and theologian:

Rules can only go so far; love does the rest. And the rest is by far the most important part. Jesus of Nazareth constantly tells his fellow human beings to let go of law and let love happen: to let go of the pursuit of certainty, to let go of possessions, to let go of pride, to let go of reputation and ambition, to let go also of obsessing about laws and doctrines. This letting go is what the fundamentalist fears the most. To him, it implies chaos, disorder, anarchy. To Jesus, it is the beginning of wisdom, and the prerequisite of love.

This is such crap. Not, I should say, in what he says taken literally and precisely, but in what he means as suggested by that concluding “obsessing about laws and doctrines,” which means not just letting go an obsession but rejecting a proper submission in favor of “love,” and what he uses this understanding of “love” to argue for, which goes way beyond what Jesus would call love. This is not the Jesus one meets in the gospels. It’s an invention and one Sullivan has to have known was an invention. One throws up one’s hands. Were I a better man I’d feel sorry for him. Appropriating  for his causes the person he as a Catholic believed to be the Lord of the universe is not prudent.