Love is Precisely the Point

Well, I did manage to make some people angry yesterday, by suggesting that Islam and Christianity are not the same. My deleted comments box is fairly stuffed and my wonderment over the Christian landscape is ever more increasing.

So I did want to blog about something charming and non-controversial, namely what is the nature of work, but I’m going to shelve that till tomorrow because I want to re-articulate something basic about Christianity, something that seems to contribute to confusion amongst Christians themselves. It was expressed in this angry comment, “‘Who is calling upon her to show solidarity with Muslims in Advent?’ Um Jesus, love thy neighbor, does that ring a bell?” You see, we are back at the very essential place of trying to understand what love is and how to do it.

I say back, because many years ago, when the Episcopal church institutionalized the goodness of homosexuality through the consecrating of a partnered gay bishop, the main thing that people said is that it was about love. God is love, see, and so love love love. You take your understanding of the English word ‘love’ and you read it all over the bible. It is the norm by which all other norms are normed. And it hasn’t gotten any better, in the decade since. If anything it has gotten worse. Rob Bell getting to be on Oprah because Love Wins is kind of the pinnacle, in my mind, although I understand Oprah is not supposed to be the king maker that she once was. Love, guys, it’s all about love.

As a little bit of an aside, how interesting is the proliferation of the dumb, facile heresy propagated by more and more mega churches–you’re good, you can know God’s will through a feeling in your heart, the greatest sin is not fulfilling yourself, don’t speak negative words over your life, don’t miss opportunities that come to you, you were born for such a time as this, and so on and so forth. When Christianity is flattened out to be a matter of your understanding of love, defined by your culture and worldview, there isn’t really a lot that’s going to be useful to you in the bible. What little there is has to be about you.

The verse that comes into my mind more and more is, “These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself.” Psalm 50:21

Love is at the center. God is love. It is his character and nature. But he cannot be defined by our categories. And if ever there was a broken and marred category in this time, a time such as this, it is the category of love.

So I will answer the angry comment above. ‘Love thy neighbor’ does ring a bell. And I will defend what I said yesterday. Even though I didn’t use the word love, I was questioning whether a professor at Wheaton College can really be said to be loving her Muslim neighbors by 1. wearing a hijab and 2. obscuring the distinctions between Christianity and Islam. We could quibble about number one, but number two is manifestly unloving.

When a Christian chooses to identify with his neighbor, and what he thinks his neighbor needs, over the objectively discerned gospel of Christ, he is going to fall away from love. To say it another way, it’s not about you and your actions and solidarity, it’s about Jesus and what he has already said. And what he has already said is that unless you come to him, you cannot be saved.

Furthermore–and I can’t believe I’m writing this out in this way, and let me just remind the wide world that this is very basic, historic Christianity, just because it is now utterly repudiated doesn’t make it novel–the understanding of Jesus in Islam is not the same as in Christianity. These two faiths make fundamentally contradictory claims about who he is. The Christian bible says that he is God, that his atoning death and resurrection are the ground of our salvation, that all people everywhere are perishing in sin and must therefore repent and turn to him, trusting that his work will be the balm, the grace that keeps them out of hell forever. Whereas Islam says that Jesus was a prophet, like Mohamed, and that if a person would like to attain paradise they must work very hard to follow the pillars, the ways Allah has laid down to avoid hell. Allah may be gracious, but it is up to you to do the work.

In denying Jesus, the Muslim person denies the only means of salvation. God is three in being, one in person. The second person was incarnate, that means he took on human flesh and nature, so that he could do what we were commanded to do in our place. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through him. Any Christian who pretends to have solidarity with anyone while obscuring and neglecting this message, is Not Being Loving.

But that is what we are supposed to do, in these modern and confused days. We are not supposed to say that. We are not supposed to say that only God is good, that he can be known through Jesus, that when you repent of your sins and cry out to Jesus, you can be saved. We are not supposed to read the bible as if God is actually speaking.

I don’t question the motives of Ms. Hawkins at Wheaton College, well, not very much. I think most every Chrisitan in America is trying to do the right thing and be the kind of person that says the right things. When something horrible, like the harassing of women wearing the hijab, or retaliatory violence against Muslims, or the ugliness of a mass shooting takes place, Christians want to say something, they want to be seen to care, to be loving. But, having not trusted the strong message of the gospel for more than themselves, having been confused by decades terrible terrible preaching, they do what seems best, what their feelings tell them is right, rather than what has already been commanded in scripture. The best, defined by the world, is always and everywhere insufficient. The Christian, unmoored from the truth of the gospel revealed in scripture, is flapping around in a confused muddle.

God is big enough to save the world. He is loving enough to want to. But we are not like him. If we are going to love our neighbors as ourselves, we are first going to have to repent for not trusting that his work, in Jesus, is strong enough for the sins of other people, for not saying, with words, that Jesus is the Way. To repeat the words of that glorious collect, “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.”