Here’s what it sounded like to visit this blog when it first began.
From February 8, 2014, “Immanentizing the transcendent and ‘Why are you a Christian at all?’“:
Why not just get busy loving one another and not bother with the God stuff at all? As Richard Beck suggests, and I agree, that’s a fine approach. It avoids the very real peril of becoming the kind of liars who claim to love God while failing to love our neighbors and, thus, become guilty of hating both.
As 1 John says, “no one has ever seen God.” But we can see each other. It makes sense to focus on loving those we can see. It makes sense to focus on the immanent because that’s what we are — and where we are and who we are.
Yet 1 John also offers us this: “We love because he first loved us.” And that, for me, is part of my answer to “Why are you a Christian at all?”
Another part of the answer is this: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world.” No one has ever seen God, but God’s love was revealed among us. Among us — not to us, dictated in a text, but among us, sent “into the world.” The very expression of divine love, 1 John is saying, was an act of the transcendent becoming immanent. Incarnation. That is the example we have been given to follow.
We have been shown what God looks like, 1 John says, in Jesus. And we have been shown what love looks like, also in Jesus — “for God is love.”
That is what and who I believe, and that is why I am a Christian. That is also why it’s not of great importance to me whether or not you or I or anyone else identifies as a Christian. “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
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