\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cBut a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while.\u201d (Acts 5:34)<\/p>\n
Acts associates the Apostle Paul with Gamaliel, too:<\/p>\n
\u201cI am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the law of our ancestors. I was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.\u201d (Acts 22:3)<\/p>\n
Paul also expresses a very Hillelian way of interpreting the Torah in the book of Galatians:<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: \u2018Love your neighbor as yourself.\u2019\u201d (Galatians 5:14)<\/p>\n
All of this taken together makes a strong case for a more progressive form of Christianity that uses love as its interpretive lens. In this form of Christianity, we ensure that our interpretations of love don\u2019t become sentimental or meaningless, and we manifest love through concern for a distributive justice for others. As Dr. Emile Townes so rightly states when you begin with the idea that God loves everyone, justice isn\u2019t very far behind.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThis speaks volumes in the context of debates still raging between more fundamentalist and\/or conservative sectors of Christianity and more progressive and\/or liberal sectors. The early Jesus movement evolved during similar tensions, and the gospels characterize Jesus as siding with the more compassionate Pharisees of his time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAs we shared earlier, there are exceptions to this. The two times Jesus departs from the Hillel Pharisees to side with the Shammai Pharisees was over economic justice issues. This says to me that the highest value was compassion. The highest value is distributive justice, treating one\u2019s neighbor as yourself, as an extension of yourself, as you yourself would like to be treated if you were in the same situation. If we are to follow the Jesus of the gospels, we will find ourselves siding with those calling for a politics of compassion and distributive justice. We will find ourselves doing so because our chief concern is love of neighbor and justice for our neighbor as we would want for ourselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPolitical parties don\u2019t always get justice right because they also are endeavoring to balance the desire to stay in power. One party might most often get it right, but where they fail, we must still choose to stand on the side of distributive justice, remembering the goal is love of neighbor. Following Jesus, we may find ourselves most often in more harmony with political positions of compassion, but there will be times when we may be achieving compassion in one area but will have to be honest when we are still missing the mark in another. There are discussions like this between feminists and womanists. I also think of wealthy LGBTQ people who support systemic harm toward those in their community who are poor; Christians who are concerned for the poor but still deeply patriarchal, homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic\u00a0 <\/span>And there are movements for economic justice, including within White Christianity, that are still deeply racist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn the end, for me, it\u2019s no longer enough to say that God is love. If our ideas of God\u2019s love doesn\u2019t also address love of neighbor in very real, concrete, material ways, then we are still missing the mark. In the spirit of the interpretive lens of Hillel and Jesus, as Paul said: \u201cThe entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: \u2018Love your neighbor as yourself.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Finding](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/1222\/2023\/01\/FindingJesus_CVR2-300x300-1.png\")
Herb\u2019s new book, Finding Jesus:\u00a0A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels<\/i><\/b>, is now available at Renewed Heart Ministries<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If our ideas of God\u2019s love doesn\u2019t also address love of neighbor in very real, concrete, material ways, then we are still missing the mark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4129,"featured_media":7313,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[729],"tags":[28,317,176,3321,3107,58],"class_list":["post-7337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liberation-theology","tag-compassion","tag-hillel","tag-jesus","tag-jewish-wisdom","tag-love-of-neighbor","tag-social-justice"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n