A Closer Look at Life

Them: Part III

Alright. At long last, here is the conclusion to this little series.  It isn't all I was hoping for, but it was stopping up the works, and all the other posts were getting restless waiting in the que, as even the best of us will at times.

In review; Christ alone is the hope of the world (despite all those lousy Christians out there) because of the kind of love He commands and facilitates.  Ready, go.

One of the main reasons the Christian church has gotten such a bad rap in the area of inclusivity is that Christians in West, (and particularly America) have been operating out of our theology to an unhealthy degree.

This is not to say that Calvanist vs. Armenian or even Protestant vs. Catholic isn’t of some value. After all, staking your life on the claims of any religion is serious business. It should be examined to the fullest extent possible to make sure that errors of sentimentality, logic or scholarship have not been committed. As we are not all capable of or interested in sounding the murky depths of the scholarly side of our faiths, we must come up with a rule book of sorts; a shorthand for living. Thus theology.

I submit, however, that we as American Evangelicals have utterly mistaken the purpose of theology when we have allowed our suppositions to govern how and when we carry out the more clear cut directives of Scripture. Theology exists to simplify the complex, not the other way around. Evangelical Christians have allowed the mechanics of salvation and sanctification, an area that is admittedly fraught with debate and ambiguity, to dictate the manner in which we carry out simple directives of Christ.

Love others sacrificially is not a complex statement. It is a near impossibility to actualize, but it is not hard to comprehend. He has told us that we are to be responsible for sacrificing ourselves for the well-being of others. He will take care of the rest, even to carrying the responsibility for the ultimate destination of their souls.

The love that will change the world is truly costly. It will cost lives, homes, fortunes, time, relationships, comfort and most of all, our narrow, self-interested perspective. This love cannot exist in a soul that is still seeking its own good first. This love is not immediately mutually beneficial. It is also more powerful than all the hate and evil this world has to offer.

This costly love can only come from knowing that we are loved in turn by a God that has our best interest in mind. Only when we are free of the worry that we must take care of our needs will we be able to shower the people around us with ridiculously inclusive, life-altering love.

This is the route to peace in the world. This is how a rich nation like the USA can decide not to spend its money on itself and reach beyond its borders to bless people half a world away that will never be able to thank them. This is how people can choose to lay aside the possible consequences of not fighting for their ideology and reach out beyond political and social barriers to serve someone. Simply put, it is the power of trusting that your needs, safety and desires are in the hands of Someone more powerful.

What is more, this love is freely given. It is not an investment, a half-trusting down payment expecting a return. (If it were, it would not be love at all.) It is not an action taken out of the faux-altruistic self-fulfillment of “feeling better” about what you can do for others. The love of Christ does not compel people to reach out with what little time and resources they have because they know their limited supply will be used well. It is a love that is spent extravagantly with no expectation of return because it comes from an endless supply.

This is why wells get built in African villages when the residents will never know the names of the donors. This is why girls are pulled out of prostitution rings in South Asian brothels, only to need an expensive education and rehabilitation program to keep them going in life. This is why business executives take time out of their schedules to visit and train men in prison who have become a burden on and a danger to society.

If you are like me, you may have spent a few idle minutes here and there thinking about what you would do with limitless resources to change the world. I imagine what I would do if I had more money that I could ever spend, and then I start thinking about what I would do if more people had that kind of money to give away.

In the end, it isn’t loads of money being given away that will change the world. It is love being given away. Love without end, without conditions, and without cost. That is a love that Christ alone can offer.

Them: Part II

I realize the claim with which I ended my last post may come across as rather far fetched to some.  Christianity has gotten poor scores on inclusivity throughout its history, and in contemporary America, there are few organizations except the NRA that are popularly regarded as being more reactionary and irrationally, combatively traditionalist.

Elements of secular humanism, on the other hand, have led the charge in the last century to preach a message of unity and connectedness in our increasingly factionalized world. In doing so, I believe they have hit upon perhaps the greatest question facing mankind today. How are we supposed to get along?

As two centuries of global political order based on the nation-state as the primary political actor wanes, we see an increased movement towards ethno-specific or religiously exclusivist self-identification. In response to the homogeneity of market capitalist-led globalism, people are turning to ethnicity, religion, geography, language, culture and even subculture to try to define the boundaries of the people group to whom they will swear allegiance.  It can appear that we are moving backwards away from the unity of humanity that had been such a fervent hope for much of the last century.

I have not studied every one of the worlds religions in depth, but to my limited experience, every other system of belief on the planet has its boundaries. Some contain a linguistic barrier such as Islam, or ethnic designations such as Judaism. Those which are more inclusive on those terms still stop short of true inclusiveness by mandating practices of dress, behavior, diet and worship that are inextricably tied to their culture of origin. Some systems of belief are so tied to their respective culture or polities that them is a political term, with no spiritual or relational component even coming into consideration.

The fact is, there is no religion on earth that preaches the radical sort of inclusiveness that Christianity proclaims.  Even the Uniterian Universalists (who have no creeds and therefore no comprehensive belief at all) and Bahá’I (whose amalgamation of multiple religions is logically inconsistent in that it believes mutually exclusive claims of differing religions to be related to each other in a process of progressive revelation) do not go to the extremity that Christ does.

Make no mistake. Christians have a positively awful track record of practicing this culture-crossing, barrier-breaking inclusiveness. For the past two millennia, uncounted horrors have been perpetrated on mankind in the name of Christ. From the Crusades to the Inquisition, the Conquistadors to the KKK, the cross of Christ has been used as a weapon in truly appalling ways. Christ on the other hand, saw things differently.

To properly understand Christ’s views on this issue, one has to distinguish between the regrettable actions of Christians and the teachings and actions of Christ.  Christians exhibiting violence, hatred and divisiveness are not proper examples of their faith. On the contrary, Christians are the only people to whom their respective deity has given a mandate to love everyone, as well as providing the power to carry out that divine vision of unity.

In brief, Christ commanded his disciples to love all people everywhere as though they were family. Something does not come from nothing in this world, and love is no exception.  God, through Christ has chosen to love mankind so completely, so radically, so deeply that were we to recognize and respond to that love, there would be no end to the love that we could give to our fellow man. 

What is more, Christ gave us only one defining characteristic of the love that we are to show for everyone.  “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

This simple line introduced to mankind a definition of sacrificial love unparalleled in any other system or belief or thought that had come before or has arisen since.  Christ did not set out parameters for the worthiness of being loved that someone must show.  HE did not say that political boundaries, racial differences or religious disparities could be used as excuses not to love someone.  HE did not tell us the point at which we are allowed to seek selfish ambition at the expense of others.  HE did not give us an out when love has become difficult or costly.  Barriers and boundaries set upon the love God lavished on and entrusted to mankind were set by man himself.  On the contrary, Christ has commanded those who would follow him to seek out self-sacrificing, costly, love for their fellow man without regard to any of the differences we humans seek to identify and accentuate.

What then, does this have to do with politics?  How does this definition of love really constitute the hope of the world? 

More to come…

Them

One of my frustrations with the blogosphere, and contemporary American culture at large, is that it is not well suited to topics that take more than 500 words to cover. Communication must adapt, however, and in every system, there is a solution. In today’s media, it is called “To be continued…”

Over the next few posts I will be dealing with some larger issues that I have refrained from addressing due to my inability to express myself succinctly on certain topics. Hopefully, these multi-part posts will provide the proper venue for dealing with these issues. They might also be dramatically dull, but they are immensely fascinating to me. Hopefully they will be worthwhile to some degree.

I recently had a long, long conversation with a friend of mine about the utility, purpose and worth of the Gospel, particularly as it relates to the confusing world we live in. I stated that I believed the Gospel to be the only hope for mankind; a strong claim in a pluralistic world where we find increasing incompatibilities and mutual incomprehensibilities across the broad spectrum of religious, ethnic and cultural divides.

My friend’s position, and a compelling one it is, questions whether the great weight of the innumerable failings of the church over the last two millennia crowd out the good it has done, and even draws into question its validity as an institution in the first place, let alone its ability to claim any sort of superiority over other systems of belief.

He is not alone in this opinion, of course. There are many who would agree with him asking what right the church has to claim any moral or ideological high ground. Crosby, Stills and Nash summed up the sentiment of this dissenting opinion well in the chorus of their song “Cathedral.”

“Too many people have lied in the name of Christ
For anyone to heed the call.
So many people have died in the name of Christ
That I can't believe it all.”

What argument is there to support the Gospel against these accusations? While there are many Christians who lack the capacity to explain or defend their beliefs at all, much of the remainder would attempt to defend of their faith through some kind of dissertation on the wonder of Salvation, the truth and importance of the Resurrection, attempt a comparative analysis of Christianity vis-a-vis other religious systems or get caught in the quagmire of attempting to defend the historicity of the Scriptures.

All of these defenses have value insomuch as they help explain the what of Christianity, but, salvation aside, they don’t go very far down the road of explaining why, which is the essential question in the first place. At least not the why our culture is asking. To explain that why, you have to find something that is unique, something that is intrinsically and uniquely valuable which is the sole purview of the Christian Faith.

This explanation mush be universal and translatable beyond the borders of cultures, nation-states, ethnicities and languages. It must be a hope that can live within any cultural context without destroying it. It must address to the essence of our humanity, rather than a particular expression of it. It must have a solution for the suffering and divisiveness that is now so visibly endemic in our world.

The reason I believe the Gospel is the one hope of the world is that I believe it holds just such a universal hope that addresses a universal need. I believe it is the only system of belief that doesn’t have a “them.”

To be continued...