Fear-Shaped Love

If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of the exile.

! Peter 1:17

Belief in the final judgement often gets a bad press. Does the belief that God will reward the righteous and punish the evil dull our senses to the pain and injustice of the world, helping the oppressed to put up with things with which they should not put up? Karl Marx arguably had more respect for the religious sentiments of the oppressed than some of his successors and perhaps did not use "opium of the people" in an entirely negative sense but he made the notion popular that belief in a God who will sort out everything in the end is harmful to the fight for justice. No doubt religion has sometimes functioned in this way. But distraction by entertainment has perhaps always been the greater threat, cf. "bread and circuses" in ancient Rome.

1 Peter speaks of a new birth through the resurrection of Christ which allows us to address God as Father. It is a new existence which breaks with the inherited ways of life and sets us on a path that takes the long view. No longer focused on short-term benefits which could be gained by silver and gold which are so often acquired at the expense of the life of others (ancient mines were notorious as places of agonising death) but becoming part of a story that begun before the foundation of the world with the predestination of Christ's self-offering as the source of life (his blameless purity embodying the maxim he taught that "it is more blessed to give than to receive," Acts 20:35). This does indeed put value on enduring pain while suffering unjustly but Christ becomes instrumental in defining for us the God in whom we put our trust, our faith and hope and it is not as a God who above all demands submission but "the one who raised Christ from the death and gave him glory." Christ's vindication encourages us to seek God's kingdom and his righteousness,  trusting that goodness, beauty and justice will have the last word. 

Yes, Christians do not believe that all depends on us and may be less in a hurry to bring revolutionary change than those who have not been born into a living hope but addressing as Father "the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds" should not lead to complacency. This is why 1 Peter 1:17 speaks of "reverent fear" for God - being in awe at the majesty, goodness and power of God not in the way of being "too heavenly-minded to be of earthly use" but with trembling that shapes the way we live in this corrupt world in which we are not quite at home.

We tremble before the one who loves the world so much that He will not allow His good purposes and the beautiful order he put in place to be disregarded without consequences. And it is such trembling, such reverent fear which enables true love. How so?

1 Peter 1:22 spells it out. We purify our souls by bringing them in line with divine truth and this purification makes unfeigned, mutual love possible because such love cannot exist with lying and hypocrisy. There is a world of difference between mere niceness and mutual love. You do not have to be born anew to be nice, friendly, smiley but the genuine mutual love to which we are called is only possible through the new birth. We need to have become purified by obedience to the truth for which the living and enduring word of God is essential (1 Peter 1:23).

Niceness will cease, friendliness will pass away, smileyness disappears - love born out of faith and hope in God remains, a love that dares to speak the truth rather than hides in the superficial comfort of niceness, and a truth-telling that is not judgemental (the final judgement belongs to God) but has the other's best interests in mind because this is how God loves.

When you look at the cross, do you see the precious blood of Christ shed for you? (If so, how can we not encounter others in humility and forgive them as we have been forgiven?)

When you contemplate the empty tomb, do you submit to the truth that Christ is risen? (if so, how can we not rejoice in a living hope even in suffering for doing good?)

Let these truths sink in ever deeper and so let genuine love arise deeply from the heart.

Love the sinner, hate the sin?

I do not remember ever having used the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” but I have heard it occasionally and, more often, heard people objecting to it violently.  The latter has always puzzled me. Every maxim can of course be misused as a slogan to put down someone but the frequent response to  “love the sinner, hate the sin” seemed to suggest that such advice  is intrinsically wrong. So I was interested to read Simon Butler’s explanation of why this should be so.

Simon Butler calls this “an old Evangelical nostrum” which is maybe the first surpise, given the long history of the maxim from Augustine’s Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum (With love for mankind and hatred of sins, Letter 211) to Ghandi’s “hate the sin and not the sinner” (in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth, page 439). Maybe Simon has encountered the phrase on the lips of evangelicals only. He cites an unnamed former diocesan bishop as saying to him “we must love the sinner but hate the sin, Simon. But never forget that these people ... are sinners.” What strikes me as objectionable here is the use of the phrase “these people” and with it the suggestion that “the sinner” is someone else (only). But to my mind this falls in the category of using the precept as a slogan against a particular group. The use is wrong, but this does not necessarily entail that the maxim is mistaken.

Simon is entirely right to stress that we are all a mixture of good and bad (the use of the phrase “saint and sinner” is arguably not helpful when explicitly including unbelievers but I do not want a quibble about words detract from the substantive point he wants to make).

The nub of the issue is this: Because we are all messed up, our identity and our actions are so interwoven with each other that any attempt to separate or even distinguish the two is doomed to failure. A related point is this: Simon thinks it is in practice impossible to hate the sin without hating the person committing it.

He adds to this concerns about spiritual superiority and hierarchy of sinfulness which are legitimate concerns but concern a particular use of the precept rather than the truthfulness or realism of the precept itself. After all, one response to the former diocesan bishop might have been, “I really hate what you’ve just said but I don’t hate you” (assuming for the moment that this is indeed possible).

The penultimate paragraph teases out the substantial point. Simon argues that it is impossible to “separate my sinfulness from my giftedness; indeed, the former is in some way a consequence of the latter...Western, juridical models of atonement, based as they are binary views of sin and goodness, fail to acknowledge such a profound reality and, at some level, prevent us from overcoming (befriending?) the fallen, shadow, sinful aspects of ourselves.” I am not sure I fully understand this. To me “overcoming...sinful aspects of ourselves” seems a very different thing from “befriending” them.

Might the popular East-West dualism help? Simon suggests, “A more Eastern perspective – of sin as a disease or a divided heart – allows us to see ourselves not as victims of an angry God, but as the beloved of a worried Parent, who can be loved into to befriending and finding wholeness in the parts of ourselves where sin can so easily master us.” Well, the Augustinian view of sin as a defect, a lack of good, fits rather well with the disease imagery. I can even imagine that you might want to befriend your disease rather than fight it, especially if you have no hope of ever being healthy again, but I admit that I still struggle to see why it should be intrinsically wrong to hate the disease.

Ok, there are dangers lurking here. Our anger and hatred is rarely righteous. Only God’s is. But still. Should we ask those who suffer from a long-term debilitating illness, which has surely shaped them and also brought into sharper relief some of their giftedness, to accept that the illness is part of their identity and to love it, hoping that in the new heaven and the new earth they might continue to be ill?

And does Simon want to sharply distinguish between his anthropology and a sociology that works in parallel to it, or would he equally argue that we cannot love contemporary British culture and society without loving the greed, slavery and arrogance that, too, have made us what we are today?

If the only alternative to “love the sinner, hate the sin” is to abandon binary views of sin and goodness and to stop distinguishing between good and evil, I’d rather side with the old maxim. I know that it is in fact not easy to distinguish between sin and sinner but in my experience the attempt to do so is the way towards love. Those who refuse to make the distinction usually keep on refusing to love the sinner because they hate the sin. This applies both to people’s perception of themselves and of others. People hate themselves because they hate some of the things they do. People distance themselves from others who say and do things that are wrong. The refusal to distinguish between people and sin does not in fact lead to an increase of love, as far as I can observe. This is true for me personally as well. I find it easier to love someone if I refuse to identify them with the aggression, arrogance or prejudice that drives a rift between us.

I have not intention of starting to throw around this maxim in conversations but I think I still seek to live by it. Loving all people, hating all that is evil, and seeing every Christian as simul iustus et peccator.

See now also Ian Paul's blog post.

To Love is to Live

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

To love YHWH is to live.

To love is to choose life over death.

To love is the supreme commandment.

To love is to cherish His ways of doing things.

To love is to cherish every little thing about His ways of doing things.

To love is to flourish.

Turning away from Love,

Paying no attention to Him

Leads away – not into freedom – and means

Turning away from life.

Valentine

“Legend has it that Valentine’s Day originates with a Roman man named Valentine who was imprisoned and eventually martyred for his Christian faith. He died on 14 February in the third century, leaving a farewell note for the jailer's daughter who had befriended him, signing it 'From Your Valentine'.

Whether or not their friendship had a romantic element is unknown, but we do know that she was inspired by his faith to express her own Christian love and that this moved her to action.” (CUF email)

Because of whom was Valentine in prison? 

Who kept him there – in more than one sense of the word?

Who was therefore his jailor?

His Name is Love.

Valentine had been captured by Christ and for Christ’s sake lost his live 

and gained it again and the jailer’s daughter became the Jailer’s sister.

Matthew 5:21-37

Outward obedience to God’s commandments is not life. To live is to love. Stopping short of murder and adultery is not yet to love. Not breaking a marriage or an oath is not yet to express loyal love. The law must be written on the heart (see Jer. 31:31–34, cf. Deut. 6:5; 10:16; 30:6). The heart is the seat of our motivations, the place from which our words and actions proceed (see Matt. 15:18–20).

If I stop loving my brother or sister – little by little,

I will cease to love God – little by little.

Turning away from love, I am on the road to perdition.

Collect

Almighty God,

who alone can bring order

to the unruly wills and passions of sinful humanity:

give your people grace

so to love what you command

and to desire what you promise,

that, among the many changes of this world,

our hearts may surely there be fixed

where true joys are to be found;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.