Hearing
that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him
with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and
greatest commandment. And the second is
like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on
these two commandments (Matt 22:34-40).”
It
seems that we Christians always have had difficulty keeping together Christian
points of tension. Whether the two
natures of Christ, our will and God’s choice, faith and works, etc., we tend almost
invariably towards extremes. Likewise on the issue of spirituality.
I
was raised in a conservative evangelical church tradition. The spirituality
sought in that tradition was almost entirely God-directed. Church attendance, prayer meetings, and quiet
times were greatly emphasized. Mission
understandings reflected this spirituality – with an additional twist: it was
to “rescue the perishing”, get them “saved”, so that they too could join in similar
devotion to God – and escape hell.
God
was almost as much to be feared as to be loved.
For some, it was hard in fact to distinguish between God and Satan,
since God was determined to relegate all unbelievers to an ultimate and endless
punishment that only the worst of demonic tyrants in all history could even
begin to dream of! (Larry Dixon’s The
Other Side of the Good News (BridgePoint, 1992)
is for example disturbingly explicit on this.
See my review on this site, and other writings about hell, excerpted
from my unpublished novel, Chrysalis
Crucible.) God as “Hanging Judge”
was a hard entity to warm to. How could
one love a stern disciplinarian Scrooge who leaned over heaven’s balcony just
waiting to catch us out in some misdeed?
It is accurate to describe this kind of extreme as a “spiritual abuse”
form of spirituality that too often centred on a fearmongering theology.
More
positive kinds of this spirituality nonetheless produced great works of
devotional literature such as My Utmost For His
Highest. God was supremely loved and
sought, according to the first of the Great Commandments.
In
my missionary career, I also encountered Christians strongly oriented
towards
service, justice and peace as central to Christian mission. But
devotion to God sometimes did not get
mentioned, or was shunted to the back of the bus. In fact, one Home
Church we joined had
adherents who simply denied all the exalted language about Jesus in
John’s
Gospel and Hebrews for instance, and defined spirituality in terms of
service. Worship of God in Christ lost all importance. It felt strange
singing Christmas carols with
this group that denied the Incarnation and adoration of Jesus. I used
to think: “They have taken the Lord
…. and we don’t know where they have put him!” (John
20:2) When I expressed this to one of
the leaders, he said simply that this group had chosen “not to
appropriate”
certain portions of the Scriptures it found distasteful. One
distasteful aspect was a high Christology. We sadly left that church
fellowship
disillusioned, even though they were great on service to others!
Both
traditions seemed to put their eggs into the basket of only one of the
Great Commandments. But there are
two, not just one!
The
Christian Gospel is an astounding Charter of Freedom (John 8:32, 36; Gal.
5:1)! It is a spirituality centred not in sentimental pious devotion to God,
nor in only service to others. Jesus taught that such pious devotion was a
religious form of idolatry characteristic of hell – a state in Jesus’ teaching
of the religiously smug caught in a downward spiral of self-righteousness
(Matt. 23:15).
And
service of others apart from worship of God is good but ultimately
unsustainable. “Can We Be Good Without
God?” (Atlantic Monthly, December 1989), by Glenn Tinder best
demonstrates that. Further, as Gil Bailie argues: “The Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel [22:36ff] did
not say that the greatest commandment was to believe in God and love
humanity. He did not say that we should
be nice to one another because that’s the way God would like us to behave. He said the first and most essential thing is
to love God with a paramount love.
It is the most hackneyed notion in the world, but once or twice in a
lifetime its dulling familiarity vanishes, and one feels for a moment the
unfathomable significance and centrality of Jesus’ suggestion for breaking the
grip of sin and death: to love God.
Partly due to the humanists’ romantic idea of basic human benevolence
and partly to the rationalistic “where-there’s-a-will-there’s-a-way” spirit of
the Enlightenment, the modern world came to believe that it could fulfill the
requirements of the second commandment without having to bother with the
first. We moderns came to believe, in
effect, that, by itself, the second commandment was a
civilizing force sufficient to the task at hand. The creaking and groaning, indeed, the
shouting and shooting, that we now hear all around us
is (sic) coming from the collapse of that assumption (Violence
Unveiled (Crossroad 1995), p. 272).”
True
Christian spirituality demonstrates central devotion equally to God and
the other – the neighbour near and the enemy
afar -through whom we however uniquely discover God and our true selves.
As
the texts say:
- “If anyone says, ‘I
love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not
love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen
(I Jn 4:20).”
Love of God is unthinkable outside love of neighbour. - “The King will reply, ‘I
tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these
brothers of mine, you did for me.’ (Matt 25:40).” Devotion to the “least of these” is
devotion to Jesus. - “But someone will say,
‘You have faith; I have deeds.’ Show me your
faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do (James
2:18).” James draws centrally on
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount which spells out the “what I do” of James. James is reiterating Jesus’ teaching: “Not
everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,
but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (Matt 7:21).” God’s “will” has just been spelled out
by Jesus in the preceding “Sermon” as “acts of justice” (Matt. 6:1), which
in Matthew are invariably demonstrable love and mercy towards others, to
be done by those of whom Jesus then says: “Therefore everyone who hears
these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man
who built his house on the rock (Matt 7:24, emphasis added).”
There
is biblically no Christian salvation nor spirituality outside love of neighbour
and the enemy. Likewise though, love of the other is dependent
ultimately solely upon our love of God.
But
for evangelicals, whose tradition I know best, since I am one, I must
continue. Our devotion to the other is
the only legitimate demonstration of devotion to God. “[T]he double love
command [Matt. 22:37 – 40] becomes a hermeneutical filter – virtually
synonymous with Hosea 6:6 [“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”,
quoted twice in Matthew] – that governs the community’s entire construal of the
Law… Those who are trained for the
kingdom of heaven are trained to evaluate all norms, even the norms of the Law
itself, in terms of the criteria of love and mercy. In the community that lives this vision,
then, acts of love and mercy should abound (The Moral Vision of the New
Testament, Richard Hays, Harper, 1996, p. 101).” In light of our opening Scripture, and this
commentary, it is hard to understand evangelicals’ support of war, the death
penalty, or any other kind of mistreatment of the neighbour.
Further,
justification is not through good works alone as the Reformers discovered – nor
is it possible without them. Sola fide –
by faith alone is however a biblical heresy: a false, unnecessary choice. The Reformers usually failed to teach the
corollary to faith/faithfulness: our salvation is our good works daily
lived out (James 2:18; Phil. 2:12 & 13; Matt. 23:23 – based on Micah
6:8). As McClendon
said of the Anabaptist embrace of this vision, violently rejected by the
Reformers: “The strength of this plan of
salvation lay in the tight bond it created between divine grace and a total
human response. Christian conduct
did not follow (by some kind of inference or induction) as a consequence of
salvation: it was itself salvation. The salvific gift
of God and its human answer in following Jesus were two sides of one reality
(James William McClendon Jr., Doctrine (Abingdon 1994), p. 118).”
This
“realized eschatology” is a spirituality most evident in the Johannine material.
Jesus explicitly taught: “Do not
be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will
hear his voice and come out– those who have done good will rise to live, and
those who have done evil will rise to be condemned (John 5:28-29).” This reflects the parable of the Sheep and
the Goats in Matt. 25:31ff. The “good”
done to the other is the measure of one’s spirituality and sole indicator of
salvation – which of course presupposes faith in Christ. It is also the “good” that overcomes “evil”
in Paul’s ethical section in Romans.
(See Rom. 12, especially verse 21, and succeeding chapters.)
The
only mission for the church is demonstrable love towards others (beginning with
fellow-believers, Gal. 6:10), which is both evangelism and acts of justice and
mercy. So Jesus prayed: “As you sent me
into the world, I have sent them into the world…. I in them and you in me.
May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me
and have loved them even as you have loved me (John 17:18 & 23).” He therefore said later in the Fourth Gospel:
“As the Father has sent me, I am sending you (John 20:21).” The supreme model is the Father who loves the
whole world (John 3:16) and calls us to a similar love. This is identical to Eph. 5:1 & 2, that
summons a consistent love of others based upon Christ’s atoning death.
There
is no Christian salvation, no spirituality, outside the other. God is an idol outside the other. Love of God apart from the neighbour who is our true self is heresy – a false
spiritual choice. The only authentic
biblical spirituality discovers God and our true self in the demonstrable
embrace of the other. If the other is
within the church, it means practising the first
principle of biblical ecclesiology: endless ( 70 X
70!) gestures of peacemaking/forgiveness toward the other who offends (Matt.
18). If the person is without the
church, it means practising just peacemaking towards
all – no less our fellow citizen/neighbour than the
enemy, domestic and foreign (Matt. 5 – 7; Luke 6).
There
is not a footnote theology to John 3:16 whereby God’s love is proffered to the
world, “except our enemies”! That has
nonetheless been majority Christendom’s spirituality whenever criminals and
national enemies are in view. The
Christian “enemy hit list” has also variously included pagans, Jews, Muslims,
heretics, witches, slaves, people of colour, whites,
Communists, capitalists, socialists, gays, lesbians, straights, pro-abortionists,
anti-abortionists, Liberals, Conservatives, fundamentalists, etc., etc. Christendom throughout history is strewn
with the corpses of its enemies. That
is a travesty of true Christian spirituality, its utter inversion.
Thankfully,
throughout church history, true Christian spirituality has been found in
believers within all the traditions – often however in spite of the dominant
theologies at work. It is at least
potentially true of evangelicalism, so self-consciously assertive about holding
to the faith “once delivered” (Jude 1:3), what Jesus said: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees
sit in Moses’ seat. So you must obey
them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do
not practice what they preach (Matt 23:2-3).”
Douglas Frank in Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the
Twentieth Century (Eerdmans, 1986), makes a
perhaps abrasive yet poignant case for this.
Of
us evangelicals it is fair to respond: “For in the same way you judge others,
you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you
(Matt 7:2).” Our “measure” is Jesus and
the Scriptures. And by that very
measure, we prove often to be sorely lacking.
Judith Haiven’s somewhat scurrilous book about
evangelicals nonetheless rightly observed what her title sadly reflects about
some evangelicalism: Faith, Hope – No Charity! This contrasts
starkly with Tertullian’s citation of the pagans’ assessment of the early
Christians: “See how they love….” A
fellow evangelical was right in gently mocking us, when, dedicating a book on
Jesus’ teaching about wealth and power to his dad, he said: “He is an unusual fudamentalist;
for he believes that inerrancy extends to the teachings of Jesus (Your Money
or Your Life (Harper, 1986), by John Alexander).”
The
biblical test for love of God is love of neighbour;
the biblical test for love of neighbour is love of
enemy. The measure of our devotion to
God is our devotion to the other.
Failure to show love to the other is failure to show love to God. How we treat the other is how we respond
to God. There is no Christian
spirituality apart from the other.
Christian salvation, Christian freedom, Christian spirituality are
consummated in love of the other! Paul’s
witness is: “The entire law is summed up
in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Gal 5:14)” James echoes
it: “If you really keep the royal law
found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right
(James 2:8).” Love of neighbour is our “spiritual act of worship (Rom. 12:1ff)”. Love of neighbour
is “the perfect law that gives freedom (James 1:25)”.
But
the source for this love is God. We
cannot in fact be good without God.
However, we cannot be Christians without doing good
to others. Such is the paradox of
Christian spirituality.