For the love of God

  • loveofgod_1.jpgI just added a short quote by Fred­er­ica Mathewes-Green to the rotat­ing list of quotes that show up at right, and it reminded me of one of the most basic things about Chris­tians that I think non-Christians get wrong. Or at least, I hope they do.

    In “The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God,(**)” Fred­er­ica said: The love of God is the only love in the uni­verse wor­thy of the name.

    I knew I was going to quote it right away — it’s just the sort of suc­cinct nugget of Pure Truth that I try to grab onto. But as I did, I knew I had a cer­tain kind of heartache. Occa­sion­ally, I’ve been exposed to the extremely low opin­ion that many in the sec­u­lar soci­ety have of Chris­tians, and whereas there are some accu­sa­tions they sling that may be true, there are some that show a breath­tak­ing igno­rance of what Chris­tians are actu­ally about.

    angrygrace-behind-the-wheel.jpgI’m think­ing specif­i­cally of a uni­ver­sity lec­ture series on phi­los­o­phy that I bought on tape. The sub­ject was ethics — that is to say, how we deter­mine the dif­fer­ence between right and wrong, good and bad if we’re going to leave reli­gion out of the con­sid­er­a­tion. I thought I could park my own feel­ings about the silli­ness of try­ing any­thing of the sort, but as the series pro­gressed, I found myself going from a grudg­ing admi­ra­tion of the men­tal gym­nas­tics to puz­zle­ment to frus­tra­tion and even­tu­ally to seething anger. It’s a com­pletely weird exer­cise to try to define good and evil while still cling­ing to the enchant­ing human­is­tic idea of moral rel­a­tivism. If there IS no greater good, if noth­ing ranks higher than humans’ opin­ions, than you have to resort to end­less, end­less per­ora­tions — as this very learned pro­fes­sor did — to try to explain why Hitler may have been a rather bad sort (but then again, maybe not).

    It was insane. I thought I could han­dle it, but as time went on, I could feel the giant-sized hole in the dia­logue — God. Reli­gion. Chris­tian­ity. It has been very dis­turb­ing to me in lis­ten­ing to lec­tures like this to dis­cover over and over again that not only do aca­d­e­mi­cians not believe in God and Jesus Christ (which I already knew), but that they don’t believe in Chris­tians. They seem not to believe that there are — or ever were — churches full of faith­ful believ­ers who are not moti­vated by pol­i­tics, power games or com­pletely prim­i­tive superstition.

    All the same, I waited and waited for some men­tion of Chris­tian­ity in this exhaus­tive dis­cus­sion of how we have gauged good and evil through­out our his­tory. And finally — finally! — the pro­fes­sor gave the most glanc­ing men­tion pos­si­ble of the Chris­t­ian view, but then skipped away by say­ing some­thing like this: But since Chris­tians are peo­ple who hold their beliefs in order to avoid the eter­nal pun­ish­ment of hell and gain the eter­nal reward of heaven, we can’t really con­sider their opin­ions to be objective.

    I think I just yelled out loud with­out mak­ing any words. If I did say some­thing, it might have been “What … the … heck???” (though I can’t guar­an­tee I didn’t use stronger language).

    Is this just me being naive? Did other Chris­tians know that this is how we are being stereo­typed? I sat there in the car and thought of the Chris­tians I’ve known, even before I was one. With all their faults, I found them to have a good­ness that was unique. I thought of my grandma Grace who gave so much of her mea­ger income away to char­i­ties that the IRS came to inves­ti­gate because they thought she was cheat­ing. I thought of teach­ers in pub­lic school who would try to tell us some­thing about the love of Jesus Christ (a very risky thing to do, even in those days). I thought of the born-again Chris­t­ian who talked to my sis­ter and I as we were walk­ing home from the mall and started me think­ing seri­ously about the ques­tions I had.

    Do non-believers really think that Chris­tians do all these things because we don’t want to go to a Bad Place?

    Don’t they know that we’re peo­ple in love?

    Maybe we don’t show it often enough. Or maybe the cur­rent cul­tural cli­mate truly can’t under­stand any love that isn’t roman­tic or erotic. Maybe they don’t really want to know that that kind of love, which has been ele­vated to such a grandiose level in mod­ern films and lit­er­a­ture, is just the tip of the ice­berg. It’s not that Chris­tians don’t feel roman­tic love as acutely as non-Christians; it’s just that we know what it’s an imi­ta­tion of. As Fred­er­ica said: The love of God is the only love in the uni­verse wor­thy of the name.

    loveofgod_2.jpgOr, to quote from Elder Por­phyrios in “Wounded by Love(***)”:

    When you find Christ, you are sat­is­fied, you desire noth­ing else, you find peace. You become a dif­fer­ent per­son. You live every­where, wher­ever Christ is. You live in the stars, in infin­ity, in heaven with the angels, with the saints, on earth with peo­ple, with plants, with ani­mals, with every­one and every­thing. When there is love for Christ, lone­li­ness dis­ap­pears. You are peace­able, joy­ous, full. Nei­ther melan­choly, nor ill­ness, nor pres­sure, nor anx­i­ety, nor depres­sion, nor hell.

    Christ is in all your thoughts, in all your actions.

    This is what Elder Por­phyrios calls divine eros. And the only rea­son we can love this way is because we are first loved. As one of the C. S. Lewis’ Blessed Spir­its says(****):“I am in Love; out of it I will not go.”

    But to bring it back to the Church cal­en­dar, this is ger­mane to Meat­fare Sun­day and the Lenten prepa­ra­tion. In the midst of toss­ing out left­over meat­loaf this week and pen­cil­ing in all the extra ser­vices, let’s make sure we don’t for­get what it’s all about. To quote again from Elder Porphyrios:

    Fast as much as you can, make as many pros­tra­tions as you can, attend as many vig­ils as you like, but be joy­ful. Have Christ’s joy. It is the joy that lasts for­ever, that brings eter­nal hap­pi­ness. It is the joy of our Lord that gives assured seren­ity, serene delight and full hap­pi­ness. All-joyful joy that sur­passes every joy. Christ desires and delights in scat­ter­ing joy, in enrich­ing His faith­ful with joy. I pray that your joy may be made full.

    Amen and amen. Then maybe in another gen­er­a­tion, uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors will have to con­cede, whether they like it or not, that what we did, we did for the love of God.


    Related posts:

    1. For the love of God
    2. C. S. Lewis on the love of God
    3. God’s image and likeness
    4. Praise for the Creator
    5. St. Sophia with Faith, Hope and Love

    February 7th, 2010 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 02.07.2010

    Yup, the stereo­type is the prod­uct of our own “Chris­t­ian mar­ket­ing”. I used to lis­ten to Chris­t­ian radio and 90% of the ser­mons were on end times and essen­tially avoid­ing hell for free by believ­ing in Jesus. So yes, I think some­times the world has picked up on the “Jesus is our asbestos suit against the fiery wrath of God” pretty well. (That, by the way is an exact quote from a pop­u­lar radio teacher.)

  • Ali

    I prob­a­bly could not even try to lis­ten to that lec­ture series. I know it would be an area that would lead me into a lot of anger. My clos­est friends, who are Evan­gel­i­cals, tease me for mak­ing every­thing about Jesus (though they do too, but I am more bla­tant about it among other Chris­tians), and a lec­ture series like that would make me nuts for its lack of empha­sis on Christ.

  • Grace

    s-p:
    I was hop­ing that wouldn’t be the case. I rarely catch Chris­t­ian talk radio, and I had been a lit­tle encour­aged by the guys that don’t sound so bad — I’m think­ing of Alis­tair Begg and Hank Hane­graaff. But yes, when I get some of the other guys, my jaw drops.

    Still, I don’t want to lay it all at their feet. Christ told us point blank that we would be per­se­cuted for telling the truth. Of course I wish that the evan­gel­i­cals would get their facts straight. But if they did, I’m not think­ing that all the non­be­liev­ers would join the party.

  • James the Thickheade

    Grace:

    Think the part about love is dead-on. Only what they see in us is not so much the blas­phemy of this love (a la St. Paul’s line)… though they do see this… but that this fail­ing of ours in not liv­ing up to our ideals… and fail­ing so obvi­ously… reminds them of their own; reminds them that sec­u­lar focus on the per­fectabilty of man is a failed dream. And the dif­fer­ence I won­der… is that per­haps they can’t tol­er­ate our beg­ging mercy to be for­given… we even have a place… a per­son to send our prayers for mercy. The uni­verse is not empty for us… and even as the physi­cists sub­scribed 30 years ago… the void is not a void. But in their case, in their view… isn’t it all just futile? They have no mercy for them­selves, for us, or sense of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. And again I won­der… if you base your phi­los­o­phy on an “interim” view of man, on a tem­po­ral “take”… don’t you end up risk­ing a wrong headed reac­tion to the uni­verse? I think they have. Their prob­lem in so many ways is that their knowl­edge of mate­r­ial sci­ence is dated.… very 18th or 19th cen­tury, and has failed to keep up. Their cut­ting edge has dulled, and the parade has passed them by. I think it is very, very sad. I’m not sure the parade will head toward Chris­tian­ity ipso facto… but it should :)

    Y’know… even Plato felt it was about love. His notion of love was dimin­ished from a chris­t­ian per­spec­tive… but at least he under­stood some basics.

  • Grace

    James:
    I’ve been notic­ing this par­tic­u­larly fero­cious kind of “evan­ge­lism” in the world’s cul­ture recently — it’s almost impos­si­ble to escape the ham-fisted ser­mons — and as you say, there is some­thing just piti­ful in find­ing out how very, very much intel­li­gent peo­ple want to believe if it only allows them to dis­be­lieve in God and in any­thing remotely resem­bling the Lord Jesus Christ (as opposed to the Prophet or Teacher or Good Guy, all of whom they’ll give a lit­tle lip-service to).

    It seems to me that right now, non-believers are sep­a­rated into two camps — the younger, hip­per “real­ists” who just want to con­stantly say “THERE IS NO GOD!” (as if that answers every­thing) and the older, squishier guys who want to say “We are ALL gods!” And they both argue with believ­ing Chris­tians unless they’re busy argu­ing with each other.

    That’s why I don’t totally blame the Protes­tants for not doing a bet­ter job of pre­sent­ing the faith. We’re get­ting flamed for even the 5% or so of the truth that’s out there — I can’t believe all would be well if we unloaded the real deal on them. Doesn’t excuse us from try­ing, of course.

    But I’m digress­ing. Good points you made, espe­cially about for­give­ness. And with For­give­ness Ves­pers com­ing up, very timely!

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