Love: what's it got to do with anything anyways?!

Philosophy cannot understand love. It’s irrational. It makes absolutely no sense. It does things that make other scratch their heads. One can only understand love if they have been in love.

Love drives people to sacrifice everything. Love keeps lovers up all night. Love would cause a college student to rent a car and drive 15 hours in order to get to spend 5 hours with the one he loves. Love makes people do things that others see and say, “that’s CRAZY!”

We can only understand God if we view him through the lens of love. The Bible is at its core a love story; God creates the world because of love; he looks to redeem his rebellious creation because of love; he calls out Israel because of his love; Christ comes to us because of love; he dies for us because of love; he creates the church because of love; he calls all to himself because of love. If we do not understand love, we do not understand God’s actions or the story of the Bible.

For this reason, theologians and philosophers who attempt to look at God’s actions through Christ a lens that doesn’t include love, miss the mark. For example, John Calvin created a model for understanding God’s working in the world – predestination – that makes sense philosophically yet it does not include love; thus it creates a poor understanding of who God is.

What do you think about this?

Quick Question:

Recently, in my class on Revelation (NT666), the professor was talking about how because the church undermined the Roman empire, they were persecuted. He suggested that this is the model for the church, our values are different than that of the world around us, and the world should hate us.

The values of American culture are so counter to that of the church; yet there is not a complete rejection of the church. Do you think this means that the church is not being faithful? or perhaps the values of America aren't so anti-Christian?

What do you think?

sin makes me human? what!

Is sin inherent or intrinsic (part of the fiber of our beings)? I think that if sin it is then we have some issues.

What does this say about Adam and Eve? Were they human before the fall? Sin could not be intrinsic with their existence, because it would then imply that before they sinned they were not human. This is just plain silly!

It also implies that without sin, one would be less than human. So what does that say about Jesus? Was he less than human? Because if sin is inherent to our existence then Jesus, who did not sin, would be less than human. Which would lead to problems in our theological understanding of Christ. We don't see Jesus as less than human, he is all that is human. If he is all that is human and is without sin, perhaps to fully human is to be without sin.

Maybe sin makes us less human. That while we are in our sin, we are actually less than what our Creator intended us to be.

This is an interesting conversation. What do you think?

(These thoughts came from Dr. David Bauer in class on 1.29.09)