Love Issue Paper
This paper is about an issue in the church concerning the love of humanity verses the love of doctrine for humanity. The issue at hand seems a broad topic and could become a huge paper. But it is also very near to my heart and to the church that I attend. I should have picked a different time to start this paper than right after a class on the New Testament with Rick Watts. The class had me just longing for Christ in all that He is, and wanting others to have Him too. So as I thought through this issue of people loving doctrine more than actually loving people or vise versa, I have come to the conclusion that you simply can not separate the two. When you do love one more than the other, you do not bring glory to Christ at all and you actually hinder their relationship with Christ instead of helping it. There has to be a balance.
So, as a gentile pagan not really having grown up in the church, I am still trying to understand what this church body is all about and what it is supposed to look like. As I look at history it seems that at some point in evangelicalism a shift has occurred where doctrines or maybe a misunderstanding of doctrines became more important than the person of Christ and the people inside and outside of the church. So that again in another point in history when that what seemed to be lost (i.e. personal relationship with Christ) it was sought after, and then doctrine was forgotten about. So in the history of the church as some communities sought to figure out right doctrine it ended up leading to the distancing of their relationship with Christ and other Christians. The result of this as am example was if you don’t hold to my certain doctrines you were persecuted, killed and excommunicated. Humanity was taken away from you because your view of Christ is different from mine and wrong. So then the result in another part of church history we saw people wanting nothing to do with this and just wanted Christ and freedom in humanity, so they segregated themselves trying to start anew. Well to say it nicely, in both of these situations they dropped the ball. Calvin makes a great point on this saying “If the Church is founded on the doctrine of the apostles and prophets, by which believers are enjoined to place their salvation in Christ alone, then if that doctrine is destroyed, how can the Church continue to stand?”[1] True that bro! How can you possibly separate the person of Christ and knowledge or the teaching of Him? But how dare we take life when we not only didn’t give it in the first place but take it on a matter of what we see as principle or doctrine. I think this is still happening today. What we do in churches now is not take physical life but we segregate and distinguish humanity between lists that this paper couldn’t even contain. We do this all the while with a sign on our churches door that says “Christ the King” or “Hope for Life”. Why would I or anyone else want to come to Christ if my humanity was taken away?
One of the greatest hopes for me is when I look back in time at our religious history and reading about those who got it right and finished well. Reading and studying about these people, communities, ministries and cultures was that they were all about the sake of the gospel of Christ’s unending love for all people. And the effect of this love for Christ and people has changed the world and culture as we know it. They understood and knew Christ and desired to make Him known in truth and reality. They couldn’t help but share Christ Jesus with others because of the change in their own lives! They believed that it was not of their own power that this happens or even their own words but they were entrusted and possessed by the Spirit. “One might think that doctrines are to be entrusted to believers, but believers are entrusted to doctrines, meaning by this reality of God in Christ for us. It is the gospel that posses ministry, not ministry that posses the gospel.” (Purves pg xvi) It is hard for me to nail down a point in world history that is the darkest and or the brightest times of the church. But there is something inside of me like the time when God spoke to Elijah that says, “Seth, there has never ever been a darkest time for the church, because there are always those that I have set aside that get it. And when they got it they couldn’t just hold on to it and hide. My Love doesn’t work that way. There are sad times, and times when a fallen world overshadows this love, but always remember that this love has and will prevail as it transforms and transcends the church and lives and culture!”
How do I then know what the true church is supposed to look like? I have read the New Testament and church history some, but I suppose I have to look at my own personal experience. The two churches I have been a part of are both nondenominational and have been great churches to be a part of. But they were also very different from each other too. Is one better than the other, or closer to the model that Christ gives? Well, one was saturated with great preaching of the word and doctrine. Not very personal though and I must say though experience judgmental towards me (though there was reconciliation). There was a bit of an age gap also, so maybe they didn’t know how to build a relationship with someone in their mid twenties. Now the focus of the second church I have been a part of is making sure that you know that you have a personal relationship with Christ and making it comfortable for you to just come as you are and know that there is a place for you. Yet when there is a class on the survey of the Old Testament or Christian doctrine, ten people show up from a congregation of four thousand. That’s crazy! Who after accepting Christ into their lives wouldn’t want more? So then is their a medium? And if both of these churches were in the same community which one should I go to? Can you really have the one without the other or I am just missing it badly and desiring a church to fill MY needs? Maybe I just haven’t been around long enough to know it if it hit me. And it scares the crap out of me and delights me at the same time because God is calling me to service in His church, or rather to participate with Him in a pastoral role of some sort.
So I am called and the harvest is ripe and seems burdensome. But what is the purpose of the church for? To be a dwelling place in a person not a building, a human being for Christ to abide in and love all people through. Packer say’s that “New Testament Christianity is essentially response to the revelation of the Creator as a God of love. God is a tripersonal Being who so loves ungodly humans that the Father has given the Son, the Son has given his life, and Father and Son together now give the Spirit to save sinners from unimaginable misery and lead them into unimaginable glory. Believing in and being overwhelmed by this amazing reality of divine love generates and sustains the love to God and neighbor that Christ’s two great commandments require. Our love is to express our gratitude for God’s gracious love to us, and to be modeled on it. We are His body, and with, and only with the Spirit can this be done; that all may experience the gospel and His love that never ever fails.” (packer).
This is where I think the church is now, or least the one I am attending but could be universal. It is desperately hungry for Christ, but too lazy to understand the doctrines of Christianity and its history or even the bible. Feed me enough on Sunday so that I don’t have to eat any more during the week. But I don’t now if that is all of it, that is just what I see when I go to church. But for me when I accepted Christ into my life all I wanted to know was Him, I really was transformed. I was a butterfly that had no idea of what it meant to fly. So that is why I love Jesus and any teaching on Him, hence the reason I came to Regent. But maybe what is happening is that people are experiencing Christ without really being transformed, or maybe they could be held captive to being completely transformed and not living in total freedom because they are attempting to earn salvation. All of these things are true in some circumstances but I think Niebuhr nails it that the issue is “men mistook their partial contributions to truth for the whole truth; transformation occurred when humility and service supplanted self-assertion and self-glorification.” (pg227) So the issue and the proof in the pudding is true love in action. We would just rather love ourselves than Christ. And theologically we would rather love our doctrines than people. And it sometimes it is sad in reading about the church’s history and the disunity it has had amongst its brethren. Yet maybe it is also the greatest blessing that the church has struggled with these issues. George Fisher says, “there is a diversity, - not a contradiction, - but a diversity in the ways in which the Apostles themselves conceive of the gospel. For example, there is a Pauline type of doctrine, and Johannine type of doctrine…They may serve also, to make it clear how theology, or the understanding of the Christian revelation, may be progressive, and yet that revelation itself not be defective or faulty.” (pg 9) So as John Stackhouse might say “GOD is BIG”, so big in fact that to say you have it all nailed down, every doctrine in place, actually brings God down to a level of human reason. And for me knowing that the history of Christian doctrine is all over the board just shows how BIG God is and how little we are. Hodge says, “ God is essentially unknowable. We can know only those parts of His nature, of His relations or of His ways which He has chosen to reveal to us. And at the best the creature can know even that which he is permitted to know only in part.” (pg33-34)
So then I guess what ends up happening is that we read all these doctrines and pick out the one that we believe is the most biblical, right? And maybe down the road we chose a different one because we have changed or gained knowledge and experience. So my position here is that I need to be able to discern if a church is in right praxis and sound doctrine so that the community that it is in is affected by Christ in His full supremacy in love and action. And I think it might just be this, washing my neighbor’s feet, having communion together and baptizing them. And explaining what those sacraments mean, and who they are about and why He cares about us. I want to be burdened to pray for our churches and our culture that deal with the issue of loving our neighbor because they are human and made in God’s image. And I pray that the Lord would take me home before I get to a place where I don’t care about this anymore, or when a doctrinal statement keeps me from loving someone, because that just does not make any sense at all. Thomas A Kempis nails this whole point “Christ’s teaching surpasses all the teachings of the saints, and the person who has his spirit will find hidden nourishment in his words. Yet, many people, even after hearing scripture read so often, lack a deep longing for it, for they do not have the spirit of Christ…If you knew the whole Bible by heart and the sayings of all the philosophers, what good would it all be without God’s love and grace, this is the highest wisdom; to see the world as it truly is, fallen and fleeting; to love the world not for its own sake, but for God’s; and to direct all your effort toward achieving the kingdom of heaven.” (pg 30)
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[1]Jean Calvin and Henry Beveridge, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Translation of: Institutio Christianae religionis.; Reprint, with new introd. Originally published: Edinburgh : Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846., IV, ii, 1 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997).
[2]J. I. Packer, Concise Theology : A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1995, c1993).