Jun 252012
 

Seeking a God to Glorify, by Leroy T. Howe

Glorify coverHere is what I wrote for Amazon.com:

“This book is a wonderful read! Dr. Howe guides us through his own journey of spiritual formation, or faith development, courageously sharing the kinds of deep questions, thoughts, and feelings that many of us have been trained to avoid and deny at all costs. Supported by his exceptional scholarship, Dr. Howe’s thinking is as penetrating and clear as his compassion for humanity is warm and accepting. This soulful combination allows him to voice great sympathy for the profound struggles of religious life, especially with church doctrine, while also permitting him to be both funny and surgically precise in criticizing a great deal of popular dogma. Personally speaking, at every turn I felt as though I was reading the thoughts and feelings of a true kindred spirit. Dr. Howe knows the only god truly worthy of worship is the God who is Truth and Love. This being the highest possible concept of God, we best honor God through our own genuine commitment to the principles of truth and love, and so we must seriously question any doctrine, text, or authority that leads elsewhere.”

With regard to mysticism, Dr. Howe speaks clearly of a world-shifting spiritual experience  in which he felt connection with an infinitely caring “Knower.”  He also alludes to exploring some methods of spiritual practice, yet he never labels his faith as mystical.   Even so, many of us will find that his work belies a truly meditative depth of reflection, if not a genuinely contemplative openness to the still small voice of the Spirit in his own heart and mind.   One of the nice things about the lack of the mysticism label, combined with his personable writing style, is that it illustrates an approach to communing very deeply with God to which almost anyone can relate.

Dr. Howe also has his own excellent blog: Faith Challenges – Searching for a Credible Faith.

As a more intimate note to readers of my blog, I’m happy to point out that Dr. Howe dedicated this book to his good friend, Dr. John F. Miller, III.  John was my philosophy professor in college, my first meditation teacher, has remained a mentor all these years, and is one of my dearest friends.  Given that John’s career as a philosopher is most noteworthy for championing love above all else, it’s no surprise to me that Dr. Howe would dedicate this book to him.

Jun 222012
 

Thanks to my friend, Steve Schrader, for striking the spark that ignited this post.

In a recent blog post at Psychology Today, Carl Routlidge Ph.D.,  spoke of religion as a response to existential threats.  Angst – our deep, pervasive, and often shadowy feeling of dread, doubt, fear, despair, and anxiety in the face of life – is undoubtedly one of the driving factors behind religion.  Christian existentialists have reflected on this truth in great depth, as in Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, to which I must pay homage.  While this post certainly reflects my own experiences and ideas, there is little here that isn’t more fully examined in Tillich’s work.

We have lots of unhealthy ways of responding to angst, and there are examples of such dis-ease in the imbalances of two extreme expressions of our religion.  Look closely and you can find it is the dank and musty secret in the closet behind the veil of a way that seems to be all about doves, rainbows, flowers, and honey.  On the other hand, it is also the searing smokey furnace in the basement underneath the way of hellfire and brimstone, world hating, and self-loathing.   In both cases, the energy of angst is not accepted for what it actually is, and this lack of acceptance amounts to a denial of our fear in the broadest sense.  Some of us even mistakenly speak of fear as the opposite of love, as if it is the very worst evil there is.   Its energy is therefore rerouted into attitudes that not only feel safer to us and others, but also seem to facilitate actually doing something in response to the supposed causes of our more specific fears.  For some of us, it is the barely bridled anger of a militant moralism obsessed with the dichotomy of sin and purity, and for others it is the sticky, saccharine sweet, whitewash of escapist optimism.  Some of us even jump back and forth from one of these extremes to the other.  To some extent, we must fall back on such defensive patterns in order to survive; it is the fight-or-flight response at the level of being itself.  Without it, we would too often be paralyzed in our angst.  We wouldn’t really live at all.

But is this all there is to religion?  Not according to those who have jesus-walking-on-water-benjamin-mcpherson[1rev]knowingly walked on the stormy waters of their own angst.  Accepting angst as something other than an evil to be vanquished is a vital part of an authentic faith.  This may be one of the deeper meanings in our language about fearing God.  According to Proverbs, that fear is intimately linked with wisdom, and in Psalms with humility and the desire for forgiveness and renewal.  As with existential philosophers and therapists, our great prophets, preachers and saints consistently tell us that there is something psychologically and spiritually healthy about standing naked before all the dark frightening aspects and possibilities of our existence – aloneness, uncertainty, impermanence, and pain.

Any genuine path of mysticism must include a deeper awareness, acceptance, and integration of these aspects of our being.  We may be drawn to mysticism as a way that seems to offer the ultimate escape from them but, if we are genuinely devoted to the fullest possible communion with Truth and Love, we cannot avoid them.  This inevitability is profoundly explored in the writings of St. John of the Cross, Mother Theresa, Soren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich among many others.  It can even be heard when Jesus describes the Way of the Cross:

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Mark 8:31-37

His own personal angst is more dramatically recorded in his experience in the garden of Gethsemane:

Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said, “Sit here while I go over there to pray.”He took Peter and Zebedee’s two sons, James and John, and he became anguished and distressed.  He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.  Stay here and keep watch with me.”

 

He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying, “My Father!  If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me.  Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”

Jesus in Gethsemane

Then he returned to the disciples and found them asleep.  He said to Peter, “Couldn’t you watch with me even one hour? Keep watch and pray, so that you will not give in to temptation.  For the spirit is willing, but the body is weak!”  Matthew 26:36-41

 

Part of the Good News is that it’s possible to discover something wonderful on the other side of all that darkness.  There is indeed a resurrection after the psychological crucifixion of accepting and learning to live with our anguish, distress, and crushing grief.   That resurrection isn’t the end of suffering; even after Jesus’ resurrection his body was still wounded caravaggio-thomasand still knew hunger.  Rather, we awaken to a clearer realization of the context of that suffering and the meaning we can give to it; in short, we can have life more abundantly, just as Jesus wished for us.  Accepting existence in its wholeness, and thus living life in our own wholeness, means no longer having to be constantly either at war with or trying to run away from ourselves, others, the world, or reality itself.  It bestows a peace that transcends the conflicts of our black-and-white either/or thinking without merely hiding them behind angelic fantasies.  With that peace comes awareness of our freedom to simply be; to live authentically; to try and to fail; to fall and get back up; to do something other than punish ourselves in pursuit of illusory perfection; to be co-creators of the richest kinds of beauty; and to know love in all its colors, flavors, scents, sounds, and textures, even when it is unrequited, and even where we once might have found nothing but indifference, fear, or hate.

Some of us also come to see this dynamic of psychological crucifixion and rebirth as only one example of a truly cosmic principle and pattern.  Our mystical experience gives us greater hope, if not genuine certainty, that there is much more to our existence than accidental interactions of energy occasionally coalescing in the form of a human brain destined for cellular decay.  By the same token, however, it can make the possibility of such annihilation fade to near insignificance compared to the awesome fact that there is indeed, right here and now, a virtually infinite amount of something rather than nothing, and that we are free to do with this miracle as we will!

Oh God, thank you just for this much!  Help us embrace our freedom in wholeness. Amen.

Agape

Jun 152012
 

It seems to me that understanding what we really mean by “faith” is one of the most important exercises in being a Christian.  It also seems that for most Christians faith is defined in terms of assent to specific theological ideas.  Said more bluntly, our predominant contemporary approach to faith is the practice of proclaiming and otherwise acting as if particular doctrines about God and Jesus are facts, no matter what we truly think and feel. We can call this dogmatic faith, because it is doctrinaire in its attitudes and also because it is largely an attempt to have faith in the doctrines rather than in our personal relationships with God.  As a central part of dogmatic faith, many of us have been trained to resist, conceal, and deny what we truly think and feel, especially if it includes any disagreement, doubt, or uncertainty about doctrine.  The self-conflict that naturally results from such a practice is sometimes even touted as praiseworthy internal warfare against demonic deception.  In effect, we’re taught that faith means an active distrust of our own hearts and minds.  Is this what Jesus and his earliest followers intended?  Is this what God wants?  I have strong faith that the answer to both of those questions is a resounding “no.” In an effort to loosen some of the chains of dogmatic faith, this post looks carefully at the meaning of faith in early Christianity, shows how it connects with mysticism, and explores some implications for our religious life.

Faith Defined

When we look at the ancient Hebrew and Greek words for faith, we find not only a greater breadth of meaning than dogmatism but also a very different emphasis.  In the Tanakh, a key Hebrew word translated into English as “faith” is emunah, which more specifically connotes an active trust and confidence in someone or something.  In the New Testament, the words relating to faith and belief are the Greek pistis (noun) or pisteuo (verb), which similarly connote trust, fidelity, and reliance.  Among other places, pistis appears in what may be the most commonly cited Christian scripture to define faith, Hebrews 11:1:

“Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.” NLT

This little statement is a concise yet penetrating revelation about the intimate relationship of faith and hope.  Hope is the anticipation of something we desire, and as such it has both emotional and intellectual components. The intellectual aspect is an idea of what we want to happen, and the emotional aspect is a positive feeling that it will happen.  Faith is therefore specifically identified as the root, source, or power behind that positive feeling in hope.  With faith as a prerequisite, hope cannot be contingent upon what a person should feel or think.  No matter how clear a vision might be for what we think we should hope, if the personal emotional conviction is not also there, then there is no real faith behind it, and thus there is no real hope. Pretended hope is faithless, and thus isn’t hope at all.  Hope is a deeply personal experience that isn’t a matter of choosing one option over others because someone else encourages it; that is merely consent at best.  Hope can certainly be influenced by others, and even shared in common with others, but each person’s hope must be her or his own, driven by his or her own faith.

Along those lines, note that this verse doesn’t say faith is confidence specifically in church doctrine, in what we hear from the pulpit, or even in scripture.  In fact, the second clause clearly specifies that faith is about unseen things.  Doctrines, preachers, and scriptures can all point toward things that we cannot see, but they themselves are seen, and thus they are not the ultimate objects of our faith, our greatest trust, confidence, or reliance.  This observation is supported by taking the full context of Hebrews 11,  in which all the examples cited for great faith – including Able, Enoch, Noah, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses – are credited for acting upon their own very personal and immediate experiences of God’s call, for acting upon their hope in serving the Divine, and not for their submission to religious authorities and doctrines.  Some of these examples further reveal that faith cannot be equated with the positive emotional aspect of hope.  With Noah, for example, while his faith in the purpose of the ark may have been positive, his faith in the coming deluge would have been sorrowful.

In this view, we can see that faith is deep trust and powerful conviction connected to one’s personal awareness of God. It is not a particular feeling, not just a function of emotion, but instead the presence of something else that stirs emotional responses in us.  It is not a matter of choice, not merely a derivative of conscious reasoning, but rather a power that rises up from the spirit within us to direct our reasoning and choices. If faith isn’t simply the product of conscious processes like thinking and feeling, it must come from some other place.  In psychological terms, we would say that faith rises up from the unconscious, perhaps intuitively or even instinctively, and as such it bears a striking resemblance to what we mean by the word will.  In terms of Christian spirituality, the New Testament consistently says faith is a gift from God.  Some Christians understand this to mean that one either has faith or does not, depending on Divine intervention.  On the other hand, some of us believe that all people have received faith from God, but for one reason or another not everyone experiences it as consciously directed toward God. It might instead be directed toward science, nature, humanity, love, happiness, peace, power, life itself, or any number of other things. My experience suggests that everyone has a deep compelling conviction that something is most worthy of their trust and allegiance, and faith is therefore an inherent guiding function in human beings.  Again, this is not unlike how we speak of the will.

Faith and Authenticity

Each of us has our own faith, just as each of us has our own sensations.  We can no more give our faith to someone else, or take someone else’s faith into ourselves, than we can see through each others eyes, hear through each others ears, or smell through each others noses.  We can describe those experiences to each other, we can describe how we have been affected by them, and we can even lead each other into situations that will produce very similar experiences, but the experiences themselves are nontransferable.  Faith is like this in that the conviction that something or someone is trustworthy happens internally, as do the thoughts and feelings connected with that conviction.  In effect, we cannot simply adopt someone else’s beliefs as our own.  Even if we trust someone else’s ideas and conclusions more than our own, we must first have faith in our own ability to make that judgment, and our own faith in the other person is still our own faith.  It is therefore inescapable that all decisions start with faith in one’s own ability to make those decisions, even if it seems to mean turning all ensuing decisions over to someone else.  Every acceptance of someone else’s choice is thus a response to our own faith.  The really important questions are therefore about the degree to which we are responding authentically to our faith, acknowledging and honoring the fact that its source and presence is within ourselves.

Let’s ask some of those questions in the context of three very basic ideas we Christians share about God:

1. God is the source of all truth and love.
2. God’s supreme will is for truth and love to reign above all.
3. Our love for God should be done with all that we are.

If this is all true, and my faith tells me it is, then which better honors God – fully accepting our responsibility for what we think and feel, or trying to pretend it can be turned over to someone else, or to a church or a book?  Is it even possible for us to genuinely believe that God expects us to lie to ourselves about what we really think and feel?  Can we come to any reasonable conclusion that our salvation is determined by trying to force ourselves to believe, or pretend to believe, a particular set of theological notions?  And if that is indeed the way one defines a faith necessary for salvation, then how is that not actually a path of works to try earning God’s unmerited grace?

I suspect that somewhere in each of us is the very natural hope, and thus the faith, that God really does want us to love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, just as Jesus said.  To me, this must mean that God wants our complete authenticity, including our doubts and uncertainties, and definitely not our disingenuous conformity to doctrine or tradition.  I suspect that denying what we truly think and feel is therefore more about fear of human judgment and punishment than it is about pleasing God, although the religious training many of us have received can make it difficult to know the difference.

Faith and Scripture

While faith itself may be innate, the mind driven by faith must focus that energy upon something.  Yet the mind makes mistakes for all sorts of reasons, including poor information and faulty logic.  The mind stimulated by faith therefore benefits from having reference points and guidelines that have been tested by time.  Likewise, we benefit from guidelines on how to manage the very powerful feelings stimulated by faith.  These are the purposes of the Bible in Christianity.  Even though there was no New Testament as we know it for many generations of early Christians, and it has only been in the last few hundred years that most Christians have been able to read the Bible for themselves, it has become central to making Christianity the unique religion that it is. Yet the Bible is neither the religion itself nor the supreme object of our faith, and it is certainly not a manual for an inauthentic “fake it ’til you make it” imitation of faith.

If we rely upon the Bible as a central aid in loving God with all our heart and mind, we have a responsibility to develop the deepest and clearest possible understanding of its meanings.  For many of us, dogmatic faith has insisted that understanding the Bible is simply a matter of regarding it as a perfectly complete, plainspoken, and inerrant dictation from God.  For others of us, this approach requires far too much confidence in the human beings who wrote, edited, compiled, and translated the works in the Bible, no matter how inspired they were.  When we look at the history of the Bible, we clearly see it has been and still is subject to the same human shortcomings and follies as other literature.  We therefore cannot claim to know exactly what Jesus said, what was and was not put into his mouth by the writers of the gospels. Supposing we did know that much, we still couldn’t honestly be so certain of precisely what he or they meant that we could exclude all other possibilities; there are just too many complicating factors. Very few of us are qualified to know how translation into our own native language skews the meanings we gather from the Bible, and those who are qualified can and do come to stalemates where one possibility is as valid as another.  The greatest Biblical scholars cannot say with complete certainty when Jesus was and wasn’t speaking in some degree of metaphor, and they cannot avoid being confronted with passages that conflict with each other in different ways. Even the attempt to read something as literally as possible sometimes leads to radically different understandings.  With all of these observations, it is quite reasonable to conclude that we are all actually interpreting everything in the Bible, whether we realize it or not.  Furthermore, when faced with various passages that seem to conflict with each other, making decisions about which ones are closer to the truth as we understand it automatically makes everyone a “cafeteria Christian” to some extent.

But with all the different possible directions to look for meanings, how do we know which ones to pursue?  This is where faith always steps in for each of us.  The nourishment we select from the buffet of possibilities is determined by our faith, how each of our hearts and minds are moved by our own trust and conviction in what is true.  Referring back to Hebrews 11:1, we can see that paying attention to our hopes is an important part of the process.  Being honest with ourselves about what we hope a scripture means can help us look more directly into what our faith is telling us about the truth of ourselves and our relationships with God. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we won’t misunderstand and make mistakes, but it does mean that they will at least be honest misunderstandings and mistakes.  That’s not only as it should be, it’s the only way it can be if we are going to be as authentic as possible, and thus it would seem that God would expect as much.  Furthermore, we don’t need to have answers for everything but we should admit (at least to ourselves) when there are some things that we simply do not believe.   Some people say that in such cases we must suspend our own disbelief and place our trust in doctrine.  But we should ask how it honors the God of Truth to try filling the gap of doubt with someone else’s thoughts, especially when the “still small voice” in one’s heart is speaking otherwise.  It seems to me that sometimes faith requires us to wrestle with the angels.

Conclusion: Mystical Faith

Referring back to “Faith Defined,” we once again consider the figures cited as examples of faith, and especially what the Bible says about their relationships with God.   We consistently find that they communed directly with God: They heard God, they spoke with God, they walked with God, and they even argued with God.  In the end, they all served what they best understood to be God’s will no matter what anyone else thought, said, or did.  Their immediate personal relationships with God are emphasized as central to their faith, and not their relationships with scriptures, doctrines, religious institutions, or any other mediating entities.  Those secondary things certainly played important roles at various times, but none were ever more important to our exemplars than the voice of the Spirit speaking through their own trust in God, their confidence in their personal relationships with God, and their convictions about what would best serve God.  In short, their faith was exceptionally authentic, and it was also exceptionally mystical.

What made their faith mystical is that it was unmediated.  Because mystics are concerned with the fullest possible realization of unity with God, we seek to commune directly with God.  The mystical way is as literal as it can be in reading and responding to the call to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.  We turn inward to open the Holy of Holies, the place of God’s immediate presence in our own beings, and we do so trusting that God wants our authentic love more than anything else.  So it is that we strive to quietly lay our hearts and minds bare before God, respectfully avoiding, at least before God, the pretense of beliefs we do not actually hold.  We are confident that the hopes arising in and from these moments are evidence of our faith being formed by God’s infinite wisdom and love.  Yet, because turning inward also makes us more profoundly aware of our humanity, we understand that we can err in the thinking, the management of emotions, and the actions driven by the energy of our faith.  We understand that there are consequences for such errors, but we trust that the loss of Divine Grace will never be one of them. We also hope to learn through those consequences, and thus follow our faith into greater experiences and expressions of love.

With this deep awareness and acceptance of our own humanity, we realize that faith, the voice of the Spirit, can lead individuals and groups in somewhat different directions. It is therefore easier for us to welcome and love others with beliefs different from our own, and especially in matters of theological doctrine.  In fact, our faith leads us to open our arms wider to embrace and celebrate the differences, not only the similarities, arising from all people’s relationships with The One who is Truth, Life, and Love Itself, and thus evolve together into greater fulfillment of the prayer, “Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

Maranatha

Agape

Jun 082012
 

Part 3: Applied Ethics

In the Present Day

There are a number of common situations in which some of us modern Christians fall back on an attitude of “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”   I’ve heard it used with reference to vices of all sorts, to addictions, acts of violence, and even to identifying as other than Christian.   In terms of public discourse, perhaps the most noteworthy context these days is that of romantic love between persons of the same sex or gender, which we shall refer to under the shorthand term of gay love.*

There are various reasons we’re taking the issue of gay love as the case in point:

First, it is an issue where judgment of sin is clearly a common practice among Christians.  A recent survey says that 71% of weekly church-going Americans, and 82% of “evangelical, fundamentalist or born again Christians,” consider gay love to be sinful, as compared to 44% of all Americans.

Second, as with many other issues, traditional doctrines based on certain scriptures are typically used to try justifying the judgment of sin.**

Third, this issue can be quite a flashpoint. The attitude of many Christians is the most passionate example of hate in “hate the sin,” while the love in “love the sinner”fred-phelps-westboro-baptist is too often at best merely pity and squeamish or begrudging tolerance. Furthermore, the message of hate can so far outweigh the message of love that some of us seem to think it is our duty to God to be hostile on this issue.  The words that come from the mouths of this hateful Christian “love” encourage intentional emotional abuse, and too often even explicitly advocate physical violence.  Is any of that what Jesus taught?

This issue clearly shows that the ethic of separating out the sin to be hated while loving the sinner eventually falls in upon itself.  The faulty cornerstone of our presumption to judge sin for others makes the entire edifice unsafe to inhabit.   As Jesus taught, and the Apostles rediscovered for themselves, this is not the way to serve and minister to others, or to build a community of faith, hope, peace, and love.

In the Early Church

When it came to the matter of other people’s sins, Jesus’ love repeatedly reached across the traditional barriers of his time.  Even so, in the early times after Jesus we find the Apostles deeply troubled in working out how to love as Jesus loved.  They were concerned about who was and was not worthy of Christian love, and how that love should or should not be expressed.  There was friction among them about whether or not a Gentile could be considered a sibling in Christ, and this friction was based upon the purity codes in scripture and Jewish tradition.  Devout Jews of the time regarded it sinful merely to associate with “impure” people, let alone treat them as equals in the sight of God.  To do so was to invite both social and legal consequences, and was even considered an invitation for God’s wrath.   To me, that sounds a lot like where many of us Christians are today on the issue of gay love.

Despite their fear, the Apostles finally let go of this sweeping judgment against their Gentile neighbors.  One of the most significant moments in this transformation occurs when Peter received two visions that led him to say:

God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean.  Acts 10:28

Notice that he didn’t say, “God told me to welcome you despite your impurity,” which would be more like “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”   Rather, he accepted the mystical experience of his dreams and visions, the Holy Spirit moving within him, and dropped his old scripturally-backed judgment.  He was then able to more freely love the soul kneeling before him, asking the man to rise and be greeted as an equal.   In doing so, he mirrored the attitudes and behaviors of the one he called Lord.  He let go of the judgment of sin, and loved the soul.

This practice of letting go of judgment, particularly with regard to the purity codes, grew rapidly among early Christians.  It accompanied a significant evolution in the understanding of sin.  With time, many prohibitions for the ancient people of Israel were no longer even regarded as matters of sin, and that progression has not stopped.  We have also increasingly realized that such purity codes actually serve more as obstacles than aids to spreading the Good News and uniting all people as one family in God’s unconditional love.  As this progression rolls on,”hate the sin, but love the sinner” should become less and less relevant to Christian life.  We are increasingly letting go of the judgment of sin, and instead focusing on loving the soul.

A Closing Thought

Jesus and his followers exemplified this point many times over: If we want God’s loving will “done on earth as it is in Heaven,” then we best serve that aim with a love that welcomes others as equals, respects their freedom, and promotes peace.   In short, it’s all so simple:  We reap what we sow.   That’s also a pretty good tenet to keep in mind!

Agape

 

* The term gay love is used here because it acknowledges that people of the same sex or gender can and do love each other in every way.  When looking into our own hearts and minds, many of us who are straight have found that the term “homosexual” has been associated with a tendency to focus only on the sexual desires and behaviors of gay people.  This is dehumanizing and unfair.  How many of us routinely refer to the romantic love between straight people as “heterosexuality” or even “straight love”?  I pray for the day when everyone will wonder why there would be a need to routinely classify romantic love in such ways.

** For now, it would be a distraction to question the traditional understandings of those scriptures, and thus challenge the idea that gay love is sinful.  It is enough to note in passing that Biblical scholars, theologians, clergy, ordinary laypersons, and even entire Christian communities are increasingly doing so, just as was done with interracial love in the previous century.

Jun 072012
 

Part 2: Beyond Proof-Texting

In this part I want to offer more of my own reflections on this attitude of “hate the sin and love the sinner,” and do so in light of what I believe are the New Testament messages underpinning Christian ethics:

  • Love God with all that we are.
  • Love others as ourselves, and even as Christ in their forms.
  • Because God’s love for humans is a matter of grace, not of merit, we cannot judge anyone’s worthiness of love.

In this context, loving the sinner while hating the sin seems possible and even praiseworthy.  Most of us know very well that we can truly love someone while strongly disliking and disapproving of some attitude or action from that person.   We recognize that occasional sinful acts can be severely hated, yet even when added together not be enough to warrant our utter hatred for a person who’s character is basically good.   In fact, we might even more strongly hate the sin because of our love for the sinner.  Yet, while there are other merits to this saying, this line of reasoning reveals its shortcomings as a guide for Christian ethics.  It falls short because it does not mirror the unconditional nature of Divine Love.  “Hate the sin, but love the sinner” continues to be based upon human judgment and limited ideas about the nature of love.

These obstacles are understandable because human beings seem to rarely express the transcendent unconditional love that is the Divine Love of God’s grace.  Furthermore, we usually have some sort of social and moral grading for portioning out our love, and thus our love is often a commodity that we trade with some degree of judgment.  Most of us even routinely speak of love and hate as if they are opposites, as if there really is no such thing as a love that hate cannot match or even outweigh.

It would be unreasonable to expect ourselves to be anything but human, and thus we can accept that our love will sometimes be conditional.  We will sometimes miss the mark by judging how others might miss the mark with God.  We will overlook the logs in our own eyes as we become obsessed with splinters in the eyes of others.  We will often put our faith in our own judgment of sin, and in lesser forms of love, rather than completely trust in Divine Wisdom and Love.

In these moments, it is helpful to have a guide for opening as much as possible to unconditional love.  Surely this is the best intention behind “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”  However, given the very human tendencies we’ve reviewed, as well as the difficulty in mentally separating the sin from the person who commits it, we can see how “hate the sin, but love the sinner” could actually encourage us to keep hate in our hearts and hold it against our love for the person.

Yet we are challenged to allow God’s unconditional love to shine through us as best we can, and so there must be other options for tenets that can carry us further in that direction.  I want to offer this as one possibility:

Let go of the judgment of sin, and love the soul.

In one sense, this statement is an affirmation to help with releasing the tendency to judge sin.  It acknowledges the possibility of being judgmental, but it does not promote an unrealistic expectation of some idealized perfection.  It is also a guide for our attitudes and actions whenever we awaken to the fact that we are judging what we consider to be the sins of another.   Its aims are also served by not using the word “sinner,”  and instead using the word “soul.”  In this way, we have a reminder that the other is not only more than a sinner, but also more than a person we know in this world (person comes from the Greek prosopon, meaning “mask”).  It reminds us that this soul, this whole being with depths and dimensions we cannot see, is a child of God.

In Part 3, we’ll review issues where “hate the sin, but love the sinner” is often applied, and some detriments of doing so. We’ll also reflect on how the proposed alternative could produce attitudes, actions, and effects more in line with the core ethics of the Good News.

Jun 062012
 

I’m offering these reflections in three parts.  First, we’ll take a look at the history of this saying.  Second, we’ll evaluate it in the context of the Good News as I understand it, and consider an alternative that I think better serves the spirit of Christ’s call.  Finally, we’ll address one of the ways this saying is frequently applied, how it is problematic, and how the suggested alternative could be beneficial.

Part 1: Some Background

Many contemporary Christians, including me, have spoken this statement, or some variation of it, as if it is traditional doctrine, if not actually scriptural.   In fact, it is neither, although there are scriptural references that might be used to support it, such as these:

Love must be sincere.  Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Romans 12:9

Show mercy to those who doubt. Pull others out of the fire. Save them.  To others, show mercy mixed with fear.  Hate even the clothes that are stained by the sins of those who wear them.  Jude 22-23

So what is the source of this supposed doctrine?  The earliest known approximation of the modern version comes from St. Augustine of Hippo. In a letter counseling quarreling nuns, he said: Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum. (Opera Omnia, Vol II. Col. 962, #211) This statement actually translates as “with love of persons and hatred of sins.”  Notice that it doesn’t refer to those persons by the term “sinners.”  The contemporary saying is also misattributed to Mohandas Gandhi, who only reflected upon it in his autobiography.  As far as I know, the first English statement of “hate the sin, but love the sinner” appears in Edward Irving’s book, Sermons, Lectures, and Occasional Discourses, Volume 1 (1828), pp. 131-132:

“It is a vain thing to say that God loveth sinners and ungodly creatures: he extendeth mercy and grace unto them, and loveth the election for his Son’s sake; but he must cease to love his Son – that is, to love himself – when he loveth those who are rebellious against himself.  He is “angry with the wicked every day:” he cannot look upon the workers of iniquity but with detestation and abhorrence. It is one of the sayings of that wretched Arminianism, with which the land is overflowed, ‘Hate the sin, but love the sinner.’  What mean they? That sin is something by itself, and the sinner something by himself, so distinct from one another, that the one may well be hated, and the other may well be loved?  They know nothing at all, and they will know nothing at all.”

To some extent, I agree that sin and sinner are inseparable, but that is about as far as my agreement with Irving goes.   It seems clear that he is trying to justify hatred toward those we would judge as sinners, and yet even his logic diverts from his own assertion that God extends mercy and grace to sinners.  What are mercy and grace if not expressions of love?  His reasoning also falters in concluding that it is hateful toward oneself to love those who rebel against you.    Does every mother who loves a rebellious child therefore hate herself?  To me, this position is absurd, makes love sound petty, and casts God as terribly small.

The Christian scriptural basis of Irving’s argument is also questionable.  His only scriptural quotation, “angry with the wicked every day,” is from Psalm 7:11, but there are so many things attributed directly to Jesus and his apostles that contradict the way he is using it.  For example, he would have a very hard time reconciling his position with Jesus’ very clear instruction to “love your enemies.”  Furthermore, in Romans 5:6-10, we actually find a powerful refutation of Irving’s argument:

For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

Let’s not get mired in a scriptural duel, parrying and thrusting with passages taken out of context.  That would be a distraction from the most important point of this series, which is to suggest a different approach to Christian ethics than “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”  In Part 2, I will therefore deal with this matter in light of what I believe to be the central moral themes of the Good News.