Theology Of Love 14

 I am just having a look at Clement of Alexandria, one of the early church fathers.  His writings were apparently influential to Brother Lawrence of the Practice of the Presence of God.  Again, I am struck by the huge emphasis on being theologically correct.  There is little or nothing about our call to serve Christ through loving others.  I am thinking again of the letter of James, particularly his injunction that faith without works is dead, that our faith is made perfect through our good works, which is to say, faith is perfected by love.  

I think that this has been historically the Church's major failing.  Even in the writings of St. Paul the Apostle, making up the bulk of the New Testament following the Gospels, there is a lot on theology, the nature of God and Christ, and of the importance of believers getting along well.  There is some mention of love, particularly in his famous hymn about love in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians.  But it is a bit of a no.brainer that if Paul, who is credited as the first architect of the Church even before Augustine, would be somewhat lacking in teaching about love, then even less mention of love would be found in the teachings that were to follow through the church fathers and those who came after them.  

I am pointing this out by way of contrasting between Jesus as we have come to understand him through the Gospels, and his purported followers and representatives who were to come after.  Jesus' ministry is full of and defined by his love for others.  His desire and power to heal, to set people free, to feed and comfort, reassure and confirm.  Even in his stinging rebukes against the Pharisees one can only read the holy indignation of love.

I find the lack of love in the rest of the New Testament unfortunate, because this appears to have set in motion the direction of the development of the Christian faith, not as the power of divine love in action in and through the lives of imperfect humans, but as a complex collection of teachings about the nature of God's truth, especially setting the Christian faith against any opposing teaching, cult or religion.  

This is not to dis theology, nor it's importance.  We need that anchor, we need the ballast of sound biblical teaching.  But even more, we need the empowerment to set in motion the very heart of love that is the heart of God who through Jesus went to his most ignominious death for us.  Particularly I don't think we need so much to be reading often what others thought of Jesus, because through his Holy Spirit, Jesus is very capable and very willing to reveal himself to us.  And he is particularly capable of revealing himself through our mutual interactions, through the way we treat one another and those around us.  

I am under the impression that in the early church there was a huge emphasis on protecting the faithful from the evil and corrupt world they were living in.  The church, following the great spiritual outpouring just following Christ's death, resurrection and ascension,  turned inward.  It was inevitable.  They were hated and ruthlessly persecuted by the authorities, and being a new religion, the pressure to maintain pure and untainted their still fragile identity must have been something enormous.  

But somehow, care for the most fragile and vulnerable must have got sidelined, as in the early centuries leading up to Augustine, and Constantine the Great, became more and more focussed on developing the canon of Christian scripture and, of course, defending biblical truth.  The Christian religion that Constantine made the official and only legitimate faith of the Roman Empire, must already have been sufficiently degraded and spiritually disemboweled disempowered to be so easily bastardised by the rulers and pomp and authority and splendour of the very world that put to death our Saviour and Lord.

So, the legacy of the Church became that of generation upon generation of sanctimonious hypocrites parading about in robes and jewels, proclaiming the truth of the religion of Jesus, while treading underfoot the very people, meek, humble and poor in spirit that Jesus proclaimed as the inheritors of the earth and the kingdom of heaven.

It isn't that people care how much we know.  They want to know how much we care.  Or if we even care at all.  If we really love the way Jesus loves us.   And that is the very heart of the Gospel.