Conservative Evangelicals often talk about being “Centered on God and not man”. The trouble with this sentiment, noble as it may seem, is that we are men, not God. Just as the solution to legalism is not antinomianism, the answer to the presumption of idolatry is not presumptuous abasement. Humility is thinking of oneself in a sober and accurate way, not thinking as poorly of oneself as is conceivable; humility is not a curtsy. Man may not be God, but neither is he an animal or automaton. There is a tendency to so monergize agency as to make a farce of the very notion of creation as something more than God’s potpourri. It does not honor God to denigrate His creation or to rob it of that part of His glory that it manifests and partakes in as its source because doing so denigrates God as Creator.
We are men, not monsters of Muppets. It is not harmless literary fancy to suggest the latter two as a kind of flattery of God’s covenants with man, since it implies equally negative things about Christ, His bride, and the perichoretic wedding dance that involves man as the children of the Father, bride of Christ, and temple of the Holy Spirt.[1] The godless attempt to implement this “evil, impotent, or divine” view of man is what sent millions of Jews to the gas chambers and so many victims of Imperial Japan to places of torment I couldn’t describe in good conscience to a grizzled police detective. Both nations decided that some among them were men, others monsters, and the remainder Muppets to be expended as mere instruments of their aspirations. The Christian version of this, where we may only go from monstrous to mendicant Muppets, is equally pernicious. The Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man is as good an anthropology as “Jesus slays the dragon and gets the girl” is an eschatology.[2]
There is work to do, children. We are the ones to do it, God helping us. We may not dither about, quibbling over words or poking our noses beneath the divine tunic like impish, impudent, and naughty little urchins. It is disobedient to God and negligent of our brothers and neighbors. It judges men before the time—both to vindicate and to condemn—and cruelly consumes God’s image bearers to satisfy our lust for blood, revenge, glory, and power, all beneath the mask of divine command. Let us recall and heed John’s warning:
Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent his Son as the world’s Savior. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God—God remains in him and he in God. And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. In this, love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister. (John 4: 7-21)
When we go beyond our remit—even and especially by denying responsibility for obeying or disobeying God and turning Him into a book, rituals, and doctrinal principles, all of which we may manipulate and control—we are inexorably following in the tragic footsteps of Judas Iscariot and Simon Magus; one was so overwhelmed by evil and sorrow that he did not repent and the other attempted to do good by evil means, neither of which accomplishes the will of God and both of which issue forth from a conviction that we know better how to be God than God.
Counterintuitively, it is those who most tout the sovereignty of God who most limit what He is—and we are—“allowed” to do, exercising far more control than they purport to posses over Him they purport to follow as slaves. Meanwhile, those who take initiative to obey the command of Christ are told that they are trying to work “in their own power”. Well, I got news for you: the only people who aren’t “working in their own power”—God helping them, certainly—are using God’s name in vain to work to their own purposes.
We must philosophize—carefully think about how to live well in God’s world and commit ourselves to it—in keeping with what God has said about us as branches of the vine, commanded us to produce as fruit thereof, and enjoined upon us to cultivate in our souls as perfuming flowers. Any man who thinks of himself as a mud man, incapable of so much as mowing the grass without divine revelation, and lacking the mind of Christ except by propositions in the epistles is not a man listening to God. He thinks that he is being humble, but he is actually usurping God’s prerogative and will end up using or murdering his brothers in God’s name, just like the Pharisees.
[1] Although I am persuaded by experience that literature is deadly serious and no less influential on the heart, mind, body, and soul of man than sex, drugs, or rock & roll.
[2] I happen to think that we permit our soteriology to bully the other loci of our theology. Revelation is meant to give us hope and to discipline us unto perseverance, not to separate the sheep from the goats. If you can’t engage with it such that it produces hope and faithful obedience, begin with the plain, simple truths which do produce that effect and build from there—presuming there isn’t lower hanging fruit in scripture which ought to draw your gaze more immediately.
Savage, but on point.
Something that I have learned in my life is that trying to get someone to love you through doing nice things for them is fairly disastrous way to go about it. It tends to only work with people who are in love with themselves. Even if your actions are well intentioned, the average person will be suspect of your generosity. The most secure way to get someone to love you (definitely for me), is to love the people that he/she loves. If you know that I am actively working to give your children a better future, then you will have a hard time not loving me, even if you find me to be like John Adams in 1776 "obnoxious and disliked." God does not love his children with different measures, but he sure seems to have more favor for those who love their neighbor well.
We are loved by God to just that degree as we love as He has loved, with His love--which also requires that we accept His love of us, since self-loathing poisons any attempt to love neighbor as ourselves. It is an awful lot like forgiveness: God forgives us so much that to accept His gift, we must forgive everyone the lesser wrongs they perpetrate against us. God goes first and most, but accepting His gifts does require becoming a spring from which they flow to others. I'm convinced that God solved the harder problem of how to teach man to love His neighbor precisely in the way you describe: if you love Me, you will love those whom I have loved. Thanks for distilling that so adroitly!