<\/p>\n
Love<\/p>\n
The doctrine of the love of God is among the hardest to articulate.\u00a0Forget defining the love of God; just think a second or two about the nature of love itself. What are the first images that come to mind? Perhaps it\u2019s from a film, where despite all the obstacles the handsome boy gets the beautiful girl (or vice versa) and everything ends happy, life is quaint and the world is now in perfect harmony.\u00a0Or perhaps it\u2019s from any array of mediums that portray life\u2019s fulfillment solely in finding love in that significant other.<\/p>\n
“Love” is a word that is beset with misconceptions, and beleaguered by well-intentioned chatter. I can only speak for myself here, as a child of the post-modern times and as one who has fully felt our culture’s onslaught on questions of meaning and essence, but I have been troubled to understand a word so elusive and transcendental as love, which I am told I cannot know.\u00a0Albeit an unconscious acceptance, I have often times bent my knee at the throne of postmodernism, wherein I have given up all rational attempts to stake my flag on the hill of a knowable love, and because of this intellectual reluctance, love has been reduced to a sentiment – something either to be felt or forgone.<\/p>\n
This presents serious problems to the Christian.\u00a0For we who agree with von Balthasaar that “love alone is credible” are in dire theological straits.\u00a0But if love has been reduced to a sentiment, our God, who is love, can only be known by how we feel.\u00a0And a god that is no bigger than feelings is really no god at all.\u00a0 Instead this god will likely assume our image, and our hearts will likely assent to something akin to the prosperity gospel: either we are happy and therefore God is blessing us, or we are blue and God is distant and aloof.\u00a0It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see the effects of this.\u00a0Just look at modern styles of worship music, which are becoming increasingly pressed to give people good and positive feelings about themselves first, and about their god second.\u00a0Perhaps one reason traditional forms of worship are dying a quick death is because they fail to deliver this rush or a neatly wrapped package of happiness.<\/p>\n
So now, if God is love, and love is a feeling, then God is a feeling.\u00a0And if this line of thought is true, then Love has ceased to be credible.<\/p>\n
Kyrie Eleison.\u00a0 Lord have mercy.<\/em><\/p>\n This, my friends, is a flat disregard of the revelation of God in the Incarnation of Christ.\u00a0 Followers of Jesus have traditionally believed that love is not a principle to be understood or a sentiment to be felt, but a Person to be followed.\u00a0I’ll say that again: Love is a Person. We know what love is, only because we know who love is.\u00a0The effects of believing this are tremendous.<\/p>\n Take for example the most intimate phrase the English language has to offer: I love you.\u00a0Now we have two options on how to construe these words: Jesus or culture. If it is the latter, we are possibly (and I say only possibly) saying nothing more than, I have strong feelings of attraction towards you, or I love the way you make me feel.\u00a0Love, like our god, is in our heads, identified by the potency of our feelings. If however, we allow Christ to be Lord over our lives and the ground of our language, we must at least mean by this: I am being as Jesus, Love himself, is to you; I am, in the power of the Spirit, incarnating Jesus Christ in this relationship.\u00a0Or as the Anglican Prayer Books says, I am seeking to “serve Christ in you” by the power of Christ in me.\u00a0Love is no longer a feeling, and love no longer exists merely in our heads (which really is not existence at all), but it, being rooted in the dynamic reality of the triune God, exists in the truest and most real sense.<\/p>\n Indeed, “Love alone is credible” because Jesus Christ alone is credible.<\/p>\n By Garrett Yates, MDiv student at PTS<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Love The doctrine of the love of God is among the hardest to articulate.\u00a0Forget defining the love of God; just think a second or two about the nature of love itself. What are the first images that come to mind? Perhaps it\u2019s from a film, where despite all the obstacles the handsome boy gets…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6356,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[8,14,31,36],"series":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theological-reflection","tag-bible-study","tag-community-worship","tag-seminary-community","tag-spiritual-journeys"],"yoast_head":"\r\n