The main and plain points
Let us treat Christ's new commandment as an essential of the faith, loving your fellow Christians as Christ did, and as he still does. We are to be beacons of the love God's bears for each of us, and be that for one another. Doing so is the very thing that will lead us to visible unity before the unsaved world. (See John 13:33 ff.)
It should have seemed odd to us that the triune one God would give us only a twofold summary of our responsibilities, to love God wholeheartedly and our neighbors as ourselves. In fact we have a threefold calling. Christ's twofold summary of the Hebrew Law, love God and love your neighbor, sums up the Christian's responsibility toward the matters covered under the old law of righteousness. But it is incomplete: It takes us only so far as Moses and the Prophets. Christ's New Commandment, which brings us up to gospel times, he added to those two: to love your fellow Christian believers as he did. That tells us how to be the church of his new covenant.
It is a tall order and that is why I think so much preaching has evaded the real issue, avoided the subject, or said the New Commandment was the same thing as loving your neighbor as yourself. Clearly, the New Commandment is not identical with loving your neighbor as yourself. For one thing, not all of your neighbors are Christians. For another, the standard of performance is different here: not as you do things, but as Christ does, in the power of the Holy Spirit. The New Commandment is to the New Covenant what Christ's twofold summary about loving God and your neighbor is to the Old Covenant: first principles made plain.
We need to change the role of theology in the church world. We have used reason in a way that has proven much too divisive. We need to take our arguments, or ourselves, much less seriously. The task of loving one another is ill-served when we think forensic justification by theological arguments is what makes us good Christians, better Christians than that church down the street. Let us instead think of theology as generating potentially useful insights into how to do the business of the church--loving God, our neighbors and one another. Where it does not do any of that, it is speculation about unseen matters. Our earthly responsibility is not to understand the hidden workings of heaven but to serve on earth. Each of us will find out about heaven, firsthand, soon enough.
The troubles now coming upon the church, worldliness and worse things invading our denominations and corrupting them from the inside out, shall continue and for a time even get worse. That will have the effect of drawing together the true Christians from all the beleaguered denominations. Shared troubles unite people. Christian leaders, like Christian laypeople, cannot be pious toward unwholesome cultural trends, and also true to the faith. The roles are impossible: Friendship with the world is enmity toward God. We will see in the ensuing troubled times that the main and plain things in Christianity were all along the true faith, things we can see in the clear light of our day; many of the things we were doing and saying and worrying over, and often arguing about and dividing over, were in response to Plato's shadows seen in a cave.
It should have seemed odd to us that the triune one God would give us only a twofold summary of our responsibilities, to love God wholeheartedly and our neighbors as ourselves. In fact we have a threefold calling. Christ's twofold summary of the Hebrew Law, love God and love your neighbor, sums up the Christian's responsibility toward the matters covered under the old law of righteousness. But it is incomplete: It takes us only so far as Moses and the Prophets. Christ's New Commandment, which brings us up to gospel times, he added to those two: to love your fellow Christian believers as he did. That tells us how to be the church of his new covenant.
It is a tall order and that is why I think so much preaching has evaded the real issue, avoided the subject, or said the New Commandment was the same thing as loving your neighbor as yourself. Clearly, the New Commandment is not identical with loving your neighbor as yourself. For one thing, not all of your neighbors are Christians. For another, the standard of performance is different here: not as you do things, but as Christ does, in the power of the Holy Spirit. The New Commandment is to the New Covenant what Christ's twofold summary about loving God and your neighbor is to the Old Covenant: first principles made plain.
We need to change the role of theology in the church world. We have used reason in a way that has proven much too divisive. We need to take our arguments, or ourselves, much less seriously. The task of loving one another is ill-served when we think forensic justification by theological arguments is what makes us good Christians, better Christians than that church down the street. Let us instead think of theology as generating potentially useful insights into how to do the business of the church--loving God, our neighbors and one another. Where it does not do any of that, it is speculation about unseen matters. Our earthly responsibility is not to understand the hidden workings of heaven but to serve on earth. Each of us will find out about heaven, firsthand, soon enough.
The troubles now coming upon the church, worldliness and worse things invading our denominations and corrupting them from the inside out, shall continue and for a time even get worse. That will have the effect of drawing together the true Christians from all the beleaguered denominations. Shared troubles unite people. Christian leaders, like Christian laypeople, cannot be pious toward unwholesome cultural trends, and also true to the faith. The roles are impossible: Friendship with the world is enmity toward God. We will see in the ensuing troubled times that the main and plain things in Christianity were all along the true faith, things we can see in the clear light of our day; many of the things we were doing and saying and worrying over, and often arguing about and dividing over, were in response to Plato's shadows seen in a cave.
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