When Command #1 Comes To Blows With Command #2 - Emergent To The Rescue

Command #1 - Love God
Command #2 - Love people

It's so simple that it is almost ridiculous. When Jesus went and boiled it all down for people, he said it like this: "Love God and love people." He then went on to affirm that this has always been God's will when he said, "The law and the prophets hinge on this."

It's all about loving God and people and it always has been. Furthermore, it always will be.

Maybe when people get this right, we'll get some more revelation. The problem is that religious people have found ways to pretend like they are doing this while simultaneously not doing it.

Let me overstate it like this: Conservatives will defend God against people while liberals will defend people against God. Conservatives say, "We will obey God rather than man," way, way too much. Liberals will cater to, coddle, and cuddle people to the nth degree of political correctness bouyed with their self-righteous "socially just" platform.

More often than not, Christians take Jesus' explanation of God's great desire - to love and be loved - and make it into a competing dualism.

I will use 3 examples from the conservative side which are from my experience to make my point.

Example #1: In my fellowship, the Churches of Christ, the use of insturments during worship is banned. Why? Because that's the way God wants it and culture be damned. Although there is significant softening on this point in some locations, it is still the rule.

Now think about it for a minute. When I said culture be damned, I was not overstating it. To many Church of Christ people, to worship God with instruments is to offer up "strange fire" like Nadab and Abihu and the same punishment they received (death) is due to those who worship with instruments. So, here you have a people willing to withhold salvation from other people based on this weird, sectarian issue.

Why? It is their love for God that gets them there. They do not want to offend God and it does not matter how many people they offend in accomplishing their goal. They are willing to defile the second command in order to accomplish the first. Is this what Jesus meant?

Change the religion to Islam and what do you get?

Example #2: In Churches of Christ and in many other denominations, women who are perfectly capable of leadership are banned from leadership. Again, this rule is rooted in a love for God over (not with) a love for people. OK, sure, there are verses in the Bible that, when read as if they were written for contemporary times, would lead one to believe that women are not allowed to lead. Granted. One the other hand, there are a lot of verses and examples in the Bible that don't jibe with those gender exclusive verses. Conservatives err on the side of trying so hard not to offend God that they can offend half the people in the world without any probelm whatsoever. They ahve become experts at compartmentalizing God's will.

God never said, "love me and hate (insult, demean, exclude, etc) people," but when you look around at the church you see that it acts as if that was what God said.

Example #3: About homosexuals. OK, if the first two issues were a no-brainer for you, then this one is more likely to be a challenge. When it comes right down to it, worship style and gender are arguably not moral issues. Few are the people who do not attach a moral value to some perspective on homosexuality.

It seems like this issue forces one to choose to love God or love the homosexual, but not both. And please, let's not be trite and bring in the "love the sinner and hate the sin" crap here. I have yet to see a person who says this actualy capable of pulling it off - at least not very well. People on the receiving end of this statement rarely feel loved and I don't know of one who does.

OK, let's assume that the conservatives are right on this one and homosexuality is a sin against God. Then how do we go about loving homosexuals as God commanded? How do we honor God and homosexuals at the same time?

While you're hurintg yourself over that one, let's go a little further and consider the other side of morality here. There is a moral component to the reponse to homosexuals. This applies to anything (instruments, women, war, politics, lying, abortion etc) where people are involved. The homosexuals are not the only ones dealing with a moral issue here. There is a morality embedded within the attitude of the responder that runs as deep as the one to whom repsonse is given. For example, it is immoral to be unjust to a gay person because he is gay.

It is immoral to be unjust for any reason. It would be immoral to punish men for their persistent refusal to breastfeed their own children. OK, that one came out of left field, but imagine a militant group of La Leche Leaguers came to political and theological power in governemnt and the church and demanded equality, requiring men to breastfeed their children despite their obvious physical inabilities. Imagine these people even jacked up their demands with a scripture or two. Whatever would men do? Being ousted from their positions of power, they would beg for mercy. They would cry out to be loved - in pissed off manly ways, of course, but they would appeal to the second greatest command, not the first.

OK, I am drifting a bit from my point, so let's come back. When Christians say, "Love God and love people," they have already said more than they are capable of doing. Woe to the person who believes he is doing it well, for that person is a dangerous person.

This is the reason why I so much like the efforts of the emerging church. It is a new way of approaching God and people. The fact that the emerging conversation gets so much criticism from the right (too liberal and catering to humanism) and the left (too conservative and catering to evangelicals) may be similar to why Jesus got the same criticism. No, emergent isn't perfect like Jesus, but they are willing to be revolutionary, risky, and pay the price for their efforts. The emerging church is willing to re-examine all assumptions about what it means to love God and love people. Some of these assumptions will remain as they are indeed valuable, some will be fine tuned and tweaked, while others will be completely deconstrcuted and left for waste, hauled out to the dump, and never remembered again.