“No hate like Christian love” – was the prompt for this episode. A comment on a social media post was met with this response.
And I get it.
Recorded in the calm before storm Floris from a campervan on the west coast of Scotland, I share a brief reflection on love from a Christian theological perspective. My take is that we are compelled, as Christians, to love. And for me, this means praxis or love in action.
However, this is contextualised with awareness that some people have been deeply wounded by Christianity.
Transcript
There is no hate like Christian love
You may have heard this phrase before. I confess I hadn’t heard it until quite recently. It’s particularly prominent in ex -evangelical and deconstruction circles, mostly in the USA. This phrase highlights the ways in which people have been hurt and damaged by Christianity. Evangelical and fundamentalist expressions of Christianity in particular. My impulse as someone who believes that Christianity is a religion based in love, might be to try and do the ‘not all Christians’ thing. But I recognise this is futile in the face of hurt and anger. Instead, I am going to do what I always do and make a podcast. This episode is about Love.
You are listening to UNFKD, the bonus series of my podcast “Fkd up by faith,” where I explore theology and adjacent ideas that are harmful, misunderstood, or just plain wrong. This episode is a bit different because I’m not sitting in my little studio at home with my podcast equipment. Instead, I’m sitting in my campervan – which actually makes a really good recording studio, and I am looking out from the Island of Mull towards the Island of Iona. I think I’ve mentioned Iona in other episodes. It’s the little island off the west coast of Scotland, which was inhabited by Saint Columba, also known as Colmcille, who established his monastery here in the sixth century. Nowadays it is home to the Iona community and sees many visitors and pilgrims to visit the Abbey.
This reflection came from a post that I saw on social media yesterday. I no longer use the usual mainstream social media applications for all the reasons reasons, but I do use Blue Sky. You might be laughing because Blue Sky is often seen as a little left-wing or liberal bubble. Honestly, I like it that way. However, I don’t post a lot. Sometimes I “re-post” other people’s posts. I do lurk and find a lot of my news that way.
I saw a post by someone well-known in progressive Christian circles. They were talking about the idea of Christianity or people claiming to be Christians who speak or behave in ways that go against the Christian idea of love. I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes the urge comes upon me to comment on posts like that. My comment was that without love then it isn’t Christianity at all. The person who answered my comment and used this quote went so far as to say that, ”Nobody has ever seen a Christianity with love. What Christians call love is so far away from love that we had to come up with the saying “no hate like Christian love”.
I get it. This is the theological waters that I swim in: religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and the ways in which people have been damaged by religion, especially Christianity. I know about the ways in which so-called Christians and Christian organisations act in hateful ways and then call it love, or say that it’s in the name of love. Being exposed to, and especially growing up in such an expression of Christianity is deeply harmful.
As someone who takes a particular interest in this topic, I am compelled to be understanding, even if I don’t agree with what the person is saying. And I don’t. It is simply not objectively true to say that there is no expression of Christianity that is loving. There are many ways in which people express and experience Christian love, the way that I would argue it should be. However, some people who have experienced religious harm or spiritual abuse within Christianity, sometimes adopt a view that suggests that all Christians are problematic, and that Christianity is based in hypocrisy and lies. Indeed even people who have not been harmed by Christianity adopt this view. It is a common stance amongst the more vocal atheists, for example, to suggest that Christianity is responsible for more harms that goods. This is also, objectively untrue, even if it sounds like it should be true. However, this episode is not about that. I may do an unfkd on that question in the future.
I thought it might be an idea to explore what Christianity has to say about love and perhaps give some examples of how Christians have shown love. There are many ways in which we can look at the subject of love, summer, theological perspective, and as with most of the topics I tackle in this podcast The discussion can be wide and complex. However. Theologians are generally united in agreeing that Christianity is, at its heart, a religion of love.
Most significant at the heart of this assertion is that Jesus Christ actually compels us to love each other. It’s one of those kind of non negotiable givens.
John 13:34-35
34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Matthew 22:36-40
36 ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37 He said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Indeed these are often cited as the only two real commandments that he gave. The clear interpretation of this is that we are compelled as followers of Jesus, to show love to others.
Now the definitions of what this love means vary among commentators. And this is very much shaped by historical and philosophical influences over the centuries. I will link to an excellent resource about these theological influences in the show notes. However, prime among the ways in which we can view the idea of Christian love is first and foremost rooted in God’s love. That is God’s love for us, and ours for God. Thus love is expressed as a dynamic relationship between the human and the divine.
This is shaped of course by our modern understandings of human biology, psychology and behaviour. St. Augustine for example believed that ONLY God could love, and therefore, any expression of love was an expression of God. Theology also went through a period of trying to separate pure love which came from God, from other lesser forms of love that were based in human desire. This has also been expressed as Agape love, a selfless, sacrificial love sometimes described as caritas. This is seen as distinct from Eros, the love which encompasses desire. Whilst there are some who might still work within this distinction, I think it is more common to consider love in a more integrated way. And certainly my view is that all relationships : with humans, with other creatures, with the environment, with our communities and indeed with the whole universe are a dynamic interplay with God as the foundation, the ground of all being, and indeed as love itself.
Bear in mind this is my theology and other theologies are available.
My thinking is that we can get rather caught up trying to define Christian love rather than get on with the business of doing love. In this respect we can see Christian love as Praxis. The ways that this might play out in practice include the ways in which I choose to meet and communicate with others, to the ways in which I engage with my community and with the world. For some, this is about engaging in acts of local community service, for others it is about larger acts of social activism.
Which brings us back to the original stimulus for this discussion, the idea that there is no hate like Christian love. What this refers to are the ways in which human beings have abused, corrupted, distorted and misunderstood what it means to be a Christian. IN the minds of some people who have been the victims of this, it corrupts Christianity altogether. The Christian response to this, should, if we are being Christian about it, be with love.
Bible References
John 13:34-35 (NRSV)
Matthew 22:36-40 (NRSV)
Theological resources
Jeanrond, Werner G. A Theology of Love. London, T & T Clark, 2010.
Jeanrond, Werner G., ‘ Love’, in Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (2013; online edn, Oxford Academic, 3 June 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601998.013.0012,
Music
“Better Day” and “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay https://pixabay.com/users/penguinmusic-24940186/
“Echoes of Heaven Meditation” by Leigh Robinson from Pixabay
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