Love and the Christian Way of Being in the World

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

As many important contributions as David Scott has made to our conversations through United Methodist Insight, one hesitates to take issue with him. And I certainly have no positive brief for Good News’ efforts to petrify the faith into a dead moralistic legalism that causes hurt to so many people. However, Dr. Scott’s essay “Lifestyle Evangelism and Moral Convictions” (August 17, 2021) has the potential to mis-frame the crucial relationship between the lifestyle of Christians and of the Church and the role of ethics.

Dr. Scott brings two articles into conversation with each other: “Lifestyle Evangelism” by Thomas Lambrecht of Good News and “Moral Convictions – the Wrong Start in Human Relations” by Dr. Robert Hunt of Perkins School of Theology. Placing these articles side by side, and thereby seeming to juxtapose Christian lifestyle with the ethical obligations of the faith as if they were differing strategies, tends to confuse a crucially important understanding of what we need to be thinking about and doing in creatively imagining a future church that is faithful to our tradition as we understand it today and that is meaningful, effective and exciting as a way of life in the world.

The Christian way of being in the world, or lifestyle if you will, must be driven and defined by the Love Command that impels all our ethics and engagement with the world around us. The two concepts are really one thing, or two sides of the same coin. While love is dominant, the ensuing lifestyle is far from unimportant.

‘What love is leading us to next’

Going forward our world view, way of life, mission must clearly be a loving, but assertive and proactive, relevant apprehension of what "love is leading us to next" in the real, practical, political and economic world. Otherwise, young people, ordinarily intelligent and so-called "woke" people, will abandon the church and the faith for more meaningful forms of activity and more intelligent spiritual understandings. Indeed, the public face we present to the world will be all-decisive as a measure of the faithfulness of our mission and whether there is a viable and meaningful future for the faith and the church. To borrow a concept used in Johann Baptist Metz’s work, in whatever future shape or forms communities of disciples may take, the church must be Love’s Strategy! Church is – faith is – mission.  Mission is lifestyle – who and what you are and what you do![i]

Although Rev. Lambrecht seems much more concerned with growing the church numerically than with faithfulness of mission, he makes some good points as to the importance of a countercultural lifestyle for Christians and the community of faith.  The question though is the general nature of the lifestyle being envisioned. The lifestyle Rev. Lambrecht spells out has a narrow and insular institutional concern and is personal and individualistic with no relationship with greater society. His perspective is one of moralistic absolutism that among other things enshrines Wesley’s General Rules. The resulting likelihood would be a community overlaid with a veneer of piousness, prim self-righteousness, and pretension.  These are the very characteristics that turn people off to the faith and the church and ultimately may be destructive for the church that “traditional” groups wish to build.

Reading Dr. Hunt’s essay immediately makes clear that despite its title, he is not arguing that an authentic Christian ethic is the wrong place to start in human relations, but that rigid lawfulness and systems of morality are the wrong place to start and the wrong way to define ourselves as communities of disciples. He notes how Jesus shocked his contemporaries by breaking the conventional moral codes.  He posits the neighbor affected by such moral codes as not letting us (Christians) rest easy in such convictions and referencing specifically the prisoner, the sick, the hungry, and the naked as incarnating the Christ demand that we love our neighbor as ourselves.  As Dr. Hunt says, “It is this old law that must be replaced by a new law, the law of love.”

The Love Command drives all works of living life and shaping mission faithfully. The scope of what love requires is expanded by the concept of vocation indicated by the Judeo-Christian tradition and by the dominant symbol of the Kingdom of God.[ii] This symbol provides a utopian model, goal for social ethics, and standard of judgment of all existing social arrangements. These provide not unwavering rules but broad areas of commitment that orient the ethic and shape our perspective and the predilections that guide our individual and collective lives. Included are such defining goals as justice, peace, compassion, equity, human dignity, and environmental sanity – concerns that Audrey R. Chapman once called “God’s Peculiar Agenda” and Nicholas Wolterstoff terms “World-formative Christianity.”[iii] 

We can certainly make mistakes and be wrong in our specific application of these guiding values to the practical matters of life, but we are responsible for pursuing and embodying these values and acting on them with the best, most thoughtful, and prudential activity we discern emerging from them.  As Gene Wesley Marshall has said, “…such love is like Atlas holding up the planet, a very heavy ‘mountain of care.’”[iv]

Distinguishing between ethics and ethic

It is helpful to distinguish between ethics and the ethic. Ethics are the various ways one deals with particular and specific issues and decisions that life presents. The ethic is the overarching framework of vocation and worldview we bring to all ethical decision-making and action. The former requires thoughtful and often methodological approaches to specific decision-making, relying on the best modern scientific and social scientific information on the situation and indications from humanistic ethical philosophy in the light of love’s core values. The latter derives from our understanding of what the tradition teaches as most important in life and how we endeavor to shape the people we want to be and the public front we want to present.[v]   

Finally, let me address the concerns of both David Scott and Robert Hunt over including those whose moral understandings differ from our own. This is an important concern as we are called to love even our enemies and to be as inclusive as possible consistent with the faith. But there is an inescapable creative tension involved that requires discerning judgment. In a Christian context we must be as tolerant of other religious views and theological conceptions as possible, but not of ideologies, theologies, ethical structures, or movements that significantly deny the very core of the faith.  Specifically, our communities are formed around this core trajectory of the Judeo-Christian tradition toward justice and peace, as the fruits of love. 

It is true as Dr. Scott says that people have competing and polarized moral visions, but it is also true that as Christians we are called to stand for and advance a particular overall approach to ethical living.  J. Philip Wogaman has spoken of days of Christendom in which the clarity of the gospel became hopelessly compromised by the numbers of Christians who weren’t really Christians at all. It remains important to be as accepting as possible to find appropriate ways to love enemies and those who disagree with us, but at the same time not divert from the nature of what we take the faith to be by diluting the community witness with incompatible understandings. A line in a progressive prayer said, “Grant me the grace to learn to love the enemies I’ve had the integrity to make.”

The real issue at hand is whether a particular concept of the faith and ensuing actions contribute to the real hurt of real people or to healing that hurt. The reality of those being hurt or oppressed must be the context of discernment and takes priority over tolerance and acceptance for their own sake.  Can we incarnate love on one hand and then accept, legitimate, and thereby empower those who insist on adhering to practices that cause such hurt? We are not responsible for the fact that there will be competing forms of Christianity, but we are responsible for the integrity of our example of love’s requirements according to our best discernment. In the pursuit of justice, we will have opponents and we will have enemies. The way to “love” such people is not to accept them uncritically into fellowship, but to commend understandings and practices that free them from complicity with injustice, and to stand for social, political, and economic relations that free and protect their victims. The scope of our ecumenicity or “big-tent” inclusiveness is to those groups and individuals pursuing justice through love whoever they may be in other denominations, in other religions, among secular humanists, and other philosophical views.

Both Dr. Hunt and Dr. Scott end their essays by returning with emphasis to love as the grounding for solutions to our dilemmas and for shaping our lifestyle. Their understanding of what that calls for may differ from my own particularly regarding the “big-tent” considerations above. But, in the final analysis, as Christians we really have nothing else to bring to human relations but our ethic of love and our resulting lifestyle.  I have no question we all agree with Letty Russell’s happy formulation that we need to initiate a kind of bonding that is a “partnership of service and freedom with and for God, with and for others, and for the future”[vi] through which we become part of God’s love affair with the world.

[i] This does not exclude such practices as celebrations of worshipful awe and commitment, education for Christian life and mission, community-making, and personal and family supports.  But these are supportive of and in service to our vocation and mission, not the central reasons for the church’s existence,

[ii] I am aware of the distasteful hierarchical baggage of the term “kingdom” in the Kingdom of God.  I much prefer commonwealth of God or realm or reign of God and other such suggestions more faithful to making the intent clear to modern readers. But since most lay Christians are familiar with the symbol and its dominance in the gospels with roots in the prophetic literature, I use it because most readers readily recognize it and have some sense of its centrality. Since I see it as fleshing out and giving structural shape to the Love Command as ideal, goal, and standard of judgment over life, it remains essential.

[iii] Maguire, Daniel C., The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity, (Minneapolis: Augusburg Press 1993), page 83. Maguire says, “It is a vision that is prescriptive of a new humanity with new social arrangements geared to the elimination of poverty, to ending all oppression, and to the flourishing of life on this versatile earth. This liberative viewpoint rings with contemporaneity.” Ibid, on page 109 he gives his list of themes as “the reign of God, justice, prophecy, hope, love, joy, peace, freedom and truth.”

[iv] Marshall, Gene Wesley, The Thinking Christian. (WIPF & Stock, 2020), page 87.

[v] More methodological approaches to questions of ethics are well provided by such critically important thinkers as Daniel C. Maguire, J. Philip Wogaman, Stephen Charles Mott, and other modern ethicists.

[vi] Russell, Letty M., The Future of Partnership (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press 1979), page 23.

Don Manning-Miller recently retired after twenty plus years as Vice President at Rust College in Holly Springs, MS. Rust is an historic HBCU affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Don is a longtime member of the Reconciling Ministries Network and an advocate for the Church Within A Church, United Methodists working for full inclusion and LGBTQ+ rights.