Category Archives: Religion and theology

Is Iran about to blow?

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There’s a very good chance of it—check out Michael J. Totten’s excellent roundup for the details. I know a few folks over there, and I can testify to the truth of what he and others are saying: among people 40 and under (which is to say, those who’ve spent at least their whole adult life under the Khomeinist regime) there is no trust of the government whatsoever, only pent-up rage and frustration. Indeed, so great is the disenchantment with their Islamist rulers that there’s a widely-held sentiment that “Islam is not the solution, it is the problem.” It really is entirely possible that in stealing this election for Ahmadinejad, Ali Khamenei and the mullahs have taken that one step too far that will blow the entire country open, and themselves clean out of power (and quite possibly out of other things as well, like breathing).

Which is why our government’s reaction—essentially, “The election was stolen, but we’ll work with the Ahmadinejad government anyway”—was so mind-numbingly stupid. You’ll notice I said “our government,” not “the Obama administration,” and there’s good reason for that; I think Barack Obama’s instincts on Iran are atrocious, and I’m sure he’s not helping matters, but I have no real faith that anyone else would be doing any better. . . . Well, John McCain mightbe if he had the chance, because he’s stubborn enough that he might actually be able to make foreign policy independent of the bureaucrats in the State Department, but I’m not at all sure of that; and the folks at State have a deeply-entrenched mindset that says “work with the government that’s in place, no matter what.” I’m not sure if it’s a reaction against US involvement in the Ngo assassination and the Allende coup or what, but our government is ridiculously good at ignoring potentially pro-US opposition movements in favor of continuing to deal with anti-US tyrants. (And don’t give me Iraq—it took us three presidents, a decade and a half, two invasions, a major terrorist attack and a minor-league cold war to decide we really couldn’t live with Saddam Hussein after all.) I truly hope we wise up this time; there’s an oppressed nation out there that could really use our help, and a government we’d be far better off without.

Links to think about

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When I heard the news about the murder of George Tiller, one of the first writers to whom I looked for reaction was the Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia, but at that point, she hadn’t gotten around to writing about it. On Thursday, though, she posted a superb piece as the daily article on the First Things website entitled “Tiller, Long, Bonhoeffer, and Assassination”; it’s an excellent piece of theological and moral reflection, and well worth your time to read. I particularly appreciate this piece of wisdom:

Why should we care about some dumb hick named William Long, who was only a soldier and not a hero abortionist? And why should his assassin’s name or religion matter? Because William Long was as entitled to the life he had, as was George Tiller. And Long’s death, at the hands of a man who used his religion to justify his actions, is the ultimate reminder of why Christians cannot emulate Bonhoeffer, for all his brilliance, or Tiller’s murderer: When we start thinking that we know the heart and mind of God so well that we may decide who lives and who dies, we slip into a mode of Antichrist.

The Pauline paradox “when I am weak, then I am strong” carries a flipside: “When I am strong, then I am weak.” Relativism is dangerous because we can too easily slip into the belief that we so well comprehend God’s will that we can confuse our own will for God’s, and thereby do terrible damage to one another. God’s rain falls on “the just and the unjust,” and it is one of the challenges of the life of faith that we must leave to God the rendering of his Justice.

The duty of a Christian—and it is a difficult duty—is to remain in the present moment that we might be alert to the promptings of the Holy Spirit (“continuing instant” in gratitude and prayer) while also taking the long view of things. This requires trust that however things look of a moment or a day, God is present and working: Nothing is static, everything is in a constant state of flux, all of it churning forward so that “in the fullness of time” Christ may restore all things to himself. What is left? Well, prayer, which is the most subversive of powers; it is a self-renewing weapon that cannot be wrested from us, and it cannot be over-employed.

Also of importance on this subject is Michelle Malkin’s reflection on the differing reactions to those two attacks from the media and the White House, “Climate of hate, world of double standards”:

Why the silence? Politically and religiously-motivated violence, it seems, is only worth lamenting when it demonizes opponents. Which also helps explain why the phrase “lone shooter” is ubiquitous in media coverage of jihadi shooters gone wild—think convicted Jeep Jihadi Mohammed Taheri-Azar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill or Israel-bashing gunman Naveed Haq who targeted a Seattle Jewish charity or Los Angeles International Airport shooter Hesham Hedayet who opened fire at the El Al Israeli airline ticket counter—but not in cases involving rare acts of anti-abortion violence. . . .

The truth is that the “climate of hate” doesn’t have just one hemisphere. But you won’t hear the Council on American Islamic Relations acknowledging the national security risks of jihadi infiltrators who despise our military and have plotted against our troops from within the ranks—including convicted fragging killerHasan Akbar and terror plotters Ali Mohamed, Jeffrey Battle, and Semi Osman. . . .

Is it too much to ask the media cartographers in charge of mapping the “climate of hate” to do their jobs with both eyes open?

On Thursday, I posted a link to Robert Spencer’s demolition of the president’s Cairo speech, but he’s not the only one doing serious analysis and coming away worried; Toby Harnden of the Telegraph is another. Harnden highlights “Barack Obama’s 10 mistakes in Cairo” and concludes,

There’s been lots of breathless commentary today about the “historic” moment and the power of Obama’s oratory. In time, however, the speech will probably be remembered, at best, for its high-flown aspirations rather than the achievements it laid the foundations for. Or, at worst, for the naive and flawed approach it foretold.

Also well worth reading is the online symposium on the Cairo speech that National Reviewpulled together; the contributors raise a number of serious issues, but also offer some strong positive comments. I was particularly struck by the contribution from Mansoor Ijaz, identified as “a New York financier of Pakistani ancestry [who] jointly authored a ceasefire plan between Muslim militants and Indian security forces in Kashmir in 2000”; Ijaz begins by praising aspects of the speech as “brilliant” and “just right,” but then says this:

Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself—to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?

Islam’s worst enemies are within it. . . .

In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected a system of life that Islam’s holy scriptures urged Muslims to learn and practice, but over the centuries increasingly did not. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize the West and to try and bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate, or house.

And finally, for a different perspective on the state of the nation and on the international situation than we’re getting from DC, check out what Sarah Palin had to say on Saturday in her speech in Auburn, NY.

I especially appreciate this line, given our current president’s apparent belief that the best way to conduct foreign policy is to apologize for America to all the people who’ve hurt us for being the kind of people they want to hurt:

We never need to fear that though we’re not a perfect nation, that we must apologize for being proud of ourselves.

Thanks, Governor. We needed that.

On the impossibility of a domesticated Jesus

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Five years or so ago, I posted a brief comment on a piece of Fr. Andrew Greeley’s in the Chicago Sun-Times titled “There’s no solving mystery of Christ”; the original is no longer available on the Sun-Times website, but fortunately, it can still be found here.  I say “fortunately” because, while there is much on which I do not agree with Fr. Greeley, in this piece he did an excellent job of capturing something profoundly important:

Much of the history of Christianity has been devoted to domesticating Jesus—to reducing that elusive, enigmatic, paradoxical person to dimensions we can comprehend, understand and convert to our own purposes. So far it hasn’t worked. . . .

None of it works because once you domesticate Jesus he isn’t there any more. The domestic Jesus may be an interesting fellow, a good friend, a loyal companion, a helpful business associate, a guarantor of the justice of your wars. But one thing he is certainly not: the Jesus of the New Testament. Once Jesus comforts your agenda, he’s not Jesus anymore. Consider Bush’s “political philosopher.” His principal statement on that subject is, “Render to Caesar things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”—a phrase that preachers for a couple of millennia have delivered with tones of triumph in their voice. Jesus had neatly dispatched his adversaries.

The preachers don’t explain what that ingenious phrase means in politics. . . . Where does one find the boundary between Caesar and God? Jesus didn’t say, and he still doesn’t. He won the argument, indeed deftly, but he leaves to his followers the challenge of how his dictum should be applied in practice. No easy task.

Or his challenge, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.” Does that mean we don’t denounce any sins? Or that we should take a good long look at our conscience before we take up the stones? Or that if we are confident of our own sinlessness, we can start throwing the stones?

Jesus did not issue any detailed instructions, save perhaps “by this all shall know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.” And that really isn’t detailed at all. Nor is the instruction that you should love your neighbor as yourself. All of these sayings seem vague, slippery, disturbing, dangerous. Jesus is as obscure now as he was in his own time: as troublesome, as much a threat to the public order. . . .

One is tempted to demand of Jesus: “Who do you think you are to challenge us with your paradoxes, to trouble us with your weird stories, to warn us that you are not a reassuring traveling companion, but a messenger from a God who is even more paradoxical, even more difficult to figure out, even more challenging.”

If Jesus makes you feel comfortable with your agenda, then he’s not Jesus.

Or as I’ve been told St. Augustine wrote, “If you think you understand the nature of God, that which you think you know is not God.”  What we can truly know about God is limited to what God has revealed to us about himself; unfortunately, we’re always trying to go beyond that, sometimes out of an honest desire to understand, and sometimes out of a desire to make God be what we want him to be—which is the essence of idolatry.  Jesus doesn’t accept that; he will not be tamed, or made to conform to our desires.

This is not to say that everything we know about Jesus is wrong, or that it’s impossible for us to know or speak truth about God, because those statements are clearly not true.  It is, however, to say that if we think we hear Jesus saying what we want him to hear, we need to stop and consider the possibility that we’re really only hearing our own wishful thinking, and then go back and take a long second look.  If we believe in a Jesus who only challenges those who disagree with us, who only makes our opponents uncomfortable, then we’ve gotten him wrong.  In the Gospels, many people received comfort from Jesus, but no one was ever trulycomfortable with him; the closer his friends got to him, it seems, the more he confounded them.

The basic principle here is that we’re all sinners, we all have sin in our hearts, and therefore Jesus confronts all of us with our sinfulness and calls us to change.  He calls all of us to give up things that we deeply do not want to give up, to set aside our own desires and goals and plans so that he can give us his own, to make changes that we’d rather not make; he loves all of us just the way we are, but he doesn’t affirm any of us just the way we are—he loves us too much for that.  As such, whenever we hear the challenge of God, we need to look first to our own hearts, without exception, to see how his challenge is for us before we ever think to apply it to anyone else.

Jesus didn’t come to confirm us in our agendas and tell us we’re doing just fine as we are; he came to upskittle our agendas entirely and call us to a radical new way of living.  As Fr. Greeley says, “If Jesus makes you feel comfortable with your agenda”—whether that agenda be political, personal, professional, or what have you—”then he’s not Jesus.”  After all, if you’re the one setting the agenda, then you’re setting the course and expecting others to follow you, and Jesus never offered to follow us; instead, consistently, he said, “Follow me.”

As a final note, I would be remiss to post on this without noting that my friend Jared Wilson (of The Thinklings and The Gospel-Driven Church) has a book coming out next month addressing this same concern, titled Your Jesus Is Too Safe:  Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior.  I’m looking forward to reading it.

 

Superb analysis of the President’s Cairo speech

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—one might almost call it a fisking—courtesy of Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.  I’m not going to try to excerpt it (not only is it long, but the comments are interspersed with the text of the President’s speech, making it less friendly to excerpting), but I encourage you to go read it; Spencer exposes a lot of the West’s naïve misconceptions about Islam—misconceptions which, alas, Barack Obama seems to share.  Taken all in all, having looked at the speech, I agree with Spencer, Michelle Malkin, and to a remarkable degree, even HuffPo’s Peter Daou (whose article title, “Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama’s Cairo Speech,” captures my point of agreement with him beautifully):  we have good reason to be concerned.

The Gnosticism of sexual sin

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In a recent ESPN Magazine article on Donald Sterling, the Clippers owner is quoted as saying—under oath, in a court of law—”When you pay a woman for sex, you are not together with her.  You’re paying her for a few moments to use her body for sex. Is it clear? Is it clear?”

That’s a stunning statement, for a number of reasons.  Most obviously, it’s stunning in its sheer crassness (something which, as Peter Keating shows at length in the piece, is completely characteristic of the man).  More than that, though, it’s stunning for what it reveals about his attitude toward sex—an attitude which I think is characteristic of far more people than just him.  In point of fact, while he puts it far more crassly than most people would, I believe the essentially Gnostic view he reveals here is in fact the default view in our culture.

Consider this in the light of a defense I’ve seen offered more than once of pornography, at least in the soft-core form:  “What’s obscene about a pretty girl taking off her clothes?” I will admit to having some sympathy with the way James P. Hogan framed this in his novel Giant’s Star:

[Victor Hunt] emerged from the kitchen and walked through into the living room, wondering how a world that accepted as normal the nightly spectacle of people discussing their constipation, hemorrhoids, dandruff, and indigestion in front of an audience of a million strangers could possibly find something obscene in the sight of pretty girls taking their clothes off.  “There’s now’t so strange as folk,” his grandmother from Yorkshire would have said, he thought to himself.

That, however, says more about the casual obscenity of much of our advertising than it does about pornography; both objectify the human body, if in different ways and for different reasons.  This defense is rooted in a complete misunderstanding of the issue.  It’s not that there’s anything obscene about the human body; far from it.  The human body is a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful of God’s creations.  However, a human body is not merely a thing, but rather is an integral part of something even more beautiful:  a human being.  The obscenity is not in the naked body; the obscenity is in the treatment of a human being as merely a naked body, as just an object of desire to be used for one’s gratification rather than as a full person to be respected and honored.

The appeal to this, I think, is that an object can be whatever one wants to imagine it to be; it’s conformable to one’s desires.  Real human beings have wills and desires, integrity and dignity, of their own, and frequently are not conformable to one’s desires.  Real human beings have minds and ideas of their own; objects don’t.  In pornography, human bodies are effectively made available for the wish-fulfillment of others, ready to be used whenever they’re accessed by whomever would use them; they never say “no,” because they’re never sleepy, achy, sick, in a bad mood, or just plain unwilling.

If we understood the spiritual consequences of this, we would take it far more seriously than most people do; but most of us don’t, because we’ve bought the line that our bodies are separate from our spirits, and that most of what we do with our bodies doesn’t really matter spiritually because they’re temporary—they aren’t the real person, and we’re going to leave them behind when we die anyway.  They’re just not that important.  That’s how you get the idea that Donald Sterling expressed, that you can rent out someone’s body for sex and just be using their body, “not together with her” (or him)—which is not only the idea behind his caddish behavior, but is also in its essence the idea behind pornography.

Even people who consider themselves Christians fall into this thinking, and use it to justify departures from biblical sexual morality; the argument that God doesn’t really mean what the Bible says about premarital sex, or homosexuality, or adultery, or whatever, always seems to rest in the end on the presumption that what we do with our bodies really isn’t all that important, and so God can’t really care about it all that much.  That stuff in Scripture must have been a cultural thing, or must have been put in there for some other reason, because God can’t have a good enough reason to tell us not to do what we want to do.  (It’s rather funny, when you stop to think about it, how we never question why such matters shouldn’t be important to God when we obviously think they’re worth fighting over.)

The truth is, though, that our bodies aren’t merely containers for our spirits, but are intimately connected:  we are our bodies just as much as our spirits, and everything that we do with one and everything that affects one affects the other.  When we treat our bodies and the bodies of others as merely things to be used and deployed for our pleasure, it debases us and it debases the people we use.  We can’t do that without consequences.  We need to treat people as people and respect them accordingly, even if they don’t fully respect themselves.

 

Clearing out the links drawer

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Here are a few things I’ve been meaning to get around to posting on (for quite a while—I think I ran across all of these back in March) that just aren’t likely to get their own posts at this point; so I’ll toss them out for your interest, and if I ever do get around to putting up a longer post on any of them, well, the duplication won’t hurt anything.

Beryllium 10 and climate
The science in this is not immediately transparent to the non-specialist, but it’s interesting evidence that climate change is far more about what the sun does than about CO2.

A Dozen Sayings of Jesus That Will Change the World—If Christians Ever Believe Them
Dan Edelen’s always challenging—sometimes problematically so; this is a post that ought to make Christians in this country uncomfortable.

Generational Disconnect
Chaille Brindley has put his finger on a real need in the American church.

Anatomy of an Internet Joke
I think this post by James Wallace Harris fits very well with Brindley’s comments.

“Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable”

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“and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.” I’ve always loved this song; it strikes me as deeply confused in its conclusion but insightful in its observations, and I’m a sucker for a great folk-rock hook.  I hadn’t thought of it in I don’t know how long until it popped into my head this morning, and I’ve watched the video several times today already.

As it happened, after I watched it the first time, I flipped over to my Facebook account to find Sarah Palin’s official statement on the murder of George Tiller, about which I’ve blogged here and here.  I think the conjunction was appropriate.  I don’t know what Saliers was focusing on when she wrote those lines, and I’m reasonably sure that neither she nor Amy Ray share my position on abortion (or much of anything else, except maybe folk music), but I couldn’t help thinking about them as I reflected on the case of Scott Roeder, the man who shot Tiller.  If this is who the authorities think he is, he’s been involved in anti-government activities and anti-abortion protests for a couple decades now; it sounds like he started out motivated by a real desire to do something about some of the evil and injustice in the world, and along the way, got twisted into fighting evil with evil.

That happens all too easily, if we’re not careful.  It’s all too easy to start accommodating evil, just a little, on the theory that the end justifies the means; but each act of accommodation makes the next just a little bit easier, and makes it seem just a little bit more necessary—and over time, the pace of accommodation increases, until finally it isn’t really even accommodation anymore, because we’re being transformed into the very thing we once despised.  It happens all too easily, because it’s always easier to roll down the slope than to climb up it, always easier to destroy than to create, always easier to justify our actions than to repent of them . . . except by the Spirit of God, this is the immutable truth about our souls:

Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable, and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.

Left to our own devices, we lose the call, wander off the path, and are ultimately devoured by the darkness.  We may not all do so as dramatically as Scott Roeder—or, for that matter, George Tiller—but there but for the grace of God go we all.

George Tiller assassinated; may God have mercy on his soul

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For those unfamiliar with Tiller, he was an abortionist in Wichita who had become over the years, as the New York Times put it, “a focal point for those around the country who opposed [abortion],” largely because his clinic “is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy.”  He was shot in his church, where he was serving as an usher.

I’d missed this story earlier today, and I expect I’ll be processing this for a while, but I’ve seen several reactions with which I agree wholeheartedly.  Most basically, Princeton’s Robert George was right to say,

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. . . . By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller’s life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our “weapons” in the fight to defend the lives of abortion’s tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.

Robert Stacy McCain had some equally wise and true words:

One reason I so despise such criminal idiocy is that, as a student of history, I cannot think of a single instance in which assassination has produced anything good, no matter how evil or misguided the victim, nor how well-intentioned or malevolent the assassin. . . .

Those who slew Caesar did not save the Roman republic. Marat’s death only incited the Jacobins to greater terror. Booth’s pistol conjured up a spirit of vengeance against the South more terrible than war itself. Assassination is an act of nihilism. Whatever the motive of the crime, the horror it evokes always inspires a draconian response, and involves other consequences never intended by the criminal.

He also notes,

Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas.

Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom has some excellent comments as well:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder. It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers. It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation that the Obama Justice Department decided to drop ex post facto. There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there? If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes? Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments? Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Donald Douglas is right to complain about Andrew Sullivan’s selective outrage. . . . This sorry episode should be an example of how absolute is the sanctity of life; unfortunately, that’s not what people will teach, and that’s not what people will learn.

The president, of course, has weighed in with a condemnation of the assassination; that’s part of his job, and it’s unquestionably warranted.  That said, I have to agree with the folks at Stop the ACLU about this:

On one hand, Obama is correct. We cannot solve the abortion issue, or others, through murder. We are a Nation of Law, not a Nation of Men. On the other hand, Obama never seems to work up much shock and outrage at the murder of over 2 million babies every year, many of them during the 3rd trimester. I wonder why?

Finally, go read Sister Toldjah’s superb post, which I’m not going to try to excerpt.

I’m not going to try to match these folks for profundity (not at the moment, anyway), or repeat what they’ve written, except to say that I agree with them; what Tiller did was evil, and what his killer did was evil.  Those who argue for this sort of violence claim to be agents of justice, but that cannot be—it’s a response to injustice that is itself unjust, and an action that denies its own premises; you cannot kill abortionists without undermining your argument that abortion is wrong.  It’s ultimately, inherently, necessarily self-defeating—which is characteristic of nihilism, one reason I think R. S. McCain’s diagnosis is spot-on.  It’s also not the way of Christ, who defeated evil by surrendering to it, not by leading a paramilitary team to assassinate Herod.

And so, for whatever it may be worth, I do categorically and unreservedly reject and abhor the assassination of George Tiller; and though as a Protestant I don’t believe in praying for the dead, I do honestly commit myself to hope that God will have mercy on his soul.  No, he doesn’t deserve it—but then, neither do any of the rest of us.

Love without truth is dead (and vice versa)

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And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

—Ephesians 4:11-16 (ESV)

Philip over at The Thinklings has an excellent post up from yesterday entitled “Love Without Truth Isn’t Love At All”; I agree with him wholeheartedly and commend it to your attention.  I believe his point is a critically important one, and one which has been largely lost not only in our culture but in much of the church in this country, in large part because we’ve lost sight of Paul’s definition of spiritual maturity—and perhaps, in many cases, of any concept of spiritual maturity at all, or at least of any sense that it’s something to be greatly desired.

That’s our loss, because Paul is right (and so is Philip):  love cannot exist without truth—and of equal importance, neither can truth exist without love, and we’ve largely lost sight of that, too.  When Paul characterizes spiritual maturity as a matter of “speaking the truth in love,” he gives us what seems to me to be one of the most luminous statements in Scripture, capturing the way Christ calls us to live in one single, balanced phrase.  We are called to speak the truth in love as a way of life, compromising neither, setting neither above the other, and for good reason: neither can exist in its pure state without the other.

Love without truth decays, because true love seeks only what is best for the beloved; when truth is taken out, whether because the truth seems too hard, too painful, too inconvenient, too much work, too risky, too unpleasant, or what have you, the heart of love is gone, for it is seeking, in one way or another, its own perceived benefit. It may believe that it’s trying to spare the other person unnecessary pain, or something of that sort, but in reality it’s trying to spare itself; and that way leads the decline of love into the mere sentimentality which declares, “Love is blind.” No, love has its eyes wide open, because love is founded on truth. It’s precisely the fact that Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and exactly whom he was doing it for, with no illusions as to our worthiness or anything else, that made his death on the cross an act of love. Had he been blind to all that, it would have been worthless.

At the same time, truth without love also decays. It’s not just the words we say that make our statements true or false, it’s how we say them, and in what spirit; which is why it’s possible for us to combine true statements in such a way that those who hear us will draw a false conclusion. Without love, truth hardens, growing cold and brittle, like a coal removed from the fire; to say that God hates sin is to speak truth, but to say it without love is to give the very distinct impression that he hates sinners, too, which is most decidedly not true. Indeed, to grasp the truth that God hates sin without also understanding that he is love and that he loves all whom he has made is very likely to come to believe that God hates sinners.

The reason for this is that God is truth, and God is love, and neither truth nor love has any meaning or reality apart from him; and thus to sever one from the other is to sever both from their source. What’s left is something very much akin to cut flowers: they may retain their beauty, and they can be kept alive for a little while, but they’re dying. To have either truth or love, we must have both.