“For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as his face is shown, love is gone.” - Dostoevsky
I finished the Grand Inquisitor the other day and came away with the thought of "artistically cruel". Dostoevsky used this term to describe the ways that the Turks were torturing people, but I can see it used by Christians.
Christians are called to love God and love others even if they don't like them. The funny thing is that we are so quick to "help" other Christians when they stumble. It is artistically cruel because our accountability is a wonderful act but it is done with the wrong intentions. We love to call others out on their sins, which is a needed thing, but we love to call them out on their actions that are very public and wrong. What about the sin of not hanging out with their family enough? What about the sin of over loading thier schedule? We seem to only focus on the juicy stuff - the really good sins. Artistically cruel.
I love the truth inside Dostoevsky's quote above. Love must be a faceless love in order to truly be love. What if our faith is not "true" love, because we have put a face on teh God who loved us first? What if the Jesus of our agenda is not faceless anymore, so therefore we just love ourselves. Artistically Cruel. We take this love, this perfect and powerful love, and we lose it because we can picture the one who gives it to us. What if this is our "personal Jesus"?
thoughts?
PS- Our Friend Rob has joined the blogging world over at ADD Theology. I can't wait to see what he has to say. Check him out on my newly alphabetized blog list. God doesn't play favorites, so neither will I...until someone donates money toward my guitar fund.
Friday, February 09, 2007
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a few months ago i began to think about how we should be defined by faith hope and love (sounds pretty dang biblical) and one stumbling block is this idea of unconditional love. it challenged me to look around at the people i love, is there something they all have in common? that would be a condition and therefore conditional. If Christians only love other Christians, its not real love. If we only love certain ethnicities, sexual lifestyles (we can not merely hate the sin not the sinner and imagine that we have learned to love that person), certain denominations, open minded people, people who aren't stupid, people who aren't annoying, and every other little loop hole we find making our love pretentious and anything but Christian. I am the greatest sinner of all in this, i think i am closer to unconditional hate sometimes than i am love. how then can love be faceless, because true love must be faceless.
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