Wirzba - Way of love : recovering the heart of Christianity

Whoever does not love abides in death.

1 J OHN 3:14

D OES C HRISTIANITY STILL MATTER ? Arent we better off without this archaic religion and its sectarian squabbles and divisive politics? Why even bother with God when it is clear that the idea of God is the basis for so much pain and hurt in the world?

This book is my attempt to answer these questions and to argue that Christianity very much still matters. Well, to be more precise, I will argue that the Christian faith can and should be taken seriously, provided that we rediscover Christianitys heart.

Christianity matters because it reveals the deep mysteries of God and the meaning of all life. It shows us what life is for and when it is at its best. And what is this ultimate revelation? The answer is surprisingly and profoundly simple: Christianity reveals the life of God and therefore also the meaning of life as a way of love. God, life, and lovethese three are indispensable for a good and beautiful world. Without these three together, everything falls apart. That is the heart of Christianity, and that is the message we most need to recover.

This revelation about love is not obvious. One only has to point to the fact that we live in a world too much acquainted with loves oppositeshatred and violence, boredom and fatigueto affirm loves centrality. Histories of war, genocide, and now ecocide suggest that love is rarely the ideal that inspires human hope and action. Doesnt the barbarity and indifference of just the last century, a century when we thought wed finally behave at our enlightened best, only to devise and carry out unprecedented levels of killing one another, teach us that the reality of God and the life of love are delusions?

Moreover, a quick look at Christianitys history and some of its contemporary expressions demonstrates that Christians have not always lived out their faith as a way of love. In fact, the church has at times shown itself as the enemy of love. This is at the heart of the crisis in the church today and explains why so many people have chosen to stay away or drop out. Christian leaders and their followers have often distorted love by turning it into a possession reserved primarily for themselves or those they deem worthy. By turning love into a stick used to exclude or punish otherswomen, children, minorities, foreigners, homosexuals, the homeless, criminals, or handicapped individuals have each had a turn at being the unwelcome otherChristians have often unleashed hatred into the world, not love. Christian-inspired hatred, however, is a theological catastrophe and a failure of massive proportions, since it runs counter to what the Bible explicitly teaches: Those who say, I love God, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen (1 John 4:20).

But recognizing the harsh realities of this world and pointing out how the church falls short of its ideals do not mean those ideals are wrong. No, my claim is that it is precisely these shocking experiences of the opposites of love that teach us that life needs love to lift existence out of the quagmire of neglect and brutality. Without love, life becomes a more or less tolerable descent into death. To give up on love is also to give up on the world and each other.

Additionally, love needsGod to expose and explode the often anxious, often self-serving desires that are loves pretenders. After two thousand years it is easy to overlook just how revolutionary the gospel of Jesus Christ really is. The God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth introduces us to forms of love that turn customary ways of ordering life upside down and inside out, showing us that what people think about love is often far too narrow and far too small. Insofar as Jesus inspires genuine love in the world, life becomes an adventure in the ways of solidarity and celebration. Love is the crucial thing, because it is love that separates the ways of life from the ways of death.