The paradox is perhaps that the limitation that Jesus is suggesting isn’t motivated by justice, but by love. It isn’t a raising of the bar, but a whole new ball game. It is a realisation that even your enemy is your equal, perhaps even an estranged brother, he is like you are. He may have a splinter in his eye, but you have a plank! Following Jesus isn’t about living up to standards, in a way it is about forgetting them, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?” It is about the spontaneity of compassion and sympathy.
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Fantastic use for those trophies! May the marks of the damage done by debate team participation continue to fade.
Arguing for points, as if one is fencing may be appealing to some; I find it apalling. In such truth is of secondary or tertiary importance to the development of an argument by rules and inclding the proper number of sub points and citations with no interest in the veracity of the claims in them.
Identify the faulty argument of your opponent? Extra points! And even more, if you convince YOURSELF your argument is eqivalent to the path to truth.
How many former debaters have never been able to shake the culture and false belief that that is the way to convince someone, and that winning points is more important than winning hearts. Then go on to think themselves apologists – arguing people into the kingdom; humiliation for Jesus’s sake.
Let the tradition die with the gladiators. And lie where it fell.
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Amen to all of this! Or nearly all of it. I see Jesus’ “…but I say unto you…” statements as a symbolic ‘raising of the bar’ to near impossible heights to help drive home to those who still want to play that game the impossibility of their ever winning it. But we are supposed to see - as I think you’ve suggested - that it’s not any kind of contest at all.
Following all the George MacDonald’s influences on me, I’ll suggest now that there is no daylight that can be found in between God’s justice and God’s love. If it isn’t motivated by love, then it isn’t justice, and if it isn’t just, then it isn’t loving either. There can ultimately be no separation between those two things.
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I found that it was God’s love for himself that perfectly squares the justice and mercy
he shows to sinful people
I’m not sure that love can be fully shown as perfection apart from being outward directed toward others. I mean … yes, of course we are to love ourselves, and how much more so would God also love God’s self then. But that is not where demonstrated love most shines as the example we are to be illumined by and drawn toward. Agape love such as God demonstrates to us and for us is directed toward the other (toward us - and all others as well.) If those I most love became convinced that I only love them for what they can do for me (i.e. that it was really my self-love that motivated anything I might do for them), then that would be a sorry state for all of us. It is tricky, though, since we are to see God in all those whom we are called to love. So I can see your point that way.
I also can’t find any daylight between GM’s conviction in this and Jesus or Paul teach. I don’t see any credible teaching in the gospels or epistles that suggest God’s love is sometimes defeated and sidelined by the need for justice, or where God’s justice must be found lacking in order to accomodate love. At least not in any ultimate sense.
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No ultimate justice. I hear you.
There are people who do not want to become Christians if there isn’t justice and it’s all warm and fuzzy ‘accommodation’.
And then there’s unrecognized yeast.
Then how did you get from that to …
There is no such thing as true love that doesn’t end up being perfected justice. And there is no such thing as justice that isn’t what perfect love demands.
Easy to say. And what that demand might just be is conditional immortality. There are such things as incorrigibility, obstinacy and free will.
God’s love for himself is different than our love for ourself. Our love for ourself should never have us lead another person to worship us. And yet that is primarily how God calls us to love him. This is also how he shows his love for us, by commanding us to love and worship him. God’s love is not a humanistic love.
The interesting thing is that the biggest flaws in ‘Protestantism’ were inherited from Rome, primary among them being the urge to invent new doctrines. That’s one of the great attractions of Orthodoxy, that they haven’t had a new doctrine for over twelve hundred years!
I’m confused by this juxtaposition. I know very little of Orthodoxy. I did listen to some Franky Schaeffer CDs years ago, but I wouldn’t consider that representative. The recent story of Molly Worthen’s conversion highlights many of the strengths I see in Evangelical beliefs and practices. But it’s a real mess out there. Have you ever heard of Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to Church?
Or – and my brother and I won our way into the semifinals once this way – correctly identify a source that your opponent quoted but failed to cite fully. That was in our final rebuttal, and the judges said until then the two teams were so evenly matched they figured that the finals would be an anticlimax.
The lesson there is don’t just know your sources, know every potential source of the other side.
[the rest of the story: we got beat in the next round because our opponents had a quote from one of our sources that they caught fifteen minutes before the round began, and that quote showed that our understanding of our source wasn’t fully accurate]
What we should learn from debate – and thanks to our speech coach – is how to be thorough, to know all sides of a topic before wading in, and to stay on top of your topic.
Our debate teams only rarely made it to the finals, but in the opening rounds teams from other schools groaned to see one of our teams as their foe because we even more rarely lost an opener – due to doing our best to adhere to what our coach taught us.
But we also learned that in the heat of debate it’s easy to forget the real lessons and to go for the points – and that is very very hard to shake.
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It’s also different because God’s love empties itself out so there’s no love left; it holds nothing back.
But God doesn’t end up empty of love, because the Father pours His love into the Son, and the Son pours His love into the Spirit, and 'round and 'round it goes as the love never stops, it just flows.
The last part reminds me of a sermon given by my first Hebrew professor focused on the command to love God. He looked at the “you shall” part of it and noted that in the Hebrew structure that is both command and promise: if we humbly accept God’s action to make Him our God, loving Him is just what will happen to us, an inevitable result of connecting to Him.
That was a fairly frequent theme; he noted that the Hebrew calls the Ten “words”, not commands, and that the first word is “I am the Lord your God”, so all the rest are as much His action as that one, declarations of what He is going to be doing to/with/for us.
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His love can be refused, however (or ‘refused however’ ; - ), now and ‘later’.
Saw it mentioned in Christianity Today is all.
Narcissism is a scary thing. I put up with someone who I later figured out was definitely a narcissist for most of a year, and the toughest part of the adjustment once I finally got him out of the place was a lot like having a wall you’re leaning against just vanish: I had put so much energy into dealing with (and trying to help) him that I totally lost my equilibrium once I wasn’t having to do that any longer.
I’d say that narcissism is a big driver behind both Rome and ‘Protestantism’ inventing new doctrines: “discovering” a doctrine everyone else has missed has got to the the ultimate ego-booster. The pattern was once described this way by an Orthodox patriarch: “The (radical) reformation is the fruit of the seed that Rome sowed”, suggesting that had Rome just remained faithful to what had come down from the Fathers and the Councils there would never have been a tempest of ever more denominations in the West.
It makes me think of a professor at a seminary near where I was aquatics director at a big apartment complex and his constant reminder to students that whenever they had a “Aha!” moment in theology they should keep in mind that someone thought of it already, probably over a thousand years ago.
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I think that the problem we have, and the reason we are often depressed at hearing the words of the young church that feel to be from a time when it was all happening in contradiction to today, is that we, like all humanity, tend to suppress the extraordinary and call it a deviation. The remarkable is often called crazy or insane, because we have an expected norm which people in groups are expected to conform to. What was going on at that time was truly remarkable but was declared insane.
So too today in Christianity, we read a text about a Jewish Apostle quoting from the Old Testament, not long after the crucifixion, and transfer his words into a time two thousand years later and feel depressed. I think of all the remarkable people of the church since then, many of whom were declared heretics, another kind of insanity, and their teaching suppressed. This has been going on for as long as human beings have been expressing themselves.
We want things to be as it was then, but as life moves forward, the spirit moves people in new ways, in extraordinary ways, so if we are judging these witnesses like the early Christians were judged back then, we will reject them and the paradigm change they bring.