Posted on by Abe Austin

Deeper Love- Summary

Over the past few days, I’ve discussed the possibility of being a Christian and holding fast to the commandments that God has given me but also having love for those who choose to live a different lifestyle. In this final post I will attempt to summarize what I have gone over, and the errors that those who suggest love for another has to include acceptance of their decisions run afoul of.

Love and Disagreement)

The first issue is that no one actually believes this. Everyone knows that you don’t support everything that a loved one does. In my last post I gave the example of drunk driving. Any decent, moral person knows that drunk driving is wrong and would perhaps feel compelled to have a serious talk with a loved one who was repeatedly pulled over for it. But does that mean that now they don’t love that person anymore? Of course not.

The only difference is that pretty much everyone agrees that drunk driving is morally wrong, while other lifestyle choices not everyone agrees on the morality of. That’s fine. Perhaps what I call morally wrong you do not. Perhaps you think I am mistaken in being opposed to certain behaviors. Perhaps I will one day learn that you were objectively correct when I meet my Savior and he tells me that I was wrong, and I will have to confess that it must be so. So be it. But even if I have a wrong judgment today, it is a non-sequitur to suggest that that has anything to do with my capacity to love someone in the meantime.

Let me ask you this. Does my “morally wrong” opinion prevent you from loving people like me? If not, then you already know that the point I am making here is true. If it does, then you are projecting your own inability to love onto others.

A Solid Foundation)

Another error is that of believing that love is one and the same is acceptance, or that acceptance is a necessary component of love. These are two separate qualities, the first having been defined exhaustively in the gospels, the second only declared a virtue in modern culture. There is no compelling argument that I have ever heard of that acceptance is essential for love.

In fact, the scriptures show an example of love given to those that you do not accept. The purest love, God’s love, is said to be given to us “while we were yet sinners,” (Romans 5:8). He loves us even when we are still in opposition to Him. That’s why His love for us is so sure and transformative. Because He gives it to us wherever we are, motivating us to come to Him wherever He is. He loves us as we fall short, while defining for us exactly what it is we are falling short of.

And each disciple is called to do the same. I will love you, even when I believe that you are wrong, because God has shown me that even the wrong can be loved. This is true love, this is unconditional love, this is love that loves no matter what. This is what God calls us to. Not to abandon our principles to appease our neighbor, but to be stalwart on our principles, loving from the solid foundation of God’s word. That is the love that God has shown to each of us, so that is the love that I will try to emulate as well.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- The Core Disagreement

The Outsider’s Perspective)

I began this study focused on the secular humanist, who balks at the idea of God’s commandments restricting his pursuits of pleasure. Afterwards, I shifted to the confused Christian, who is frustrated by his attempts to obey God while still holding part of his heart back. I’ve spent some time in that latter category, and would like to briefly shift back to the secular humanist, and how he often misinterprets adherence to the laws of God.

From the secular humanist’s perspective, God and His commandments are understood as a checklist, one series of behaviors that are forbidden and one series of behaviors that are required. Thus, an individual’s level of obedience can be measured by a simple comparison to that list. The more points where you align with God’s law, the better you are in His eyes. If you get enough points right, Jesus will cover the rest and you get to go to Heaven, but if you are off on too many points, God will send you to Hell.

Thus, many secular humanist say they reject Christianity because they are not willing to conform to lists of rules that they don’t believe in. Many of them believe that God doesn’t exist, or that if He does that Christians fundamentally misunderstand Him, and that He really want people to be true to their own autonomy. Or if the Christian God did exist, the secular humanist concludes that He is a tyrant, and being true to one’s own autonomy and being damned for it would still be more noble than subservience to a cosmic taskmaster.

Autonomy as a God)

In short, the secular humanist sees autonomy as the ultimate ideal. It is the highest god that it would be blasphemous to sacrifice for anything else. Any discussion about commandment-following is therefore a distraction. True, the secular humanist might not want to adhere to those commandments, but the deeper, core issue is that they worship the autonomous self over any creator God.

To the secular humanist, the following of the commandments would be torture, because they would refuse to let go of their sense of autonomy. Every commandment would be like a shard, cutting deeply into them, fundamentally opposed to their most-precious ideal.

I think if Christians and secular humanists understood this, they could actually discuss the real issue, instead of quibbling over this side business of following rules. Yes, the true gospel of Jesus Christ leads to obeying God’s commandments, but that’s not really what it’s about at its core. It’s about letting one’s will be absorbed into the Almighty’s, and the Christian who isn’t willing to do that is outside true theology just as much as the secular humanist.

I won’t take the time to exhaust all of the reasons why the surrender of autonomy to God is essential in Christian theology, I am only interested in making the point that this is the true disagreement between it and secular humanism. I will, at least, use tomorrow’s post to share one of the reasons that the scriptures tell us that surrender is essential, but beyond that I would have to do a separate study to truly explore the matter.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Striving Together vs Striving Against

I have noticed two different types of conversation that I have had with friends and loved ones who hold different perspectives and principles from my own. One type has been far more fruitful than the other. Let’s take a look at each.

Shared Foundation)

In some cases the conversation has seen us first speaking from our shared convictions, reinforcing the points that we agree on, and then from that shared foundation explaining the reasoning that has led us to the perspectives that are different from one another. Seeing the two different chains of logic that led us to different places allowed us to question the process that one other took and offer alternative reasoning.

In my experience, this approach worked very well. It felt that we were working together to figure something out that we both wanted to understand. Seeing the motivations behind the conclusions, we each had understanding of where the other was coming from. I and the other person had multiple instances where we each said something along the lines of, “That’s a good point. I’d never thought of that before.” We actually seemed to be changing one another’s mind!

Split Foundation)

The alternative, of course, is when I have had conversations where I and the other person established no shared foundation between us at all. The two of us started by focusing on the differences between us. We didn’t explain the logic that led to our conclusions, except when doing so worked into our critique of the other person’s position.

The result, of course, was far more divisive. The conversation was more prone to devolve into an actual argument, and moments where either of us thought the other person had something insightful to offer were rare.

I think this difference of outcome is very telling. Furthermore, I know that the difference isn’t simply based on the person that I was having each conversation with, because I have had both types of conversation with the same person! In some cases, people might just be belligerent, but at other times it may be the structure of the conversation that invokes one outcome over the other.

Conclusion)

If one only ever experiences the more confrontational form of conversation, he may very well come to assume that the entire enterprise is pointless, and that he should give up trying to seeing eye-to-eye and divorce himself from the other. This would be a very tragic conclusion, particularly since it doesn’t have to be that way.

It is only natural that when we want to encounter a difference of opinion that we would go straight to the matter of contention, but that is the most likely to have us at loggerheads, accomplishing nothing. Though it feels counterintuitive, spending the majority of our conversation on what is shared, building up connection, and only then venturing out into the fringes certainly yields much better results. When two people focus primarily on what they share, they will gravitate to a unified opinion much faster than if they focus on the differences. When we have our shared perspectives as common foundation, securing greater truth becomes the goal of all participants, and we are partners in its discovery. Then, and only then, will that greater revelation be given to us, for then, and only then, will we be ready for it.