Should We Limit Love?

“When you're taught to love everyone, to love your enemies, then what value does that place on love?”—Marilyn Manson

I’m no Marilyn Manson fan. Though I do think he is both intelligent and articulate. Here, he is making a point. If we just throw love out to whoever, is it really valuable? If it’s valuable, shouldn’t we be more discriminating in who we love? I think his point makes some sense. What comes to mind is preachers who are very involved in their congregation, but neglect their families. St. Paul talks to us about that. If you can’t maintain your family, you have no business trying to run a church community. The needs of your immediate family need to be met. You can’t serve others at the expense of your family. To the responsibility of raising your children properly is a grave sin. Unfortunately, it is all too common. I think it is one of the reasons preacher’s kids have such a bad reputation, though there are other factors, of course.

My first reaction to this quote was to say that it is true if love is a limited commodity, but as I thought about it, it is limited, in a sense. By this I mean that we can only really invest in a limited amount of people because both our time and energy are limited. We have to choose wisely. However, we can love others without restriction in the broader sense of being concerned for their well being, and working to help improve it. We can give money to support charity (though this is limited by our available funds); we can volunteer at shelters; we can teach adults or children how to read; we can reconcile with those who are estranged from us; we can vote in ways that take the interests of the most people into account; we can use our time better so that we can do more to help others.

To teach children, or adults for that matter, to love everyone places the highest value on love. Love is not like money. If there is more of it, there is no inflation which causes it to have less value.

Love is so important because others are important, despite their stupidity, arrogance, and brokenness. Loving others is less concerned with love as an abstract thing, and more concerned with others as God’s children, and our brothers and sisters. We love because others are worth loving, despite themselves, despite ourselves.

The problem with the church and society is not that we are too free in our love, but that we are not free enough. How many people do you know that have broken past the insider/outsider binary? We tend to love those like us, and hate those who are different. Christians have not really been an exception to this, though Jesus called us to be. As he told his disciples, we must be better than the pagans, and love those who do not love us. Only when we do this will we be like God.

Such love is not a smug liberal self-serving love that assuages our guilt while remaining ultimately apathetic, nor is it a conservative love that is judgmental, loving in name only while secretly hateful. It works for the good of its object. As Christians, we must always work for the good of all creation, not just our own good. We must put aside hate, and look past difference. We must see with God’s eyes. We must be willing to put aside our negative feelings and selfish interests, and live compassionately. Every person is a son or daughter of some one. Every person is loved, if by no one else, then at least by God. And every person is broken and in need of kindness. We must be ready and willing to give them kindness, even when it hurts. We must not limit love.

Should Christians Be Vegans?

Being a vegan in church is probably like being a pacifist at an NRA meeting, or a Christian ACLU member. We’re just not that common. But why shouldn’t we be? There’s a lot that can be said about how the Church has conformed to a certain culturally conditioned means of understanding the world. It is anthropocentric and utilitarian in many ways. In other ways it is pessimistic and gnostic. These are all ways that it is unfaithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jesus may or may not have eaten animals. I don’t know. In the gospel of John, he is depicted as cooking fish post-resurrection, but that’s the only story we have. Even then, some contend that the Greek says he ate some honeycomb, not fish. I’m not a Greek-reader so I can neither confirm nor deny this. Even if Jesus did eat meat, it would not have been often. Separated from food production as we are are, we rarely think about how what we eat is produced. Meat, for example, is very expensive to produce (about $35 a pound) and resource intensive (17 pounds of grain and 440 gallons of water for a single pound of cow flesh). It is the food of the rich. The 1st-century Jews would have eaten it on feast days, but that’s about it. The staples of their diet would have been bread, wine, olive oil, some dairy, and whatever garden vegetables and herbs they grew. From archeological discoveries we know they were prone to diseases like rickets and, overall, didn’t have very good nutrition. (This is why diet books flouting Jesus’ diet are absurd—though he probably was skinny, but from hunger!) 
Some do insist Jesus was a vegetarian (we have have an early gospel from the Ebionites insisting quite strongly on this point), others insist he was not, still others don’t care. Should we care? The scriptures say that “ a wise man has regard for the life/needs of his animal, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel” (Proverbs 10:12). Are we wise? Do we have regard for the lives of the animals with whom we share the planet? Or are we cruel in our wickedness? Modern animal husbandry is indeed cruel. Animals are confined so that they are unable to move; they are denied natural food and light, kept in constant states of pregnancy only to have their young taken from them. Cows, vegetarians by nature, are even fed the remains of other cows who have died. That's how mad cow disease started.
These are just a few practices. In reality, the entire process is cruel, inhumane, ungodly, and sinful. Jobs at a slaughterhouse have a 100% turnover rate,  and are very dangerous, with assembly lines that run so fast and so ineffectively that 25% of cows are dismembered while still conscious. This is wickedness.
Even if killing animals for food could be done in a way that did not cause suffering and was not resource intensive, I still would not participate. Why? Because my morality is shaped by my allegiance to God's goodness. For example, Genesis 1:29-31 reads,
“ Then God said, 'I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.' And it was so.  God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.”
Though I do not read the creation story as a literal/historical event, I still understand this as representing God's intention for creation. God desired a world without bloodshed, not just between humans, but between all creatures. This is not the case, but we can still do our part to contribute to God's vision of peace. God desires harmony, not just "back then," but now and always. Harmony precludes unnecessary violence.

But what of sin? Since humanity is sinful such initial prescriptions are put aside in favor of a “grace” that allows permission for such things, doesn't it? Isaiah thought otherwise. Isaiah 11:6-9 reads:
The wolf will live with the lamb,
       the leopard will lie down with the goat,
       the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
       and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
       their young will lie down together,
       and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
       and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
       on all my holy mountain,
       for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
       as the waters cover the sea.
Even in a state of rebellion, of sin, God still calls us to exercise peace at the level of inter-species relationships, and to take the lead, just as the child led them. Such harmony is even associated with having knowledge of God.If we truly have God's knowledge then we must cease to inflict needless harm on animals. If we refuse to do so, we do not know God. To paraphrase I John, how can we love God. whom we do not see, and not love our fellow creatures who we can see? If we cannot love them, then we cannot love God." Tough words. John applied them to humans, but there's no reason that they can't be applied to animals.

Jesus tells us that God cares for animals, and the OT is full of various laws to protect them. Perhaps those who think themselves wise or righteous should be more willing to consider the rights of animals, to consider that God loved the "world" (John 3:16), and not just humans. Perhaps they need to raise their consciousness a little bit, and begin to expand their sphere of compassion. Such a thing would be quite Christian. Jesus challenged his listeners to move beyond the Jew/Gentile binary, to include more than just Jews in their sphere of concern. It's time we moved beyond just humans as well.

Toward a Fuller Reading of the Scriptures

Calvin told us that Scripture is the Word of God when it points to Christ. Such an idea is a proper hermeneutic in that it rightly places Jesus at the center of the narrative, using Jesus as the interpretive matrix through which to read the Scriptures. This helps us to determine God’s self-revelation from human distortions of God, attempts to make God ours, rather than recognizing that we belong to God. But this is not all that is necessary to understand the Bible. Reading the Bible, we can plainly see that there exist multiple genres of the written word. Paul writes in prose; Acts, the Gospels, and much of the OT are written in narrative form; the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes are wisdom sayings and poems. We also have apocalyptic writings which are shrouded in symbolism and mystery, which is appropriate and necessary given their subversive nature. And even these are not clear cut, as the Gospels contain poems and parables, and so on. Additionally, we have the difference of context to consider. Ancient biographies were not structured as contemporary biographies are. They were not the empty recital of fact, but contained what we would call myths or legends as ways of communicating truth. Such a means was necessary given that, like the apocalyptic, the Gospels contained much that was subversive to the dominant religious and political climate. In a certain sense, the Gospels needed to be hard to understand in order to help secure the safety of the original communities from enemies.¹

In that some parts of the Bible were written in “coded” language, the community’s knowledge was imperative for rightly reading the Scriptures. Such knowledge is now lost to us. There are many points where we might have strayed. Perhaps it was when Constantine incorporated Christianity into the Empire, perhaps it was when the Church became more gentile than Jew, perhaps it was even when Jesus died, leaving the disciples to muddle his message. However, contemporary means of reconstructing the past have helped us immensely to gather a clearer picture of the early church community and its life. With all that is known it seems still that much knowledge has been lost when it comes to rightly reading the Bible.

Regardless, how we read the Scriptures contemporarily does not represent the only way or even the best way to do so. To say that each person is his own interpreter and the text is clear is simply untrue. If the text was that clear we wouldn’t have so many different interpretations. There is probably not a single interpretation that can exhaust the meaning of the text. If we confess the Bible to be inspired, despite its failings, we believe it to express who God is and contain God’s self-revelation. This means that the text is as full as God is, virtually inexhaustible. This is seen in the early readings of the Church. Historically, the Church understood the text as having multiple senses. It had an allegorical or symbolic sense, a literal or historical sense, and a tropological or moral sense, for example. In such readings, dating back to Origen in the 2^nd century, the literal sense was always the least important. This is important because it demonstrates that symbolic readings find a deep affinity with the historical Church, even though our readings will be different. For example, I would argue that significant parts of the OT are to be understood as symbolic stories meant to communicate certain truths. The issue is not whether something is symbolic or true, but whether the truth communicated takes the form of history or allegory.

Such readings do not endanger the Scriptures, for even in a historical reading, the meaning is found in and derived from the symbols. An allegorical readings simply asserts that the symbols were meant to be understood as symbols, rather than history, and that it is in the Church’s best interests—for the sake of its credibility, and its intellectual and spiritual life—to affirm rather than deny such readings. The discipline comes in determining which parts of the overall narrative are to be understood as parabolic rather than having actually occurred. This is where the sciences of history, textual criticism, and archeology, among others, come into play. Such tools can help us determine how to read the Scriptures. However, the traditions of the Church and its readings are the primary means of determining how the Bible is to be read. This does not mean that we can never disagree with those from the past, simply that we heed their input as wise voices from the Church’s life. We ought to give their voices a say in the life of the Church, which is, as G.K. Chesterton described it, a “democracy of the dead.”

1 Early churches had “gatekeepers” at the entrances of house church meetings who functioned as bouncers in order to guarantee the safety of believers who risked their lives to gather.