Christianity
Christianity without Love is not Christian: Faith without Works is Dead
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 28 June 2011
God and Love
W E H Lecky (History of European Morals) explains to us that many early Christians believed the world would be utterly changed by love. It imbued everything with a new significance—a holiness. Yes, indeed, people had to submit to the vicissitudes of this mortal life in exchange for nothing but the consolation of an endless post mortem “life” of bliss, but in those days it also held forth the promise of the alleviation of the suffering in this life, by degrees, as love dispersed from the few to everyone.
This ointment of love could, in practice, only be supplied by human beings. Love was not supernatural. It was entirely natural, but God was considered its supernatural source. As Lecky put it, the weary, the sorrowing and the lonely could look up to heaven and say, “Thou, God, carest for me”. The early Christians were not to know that God was a metaphor for human society which had become personified as a supernatural super being.
Before Gods had ever been thought of, people knew from experience that there was something greater than themselves, something that helped them, protected them, cared for them and comforted them, something that already existed when they were born, taught them all they knew and how to behave, and was still living when they died. It was their own community, their tribe or clan—their society. By a process of symbolization involving totems and ancestors, the eternal entity that created them and succored them from cradle to grave became a god, then, as human groups got larger and merged, gods, then a high god ruling a court of gods, and ultimately, in the west, in the age of empire, became the almighty God.
So, the God that cared for the Christian believer was originally the believers’ neighbors, in fact. The teaching of Christ, considered as the supreme God incarnate, that we should love our neighbors as if they were ourselves, indeed as if they were God Himself, was the human subliminal yearning for the ubiquitous love of the primeval human groups. The expansion of human groups had meant the dilution of the effect of the love members of small groups once had for each other. People also felt distant from the centers of power, and felt oppressed and exploited by those they hardly knew or did not know at all, they felt impotent to change things, and abandoned to injustice and unfairness by a class system of monstrous inequality and inaccessibility that had replaced the near egalitarianism and mutual accessibility of the primeval groups.
The notion lingered that society could be better—and had been better once, in a Golden Age that had become mythical—and therefore ought to be better, and that there were ways of living that could change society from the selfish state into which it had decayed to a decent and tolerable one. Largely only an empty post mortem promise, it was nevertheless the old society personified, the imaginary supernatural God, offering solace after death to those who had sought but never found it in life. Yet love kept alive the reality of a society free of anguish through mutual kindness.
Christians have to Love Others
The Jewish religion promoted personal righteousness through the law, and the Christians promoted mutual love, but they amounted to the same thing. Christ did not come to abolish the law—the definition of righteousness—but came to fulfil it in an altogether simpler and more natural way—through love of others. It was not passionate romantic love, nor was it cloying sentimentality, it was practical love, lovingkindness, and it was not reserved only for close friends and family, but for everyone. Christ illustrated it as clearly as possible with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The compassion that Christian love encompasses applies even to those that the abject norms of a decayed and depraved society classify as undeservingly wicked.
Samaritans were intensely disliked by Jews, and the dislike was mutual, but in this parable, a Jewish traveller is mugged, robbed and left for dead, bloody and dishevelled. A passing temple priest had no love for his fellow Jew, crossing the road to avoid him. A Levite, another pious temple functionary, did the same. Then a Samaritan, who according to Jewish stereotypes, should have given the half dead Jew an extra kick as he passed, turned out to be the only one of them with any human love in him, with any compassion. He helped the bruised and penniless Jew, gave him attention, comfort, saw him safely to an inn where he left him with a little money for food and to continue on home when he felt able. The Samaritan helped one whom he was conditioned to regard as wicked, and deserving no love, but instead he recognized him as a fellow human being. The rich and hypocritical priest and Levite had done nothing to help a fellow Jew.
The story is so famous because it so simply illustrates the meaning and purpose of Christian love. It is a pity that the whole message of love which Christ taught has been hidden by the smoke and mirrors of faith and salvation, spread most obviously by S Paul, indeed, contraverted by him. Salvation is purely selfish—love is purely concern for others. It is true that others’ love benefits oneself, but selfishness effortlessly swamps love, drowning it out. That is why Christians are required to make the effort to drown selfishness with love.
Criteria of Christian Discipleship
By placing the emphasis of Christian practice on human morality, through the practice of love rather than on worship, the proper scope for Christianity is opened up. Those who are not at all religious are not devoid of morals thereby. Often they are more moral because ritual and sacramental Christianity offers a hall of smoke and mirrors ideal for criminals and sociopaths to hide in. How often do Christians say so-and-so was not truly a Christian even though so-and-so professed Christianity and did all the things Christians do—regularly attend church, pray, ostensibly believe in God, regularly rattle the collection platter with coins. Yet they are objectionable people, crooks and extortioners who love no one but themselves. Plenty of priests and pastors fitted the description, and still do, and most of the rich and powerful.
So what criterion is to be used to evaluate the Christian? It ought not to be hard for the Christian to answer because Christ answered it for them often, in the gospels, and the core of it has just been reviewed above. Love is the answer. One professional Christian, at least, agrees:
At the Last Supper, Jesus instructs us that we are to love one another as He (Christ = God) has loved us. This means that we are called to participate in this love, not only by being recipients of God’s love and mercy, but by imitating Jesus’s example of sacrifice and self giving. This is His new commandment. Sacrificial love is not something optional to the Christian life, rather it is how we show that we are authentic disciples of Jesus Christ.Fr Ted Dudzinski, S Joan of Arc and S Patrick Church, Kokomo Perspective, (2011)
Most Christians attend church as if it were a tennis club, a social opportunity for them to meet relatives, friends and like-minded people. Whatever else they do, they are regarded as good Christians for attending their tennis club! But Christ was not advocating that people should love those they should love anyway. He advocated universal love. No one, not even enemies could be excluded if the horrors and indifference people show to the suffering of others is to be alleviated and eventually removed.
Love of Money
The American hero is a hard man, but the hard man is a cruel man. A hard man is indifferent to the suffering he sees around him. Usually, these days, the hard man just pursues some given objective, usually self aggrandizement. But all forms of selfishness ought to be subsumed to the preservation of a fair and just society, for without it no one can feel secure. The rich in such a rotten society have to prepare constantly for a mass uprising, terrorism, assassination attempts, and widespread disorder, while the poor and oppressed eventually feel they have nothing to lose and become willing to disrupt the smug assurance of the rich who have no interest in their plight, other than to blame them for it.
Again the man who lent his title to Christianity told a rich young man how to be saved. It was not faith alone! He had to love God and his neighbors, and even so had to give his wealth to the poor. Like the rich today, he could not do it. “How hardly shall they that have riches enter the kingdom of God.” It is too hard for them because they love money more than people! One has to wonder how many self proclaimed Christians can live among abject poverty, indiscriminate warfare, and widespread injustice without them realizing they just do not meet Christ’s oft stated criterion for discipleship. All of these Christians are frauds. They pretend to be Christians for the kudos it brings in their tennis club Christian society—a world practically devoid of Christian principles.
Adelphiasophism and Secular Christianity emphasises Christian morality as truly reflecting our natural moral instincts, and therefore not needing any superfluous supernaturalism. An atheist can be a perfect Secular Christian, but more orthodox Christians, who retain a belief in a supernatural God just as Christ himself did, are not excluded. Nor are Jews or Buddhists or Moslems, or those of any belief system excluded as long as they can see that morality is centrally about lovingkindness to other human beings. Those who need a supernatural God should just realize that no almighty God could possibly have prescribed ritual and worship as the most important duties of a human being. It is a hangover from the times when humans were considered as slaves of the gods, and that is why the bible refers to Christians as God’s slaves, albeit commonly translated as servants. Devotion to God is not shown by attendance at church services (serving the gods!) but by care and compassion for our fellow humans. Without that, church ritual is nothing more than primitive fetishism, or whistling in the wind, a narcissistic love of oneself projected on to God.
Faith Necessitates Love
S James, called the brother of the Lord, writing apparently in defense of Christ’s teaching against the pollution of it by Paul, showed that spiritual love was worthless unless translated into practical love. The passing Jewish priest and Levite might have given a prayer and a blessing to the poor half dead Israelite, but such assistance is easily given at no personal cost, and offer not the least benefit to the wounded man who wanted practical help! It was the Samaritan who gave it. Secular Christianity is a return to the practical love taught by Jesus and his brother but disparaged as “mere works” by almost all subsequent Christians, especially those professing the Christian faith in the US today, though they boast of knowing nothing about it. Faith without works is empty because only works—care and kindness for other people—shows that faith is real.
What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled, notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body. What doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works! Shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God, thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? … Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. … For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.James 2:14-19;24;26
And that is why Christianity today is dead, why it is impotent and ineffective. Too many think that effortlessly they are saved by faith, and therefore have every right to hate anyone they do not like. They forget that faith in Christ involves belief in what Christ taught and himself demonstrated in life. Without the active, practical love, he taught and lived their faith is a lifeless, festering, worm ridden corpse of a faith. No wonder so many Christians hate so much.
