Love for God and Love for Neighbor

I wrote this piece a few years ago, but I republish it now because I think these observations are important now more than ever. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we make Justification a completely vertical reality pertaining only to God, but don’t think often think of it as effecting our horizontal relationships with other people. But we are wrong in this. Being justified before God is part and parcel of being in just relationships with other persons. We cannot have God and ignore our neighbors. I think my journey to this realization began a few years ago with this post. 

Saul’s Conversion: The Rest of the Story

It struck me this morning that Saul’s conversion story in Acts 9 is just as much a story about his reconciliation with other people as it is a story about his reconciliation to God. After all, it is not God in some abstract sense that Saul curses in vs. 1. No, it is the Lord’s disciples whom he is “breathing out murderous threats against.” (1)

In other words, Saul’s sins are a violation of God’s law made tangible in his sin against the Lord’s disciples. It is precisely there, in that broken human to human relationship, that Saul’s sins against Christ exist and become incarnate, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (9:4)

Here the 2 Great Commandments – love of God and love of neighbor – are shown to be so intertwined that separation is nonsensical.

Saul is a sinner against God because he does not love his neighbor as himself.

Saul is a sinner against other human beings because he does not love God with his entire heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Interestingly, I’ve never heard this passage preached this way. I always hear it as a ‘gospel’ passage whereby God reconciles Paul to Himself and Himself alone.

But this is only half the story – God tells Saul to go into the city and await instruction. Saul later encounters a group of disciples who are afraid of him; he then spends several days with them (19), probably seeking their forgiveness, learning from them, and healing a very broken relationship with them. It is this part of the story I’ve never heard from an Evangelical pulpit.

But if contemporary Evangelicals wish to maintain some moral authority in the postmodern world, we must begin to pick up this other side of this story. No longer can we permit ourselves to believe the gospel is just a spiritual reconciliation of “my” individual self and God. No, no, we must see that the gospel inescapably entails reconciliation between “me” and the larger community of human beings created in God’s image…especially those whom I have hurt or excluded. The true gospel necessarily holds together love for God and love for neighbor. Any gospel that doesn’t proclaim both isn’t THE gospel.

Receive the Spirit? What Spirit? Huh?

Reading through the book of Galatians the other day, I came across this interesting question Paul asks in 3:2:

I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?

Now, Paul’s larger concern here is that this church not be deceived into thinking their salvation or sanctification has anything to do with obedience to the law. They did not enter covenant with Jesus Christ, nor are they sustained in that covenant, because they were/are circumcised.

But the thing that caught my attention in this question has little to do with that larger theological discussion he’s having. Rather, it’s the one he’s NOT having…the one he’s assuming…the one even the Galatians are assuming: That the Spirit’s activity and dwelling among the Galatian church is an objective reality.

When Paul asks this question about the Spirit, his assumption is that the answer will come back unanimously, “by believing what we heard.”

In other words, both Paul and the Galatians are assuming the objective reality of the Spirit in their midst. It is so objective that it is assumed.

This is quite the contrast to the present day church. If someone were to ask the American church, “Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?” we would probably say, “Receive the Spirit? What Spirit? Huh?”

I’m not sure that I have anything theologically profound to say here. I’m in awe of the Spirit’s obvious manifestation to the Galatian church and Paul. And I feel a bit of sorrow that such a manifestation is not nearly as objective in my life…and that so many of us would feel the same way I do.

I would like to be clear here, though. I DON’T think the seeming lack of objective movement by the Spirit in our midst is because we don’t believe the gospel as much as the Galatians did. In fact, quite the contrary, Paul’s problem with the Galatians here is that they don’t believe it like they should…they’ve abandoned it. And yet, even in the midst of it, he can still appeal to the objective reality of the Spirit in their midst.

So why does it seem so different with us? Is the Spirit an objective reality in your life? Your church?