Fundamentally, the central purpose of the law was to drive us beyond it to Christ. By condemning us, the law exposes the impossibility of our ever living in perfect union with God so long as our relationship is filtered by our knowledge of good and evil. The law thereby prepares us to receive God’s judgment of our rebellious knowledge in Christ and opens us up to being reconciled with God in Jesus Christ.
In his mercy, the all-holy God works with us. God lovingly works with us in the midst of our fallenness, while we still struggle under the curse. God’s mercy permeates his judgment and ultimately triumphs over it. We might say that God chooses perfect love over perfect ethics.
The church is called to represent this God, just as Christ did. “The Church is not a religious community of worshippers of Christ but is Christ Himself who has taken form among men” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)[1] (1 Cor. 12:27). Hence, the church is called “the body of Christ.”
God’s love is merciful; so must our love be. God’s love is patient; so must ours be. God’s love does not start with an ethical ideal and then pronounce judgment. God does not start where he wishes we were, condemning us for what we are not. God starts where we actually are and then pronounces hope and patiently and graciously loves us into becoming what we can be and what we, in fact, already are in Christ.
The body of Christ is to love mercifully and patiently. We are to accept people wherever they are and patiently love them and view them with hope. While we cannot ignore practical considerations of safety, we are to embrace people as they are, trusting that the Spirit of God will use our love to lead them to a place closer to where God wants them to be. We are to love like this because this is how we ourselves are loved.
We know that no matter how good we may appear, we are in fact sinners whose depravity was so great the Son of God himself had to die for us. If we have placed our trust in Christ, we are redeemed children of the most high God. We are filled with a life that is not conditioned by our knowledge of good and evil.
We are called to live out of love, not out of an ethical system. Of coursed this does not in any sense entail that we relativize ethical truths, but it does mean that we make them subservient to love. Moral principles are absolute, but only love submitted to the will of God can direct us on how they apply in a particular situation.
As we shall discuss in Chapter 12, it also means that within the body of Christ we should cultivate intimate relationships in which people can speak the truth to one another in love and confess their sins to one another (Eph. 4:15, James 5:16) without fear of judgment (1 John 4:18).
We live by following the Spirit and by loving people where they are, in the complexity and uniqueness of their nonideal situations. And we do so without judgment. Love respects whatever boundaries other people believe they need. It is only when we enter into solidarity with people as they are that we acquire the wisdom to know how, and when, and if various ethical principles apply to their lives. Only then do we learn how to realistically and helpfully adapt ethical principles to the real situation in which people find themselves. Only love, given without hesitation and without conditions, can ever motivate people to trust us enough to invite us to speak into their lives in the first place.
The only way to understand people’s behavior and help them transform it is to get on the inside of their stories. This takes a great deal of trust, time, and patience, and it can only be done in love. This understanding gives us a wisdom – the wisdom of love – to know what to do to help them grow out of their destructive behavior. It is never done if we are judging them.
At times we may have to intervene to stop destructive behavior. If it is our place, we may have to hold the person socially responsible for his or her behavior and stipulate consequences. But it is never our place to pretend to be God. We can only be God-like in the way we are created and saved to be if we refrain from trying to be god-like in the way the Accuser temps us to be.
God banished the man and woman from the garden he had created for them, blocked the way to the Tree of Life. From this point on, life “in Adam” would not be the Paradise God intended. In principle, Christ reversed all this on the cross when he closed the infinite gulf that separated us from God. On the cross, both our goodness and our evil as a strategy for getting life was exposed as sin, and we were given a righteousness that does not and cannot come from our own efforts. God does not merely tolerate us. No, when the prodigal son returns, he is immediately acknowledged as a son, as though he’d never left (Luke 15:11-32).
The job of the church is to proclaim and embody this truth, in the hope that all will acknowledge it, experience it, and be transformed by it. Our single task is to ascribe unsurpassable worth to every human being, and the form this takes in our fellowship is that we invite and welcome all to the celebration of the cessation of the banishment from the garden. When they come, they must not simply be tolerated, for God never merely tolerates anyone. If we see things through, the lens of the cross, our welcome cannot be on the condition that they first clean up their act. The point is all the more important for us because, unlike Jesus, we are not entirely cleaned up yet. Scripture does not say that Jesus fellowshipped with “former” prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. He fellowshipped with “current” prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. They will never see the reality of love that leads one to repent and believe if we withhold love until they repent and believe (Rom. 2:4).
If we understand ourselves and others as we are in Christ, we will live in the awareness that we are no better than the bum, the whore, the evil pervert, the obese glutton, or the Samaritan woman who failed at five marriages and was not living with a man out of wedlock. What we have in common – our sin and unsurpassable worth – dwarfs in significance whatever differences exist among us.
The point is that God does not merely tolerate us, and we must not merely tolerate each other. Our task is to love as God loves, to celebrate as God celebrates, to embrace others as we have been embraced and to draw near to others as we have been brought near. “In Christ . . . the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). We have faith that God is who God says He is in Christ, and we are who God says we are in Christ. And we express this faith through love. Nothing else matters!
If we are celebrating the cessation of the ban in this outrageous fashion, we will face two challenges. On the one hand, we will likely face the wrath of the religious people whose entire way of life is assailed by the ethical model of the church. On the other hand, we must face the legitimate question of how the church can be this open and yet remain faithful to its call to grow in Christ-likeness. We shall discuss the first of these problems in Chapter 11 and the second of these problems in Chapter 12.
Boyd, Gregory A. Repenting of Religion – Turning from Judgment to the Love of God. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics. New York: Touchstone Books, 1995. p. 84.