Love is Not Enough

When “you are accepted” acts as a thin veneer in the church

Last week on fb (follow me on facebook HERE) I explored the Stanley Hauerwas notion that “Love is not enough.” In Stanley’s latest book, ch. 5 bears this title, and he says, "There is much talk of the church ... accepting people as they are. I don't want God to accept me as I am. I want God to transform me ... Our lives cannot remain the same when all our desires and loyalties are directed to the way in which Jesus loved. The gospel is not "you are accepted." That's not love." p.20

There was much push back on fb, good push back. And this is to be expected? The Hauerwas riff threatens a current orthodoxy that runs thick through the American/Canadian church culture. It upends a foundational tenet among many protestant mainline, evangelical, and post evangelical churches that see “all are loved, affirmed and welcome here” as the starting point for how we gather.

So what are we to do with this?

The largest push back to the post was from those who saw acceptance as an essential part of transformation. For these people, acceptance, love, affirmation is the gateway into transformation. Being loved and transformation cannot be separated. Indeed, Jesus’ pattern of encountering people was to start with acceptance and love, from which the processes of transformation and discipleship ensue.

I agree with this 100%. And I see Stanley agreeing as well.

So Stanley must be getting at something else here?

When Love Itself Becomes The Gospel

I believe what Stanley is engaging is that moment when love and acceptance move from being the entry way into a space of presence with Jesus/transformation to becoming the end unto itself. Love and acceptance becomes itself the ethic to be pursued, which leads to the gospel becoming God loves you, affirms you, and wishes to flourish you as you are. Perhaps we could call this the self-fulfilment gospel?

Certainly we must not forget that “God loves you” is an important part of the gospel. John 3:16 starts with “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son …” Bill Bright’s four spiritual laws start with “God loves you and has a wonderful plan form your life.” So this is nothing new. I would go further to say that the very force of the gospel is love. God’s love is a force which once unleashed upon a person leads to salvation and transformation.

But it is not the whole gospel. It is an entry point to the whole gospel. It is a part of the gospel. Billy Graham’s “God forgives you and pardons you via the cross of Christ, and now you are restored to a relationship with God” is a part of the gospel, an entry point to the whole gospel, but is not the gospel (McKnight, King Jesus Gospel, ch.3 makes a similar point in distinguishing ‘ classic evangelicalism’s “plan of salvation” from “the gospel”). In the same way “God loves you and affirms you” is a part of the gospel, but NOT the whole gospel,

When love and acceptance become the whole of the gospel, a misshaping happens. In many churches I’ve known over the years, I have seen where “love and acceptance” becomes the whole gospel itself, separated from the rest of the gospel: Jesus death, resurrection, defeat of sin, death and evil, and his rule and reign until all has been right. The love ethic, the love ethos, becomes the end in itself and it gets stuck into something we do. And the church can become one large “I’m OK you’re OK” group therapy session every Sunday. It can become an enabling church, whose one goal is to be “nice.” This is what Stanley is helping us to understand.

Much of the angst on fb towards this post by Hauerwas seems to come from evangelicals/ex-evangelicals who come from evangelical fundamentalist spaces. There was much guilt, legalism there. The first approach to God in those spaces is “you are sinner, deserving of hell.” There is much judgement in those spaces. Often in these same spaces, any desire by women to achieve personal aspirations that do not fit appropriate social roles receives consternation, judgement and even rebuke. It is therefore natural to recoil from that. It is why “God loves you, affirms you, you are good” is such a glorious gospel to receive. This can be such an awesome starting point for a fresh engagement with God.

But the Hauerwas rhetoric is not aimed at such folk. He comes from the climes of mainline Protestantism where the boldest act of a Christian (he sometimes claims) is to be “nice,” where we seek to be tolerant, certainly no judgement towards one another. Let us be safe together and have a spiritual experience of being loved by God. In the process the love ethic has become an end in itself. And the only time we are stirred to judge is against injustice in the world. We become justice warriors in our own strength and self-righteousness. In the process love becomes emptied of any force that can change the world. It’s this world, the protestant mainline world of really the last 70 years, that Hauerwas is speaking to.

The Hollowing Out of Love

Hauerwas, it turns out, does not want to rid the church of love but to expose the emptiness in the ways Christians use, and practice, the term. He says:

“To make the gospel into an ethic of love is to leave it at our disposal, in which we fill in the context of love by our own wishes. But Christ’s story forms us into the kind of people in which God’s love can take shape; it transforms us so that we can become capable of love.” (19)

To most Christians, both protestant and evangelical, love is thought to be self evident. What it means to love someone is obvious and needs not be explained. But through reading Hauerwas, we discover our culture has scripted love into a thin veneer that covers over our most basic selfish impulses towards one another another. Into this love we import the best of our wants and feelings never believing they they might be corrupted, self-fantasizing, and empty in the end.

And so Hauerwas is pleading for a love that means something. Again he says:

“The great commandment, to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, is followed by the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). And there is good reason. The oft-cited command, “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not self evident… the story itself (displays) the meaning of love.”(19)

For Hauerwas, ultimately, there is no knowing what love means apart from following Jesus, the way of the cross, the giving up of one’s self for another. Without Jesus, we are misled into the illusion that love is somehow solving people’s problems for them, or saving friends from all suffering. But love is so much more than doing things for people. In Hauerwas’ words “Love is not the saving of others from suffering, but the willingness to continue to love them in their suffering… “ In other words be with them, for them, alongside them, walking with them, as Jesus works to preserve them and bring in the new world.

It is amazing how this little short chapter about love both proves how shallow ‘love’ has become in our daily Christian vocabularies, and how transformative this love can be when embodied through a practice of loving one another in the power of the living Christ.

Re-examining How We Use the Word Love

And so here we must go. We must re-examine how we have become used to using the word “love” so much in the church.

The way ideology works is it takes a real experience named via a word, extracts it out of embodied life, and then uses the word to make a banner that we all cheer around usually over against another group of people. This is what I fear has become (at least sometimes) of the gospel of “you are accepted and loved” among evangelical/post evangelical and/or protestants. It has become performative. It has become a mantra, extracted out of everyday life, that now shapes a culture in reaction to/and against that judgmental coercive legalistic culture of the evangelical fundamentalists. In the process we lose the transformative power of Jesus that is released when we come alongside people, and become mutually together supporting, caring, speaking truth, discerning the ways forward. In other words the ways of walking in love one with another.

I attend an Alcoholics Anonymous open meeting once a week. It is where I go to be among the hurting and have my own hurts and inadequacies revealed. It is stunning, the level of love and support there, the alongside-ness there, but no one shrinks from discerning the truth about our broken lives. The meeting starts out with owning “I am an alcoholic.” But this admission is done in a sea of love and acceptance. There are no illusions that we are beyond discerning our brokenness. And this makes for a way of relationships (mentoring-sponsorship) that challenges one another to faithfulness, to discipleship, the steps. It is a model of love in action.

I say with Hauerwas, let us seek faithfulness in the way we love, in the simplest of ways, let us be truthful, come alongside and discern one with another, let us live and support one another. Let us be a people of Jesus disciples where His power dwells among us for the world.

As always, dialogue with me, push back on, or extend this conversation through the comment button. I’ll be glad to interact and learn from you!!