Bold Love and Evil

"If Christ, for one had practiced the love we advocate these days, he would have lived to a ripe old age."

In his classic book, Bold Love, psychologist and minister, Dan Allender writes compellingly of the face of evil in a world that is all things, not all love. He says, "We've come to view love as being nice. Forgiving and forgetting. Yielding to the desires of others. Yet the kind of love modeled by Jesus Christ, Ghandi, Martin Luther King and others has nothing to do with manners or unconditional acceptance. Rather, it is shrewd. Disruptive. Courageous. And as a result, often socially unacceptable."
Bold love is a harsh mistress, because there's nothing redeeming about a love that just blindly accepts.

What does it mean to love those who harm me? What does it mean, to love my enemy? The love of my friend is not so difficult. This story ultimately is about a forgiving love in a world side by side with the evil of the devil. Allender says that forgiveness surely does not mean forgetting the past, and ignoring the damage of harms past and present. Doing this would be erasure of one's personal history in the midst of a life. Human beings have been created lives worthy of love and forgiveness. We must first learn to forgive ourselves of the fault and failings that we have perpetrated. We must accept our humanness, our sometimes incomprehensible oddities and weaknesses.

"Bold love is a powerful agent of change that can transform both the lover and the beloved." The passion of bold love is a gift that brings a hardened heart face to face with a redemptive tenderness, and love of a Creator for his creation. We have all heard so much about God's love that his wrath and fury at our hardness and iniquity have been plowed under. There is no understanding of the Gospel message nor the centrality of the cross. Without recognition of the cross, its meaning and intersection of both, wrath and mercy are lost. It is a cross.

Mercy and its mysteries are great. Is it possible that we may be both passionately furious, and disposed to the doing of good?
Like the biblical figures Job and Jacob, we have the privilege to struggle with our failings, with God, and know that we will not be destroyed. Someone has been to the cross and shown us that. We are not to be in exile, nor a stranger to the promises of God. Not to be stripped naked and shamed, even in our darkest rage and most insolent self-justification, the face of God is there for the viewing. We may see his face and live.

The apostle Paul writes,  'For if we were God's enemies, we were reconciled with him through the death of his son.' Romans 5:8-10
"In his book, The Crucified God, Jurgen Moltmann expressed the loss for the Father and for the Son in this way: 'The Son suffers the dying; the Father suffers the death of the Son.
 The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father."

Allender writes, "Love is [now] before me, like a wall, like a deep cut on my hand. It is unforgettable; it is inflamed within me; it is a shrill, silent, noisy, still voice that captures my deepest and my most superficial thoughts." I am saved because he is mine and I am his. I am the deepest secret of God's heart.

The Struggle for Love: What Do You Live For?

"What if what we long hoped for, does not come? Willingness to risk for a better day"

Continuing in the book Bold Love, Dan Allender, Christian minister and clinical psychologist, observes many things, most especially that love as the Judeo-Christian tradition writes of it, is a "bold love, a harsh mistress, because there's nothing redeeming about a love that just blindly accepts."

In so many ways we are robbed of our birthright, of our natural beauty, present within us from infancy onward. In the Bible from Genesis chapter 3 onward, we read that God has been in a struggle against evil within our midst.
He vexes the serpent, saying, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." Gen.3:15

The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name. Ex. 15:3

This phrase is a part of the Tanakh or Old Testament story about the parting of the Red Sea. Did the sea part? Perhaps, but its symbolism of courage and determination are certainly powerful. It is this same courage and determination needed by each of us as we move forward into our lives--and our loves.
God, as the Bible amply recounts, is not willing to accept any old thing. He wishes, desires, demands us to be the creations of his heart, one with his being. In this, we are called to a love, eternal, cosmic, and nearly unfathomable.

While our perspective may be simply as small as living a better life, his desire for us is a more radical one, that we learn the love of a Creator for his creation.
No small order, and far and away from the notion of "unconditional" love, popularly bandied about these days.

Are we then to be set to fail? The task is so large. No wonder when many think of notions of God, they think of God, the enemy. The one who shows us both what we long for, and what we rather not see at all. Allender writes, "...we will be either lulled into thinking that what we currently enjoy in this life is enough, or lapse into fury for this life not being enough."

Seeking his face, we seek our own. What we love when we are with him is what we fail to see as our own. Love is between he and I; it is not either he or I.
Rather, it is he and I, what exists between us, is made freely and durable, created as the love we realize.

The light in the darkness, brilliantly shown of a love that God has known. He has held his hand for us to steady our climb, he has waited patiently as we fall; our anticipation of what is to come has at times deepened our disappointment. Yet as a kind father, his love remains our own. His love, unconditional continues to be offered and we may continue to seek.

Yet the heart deferred, makes hope a sadness. Admitting that I do not yet see clearly, that I do not yet know, makes way for the greater development of truth in clarity and freedom. I see the reason for my existence and behave accordingly.

What am I living for? Living for the joy of acquisition and power is self serving; living for the good of others is perhaps more in the Way. Yet we can seem to think ourselves to be living in the Way and yet we are not. There are those who convince themselves they are right; their ego has the answer, it is good--for me.

Do you live for freedom? In one sense freedom is the absence of restraint. There is nothing to hinder me to act as I choose. Suppose, however, that you live in a universe that for every choice I might make, the world has already determined the response, responses for which I have no control. I may remain physically free, no one has tied me down or locked me up, but I seem to lack freedom in a more durable and possible sense. While I am free to act as I choose, my choices are not free.

There is another type of freedom says the Christian philosopher and theologian, Augustine of Hippo. In the book, On Free Choice of the Will, translated by Thomas Williams, Augustine writes, "I have freedom to choose in a way that is not determined by any thing outside my control, what Augustine called metaphysical freedom. The view that human beings have metaphysical freedom is also known as libertarianism."

Augustine is one of the great defenders of libertarianism. He says that human beings are endowed with a power called the will. A person can direct his will to go in seemingly limitless directions. His own freedom of direction, then, can be thought of as free choice.

A person may choose for himself money, power, influence, sex, excesses of all types; these choices so mentioned have all been external choices, made by factors outside the person. If so, then a person could not be entirely responsible for them.
But it is not external factors that determine our choices. Rather it is internal states: beliefs, desires, hopes and fears. Since it is the desire, the will of a person and the character which determines one's choices, freedom therefore is not threatened.

Yet a libertarian like Augustine would not be swayed by this. He says that in fact, human beings are rational thinking, and free choice makes them therefore responsible. Because persons have metaphysical freedom in this view, they are capable of making a real difference in the world. We may write our own "scripts." We may be truly in the image of God, the Creator, bringing something into the world that previously did not exist before us.

He says further, "that without metaphysical freedom, there would be no evil, because evil is also a choice, but then the world might be nothing more than a divine puppet show in the absence of free choice.

If there is to be any real goodness, any new and creative acts of love, then there must be metaphysical freedom. This freedom cannot ever be taken; it is of your own free will. What do you live for?
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