The Love that Will Not Let You Go

Being Christian is Not What You Think

Heidt

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498203524
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book is an alternative to what passes for Christianity in movies, television, videos, novels, political campaigns, and, sadly, in many churches. It is for Christians, people of other faiths, and people of no faiths. It is for those who have given up on religion and those with secret doubts about concepts and biblical narratives most Christians seem to believe easily. Douglas Heidt contends that traditional Christian theology deals primarily with intellectual conclusions and emotion, leaving seekers with the idea that if they believe certain propositions, and love God, they will lead safe, happy lives, and go to heaven when they die. But this book argues that Jesus didn't teach a theological or ecclesiastical system. By his words and life he simply revealed a way to live, the way God created life to be lived, the life of sacrificial, eternal, universal love, kindness, forgiveness, justice, and compassion. Life's goal is not to believe certain things and go to heaven. Life's goal is to love your neighbor. This uncomplicated assertion has crucial implications for the church, how we understand the Bible, the Christian story, and the Christian life and its conclusion. It presents ideas that may be challenging, and describes how being Christian is not what you think, it's what you do.

1

Who I Am

As I write this, I see out my back window that a green spring is beginning to appear in the winter of these West Virginia hills. A couple of deer make their way through the still mostly bare trees in the woods at the edge of the yard. Our dog is around the corner of the house. She knows they’re there, and they know she knows. I think they’ve called an uneasy truce, for she couldn’t catch them if she tried. But, her legs tremble in her sleep and she still dreams of the chase. And in the sheltering trees, always alert, watching, the deer will take no chances.

Along with life’s breathtaking beauty and cherished moments of miraculous Love, the world is full of danger, fear, and enemies. Swords are sharpening in the Middle East, Americans by the thousands are arming themselves, nations still lift up swords against nations, and violence is everywhere. Across the globe the chasm between the haves and the have-nots swells, and greed is rampant. The words of candidates and election campaigns that seem endless are designed to evoke fear and hatred in the land, hoping they will turn into votes. In every land, children by the millions wander the streets lost, alone, afraid. I have lost some good friends to death over the winter. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad. People everywhere are hungry for food and clean water, honest work, security, and life. They yearn for happiness, justice, fair play, and peace. The winter has been cold and dreary. It had its own strange beauty, and the skiers loved it, but I’m glad it’s done. Winter things happen in every season, but spring seems to me to have a healing beauty, and it is near. It’s a reminder of all things coming.

Since the beginning, in all kinds of religious and philosophical systems, humankind has tried to make sense of life and its seasons, its darkness and light, peace and war, comfort and pain, success and failure, grief and joy, birth, life, death, good and evil, hate and Love. I have been a Presbyterian pastor for nearly half a century, and I have lived and walked with people through all these and more, and I can’t help but feel their struggle and their joy. I am writing this because, after a lifetime of searching, this is what I have come to affirm is the truth about the struggles and celebrations of our life together, and the Love that is the substance of every truly joyful life. Year after year, I have read books and discussed ideas and asked questions and listened to sermons and lectures and studied journals and articles and listened in and out of churches. Now, as valuable and influential as all that has been, I am putting the books and papers down, and will try to articulate what in this world I conclude is holy and life-giving, and what truly makes sense.

After all these years, I am a Christian still, and I consider my conclusions to be Christian. For many, this will be pretty ordinary stuff, while for others some of it may be a departure, perhaps somewhat challenging, and outside the box. I believe what I have written is an accurate representation of Christian truth and the substance of the church’s proclamation (or what I believe it should be). It seems important to me to write it as clearly and honestly as I can for my grandchildren, the rest of my family, all whom I know and Love, and those I Love but have yet to meet (including those who have left the church or the faith, or have never experienced either). This is for their comfort, their encouragement, and their joy. I want them to know that there are alternatives to much of what passes for Christianity on television, in movies, in videos, in political campaigns, and, I’m sorry to say, in many churches.

Whether you are an active Christian church member, or you are a seeker with real doubts and sometimes secret questions, or you simply consider yourself spiritual but not religious, or you just don’t really care one way or another about all this religious stuff that doesn’t seem to make much sense anyway, I invite you to come along for the ride. I invite you to consider what the Christian faith looks like from a slightly different, refocused angle. Read on, my friend, and discover that being Christian isn’t what you think, it’s what you do.

These thoughts came together and were written at a moment in time that has turned out to be an ongoing journey. I am constantly discovering new ways to express all these ideas, reforming and expanding them, and I expect that to continue. To that end, I seriously welcome your suggestions, questions, agreements, disagreements, and your critical thinking, in the true meaning of that concept.

I accept that you may or may not immediately affirm what I affirm here about the Christian faith. In fact, it has taken me a long time to get this far. But I give you these pages hoping that over time some interesting conversations and insights may result from them and a deeper truth emerge.

2

Where I’m Coming From

God is Love

God is Love, and those who abide in Love abide in God, and God abides in them.1

God = Love

Might as well begin at the beginning, on a sunny Sunday morning, when I was five or six years old. That was 1947, and everybody I knew went to church. I walked into my Sunday school classroom, not a care in the world, when a teacher (I remember her towering over me, stern and mountainous) grabbed my arm just above the elbow, pulled me up, got right in my face, and with a voice like the crack of doom, announced to me, “Now Listen!”

I did.

“We’re not going to behave this morning like we did last week, are we?” she said.

I had no desire to argue the point, since I had no idea what we had done last week (I was certainly capable of having done something, and no doubt I did—probably arguing some theological point). In those days, at least where I lived, when an adult, especially at church, called you on your behavior, you got your act together, or your parents would find out about it, and that was never—I repeat, never—a desired consequence.

“No ma’am,” I said, and hung my head in the best imitation of shame I could muster. For what, I never learned.

It is always possible that memories of such passing events (for I was capable of evoking multiple such corrective efforts) in my small child life might have nagged at me over time enough to turn me against church, Sunday school, religion, the whole story. That one harsh moment could have begun to teach me, as it has for many of us, that God is like a big, intimidating, angry Sunday school teacher—either an object of paralyzing dread, or simply not worth the trouble.

But, from my earliest memories, I was fortunate that in my church life beyond that morning, in my immediate and large extended family, friends, and other early experiences, Love and care had already filled my young life. It was already wrapped securely around me so that I was ready to hear what turned out to be the most significant theological manifesto I have ever known, and the key to this book. It was a song we sang almost every Sunday morning, year after year, until we could no longer consider ourselves “little children.” If you did the Sunday school thing, you may have sung it too. In some places I think they still do. It’s very simple. It went like this:

Praise Him, praise Him, all you little children,

God is Love, God is Love;

Praise Him, praise Him, all you little children,

God is Love, God is Love.2

I was given that song, and I have always remembered it and treasured it. God is Love! Before I knew what the word “insight” meant, I had one! The Love I already knew about was God. Before I knew about God, I knew Love. I have come to realize that the gift of Love, the capacity and the will to Love, the orientation of life around Love, and giving Love away are the most important things in all creation. I am convinced that the Spirit of God, truth breathing into me from beyond myself, was working in my experience, and made that Love real and visible.

Love is right; the most right thing there is in human life. I came to understand that God was not intimidating or angry after all; God is Love. The unnamed Love I already knew, and had known for a long time, was God.

Sounds like just pure sentimentality, doesn’t it? Maybe even a little sappy. But stay with me on this. The song was right!

Love, indeed, won. It was not that I made a choice between the two— an angry God out to get me, or God as Love—and chose the latter (whoopee for me). Rather, through a growing awareness, reflecting on my life story and the stories of others, I have come to see that it is Love—Loving and being Loved, giving Love away—that is the most determinative element of all human experience.

You don’t have to be a religious, churchgoing person (or even Christian) to know Love, and how it is the deepest and most profound element of human life. Churches have a particular language and stories and vocabulary to talk about Love, but it is not the only place where it exists. It is obvious that non-religious persons have Loved and do Love, and Love sacrificially. This Love in some or all its forms is the one experience that transcends and joins together every human life in every age and in every worldview.

Certainly not all persons have positive experiences of Love, and some have no experience of it at all. All of us have experienced the apparent absence of Love in our lives at one time or another. Countless people are tragically lacking in much Love at all, as their lives move slowly on, day by day, filled instead with sadness, hatred, frustration, depression, violence, and anger. Love is defined differently in different cultures. It is defined differently within cultures, as well. But among all of life’s dynamics, Love, or the lack of it, or the yearning for it, is universally present. The tension between hatred and Love, between disinterest and Love, between ridicule and Love, between rejection and Love, between Love and the apparent absence of it, is the primary substance of life everywhere. Love or the lack of it, or the distortion of it, or the celebration of it, constitutes the most basic component of human life. We all want it, we all are afraid of it, we all think we know how it should look in every human life everywhere, and we all revel in it when we are filled to overflowing with it. It is the deepest, brightest, most far-reaching, and most determinative experience that we—the whole human family—can know.

The experience of Love itself, in all its faces —healing, caring, supportive Love; Love that is persistent, sacrificial, forgiving, and universal —is what is required to deal with life’s struggle against the forces that deny the experience of true joy. It is Loving-kindness —not right doctrine or belief, not self-esteem or success, not the right church or right kind of w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Who I Am
• 2. Where I’m Coming From
• 3. What Christianity Isn’t
• 4. What Christianity Is
• 5. The Church
• 6. The Book
• 7. The Story
• 8. When Love Seems Lost
• 9. The Final Universal Gift
• 10. A Kind of Finale
• Bibliography