We can intellectualize love, conceptualize love, analyze love, psychologize love, but we cannot create it by any exercise which originates primarily in the intellect. The heart may remain untouched despite all the most careful thought. The one emotion that ideology seems all too readily and too often to generate in abundance is hate. It may, however, also generate a pseudo-love, a counterfeit to stand in the place of what love, by its nature, is meant to be. Ideologically bred “love” is obsession, fanaticism, a sort of veneration of national, class, social, or economic identity. This pseudo-love is usually an amalgam of more than one of the above, and it absorbs the “lover’s” sense of self in the process.
Tag Archives: agape
Cold Love, 4 – The Quality of Mercy
The Christian Story says that the Creator-God did not sit back and shrug. Instead, speaking anthropomorphically, (S)He is deeply grieved, even distressed, and even angry. However, God’s ultimate response is mercy rather than wrath, although wrath has been allowed to fall. If we are willing to face our rebellion and defiance of God, we must see that, just as with human offenders in human society, there is an inevitable day when judgment finds the unrepentant transgressor. This is called “natural consequences”, and it applies in both the physical and metaphysical realm. It also comes as a legal requirement.
Cold Love, 3 – A Case Study
Agape is the highest form of love which God exampled in Jesus. He commissioned a community of followers which became known as the Church, to continue to spread it and bring it into every part of human life and society. It is sad to watch and lamentable to admit that cold love has all too often and too much crept into the Churches of the West, not to speak of the secular, godless ideologies which have supplanted them here in the rich and comfortable West.
Cold Love, 2
Hot zeal for God’s judgment to fall on sinners can be a shield protecting the zealot from actually having to practice the harder things such as agape-love (agape being the Greek word used for love in all of these citations) Jesus is talking about. As pointed out in Cold Love, 1, Jesus is talking about the highest form of love (agape) which governs all others. It is this kind of love which we need to live by, and this can only happen in constant relationship with its giver – Yahweh-Adonai, the Creator and Author of all that is.
Cold Love, 1
Jesus was not saying that people would stop falling in love, stop having sex, or stop caring about family and friends. However, if those other kinds of love are to truly reach their highest potential, they must be ruled by something yet higher – agape. That is what Jesus was predicting would “grow cold” for most people.
When Evil Comes, 12 – Rebirth, 3
The Kingdom of God is all about agape and entering it can only be by that road. Otherwise, we are once more trying to prove we can do it ourselves, trying to prove we don’t really need the supernatural power of the Creator to really love the agape way, the way the Creator loves each of us and everyone, and indeed the whole Creation that Adonai made in the beginning.
When Evil Comes, 11 – Rebirth, 2
Yeshua speaking to Nakdimon about “spiritual rebirth from above” was talking about true radical change, because more of the same – using the power of the state, of religion, of fear and manipulation and control to compel outer conformity, whether by actual law or social pressure, cannot produce true readiness and willingness, let alone ability, to enter the Kingdom of the Creator.
World.V.You 