I will be posting items that are laden with my own thinking under the category of heresy. I do this for three reasons. First, I elect to not refer to someone else’s ideas or thoughts as heresy. Second, I want to make it perfectly clear here that I do not claim to have all the right answers. And finally, lately I’ve noticed that many people that inspire me are called heretics, so I must be one also. Rob Bell is accused of not beating people over the head with the cross. Brennan Manning is referred to as a universalist. Shane Claiborne is referred to as one of the emergent “wolves in sheeps clothing” and Donald Miller is more concerned with “feelings” than “the truth.”
What inspires me about these people is that they lay down their traditions for the sake of love. Peter Rollins refers to this at the “prejudice of love”. Another one of my heroes also laid down his traditions for the sake of love.
When consistently confronted by the Pharisees (the religious leaders of his day) with the law, Jesus refused to act in a non-loving manner for the sake of tradition. On one occasion, when it says the Pharisees were looking to accuse Jesus, there was a man before him with a shriveled hand. Now this happened on the sabbath, and healing or doing any work on the sabbath was unlawful. Jesus chose to heal the man and announced to them “what is lawful on the sabbath, to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill.”
Another time, there was a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus took some mud and gave him sight. When the Pharisees saw the man and heard what happened, instead of celebrating with him they told him “this man (that healed you) is not from God, he does not keep a sabbath.
Yet another time, Jesus was in the synagogue teaching a group when the Pharisees threw a women caught in adultery in front of him. They questioned him stating that “In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” Rather, than affirming that tradition he answered, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”
He even says in the sermon on the mount “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.” At the very place of sacrament, love and reconcilation are more important than religious tradition.
My pastor Matt recently said on the subject that “God gave away his God-ness for the God-less.” This is the most radical expression of Jesus putting on love as the ultimate form of orthodoxy and being the measure by which we are called to make decisions. This idea is found in Phillipians 2 – ”Jesus, being the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing.”
May we all be reminded that the most orthodox view we can hold is that we are to love God and each other.
