The problem is not love; the problem
is our understanding of love. Throughout
this course we have looked at love and what it perpetuates; sexual attractions,
marriage, and children and not necessarily in that order. We have seen authors blame the breakdown in
unions as love and friendship not being able to coincide. We have also seen them blame polygamy as the
culprit of the failings of love. However,
I believe the real underlying problem to be our understanding of love. We in the Christian realm base love on the
atonement, that is to say we think of love as sacrifice and as death to
ourselves. We see evidence of this
theology of love first in the writings of Paul and throughout most Christian
writings. However, a better
understanding of the atonement may bring new and refreshing light to love.
We see the
language of sacrifice and love in the early writings of Paul. In Ephesians 5 Paul calls all wives to submit
to their husbands. He then calls all
Husbands to treat them as the Lord Christ treated the church and was the savior
of the body. In this Paul implies love
is a
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sacrifice. By Paul implying
the husband should be submitted to as we submit to Christ our crucified savior
in inevitably calls us to sacrifice in marriage. It is this language of sacrifice and this
expectation that creates the problem with love.
If we base love on sacrifice and death our view of love from the start
is one of gloom. It is for this reason
we change or explanation of love; thus changing the way we look at the
atonement. For this new view we look first to creation.
In the beginning God created, this we
can all agree. But why did he create
man? If we understand this first we can
see His motives that explain best love. SO
why did God create us? Revelation says
“for His pleasure.”(Revelation 4:11) “You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your
will they were created and have their being.” Colossians 1:16 echoes
the theme: “All things were created by him and for him.” Being created for
God’s pleasure does not mean humanity was made to entertain God or provide Him
with amusement. God is a creative Being, and it gives Him pleasure to create.
God is a personal Being, and it gives Him pleasure to have other beings He can
have a genuine relationship with. Thus it is safe to conclude he did it out of
Loneliness.
Being made in the image and likeness
of God (Genesis 1:27), mankind has the ability to know God and therefore love
Him, worship Him, serve Him, and fellowship with Him. God did not create human
beings because He needed them. He
created them to cure his loneliness. We all feel
the loneliness he felt. Of course, this feeling stretches back from when I
was young.
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When I was younger I would sigh, think I think that the loneliness that
we all feel at times -- that searing pain, that sense of abandonment, the sense
that you're alone in this world and nothing is worth living for, that silent
spread of snow in a dark and bitter land -- is but a pale reflection of the
searing longing He feels during every single living second. He was lonely in
turn. It's hard to imagine the all-powerful being as lonely. "Loneliness" is closely associated
with "loner," and "loners" are often regarded as lost
creatures deserving pity and no respect. Loneliness also has the concept of
being alone all the time. God does not fit either of these descriptions he is
too great and too merciful to be pitied.
We see in both
accounts of creation (that is chapter 1 and 2) that God looks at all he has
created and at the end of the day feels loneliness. He was lonely in the beginning. That's why He created Adam. Since
He had no equal, He wanted to create someone in His "own image",
someone who could talk and converse with Him, and share His days in happy
communion. He then seen Adam was equally
lonely and gave him Eve. It was tranquil,
a bond that was supposed to last for life. The love God had for Adam and Adam
for Eve was what the Greeks termed Agape.
Now it may seem strange that a divine
love is one that is required to help us fix the problem. However love itself in the beginning was
thought of as mysterious force. See we know love is to be eternal it says so in
Jeremiah 31. Now I know saying the word
is illogical due to we only live a set amount of years. But step outside this relam and see that if
your love inspires your kids to love the same and their kids to then it does
last forever. Now the question
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always arises why do we need God to understand love. II Thessalonians
says: “ lets us know that love is divine thing we cannot fully understand on
our own” That divine love is Agape.
Agape is love which is of and from
God, whose very nature is love itself. However this is the love we must feel
for our spouse. (Lewis 2005) The apostle John affirms this
in (1 John 4:8): “God is love.” God does not merely love; He is love
itself. Everything God does flows from His love. But it is important to
remember that God’s love is not a sappy, sentimental love such as we often hear
portrayed. God loves because that is His nature and the expression of His
being. The object of God’s agape love never does anything to merit His love. We
are the undeserving recipients upon whom He lavishes that love. His love was
demonstrated when He sent His Son into the world to “seek and save that which
was lost” (Luke 19:10) and to provide eternal life to those He sought and
saved. (Lewis 2005) He paid the sacrifice for those He
loves. However Agape love does not require
sacrifice it in turns requires a love that is so deep it disregards the need
for one individual and accepts the union as a whole. This is to say that love in the same way, we
are to love others sacrificially. Jesus gave the parable of the Good Samaritan
as an example of sacrifice for the sake of others, even for those who may care
nothing at all for us, or even hate us, as the Jews did the Samaritans.
Sacrificial love is not based on a feeling, but a determined act of the will, a
joyful resolve to put the welfare of others above our own. But this type of
love does not come naturally to humans. Because of our fallen nature, we are
incapable of producing such a love. If we are to love as God loves, that love
that agape can only come from its true Source. (Lewis 205) This is the love which “has been poured out in our hearts
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through the Holy Spirit given to us” when we became His
children (Romans 5:5). Because that love is now in our hearts, we can obey
Jesus who said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. As I
have loved you, you should also love one another” (John 13:34). This new
commandment involves loving one another as He loved us sacrificially, even to
the point of death. But, again, it is clear that only God can generate within
us the kind of self-sacrificing love which is the proof that we are His children.
“By this we have known the love of God, because He laid down His life for us.
And we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16). Because of
God’s love toward us, we are now able to love one another.
So God was lonely and
created man, then he seen man’s loneliness and created a coequal, how does this
relate to love and fixing marriage. Then
there came the fall. Because of
this disconnection, this break in the love man and God shared he reinitiated
the connection through the cross. There
was a barrier that separated man and God a void that needed to be filled. In this God sent his son to be bore by his
greatest creation; mankind. Through this
the creator made a way for the creation to find its way back by innocent blood
being shed for the sake of loneness.
However to look past the sacrifice and blood, and to carefully trot away
from this very significant event, we look at the love behind God’s motive. His notion to once again cure loneliness by
love and a reestablishment of the union between man and God and therefor set a
standard for love and union. (Lewis
2001)
The question this rises how does this apply to marriage and love and
this notion of taking the original view of
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sacrifice out of the atonement?
Christ on the cross took on all of humanity’s sufferings, failures, sin,
and loneliness and made the connection of love one in one rather than one and
one. He did this by reconnecting or filling In the void that’s was left after
the fall. Thus eliminating the need for sacrifice
and its language. It is this language of
sacrifice that is separated by millennia’s of its use that deters marriage and
breaks love. To fix this we look to Eve
and her roll.
So we understand
Agape love and the loneliness of God and his cure for that a companion. We also understand the need for companionship
in order to cure the original problem.
However, who does understanding this entire idea can fix our current
situation of a decaying love and broken marriages? For this we look to a retelling of the
narrative of the cross. We all know
Christ died for our sins and that God loved us so much he sent his son to die
for us and our salvation. Moreover, we
get the sense that love equals sacrifice.
However, this is a misunderstanding of Agape love. We can turn away from sacrifice when relating
love and marriage in Christianity and point to the underlying message of the
cross. The cross was set out to to bring
about divide but to fill a void. He set
out in his infinite plan cure his loneliness and he did so with creation. We do the same when we look for a
partner. We set out to fill a empty part
of ourselves. And just like God did with Christ on the cross we throw ourselves
out to be the initial filler of the void. We we set out to find our “other
half” we do so in a way that allows us to communion on a regular basis with
someone. We can look to the cross, not
as an example of sacrifice but one of going all the way to be with that
person. Allowing you to freely
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give and receive what happens. The act of the cross reestablished a basis for love. It was not the sacrifice itself, however, it
was the willingness to make the connection that was important. On the
cross Christ undid all the wrong that severed one in one relationship between
God and man; and we harness that in our personal relationship between the one
we love and convey that through the commitment through marriage we allow
ourselves to then make that same connection. When we enter a union it is done so on the
basis of accepting that person for who they are. When we better oneself in the relationship;
both in turn our bettered.
Love should not be modeled on death and sacrificing; but rather
life and a gaining of sense of completion.
Let us set aside logic and math and for a moment and imagine love in a
different realm. A realm that defies
laws of physics, human logic, mathematics, and even what we think we know about
the human experience and creation. What
if all that was needed to fix love and marriage in this country and more so in
our faith was a new understanding of what the creation story is telling us and
how that helps to explain the atonement?
We
have to allow ourselves to know love in a realm that is unfamiliar to
reality. Love is brought to Earth by God
and understanding it will never be easy.
But if we allow ourselves to imagine it as coequals coming together to
serve a purpose of curing loneliness all will be better in turn. Fixing love comes down to understanding what
love was when it came from Heaven and that is one and one becoming one. Love is
not something that can be measured and quantified; it is an independent,
transcendent of all inside.
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References
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. New York
NY: Harper One, 2001.
Lewis, C.S. Four Kinds of Love. New York
NY: Harper One, 2005.
