Letter #164: To See As in Eternity

The Lesson of Love

Spence!

Of course this is the way of it. The orthodoxies will each be true and all completely different than what we thought they would be. Every one the same to all and each unique to each. It’s exactly this paradox that makes spiritual judgment obstructive and agape love essential.

In this month’s essay, I wrote that the “tension between individual and church was built into Christianity. It was there from the beginning.” But it goes deeper than that. The tension between individual truth and general truth is central to human experience.

When Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s,” he wasn’t just talking about taxation. He was pointing out that Christianity is not a governing philosophy. The work of heaven’s king — which saves each man — is not the work of the kings of this world, who must try to provide for the general good.

This is what makes so many faux-Christian political arguments absurd. When someone says we must open our borders because the Bible demands we welcome the stranger, he is talking nonsense. An individual might, in a specific instance, look the other way as a mother sneaks her child through a checkpoint. But a president who leaves the border open is a wicked buffoon, inviting chaos, violence and cruelty into his nation without regard for the laws he has sworn to uphold. The parent of a murder victim may forgive the killer, but a judge doesn’t have that right. Society must deliver justice even where the individual shows mercy. This is why Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a devout Catholic, said that a Christian judge is not a judge who gives the law a Christian interpretation, but a judge who does his best to interpret the law as it was written. What we want, as my friend Larry O’Connor puts it, is a secular government of religious men.

Salvation can only come to humanity one unique individual at a time, but this doesn’t erase the general rule. God can forgive an adulteress, but adultery remains a grave and terrible sin.

And as above, so below. A man may be born with one leg, but a human is still a two-legged creature. Likewise, a man may be born with female genitals but that does not change the fact that humans have only two genders. We cannot erase the natural travails of abnormality by refusing to see the form of things. The forms are the language of God’s creation.

And yet, each of us hears that language differently. This has to be so. If when we see God face to face, we were all to see the same thing, each of us would vanish into the universal. Instead, I think, we will finally recognize the unique and surprising image of God in every one.

So when, here in time, we abandon spiritual judgment for agape love, we are teaching ourselves to see as in eternity.

Your ever-loving,

Dad