"Thefore, claims for the distinctiveness of the church, and thus Christian ethics, are not attempts to underwrite assumptions of superiority or Christian dominance. Rather they are meant to remind Christians of the radicalness of the gospel. For the gospel cannot be adequately summed up by appeals that we should love our neighbor as ourselves but is meant to transform us by teaching us to be God's peaceable people"
-Stanley Hauerwas The Peacable Kingdom
I think that we love this idea of loving our neighbor as ourself often for poor reasons, reasons separated from the rest of scripture. So often we use it as this sort of rule that if you are clever enough can be made to allow anything. "Well it is ok for me to do.... because it is in the name of love." It is as if truth is our own creation, coming out of our defining of love. What we believe love is cannot be questioned by others because it is our own creation of love. For love and truth are what we make them to be.
To this though I shake my head and extend my middle finger. We are called to be a part of God's kingdom. A community which is radical in nature because it follows Christ's picture of what love (kingdom love) is. Kingdom love is a love which forgives those who hate us and persecute us. Kingdom love is not something which acts with violence but seeks to bring reconciliation between people. Between people and creation. And between God and people.
As we seek to follow this picture of life as a community of people in God's 'not yet but yet now kingdom' we become storied people. We are storied by those around us as we together engage with God's narrative that is recorded in scripture. As we together engage with this narrative of God working in Israel and the early church the living God transforms us and speaks to us through the Spirit. Gradually we are being drawn from being independent beings who story themselves to being a community which is storied by God.
God calls us out of a place where we are violent individuals, seeking our own wills in the world, to be a peaceable kingdom seeking the will of God.
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