Love is More Important Than Doctrine

A few weeks ago, I read something which resonated with me.  It was the statement (unfortunately I can’t remember the source), “love is more important than doctrine.”

Reflecting on this statement, I believe that it captured the essence of the Christian message, at least the message of Jesus Christ.  When he was asked what is the greatest commandment, his reply was all about love:

you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” ³¹The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ (Mark 12:30-31)

So, if that is the Great Commandment, why do Christians pay more attention to doctrine than the commandment of our Lord and saviour?  On reflection I think that it is because doctrine is easier to get our heads around and actually follow than it is for us to actually love God and consequently to love our neighbours.  Make no mistake about it, this idea (commandment) of Jesus is truly radical.  Richard Rohr noted this recently in one of his daily meditations:

Of the many radical things said and done by Jesus, his unflinching emphasis on love was the most radical of all. Love was the greatest commandment . . . his prime directive—love for God, for self, for neighbor, for stranger, for alien, for outsider, for outcast, and even for enemy, as he himself modeled. The new commandment of love [John 13:34] meant that neither beliefs nor words, neither taboos, systems, structures nor the labels that enshrined them mattered most. Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else—everything. (Richard Rohr January 3, 2019)

I noted above that it is easier to follow doctrine than to love.  I do believe that is true; it may be easier but has certainly led to a great deal of trouble in the Christian church(es) in the past two thousand years.  That is probably true of most, if not all, religions―but not being a religious scholar, I can’t state that as a fact.  In modern times the Anglican church certainly has spent a lot of time and energy on points of doctrine.  The most recent one is the doctrine of marriage and should be marriage canon be amended to include/permit marriage of same-sex couples.  This issue is important to many people, including me.  So, the reality is that even though love is more important; indeed, the most important thing, we are not going to avoid arguments, and worse, over doctrine.

The best approach, if not the way out of this quandary was put forward by the Primate (head) of the Anglican Church of Canada, Fred Hiltz in a sermon he preached on the proposed changes to the marriage canon of our church, stated that the way forward in what seems like an impossible divide was to disagree in love.  This, I believe, captures the essence of the idea that love is stronger than doctrine.  The most important thing is to continue in loving relationships even when you disagree on things that matter deeply to you.  If we can understand that staying in a living relationship is more important than agreeing on doctrine, we will be following the Great Commandment of Jesus. 

This, of course, is not easy, but who ever said following Jesus Christ would be easy?  I know, I know, some of you are probably going to quote Jesus back at me, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  I have struggled with that one over the years and still am trying to resolve that with my struggle to follow him.  However, I do know in my heart that love is more important than doctrine.

Blessings on you journey.

The Beauty of Paradox

Recently I listened to an episode of On Being on NPR radio.  The program was an interview with physicist Frank Wilczek and was entitled, Why Is the World So Beautiful?  The conversation began with an exploration of truth but turned to beauty which lies beneath the surface of things.  This is not surprizing given the traditional connection between beauty and truth. 

The interviewer Krista Tippett quotes Wilczek back to him, “you say is that “In ordinary reality and ordinary time and space, the opposite of a truth is a falsehood.” But, you say, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface.” This is so interesting. “You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”  

Here we are dealing with paradox which is, for me, is a hallmark of truth.  THE technical definition of paradox is, “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but, in reality, expresses a possible truth.” Wilczek uses the classic example in quantum physics of light being both a particle and a wave.  Both ways of looking at it are correct.  Sometimes under observation it behaves as a particle and sometimes is behaves as a wave. 

Paradox is central to the Christian story.  We worship a God who humbled himself and became human.  That fact for us is the strength of what on the surface is a really crazy act.  We worship and are followers not a God of power but one who gave up his power to become a creature; one who gave up immortality to become mortal; a God who was powerless on the cross.  And yet the God was born again to immortality and is returning to rule this world.Wilczek notes, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface. You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”

I believe that much of the problems that develop in religious doctrine come about by the belief that there is only one way of looking at things.  I have the truth and you don’t or my way of understanding this event of passage is the correct and only way.  It may very well be correct but there may be a different way which is also correct even though it seems contradictory.  There is beneath both a deeper truth which is reflected in part in the truth of both or many ways of looking at it.

The idea of paradox is an insult to our rational minds.  We want to believe desperately that our understanding of the world can only be either/or.  It must be either black or white.  We do accept that their may be shades in between but basically, they are one way or the other.  Things cannot be both.  That is why the Newtonian Universe is still the way that we understand the universe.  Quantum Physics turned that on it head but has not sunk into the foundation of our existence.  We look at the light and see only the object illuminated but not the shadow that is behind the object. 

We Christian do not truly believe that God could have chosen to become human and be born as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.  It fits into the romantic ideal of Christmas but we do not truly believe in the consequences of that action.  We do not truly believe that Jesus did not go to the cross without an internal struggle.  We do not truly accept the truly radical nature of a God willingly dying on the cross.  We cannot truly accept the implication of the paradox of the cross.  We do not believe that there is true power in the weakness of Jesus surrender to the will of Father and the submission to the cruelty of the cross.  That perhaps is the ultimate paradox of where true power lies.  If we Christians truly believed that the Christian Church would be very different.

Blessings on the journey and try and embrace the paradox.