The Church's Most Radical Theology is Learning to Teach and Be Love

The Church's Most Radical Theology is

Learning to Teach and Be Love

in all it is, does, and preach

by R.E. Slater

The very best biblical hermeneutic to live in our lives is also the simplest and most effective.

True, a hermeneutic is how one reads the bible. More specifically, how one interprets the bible using exegetical tools of grammatical, historical, and contextual development of ancient oral traditions collected in their recitement by the temple of Israel and the early Christian church and passed along in their generations to both the peoples of the OT (the Hebrew Scriptures) and NT (the Christian Scriptures which include the Hebrew Scriptures).

However, as studies and earnest converts to the Christian faith we live out the hermeneutics we have learned. And if we are looking for outcomes of faith it must error towards love and not simply truth.

Why? Because is a God of love first and foremost. And secondly, because what we grasp as "truth" is most often not truth but forms of folkloric traditions we believe are truth.

Many examples abound across the history of science and the church as each struggled with the other in defining what truth means to any given situation. This struggle hasn't lessened but as I have discussed on multiple occasions here, with the right kind of theology, the epistemological traps of both church and science can be overcomed. All this can be found in the science section of the topical list on the right (and in the Index lists found within the topical list).

From reading the bible we know that within it are hundreds of stories written around the word "love's" power to change things. As can truth when contextualized in its epistemological parlance. But for many faith keepers we speak best when we love. To speak truth, as we often try to do, but shows to us much of our failure in this task. Thus, as a Christian, I would wish the church lean towards love rather than use "truth" as its marker of faith. Not to discount the importance of truth but to honestly say that Christians seem to be particularly terrible at distinguishing truth from fakery, fakerers, and false teaching.

• Now some may call LOVE radical while others hardly mention it at all as a bastion of Christianity. Yet, in the bible, as well as in the stories of the world, whole stories of redemption are written around LOVE.

• Large words are used to describe LOVE - atonement, propitiation, expiration, transformation, renewal, rebirth, even resurrection. But all the best stories can be captured by this word's four simple letters... LOVE.

• LOVE is the most humble of words. The most simple, most often overlooked word. 

• LOVE can aptly be described as overlooking itself while bearing all.

• All the best theologies are underlaid by LOVE's essence.

• All the best faiths and churches are centered around LOVE.

• Whole seasons and holidays are dedicated to LOVE.

• So when entering any faith or belief remember to look for LOVE's centrality.

• If LOVE is only a cursory subject to that faith's foundations and messaging than walk away from all such people and institutions whose own words have replaced it with other words.

• Without LOVE as the keystone, lodestone, or cornerstone to one's life animus, life force, or life energies, no other stones are equal to its grace, power and ability to heal, or provide soul nourishing constructs.

• More simply, LOVE is God and is of God.

• God's imparted Imago Dei is our own inner construct however conflicted by our own lives and experiences.

• LOVE begins when it is unlocked by God's Self through Jesus. This faith experience of Godly grace and forgiveness has gone on to revolutionize everything. Except, of course, it's very simple frame usually becomes lost around other words promising power and meaning.

• Inside the breast of everyone man and woman can be found LOVE as displayed by our passion and zeal for the things which motivate us... both the good things in this life as well as the bad things, the addictions, the drives for money and power, the lust for power, dictate, and harm. Underneath these drives is the driving force of LOVE gone bad.

• At the last we must learn to re-see LOVE. To recenter around it. To lean into it in all we do. For without LOVE we are but shells to life's energies. But with LOVE, it can change everything we do... beginning with ourselves.

R.E. Slater

December 2, 2022