What Is Divine Love
and How Is Love Holy?
Through the years, starting around 2009, I made a decision to move away from evangelicalism's platforms to revere God's holiness and chose to lift up over holiness God's deep and resonous love. That is, to define all divine attributes on the basis of divine love and not holiness. This was no easy task when it came to western biblicism but once begun it became easier and easier to discern the difference and write about affectively.
Why? Because all the doctrines I was taught over the decades had been outcomes of God's holiness including many of the historical Christian creeds. The local church has tried mightily to live, incorporate, and produce, the impossible reconstruction of the human character. A holy perfectness that is fraught by every move and angle of our human being. And as both church and religion did so it found itself leaning deeply into the religious side of our dark nature and made a Jesus faith twice the child of cruelty, brainwashing, and moral sectarianism, if not death itself both while attempting to live out a compromised faith and in fact.
As such, by 2009, I had been reading of God's love on every page of the bible, including those biblical narrations which fell deeply afoul of the divine presence of love when it errantly portrayed human depravity as attributable to God's direction and will. Thus making of a loving God a God of cruelty, war, and oppression. But in Jesus, when reading of human actions in both the Old and New Testament we know these narratives cannot be attributable to God but to the depravity of the human heart.
Furthermore, over the many years of a Semitic Jewish nation struggling between divine holiness (Ezra's stoic Essenes come to mind) vs divine love, Jesus then came along to reright the religious argument for Jewish holiness showing God to be a loving God by Jesus' own words and deeds of how to love one another (more or less, by simply meeting the moment as it came). That by such loving actions and attitudes we followers of Jesus are to do the same for no gain - not even heaven - as we should by love's qualities of selfless service to one another.... Thus, holiness comes by way of a qualitative way of living out one's heart, mind and soul even as it is Jesus' holiness of love that all human actions are loving founded upon the God of Love and result in holiness in its production or outcome.
Lastly, the doctrines of holiness demand rather a controlling God of dictate, fiat, and enactment BUT doctrines of grace, mercy, and peace do not advocate such for such a determinative Creator nor divine partner who isn't a controlling theocrat, ruler or presence but an uncontrolling Gid with all things good and decent. This is where freewill comes in against the church idea of a controlling, all-determinative divinity (known as Calvinism vs Jacobus Arminian's position of freewill and love).
In Jacobus' theology a God of love doesn't require control of creation or the future but has lovingly birthed God's Self, God's Essence or Image, into creation that a loving freewilled agency may exercise itself to its own conflicted being... loving freewill is, by nature, conflicted. It may choose love or unlove, else love wouldn't be part of our freewill agency. Hence, we live in a world which is conflicted towards generosity and goodness or evil and depravity. It is not one thing or another but all things. And in a God of love the amazement is God's own story of loving freewill presence who birthed the universe for a loving future. A future which blossoms in fidelity with God's own Spirit of soulful repentance, purposeful redemption, minded renewal, non-oppressive reconstruction, spiritual reform, constitutional recreation, and atoning resurrection.
So then, Love is the only sufficient answer to any church or religion against it's own doctrines of hypocrisy, legalism, pride, and manmade (stoic) holiness in religious attempts to control a depraved religious nature seemingly always bent to the wrong thing, the wrong God, and wrong actions. Here, is where soulful repentance must begin at our own design to propitiate=atone ourselves by our own ragged works. Known as the profuse act of pride, man would be his own pious savior should we turn to this direction. But love is self-giving and even in the last instance it must always turn to another for true relational propitiation and never to oneself (sic, process theology).
These bespeak divine actions of restitution, expiation, reparation, salvation, regeneration, and redemption. And though the human soul yearns for these qualities it cannot do so on its own. It requires an atoning God to effect these qualities into our star-crossed heart by the divine act of covenanted restitution upon God's own self. Even as this was the basis of the Abrahamic Covenant when walking between the sacrificed carcasses; or Moses' lifted Rod against viperous bites; or David's please for divine mercy; or the prophet's cry for atoning help. So too was Gidcraised upon a cross between sacrificed brutes by viperous religionists crying Abba Father as lasting sacrifice. This is divine love.
Thus and thus, I left evangelicalism's "holy control mindset" and became a mix of progressive, loving ex-vangelical, and post-evangelical in my soul's associations, rewriting all the theologies I was taught using a process-based philosophical theology centered in love. Over the years I've written thousands of articles on what this means across a breadth of human activity and disciplines. It took awhile to find that the simplest energy on earth is that of love,... but once found, I've applied it over and over and over again to humanity's histories, sciences, churches, socio-economic politics, ecologies, and religions.
Peace,
R.E. Slater
August 25, 2024
*A personal note.
I have been struggling with surgical infections for nearly ten years. This past spring a final, determinative act was made to return me to full health. Over the recent months I have been adjusting to a new reality which has caused some reciprocating actions in my activities. Consequently, I have ceased activity across a plethora of volunteer community duties over the past 17 years of retirement. I also have lately assumed the caretake of raising very small grandchildren. I am also experiencing a general weariness of soul, if not a general slowing down by age. I kindly then ask prayer for strength, energy, vision, discernment, and endurance for the days and years ahead, Lord willing.
I've given these many years of retirement to Christian testimony how any faith, and especially a Christian faith, may be, become, and remain steadfast through the dessimination of a variety of resources mentioned throughout "Relevancy22's" digital pages. Use them to help sort through faith issues and to build awareness in the many ways one may minister by labor, calling, direction, or witness.
Thank you for this service to you by the God who loves and uses even the small voices of this world to speak out for loving embrace, equity, fairness, and compassion in all matters of living which we do every, single day of opportunity. Peace. - res
