The Love That Is God
For a moment, let’s pretend. Let’s imagine you’ve been asked to write your own concise apologetic of Christian faith. You’ve got 120 pages to present the heart of the matter, to articulate the radical claims of the gospel, to persuade women and men that the good news really is—despite everything and everyone standing in its way—good news.
How would you go about making your case? How would you organize the thing? What are the three, four, or five points you’d want to make lovingly, clearly, subtly, abundantly clear? How do you decide what to emphasize and what to skip?
The task is harder than it seems. Which makes Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt’s The Love That Is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith (Eerdmans) such an immeasurable gift. Early in the book Bauerschmidt elaborates on the title, writing:
To say that God is love is to say that God is not simply the kind of thing that loves but is the activity of loving itself—not our human act of love, not even the sum total of such acts, but an activity that is prior to and the source of our human being and knowing and desiring, an act of love so vast and deep that it brings forth creatures in all their diversity: ravines and rivers, sassafras and sequoias, bacteria and border collies. To say that God is love is to say that God is a benevolence, a well-wishing, a kindness of such infinite scope that it draws beloved creatures out of nothingness into being.
There’s no need for me to summarize Bauerschmidt’s argument. In this little book, the table of contents itself is the thesis:
1. God is love.
2. The love that is God is crucified love.
3. We are called to friendship with the risen Jesus.
4. We cannot love God if we do not love each other.
5. We live our love out from the community created by the Spirit.
There’s so much I could say about each of these wise, winsome chapters. But I find especially moving Bauerschmidt’s reflections in Chapter 3 on the story in Luke’s Gospel about two of Jesus’s confused and dejected followers fleeing Jerusalem in the chaotic, fearful days following the crucifixion. As they walk, we might imagine shared looks of befuddlement. Nervous hand gestures. Anxious tousling of hair.
There on the road, they meet a stranger (or so they think) who approaches and asks what they’re talking about so intently. The Message translation renders the scene this way: “They just stood there, long-faced, like they had lost their best friend. Then one of them, his name was Cleopas, said, ‘Are you the only one in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard what’s happened during the last few days?’” (24:17-18). Dumbfounded, they tell the man everything they can remember, everything they think they might possibly understand. They sum up their distressed disillusionment, saying, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (24:21, NRSVUE).
Here’s Bauerschmidt:
We had hoped: this word hope, grammatically stranded in the past, exiled from its native land, the future, points to their dreams of the kingdom now shattered on the cross. In response to their disappointment and perplexity, the stranger begins to teach them how all of these things had been foretold in the sacred writings of the Israelites. Moved by his words, they urge the stranger to continue walking with them until they come to a village called Emmaus, where they stop for the night. As they sit down to share a meal, the stranger takes bread and, giving thanks, breaks it and gives it to them. Suddenly they recognize the stranger as Jesus, the crucified and risen one, who then immediately vanishes from their sight. They say to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” (Luke 24:32). Immediately they return to Jerusalem, to the city from which they had been fleeing, to bring the good news that Jesus still lives, still breaks bread with them in friendship, still converses and speaks and dines with them.
To this day, Christians still dine with Jesus in the sacrificial meal of the Eucharist (a Greek word that means “thanksgiving”), also called the Lord’s Supper or the Mass. As with the disciples at Emmaus, the risen Jesus still opens up the Scriptures to his friends and shares a meal with them in which he gives himself to them in love as food and drink.
I know from experience what it’s like to be disappointed and perplexed, to have the word hope “grammatically stranded in the past, exiled from its native land, the future.” I know what it’s like to go for long walks after receiving horrible news, searching for answers, for some solid ground on which to stand. And I have known the feeling of my heart burning within me—the sure and certain (but never cheap) hope of the resurrection.
It’s possible you resonate. If so, take it as an apologetic clue.
Writing about the earth-shaking significance of the atonement, N.T. Wright reminds us: “When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.”
Yes, the Eucharist is the Feast. But as an introduction to Christian faith, The Love That Is God is a well-prepared meal as well: nourishing, flavorful, enjoyable. A feast giving us an appetite for the Feast.
Bauerschmidt knows his Bible and his theology. But in this book you won’t find a precise theory of the atonement, a specific view of ecclesiology, or an unambiguous timeline of “the last things.” Nor is Bauerschmidt interested in resolving once and for all the problem of evil. Rather, he invites us—whatever our questions, whatever our hungers, whatever our fears—to taste and see that the Lord is good. And then, whatever else we do, not to keep the abundance to ourselves.
