Failure?

             

 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. (I John 4:16)

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

I know. We’re back to those verses. But as Jesus said, “all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” I’m returning to them today because of a question asked on a social media platform. The gist of the question was, if America has failed, doesn’t that mean that people don’t deserve freedom – that they deserve to be ruled over by others?

This is the same sort of complaint we sometimes hear about Christianity:

I tried Christianity. It didn’t work.

All the people in the church were hypocrites.

That might be OK for you, but it’s not OK for me

That might be OK for some, but because it’s not OK for Group X. I want nothing to do with it (even though I’m not a member of Group X. I merely sympathize with their plight.)

Christianity might be OK if they lived what the Bible teaches, but they spend all their time trying to shove their philosophy down everyone’s throats.

          And, I have to admit that I’ve used a similar argument with regard to Socialism.  Socialism and Collectivism have been tried in the past. They have always failed – frequently at the cost of tens of millions of lives. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Che, the Young Turks, Castro, the rulers of Venezuela, and even Hitler (the Nazis were National Socialists) – all examples of the horrors of Socialism.

          But the same question arises. Are we judging an idea based on the idea, or are we judging it based on the failure of those who claim to be applying the idea?

Jesus said that the Law and the Prophets could be summed up by our loving God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strengths, and loving our neighbor as ourselves.

          What this means is that Christianity does not fail when or because “They” fail to love God with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strengths and to love their neighbor as themselves. Christianity does not fail when or because you fail to love God with all your hear, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself, though that  is much closer to the mark. It fails only when or because loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving your neighbor as yourself become – in and of themselves – the wrong things to do.

          And I submit that Christianity can only be declared invalid if God declares that Jesus’ death and resurrection were no longer sufficient for the forgiveness of sins.

          All of which brings us to something G. K. Chesterton said: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”