Are you Practicing for Love? Or Infatuation?

This week at the American Society of Missiology a common theme emerged, one which is really common sense. From firey activists with anecdotal evidence to soft spoken scholars like Amos Yong, with his thoroughly systematic explorations, there was a common consensus relating to developing Christian love for persons of other religions.

Changing minds doesn't necessarily change hearts or behaviors. Orthodoxy doesn’t create morality.

We academics put far too much faith in the capacity of the intellect and the will to generate Christian behavior. Which humans have known since Aristotle and Confucius, not to mention Jesus and Paul, is nonsense. The will becomes capable of responding to the intellect only through long training and the formation of habits that are the muscles of the will.

It is common sense that having a theoretical knowledge of tennis, down to the physics of string on ball, will not make you a Wimbledon champion. You get there by training. By actually hitting a ball hundreds of thousands of times until your body has both the strength and coordination to hit a ball accurately enough to stay in the court and hard enough to overwhelm you opponent.

This is why "teaching" inter-religious dialogue is at best an early and incomplete part of forming inter-religious understanding and hopefully loving relationships. The strength of will to relationship is formed by the habit of making friends, broken down to introducing ourselves, attending to the other, etc.

And this long practice eventually leads to authentic love, as opposed to an infatuation with the exotic.

This is relevant for Christians in many realms. Christian love of God is impossible without the practice of worship, daily and weekly in the company of others. Christian love of neighbor is impossible without the practice of love. And the church should be the place in which these two practices should come together. 

Should be, because it is observable that too often churches and their leaders accede, perhaps unintentionally, to the demand of its constituency not for training, but for the kind of dramatic entertainment that creates warm feelings of infatuation with God and neighbor. And these can never be turned into love because there is no practice, no training, only emotion. And just as orthodoxy can never create morality, so infatuation can never create love. 

And this explains, I think, the reason that so many congregations and their members and leaders engage in hateful behavior toward their non-Christian neighbors while vigorously asserting their love. 

It isn’t merely a matter of theory versus practice. These congregations practice in their worship and community life the cultivation of infatuation, until it becomes the only real strength they have. On a Sunday morning, touched by highly affective music, preaching, and increasingly sentimental video accompaniments they learn to cultivate a quick flood of emotion toward God and their pathetically needy neighbors. And they learn as quickly to shut down that flood of emotion at the benediction so that they can go out into the embrace of the the demons of fear and envy they left at the church door.

In our current context there is really only one way to address this temptation, and that is to invite our non-Christian neighbors into the church, ask that they host us in their places of worship, and force ourselves into the training necessary for us engage in that act of the will called love.