Paul's Radical Position About Faith and Love

In the Thirteenth Chapter of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul goes into an extended discussion of the primacy of love.  In the concluding verse of the passage, Paul indicates that love is even greater than faith.

This is a widely misunderstood text because of the way that we define these two terms.  Today, the term "faith" is associated in evangelical Protestant Christianity as a belief without evidence that is obtained through emotional experiences (i.e. we have an emotional experience where we simply "know" that the abstract theological principles that we have been told about Jesus are true).  The term "love" is borrowed by the Church from our society's use of the term, which largely corresponds to the Greek term "eros"; it is associated with sappy, syrupy emotion.  It is no coincidence that much of the genre of contemporary Christian music is largely drawn from contemporary pop music, where the object of one's adoration is changed from an individual to God.

Faith in a biblical context means commitment and adherence to an object (i.e. God) and our willingness for our belief and practice to correspondence to what we associate with that object.  Love, as used in Paul's message to the Corinthians as well as in other locations in the New Testament, is the Greek word "Agape," which was distinguished from both "Eros" and "Philia".  Agape, speaking broadly, is reflective of the love that was demonstrated for us by God in Christ.  It is a devotion to, a willingness to sacrifice for, and an ultimate commitment to, all people, including those who we deem distinctly unlovable.

Going back to Paul's message with our contemporary understandings of faith and love replaced by how the early Church understood these terms results in a rather shocking message that should make us shift in our church pews: our devotion to, willingness to sacrifice for, and show ultimate commitment to all people, including (particularly) those who are distinctly unlovable, is more important than our commitment to those theological abstract principles that we associate with God as God was revealed in Jesus.

If the Church, and the larger world, practiced Paul's message of the primacy of Agape, it is difficult to comprehend how much this would transform our world.  If there is nothing on earth as important as love of those we deem unlovable, the Church and our societal institutions would come to a (fortunate) crashing halt.  What they would be replaced with is too wondrous to even imagine.

The Good Work that God Seeks to Accomplish in Us

In Luke's Gospel, John the Baptist uses the metaphor of a threshing floor to describe what God seeks to accomplish in our souls.

The metaphor of a threshing floor would have been very familiar with John's listeners.  The threshing floor was the place where harvested wheat was placed; the harvested wheat contained grain, which was useful and edible, and chaff, which was useless and inedible.  The purpose of the threshing floor was to provide a place where the grain and the chaff were divided, leaving only that which was edible and useful.  The chaff is then burned and destroyed.

God enters into human life bringing grace, so that what is useless in us can be removed, leaving only that which nourishes ourselves, and others.  God seeks to burn away what is useless in us, so that we are purified and made whole, bringing about our own redemption so that we can then be God's instruments to bring about the redemption of the world.

God's agenda in the world has always been, and will always, be, our salvation and redemption, not our destruction.  The only thing that God seeks to destroy is that which is impure within us, so that we might be a new creation in Christ.