The eCrozier

Former Senator John Edwards is now back in the news because there is some question as to whether he broke the law by using campaign funds to keep quiet the fact that he fathered a child with a mistress while he ran for the presidency and his wife battled a recurrence of the cancer that would claim her life. I am less interested in the legal question as I am in his behavior. What was he thinking? Or what was Newt Gingrich thinking when he acted out in similar ways? This stuff happens so regularly these days we are hardly shocked anymore. Have we lost the capacity to blush?

What I see happening is this: we are steadily subordinating lifelong commitments, be they between persons covenanted in marriage, between persons in friendships, or between fellow disciples in the Church, to the utility of satisfying the present desire of the self. So, persons walk away from marriage because they have developed in different ways. They end friendships because that friend no longer meets their present needs. And, they break off relationships from their fellow disciples in the Church because those persons become disagreeable or difficult to live with.

This desire to satisfy the self, of course, is not limited to physical desires (what the Greeks called eros), but it sure does suck in a lot of the cultural air. Take our Greek philosophical sensibilities, sprinkle in a heavy dose of the French Enlightenment, and voila!, we have our current McGnostic culture, the fast food-like mass marketing that separates what goes on in our heads from what we do with our bodies. So, we can have all sorts of high and noble thoughts in our heads (both Edwards and Gingrich have them) while using our bodies like amusement parks or production units each week.

No one with ounce of Christian sense could conclude that this is anything less than destructive to the image of God found in every human being. But the destruction is far more than the misuse of sex. That is merely a presenting symptom of the larger disease of our rebellion against God, which many in our culture are pursuing with avid enthusiasm, and not always consciously.

God’s covenantal love (Hebrew = hesed, Greek = agape) is the meta-narrative of the Bible. God has created us for steadfast love in holy relationships, and not only with God, but with one another in marriage, in friendship, and in our discipleship in Jesus. And this human love and mutual devotion are but a glimpse of the divine love poured out for us in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Love has been on the rap sheet of Christians from the time of Pliny the Younger in the earliest centuries to the camp songs of our generation (everybody sing: “They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes they will know we are Christians by our love”). But this love is covenantal love. It is love that is in it for the long haul with a spouse, a friend, or a fellow disciple. It is love for the other regardless of their utility to us in the present.

+Scott