Sunday, June 8, 2014

Love is Not an Absence of Sin

It is very strange in the current day that some theologians have begun to define love as an absence. All discussion around love are what love is not.

It is difficult for these theologians to speak of what love positively is. They can talk for hours about what love is not. They tend to turn positive statements about love in the bible into the converse negatives of what love is not.

The bible gives negative and positive guidance about many things. It is important to keep the tense of the biblical teaching.

It is interesting that theologians who cannot speak positively of love also tend to turn all positive statements in the bible into negative statements which roughly correlate.

You see this is a great error. Christianity is an active religion, not a religion of absence. Love is a presence. It is positive power, not a lack of sin.

We can have a relaxing day at home alone avoiding sin, but we are not positively expressing love. There is nothing wrong with the relaxing day at home, but to be clear we have not expressed love if we sit at home alone for a day with no contact with the world.

Love is active. The bible uses many active statements about love because love is an action. The negative statements of what love is not in the bible clarify what love positively is.

Negative statements of what love is not are not a denial that love is an action. We must be very careful to read what the bible says. It is not scriptural to read what the bible says and then always modify it into a different form.

It is a form of redaction to turn the whole of scripture into a set of negative commandments. The bible is full of positive commands for living. To change the tense of the commands from positive to negative is to redact scripture.

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