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.

God must be Defined Positively

We must define God positively. He is a person. Many people always wish to define God by what he is not.

You cannot define a person by what they are not. A person is a positive entity and must be defined positively.

At times statements about what a person is not can help clarify a person. But negative statements are far less useful in defining a person than positive statements.

The bible offers a great deal of positive statements about God. We always need to grasp the positive teaching on the nature of God. This gets us much closer to understanding God than negative statements of what God is not.

In fact God walked among us in the person of Jesus who took on human flesh. We can learn much about the nature of God from looking at the life of Jesus presented in the gospels.

Of course we must really read the gospels rather than what those who do not read the gospels think they say or those who pick and choose what they like from the gospels.

Jesus was a person very concerned with heaven and hell. He did repeatedly declare his divinity and call men to himself.

He was a man who turned the other cheek, but also a man who stood up and fought injustice. You see God's nature is more complex than ours. His personhood is deeper and richer than ours because he is bigger than us.

It is why so many people get God wrong. They cannot understand a righteous anger or a God who judges but does not delight in judgement. We need to learn as we see God what true personhood of the deepest kind looks like.