I have never understood the meaning of the idea that Jesus is your “personal savior”.
I have never grasped the meaning of the notion that we can have a personal “love” relationship with Jesus. Or any personal relationship at all with God.
It has always seems to me that this notion of having a personal relationship with God or Jesus abandons our nature as embodied humans. The truth is, and this is quite evident in Scripture, that Jesus did not die “for me” or “for anyone” but died mostly as a result of screwing up the system and offending people who held the power. In spite of that, he overcame it all through Resurrection. He died for very specific reasons, and rose from the dead for a universally construed humanity.
The evangelical notion that I need to accept Jesus “into my heart” to to claim him as a “personal savior” seems to cheapen the distinction between God’s love and the love that I am able to perform. The Jewish notion of love was one that was very pragmatic, and was something enacted more than felt. It seems that Christianity post Great Awakening has focused so much on this personal God who loves “me” distracts from the universal notion that God’s love for us also means that any individual is not that special because we are part of a much bigger legacy and humanity that God loves equally as much.
The truth is that the idea of a personal God and a personal relationship with God and Jesus is a cheapened version of love that is diluted with touchy-feely personalism and the need to be wanted, to feel special, to feel important. It looks in practice like a love of self transferred onto a very specific ideological notion of God. God is more of an archetype in function and it’s hard to actually love an archetype.
It’s hard for me to actually love that which is not embodied. I love my children, my wife, most members of my family, many others as well. I can be committed to ideas, have convictions in what I believe to be true, and understand my desires for what makes me happy and fulfilled. But do I really love these abstractions? Even if I do, it is still something different from loving a living being independent of me. Ideas do not respond to us, we cannot have a conversation with an idea, feel the warmth of its touch.
Loving God is something different than loving a person and so, it is not a personal love. Loving God is acting in response to the Resurrection by loving others and that is how we in turn love God. When God comes to me, shakes my hand, and cares to sit down and get to know me and I God, on a personal level, my idea of the love of God will become more than an idea, but a personal engagement with a being. Until then, love of God is a once removed response to God by loving my neighbor, who I can physically and actually love. And perhaps God can love me through that.
Loving this way is irreducibly embodied. Yes, we are told that God came in the flesh in Jesus. But that was a long time ago. The truth is we cannot love that person of Jesus anymore. At best, what we can do is love a good idea about this Jesus. But loving an idea, even a good one shaped by often powerful experiences, is still not the same thing as loving Jesus, much less loving God.
Because loving God is impersonal this way, God is really not that much of a personal God.
This is why I don’t understand the “personal Jesus”, “God loves me”, “love God”, “Jesus is my friend” kind of language. It’s just not grounded in the same reality that necessarily constrains what one’s actual ability is to love a person looks like in the world. I don’t want to confuse the idea that I love with the person I aspire to love. Confusion between the idea and the person is where most seem to find comfort. It is also the seat and source where the most egregious and malevolent actions are often performed in the name of religion. For confusion of an idea with the very being of God is nothing other than idolatry.
Originally posted at The Crowded Handbasket.
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And yet, in some way, classical Trinitarianism affirms that God is Love. God is love between the three persons of the Trinity. God, Son and Spirit. And through the outpouring of that love between the three, God invites us into a relationship with Godself and with others that is built on the same activity of love between the three. To me that invitation into community, is a much more appropriate and attractive notion of love than "Jesus died for me."
I agree with your objection to emotionalism and certainly think that Jesus' death is too often trivialized, but I completely disagree about God being personal. I can only speak for myself, but I have found God to be intensly personal. My relationship with God has been, in many ways, more lively and volatile than any other, if you would believe that. He even seems to have a sense of humor.
This is correct. And it also points to that relationship as a rather mystical union, not something "personal" in the way that is oft characterized in especially evangelical circles.
I can only agree to being puzzled by people claiming to have a personal “love” relationship with Jesus. The weirdest manifestation of this in my mind is the bumper sticker that says "Real Men Love Jesus".
(Theological conundrum for Drew… would that be adultery?)
I agree with you, Drew. I can't really love something that's disembodied. And when you come right down to it, when I exclude the emotional and subjective experiences, God has never loved me back in a tangible way except through people.
The "personal relationship" version of Jesus was virtually unknown before 1747 – see Count von Zinzendorf's Nine Public Lectures . . .. How on earth did it get elevated into the chief essence of Christianity to so many these in only a couple of hundred years?
I don't think that "personal" or "in love" sentiments concerning God are in any way intentionally cheapening. In fact, I would argue that the Incarnation makes such sentiments viable. The varieties of mysticism we encounter are attempts to bring about palpable union between Creator and creation in a very personal way. I think John Piper's argument s about "desiring" God feed into this discussion as well. God is more than an abstraction or idea, as are we. Thus to deny the realm of emotions to the contemplation/experience/study of God can be as equally debasing of both God and us as an overly emotional focus.
I don't think that "personal" or "in love" sentiments concerning God are in any way intentionally cheapening. In fact, I would argue that the Incarnation makes such sentiments viable. The varieties of mysticism we encounter are attempts to bring about palpable union between Creator and creation in a very personal way. I think John Piper's argument s about "desiring" God feed into this discussion as well. God is more than an abstraction or idea, as are we. Thus to deny the realm of emotions to the contemplation/experience/study of God can be as equally debasing of both God and us as an overly emotional focus.