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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