Week 13—Sunday 1 John 1:1-4
PRINCIPLES WITHOUT THE PERSON—EMPTY
We are looking at the fact that if you work from Revelation down and the facts up you come out at the same place—at the feet of Jesus Christ. Life is rendering one verdict—the Christian verdict. While many thoughtful persons would agree to the fact that “we come out at the same place,” they question the interpretation that the same place means “at the feet of Jesus Christ.” They would say we come out to the same principles, but not to the same Person. There is a disposition to accept the principles apart from the Person.
For instance, Fromm, in The Art of Loving, says: “To love God, if he were going to use that word would mean, then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which ‘God’ stands for in oneself.” Again: “Having spoken of the love of God, I want to make it clear that I myself do not think in terms of a theistic concept, and that to me the concept of God is only a historically conditioned one, in which man has expressed his experience of his higher powers, his longing for truth and for unity at a given historical period.” God is then only a concept mediated through oneself, one’s experience of one’s own personal higher powers, one’s longing for truth and a desire for unity. We put our own content into “God” and we are the mediator of God to ourself. God then is all we see in ourself, writ large, when we say, “God.” No wonder then, that Fromm has a chapter entitled, “Love—Disintegration in Western Society.” For the moment any idea or principle gets away from Jesus Christ, it disintegrates. And love is an illustration. If you don’t take the content of your love from Jesus Christ, you will probably take it from Hollywood. So principles of ideas are bound to get their content from the children of men and women or from the Son of Man. And if they get the content from the children of men and women, they degenerate. If from the Son of Man, they are regenerated. So to take the principles apart from the Person is to take degenerated principles.
O Jesus Lord, you are our personal Savior, but you are the Savior of principles and ideas, for you put into them a new content, the content of your divine illustration. We see everything different when we see you. For you are different. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: This is the new crucifixion of Jesus—to take his principles and reject the Person.