At this point I would like to make a distinction between the idea of Truth and truth. The first, which is distinguished by the use of a capital letter, refers to the subject matter of theology and metaphysics and refers to what some philosophers have called the ‘Real’. Here the word ‘Real’ refers to the ultimate source of everything that is. To possess some knowledge of the Truth means that one rationally accepts some propositions that accurately describe what this Real is like. Such thinking is called metaphysical because it refers to a realm that lies beyond the reach of the physical sciences, relating to questions such as the existence and nature of God, the underlying substance of the universe, the nature of logic and so forth.
In contrast to Truth, the term ‘truth’ can be said to relate to statements of fact concerning reality. Unlike the Real, ‘reality’ is a term that refers to the world as we experience it. Here metaphysical discussions are abandoned in favour of discussions concerning how we interpret and interact with the world. For instance, one may have no opinion on whether or not God exists, but one may still make meaningful statements concerning such things as the number of people who got married in a certain country at a certain time or the long-term environmental effect of carbon emissions.
The work so far may seem to suggest that Truth has no place within Christianity, for while such an approach does not deny its actual existence, the fact that Truth (God) can never be grasped ultimately leads to an eroding of absolutism that creates a space for relativism to take root. Yet one of the main problems with such a concern is the way that it presupposes a view of knowledge and truth that shares more in common with Athens than it ever did with Jerusalem. While the above views of truth (in both its capitalized and uncapitalized forms) are important and offer a wealth of insights, these Greek-influenced approaches view questions concerning truth and knowledge in a fundamentally different manner than that found within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Rather than describing the Real or reality, the Christian idea of ‘knowing the truth’ can be said to operate in an entirely different realm. For, unlike the former perspectives which refer to the ability to make substantive descriptive claims concerning the Real or reality, the Judeo-Christian view of truth is concerned with having a relationship with the Real (God) that results in us transforming reality. The emphasis is thus not on description but on transformation. This perspective completely short-circuits the long-redundant debate as to whether truth is subjective or objective, for here Truth is the ungraspable Real (objective) that transforms the individual (subjective).
While the Christian can make use of these other discourses, the prime notion of truth within Christianity is directly connected with liberation and transformation rather than with objective description. For instance, when we read that Christ is the truth and that knowing the truth will set us free, we come face to face with truth, not as the objective affirmation of a proposition (as if that would set anyone free), but rather as that which arises from a life-giving encounter. The Truth in Christianity is not described but experienced. This is not then the affirmation of some objective description concerning Truth but rather describes a relation with the Truth. In other words, Truth is God and having knowledge of the Truth is evidenced, not in a doctrinal system, but in allowing that Truth to be incarnated in one’s life. Hence, this claim of Christ is not a way of claiming that some theoretical system will bring new life, but a way of saying that by entering into a relationship with God we will find liberation. To know the Truth is thus to be known and transformed by the Truth. In the Epistle of John we find an extrapolation of this theme when we read that knowledge of God is evidenced in a life of love rather than in the affirmation of a theoretical, dogmatic system:
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love … No-one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us … God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.55
Here John equates the existence of religious knowledge with the act of love. Knowledge of God (the Truth) as a set of propositions is utterly absent; instead he claims that those who exhibit a genuine love know God, regardless of their religious system, while those who do not love cannot know God, again regardless of their religious system. Truth is thus understood as a soteriological event. This word ‘soteriological’ is derived from the term soteria, from which we get the word ‘salvation’. In precise terms the word refers to a cure, remedy or healing.
While this religious idea of truth as soteriological may initially seem somewhat unrelated to the idea of truth as that which describes, there are times when they can come into conflict with each other. For example, let us imagine that we are hiding some Jews in our house in Germany during the Second World War. Early one morning some soldiers come to our door as part of a routine check and ask if we are housing any Jews. In response to this question we have three options: (a) we regretfully say ‘yes’, acknowledging that we are held under a higher moral law which requires that we do not deceive; (b) we say ‘no’, judging that it is the lesser of two evils, a necessary lie required in order to prevent murder; (c) we say ‘no’ and feel happy that we told the truth.
In this example most contemporary Christians in the West would, I suspect, choose (b) as closest to their own position. However, if we take truth to mean any act which positively transforms reality, rather than describes reality, then there is no problem acknowledging that, while denying there are Jews in the house is empirically incorrect, it is true in a religious sense precisely because it protects the innocent (as well as protecting the soldiers from committing a horrific act). I have been told that the Christian writer Corrie ten Boom was actually faced with this situation and chose to say that there were Jews in the house. The soldiers thought she was joking and laughed. In response to this Corrie ten Boom also laughed, and the soldiers left. Yet, if this is a true rendering of what transpired, far from being a defence of (a), Corrie ten Boom’s response is actually a perfect example of position (c), for if she was not being deceptive, then, after they had all laughed, she would have said, ‘No, honestly, there are Jews in my house.’ To think that this action is not a lie is somewhat equivalent to a child who, after having been told that she is not allowed out of her bedroom door all night, climbs out the window with the internal justification that this was not prohibited and thus was not wrong.
The idea that religious truth transforms reality in such a way that it reflects the kingdom of God renders some Bible stories far more intelligible, for throughout the text there are instances in which the people of God seemingly lie (i.e. say something which is empirically false) for the sake of truth. For example, at the beginning of Exodus we read of two Egyptian midwives who refuse to carry out Pharaoh’s command that all male infants be put to death. Here we read:
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, ‘When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.’ The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, ‘Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?’ The midwives answered Pharaoh, ‘Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.’ So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became more numerous.56
Here God does not merely accept the deception of Shiphrah and Puah but actually blesses it. Not only do we find other examples littered throughout the Old Testament, we even find Jesus himself engaged in what would appear to be an act of deception. In John 7 we read that Jesus’ brothers attempt to persuade him to attend the Feast of Tabernacles. In response to this request Jesus replies:
‘The right time for me has not yet come; for you any time is right. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil. You go to the feast. I am not yet going up to this feast, because for me the right time has not yet come.’ Having said this, he stayed in Galilee. However, after his brothers had left for the feast, he went also, not publicly but in secret.57
Such an approach opens up a way of thinking that challenges the manner in which we have been taught to think through moral questions. Most of us have been brought up to think that Jesus taught an ethical system for his disciples to follow. The term ‘ethics’ refers to an approach to moral situations in which we work out how we ought to act by deriving ideas from a foundation given by reason and/or revelation. By seeing Jesus as an ethical teacher we approach the Bible as this foundation and read it as one would read a textbook –attempting to read it in a neutral manner so as to work out how we should act. In this approach we must endeavour neither to read into the text nor to interpret it, but rather to draw out from the text its precise meaning.
However, the religious idea of truth, as expressed above, places this modernistic approach into question. For, not only is there no such thing as a neutral interpretive space, but also the religious idea of truth demands that we should have a prejudice when reading the text: a prejudice of love. The Bible itself teaches us that we must not enter into any situation in a neutral and objective manner, even the reading of scripture, but always with eyes of love. Christ himself expressed this when he healed on the Sabbath, informing those who sought to condemn him that the law was made for humanity, not humanity for the law. Here the work of healing was judged to be more important than the dominant interpretation of the law that forbad work, precisely because healing was the loving thing to do. Here Jesus did not approach the law in a neutral manner, for the law of God was never made to be read in this way. Rather, Jesus showed that we must read it with a prejudice towards love. This does not mean that we re-interpret our traditions in any way we want, but rather that we must be committed to living in the tension between exegesis (by which we extract meaning from the text) and eisegesis (by which we read meaning into the text). By acknowledging that all our readings are located in a cultural context and have certain prejudices, we understand that engaging with the Bible can never mean that we simply extract meaning from it, but also that we read meaning into it. In being faithful to the text we must move away from the naïve attempt to read it from some neutral, heavenly height and we must attempt to read it as one who has been born of God and thus born of love: for that is the prejudice of God. Here the ideal of scripture reading as a type of scientific objectivity is replaced by an approach that creatively interprets with love.
In response to this, the question can be asked concerning how we ought to interpret the Bible, once we recognize that all our readings are influenced by such things as cultural context, church tradition, psychological make-up and educational background. This question revolves around the concern that once we recognize the reality that none of us merely ‘translates’ the Bible, but interprets it in a variety of ways, we can no longer decide which reading is good and which reading is not.
In order to answer this, we need to reflect upon two important concepts – the ‘transfinite’ and the ‘infinite’. Infinity is a term used to describe the set of numbers that never ends, while the transfinite signals the infinite range of numbers that exists between finite numbers (e.g. between the numbers 1 and 2 we have 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 ad infinitum). While we must acknowledge that the Bible holds such a wealth of meaning that it can be read in a never-ending number of ways, this does not mean that it can be read in an infinite number of ways. To return to the example of an artwork, a painting can be read in multiple ways, but there are limits to the range of legitimate interpretations one can have. For instance, an image of two people embracing cannot be legitimately thought of as an image of war. In this way a piece of art has a transfinite set of interpretations rather than an infinite set of interpretations. The same goes with the Bible. While people will understand the phrase ‘God is love’ differently, depending upon their cultural context, it cannot be legitimately understood as a call to hate or do violence to others. So then, acknowledging that we all get God wrong and that revelation can be interpreted in a variety of ways does not necessarily mean that we are caught in the tentacles of relativism, but rather can open up a dynamic, kinetic relationship with the text.
With this in mind, we must grasp that the central interpretive tool that Jesus employed when interpreting the scriptures was the prejudice of love: he exhibited this prejudice when interpreting them in relation to his concrete interaction with those who were poor, weak and marginalized. He thus remained faithful to the text by reading it with the poor, weak and marginalized in mind. Failure to engage in this loving prejudice towards the poor can result in readings from power, readings in which we legitimate our own desires over and above the needs of those around us.
At their best, our traditions provide us with appropriate ways to engage with the various commonplace situations that arise in daily life. However, there are a myriad situations that arise in life which have not been directly faced in the past. These events often require a response which cannot be discerned via reference to our already existing interpretive maps, and instead demand a step of creative and loving interpretation. For instance, the advances in life-saving technology in the late twentieth century have cast up numerous problems in medical ethics to which no Bible passage can give a definitive answer. When thinking of this Christlike prejudice of love, I am reminded of the Buddhist story in which a disciple plucks up courage to point out to the Buddha that some of the things he taught were not in the scriptures. In response the Buddha replied, ‘Then put them in.’ After an embarrassed silence the disciple spoke again: ‘May I be so bold as to suggest, sir, that some of the things you teach actually contradict the scriptures?’ To which the Buddha, without hesitation, smiled and said, ‘Then I suggest you take them out.’58
There is a Christlike depth to this parable that few of us will allow ourselves to perceive. Yet we can see this at work, not only within the biblical text itself, where images of God are sometimes developed, and even abandoned in favour of others, but also in more recent times. Take, for example, the issue of slavery, which, although condoned within both the Old and New Testaments (explicitly in the former and implicitly in the latter), was eventually judged by many Christians to be a grave social evil that could not be abolished via the traditional way of interpreting scriptures. The slave was experienced as one to whom we were obliged; their suffering impinged upon us, requiring that the existing interpretations of the law be reinterpreted for the sake of justice. This reinterpretation of the law was often done by those who loved Christ and sought to follow the trajectory of Christ’s teaching, for Jesus taught us not merely to read the scriptures, but to enter into a dialogue with them: a dialogue that is saturated and directed by love. The end result is a faith that engages in a double hermeneutic by which we read both our religious tradition and the situation we find ourselves in. This can be illustrated in the following story:
The commander of the occupation troops said to the mayor of the mountain village, ‘We know you are hiding a traitor. Unless you give him up to us, we shall harass you and your people by every means in our power.’
The village was, indeed, hiding a man who seemed good and innocent and was loved by all. But what could the mayor do now that the welfare of the village was at stake? Days of discussion in the village council led to no conclusion. So the mayor finally took the matter up with the priest. Priest and mayor finally came up with a text that said ‘It is better that one man die to save the nation.’
So the mayor handed over the innocent man, whose screams echoed throughout the village as he was tortured and put to death.
Twenty years later a prophet came to that village, went right up to the mayor, and said, ‘How could you have done this? That man was sent by God to be the saviour of this country. And you handed him over to be tortured and killed.’
‘But where did I go wrong?’ pleaded the mayor. ‘The priest and I looked at the scriptures and did what they commanded.’
‘That’s where you went wrong,’ said the prophet. ‘You should have also looked into his eyes.’59
Here the prophet in the story advocates a double hermeneutic which acknowledges that our reading of the Bible (as mediated through our particular tradition) must be re-examined and wrestled with repeatedly as we encounter the situations that present themselves to us. It is in the midst of this double reading between our interpretation of the text and our interaction with the other that the Christian community operates.
One of the most powerful and controversial cinematic explorations of this double reading is found in Costa-Gavras’ film Amen. The film itself explores the failure of the Catholic and Protestant Churches when confronted with the terror of the death camps during the Second World War. We are presented with two religious figures, a Protestant youth pastor (Ulrich Tukur) and a Catholic priest (Mathieu Kassovitz), who each attempt to inform their respective religious leaders about the genocide. In response the churches struggle to retain their ignorance of the situation, wishing to keep their innocence by closing their eyes to the horror.
The response of the priest is of particular interest. At one point he wonders aloud to the Cardinal (Michel Duchaussoy) whether it would be possible for every Christian in Germany to convert to Judaism in order to stop the horror, for the Nazis couldn’t possibly condemn such a huge number of powerful and socially integrated people at that stage in the war. The idea is, of course, utterly rejected. Then, in complete frustration, and with a crushing sense of obligation towards the persecuted, the priest takes his own advice. In tears he turns from that which he loves more than life itself – his own faith tradition – and becomes a Jew. By taking on the Jewish identity he suffers with the persecuted, voluntarily taking his place on the trains that run to Auschwitz.
For this priest, the singularity of the horror required an unprecedented action, one which cut at the heart of his tradition. It was his very tradition (or rather his interpretation of that tradition) that demanded that he should give up that tradition. This is a stunning exploration of what is demanded in the face of unprecedented horror. For most Christians, the question, ‘Would you die for your beliefs?’ is the most radical one that can be asked – to which the faithful will answer with a defiant ‘Yes.’ But Amen asks a more radical question, namely, ‘Would you kill your beliefs?’ In other words, would you be prepared to give up your religious tradition in order to affirm that tradition? Can you give up the very thing you would die to protect, not because of something even more powerful, but rather because of another’s suffering?
The most powerful way for this priest to affirm his Christianity is to lay it down – symbolized by the incongruous image in which he remains in his cassock while wearing the Star of David. Here, the beliefs and practices which have served him in daily life are placed into question by the terror that faces him and the demand for a response. Amidst the fires of the Jewish persecution his Christian beliefs are subverted by the belief that Christ gave up all for the powerless. And so this priest gives up his Christianity precisely in order to retain his Christianity. It is the very narrative that he loves which requires this exodus from the narrative – losing his soul while perhaps, unintentionally, finding it.
It is this double reading that ensures that we are never absolved from the difficult job of making moral decisions. The double reading requires not only a commitment to listening to and serving the people we meet, but also a deep respect for the Christian tradition. We must engage with our religious tradition, for it acts as a compass that enables us to navigate the world. Yet we must combine this compass reading with a knowledge of the terrain in which we find ourselves and a deep love in order to work out which way we must travel. Our interpretations of the Bible must then be understood more as temporary shelters than eternal structures. We never finish reading the Bible but always find ourselves standing on its threshold, ready to read again. Thus we can never rest easy, believing that we have discovered the foundations that act as a key for working out what we must do in different situations: for the only clear foundation laid down by Jesus was the law of love. This love demands that we use the scriptures not as an ethical textbook but rather as a text that extrapolates the Christlike way of being in the world.
In order to grasp what this means, let us reflect on the following teaching of Jesus: ‘If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.’60 This teaching refers to a part of Roman law at that time which allowed a Roman soldier to compel a citizen to carry his military pack for one mile. Let us imagine that after Jesus offered this teaching to the Church, the leaders had enshrined this second-mile command into a law which stated that, if anyone was forced to carry a pack one mile, they would carry it for two miles. Then let us imagine Jesus returning to this community a few years later. Would he say to them, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servants, for you have faithfully carried out my commandment’, or would he perhaps shake his head and say, ‘Dear friends, your law says carry the pack two miles – I say, carry it three’? If we are more drawn to the first response, then we are affirming that the teachings of Jesus are a type of ethical rulebook that must be followed in their substance; if we are drawn by the second, we are affirming that Jesus came to teach us a way of life that is dictated by the radical excess of love rather than an ethical rulebook.
Here we can see the heart of the Christian critique of ethics at work. ‘Ethics’, as we have already mentioned, is a word used to describe a foundational approach to moral questions which uses a set of principles (derived from reason and/or revelation) in order to work out what to do in any given situation. Far from teaching an ethical system, this was the very approach that Jesus critiqued when he called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs: clean on the outside but rotting on the inside. For ethical systems allow us to follow rules whether we love or not. While ethics says, ‘What must I do in order to fulfil my responsibility?’ love says, ‘I will do more than is required.’ If, for instance, it was the right thing to do to buy a flower on Valentine’s Day for your beloved, then love says, ‘I will buy more than one.’ Love is never satisfied by what is required but must always do more. If ethical duty requires that we give ten per cent of our money away, then love will always look to give more than this. In this way love fulfils the telos (goal) of ethics by existing as the excess of ethics.
In the same way that contemporary religious thought has set transcendence in opposition to immanence, and has considered theism to be the binary of atheism, so ‘orthodoxy’ has been interpreted as necessarily excluding heresy. Orthodoxy (a word derived from ortho, meaning ‘correct’, and doxa, meaning ‘belief’) is generally understood as referring to the embracing of right belief and thus has the connotations of that thinking which claims that we can extract substantive ethical foundations from the Bible. However, there is another way of understanding the word ‘orthodoxy’, one that does not set it in a binary opposition with heresy but embraces the idea that we all get God wrong.
In order to discover this alternative reading, we must break down the word ‘orthodoxy’ into its Greek roots, ortho (right) and doxa (belief), and read them as if one were reading Hebrew – that is, from right to left. Thus ‘right belief’ becomes ‘believing in the right way’. Thus we break down the binary opposition between orthodoxy and heresy by understanding the term ‘orthodox’ as referring to someone who engages with the world in the right way – that is, in the way of love. Here religious knowledge is not something that is opposed to love, nor secondary to it; rather, the only religious knowledge worth anything is love. By understanding orthodoxy in this manner, it is no longer distanced from what the liberation theologians call ‘orthopraxis’. Like orthodoxy, this term is often read straightforwardly as right (ortho) practice (praxis). However, once we understand orthopraxis as ‘practising in the right way’, we see that these two terms really shed slightly different light on the same fundamental approach. This means that the question, ‘What do you believe?’ must always be accompanied by the question, ‘How do you believe?’ We are left then with the idea of orthodoxy and orthopraxis as two terms which refer to a loving engagement with the world that is mediated, though not enslaved by, our reading of the Bible.
We can see an embodiment of this approach to orthodoxy in a situation I once found myself in, where two people from the same church, at different times, approached me to ask if I thought that their church taught the truth. The first person to ask me was a kind and gracious individual who gave of his time and money in a sacrificial manner. The church was not only a comfort to him but also a place of challenge and critique. I listened for a while before saying that I thought his church did emanate truth. Within weeks of this conversation, I met the second person. It was obvious when talking to him that his experience of the same church had been very negative. The teaching was dead to him and the type of projects which the church engaged in had done little to challenge or encourage this individual to live in a genuinely sacrificial manner. Here I found myself saying that this church did not emanate truth (at least for him).
This makes little sense within a modernist paradigm, for the idea of affirming a church as true includes the idea that you think that church is true for all, and to think that one church teaches the truth implies that you necessarily judge any church which contradicts its teaching as incorrect. Yet this need not be the case, as we can illustrate via the parable in which two camels are being led to market. One camel is loaded down with salt while the other is weighed down with cotton. On the way to the market they encounter a river which has burst its banks from a rainstorm the night before and has flooded the road. At one particularly deep part the camels are almost completely submerged. When they finally get to the other side, the camel with the salt on its back has gained a renewed sense of strength, as the water has largely dissolved the salt. However, the camel with the cotton collapses in exhaustion, for the cotton has absorbed much of the water.
In this parable we see how the same stream was experienced in two markedly different ways that depended upon the burdens that each camel brought to it. In the same way, one church may help one person to become more Christ like, while oppressing another: the idea of a single congregation being judged right or wrong in some universal way is naïve. Yet this is not an apology for relativism, because in the same way that we see the first camel as having had a better experience of the water because it is freed from a heavy load, so we must judge our various traditions according to whether they tend towards freeing their congregation from their burdens, helping to transform them into more Christlike individuals. However, if a church is not helping in our transformation, then the problem need not be the church’s, or our own; rather, this may simply be the wrong context for us to be in. Rather than encouraging people to join our community (whatever ‘our’ community happens to be), we ought to be trying to help people to find the right community that will aid them in their further conversion.
If this double reading of the Bible and the other is motivated by an underlying love, then we can ask how we are supposed to justify this prejudice over any other that we might arbitrarily choose. The answer to this question is at first frustrating, for there is no way to justify the prejudice of love over any other. However, this is far from devastating, for love cannot and ought not to be justified. There is no justification for love, for if there were, then it would not be love. If we love because we are compelled through force, then it is not love. If I give some money to the poor only because someone is holding a gun to my head and demanding the action, then this is not a loving action. Neither is it loving if I act in order to gain a reward, even if the reward is simply the feeling that comes from doing the act. As soon as we say that we should love, then love disappears, for love is the law that has no law, the way that knows no ‘should’. Love is the law that tells us when to subvert the law, when to obey the law and when to break with laws, yet love is a lawless law that cannot be argued for.
This means that my argument for love can in no way be taken as a justification for works-based salvation, for as soon as love works in order to receive something, it is not love. Love acts because it is compelled by love, not for a place in heaven. Here the binary between faith and works is devastated, as the work of love is faith by another word. The love that Christ spoke of is born of God, and when we see it at work, we know that the person has been born of God. If the works being carried out are for other reasons (such as the desire for salvation), then it is not love that we are witnessing. This love is not the narcissistic love that we see all around us and within us; this love is more radical that we can ever imagine.
The problem we all face when confronted by this idea of love is whether we have ever done anything that could be described as loving in the way of love that emanates from God. For when we acknowledge that true love offers everything as a gift rather than as an exchange (where we selfishly expect something in return), then we must wonder if we have ever really given a gift. To take a concrete example of what I mean, let us reflect upon how a loving relationship between two people will exhibit itself in the offering of unconditional presents. Yet in reality we often give to our beloved, not unconditionally, but with many conditions. Perhaps we give so as to get a present in exchange, but more often the return will be something much more subtle, such as a warm sensation that comes with buying a gift for our beloved, or the psychological well-being that accompanies the thanks we receive in return. We can perceive the conditional nature of our gifts most clearly whenever our relationships break down. Here we often witness people demanding that letters, photographs or presents should be given back. This behaviour is stark evidence that these things were never unconditional gifts, but rather, were given on the condition that the recipient of the gifts would continue to love the giver in return. Yet true love gives without regret and without strings.
We could perhaps say that a gift is purer when the person who receives it doesn’t know who gave it. Such anonymous presents do not present the danger of the selfish pleasure that arises from getting thanks from the one who is receiving the gift. However, there is still the joy of knowing that the recipient is grateful to someone (a thought that can give us great pleasure) and that we have made that person happy. A good friend of mine once bought me tickets to see my favourite band in concert and posted them anonymously through my door. Only years later, by chance, did I find out who had done this. While this was a beautiful gesture, he admitted that the act had given him a deep sense of pleasure at imagining my surprise and delight.
So perhaps an even purer gift would not only be one that was given anonymously but one where nothing was actually given. In this way the person would not be thankful to anyone, for they would not have actually received anything at all. This may seem very strange at first, but we can use the example of one person offering forgiveness to another. If someone wrongs me without knowing and I later say that I have forgiven them, then I have offered a gift which is literally nothing, for forgiveness is not a thing. However, giving this type of gift can often be very rewarding on a personal level, for I may be seeking an apology in return, may want to look spiritual or may have the desire that my apology be humbly accepted. As such, it is important that we should sometimes endeavour to offer the gift of forgiveness without the other person even knowing. Here we do not get the warm feeling of them knowing that we have done such an act, nor the pleasure of knowing that they are happier as a result, and thus the act of offering forgiveness is purer.
However, a gift in which the receiver does not know who the giver is, or even that they have received a gift, still has the problem of the person feeling good about themselves: thinking, for instance, that they are spiritual enough to do such a selfless act. Here the gift has a return of pride and self-satisfaction. And so Derrida, to whom I am grateful for helping me reflect on the idea of gift, claimed that the perfect gift would have a third criteria: namely that the giver would not know that he or she had given it. Here we are presented with three criteria for the perfect, loving gift – that is, one that we would not use in order to get a reward: (1) the receiver does not know he or she has been given a gift; (2) nothing is actually given; and (3) the giver does not know he or she has given anything.
At first this sounds both impossible and ridiculous. However, it is here that we gain an insight into what Christian giving actually looks like. For a love that is born from God is a love that gives with the same reflex as that which causes a bird to sing or the heart to beat. For a concrete example of this, we can say that an act of love could involve giving money to someone on the street without stopping to think, or talking to someone who is in pain without thought that we are doing anything special or different from any other daily activity. Is this not what is really meant by the biblical injunction to give so as the right hand does not know what the left has given? The love that arises from God is a love that loves anonymously, a love that acts without such self-centred reflections, that gives without thought. Our lives should be full of acts of love of this kind, and yet, by definition, they will be invisible to us. As Meister Eckhart once said:
When one can do the works of virtue without preparing, by willing to do them, and bring to completion some great and righteous matter without giving it a thought – when the deed of virtue seems to happen by itself, simply because one loved goodness and for no other reason, then one is perfectly virtuous and not before.61
Yet here is the difficult bit, for we cannot force this radical, Christlike love, we cannot work it up or commit to living in this way. We cannot read this chapter and then say, ‘OK, today I will live this life of love’, for that would not be the life of love, it would be forced and would lead to condemnation and/or arrogance. So what can we do?
This underlying love cannot be worked up but is gained only as we give up. To be born of God is to be born of love. Here we come into contact again with Meister Eckhart, who claims that we must let go of ourselves in such a manner that we can become a dwelling place in which God can reside and from which God can flow. Our own works and beliefs are here dethroned by the enthronement of God. What is important for Eckhart is not to think correctly, or to work hard, but rather to engage in a type of concrete ego-death by which the divine is invited to enter the place which we have laid down. The hope is that in so doing, love will flow from us.
And so we end Part 1 as we began, with the word ‘love’. Not an inauthentic love which only embraces those who embrace us, but the love that emanates from our beloved, the love that would embrace our enemies, that gives until it hurts and then gives more, the love that gives with the right hand while hiding its gift from the left. To affirm the approach that I am advocating means that we must accept that to be a Christian is to be born of love, transformed by love and committed to transforming the world with love. This is not somehow done by working ourselves up and trying to find the right way of thinking and acting, but rather in letting go and opening up to the transformative power of God. In so doing, we will not merely sit around describing God to the world, but rather, we will become the iconic spaces in which God is made manifest in the world. It is my hope and prayer that those of us taking part in this emerging conversation will find ourselves translating that dialogue into a journey that willingly walks that third mile with Christ.