“It is not our love that satisfies God or makes things right. It is God’s love for us that does so.”

Author’s Note: Even the least biblically inclined people are aware of this pericope and epistle, even if they cannot name or quote it. “God is love” is the main takeaway, and that is now a fixture of Western culture. Here, the focus is in how this can quickly slide from proclamation of what God has done for us into a generalized commandment that we all think we can fulfill without any need for God.

DIAGNOSIS: All you need is love

Step 1: Initial Diagnosis (External Problem): Love is the one thing you must do:  God is Love?
The text seems to command that love is the one thing you must do (v. 21). Don’t need to worry about anything more or anything less. All of those other commandments and suggestions fall away in the face of love. This is also an easy way to conflate religions – if they value love, they all know God in their own way, and that is enough. Good people love their fellow humans, and loving them is enough to satisfy God and anyone else who may care to critique us. As long as we try hard, and hold to love, we’ll be ok.

Step 2: Advanced Diagnosis (Internal Problem): Lying in our Fear and Hatred:  We Know God Because We Love?
The probing of our problem focuses on the quality and reality of your love: is there fear (v. 18)?  Do we hate others (v. 20)? In other words, is your love real? But both of those focus on the commandment to love God, which is Law.

‘Do you really love God’ is an easy route to go with this pericope. Especially if there’s some kind of conflict between people who all agree that God is love. The Law is great for diagnosis. “What is love” becomes the focus, sometimes with a “how-to,” sometimes with a “just wing it and it will work out” approach. Tackling the question “are you really loving your neighbor” often moves to calling people liars (cf. v. 20).  Perhaps they are. While ‘‘what is love?” is an important question, perhaps a bigger question (taken almost for granted in the text) raised in this pericope concerns our relationship with God. Can we be saved by the Law, even one as important as “love others”? Or in other words, is holding love in our hearts enough to satisfy whatever Power rules the universe? Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian, agnostic, atheist, etc. … it’s all the same as long as we agree that we serve love… right?

Step 3: Final Diagnosis (Eternal Problem): “Love is God”
In the text, the final criticism is in the negative – if you fail to love others, you cannot love God, which means you do not abide in God, so God will not abide in you. All of that is bad news, so you better love.  Not only that, it better not have any fear and be “perfected” love (v. 18), despite the implicit threat.

While that is all terrifying and everything, if you serve Love, everything is fine. Right?

The problem is that we are often tempted to switch from “God is love” to “Love is God” in practice. If you having love is all you need, you are the focus, not God. Soon, your definition of love becomes all important. That definition justifies many actions you might want to take. Maybe those actions hurt other people. Maybe they don’t… they just leave God out of it. Then the Christian God becomes one face of a more expansive Deity called “Love” that encompasses all people, Christian or not. The Christian God is no longer needed, and becomes no longer present or meaningful.

In other words, God no longer abides in you.

PROGNOSIS: All you need is God’s love

Step 4: Initial Prognosis (Eternal Solution): God saves us out of love
The epistle spells out what “God is love,” and how it is NOT about our love: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (vv. 9-10)

The mechanism for God’s love is specifically Jesus’ death on the cross to put to death all of our failures, sins, imperfect love, and other short-comings. That God’s love for us is stronger than our service to other gods, including our ideas of love, is borne out in Jesus’ resurrection from the grave.

We are saved by God’s love for us, not by our love for God or neighbor.

Step 5: Advanced Prognosis (Internal Solution): We believe the love God has for us
Centering on the love God has shown us in Jesus changes the equation. It is no longer about the quality of our love. It is our trust that ”God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.” (vv. 15-16a).

It is not our love that satisfies God or makes things right. It is God’s love for us that does so. Trusting that promise of love is God abiding in us. We are assured of God’s presence through our faith that Jesus is the Son of God who was crucified for us.

Step 6: Final Prognosis (External Solution): God’s love is perfected in us
The outcome of trusting God abiding in us is love for others. The key difference from the beginning is that when we trust that “God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.”  We do not live from our fear, nor from our alienating ourselves from others in hatred.  Fear and hatred have been overcome on the cross. Our love becomes perfected love when it is grounded in this  Promise. That’s because the focus is God’s love for us, not our love for God, or even our love for others. Or as phrased in the pericope: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world.” (vv. 16b-17)

This frees us to live in love and testify to our Savior. Through this, we reflect God’s love in this world.

Co-missioners,

Here is the second half of Robert Bertram’s 1968 commencement address at Concordia Senior College.

Back then, had Bob already tumbled to the terminology of Diagnosis and Prognosis that he would later bequeath to Crossings? If not, he was certainly practicing what the terms describe. Last week you got an expert’s diagnosis of the way freedom traps us all in God’s accusing judgment. Today you get a prognostic description of how God acts in Christ to spring us from that trap.

There are two ways of reading this address in 2023. One is devotional, the other didactic. The first is easily the more important of the two. God is still talking to us through his sainted servant, Bob, with a message to hear, trust, and exult in as we put it to use this year. God gladden your hearts as you read!

Meanwhile, notice how Bob the consummate teacher is still teaching the rest of us how to locate the Gospel in the gritty dust of Golgotha. Those familiar with the six-step Crossings Method will find the last three steps on vivid display today. (For the first three steps see last week’s post.)

Finally: if you’re one of those Lutherans who insist on observing Reformation Sunday at the end of October, we encourage you to keep this post handy. We can’t think of a better exposition of the day’s great text: “If you continue in my word…you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” And again, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Amen and amen, as Bob prompts us to say.

Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community

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The Twice Free Student—or Citizen
(continued from Part One)
by Robert W. Bertram

 

Recapping from last week—

There is freedom and there is freedom. There is freedom with a small f and freedom with a capital F. Both freedoms are yours. You are twice free. Of both freedoms we can say, though not in the same way, three things: freedom is a hard-bought thing, freedom is a responsibility, freedom is a mirror.

Again—

We have no right to run away from our freedom, as mortifying as it finally is…. We have no right not to be free, no right to evade that ultimate exposure. From that dilemma there is no buying our own way out. That, alas, is freedom with a small f.

 

+  +  +

II. Freedom, Capital “F”

But there is also freedom with a capital F. You are twice free. So now let us say it all over again quickly another way—that Way which is Jesus our Lord.

Freedom is a hard-bought thing. Your freedom, “you,” says the apostle, “were bought with a price,” and that Price is Jesus Christ. You were “purchased with His own blood.” To rescue us from exile in the far country of our sin and our rejectedness, he left behind the beloved country, the family circle of the heavenly Father, having counted in advance the cost of bloodshed and parental rejection, and he suffered our forsakenness. He cried our cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” But for this price, which he did not begrudge, we are free to return, beyond the forsakenness to the forgiveness of the waiting Father. This “Freedom Fighter,” Jesus Christ, fought for us with stick and stone—a stick of a cross and a stone rolled from a tomb. But though he lost his life, it was no losing battle. He bought for us our freedom.

Freedom is a hard-bought thing. But because it has been bought the hard way by Jesus our Lord, you won’t need to buy your own freedom that way, also not your academic freedom. I don’t mean by that that those students who are Christians and have been liberated by Christ ought therefore to get their academic freedom cheap, at some sort of clergy discount. Our Lord did not die for us to be goof-offs. Christian freedom is not permissiveness and coddling. Church membership does not exempt students from doing their homework or from taking the consequences when they slip. If anything, it liberates them to take the consequences with good courage.

But that isn’t all that our Lord’s hard-bought liberation liberates us for, namely, for the courage to face the music of our own failings. Oh, no. It also liberates us from failing in the first place. It really does, as those of you who believe that have discovered. Take the threat out of freedom, and those who otherwise would dread that freedom might now instead be glad to try their hand at it, be glad to live up to it, be glad to take on one new freedom after the other.

When you take the threat out of freedom the way our Lord has done, by his taking our threat unto himself, it does not follow that his beneficiaries will necessarily abuse their new freedom. They might. That is a risk. But they might also take their new freedom in stride, and prove in the process that they can handle it. If so, they are then free not merely to accept their F’s like men, with stiff upper-lip, but more than that: free to expect excellence of themselves and actually to enjoy it. Don’t be surprised when students with that kind of confidence—confidence in the hard-bought freedom Christ won for them—appear at the dean’s office one morning with a request for some bold new student freedom. They might just have rather impressive backing.

+  +  +

Freedom, we said, is our responsibility. Let us say now, “Our freedom is Christ’s responsibility.” For liberating us, who were not only bound but guilty, he took the blame. If I walked into the Allen County jail and took it upon myself to turn the prisoners loose, I of course would be held responsible for this audacious interference. Christ in his audacious mercy walked into our off-limits world and took it upon himself, the Holy One of God, to fraternize with us, the enemy, and to set us free. For this he bore the responsibility, bore it all the way to the death, bore it away.

Our freedom is Christ’s responsibility. Because it is, we in turn are free to be responsible for every other weary slave. No one who enjoys the liberty of Christ sits idly by, irresponsibly observing the slavery of others. Christ’s church is no observatory, no womb-with-a-window. Wherever men are bound, in whatever ghetto—whether in the inner city or perhaps on our own campus—whether east of the Iron Curtain or west of it; wherever people are silenced by bigotry, the cruel bigotry of militant prejudice or of bleeding-heart sentimentality or of quietistic silence; wherever people are terrorized, whether by starvation and rats, by napalm, by a mushroom cloud, by cancer, by the truth about themselves—there is the church’s urgent and happy responsibility: to cheer them on to their freedom, or to love them into their freedom, or to spend oneself for their freedom.

Our freedom is Christ’s responsibility. Because it is, you too are free to be responsible for one another—for one another as students, as scholars and learners. You need not restrict that responsibility to your fellow-student’s courtship problems or to his emotional problems, to his (as we say) “personal” problems. Even with such prosaic problems as the boredom he suffers in course number so-and-so or the fatalism he brings to tomorrow’s exams you are now free to help shoulder his burden. “He’s not heavy, Father, he’s my brother.” No longer need you say, about his disinterest in history or science or his aversion to ideas, that is none of your business. He is your business, as you are Christ’s. That, thank the Lord, is how free you now are. Only a few weeks ago a student told me he would never have gotten so wrapped up in his term paper if it hadn’t been for the interest shown in it by an upperclassman across the hall. For the freedom of one another you are now free to be responsible.

+  +  +

Freedom is a mirror. It may be an accusing mirror, reflecting our unworthiness of it. This freedom scares us off. But now Christ steps before the mirror, between it and us. He makes the mirror reflect not us but himself as our Go-between. Now we are free from the way we used to look, free to look like him. Gone are the old wrinkles of discouragement, the shadow-lines of guilt, the slouch of defeat. Instead the mirror, the divine evaluation, shows us looking quite as good and alive as Jesus himself. He, the New Testament says, is the very likeness of the Father, the express image of the Godhead. We had been orphaned from that Father, and we looked it. But now our Father, seeing us as Christ, exclaims, “My, how you resemble me, how much you look like my own darling youngsters—the very spit and image of your Father.” This new look is the “glorious liberty of the children of God.”

Freedom is a mirror. In the Father’s eyes we have the look of Christ about us. But not only in our Father’s eyes. Also in the eyes of one another. As more and more we associate with Christ—as in the church’s preaching we listen not for the preacher but for Christ, as in the company of one another we divine the companionship of Christ—so more and more he begins to grow on us. You have known some happily married couple who through their life together have come to think alike, talk alike, and even look alike. So it can be with us and our Husband, Christ. I say this not only to those of you who already have learned to enjoy this happy union with him but to those of you as well who are trying to make it alone. The freedom of being independent is nothing like the freedom of being mated with him. And it shows. One of you, seated here this afternoon, once said to me: A saint is a person who makes it a little easier to believe in God. You not only said that to me. You showed it to me, you and your wife, to my own eyes.

As you, my students—and that, poor you, is what you will soon literally be: my students—as you grow to think and love with “the mind of Christ,” and thrive on His Spirit, there is no hard-nosed professor tough enough to intimidate you, no seminary that can contain you, no system—synodical or otherwise—that can restrict you, no accusing mirror that can embitter or depress you, at least not unto death. Whatever oppressors you may encounter had better watch out for you, for what they will see in you—and they jolly well may recognize him—is the liberating Christ. They had better watch out, for you may just captivate them as he did you, by loving them and helping them to live. There, in the Christ whom you can mirror, is the freedom for this world, and not for this world alone.

 

Co-missioners,

Americans will celebrate the Fourth of July this weekend. We can’t think of a better time to send you a reflection on freedom by the late great Robert W. Bertram.

Bob took this topic up fifty-five years ago in an address to the graduating class of a late, great school, Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “The Fort,” as students called it, specialized in pre-ministerial education. It gathered seminary-bound students from Missouri Synod junior colleges around the country and grounded them for two years in liberal arts and Biblical languages. Most of them would proceed from there, B.A. in hand, to Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. That’s where Bob was teaching in 1968, the year of this address. As he delivered it, he was looking at a solid block of men. Two of the major U.S. Lutheran church bodies had women in the ministerial pipeline that year. The LCMS was not one of them. Aside from the librarian, there were no women on the otherwise outstanding Senior College faculty.

Bob entitled his address “The Twice-Free Student.” Or so we learned from editorial notes by Mike Hoy when we unearthed it from an old Crossings newsletter. One could speak as well of “The Twice-Free Citizen.” As you read, you’ll notice how Bob touches frequently on this topic too. We’ve taken the liberty here of adjusting his title accordingly.

Bob spoke at some length on that long-ago commencement day. Hence another in our recent string of multi-part postings, this one dispatched in a way that will bracket America’s pending Freedom Fest (as one might call it) with God’s two Words, Law on the one hand, Gospel on the other. Both are delivered with the clarity, richness, depth, and finesse that set Bob apart as a teacher of teachers.

Would that every American in 2023 had ears and hearts for the honest, vigorous freedom God wants us to enjoy. “Come, Holy Spirit!”

Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community

___________________________________________________

The Twice Free Student—or Citizen
by Robert W. Bertram

 

There is freedom and there is freedom. There is freedom with a small f and freedom with a capital F. Both freedoms are yours. You are twice free. Of both freedoms we can say, though not in the same way, three things: freedom is a hard-bought thing, freedom is a responsibility, freedom is a mirror.

I. Freedom, small “f”

First, freedom (freedom with a small f) is a hard-bought thing. How hard is it for people to buy their freedom? I had a student who had come to us from the brave country of Hungary. He had been one of the Freedom Fighters who in those dark days on the streets of Budapest had fought a losing battle, with sticks and stones, against the Soviet tanks. And now for a while he had left behind the homeland, the beloved country, but only until that opportune day when he could return and rejoin the cause for freedom.

Freedom is a hard-bought thing. In 1776 when Richard Henry Lee stood before the Continental Congress and proposed that the colonies assert their independence from the fatherland he loved, he had already counted what this would cost in the bloodshed of his fellow Virginians. Moreover, his blood brother was still an alderman in London and his own two sons were away at school in England.

Freedom is a hard-bought thing, also for you as students. In its quieter agonies on every thinking campus throughout today’s world, the fight for student freedom is a costly one. You too must be experiencing, at first hand, how students can win their freedom at only a very high price.

For even such conventional freedoms as the freedom from compulsory class attendance, freedom to help shape the curriculum, freedom to choose your own seminary or your own pre-seminary college, freedom to raise a beard (you’ll notice I don’t have one myself), freedom to marry a wife, to own a car, to incur debts, just think of the exorbitant cost which even such freedoms entail: the cost in negotiations between students and administration, the cost in manhours in faculty curriculum committees—not to mention the higher cost of impatience, generations gap, misunderstanding, demoralization. Freedom is a hard-bought thing.

+  +  +

Freedom is a responsibility. Liberty, as we Americans will again remind one another on the fourth of next month, is our “inalienable right.” But it is more than that. It is a responsibility. To be free is my obligation. I don’t mean only that freedom imposes responsibility. That is self-evident. What I mean is that people have a responsibility to be free. It is one of the ground rules of a democracy that no citizen may sell himself or herself into slavery. One thing people are not free to do: They are not free to forfeit their freedom. Not even by majority vote. The governments of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were both voted into power by sizable majorities in their popular elections. This did not make them free nations. Can a democratic people, by popular vote, repeal the popular vote? If so, what they repeal is not merely a right but a responsibility. Do we have a right to be free? We have no right not to be free.

Freedom is our responsibility. There are some things in life which I have to be left free to do myself and which neither you nor anyone may do for me. I have to do my own eating and drinking. I have to do my own dying. These you cannot do for me.

I have to do my own loving—loving my God, my fellow humans. You may love them, too, but that would be your love for them, not mine. You may not relieve me of that responsibility. I have to be free to do my own thinking. You may advise me, but it is I finally who must make my decisions if I am to be held responsible for them. I may be a member of an oppressed people—say, a disinherited American citizen or an overrun foreigner—and you may be willing to fight for my freedom. But you are not free to take my responsibility for me, my own responsibility to be free, free even from you. I am responsible for that freedom, responsible to Someone greater than both of us.

Freedom is your responsibility, also as students. Student freedom is not only your right. It is your duty, frankly, whether you desire it or not. Just which freedoms in particular you ought to have may be an open question. Such questions are still negotiable. But this much, now already, is sure: If as students you are being retarded, stunted, in your shouldering of your responsibilities, then to that extent you are not as free as you ought to be—as you ought to be, as you are obligated to be, not merely as you have a right to be.

For example, there may be daily roll-calls to check your class-attendance, pop quizzes to motivate your homework, a prescribed curriculum to protect you against your own bad choices, acres of real estate to insure your environment, a likeminded peer group all moving on the same vocational track, a synodical “system” providing you an eight-year planned society. Are these conditions debilitating? Not necessarily. They might even be liberating. But if these conditions were to disable you from accepting your own responsibilities—especially in view of the profession you are entering, which gives you more responsible freedom than any other profession does—and if conditions like these were still retarding your responsibility as seminarians in professional school, perhaps with wives and families of your own, then those conditions, to put it modestly, would be depriving you of a freedom you ought to have, a freedom you not merely have a right to have but are obligated to have. Freedom, also student freedom, is your responsibility.

+  +  +

Freedom is a mirror. Freedom can show me up for what I am. Leave me free to face my responsibilities, and I have to face up to myself. The ten-year-old boy insists to his father, “At my age I should be free to start smoking.” His father reasons with him, but with no success. Finally he says to the boy, “All right, son, you’re free to try it.” When the boy does and, in the process, turns green and everything around him begins to spin, the boy has learned something about smoking, about ten-year-olds, about himself. His freedom was a mirror.

The prodigal son asked for his inheritance and for the freedom to set out on his own. Reluctantly his father gave him that freedom. Later, when the son sat penniless and defeated among the husks in the far country, he had made a discovery, “Father, I am not worthy to be called your son.”

Freedom is a mirror. When I insist on bearing my responsibilities, as indeed I must, I also have to bear the consequences and face the truth about myself—whoever I may be. I may be the American business community, free to take responsibility for the national “inheritance.” But suppose that in my freedom—though I’m never convinced I have enough of it—I nevertheless become prodigal and waste the nation’s substance, pollute its air and its water, give only token consideration to its unemployables, and exploit its consumers. Then my freedom, the freedom of American business, only mirrors my unworthiness to be free.

I may be The American Family, free to take responsibility for my family members. But suppose that in this freedom I mortgage myself to death on creature comfort yet begrudge the cost of my youngsters’ and other peoples’ youngsters’ education. Suppose what I show these youngsters of married life forever ruins their respect for it. Suppose I abandon their spiritual care to a Sunday School and their grandparents to loneliness and a little Medicare. Then my freedom, the freedom of the American family, only mirrors my unworthiness to be free.

I may be The American Student, liberated more and more from the old restrictions of curriculum and grading system and campus discipline, free more and more to take responsibility for my own education. But suppose that in my new freedom I flunk my courses or just squeak by with the barest minimum, find it increasingly difficult to get myself to classes anymore and increasingly tempting to blame my uninteresting teachers—as though I were really that dependent upon my teachers.

Worse yet, suppose that in my new freedom it suddenly becomes clear how little responsibility I accept for my delinquent fellow students, how little responsibility for getting them to class or helping them to excel, and how little responsibility we students all accept for our own mutual discipline and encouragement, as students.

Then see what the mirror of my student freedom reflects. It reflects not only that I’ve done poorly in a course, not only that I may have to spend an extra semester in seminary, not only that my financial aid will be reduced, not only that the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to read this book or hear that lecture is forever forfeited, not only that the student brotherhood has been deprived of my help. No, the worst of it is, my student freedom then mirrors my unworthiness to be free.

Yes, freedom is a mirror, an accusing mirror. It is the mirror of the divine judgment. The more freedom we have, the more it incriminates us. But it’s the same even when people hesitate to trust us with freedom. Whether their distrust is justified or not, their restrictions upon us are implicit judgments upon us. And not only their judgments. Their judgments in turn mirror the judgment by God. And that his judgment is justified there can be no doubt.

That, finally, is why freedom is so costly. It costs us every last pretense about our own importance. It exacts from us the ultimate confession, that we cannot justify the freedom we have. No wonder so many among us, also so many students, cop out on the drive for freedom. It isn’t worth the effort, they alibi. But that isn’t all it isn’t worth, namely, the “effort.” Perhaps what they really mean is, it isn’t worth the painful truth which freedom uncovers about ourselves.

No wonder so many among us, also so many students who do stump for freedom, are those who kid themselves about their ability to handle it. They haven’t counted the real cost in self-honesty. Still, as we also said, we have no right to run away from our freedom, as mortifying as it finally is, and as it is meant to be. We have no right not to be free, no right to evade that ultimate exposure.

From that dilemma there is no buying our own way out. Freedom is a hard-bought thing, freedom is a responsibility, freedom is a mirror.

That, alas, is freedom with a small f.

…to be continued