The Soul of Christianity by Huston Smith

Author:Huston Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

If a young man found himself thus changed by the interest a human being had shown in him, perhaps we can understand the way the early Christians were changed by feeling certain that they were totally loved—not abstractly or in principle but vividly and personally—by one who united all power and all goodness. If we too felt loved this way, the experience could dissolve fear, guilt, and self-concern dramatically. As Kierkegaard noted, if at every moment both present and future we were certain that nothing has happened or could ever happen that would separate us from the infinite love of the Infinite, that would be the clearest reason there is for joy.

God’s love is precisely what the first Christians did feel. They had experienced Jesus’s love and had become convinced that Jesus was God incarnate. Once that love reached them, it could not be stopped. Melting the barriers of fear, guilt, and self-centeredness, it poured through them like a torrential stream, heightening the love they had hitherto felt for others to the point where the difference in degree became a difference in kind. A new quality, Christian love, was born. Conventional love is evoked by lovable qualities in the beloved, but the love that people encountered from Christ embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies. It gave, not prudentially in order to receive, but because giving was its nature. Paul’s famous description of Christian love in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians ought not to be read as if he were describing a quality that was already known. His words list the attributes of a specific person, Jesus Christ. In phrases of unparalleled beauty, it describes the divine love that Paul believed Christians would reflect toward others once they experienced Christ’s love for them. The reader should approach Paul’s words in the understanding that they define a novel capacity that, as it had been fully realized “in the flesh” only in Christ, Paul was describing for the first time:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

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