Unlike so many, I’m sad to hear that Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury will be stepping down soon as primate of the Church of England. Here’s something interesting of his that I read again the other day:
“…which of us does “love” God?
I remember, ages ago, talking to a young Chinese Marxist student, who amazed me by saying, “of course, priesthood [I had him I hoped to be ordained] is unrewarding, but you won’t mind that, because you love God.” I was amazed and rather appalled, because I couldn’t imagine why he should think I loved God; as soon as he’d said it, I knew it wasn’t true. After all, what was it to love God? The saints loved God: their whole lives revolved around God, they wept and laughed and danced for love of him. When St. John of the Cross was staying at a convent over Christmas, one of the sisters saw him, when he thought no one was looking, picking up the figure of the child Jesus from the crib. He hugged it close to his chest and then, with eyes closed, danced around the crib for a few minutes. Well, that, it seems, is love of God: a devotion that makes people more than a little dotty, that produces an all-pervading warmth and delight, an incommunicable gladness beyond all words. “My beloved is mine and I am his”; Jesu, the very thought is sweet; In that dear name all pleasures meet”…St. Aelred of Rievaulx on his deathbed murmuring “Christ, Christ, Christ” unceasingly; Francis of Assisi literally crying himself blind in his long vigils of prayer.
If this is loving God, most of us don’t.” – Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) “Loving God” in “A Ray of Darkness” p. 127
In Christian history in the West, there have been two Traditions on the notion of loving God. The one Tradition comes from the Wesleyans and the Holiness Movement, building on the Catholic Tradition which says that we can love God, and that Christianity is in a sense, a growth of our love for God, which he pours into us by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5 – St. Augustine’s favourite verse). In this model even if we don’t know whether God will save us or not, we can still have pure love for him just because of who He is.
On the contrary, the Reformed and Lutheran Tradition affirms that the only love worth the name is God’s love / agape. In this model it is noted that love is ‘not that we loved God, but that he loved us’ (1 Jn. 4:10), and that as sinful human beings we can’t love God. Since love is the perfect fulfillment of the law, and we can’t keep the law, it follows that even with the Holy Spirit we can’t love God, or if we can, we do it in a very imperfect fashion.
The history of the Church shows great men of devotion and moral probity holding to either view, even though they are mutually exclusive. In any case, the first necessary thing in history as in theology is to be passionate to find an answer, not necessarily having an answer. Today my friend and I had a conversation on this subject, and as Christians we disagreed on it. As my old bible school principal once said, each group picks their prooftexts and holds to their arguments and does their best to ignore their opponents, who do the same. You pay your money and you get your ticket.