Love and the Transformation of the Moral Imagination

So how are the moral ends of righteousness accomplished in the new covenant that Jesus accomplished?

If Christ is our righteousness, what can we add to our salvation? Our righteousness will never replace the atonement of Christ, the victory he offers us in the resurrection, or the position we inhabit with Christ in Heavenly places. Yet obviously the pursuit of living a righteous life is still the goal of followers of Jesus, our lives are still to conform to the image of Christ. The consequences of sin and brokenness are obvious, so much so that we often resort to weak moralisms and our pragmatism only results in trying to obey empty laws for the sake of avoiding destruction. If new covenant faith is supposed to result in the witness of our love drawing in the nations, then how does that happen? Is it through a top down, outside-in approach to behavior modification? Is it a law based guilt and power move on behalf of God to pressure us into change?

What if the gift of the Spirit on Pentecost was even deeper than Pentecostals or charismatics give it credit for? What if the gift of the Spirit and the tongues of flame on our heads was the beginning of the Father writing his law on our heart with the same  firery finger he engraved the Ten Commandments on the top of Mt Sinai.

If it is no longer circumcision that guarantees entry into Israel (Gal 5:5) what if it is the Spirit who empowers faith to work itself through love in our hearts has become the signifier of being in God’s Family?

If we were created as images of God, we were made to reflect our Creator. We were made to deal with our own imaging capability and power. What if God desired to transform us as much through images as word?

What if we could be missing drastic element and powerful tool that God has placed in us but yet we are not utilizing? I believe that our imaginations in combination with scripture, the Holy Spirit, and the community of God, hold the key to the transformation of our personal lives, lives of our community, and has implications into the world at large.

I believe that faithful reading of scripture, to the depth of ability we currently own, and through instruction of faithful readers and interpreters of scripture, we can be transformed simply by reading. But within the story of God, we can also see the ways in which our imaginations play a critical role to go beyond reading. King David said he meditated on the law of God day and night. This is not just, the 10 Commandments, or the law codes, but these were the narratives of Israel, their origins in creation, the stories of the patriarchs, the release from slavery in Egypt, and the conquest of the promised land. David immersed himself in the story, in order to know who God was so that in his remembrance, his imaginations would be filled with images of those that have gone before.

This is also true with Christ, if his meditations weren’t simply the musings of a lawyer, accountant, or a systematic theologian simply concerned with propositional truth, Jesus had meditations that imaged the stories within the history of his people, and through the power of the holy spirit, made connections to his own life and ministry, as both the source of meaning and guidance. Jesus imagined in depth, the full breath of characters and scenes of the Old Testament narratives which gave him ground to break his people free from the shackles of moralistic human power, to see the hopes of Israel in the law through the miracle of the exodus, instead of ignoring the miracle working God and only envisioning freedom through the materialism of earthly authority and the exertion of state violence.

This is also true, for the disciples who followed Christ and mimicked his actions and his authority, in the power of the spirit. I believe we are to see Christ in our world in the full breath, political and social complexity, crossing the awkward boundaries of unspoken norms, to see him break through our binary ways of thought, and to create a new way that unlocks are minds and our bodies into new ways of being in the world. I believe the spirit can give us images of how Jesus would walk down our streets, what words of affirmation and love he might speak to our forgotten neighbor, what sort of help he would give to the lonely single mother next-door, or how he might lays hands on the homeless person who lives on our corner to see him take up his mat and walk.

If the law is love, and it is written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit, it is no longer an external law that we obey with a broken will, then God must give us words and pictures of what the law of love means in our life. This demands that we immerse ourselves in the story of God to learn God‘s way of love, to re-picture ourselves in his story, then re-picture our world, listening, for what love might say over it. We then begin to desire these images of love that the spirit has put on us, working its way into our hearts, softening Our hardness. We begin to replace the images that corporate America, or the military, have placed in our hearts as images of desire, of adventure, of meaning, and we replace them with images of Christ in our world, Christ loving our neighbor, Christ loving our spouse, and we see these images, not as selfish aspirations, but as now our own hopes and dreams. We now get to participate in God‘s heart. We now have the law of love written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and if it is, our desire will fulfill those deep narratives and satisfying images of God’s kingdom come to earth.

I believe Jesus wants to start with us in our own habits and practices, our own ways of being in the world, so that the compounding effect of his people listening to his voice, and watching his actions in their world, would create an overwhelming force of transformation at the gates of hell could not Handle. I believe we are to be discipled together by the spirit through our imaginations, but I don’t think the world is ready for it.