There is hardly a week that passes when Christian pastors and ministers from across denominations don\u2019t use their time at the pulpit to admonish their flocks to love as Christ loved. As the Christian world prepares itself for the Passion and Resurrection of its Savior during this Holy Week, such calls to love intensify.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To be certain, Christians are called\u2014are commanded\u2014by their Lord to love. <\/em>\u00a0As St. Paul said, of the three \u201ctheological\u201d virtues, faith, hope, and love, the greatest of these is love.<\/p>\n But those of us who aspire to be the disciples of Jesus are also called to hate.\u00a0 <\/em>In fact, it is precisely because<\/em> we are called to love that we are called to hate, and to hate with every ounce of the zeal, the devotion, the aching, with which we are expected to love.\u00a0 The paradox here is only apparent:<\/p>\n The love of God and neighbor with which Christians are consumed is inseparable from the intense hatred of evil and sin demanded of them.<\/p>\n Yet Christians hear relatively little about their obligation in Christ to burn with hatred for corruption.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is nothing short of a scandal.\u00a0<\/p>\n First, while it is true that, as St. John said in his First Epistle, God is <\/em>Love, it is equally true that God is Justice.\u00a0 The God of the Bible\u2014both the Old <\/em>Testament as well as the New\u2014<\/em>is a God of infinite compassion.\u00a0 But He is also a God who rewards and punishes. In stressing God\u2019s mercy at the expense of neglecting His wrath, Christians do a gross disservice to both, for divine mercy and divine wrath are meaningful only when each is understood in light of the other.<\/p>\n One can\u2019t know God unless one knows about His love and <\/em>His justice.<\/p>\n Second, when justice is<\/em> mentioned in connection with love in many Christian churches nowadays\u2014particularly Roman Catholic churches like the one that I attend\u2014it always refers to something that Christians from times past wouldn\u2019t have recognized as justice at all: so-called \u201csocial <\/em>justice.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Yet social justice is what I will call No <\/em>Justice.\u00a0 No Justice is a doctrine, favored by secular, atheistic leftists and far too many Christians alike, that the government must confiscate the resources in time, labor, and property from those to whom they belong and \u201credistribute\u201d them to those who have less.\u00a0 This is the ugly reality of No Justice. \u00a0<\/p>\n No Justice is injustice.\u00a0 Far from supporting \u201csocial justice,\u201d as a Christian, I am duty-bound to detest it.\u00a0 And I detest it for the same reason that I detest slavery: it is manifestly unjust for one person or group <\/em>to coerce others, for whatever reasons, to part with the fruits of their labor.<\/p>\n It is unjust for one person or group to coerce others to subsidize activities to which the latter never consented and to which their consciences may very well be opposed.<\/p>\n But it is exactly this of which No Justice consists.<\/p>\n We should not be misled by any of this into thinking that it is only the evil of the government for which Christians are to reserve their hatred, much less that only government is capable of evil.\u00a0 The disciples of Jesus know as well as anyone that such is the ubiquity of evil in the world that it even infects their own hearts.<\/p>\n Still, while Christian clergy will talk much about sin in the abstract, they seem to studiously avoid mentioning many specifics.\u00a0 And even when they urge the members of their flocks to look within, they routinely counsel them to be \u201cless judgmental\u201d of others, and more mindful of their own sins.\u00a0 But turning a blind eye to the wickedness of others is a recipe for the perfection, not <\/em>of virtue, but of vice.<\/p>\n It has not infrequently been noted\u2014but not noted enough\u2014that the vicious are a better source of moral guidance than are the virtuous.\u00a0 By way of his life sentence behind bars, a convict stands a far better chance of deterring a reckless adolescent male from a life of crime than that of his honest father who constantly pleads with his beloved son to walk the straight and narrow path.\u00a0 All of the Surgeon General\u2019s warnings regarding the potential dangers of cigarette smoking aren\u2019t going to persuade young, healthy smokers from indulging their habit of choice.\u00a0 The sight of a lifelong smoker suffering from lung cancer, however, might do the trick.<\/p>\n Similarly, for Christians to learn about and hate evil as they should, they must <\/em>judge, and judge unequivocally, judge passionately, the wickedness of others.\u00a0 We first spot evil when it is outside of us, and it is vastly easier at that point to recognize it in all of its hideousness. Noticing and judging the evil of others is an indispensable step to noticing and judging the evil in our own hearts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Noticing and judging the evil of others is an indispensable step to knowing and loving God and neighbor. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is hardly a week that passes when Christian pastors and ministers from across denominations don\u2019t use their time at the pulpit to admonish their flocks to love as Christ loved. As the Christian world prepares itself for the Passion and Resurrection of its Savior during this Holy Week, such calls to love intensify.\u00a0 To…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n