Love's Way Exercise

God is love, and the love of God pours into our hearts through his Spirit. Love is the greatest commandment, Jesus' new commandment, the Spirit's firstfruit, and what Paul tells us to aim for. You are what you love, and you are how you love.

This course is borne out of God's love. It testifies to God's love, explores it, subjects everything to it, aims for it, and serves it. Of course, none of that might have brought you here. You might be in Doctrine out of love of a degree, a career, your family, achievement, status, a good grade, 'learning for its own sake' ... who knows. Higher education can be confusing. It can be disorienting. It can bait and switch. We need to be careful to guard our hearts.

How's your love? How can this course help?

We led the semester with the topic of faith, hope, and love. This exercise allows you to circle back to that original and ultimate topic in Christian doctrine as an exercise, then work on shaping your loves.

Before you begin, create the file in which all of your work will go, if possible on the cloud. Make sure it's regularly backed up! Then add all that follows and submit it to Canvas at the end.

Part One: Go through this initial exercise in the semester's first three weeks. It ought to take an hour or less. Number the sections in your written comments.

1. Here’s a focused summary of our semester. Let’s call it ‘the Way’—my version anyway:

All creation is the work of Israel’s holy, loving God. Love is relational virtue that wills others’ good, not out of ordinary human passions and impulses but in the Triune God’s grace and truth. Augustine called existence a worshipful hierarchy of loves, which sin misplaces and disorders. Jesus occupies both God’s rightful place in that hierarchy and ours. Christ’s love replaces and reorders ours in his atoning work and official roles. Remaining in him draws us into God’s ‘dance of love’ and transforms us in his likeness. The Father's loving heart is the motive of the mission of the Son and Holy Spirit to reconcile the world to God and one another through disciples' action and testimony. Our fundamental relationships in the church catholic come down to obedient and participatory love that passes on the Lord’s. Remaining in it strengthens our obedience to his commandments and grows in us firm hope, stronger and greater trust, and the Spirit’s fruit of joy, patience, self-control, and the like. We invite and await Christ’s judgment to transform and restore the unjust world that he rules with love’s authority. If the narrative framework of our faith and our course is life from the Father, death in the Son, and resurrection through the Holy Spirit, then its substance is love—the particular love that the Triune God is.

Do you believe this? (And why or why not? How solid are your reasons?)

2a. Imagine someone you care about asked you, in all seriousness: What is love? Take these steps to shape an answer that isn’t just an echo of our popular culture’s notions of ‘love’:

Recall an image from lecture, a Bible passage, concept, or song that grabbed you this semester.

2b. Consult 1 John 4:7–5:5. Trace connections: e.g., loving, obeying, Holy Spirit, abiding, knowing. What stands out that helps you answer?

2c. Tie in other book and lecture material that fleshes out the specifically Christian meaning of the claims in that passage in ways especially significant to you. (This is 'review for the final.')

3a. What kind of life does that call for?

3b. Review the 'church circle' from Acts 2. How does Christian fellowship facilitate the love in 1 John 4–5?

3c. How does that compare with your priorities in life? (Both this year, and in your life as a whole.)

4a. What loves brought you to college? List better and worse ones, evaluating them.

Review 1 Corinthians 13 for Paul’s guidance on (a) ends, and (b) things (like church, and college too) that can either be means to those ends, or distractions and distortions, then answer the questions that follow. Here’s my summary:

12:31 Yes, seek the Spirit’s gifts. Yet love’s way is far better:
13:1-3 Wrong ways: Christianity without love.
13:4-7 Love, and things we mistake for it.
13:8-10 Means: gifts that can help.
13:11-12 Growing up: living for the future.
13:13 Ends: the life that lasts.
14:1 Therefore: Aim for love, and go for the Spirit’s gifts.
4b. How is college shaping your loves? List better and worse ways. What things, even good things, distract you from the Way? What things distort it into something like a dead end? What things return you to it and speed you along?

4c. What twists and turns in your time in college have improved your loves (not just grown them), and what have degraded or misdirected them? I have in mind unpredictable and uncontrollable things like a broken relationship, a pandemic, something you learned, an injury, a beautiful unexpected friendship, a losing or winning season, a book you read, and so on.

4d. The Father Glorified shows that God shows sacrificial love to people far from him and calls disciples to do the same in his name. How have your intentional acts of love, perhaps for those you've identified with the 'five fingers' technique, shown them that they are loved and significant?

5. In sum, where has God been in your college saga?

Part Two: After you have completed that part, then proceed with this phase, which lasts until the due date is near:

Draw on what James K.A. Smith says in ...this lecture...  to engage the course material with what he calls "love-shaping habits" in ways that develop a love of God and/or neighbor. (For instance, you might make it a practice to pray for and serve members of a DBS group who share what they're struggling with; you might establish a discipline of contemplative prayer or personal worship after a lecture, book chapter, or DBS 'do and tell' resolution; if you're confused or put off, you can take that to the Lord in prayer. You might enrich your loving service to others on your 'five fingers' list, or align your service more fully with God's Kingdom in light of what you've learned. Smith's book will surely kindle other ideas.)

Over the course of the semester, write at least three entries that each articulate how (a) some aspect of the course (a lecture, a book, a written assignment, an activity) has developed that love; (b) what in your life (perhaps the course itself!) has interfered or threatened to interfere with that development; and (c) how you responded to counter or overcome that threat.

You may wish to conclude with a brief summative reflection of some kind, treating the general relationship between Christian theology and fruitful love.

Then submit the whole thing.

Remember, I always want to see proper style, clear writing, a thorough answer to the question, and explicit citations of course materials. I hope that after this assignment you have refined your loves and maintained or restored your focus on what matters most in your life and your education.