with lust—I mean love—for each other? Love is costly, consuming, and fanatical, says the Song of Solomon. Apparently, God has got this thing for us almost like lust. Just before being hung by the Nazis in Tegel Prison, Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Bethge that he had been meditating on, of all the books of the Bible, the Song of Solomon and found there much strong comfort that "nothing calamitous can happen" when we are loved by such an "ardent, passionate, sensual love that is portrayed there."1 Nothing calamitous—even as catastrophic as the Nazis—can happen to the person who has been ravished, claimed, embraced by such salvific love.
It is scandalous too that the New Testament dares to call the poor old church Christ's "bride." The church is invited by God to do what husbands and wives do in marriage. The bride nervously awaits the full consummation of Christ's love, recipient of a kind of arranged marriage. She is besmirched, unworthy of such adoration by one so pure and good. Still, she knows that she is betrothed, spoken for by the Savior who will keep his promise to fulfill his passionate intention to make love to sinners (Rev 21:2, 9). Jesus looks upon the poor old church the way a proper groom looks upon his bride.
God erotically risks, desires union with humanity. So God comes close enough to be not only God for us but also God with us. In what biblical writers call "the fullness of time" God steps up, steps in, and steps out in a most amazing overture of love. The God who was from the first so joyously creative extends that divine creativity to become Incarnate. A defiant young woman (Mary) submits to be a fellow conspirator in God's dramatic, miraculous move on humanity (Luke 1:46-55). Swept up in God's invasion of God's world, she bears a son with the revealing name, "God is with us" (Matt 1:23).
Think of all those images in John's Gospel where Jesus stresses intimacy. He not only comes to us but "abides" with us. He is the shepherd, and we are the sheep; he the vine, we the branches. Bread, we are to feed upon him. He is the Water of Life who eternally quenches our thirst. Almost never does this God seek simple agreement or correct thinking. God seeks us, all of us. God's goal for us is intimacy, indwelling. Not I, "but . . . Christ who lives in me," said Paul (Gal 2:20).
In Islam, at least from my amateurish reading of the Qur'an, there is this constant distancing of God, apparently as a means of honoring God. The God who is rendered in Islam is noble and exalted, at some remove from the world, God as absolute and majestic as a god can get. You would have to know the incarnational story that I've just narrated to know why that's a problem. Christians don't know that God is sovereign, noble, exalted, absolute, high, and lifted up. We know that God is Immanuel, love with us, for us.
By the way, we do not take it as a compliment that Islam regards Jesus as a great prophet. Jesus is a prophet, but prophets, even the most truthful and courageous of them, cannot save. They can announce salvation, but they can't do it. Jesus is not just preparing us for the last prophet, Muhammad; Jesus redeems us so that we are free to stop awaiting prophets to tell us what to do because a Savior has already acted in our behalf. Jesus is not simply the one who shows the way; he is the way (John 14:6). It appears that Muslims think of the Qur'an in the same way that we think of Jesus. (I'll admit that there are some Christians whose fundamentalist views of Scripture are more akin to Islam than to Orthodox Christianity.) The Holy Qur'an, recited by Muhammad, is the way that Muslims get to a sovereign, majestic, exalted God who intersects history. The Crucifixion, so vehemently denied by the Qur'an2 (for it is outrageous for a true prophet to suffer such a fate) is for Christians a window into the heart of God. When we see God next to us, stooped toward us, in the muck and mire with us in order to have us, that's what Christians call God.
The biblical testimony of God as the waiting father, the passionate lover is difficult for us because as modern people we are creations of the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, the individual was invented as the sovereign, supreme center of reality. Human beings were said to be most fully developed when they are most completely self-sufficient, selfmade, and self-reliant. The truly developed person learns to shed social connections and restraints and stand alone, stripped of relations. From a Christian point of view, in the Enlightenment the modern self did not grow; it shrank. The thin contemporary self, a creation of the individual's choices of the moment, responsible only for itself, having no greater project than itself was the self shed of the very qualities that previously were thought to be most humane. Therefore, to be told that salvation is tethered to a God who connects, a God whose Trinitarian nature is inherently relational, communitarian, and communicative, is to encounter a God who appears to be against everything in which we believe. There is a reason why there is no God in the Harry Potter novels. Potter is not only good entertainment but also training in how to get by in the modern world alone, yet with an active imagination.
Christians have the intellectual means for devising one of the most pessimistic assessments of human nature. We really do believe that all of us, all, are sinners, all the way down, gleefully on our way to hell in a handbasket. Believing this enabled me to say—when George W. Bush told us that we were going into Iraq for the very best of motives to do the very best of work—"Probably not." When told that the purpose of our war was "Enduring Freedom," I responded, "Probably not." By the way, belief in the persistence of sin also enabled me to say (quietly, to myself), when someone said that I was one of the most selfless, godly bishops ever, "Probably not."
We are able to be pessimistic about human motives and achievements (most especially our own) because we are optimistic about the ultimate triumph of a God who saves the ungodly. Ephesians says that we are as good as dead but that, in our salvation, God pulls off nothing less than resurrection. Confidence in the salvific triumph of God enables us to tell the truth about us. We are sad, scary beings, but God,
who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God. (Eph 2:4-8)
For most of the people to whom I've preached, the most challenging words in this Pauline passage are that salvation "is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God." Reasonably well fixed, fairly well off, mostly successful in getting anything we want through our checkbooks, we are surprised that there is anything, including our situation with God, that is not the result of our own doing, anything that is pure gift, grace. As Scripture teaches, "salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22). Salvation is not what we desire or earn. We must, therefore, submit to Scripture, must bow to Jews and their testimony; we must allow ourselves to be welcomed into the salvific promises of God to Israel.
Creation implies donation. In a world that is created, all is gift. This is a difficult truth for those of us who are modern and who have, therefore, been taught to believe that all good is an achievement of our sole fabrication. Knowledge is reduced to power, a possession, the accumulation of which enables us better to dominate the world. Plato (and Augustine) taught that in order really to know something, the would-be knower must be willingly seduced by the object of knowing, to fall in love with what is to be known, to enjoy erotic participation in the object of our knowing. We, however, want to know in order to dominate, to use. In a world of utility, there is paucity of gratitude and little real joy.
God help you if you try to think about a gratuitous matter like salvation in this utilitarian way. Christians are taught to believe that everything is only what we have been given. Augustine was fond of quoting 1 Corinthians 4:7 which he translates as, "What do you have that you haven't received? And if you have received it, why boast as if you hadn't?"
Salvation, from our side, is acceptance rather than decision, result, or program because salvation is, in the words of Paul, "free gift":
The grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. . . . If, because of the one man's trespass [Adam],
