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Bruce Baker's avatar

Randy, thanks for this post. It was insightful and thought provoking. It inspired the following loosely related ramble. I’m not sure it’s very helpful, but in the interest of helping your algorithm, here it is!

I was recently made aware of a debate in certain online circles concerning the virtue of loving humanity in the abstract vs loving an humans in the particular. I also noticed this same debate happening in the Brothers Karamazav when I read it this winter. The argument goes something like, it’s easy send money to charity or feel compassion for the poor when you don’t interact with the people you’re “helping” because when you get close to someone they may reject your charity, or take it without gratitude, or simply offend you by their social awkwardness or odor. Each of us is annoying to our neighbor in the particular where we are not in the aggregate.

I think both sorts or, better yet, modes of love are important since it is my love for the unknown neighbor which motivates me to steward resources for great grandchildren who I may never meet and to vote in favor of civil liberties for men and women of different religious convictions though I don’t know them personally. Yet, I think, it is more difficult and probably more virtuous to love the neighbor that I know by name. Furthermore our love for individuals, like our children, often motivates us to love the aggregates to which they belong, like the next generation.

I suppose it’s appropriate to love the individuals and the aggregates in different ways. To confuse these two modes of love is tempting but unhelpful. I think we love our congregations well when we build good systems by which we incorporate new members into the organic life of the church, like a membership or baptism class. But never allow these systems to treat individuals as aggregates. We do our people a disservice if we think programming and equipping are the totality of our pastoral work. Maybe small church thinking can serve as the soil of a pastoral philosophy from which biblically faithful, human-scaled systems can grow.

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Bob Stouffer's avatar

You hit the BULLS-EYE, Randy!

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