Take & Read: Theology

The past year has exposed the fragility of life and the denial of death, the depth of cultural antagonisms and the entrenchment of its tribes, the persistence of America’s original sin and the conundrum of how the church is to be Christ’s body when actual bodies are kept at a safe remove. These realities force upon the church a broad and disconcerting question: What is Christianity all about?

What Christianity is all about and how we can live as if our lives depend upon it are the questions Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt dares to address in his beautiful primer, The Love That Is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith (Eerd­mans). In conversation with voices as diverse as Augustine and Pope Benedict, Martin Luther King Jr. and Friedrich Nietzsche, Julian of Norwich and Ignacio Ellacuría, Bauerschmidt reflects on five truths: God is love, the love that is God is crucified love, we are called to friendship with the risen Jesus, we cannot love God if we do not love each other, and we live out our love from the community created by the Spirit.

Bauerschmidt’s spare, poetic prose not only buttresses the alluring intent of his subtitle but also reinforces his thesis that the radical claim of the gospel is, at bottom, a simple aesthetic assertion: God is love, crucified love. “What Christianity is about must be something more than a collection of beliefs and behaviors; it must be a mystery that sinks its roots into the heart of life itself. This mystery, however, is mysterious not because it is complicated, but because it is so simple.”