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Also, the writer’s appeal to impartiality does not distinguish any difference in treating those who belong to the Christian communion and those outside it, including those in other faith communions. If the writer did speak of this as a matter pertaining only to the Christian communion, then, he would have been denying his premise of essential impartiality or universal love.
Indeed, the more one joins with this Love, then, the more easily she senses oneness with all peoples and, likewise, her loving becomes more universalizing, until to love one person is the same as loving another, and loving all, and labels like “Christian” lose the extent of prior motivation for loving. Love becomes its own motive, own reason, and own dignity. She no longer needs to practice Buddhist love, Christian love, Muslim love, for she has experienced a union with Love itself, a Love which sources all aspirations of and appeals to love everyone equally. Without this Love, there would be no potential for loving, truly and impartially. And, love otherwise would be partial, including loving with an intent to win someone over to my group or belief, often opinion. Then, her love is most Christian, most Buddhist, most Christian, become exactly what Jesus taught and the writer of James, likewise.
This Love pulls the Christian, the Sufi, the Taoist, the Vedantist, … to the Embrace within which all loving exists and without which religion is a contradiction and will undergo inertia and, thankfully, death. For outside this Love and loving there is no hope for peace, brotherhood, and sisterhood, as well as loving across the boundaries of politics, faiths, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, and class. This Love is Boundless Loving, and this Love relies not on the apparent worth or merit of neither the recipient, nor the apparent worth or merit of the giver, and in Loving the other is drawn to be a sharer in this Love. Yes, the other becomes the Other.
This Love, to speak of inherent Reason, intends to dissolve all partializing boundaries, sacralized and secularized, which separate us from each other. And, to the extent that anyone in the name of God uses the name of God to create partializing boundaries, then, that is blasphemy. Rather, this Love, which seeks not to annihilate our differences, attempts to enrich all persons and peoples through the richness and good within our differences. This makes Love universalizing. This means Love is Love.
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The writer’s words model for the faith community the very spirit which is to distinguish a Christian community as truly Christian, which is none other than being fully human and a universalizing communion devoted to Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit. Verse 12 provides that spirit of Christ-in-Community, as well as Christ-as-Community, in referring to the “royal law” about loving others as much as we love ourselves. The verb “you shall love” is, literally, “you will certainly God-Love (agaphseiv, from agapao)” or “love as God loves.” This is taken from Leviticus 19.18, which has, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (NRSV). Generally, “neighbor” in the Hebrew Scripture refers to fellow citizens. New Testament writers open the term up to be inclusive of all persons, which was a radical move in the direction of universalizing the Jewish faith.
Therefore, Wesley observes that this is, in essence, “the gospel” and the “law of universal love,” and a principle that is the only way to “perfect freedom.” Therefore, for Wesley, being true to the Gospel, there is no difference among “the gospel” and “universal love” and “perfect freedom.” To be outside the gospel, as the good news in Christ, is to be outside universal love. To be outside universal love is not to know perfect freedom. These three are one reality: gospel, universal love, perfect freedom. To be in either, is to be in each and all together.
Returning to the appeals to the “brothers” or “friends,” we get another hint into the nature of Christian community or, better, Christo-form Communion, which transcends culturally defined parameters of “Christian.” Adelfoi is a plural, combining a from biblical Hebrew, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Delfoi is from delphus, the word for “womb.” Therefore, the spirit of Christian community is a kinship of persons of and from the same womb. The womb from which we each derive being is Being, our common Creator.
The writer leads us to see that our treatment of all persons has both an objective and subjective rationale, demonstrating again that all ethics is rooted in wisdom and is not simply a proposition imposed legally. The objective basis of equality in community is Scripture. Someone could ask, “Why should I treat persons fairly, without prejudice?” A legitimate response is, “Impartial love is an ethical imperative that Scripture places on us each and together?” Scripture does not offer this universal principle, or law, as an option. Then, someone could ask, “Still, why should I treat persons fairly, without prejudice?” Another response is, “For you participate in a union of innate, universal kinship, which delineates that impartial love is your Source and the Source of everyone else. Therefore, logically, to act in impartiality is both a contradiction of your nature, as well as an act against the essence of the other.”
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