Dear Reader:

Your question makes me think of a promising young German theologian who was visiting America in 1939. He was keeping track of the ugly rise of fascism in his country, and he had every reason to remain in the US for his own safety. Plenty of seminaries would have been happy to employ him. But he felt a moral obligation to return to Germany to do his part to resist the evil being done in and by his country.

Before leaving, he wrote a farewell letter to American’s leading theologian of the time, Reinhold Niebuhr, to explain his reason for leaving. “Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that … civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make this choice in security.” (1)

This young theologian (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) did not put the smaller “us” of his country as more important than the larger “we” of civilization. He widened his perspective. In theological terms, Bonhoeffer referred to European civilization as “our civilization” and as “Christian civilization.”

He let his personal circle of care and concern expand to more fully approximate God’s circle of care and concern.

That’s the challenge we face on many levels. The evil we see again and again is not simply hate (although there is plenty of hate around). It is, rather, love that is too small.

I love me but not my family.

I love my family but not my neighbors.

I love my neighbors but not the stranger, the outsider, the outcast, the other.

I love the people of my race, party, nation, economic system, or religion, but not those outside.

I love all humanity alive today, but I don’t care or even think about the human beings of the 22nd or 28th century.

I love our current human civilization, but I don’t really care about the birds of the air, the insects of the meadow, the whales of the sea, the forests of the valley, the climate of the planet.

So, at a time like this, don’t love your country less. But don’t limit your love to the size of your country. Let your love grow deeper and wider, and then deeper and wider still. Your love for the larger whole will help you bear your sorrow for the bad turn that our little country has taken. And if you and enough of your neighbors are able to do the same—to let our love grow deeper and wider during this tough time, our bigger love will have the power to heal what is now so obviously broken.

~ Brian McLaren

----------

(1) See James Lawson, Jr., “A Nation Faces Its Own ‘Terrible Alternatives."