Loving Your Way Into the Kingdom

A few months ago I gave a chapel talk for the students in our Honors College. They are a wickedly smart group of students. And they are beginning that journey where they are asking hard questions of the Christian faith. As they should.

By my message was this. You can't think your way into the Kingdom of Heaven. You can only love your way into the Kingdom.

And love, to borrow a point from James Smith, is always aimed at a vision of the good, a vision of human flourishing. Love is always desiring a Kingdom.

So what sort of Kingdom are you desiring, loving and craving? That's the question I posed.

For me, I said, the Kingdom of God looks like how Jesus moved through the world. That's the vision of the Kingdom I'm loving my way toward. In that sense, Jesus is my aesthetic, how I judge was is beautiful and ugly in my life and in the world.

Christianity, I told the students, is the practice of an incarnational aesthetics.

Loving your way toward something beautiful, loving your way into the Kingdom of God.

This entry was posted by Richard Beck. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply