“A love that left people alone in their guilt would not be real love.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1990, 1995), 217.

Bonhoeffer was speaking about the love Christ had for humanity. By taking on human flesh, by being found among the guilty, by taking that guilt upon himself, Christ was loving the world with a real love, not an idealized one. The world Christ loved was also a real one, not an idealized one. Any ‘ism’ practiced in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in the twentieth century lauded the idealized society at the expense of the real one, at the expense of the actual human being. Human beings, flawed, broken, sinful, real human beings, are an inconvenience to the idealized society and, it seems, to the idealized church. Purification campaigns, societal or ecclesiastical, fail to account for the Jesus who actually came, whose incarnation affirms humanity and creation even after the fall. 

“God becomes human, really human. While we endeavor to grow out of our humanity, to leave our human nature behind us, God becomes human and we must recognize that God wants us also to become human—really human. Whereas we distinguish between the godly and the godless, the good and the evil, the noble and the common, God loves real human beings without distinction…. God takes the side of real human beings and the real world against all their accusers…. But it’s not enough to say that God takes care of human beings. This sentence rests on something infinitely deeper and more impenetrable, namely, that in the conception and birth of Jesus Christ, God took on humanity in bodily fashion. God raised his love for human beings above every reproach of falsehood and doubt and uncertainty by himself entering into the life of human beings as a human being, by bodily taking upon himself and bearing the nature, essence, guilt, and suffering of human beings. He does not seek out the most perfect human being in order to unite with that person. Rather, he takes on human nature as it is.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, ed. and trans. Edward Robertson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 151.

Programs of abstraction and idealization are not as godly as they appear. God created a diverse world, declared male and female human beings to be the ones to bear his image, and then set them to work cultivating space and filling it. Even after the fall, even after the curse, Adam still works the ground, Eve still bears children, the diversity continues to develop and expand as spaces continue to be cultivated and filled not by ideal human beings but by actual ones. This does not mean humans should be affirmed in all they do. Clearly the scriptural witness mitigates greatly against that notion. One of societies problems today is the notion that to love is to affirm, this is not true. But, to love does mean to affirm the humanity of the human being staring you in the face, the actual human being. When you look in the the eyes of another you are not looking into the eyes of an ideal, you are not looking into the eyes of an abstraction, you are looking into the eyes of a real, complex, complicated, broken, image bearer for whom Christ took on flesh and loved by making their guilt his own. This is why programs, societal or ecclesiastical, that seek to instantiate uniformity at the cost of individuality are problematic because they do violence not just to the creation but to the message sent in the incarnation, that human beings as they are still matter. 

Theology is always applied contextually, it always speaks to the moment, to the person actually listening, or it is misapplied. The law afflicts the comfortable. The gospel comforts the afflicted. This well known trope about the distinction between law and gospel makes the point on its own. Law and gospel are the two words God speaks, indeed two words that God speaks to real people, but he speaks them to people as and when they need to hear them. Walther knew this. Luther knew this. Augustine knew this. Paul knew this. Jesus knew this. The difference between Jesus and the rest of the names, between Jesus and the rest of us, is that in being the son of God, he truly is the ideal human being. He is new Adam, the new pattern. But his incarnation does not wipe out individuality, by taking on flesh he affirms humanity individually and collectively. This flesh, your flesh, their flesh matters. This guilt, your guilt, their guilt matters too—which is why he doesn’t just take on flesh, he takes on guilt, he takes on humanity as it is and restores it. In his resurrection Christ is bearing the new reality in his flesh, but he is still him, with feet, with wounds in his hands and side, with a voice that shook Mary out of her shock. 

Truth matters. Doctrine matters. I wouldn’t be any kind of pastor worthy of the office if that were not true. But those things do not matter in and of themselves as much as they matter for the sake of the real human beings, not idealized ones, that Christ’s incarnation affirmed and that his crucifixion and resurrection restored, in part even if not in full yet. That’s the other reason why programs of purification are less godly than they appear, because they usurp the authority of the one who sits at the right hand of the father. The judgment is his, the restoration is his, the purification his, not yours or mine. It could not be in safer hands than the ones wounded in bearing the guilt for real people, than the ones loving humanity as it actually is not as we want it to be.