Abstract: Truth in its fullness is beyond human apprehension. Yet humans are capable of attaining and increasing practical understanding. Thus, tradition and interpretation are rudimentary and evolving. Christian tradition presents Jesus Christ as both GOD and man: as GOD Christ is capable of comprehending the fullness of Truth, as man capable to lead humanity along the path of Life. Agape is the principal teaching of Christ. Humans are capable of internalizing instruction and realizing/materializing concepts, yet love/agape is an act of freedom not compulsion. Cunctos populous enacted the merger of the Church with the Roman Empire but also imposed Catholicism and denounced non-Catholics as enemies of GOD and the State. Hostile intolerance of outgroups contravened agape and set a precedent, along with other Western pre-Christian traditions, which served to “justify” the Crusades, the Inquisition, the militant conquest of the New World, the Christian Wars, and even the Holocaust. The Holocaust demonstrated the end result of outgroup intolerance and dehumanization. Can a family thrive without love? Is not the human race a family: children of the Father, the Source of all? The paper calls upon Christendom to recognize its xenophobic contraventions and pedagogic contradictions, repent, internalize the Gospel principles, abandon incompatible traditions, and practice the art of agape.
Keywords: Jesus Christ, agape, church, faith and reason, Western society, tradition, authority and obedience, outgroup intolerance, Christian aggression, metanoia.
Sims Beeler
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