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Love Redefined

This all adds up to an inescapable fact: the bible’s definition of love is foreign to the modern mind. Even non-Christians would agree the Bible is entirely out-of-step with our culture. The quick scan of western culture above demonstrates how the fabric of our society mitigates against real love. Most significant is the way our culture severs the family connection and leaves people so isolated and confused about relationships. In centuries past, for example, young newlyweds were often living either with parents or nearby, and the parents were far more emotionally healthy than parents in western cultures.

When people become Christians, they are introduced to a concept of love entirely foreign to their previous experience. It means all their former presuppositions and knowledge about love are distorted. It means love must be redefined within a biblical framework.

The need to redefine love is difficult to swallow. People experience love feelings and know it without knowing any definitions. Even a child knows what love feels like in a mother’s arms. Since people intuitively know love by how it feels, there’s no need to redefine anything—or so thinks the young Christian.

This scenario is too common: let’s consider a young Christian named Ted. As a non-Christian Ted was heavily involved in sexual affairs. Most of us have known Ted or we’ve been Ted at one time or another. As a new Christian Ted is so excited by his faith, and so relieved to be set free from that crazy sex life, which was becoming an addiction. But then it’s spring time, and Ted begins dating a young Christian girl and falls “in love”. Other Christians tell him to “cool it,” he’s getting too hot too fast. But Ted’s not in a listening mood because his love for her is so strong and warm, and he knows what he’s doing. The young couple is swept up in a lover’s paradise, and their passion soon becomes physical and hot. Older Christians say the relationship is headed for trouble, but the warnings make no sense. Ted knows this love is real, unlike his previous sexual encounters, and he’s confident it will work differently. Older Christians explain that his definition of love is flawed, but he can’t believe it.

What’s the likely outcome of Ted’s new romance?

There’s a big difference between recognizing love and succeeding at love. Feelings recognize success, but they don’t create success. New Christians like Ted will continue to love in a defective way until they realize love is governed by principles.

Love must operate by principles. This is painfully demonstrated when love hurts, because it means something went wrong. Love can also be the most thrilling experience in life, which means something went right. There is a “right way” and “wrong way” to love. The confusion of our lives is figuring out the difference and how to make love “go right.”

Isn’t there a manual to explain these things?

Irrational Love

Love operates by different principles than banking. Investors who understand the principles of finance may grow wealthy, but when they apply those same principles in a marriage, divorce usually follows. Love operates by its own set of principles.

There is an irrational aspect to love which makes it difficult to fit in a tight system under human control. Consider these irrational elements in Paul’s description of love:

Love is not jealous…It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. - 1 Corinthians 13:4,5

Anything that “keeps no record of being wronged” doesn’t work in a banking system. Love “is not jealous”, but that’s irrational if the person you love ignores you and loves someone else! Love “is not irritable,” but how can you avoid irritation with people you care about?

It means that all our reasonable rules need to be set aside if we’re to love people. We cannot love others through reason and logic. Whatever love involves, it certainly involves a personal interaction which surpasses reasonableness. If you interact with your relationships in a business-like, reasonable manner, you’re not loving. You may be treating them reasonably or fairly or politely, but not lovingly. English gentry is famous for its formality and stuffy protocols—which is fine for rulers of an Imperial Empire to maintain an aloof, safe distance from their subjects—but this austerity will not create a nurturing, loving home. Loving relationships encourage spontaneous, personal and free interactions.

Most important, love means drop the justice and exchange system. Some people’s minds churn endlessly, calculating and reviewing and summing up the spreadsheets as they consider their relationships. If you’re concerned primarily with getting a fair return on your investment or the unreasonable treatment you receive, you’re not involved with love. You’re involved with the rules of banking, perhaps, but not the principles that make love work. The rules of banking will never deliver what you want and what you need from love. For a fair exchange rate, go to the bank. Continue Reading »

It was clear that Dr. Ankenman’s Love Therapy was not his invention. He simply uncovered—or crystallized—what was already splashed across the pages of the Bible. It should be called a “Love Ethic” rather than “Love Therapy.” As a clinician, “Therapy” was appropriate for Dr. Ankenman, but it’s really a lifestyle and an ethical framework clearly explained in the Bible. “Love Ethics” guide us into Christian maturity.

As discussed earlier, much of Dr. Ankenman’s principles of Love Therapy are also found outside a purely-biblical framework. Since the Bible teaches the truth about the human condition, Dr. Ankenman noticed the same biblical principles at work in traditional, older cultures we so derisively label Third World (as if they were “third-rate” to our Industrialized World). Are those cultures really so “primitive”?

Research from our own scientists can be rattling. America is a world-leader in suicides, broken homes, murders, violent crimes and most other sociological measure of health. The difference is more startling when compared against impoverished countries we pity so much like Bangladesh.

What is the source of our social ills? What have we lost that other cultures—even non-Christian cultures—still retain? Continue Reading »

by Keith McCallum

A Strange Missionary

“Victorious Love Output” was a corny term we first encountered in 1974. I was not quite an adult, and like most others my age, I suffered from turmoiled emotional disease, which nobody dared understand — “Let him grow him out of it,” people whispered. I was intimidating and street-wise. Or so I thought, but maybe I was just exasperating. Covered with acne, I weighed 120 pounds and carried a scraggly, flopping mop on my head called a “Freak Flag”, and I looked dirty and degenerate like most hippie-wannabes back then.

I was also blessed with a fanatic Christian mom who often compelled me to attend the Christian thing no matter how much I hated it. When she dragged me to hear this medical missionary she dug up from Cedarville, Ohio, I plopped down in the front row to growl, glower and inflict my misery on him.

But Dr. Ankenman was oblivious to the sour-faced kid sitting in front. He was upbeat and chuckled at his own jokes, but these were not antics. Ankenman was genuinely excited about something he called Victorious Love Output, and it was contagious. His stories about working with the “Criminally Insane” psychopaths at Lima State Hospital and other strange patients were spellbinding. More intriguing were the results: he steered the hopeless towards hope through emotional healing.

A Grace Awakening

Those were heady days. This amazing Christian fellowship known today as “Xenos” suddenly materialized out of thin air.

Xenos was hatched in an obscure nest called “Layman’s Challenge for Today,” which in-turn arose from a miraculous chain of happenstance triggered by tragedy. It was the tragic division in a local United Methodist church when a well-trained liberal minister arrived with radical curriculum and a radical agenda to oust the growing pocket of evangelicals gathering there. He neatly divided those who believed in the veracity of the Bible against those who believed in the authority of the Methodist bishopric. Dazed and bewildered, the believers in veracity left that church not knowing where to go, but they soon discovered they weren’t alone. There were many such Christians and spiritual seekers drifting away from their traditional church moorings which had become liberal and devoid of spiritual power. People were leaving in droves across the nation quite simply because the Liberal Church was boring and dead.

Coincidentally, some Campus Crusade for Christ leaders left their organization not knowing where to go. They were young and visionary men, drawn to the “Jesus Freak” movement spreading from the West coast and filling socially-liberal pockets like OSU. These ex-Crusaders were dismayed at the growing population of Hippies who were finding and loving the freedom of Jesus Christ, but could find no church to attend! Traditional churches would never welcome these misfits in such numbers.

These evangelical ex-Methodists and visionary ex-Crusaders found common cause, and with their respective followings, “LCT” was born. The alliance promised a unique combination.

At first LCT was a simple Bible study for equipping about 100 “laymen” on Tuesday nights, like Xenos Central Teachings today. But then some OSU students wanted the same Bible study on campus. They formed “The Fish House,” which was actually a Christian rooming house, or what we call a ministry house.

More Bible studies started in different parts of the city and then at Whetstone High School, new teachers arose, and the groups grew. People from all ages were excited by the freshness of a relationship with Jesus Christ without the institutional trappings.

What fueled the commotion was the clear, biblical message of grace. Few churches taught grace so powerfully. Those ex-Crusaders were Dallas Seminary grads, and they brought more Dallas alumni into Columbus—several of whom later became national authors and luminaries, like Hal Lindsay. This group of Dallas grads imparted a sound framework of grace that still characterizes Xenos. We studied grace, talked grace, and loved grace. It was a “Grace Awakening,” as one writer coined the term.

But the Grace Awakening had problems. People found a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through grace—and lots of people did—but sanctification was not well-understood. We knew aboutIdentity Truths and “walking by grace,” but questions remained: how did this new Christian identity look and act? It meant holiness we knew, but holiness as many Christians discover can be confusing. It means becoming more “Christ-like,” everyone agrees. But many Christians foolishly build arbitrary and strict rules to get sanctified, which only ends in frustration, guilt, and failure. The uncertainty grew more desperate as many people in those days began drifting back into unhealthy and damaging lifestyles.

The Love Therapist

“The key to emotional health is Victorious Love Output,” was Dr. Ankenman’s repeated theme. He began lecturing at LCT during this crucial, uncertain time and appeared from nowhere. He was spotted during a panel discussion on parenting, and he stood out with his clear-headed, practical insights on relationships. A few LCT leaders drove to his home in a remote country town and asked him to teach at LCT, and surprisingly it was an opportunity he readily accepted because he was driving to Columbus every week anyway to finish his degree in psychiatry.

Ankenman launched into a three-year period of weekly lectures and counseling for us in Columbus. His presentations were more lively than organized, but they were well-attended and deeply impacted us. Unwittingly, he played a vital role forging the unique character of this fellowship and filled a significant gap in our biblical understanding.

What he called Love Therapy never caught on in secular psychology, even though Dr. Ankenman was a brilliant psychiatrist with a long, proven track record. His life was a long preparation by God in the mechanics of Love Therapy. As a younger Christian he was burdened with the plight of the poor, and after medical school he worked in Pittsburgh’s inner city. Then he launched a 15-year stint in Bangladesh, one of the most impoverished nations on earth. During typhoon season this low-lying country becomes a vast, disease-ridden flood zone.

The intensity of suffering and poverty in Bangladesh takes quantum leaps beyond our inner cities, and Ankenman went there thinking he would find and help the most helpless souls on earth. He was surprised at what he discovered. These people were more capable of rebounding from heartbreaking tragedies and loss, while in America his patients kept returning and never seemed to improve. By the time he returned to the states 15 years later he was both biblically and practically prepared with the answers he taught at LCT.

What made Bangladesh so much more healthy than America?

Paul describes Easter different than most people:

“He gave up his divine privileges…” Phil. 2:7

It describes the crucifixion of the Christ, and how ironic it is: they killed the author of life. He had eternal life, but exchanged it freely for death. He is the King of Kings with indisputable rights, but He gave up all those rights. As Americans, we’re educated to be rights-aware and we guard our rights desperately. Paul wrote this in a different time and culture, but there it is for Americans, too: “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus” (vs. 5). It’s radical and it torpedoes the American Dream, but still God wants us to “regard one another as more important than yourselves.” (v.3)

But the resurrection of Christ proclaims the victory of sacrificial love: “every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (v.11) This Victorious Love is a new life of freedom from desperately guarding our rights, but even more, it’s a victorious life which everyone will confess one day is right and good and brilliant, “to the glory of God the Father.”

Why did Jesus do it? That’s the real question. I’ve heard answers like, “because it’s a more fulfilling life,” or “to have eternal relationships with us,” or, “He was ordered to do it,” or “To show us what sacrifice means.” All these answers ignore the fact that Jesus was already God. He was already very fulfilled, already loved, needed no more company from us, was already fulfilled in every manner, and he did it entirely by free choice.

Why did Jesus do it?

NeoZine has collected some rich material from a large repository of teachings, seminars, handouts and studies from psychiatrist Dr. Ralph A. Ankenman, Xenos Director of Counseling Katey Downs, and Xenos Senior Pastor Keith McCallum.

It’s all about new life made possible through Victorious Love Output. It’s highly practical, and surprisingly liberating. Love Ethics will break all the rules about love you ever learned, and that’s good news! Trash the old the rules, and let’s build a new life you never thought possible!

What does it mean? A biblical approach to freedom and personal authority. It’s not a small point. You soon discover that all emotional problems stem from a failure to feel loved. And we don’t feel loved because we don’t understand God’s principles of how love works. Love Ethics is the study of how to make life work by learning how to love as God created us to love.

kmcc 4/2007