The Purpose of Life is Love

This post is the third in my series on the 4-Ls. (Those of you who didn’t see the previous posts or want to review them can click here for the March 9 post and here for the one on March 30.)

The second of the 4-Ls is love, and the title of this article comes from the following words by Leo Tolstoy:

The purpose of life is loving, the penetration of everything with love. It is the slow and gradual change from evil to good, it is the creation of the real life, the life filled with love (A Calendar of Wisdom, p. 249). 

As I began teaching Christian Studies in Japan, I soon realized that most of my students were not only quite disinterested in Christianity but that they were also not much interested in traditional Japanese religions either.

Many students, however, were interested in thinking about the meaning of life (the first of the 4-Ls) and of love.

Few of my students had ever heard of or knew little about  Kagawa Toyohiko, a Japanese Christian. But the life and work of Kagawa (1888~1960), who obviously lived a life of love for others, was appealing to many of them.*¹

And while many students were negative toward the racism they knew existed in the U.S., which they generally regarded as a Christian country, they were impressed by the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and by his book Strength to Love (1963; Japanese translation, 1965).*²

So, I focused increasingly on how Christianity had been, and is being, expressed in loving actions and less on the doctrinal expressions of the Christian religion.

Understanding the distinctively Christian meaning of love is of great importance. In English, “love” is used in many different ways. For example, a man may say he loves his wife at one time and then in a different conversation say he loves ice cream.

C.S. Lewis, the English writer and popular theologian, sought to clarify that diversity in his widely-read book Four Loves (1960). One of those four was called agape in the Greek New Testament, and that word articulates the particularly Christian form of love.

The word “love” is not used as much in Japanese as in English. Rather than the word for love (愛、ai), Japanese people are more prone to say like (好きsuki) or really like (大好き、daisuki). But to emphasize the distinctive meaning of agape as used in the New Testament, I used holy love（聖愛、seiai).

Here is how that is written in Japanese calligraphy on the hanging wall scroll I introduced in the March 9 blog post: 

 The basis of Christian love is God’s love for us, but I am writing here only about our love for others, or the lack thereof.*³

In the Gospels, Jesus stated clearly that following the commandment “Love the Lord your God…,” the second greatest commandment is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31, NIV).

This is a commandment, though, that is definitely difficult to obey. How often do we really love our “neighbor” as much as we love ourselves? And remember that Jesus taught that a neighbor is any hurting/needy person who we have the opportunity to help (see Luke 10:25~37).

Some of the “Church Fathers” spoke plainly, and challengingly, about such neighbor-love. Consider these words of Basil of Caesarea (330~370):

The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man; the coat hanging in your closet belongs to the man who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes; the money which you put into the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help but fail to help.

I am not sharing these disturbing words to make us feel guilty, as perhaps we all are. But if the purpose of life is loving, as Tolstoy wrote, seeking to love God and to love our neighbors is, truly, the key to experiencing life to the fullest.

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*¹ Here is a link to the blog article I posted about Kagawa in July 2013.

*² The first of several blog posts about King was in January 2010. I also wrote about his explanation regarding Christian love in a September 2018 post, in which I also made reference to chapters #22 and #25 in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (published in 2020).

*³ Earlier this week, I  posted a brief article about the hymn “The Love of God” on my alternative blogsite, and I encourage you to read it by clicking here.

Christians for Socialism

"Socialism” is a word with a very negative connotation for most Americans. And yet perhaps socialism, especially democratic socialism, deserves to be much more highly evaluated by the public at large and by Christians in particular.

 

Last month I read with great interest two books about past socialist leaders in the U.S. One was Irving Stone’s Adversary in the House (1947), a biographical novel based on the life of Eugene V. Debs and his wife Kate. Debs (1855~1926) was a pioneer union leader and five times the Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States.

While reading that captivating book, I remarked to June, “I hope Debs was as good a man as Stone thought he was.” Needless to say, I was highly impressed by him—and by his thoughts and actions. 

The other impressive book was The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (2000), a superlative biographical work by historian Maurice Isserman. Harrington (1928~89) was the last great socialist leader in the U.S. 

Harrington was also the author of The Other America (1962), a very significant book that helped influence President Johnson to initiate the “war on poverty” in 1964.

Debs was not particularly religious, although he was friends with and a benefactor of a minister in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana. And although he became an agnostic, Harrington grew up as a devout Catholic and as a young man worked for two years with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.

Isserman writes how at a party in celebration of Harrington’s 60^th birthday, Ted Kennedy declared,

In our lifetime, it is Mike Harrington who has come the closest to fulfilling the vision of America that my brother Robert Kennedy had, when he said, “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and say ‘Why Not?’” . . . Some call it socialism; I call it the Sermon on the Mount (p. 359).

The other most prominent 20^th century socialist leader in the U.S was Norman Thomas, a six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. Thomas (1894-1968) was also a Presbyterian minister for twenty years. 

So while socialism in America was not a Christian movement as such, it was closely tied to people shaped by a Christian worldview. Looking more broadly, though, some of the most prominent 20^th century Christian theologians and/or activists were advocates of socialism.

Among those who quickly come to mind are Karl Barth in Switzerland (and Germany), Paul Tillich in Germany (and the U.S. after 1933), Kagawa Toyohiko in Japan, and Reinhold Niebuhr in the U.S. In addition, in the 1970s and ’80s there was a “Christians for Socialism” movement in Latin America.

Kagawa, who as a young man began to live in solidarity with the poor in the slums of Kobe, stated his position quite clearly: “I am a socialist because I am a Christian.”

There are many different types of socialism, and it perhaps goes without saying that most Christians who have espoused socialism have been staunch opponents of the violent or coercive type of socialism. 

Barth and Tillich were strong opponents of Hitler’s National Socialism. And most American socialists have been strongly opposed to oppressive socialism such as that seen in Stalinism or Maoism.

Most Christian socialists are best designated as democratic socialists, and the socialist activities of Debs, Thomas, and Harrington have morphed into what is now known as the Democratic Socialists of America.

Perhaps it is again time, especially for Christians, to take socialism more seriously and evaluate it more highly.

In Praise of Toyohiko Kagawa

He is no longer well known in the U.S., but there was a time, especially up to the early 1940s, when Toyohiko Kagawa was the best-known Japanese in America, except for Emperor Hirohito.

Kagawa was born 125 years ago today, on July 10, 1888. Although sickly from the time he was a young man, he lived until April 1960. During his lifetime of nearly 72 years, he was creatively involved in a wide variety of activities.

He was a Christian evangelist, social reformer, labor activist, author, and peace activist. Because of his contributions in the two latter arenas, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 and 1948 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954, 1955 and 1956.

Kagawa studied at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1914 to 1917 and later made several other trips to the U.S., the most extensive one being for more than six months beginning in December 1935.

In the spring of 1936, he delivered the Rauschenbusch lectures at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. (Those lectures were named for Walter Rauschenbusch, whom many consider the most prominent Baptist theologian of the 20^th century.)

Kagawa’s Rauschenbusch lectures were published later that year under the title “Brotherhood Economics.” Even though (or because?) he was a Christian evangelist, Kagawa was deeply interested in economic matters, especially the plight of the many people in Japan (and the world) who were living in poverty.

He knew about being poor from his own experience.

When he was still a seminary student in 1909, he moved into the largest slum area of Kobe and lived there for years. He freely shared what he had, including his small house, with needy people.

As a result, he contracted trachoma (a serious and contagious eye disease) from one of the poverty-stricken people he took into his home.

Because of his concern for the poor, Kagawa was active in the founding of the first labor unions in Japan soon after his return in 1917. Over the next several years he worked extensively in forming unions and cooperatives, and that was a major topic in his 1936 lectures.

Kagawa has been called a “reverse missionary.”

Bo Tao is a doctoral student at Yale University. His master’s thesis at a university in Shanghai was on Kagawa, and his article in the July 2013 issue of “International Bulletin of Missionary Research” is titled “The Peacemaking Efforts of a Reverse Missionary: Toyohiko Kagawa before Pearl Harbor.”

Tao tells how President Roosevelt personally asked for Kagawa to be allowed to enter the United States after he had been detained by immigration authorities in San Francisco in 1935. He was held, ostensibly, because of fear that his trachoma might be transmitted to others.

There were some, though, who opposed his involvement in labor unions and cooperatives. They were the same ones who objected to President Roosevelt’s implementation of New Deal policies during the Depression years of the 1930s.

A few years later, after being arrested and detained in Japan for nearly three weeks in 1940 because of his anti-war activities, Kagawa again visited the U.S. from April to August of 1941 in a “last-ditch” effort to avert war in the Pacific.

Unfortunately, as we know, his peace activities were unsuccessful. But not because he didn’t try.

There is much more I would like to write about Kagawa, who as early as 1939 had been deemed one of three “modern saints”—along with Gandhi in India and Schweitzer in Africa.

After all, I included Kagawa on my list of “top ten Christians” in my Sept. 15, 2010, blog posting.