As to loving Jesus, he made it quite clear that to love him means to obey him and to keep his commandments. It is not some emotional experience or some content-less feeling. It is a very particular sort of love: a love that says no to self and that says yes to God. 

Hmm, a nice sentiment that. What Christian would quibble over this? Isn’t loving Jesus the main game? Isn’t that all we need as believers? Well, sorta! Of course we are to love Jesus. But that is not the end of the matter. Both of these key terms – ‘Jesus’ and ‘love’ – must be given some actual specific content, or they will mean absolutely nothing – and may even lead us astray.
What exactly do we mean by ‘love’? And who exactly is this ‘Jesus’ that we are to love? These are very important questions indeed. The truth is, anyone can say they ‘love Jesus’. But not everyone actually does love – in the biblical sense of the word – Jesus, at least as he is defined and understood by Scripture.
So we must be much more specific and definite in what this is all about. For many people love can just be lust, or sentimentalism, or accepting anything and everything, and so on. And there are countless versions of Jesus – but only the biblical Jesus is the true Jesus.
As to loving Jesus, he made it quite clear that to love him means to obey him and to keep his commandments. It is not some emotional experience or some content-less feeling. It is a very particular sort of love: a love that says no to self and that says yes to God. See more on this vital truth here: billmuehlenberg.com/2011/06/18/loving-god-and-keeping-the-commandments/
And all this talk about loving Jesus is determined by what the Bible teaches. Without Scripture we would not know what real love is, and we would not know who the real Jesus is. So we must be much more precise – and biblical – if we want to speak about loving Jesus.
A recent social media exchange helps to bring all this into focus. I trust my friend will not mind if I share this for the edification of my readers (he did kindly like my reply – bless you sir!). I had put up a post on one current topic of interest. It had to do with a former Qantas pilot who has been at the forefront of resisting medical mandates and statist overreach as he stands for freedom. I had said this:

Some Christians have asked about the champion freedom fighter Graham Hood concerning his being a Seventh-day Adventist. Is it a cult? Should we work with him? I would say two things about this:1. The noted cult expert Walter Martin was somewhat ambivalent here. He said this in The Kingdom of the Cults: “It is my conviction that one cannot be a true Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, Christian Scientist, etc., and be a Christian in the Biblical sense of the term; but it is perfectly possible to be a Seventh-day Adventist and be a true follower of Jesus Christ despite heterodox concepts which will be discussed.” See my article on Ben Carson (also SDA and also someone we support) in the link below.2. This is once again about co-belligerency. We support Carson and Hood at least in terms of the culture wars, just as we supported Israel Folau, even though he is anti-Trinitarian. Theological orthodoxy is of course important, but there is a place for working with others in specific causes, such as in the pro-life, pro-family and pro-freedom wars (see the link below).

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The Holy Spirit does two things: inspires the writing of Scripture and indwells the people of God. As a corollary of both, he carries the divine writings into the hands of his people and guides them, as a people, in their interpretation. Scripture and Church, therefore, stand in harmony. 

Early on in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (in its completed 1559 edition), he discusses the authority of Scripture. After describing humanity’s natural sense of divinity (sensus divinitatis), Calvin turns to the necessity of the Word of God for saving revelation due to humanity’s clouded judgment. In order to establish Scripture’s authority, he first attempts to rebut the claim of the Roman Church that the authority of the Bible depends upon “the consent of the church.”[1] In seeking to secure the tyrannical claim that “the church has authority in all things,” his opponents trust more in the judgment of men than in the truth of God.[2]
Scripture, for Calvin, bears witness to its own authority. Since its source is divine, it exhibits the marks of divinity. Indeed, Scripture, he claims, is “self-authenticated” (autopiston).[3] “It is not right,” therefore, “to subject it to proof and reasoning,” or, more basically, to any judgment of men.[4] To ask for external verification for the truth and validity of the Bible is like asking, “Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter?”[5] As Calvin puts it plainly, “Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.”[6] Insofar as Scripture is concerned—putting to the side for a moment the question of individual apprehension—its authority is unquestionable. It is an obvious fact. Just as one could not describe the color black—“…it just is!”—so he cannot attempt to “prove” Scripture’s veracity.
What are we to make of disagreements among men concerning the truth (or lack thereof) of Holy Scripture? The answer lies in the internal testimony of the Spirit. According to Calvin, “the same Spirit . . . who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.”[7] In other words, the authority of Scripture, since it is self-validated, cannot depend upon human judgments for its vindication. “We ought to seek our conviction,” rather, “in a higher place than human reasons, judgments, or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.”[8] Thus, those who do not acknowledge what is plainly true about the authority of Scripture have simply not received the illumination of the Holy Spirit. But on the other hand, “those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture.”[9] The reception of the Spirit’s internal witness is the dividing line between those who recognize Scripture’s authority and those who do not.
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We are informed by an ancient fable that Ixion was invited by Jupiter to a banquet, fell in love, and began to court Juno herself; offering to embrace her, he clasped a cloud, from whence the Centaurs proceeded, by nature half men, half horses, a fierce, a fighting, and unquiet generation, the source of all contention and bloodshed…—Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1641)
Born into one world, yet longing to live in another, man stumbles as he jumps, then settles in awkwardly between the two worlds, a discontented and dangerous halfway creature. Therein lies his ruin. To what examples might we allude for confirmation?
Anticipating the catastrophe of the English Civil War, Hobbes (see above) proposed that its cause would lay in man’s inability to accept that justice exceeds mortal grasp. Man cannot jump that high. Purporting nevertheless to be able to achieve a Divine vantage point on the matter, English citizens would give birth to monstrous ideas about justice. Monstrous crimes followed.
Consider Plato’s Republic. Positioned halfway between darkness and light, man dwells in a cave-like world, amidst shadows, neither quite alive nor dead, neither ignorant nor knowledgeable, swayed by the half-truth of opinion. Misunderstanding where real substance lies, he seeks instead to possess all things among the shadows and, so, succumbs to tyranny. Thrasymachus is everyman.
Consider Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Dwelling halfway between the aristocratic age and the democratic age, man alternates between looking back longingly with the hope of reenchanting the world; and looking forward, with revolutionary rage, to abolishing the past and the present altogether. Here are the conservatives and the radicals, at war with each other, but alike in their inability to live without thorough-going parsimony, as a good liberal must be able to do.
Consider Nietzsche, in his assorted writings on the genealogy and fate of Europe. Claiming to have overcome Christian religion via the Enlightenment, European man nevertheless remains halfway Christian, adhering to Christian moral claims about equality, though now dissevered from Christian religion. “It is the church, and not its poison, that offends us,” European man declares. Unable to fully destroy the Old Tablets, so that new ones may be written, European man is suffocating from the Christianity he thinks he has renounced. Ensnared halfway between a Christian past to which he cannot return and a truly post-Christian future he dares not embrace, European man has no basis for believing anything and, so, he “feeds parasitically on every civilization under the sun,” in a multicultural orgy that masks a hunger he cannot sate.
What shall we make of civil religion? Is it, too, a tempting halfway measure, alternatingly dangerous and impotent, “operating in a realm distinct from both church and state, though borrowing from both,” as Richard Gamble writes in this fine essay about civil religion as it was crafted by Robert Bellah? Many of us know of Robert Bellah the sociologist, who is his classic work, The Habits of the Heart, carved out a halfway position between Weber and Tocqueville, declaring at one moment that the world has succumbed to the instrumental rationality of the former, and at the next moment that only the civic institutions defended by latter can save us. Gamble’s fine-grained account of Bellah, an advocate of American civil religion in the late twentieth century, is a welcome point of departure for us to re-engage a question that has loomed over America since she has come to occupy a halfway position that is neither fully Christian nor quite post-Christian.
This haunting question is, for us today, more than merely scholarly. The political left increasingly has both Christian ideas and the churches that profess them in its figurative gun sights; and in the wake of the near collapse, on the political right, of Reagan free-marketism and Bush II neo-conservatism, an emerging chorus of public intellectuals, courageously or recklessly, depending on your judgment of the matter, ponder a return to pre-modern political Catholicism of early modern Reformation nationalism. For us today, the question is whether a civil religion can bring coherence and purpose to a nation that seems on the verge of being torn asunder. If it cannot, as so many of us suspect, what next? Are we seeing the beginning of the mobilization for war between those on the left who want to destroy every vestige of Christianity, so that the world it has stained may be bleached clean; and those on the right who believe that without the whole cloth of Christianity, our nation cannot endure?
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