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Love Is The Answer

 I'm gonna start this in a weird place, but I don't like Foreigner that much. I've heard "I Want To Know What Love Is" probably 200 times in my life, and that's enough. I'm sorry. And the thing is, I don't inherently mind power ballads [You love power ballads, you mawkish clown.--ed.] or songs with slow verses and bold choruses. It's just this song. Frankly, every time I hear it though, I think, "How many out of wedlock conceptions happened with this song in the background?"

There's a beautiful song written by Todd Rundgren that is the title of this post. It was the final track on the Oops! Wrong Planet LP from 1977 from his band Utopia. It got even more popular when it was recorded by England Dan (Dan Seals) and John Ford Coley in 1979. I don't know if Todd Rundgren identified as a Christian when he wrote it--I wasn't there--and I don't know if he does now, but that's a gospel song.

In fact, Dan Seals said he "got saved" in 1996, singing "Love Is The Answer" for close to two decades. Some dork will say that it's the Arian heresy or some such, and that's fine.

It's not just a beautiful song, but it has a special meaning in my journey with Christ. I had satellite TV for most of the Obama era--let the reader understand--and it was kind of before all these music subscription services took off. You can still turn it to genre specific channels on satellite TV or cable, and knock yourself out.

I heard the song for the first time in late 2010, when I was really wrestling with the place of the theological virtue of Love/Charity in justification. Protestant version: Love is the fruit of justification, but not part of it, strictly speaking. Catholic: In a sense, the possession of Love as a virtue of the indwelling Holy Spirit, IS justification. I was getting prepared to be able to accept Catholic authority based upon the historical record and their account of the visible Church, but what to do with Divine Love had a lot to do with accepting the sacramental system, apostolic succession, and the Chair of Peter. The song was oddly helpful in just going, "I think Love is the answer, man." Quite frankly, I think the criticism that a Protestant soteriology--rooted in Calvinism--can't actually theologically tell the difference between a justified person, and someone who has the "common operations of the Spirit," as the Westminster Confession of Faith has it. Dr. Cross has a blog post about it from his blog Principium Unitatis, but if I'm being honest, I don't feel like linking it for probably the 35th time in my life in the last 17 years.

I think Protestant people actually do better with discipleship than Catholics, in my experience. But the Reformed systematic theology is a hot mess. A person will either be scrupulous or presumptuous, and I don't see a way out. Well, there is one.


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