Who Will Bring Me Home?: Biblical Philosophical Reflections on Power and Love, Trust and Hope for Those Who No Longer Know What to Do with Love

By Jan Willem Kirpestein and Joost Röselaers

This book is a profound meditation on power and love and in its wake on trust and hope. The author offers a new approach of these ancient biblical values.
If human love is fascinated by power, what is power's attraction and charm? Love is fascinated by a promise of rootedness in a real future life. This promise is experienced as a revelation of our true home. It means that human love is expecting something from the one who possesses power. Is he or she able to make the promise true?
Power should be cute, otherwise it will be experienced as a repulsive force. However, without the possibility to become a repulsive force power is unable to unveil its executing force. But the promise needs to be unconditional. Love is a movement of one's free will. Therefore, love can become disappointed. How were love, trust, and hope at work in relation to Gods revelation in the Torah and at work in the consciousness and live of Jesus Christ? What does that mean for us?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Oct 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666785791

Jan Willem Kirpestein

Jan Willem Kirpestein is executive coach, boardroom advisor, and theologian. He qualified himself in the logotherapy of Viktor Frankl. Jan Willem is married with Jeanine and lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He worked as a pastor in dereformed churches of the Netherlands and founded in 2004 his consultancy Spirit, Heart & Mind Corpus. He wrote a thesis at the Free University of Amsterdam on belief in church and state after the French Revolution.

Book preview

Part I

Prologue

1

Why This Book?

Preamble

This book is about love. But this book is also about power. Maybe that sounds strange. What do love and power have to do with each other? Don’t the two interact with one another like fire and water? Doesn’t power lead to rape and scorn? And doesn’t love seek to protect and respect?

It is common knowledge that people with authority have the power to attract others. But can we call that love? I think they are attractive, but I am not in love with them, we would say in that case. Power can fascinate. Power can arouse. People will want to become one. But if someone loses themselves in the power of the other, doesn’t he or she disappear? From someone, you become no one. At that moment, love’s utility ceases. And the same goes for trust and hope.

Power and love. Trust and hope. They cannot exist without one another, but they often also cannot exist with one another. Is it perhaps better to keep the hard world of power and the soft world of love, trust, and hope separate? But are power and love really so easily separated? Isn’t the influence of power on love and love on power greater than we often think or want to believe?

In the Hebrew Bible as in the New Testament, God’s power and God’s love are not separated. On the contrary, they belong together according to the experiences of the authors. Love without power is powerless. Power without love is ruthless. Rightly so, the Bible authors are fascinated by power—more precisely, the power through which love exists and makes trust and hope come alive and flourish.

Question About Life

The question of how God’s power to judge and God’s love relate to one another played an important role in my parents’ lives. They associated power with detachment, arbitrariness, repudiation, and in the worst case scenario, destruction—ceasing to exist. Love had to counterbalance that. The thought of power without love made them doubtful. Power without love corrupts. It did not matter to them if this concerned earthly or heavenly power. They were not convinced by the idea that life-giving true love is the power of judgment.

They lived with a deep longing for assurance about their existence, which is why this topic continued to preoccupy them. At its essence, their life question was, Who will bring me home? They sensed that the answer to their question could be found in the Bible. But the Bible also confused them. Their discovery process was hindered by the doctrinal foundation that they held. In the postulated doctrine from which they read the Bible and by which they lived, God’s power and God’s love were uncoupled. What the one hand gave out the other hand took back. They suffered as a result. And they kept trying to wrestle with it. Their question about life was greater and heavier than any doctrinal premise.

My parents were both traumatized. My father suffered with trauma he faced because of what he experienced during the war. From an early age, my mother took on the guardian angel role to her emotionally manipulative mother, her ailing father, and both her sisters, a role she took in stride, but one that was far too demanding on her. Both were confronted with situations that severely tested their confidence in a secure future self. Memories of the traumatic experiences magnified the intensity of their questions about faith and life.

I came to recognize my parents’ questions as my own. Their most existential question, Who will bring me home?, formed the basis for the other personal questions that concerned them. In my opinion, deep inside every human being is a longing for a future home that enforces your sense of self and for someone who is capable of making such a home a reality for you. And so, the question Who will bring me home? became the title of this book. I have come to understand the question not only as one that I raise but also as a question directed at me. What do you do with this question?

This book consists of biblical, spiritual, and philosophical reflections with this question as the starting point. They deal with this longing. It is a longing for a home that enters into your life like the promise of a new day. And this book is about what this longing does to you when you become one with somebody whom you hope can fulfill this promise. And then we can’t help but delve into how power and authority, love, trust, and hope are related to each other.

Christian Doctrine

As I touched on previously, my parents had a love-hate relationship with the tenets of their youth. The church’s views on power and love that they grew up with evoked fierce resistance inside them and simultaneously drew them back in. It had the potential to lead to emotional discussions within the family.

Spiritually, they subjected themselves to the power of the representatives’ teachings against which they rebelled. They hoped to find any modicum of understanding about their own position from these same representatives. This disappointed them more and more. The fire of hope was stoked when, for example, a different emphasis was placed during a sermon or a conversation. God’s love then took center stage for a moment. But that could change back again in a subsequent sermon or conversation. God’s power of judgment and God’s love remained separate giants, at least within the tradition they legitimized. Could they not free themselves from this tradition?

On a rational level, I think they succeeded; on an emotional level, they weren’t as successful. Reason and emotion did not speak the same language. On this emotional level they sought safety and security in their future sense of self. However, in order to get this security, you do not only rely on the love of God but also on the power of God, as though you need both fire and water. How do you reconcile that?

Passacaglia

The stalemate between these two worlds broke for my father when he listened to Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. He experienced the unity he was looking for in Bach’s baroque music. Therefore, I have chosen to compose Part II of this book in the form of a passacaglia, in memory of my father. He passed away truly knowing that God and Jesus welcomed him home on June 10, 2015. A passacaglia is characterized by a consistently repeating basic theme with a succession of variations. The basic theme provides gravity and stability to the composition, and the variations ensure movement and momentum.

In Line with Tradition

The doctrinal beliefs that my parents struggled with were rooted in the Calvinist tradition. The Calvinist tradition dates back to the Renaissance and the Reformation in fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth-century Europe. In terms of doctrine, it was certainly not unambiguous. And in the European context, several streams developed within this tradition. Over time, the more rigid sentiments developed into closed schools of thought; they became part of a power struggle between different persuasions. The stricter schools were able to become authoritative through the support of global and church politics.

Historically, however, the Calvinist tradition cannot be compared to an established school of thought. On the contrary, this tradition originally made a strong case for being conscience-free and tolerant. Early pioneers traced these arguments back to the books of Moses. They were the children of the Renaissance and wanted to return to antiquity to discover what had been lost along the way. They learned Hebrew and read rabbinical commentary on the Torah. They vehemently sought answers to the question How do we deal with God’s power to judge and God’s love for us without compromising free will in our personal and social lives? They found their answers in the Jewish origins. I readily align with this tradition.

Reconciliation

I consider the one-sided way in which God, power, and love are discussed in modern media, journalism, literature, and science to be inadequate, to say the least. Yes, it is necessary to bring wrongs to light. But aren’t many abuses caused by the fact that repeated attempts are made to separate power and love? Power without love is ruthless, and love without power lacks respect. In this book, I want to sing a different tune. In order to do so, I needed a new way to put my ear to the ground when discussing God’s power and God’s love in the Tanakh, respectively. For decades in the Western Christian world, the latter has been the most persistently misunderstood. The consensus is that the Hebrew Bible focuses primarily on God’s power to judge and his majesty. Love would then become the distinguishing principle between the aptly named New Testament, and the Torah and the Prophets. Nothing could be further from the truth. As for the Calvinist tradition, I have also come to understand this tradition quite differently; namely, as an antidote to absolutist claims to power that doesn’t take people into consideration.

For me, this exercise in listening shed a new light on Jesus as a person, on the claim to power he made, and the controversy that he created because of it. The Gospel leaves no doubt about Jesus’ self-awareness. Jesus saw himself as the heavenly Son of Man from the Torah and the Prophets. During this life, Jesus was fully aware that the heavenly Son of Man was destined to be the ultimate judge and redeemer of Israel and the world according to YHWH. Only God himself was able to determine the moment at which the Son of Man would be appointed. Jesus knew that according to the Gospel this moment was nearby, but he had to wait for God. This moment came when Jesus died and had proven that he loved and trusted God to the end. Hence Jesus did not try to take this heavenly power by force like earthly rulers normally would.

Instead, he refused to assert his promised appointment and glorification as the Son of Man arbitrarily. There was enough temptation to do so anyway. But Jesus waited for the moment God would ordain him the Son of Man and grant him the authority that goes with it

It was during this exercise that I discovered that earthly love, faith, and hope find their means to survive in the love, faith, and hope of Jesus. Jesus as the Son of Man is Love, Trust, and Hope. This is the reason why I capitalize them in Part II. Love, Trust, and Hope cannot