CHARLO, New Brunswick, May 11, 2024 – I’ve written here before about the Bible being messed with. By “messed with”, I mean that it’s been added to and taken away from, which has changed the content and therefore the meaning of certain parts. The Bible’s also been messed with through translation, which is a built-in hazard surely, but in certain instances it’s been purposely mis- (or better said, dis-) translated. All of which is why you need to read the Bible not with your own understanding, but with God’s.

Even better is to have God read the Bible to you.

One particularly concerning change that’s been made in newer translations is the replacement of “charity” with “love”. The two words are not the same – they aren’t spelled the same and they don’t have the same meaning. This is obvious to us. Not sure why it’s not obvious to the translators unless they’re driven by some agenda other than God’s.

Charity is a form of love that doesn’t require emotional engagement. Charity is based on obedience to God’s directives and indicates a seamless alignment of our will with God’s, an active willingness to do as God advises, which in most cases is either to give or to forgive, or both.

Love, on the other hand, is a deeply emotive feeling that yearns as much to receive love as to give it. Being emotion-based rather than obedience-based, love is an entirely different dynamic than charity, so the two terms should never be used interchangeably.

It’s not “faith, hope, and love”, it’s faith, hope, and charity, and of these, Paul reminds us, charity is the greatest.

In one of his letters, Peter talks about the primacy of charity:

“And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.”

In the newest translations of the Bible, the word “charity” used here has been changed to “love”, which entirely alters the crucial teaching that Peter intended to convey. When you love someone, you don’t have to be prompted to be “fervent” towards that person or to consider his or her wellbeing ahead of your own. You just do those things as a matter of course, as an outpouring of your emotions, prompted by no other directive than your depth of feeling. Your kindness and caring are natural expressions of your love for that person.

But when you don’t feel that depth of emotion (or any emotion at all or only negative emotion) for someone to whom God has asked you to be kind, it takes charity for you to positively respond to God’s request. This is not an emotion-based response but rather a conscious decision to choose obedience to God, and through that obedience to offer something that you otherwise would not offer. You make that choice for no other reason than that God advises you to. That’s charity.

As you can see, there’s a vast gulf in meaning between love and charity, and the two terms cannot and should not be used interchangeably.

Peter was a huge fan of charity. So was Paul. This should not be surprising, as at its core Christianity is all about charity, though not in the sense that the word is used today, either in the new translations of the Bible or in everyday parlance. Charity today has been corroded and cheapened into mostly meaning giving money to a tax-dodging organization that collects financial or other donations for redistribution allegedly to “the poor”, but the lion’s share of these donations usually ends up staying within the organization. This is not the type of charity that Peter and Paul wrote about.

For me, the best example of Christian charity is Jesus’ last words on the cross. According to scripture, they weren’t his only last words, but they were by far his greatest. Jesus said of his executioners: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Instead of cursing his tormentors or lamenting the unjustness of his circumstances, Jesus looked past it all and positioned himself firmly in the realm of charity. He wasn’t responding emotively to the situation but making a conscious decision to choose righteousness rather than self-pity or revenge.

This is the kind of charity Peter and Paul wrote about. As well as being the highest level of charity that we can aspire to, Jesus’ final words on the cross were also his greatest teaching moment. Everything Jesus had said and done up to that point blossomed and bore fruit in those few words. For me, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” is both a summation of the New Testament and the most precious of our earthly inheritances: Jesus entrusted us with those words so that we would cherish them and apply them in the same way he did, so that when our time comes, we would leave those same words in the safekeeping of our brethren, like Jesus did, and like Stephen did, and like countless other martyrs have done down through the ages, blessing their murderers in their final breath rather than cursing them, and showing us how it’s done.

Love and charity are not the same thing and should never be used interchangeably. Love is an emotion, whereas charity is a choice. There is no greater achievement than the offering of charity in the face of hatred and violence. We not only need to know this but to internalize it so deeply that when our final test comes, we’ll be able to repeat Jesus’ last words unprompted and as if fully natural to us, and in so doing cover our own multitude of sins.