Your second post here definitely clarifies your first, and now I can see what you were intending. (So much for exegesis as discerning [successfully, at least] authorial intention, :-).) I’ll have a look at your blog.

You’re right. My intent (which I didn’t communicate very well) was not to affirm this pastor’s ‘optional’ claim as much as to say that loving our enemies is “as optional” as mercy or generousity is in the NT, which is to say it is not, even if we’re still failing in it after years of following Jesus. The call to mercy keeps calling. I should have put more emphasis there to be clear. I’d love to get your feedback on some related thoughts on non-violence that I posted at my blog.

There are at least two issues here, I think. My statement to Rev. Pagano that this is not about pacifism was meant to suggest that the big-picture issue here is what the church of Jesus Christ should be doing with its time, and promoting gun-possession and gun-use do not seem to be among them. (Try to find either of them in the NT!)

But about “loving nonviolence” and “financial giving” being optional–this sounds like a divorce between justification and sanctification that is unknown to the NT and thus dangerously close to cheap (bogus) discipleship. If we turn to Paul, he reasons that if God gave us Christ in love, we should give our possessions in love (2 Cor 8-9) and if God lovingly reconciled us through Christ when we were enemies, we too should love our enemies (Rom 5 and 12-13). That is, these are constituitive elements–not optional supplements–of life in Christ. To be sure, none of these aspects of Christian existence matter without love, but thta does not mean that they are optional. Instead, they are the fruits of love, of inhabiting and being inhabited by the God of cruciform love.