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Notes -
Reporting my reply from before the wipe:
The purpose of a Christian ad in the Super Bowl is to reach non-Christians.
From a non-Christian perspective, the Christian God is neither dominant nor popular, and it's not clear to me how one would change that through the medium of a Super Bowl ad.
Yes, and the successor culture has long-since made memetic antibodies to such appeals ubiquitous: Any talk of hell, sin, or damnation is simply assumed to be an expression of hate and intolerance. If you are attempting to communicate the message of Christ to the world, you need to engage with the fact that the world you're speaking to is not merely unaware, but actively armored against your message. Now, it's an interesting question where a Christian's responsibility goes from there, but it seems to me that interpretations of Paul's answer are at least colorable:
Jesus also told people that his yoke was easy and his burden was light, and that they would find rest for their souls. He told people that the poor and the suffering were blessed, while the rich and prosperous were destined for woe. This is not to say that the Gospel message can be reduced to a message of naive love-as-the-world-understands-it, any more than it can be reduced purely to hellfire and damnation. Both damnation and love-as-it-actually-is are integral, and different people need to hear different parts of those elements at different times.
No, but such descriptions are meaningless and pointless to people whose understanding of Jesus amounts to a cartoon.
I think it's aimed at saying "we do not and will not hate you." Given the considerable effort by the faith's opponents to paint sincere Christians as fundamentally hateful, and given the nature of the society we find ourselves in, this seems to me to be a plausibly-valuable message.
@reactionary_peasant brings up the salient point about how each era pretends that one virtue is the only virtue that exists. This is very true. He further quotes C.S. Lewis' observation that the current era's virtue is charity, and again, this is true. It seems to me that there's two other points that should go along with it, though. First, Lewis made that observation more than half a century ago, and it seems to me that our society is very clearly and quite rapidly moving away from Charity as the virtue du jour, toward Justice. The old days of universal license and freedom and live-and-let-live liberalism have largely gone away, and now we are all hurtling toward the opposite extreme, toward authority, laws, demands, and vicious enforcement. And secondly, to the extent that Charity is still over-played by the culture at large, the value of actual, balanced charity is not thereby reduced. It is still both good and necessary to maintain proper charity in balance with the other virtues, regardless of how the broader culture behaves.
God is love. Christianity is defined by emulation of God's love. Our message is not hateful, and there is no room for hate of other humans within it. Walsh argues that washing the feet of sinners and enemies of the faith can be seen as affirming their sin and opposition. While such misinterpretation is obviously possible, it does not seem to me that it is inevitable, or indeed, strictly speaking, avoidable. We are, in fact, explicitly commanded to love our enemies. We are, in fact, explicitly commanded to repay evil with good. It is true that the Gospel does not record Jesus washing the feet of non-believers; it does record him dying in humiliating, wretched agony to secure their salvation, which is a rather more extreme form of submission than washing feet. Showing kindness to defiant sinners does not necessarily concede approval of their sin, and showing kindness to real or presumed enemies is the direct command of our savior. Misperception of such kindness as approval of sin requires either willful blindness, or a complete absence of meaningful communication.
Christians, also, need the reminder that we cannot hate. We may oppose our enemies, and perhaps we may even fight or kill our enemies, but whatever we do must be compatible with love for those on the other side. It seems to me that this requirement is much less restrictive than many in the world would presume, but I do not believe that this makes it any less meaningful a restriction. The civil war killed more than half a million Americans, but when it ended, the winners did not exterminate the losers, nor even enslave them. Instead, they made peace, and many soldiers who had spent years earnestly trying to kill each other laid down their arms and lived together. Our modern society spits on that idea, furious that the wicked were not sufficiently punished, that injustice was merely greatly reduced rather than entirely eliminated. I do not, and it seems to me that Christians should not. Humans will always sin, and many of them will always embrace their sin defiantly. Nothing we do or say will change that fact. Our job is to attempt to reach them despite their defiance, and that requires contact, communication, personal connection. Given the current climate, "We refuse to hate you" seems like a reasonable attempt at a start.
Is it? The purpose of this one appears to be trying to reach Christians and explain to them why the Christian thing to do is submit themselves to the left.
I disagree, for reasons explained in the rest of the comment.
Christianity demands a balance between loving the sinner and hating the sin. Non-Christians seem determined to insist that we only do one or the other, as their short-term-preferences dictate, but we will continue to do both regardless.
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