The Problem with Love
Reflections on the Lectionary for September 10th
Although I put myself squarely in the “progressive Christian” camp, I can see a lot of problems in that community, or if not problems, then at least things that I wish were different. For example, the notion of “progress,” embedded in “progressive,” can be misleading or misguiding as a theological category. And as my Iliff colleague Antony Alumkal has pointed out, “progressive” Christians are sometimes engaged in theologies that have deep ties to the past, not to any future space of progress. As another example, I sometimes wish “progressive Christians” were better at articulating theologies and beliefs in positive terms, not only saying what they don’t believe and practice, but proclaiming what they do believe and practice. And there is a tendency for “progressive” religious folks to conflate “progressive” religion with “progressive” politics, which do have a lot of overlap, but which are not the same thing exactly. So although I feel at home in this little corner of Christianity, I do get frustrated by it, and I see things I might change if I had the power.
One of the most consistently difficult things about progressive Christianity, related to that first paragraph above, is the tendency of progressive Christians to reduce everything to love. Love becomes the start and finish of every theological dispute; love takes the place of ethical reasoning or pulling out nuance or wrestling with tradition. Don’t get me wrong; love is great. But I have noticed that when progressive Christians get into the weeds of difficult conversations, hard biblical texts, or thorny questions, someone will inevitably say something like, “isn’t love the answer?” Or, they might ask, “wasn’t Jesus all about love?” Love becomes a theological alpha and omega, a way to relieve the cognitive burden of struggling with hard or toxic things from our past or our present, and a way to shut down conversations.
I think the progressive Christian focus on love is probably a remainder of the equation that is the Protestant Reformation. Beginning in the late medieval period, and stretching especially through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some Christians (mostly but not exclusively in Europe) began to critique and then oppose the western (Latin, or Roman, or Catholic) church. They did this on a number of fronts, with quite a few different critiques, but one of the big ones was by characterizing the Catholic Church as wooden, dead, works-based, overly traditional, and too beholden to arcane doctrines and theologies. Many (but not all) modern progressive Christians can trace their lineage back to those Protestant Reformers, and they have inherited, even if unwittingly, the tendency to critique institutional religion as backward, stuck in the past, and too concerned with minutia. If you’ve ever heard someone say that they oppose “organized religion,” or that they’re “spiritual but not religious,” there’s a good chance that that idea has its roots in the thoughts and writings of a bunch of people in western Europe in the 1500s, even if the modern person is not aware of it. Ironically, the people at the source of these ideas were likely also the founders of the “religious” “organized religion” that the modern person is now opposing. This attitude even accounts for a lot of the anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in our world; those Protestant Reformers often criticized the Roman Catholic Church by comparing it to and conflating it with Judaism, characterizing both as inflexible dinosaurs that were too invested in their own traditions of religion to meet people’s needs in the present—and of course presenting their own tradition as an appealing and convenient alternative.
When progressive Christians appeal to love as a kind of universal principle of Christianity, I think they’re often returning to that well of the early Protestant Reformation, with its anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish rhetoric. “Wasn’t Jesus all about love?” is a way to position Jesus and one’s own form of Christianity in opposition to some other way of doing it—Catholicism and Judaism in the past, and perhaps evangelicalism or fundamentalism in the present. (People also do this with the bible, arguing that the New Testament is all about love while the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament is all about wrath and vengeance, although this isn’t remotely true). Love becomes a way to wholesale delegitimize someone else’s perspective. Love becomes a kind of theological nuclear weapon, wiping out and flattening everything. If it’s all about love, after all, then all other nuances, caveats, complications, or expansions are either unnecessary or harmful. “Isn’t it all about love” becomes a way to singlehandedly dismiss someone else’s tradition as too complicated or arcane, while simultaneously lifting up one’s own tradition as pure, simple, and right. And it becomes a way to short-circuit difficult, painful, or confusing conversations.
The other objection I have to the “wasn’t Jesus all about love” perspective is that, in my opinion, the answer is no. Jesus seems to have had a multi-faceted and varied public career, judging by the gospels, with lots of healing, teaching, preaching, and a bit of what we might call public activism. Some of that looked like love, and some of it looked like anger, indifference, contempt, wrath, weariness, and indignation. It’s true that Jesus spoke often about love, and that he seems to have held it up as a high value. And it’s also true that Jesus’ life itself can be seen as an act of love or expression of love. But when people insist on reading everything Jesus did as love, it flattens out what was really a nuanced and varied life. And so often, when people speak of Jesus’ love, they do so by way of contrast to the Old Testament, where, they argue, God is violent, wrathful, and even abusive. Sometimes we set up the New Testament’s love only as a way to criticize the Old Testament.
There are a lot of reasons that this is a bad thing to do, including that it’s simply not a good reading of either testament—they’re both more complicated than that. But it’s the dichotomy that might be most dangerous—the lumping of all Old Testament things into one category (wrath) and all New Testament things into the other (love). That’s an interpretive move and a theological perspective that has led to a lot of bloodshed over the years, and of course to a lot of interreligious hatred.
In the lectionary for this week (I’m finally getting to it), we see Paul’s take on this question. In Romans 13:8-14, Paul tackles a version of this question about love. The background or purpose of Paul’s letter to the Romans is a little bit murky. Some people think that it’s a kind of theological magnum opus, a long essay in which Paul tells everyone what he believes. Modern Christians (especially Protestants, especially evangelicals) use it as a handbook for salvation. I’m one of those who believes that Paul wrote Romans essentially as a fundraising campaign, to help garner support for a planned mission to Spain. (He says as much in chapter 15). The main text of Romans, then, is Paul explaining himself to the Romans, in preparation for asking them for help. Romans 1-14 is the windup, and Romans 15 is the pitch. He’s trying to get them on board with his theology, so they will be inclined to help him.
In the course of this effort, in chapter 13, Paul has a few verses on love. They are very helpful for anyone who is thinking about love as a theological category in the Christian tradition. And Paul’s words are especially important for those of us who use love in contrast to Judaism, or in contrast to tradition and “organized religion” generally. Paul writes in 13:8 that “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” And a couple of verses later in 13:10, he says that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” The words that Paul is using here are being used in specific ways that I find interesting. The ones being translated with forms of “fulfill” in English are the related Greek words plēroō (a verb) and plērōma (a noun). The verb means something like complete, fulfill, or finish, and the noun means something like fullness or completeness. (By the way, the same verb is used in chapter 15 in interesting ways, where Paul uses it to talk about being done with his missionary work in the east and wanting to go to Spain in the west; he thinks he’s done there, which is the purpose for his letter). And back here in chapter 13, what is it that Paul thinks is being completed, fulfilled, or finished in love? The Greek word is nomos, and it means, broadly law. Scholars have spilled a lot of ink arguing over whether Paul means “law” in a generic sense here and in other places where he uses nomos, or whether he means the law, the Torah, the Jewish law. (That interpretation makes the earlier verses of Romans 13, which are often read as Paul’s exhortation to obey civil authorities, make a lot more sense. If you want to know more about my arguments on that, I have a chapter on it in this book). I think, given the rest of Paul’s argument to this point in Romans, that it’s almost certain that when he says nomos, he means the Torah—that loving another is the fulfillment of Jewish law. That’s how most translations treat it, while leaving room for ambiguity. Besides, it wouldn’t make a ton of sense for Paul to appeal to loving another as the fulfillment of civil law. I think he’s speaking, as a Jewish person, to what he sees as the essence of the Torah, which is love. The fact that he goes on, in verse 9, to quote essential parts of the Torah, just confirms that he’s really talking about Torah, and not about law in a general sense.
If that’s what he’s doing, he’s in good company. Leviticus 19:18, for instance, says that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” which is where Jesus got the idea. Leviticus is also what Paul is citing at the end of verse 9. The eminent rabbi Hillel also offered a form of this, saying that “what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” Paul, standing firmly within the Jewish tradition as a Jew, is simply echoing the part of the tradition that Jesus also pointed to, arguing that the upshot of the Torah is that we ought to love one another. As Hillel continued, “this is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary.” That’s not so far from what progressive Christians have said about love, when you come to think of it: love as an overriding principle.
The difference, for me, is that Jesus, Paul, and Hillel all see love as an expression of earlier tradition and as a summation of it, not as an interruption of it. They see love as the thing that arises naturally out of the Torah, and not as a correction to the Torah. Whereas Christians, even and especially progressive Christians, have often used love as a way to signal that they are departing from tradition and rejecting part of that tradition, Jesus and Paul and Hillel are using love to speak to the essence of tradition. Love is the thing that everything else adds up to. Love does not negate law, or Law, or tradition, or belief or practice. Love cannot provide the basis for rejecting, skipping over, or eliding the tricky parts of religion; love simply provides the telos, the endpoint, for the practice of religion.
Read that way, “isn’t it all about love” should be a starting point for engaging with one’s own tradition, and an end point. It should be the warrant for engagement. It shouldn’t be a form of dismissal of the everyday bits and pieces of religious life—keeping customs, traditions, and laws—but love should be the thing toward which all of those things are pointed. Love can’t be an escape clause from religion; love must be the purpose behind religion.
It's a nuanced point, but one that I think needs our attention. When we use love to circumvent the hard work of religion—when we use it to do an end-run around difficult questions and thorny issues and burdensome practices—we use love wrongly. “Isn’t love the answer,” and “wasn’t Jesus all about love,” can become excuses to opt out of further thought and effort. But love isn’t a reason to abandon the law; as Paul says, love is the fulfilling of the law.