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LOVING the UNLOVELY When A 1 LOVING THE UNLOVELY When a relative of mine was 18 she began to date an older fellow (lets call him “Adolf”), who to me, was the epitome of vermin. Not only was he currently legally married (although separated), he had fathered children from three other women, and was cheating on my relative during their engagement. On top of this, he was not only an alcoholic and a drug addict but also involved in the selling of narcotics, along side of his other “business” of smuggling restricted firearms across the border for sale to criminals. Oh yeah…and he smoked. My relative, clothed in an optimistic halo of missionary dating, refused to see what was in my opinion a considerable “down-side” to the proposed nuptials and continued to date this…creature. It was at this point that I began, in all sincerity, to pray for this Adolf’s demise. I reasoned that God needed to step in and save what was sure to be a devastating relationship. I even gave God the freedom to pick his method, although suggesting more than once that the front end of a bus would do the job nicely. God apparently did not agree with me and allowed Adolf to live and marry my relative. Consequently, three boys were born into the family, two that have the effects of FAS (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome), thanks, in no small part, to my brother-in-laws habits. Over the years, the family has had to endure numerous times of squalor, desertion, infidelity, unhealthy moral choices of all stripes, irreligious education and other ills, directly resulting from Adolf’s lifestyle choices. And yet, on Thanksgiving or some other such occasion, I find myself sitting across the table from him, asking him to “Pass the potato salad, please”, painfully aware that, as my neighbor (And enemy?), God commands I love him. How is this reasonable, even possible? Everyone knows that universal maxim of 1 John 4: 8, “God is love”, even though it is usually proclaimed in some ephemeral, sickly sweet [out of] context involving universal “niceties”. As such, the typical three point liberal sermon ( 1. God is love. 2. God loves you. 3. Have some 2 candy.) is more or less useless in helping me to love Adolf, making the “royal law”1 of Matt. 22:39 (“Love your neighbor as yourself”) an impossible command (never mind the even more onerous command to love my enemies). But “if the fulfillment of Jesus’ love command is in some sense a condition for entering the Kingdom of God”2, I’ve got my work cut out for me. But herein perhaps lies a way out from my conundrum. If Jesus commands me to love Adolf (as we have seen), he can’t possibly expect this to include my affections, for how can emotions be commanded…particularly when love is understood a la Freud as “an emotional reaction that arises spontaneously”3? Even though Lewis feels it’s possible that “almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating”4, he hasn’t met my brother-in-law. Or to put it nicely: To live above with those you love, Undiluted glory; To live below with those you know, Quite another story.5 And according to Malamat, the Hebrew word for love, ahav, in the context of Lev. 19:18 (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”) means “to be beneficial to”. As such, “the Bible is not commanding us to feel something – love – but to do something – to be useful or beneficial to help your neighbor.”6 Thus, to misrepresent Malamat’s intentions, I can do good things for Adolf but not necessarily have to feel love for him. Precisely its formulation as a command recognizes “that 1 Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 40. 2 John Piper, Love your enemies: Jesus' love command in the Synoptic Gospels and in the early Christian paraenesis : a history of the tradition and interpretation of its uses (Cambridge, New York : Cambridge University Press, 1979), 77. See Matt. 5:43-48, from which Piper says, “The fulfillment of Jesus’ love command is a condition for sonship of the Heavenly Father.” 76. See also D. A. Carson, Love in Hard Places (Wheaton, Ill. : Crossway Books, 2002), 27. “Jesus is certainly saying that he cannot imagine admittance to the kingdom without taking on board this double command to love.” 3 Victor P. Furnish, “Love of neighbor in the New Testament,” Journal of Religious Ethics 10 (Fall 1982): 332. 4 C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), 54. 5 Carson, Love in Hard Places, 55. 6 Malamat Abraham, “Love your neighbor as yourself: what it really means,” Biblical Archaeology Review 16 (no 4 1990): 51. 3 love in the Christian sense is not something “spontaneous,” but something which must be repeatedly called forth and repeatedly obeyed.”7 The work ethic from my Mennonite upbringing can relate to that; I’ll love him with good deeds, even if he is a jerk. I’ll be nice to him but I don’t have to like him. Besides, emotional love is fickle; “spontaneous love can be changed within itself; it can be changed to its opposite, to hate.”8 But what about 1 Cor. 13? If I’m nice to Adolf and help him move and take him out for coffee, “but have not love, I gain nothing.” What!? Paul makes it clear that Christian love cannot be reduced to committed altruism, “the commandment to love must not be stripped of affective content.”9 “Willing the good of the scoundrel whom I emotionally detest” is what Carson calls “a nice dodge.”10 Logically this also makes sense. When Karl Barth was asked if it were true that one day in heaven we will see our loved ones he replied, “Not only the loved ones!”11 This means that it is entirely possible that I might need to co-exist with Adolf in heaven one day, and as Miroslav argues, God isn’t just going to sprinkle some magic pixie dust in the air to make Adolf and me like each other. There will be a completion of a reconciliation that will (should?) have begun in this life. This points to the origin of my inability to muster my affections for people like Adolf; the fall, which then points back to the first manifestation of love, (outside the trinity) the creation. Within the act of creation, we see, according to Augustine, an act of gratuita bonitas – “spontaneous goodness…a love not proceeding from indigence but from bounty towards His works.”12 This love is what Nygren has called “uncaused,”13 which “means that God creates in 7 Victor Paul Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), 201. 8 Soren kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 49. 9 Carson, Love in Hard Places, 21. 10 Ibid., 30. 11 Miroslav Volf, “Love Your Heavenly Enemy,” Christianity Today 44 (Oct. 23, 2000): 94. 12 John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of St. Augustine’s Teaching on the Love of God as the Motive of Christian Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), 164. 4 complete freedom.”14 Without any need requiring him to create the world, creation becomes “an overflow of his loving, not a necessity.”15 This freedom is critical, as we shall see later, but one denied by process theologians who at worst, attribute creation to the product of “metaphysical necessity”16 or at best, a withdrawing of God’s omnipotence to allow space for the ‘Big Bang’ (“in this way creation comes into being in the space of God’s kenosis”17). What is also important to recognize is that love comes before creation. Since “God is love,” that love was also at the beginning (John 1:1) before creation; as Kierkegaard says, “Thou who art unchangeable in love.”18 The creation is not an attempt by God to fulfill a need of relationship (contra process theology19), since within the trinity we already see a perfect love. This allows creation to be expressions of this perfect love, including, but not limited to, humanity. And because we are created in God’s image (Gen. 1:27), part of what it means to be image bearers is that we “are made for love, for God’s perfect love”20 (1 John 4:7). This likeness “of humankind to God is not analogia entis but analogia relationis,”21 or ‘analogy of relationship’. However, we are not talking “of any kind of loving human relationship, but rather a particular kind of irreducible union marked by definite and biological difference.”22 Since “[Jesus Christ] is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), this ‘particular kind’ of union “is therefore the church in its original 13 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, Part One (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1932), 52. 14 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3 (Minneaplois: Fortress press, 1997), 41. 15 Clark H Pinnock and Robert C. Brow, Unbounded Love: A Good News Theology for the 21st Century (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 48. 16 Ian G. Barbour, “God’s Power: A Process View,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 6. 17 Ibid., 146. 18 Soren Kierkegaard, The Prayers of Kierkegaard, trans.
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