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 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 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 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 ’ 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. and ed. Perrry D. LeFevre (University of Chicago press, 1956), 9. 19 Paul S. Fiddes, “Creation Out of Love,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 169. 20 Pinnock, Unbounded Love, 31. 21 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 65. 22 David Gueretzki, “Some ‘Random’ Notes on the ‘Image of God’,” BT650 Theology of God and Creation class notes, May 2-6, 2005. 5 form,”23 symbolizing the relationship between church and Jesus Christ, the “profound mystery” of

Eph. 5:31-32.

As an aside, analogia relationis insists that a “genuine love sees faces, not a mass.”24 It is not

“a universal love of humanity” but one that “takes place somewhere in time and space, which does not, therefore, take place always and everywhere, but in which there is always a demarcation and limitation of its object or objects.”25 An antithesis to this would be the recent “Live 8” concerts that purported a love for the starving of Africa but were essentially a mass enterprise of mutual masturbation26 among media celebrities.

But lest we think this love God has for us is somehow prompted by an intrinsic loveableness in humans, we need to keep in mind that “it is not that God loves that which is in itself worthy to be loved; but, on the contrary, that which in itself is without value acquires value by the fact that it is the object of God’s love”27 (italics his). Or as stated more succinctly by Barth (oddly enough),

“The one loved by God acquires his worth from the fact that God loves him.”28

Surprisingly, this simple truth lies at the heart of my conundrum in trying to love Adolf. A

God who acts in creation from a position of freedom and not need (contra process theology as mentioned above) and as a manifestation of His intrinsic love (“God is love”), is the only sort of

God who will enable me to be able to love Adolf. For:

this means precisely that (as He made heaven and earth ex nihilo, or formed Adam from the dust of the earth according to Gen. 2:7, or can raise up from the stones children to Abraham) He can make of those who cannot and will not love (for they are sinners) men who do actually love.29

23 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 100. 24 George A. Buttrick, “Prayer,” in Devotional Classics: Selected readings for Individuals and Groups, eds., Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith (SanFrancisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 102. 25 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Vol. IV - The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part Two (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958), 802. 26 I had to get this word in here somewhere, but honestly, for anyone who watched the veritable orgasms on TV during the live coverage, the word is all too apt. My prayer is that no starving Africans see any of it. 27 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 54. 28 Barth, Church Dogmatics, 767. 29 Ibid., 776. 6

Any theology that denies ex nihilo; that there was a beginning,30 forfeits any hope that humanity in its fallen can produce love beyond some sort of philanthropic altruism. Those theologies that do (I’m thinking know in particular of process theology) require

humankind’s going back behind the given word of God to procure its own knowledge of God. This possibility of a knowledge of God that comes from beyond the given word of God is humankind’s being sicut deus; for from where can it gain this knowledge if not from the springs of its own life and being?31

As opposed to imago dei – the image of God as “representation,”32 sicut deus – ‘like God’ – assumes an autonomous, libertarian creature free to create. “The visual picture here, in other words, is of a (very big) divine figure backing out of the scene, or restraining his influence, in order that the other (little) figures may exercise completely independent thinking and acting.”33

We may add “little divine figures.”

But as mentioned, an autonomous independent creature cannot create ex nihilo – it cannot create a love for neighbor or enemy. This lust for human autonomy lies at the heart of the fall; a desire to be sicut deus. We have exchanged our initial slavery to God for slavery to self. Having been bought by Christ (1 Cor. 6:20), we belong to him; a belonging from before the creation34

(Eph. 1:4). In our attempts to love the other ex nihilo, “God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God…love, having become a god, becomes a demon.”35 By standing in

30 Bonhoeffer writes, “Luther was once asked what God was doing before the creation of the world. His answer was that God was cutting sticks to cane people who ask such idle questions.” Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 31. As my mother often said, “Wenn du eine dumme Frage fragst, kriegst du eine dumme antwort.” (When you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. Those crazy Germans!) 31 Ibid., 116. 32 G. C. Berkouwer, Man: The Image of God, Studies in Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1962), 114. “This concept deals with man as he actually is, the non-autonomous and non-independent creature.” 33 Sarah Coakley, “Kenosis: Theological Meanings and Gender Connotations,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 205.

34 Gueretzki, BT650 Theology of God and Creation class notes, pg. 10, May 5, 2005. To paraphrase: “The incarnation is the ground for creation. Without incarnation there could be no creation, even though the creation came before the incarnation chronologically, it comes after the incarnation theologically.” 35 Lewis, The Four Loves, 17, 83. 7 the center, God becomes a “cause among causes”36 and we become idolaters. In our incompatibilist divinity we have “catapulted [ourselves] into a squalid revolution with disastrous results.”37

In this state, Adolf has little hope of getting nothing more than contemptuous philanthropy from me and God remains “unseen” (I John 4:12). If love of God and neighbor are required for entrance into the kingdom of God (Matt. 5:45; Mark 12:34) then I, in my state of sicut deus, am faced with an impossibility (:24). As long as my heart is set on earthly things (Luke

14:26) then I will only be able to treasure that which is on earth, for I cannot give my heart to that which I do not treasure (Matt. 6:21). This means that I will need an inversion of values, a transformation that allows my heart to treasure heavenly things. “Apparently God alone can free a man so completely that the man can and will fulfill the conditions for entering the Kingdom.”38

The impossible becomes possible through God (Mark 10:27). “An indispensable condition for entrance into the Kingdom is the power of God…what God demands he gives.”39

This requires a re-creation, a putting on of a new self through God’s incarnation “slaying

[humankind’s] false divinity and restoring the imago dei” 40 (Col. 3:10). This “image of the invisible God” is the one who “has rescued us from the dominion of darkness” (Col. 1:15, 13).

And now we are being called “to be conformed to the likeness of his Son” (Rom. 8:29), to be

“transformed into his likeness” (2 Cor. 3:18). This transformation from sicut deus to imago dei

“took a second Adam to make us what we were meant to be from the beginning.”41 In this act God has himself taken action to reconcile us to himself (2 Cor. 5:18; Col. 1:22). Precisely here we can

36 John Polkinghorne, “Kenotic Creation and Divine Action,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 104. 37 Carson, Love in Hard Places, 103. 38 Piper, Love your enemies, 78. 39 Ibid., 77. 40 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 113. 41 Pinnock, Unbounded Love, 106. 8 speak of philanthropy (if we must); a completely free, spontaneous act of love flowing from who

God is (John 3:16), for while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom. 5:6). “For God to salvage the relationship he allowed for the incarnation of Jesus to provide a locus for us to meet with him again,”42 becoming flesh and taking on the form of a man (Phil. 2:7,8).

“This analogy of love (analogia amoris) has its strong foundation in the emptying, the kenosis, of Jesus Christ, who became like man, the renewal of the image of God.”43 Here we have the most astonishing thing of all – “then make my joy complete by being like minded, having the same love” (Phil. 2:2, italics mine). What Paul showed possible he then expected us to follow!

Thus we see that the transformation, a repentance, if you will, from our idolatry, is what enables us to obey the royal law, “not just because it is important for the future [entering the Kingdom], but also because it is possible in the present.”44 Essentially, the “love command is thus no less than a command that this renewal of heart happen.”45

All of a sudden there is hope for Adolf to receive love and for me to enter the kingdom. But even at this point there is a temptation to allow myself to remain in the center; to pursue love for

Adolf out of a self-effort at imitation, laudable as that may look. What is missing is that

“neighbor-love requires, to use a broad and inclusive term, “religious nurture,” ie., the restoration of a lost bond with the divine. So the “first great commandment” has come before the second, and perennially infused it with content and depth.”46 The double command demands “two spheres of activity” (Barth’s wording), because “the second half of the law is a delusion and a cheat if you erase the first half.”47 As T. S. Eliot wrote in a poem:

How can we love our neighbor?…

42 Gueretzki, BT650 Theology of God and Creation class notes, pg. 3, May 2, 2005. 43 Berkouwer, Man: The Image of God, 116. 44 Piper, Love your enemies, 80. 45 Ibid., 96. 46 Stephen G. Post, “The purpose of neighbor-love,” Journal of Religious Ethics 18 (Spr 1990): 182. 47 T. S. Eliot in “The purpose of neighbor-love,” Stephen G. Post, Journal of Religious Ethics 18 (Spr 1990): 184. 9

You, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone? Talking of right relations of men, but not of relations of men to GOD. (Eliot, 1936:112, Selected Poems)

The first command requires for me to understand that my love for Adolf cannot be a primary love, but only a secondary love following the primary.48 As Foster has said, “Love of God, of necessity, leads to love of neighbor.”49

The question now becomes; how do I love God? Aimeric, cardinal deacon of the Church of

Rome in the 12th century asked the same question of , who responded with,

“You wish then to hear from me why and how God ought to be loved. I answer: The cause of loving God is God himself…God is to be loved for his own sake.”50 Why? “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19), “for apart from [God] I have no good thing” (Ps. 16:2). As Bernard so eloquently put:

The more you know yourself loved, the easier you will find it to love in return…My God, my Helper, I shall love you in proportion to your gift and my capacity, less indeed than is just, but to do that is beyond me. Even though I cannot love you as much as I ought, still I cannot love you more than I am able. I shall be able to love you more only when you deign to give me more; and even then you can never find my love worthy.51

A true realization of what God has done allows me to love, for “he who has been forgiven little loves little” (Luke 7:47). “Then the soul, seeing how tremendously she is loved, is herself filled to overflowing with love”52 (1 John 4:11). But as the song by Bobby Vinton (1969) says, “To know, know, know you is to love, love, love you,” which means that I “doubt that it is possible to obey the first command without reading the Bible a great deal.”53

48 Barth, Church Dogmatics, 753. 49 Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith, eds. Devotional Classics: Selected readings for Individuals and Groups (SanFrancisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 93. 50 Bernard of Clairvaux, Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 174. 51 Ibid., 187. 52 Catherinne of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 64. 53 Carson, Love in Hard Places, 32. 10

Getting to know God better is critical because we are not to love a god of our choosing but the God of Creation; the one who created ex nihilo and gives us the double commands in the order given. To reverse the commands “is to return to idolatry”54 by loving the created order more than the Creator. It is this love of this God that produces an obedience to the commands (John 14:21) for “every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for

God.”55 This love which grows out of a knowledge of God is finally compelled to act, for where there is no act (1 John 3:18), “there is no imitation.”56 Here I can agree with process theology in saying that my act is an act of creativity, but not ex nihilo, and not from autonomy but only a

“weak and puny” imitation57. I am not a conduit for God’s love but one responding to His love, and thus reflecting His love. But even here grace abounds, for God responds to my “weak and puny” efforts at obedience and increases my knowledge,58 “of the Son of God, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

In the end, it is an ever increasing love for the God of Creation that “enables [man] to love what is not naturally lovable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior and the sneering,”59 and for me to love Adolf. In the words of Clement of Rome, the love command has become a “yoke of grace.”60

54 Ibid., 187. 55 Lewis, The Four Loves, 13. 56 Barth, Church Dogmatics, 786. 57 Ibid., 785. 58 Philip Jacob Spenner, Pia Desideria (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964), 102. 59 Lewis, The Four Loves, 177. 60 Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament, 218. 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: Vol. IV - The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part Two. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958.

Bernard of Clairvaux. Selected Works. Translated by G. R. Evans. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.

Berkouwer, G. C. Man: The Image of God. Studies in Dogmatics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1962.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3. Minneaplois: Fortress press, 1997.

Burnaby, John. 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.

Carson, D. A. Love in Hard Places. Wheaton, Ill. : Crossway Books, 2002.

Catherinne of Siena. The Dialogue. Translated by Suzanne Noffke. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. Foster, Richard and James Bryan Smith, eds. Devotional Classics: Selected readings for Individuals and Groups. SanFrancisco: HarperCollins, 1993.

Furnish, Victor Paul. “Love of neighbor in the New Testament.” Journal of Religious Ethics 10 (Fall 1982): 327-334.

______. The Love Command in the New Testament. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Prayers of Kierkegaard. Translated and edited by Perrry D. LeFevre. University of Chicago press, 1956.

______. Works of Love. Translated by Howard and Edna Hong. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Gueretzki, David. “Course Notes.” BT650 Theology of God and Creation class notes, May 2-6, 2005.

Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960.

Malamat, Abraham. “Love your neighbor as yourself: what it really means.” Biblical Archaeology Review 16 (no 4 1990): 50-51.

Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, Part One. New York: The MacMillan Co., 1932. 12

Pinnock, Clark H. and Robert C. Brow. Unbounded Love: A Good News Theology for the 21st Century. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Piper, John. 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.

Polkinghorne, John, ed. The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001.

Post, Stephen G. “The purpose of neighbor-love.” Journal of Religious Ethics 18 (Spr 1990): 181-193.

Moffatt, James. Love in the New Testament. London : Hodder and Stoughton, 1929.

Spenner, Philip Jacob. Pia Desideria. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964.

Stiegman, Emero. “Bernard of Clairvaux.” In The Medieval Theologians, ed. G.R. Evans, 129- 155. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Tisdale, Leonora Tubbs. “The Gospel We Don’t Want to Hear (or Preach).” Journal for Preachers 23 (no 3 Easter 2000): 23-30.

Volf, Miroslav. “Love Your Heavenly Enemy.” Christianity Today 44 (Oct. 23, 2000): 94-97.