Episode Details

What is love, when all is said and done?

We finished the first part our exploration of this surprisingly tricky question with more questions than answers. Perhaps Don Carson’s little book on The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God needs a counterpart: the difficult doctrine of the love of Christians.

But we did make some progress.

We figured out that love is deeply connected with goodness—with perceiving something to be good and reaching out to it, being inclined or attracted towards it, wanting to embrace it and enjoy it, and see it grow in its goodness or become the good thing it can be.

Love draws us out of ourselves to focus on some good beyond ourselves—whether that’s the good of a beautiful piece of music, or the good of seeing someone healed or fed or saved, or the ultimate good of the God who made all these goods. This is why love is the opposite not just of hate, but of selfishness and pride. Love rejoices in the truly good that we see beyond ourselves, for its own sake.

Good old St Augustine thought deeply about all this. He realised that love was really a kind of knowledge—an affective, heart-felt knowledge that not only understood intellectually that something was good but reached out towards it, yearned for it, and acted accordingly.

Love is of two kinds, he suggested: a rational (or affectionate) love that perceives and reaches for something good; and a benevolent love that acts upon that affection, that seeks the good for others rather than ourselves.

If this is the case, suggested Augustine, then true love depends on the true goodness of that which is loved. It depends on God’s own goodness, and on the good world that he has created, full of good things and good purposes. Love does not just arise within us as a sentiment or feeling; it relates to some real and good thing that we love. It requires an object or purpose that is truly good.

At a practical level we know this to be true. To be loving towards a person—to do something good or gracious or kind for them—requires us to know them and what would be good for them. The intention or motive to love, on its own, is not enough. To throw myself off a cliff to demonstrate ‘love’ for my wife is folly, not love. It seeks or achieves no good thing—quite the opposite. To throw myself in front of a bullet for her is indeed love, because it seeks to protect and prolong that good thing that I love so very much, which is her life.

For love to be real and true, it must constantly make judgements between good and evil. “Let love be genuine”, says Paul. “Abhor the evil, cleave to the good” (Rom 12:9). Without a true knowledge of what is good, it’s impossible to truly love.

This is why our world is so lost and confused about love. Our world has rejected the idea of something or someone being objectively good. Goodness now resides entirely in the eye and heart of the beholder. Whatever I love is good by definition because I have decided to love it, and who are you to tell me otherwise? Love is love.

But as Augustine famously pointed out, it’s impossible to truly love another person without understanding them as God’s creature, made in his image, made for his purposes, and made for fellowship with him.

“He truly loves his friend”, he wrote, “who loves God in his friend, either because God is in his friend, or that he may be so.”  (Confessions, 5.19)

Perhaps we are starting to see why faith is the foundation of love in the New Testament.

By faith, we receive in Jesus Christ a whole new understanding of reality. Our eyes are opened to comprehend what is truly good and evil, because we have left behind our nonsensical rejection of God, and the darkened mind that resulted from that. We come to see God and each other and the good (though falle