Love is Not Love: The Uniqueness of the Christian Virtue of Love

Christian Love

Love is a theological virtue.  This means that only Christians are capable of love.  To some, this may seem like a bizarre statement.  Our culture is filled with affirmations of the value and importance of “love.”  In fact, appeals to “love” often have a prominent place in anti-Christian discourse in our culture.  

It is important to clarify that there are many different kinds of love.  There is our love for things (e.g., food, art, entertainment).  Then there is our love for other human beings.  Our love for other human beings comes in many different varieties: affection, familial love, friendship, and erotic/romantic love.  There is certainly no denying that nonChristians can and do express all of these different kinds of love.  

The theological virtue of Christian love, however, is distinct from all of these natural kinds of love.  It is a supernatural love.  The theological virtue of love is revealed to us by Divine revelation, is infused into us by the sanctifying power of God, and directs us towards God.  Thus, only Christians are capable of this kind of love.

Christian love is not based on our natural human instincts regarding what is desirable or enjoyable.  Rather, it is based on who God is.  God is love (I John 4:8), and God loves us not because there is anything in us deserving of His love, but simply because that is who He is.  As recipients of God’s love, Christians are then transformed by His love such that we love God above all other things.  And because we love God, we will love God’s beloved creation, especially our fellow human beings.

When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus responded, “‘Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ [Deut 6:5]  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ [Lev 19:18]” (Matt 22:37-39).  It would be a mistake to think of loving God merely as something added onto our natural human love for human beings and occupying a somewhat higher priority.  Rather, Jesus (and the Torah before Him) demands that we love God with the entirety of our being.  Our love for our fellow human, then, is an expression of our love for God.  Jesus highlights the command to love our neighbor here because it is the most important way in which we express our love for God.

God loves us, even though we do not deserve it.  God loves us, even though He does not need anything from us.  God loves us, even though He had to suffer and die on a cross in order to show that love to us.  As recipients of this amazing, gracious, Divine love, Christians are called to show that same kind of love to their fellow human beings.  We must love all human beings, even if they do not deserve it, even if we do not get anything out of it, and even if it might mean self-sacrifice, suffering, or death for us to do so.  

For this reason, Christian love embraces even our enemies.  Our Lord commanded us, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in Heaven.  He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.  If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?  Are not even the tax collectors doing that?  And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?  Do not even pagans do that?  Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:43-48).  

From the world’s perspective, loving our enemies is a contradiction in terms.  Our enemies hate us.  They do not deserve our love, and there is no benefit or enjoyment we can receive from them that could cause feelings of love in us towards them.  From a Christian perspective, however, love must embrace our enemies, or it is not real love at all.  Christian love for enemies is not based on there being anything loveable about our enemies.  Rather, it is based on who God is, and who He has called us to be as His children.  Christians love all human beings, including their enemies, because God is love, and He has called us to love in the same way.

Thus, a Christian who does not love their enemies demonstrates that they are only loving with a natural human love and do not truly have God’s love in their heart.  All human beings love their friends and family.  But, from a Chrsitian perspective, this is not real love.

It would be a mistake to think of Christian love as just taking natural human love and adding to it love of enemies in order to turn it into Christian love.  No, Christian love is something that is fundamentally different from natural human love.  True Christians love all human beings–friends, family, strangers, and enemies–with Divine Christian love.  But most of the time, viewing a person’s outward actions, this Divine love is almost indistinguishable from natural human love.  It is only when one sees Christians loving their enemies that one can clearly see in outward behavior that the love guiding Christians is something fundamentally different from natural human love.  Love of enemies is not something tacked on to natural human love to turn it into Christian love; rather, it is the litmus test by which one can discern whether a person’s love has all along been merely natural human love or whether it has been genuine, Divine Christian love.

Love and Truth

There are only a handful of people Jesus is said to love in the Gospels.  He loves His disciples (John 13:1).  He loves Mary, Martha, and Lazarus (John 11:5).  And He loves a rich man who asked Him how to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:21).  Jesus, as Love Incarnate, is our primary example of what it means to love.  Therefore, if we want to know what it means to love, it is important that we examine how Jesus loved this man.

When the rich man asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life, Jesus responded by reminding him of God’s commandments (Mark 10:17-19).  After the man insisted that he had always kept God’s commandments (v. 20),^[1]Interestingly, Jesus never questions the accuracy of the man’s claim to have always kept God’s commandments, nor does He accuse the man of being self-righteous for making this claim.  … Continue reading “Jesus looked at him and loved him.  ‘One thing you lack,’ He said.  ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me.’  At this, the man’s face fell.  He went away sad, because he had great wealth” (vv. 21-22).  

Jesus did not tell the rich man that he would have eternal life no matter what, because God loved Him.  Nor did Jesus tell him that He would accept him as part of the community of His disciples just as He was.  Instead, Jesus told the man the truth: the only way he could have eternal life was by submitting to the radical and costly demands of Christian discipleship and being willing to give up everything in order to follow Him.  The man’s response was to leave sad rather than following Jesus.

If the body of Christ wants to love people with the love of Christ, then we cannot tell people that they can have eternal life no matter how they live and be accepted as part of the Church just as they are.  Instead, we must tell people the truth: “These are the radical and costly demands of Christian discipleship, and if you are not willing to submit to these demands, you cannot have eternal life and cannot be part of the Church.”  Often, when we tell people this, their response will be to go away from the Church sad.  This is tragic.  But it is their choice.  It is not a result of the Church being “unloving.”  It is a result of the Church loving people by confronting them with the truth.  The unloving thing to do is to tell people they can have eternal life without submitting to the radical and costly demands of Christian discipleship, and and then to accept such deluded, false converts into the visible Church.

In our culture, there is a strong tendency to conflate “love” with kindness.  Things such as “tolerance,” “inclusion,” and “affirmation” are routinely touted as prime examples of love, while judging, excluding, or rebuking people are often considered prime examples of what it means to be unloving.  Many Christians have absorbed this idea of love, believing that loving others means accepting and including them as members of the Church, no matter what they do.  

Kindness is certainly a vitally important aspect of love.  However, we cannot reduce love to mere kindness.  True love is inseparable from truth, and includes a willingness to tell people the truth, even when they do not want to hear it.  It is possible to tell people the truth in an unkind, unloving manner.  However, it is not possible to love people without telling them the truth.  God’s word calls us to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15).  

When the Church shows genuine, Christlike love, the world may criticize it as “unloving,” “intolerant,” and “judgmental.”  But this should not dissuade us from loving people and telling them the truth.  We must carry out our Lord’s task of building a community of genuine disciples, practicing church discipline, and proclaiming the Gospel in word and deed.

The Christian concept of love differs from our culture’s concept of love in that it is a higher kind of love that genuinely cares for someone’s ultimate, eternal wellbeing.  A friend who loves with a very immature, shallow kind of love would say that being a friend means encouraging someone to keep doing drugs if that makes them feel happy.  But someone who loves their friend with a mature love will not be content to see their friend destroy their long-term health with harmful drugs, and will stage an intervention to get them to stop, even at the risk of the friendship.  In the same way, a friend who loves with a natural human love would say that being a friend means encouraging someone to do whatever makes them happy, even if it is immoral.  But a Christian who loves with a true Christian love will confront and rebuke a friend for their sin, even at the risk of the friendship.  This may be misinterpreted by the spiritually immature as being “unkind,” but true kindness cannot be divorced from telling the truth, and neither can true love.

As New Testament scholar Richard Hays insightfully comments, the term love “has become debased in popular discourse; it has lost its power of discrimination, having become a cover for all manner of vapid self-indulgence. . . One often hears voices in the church urging that the radical demands of Christian discipleship should not be pressed upon church members because the “loving” thing to do is to include everyone without imposing harsh demands–for example, disciplines of economic sharing or sexual fidelity. . . The biblical story teaches us that God’s love cannot be reduced to “inclusiveness”: authentic love calls us to repentance, discipline, sacrifice, and transformation. . . We can recover the power of love only by insisting that love’s meaning is to be discovered in the New Testament story of Jesus–therefore, in the cross.”^[2]The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (New York, HarperOne, 1996).  What many people in our culture (including many Christians) call “love” is nothing more than shallow sentimentalism.  True love, Christian love, must be defined as “what God revealed to us in the cross of Jesus Christ.”  It is a self-sacrificial love, a love that embraces even enemies, and a love that is inseparable from truth.  Growing in this virtue of love is central to what Christian ethics is all about.

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