Love in Paul (10) love for one another

We’re continuing a series about the apostle Paul’s theology of love. To recap, there are three great strands of love in the OT that also continue, now Christologically framed, into the NT (and Paul in particular).

1) The elective and saving love of Yahweh for his chosen people.

2) The responsive love of Israel (God’s people) to God’s prior redemptive action.

3) Inter-communal love: the love God’s people are to have for one another

This is the first post in strand 3. If strands 1 and 2 were ‘vertical love’ (love of God for humanity; human love for God in response), this strand is ‘horizontal love’ – at a human to human level. It is also the strand about which the Apostle Paul has by far the most to say.

Indeed, he has so much to say about love for one another that I call him the ‘apostle of love’. He’s right up there with John in the frequency and importance of love within the community of God’s people. The love believers are to have for one another is to be THE distingushing mark of these fledging churches, reflecting their new-found identity in Christ and marking them as belonging to a different story and ethic to that of the surrounding nations.

We’ve mentioned earlier how Douglas Campbell calls this ‘agapeism’ – that love captures all that is important about Pauline ethics. And I agree, it does. Let’s take two broad themes in this post, and we’ll continue with others in the next post

The Missional Focus of Pauline Love

Here’s a sweeping generalisation – there is a strange lack of attention paid to the importance of love within Christian mission. There can be much discussion of context, strategy, culture, vision, leadership, apologetics and so on, but, rarely a sustained focus on the most important element of all – the integrity and attractiveness of the Christian community. (happy to be corrected here)

Paul, it seems to me, has a razor sharp awareness that love is essential for the health and witness of his Christian communities. There was nothing like them in the ancient world. No other communities embraced individuals across the profound religious, gender, socio-economic status and ethnic divisions of the ancient world. Believers now have a new primary identity in Christ as brothers and sisters (adelphoi) within God’s household. Previous identity – whether Jew, Gentile, male, female, slave or free – are relativised, not erased they are – radically – now of no spiritual significance.

In this vein, coming from a social-scientific angle, David Horrell (2016) makes the argument that Paul is primarily concerned with the construction of a corporate solidarity that acts to heal inner-communal conflict and draws strength from a vocation to holiness within an immoral world.

So, in Paul, love is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the defining characteristic of the first Christian communities in their new vocation to live lives worthy of the gospel under the Lordship of Jesus Christ within a world that is ‘passing away’ (1 Cor 7:31).

Love is only thing that could possibly hold such ‘households’ together. Love is essential to the life and witness of the church. Without love no church and no family can survive – and that’s as true today as it was then.

Love as following the paradoxical way of Jesus

For Paul, Christian love is cruciform love. God’s love is demonstrated and experienced through the cross of Christ. Cruciform love is costly, it acts for the good of others at the expense of the self.

This is the paradoxical way of Jesus.

Sometimes this can be misunderstood. Christianity does not call believers to be ‘doormats’ – walked over by others at every turn. Nor does it call for self-abnegation or self-hatred. Rather, it proclaims that real flourishing, happiness and purpose is found in loving others. Loving another means acting for their good, even at cost to the self. Christianity is a corporate faith, which is another way of saying it is orientated around living well with others within a network of mutually loving relationships.

This conflicts head on with Western individualism that says fulfilment is found in self-realisation, finding yourself, loving yourself, expressing yourself and so on. This sort of ‘expressive individualism’ is centered on the self rather than on loving others. It has no place for community and its ‘eschatology’ is consumerist – short-term individual pleasure or achievement. There is nothing ‘bigger’ or more significant than the self.

We see other-focused Jesus-type love applied by Paul to a multiplicity of situations and contexts. Here are some examples and we could keep going at length here:

• Other-focused love is seen in his repeated appeals to maintain unity (Rom 12:16; 14:1-15:7; 1 Cor 1:10; 12:21-27; 14:12; Gal 6:10; Eph 4:1-3; Phil 2:1-2; Col 3:12-13; 1 Thes 5:12-15; Titus 3:1-2, 8)
• In his many warnings against divisive attitudes or behaviour (1 Cor 3:1-4, 16-17; 6:1-11; 8:9-13; 10:24, 31-33; 11:17-34; 2 Cor 12:19-20; Gal 5:15; 6:3-4; Eph 4:25-32; Phil 2:3, 14-15; Col 3:5-9; 1 Thes 4:3-6; 1 Tim 6:2b-10; 2 Tim 2:23, 3:1-5; Titus 3:9-11).
• Converts to Christ are to act in love for each other (1 Thes 4:9; Rom 12:9-10; 14:15; 1 Cor.8:1; Eph 4:2, 15-16; Phil 2:1-2; Col 2:2).
• Famously, in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3, all Christian life and ministry is of no value at all if it is not done in love.
• The Colossians are encouraged to clothe themselves with love on top of a list of other virtues (Col.3:14)
• In 1 Thessalonians 5:8 all believers are to put on the breastplate of faith and love.
• Paul prays that believers’ love would grow as they await the coming of the Lord (1 Thes 3:12; Phil 1:9) and is glad to hear of a church’s love (e.g., 1 Thes 3:6; 2 Thes 1:3).
• In Philippians he is thankful when Christ is preached ‘out of love’ (Phil 1:16) – regardless of who the preachers are.
• He rejoices when he hears of believers’ love for God’s people (Col 1:4, Philem 1:5, 7)
• He encourages the Corinthians to show the ‘genuineness’’ of their love by giving financial help for brothers and sisters in need (2 Cor 8:8, 24).
• Rather than use apostolic authority, he prefers to appeal to Philemon about Onesimus ‘on the basis of love’ (Philem.1.9).
• And, as a pastor, it is significant how often Paul expresses his deep love for the communities to whom he ministers (e.g., 1 Thes 2:8; 3:12; 1 Cor 4:21; 16:24; 2 Cor 2:4; 8:7; 11:11; Phil.4:1).

That’s a pretty strong case for ‘agapeism’ right there. More to come in the next post.

Thinking about the colour of my skin

This is a reflection I wrote for the PS column of Contemporary Christianity

It is also published on Jesus Creed on Christianity Today’s website.

Galatians 3:28 is one of the better-known verses in the Bible: 

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 

Christians, rightly, rejoice at its liberating truth – all joined ‘in Christ’ through faith are ‘one’. This unity transcends the great religious, socio-economic and gender divisions of the ancient world. The implications are astounding – in God’s eyes all human beings are of equal value and dignity regardless of religion, ethnicity, net-worth, social standing, intelligence, physical disability, education, gender, age, or skin colour.

However, it’s one thing to affirm an inclusive principle, it’s quite another to put it into practice. From its earliest days, a challenge for the church has been to live up to its calling to be a radically inclusive community in contrast to systemic inequalities that define the world.

At this point Wilberforce is often referenced (rightly) as an inspiring example of Galatians 3:28 in action – taking on, and defeating, the economic and political might of the slave trade. His dogged determination, and eventual success, is a story worth telling. 

But I wonder if it also rather too conveniently air-brushes the darker history of Christian rejection of the radical social and political implications of Galatians 3:28. 

Perhaps if you are reading this you might be like me, a Christian with roots in Northern Ireland evangelical Protestantism. Over the years I’ve thought a lot about theology and the intersections between evangelical identity, faith and politics. I’ve also thought a lot about gender, particularly how innumerable gifted women have experienced marginalisation within the church and the inbuilt privilege and assumptions I have as a man. For centuries the dominant paradigm was that women were simply inferior to men. If we had space, we could quote Chrysostom, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and Hodge and many others. More recently, modern ‘complementarians’ shy away from the inferiority argument, instead making the historically novel, and logically questionable, claim that women are equal in status and gifting with men and yet selected leadership roles in church and family are open only to men.

But why is it, I ask myself, that it took the death of George Floyd for me, in my 50s, to even begin seriously to think about the colour of my skin?  

Over the last few weeks I’ve begun to read up on slavery and the bloody history of white colonialism in Africa (too many atrocities to name but we could start with Britain in multiple places, German genocide in Namibia and millions dying in the Congo under Belgian rule). And then there are the tens of millions more men, woman and children kidnapped and transported to lives of unimaginable brutality in a global slave trade designed to prop up the developing economies of the colonial powers. And this doesn’t even include the violent suppression, and local exterminations, of indigenous populations in places like Australia and the United States. To this you can add Apartheid in South Africa and the appalling more recent history of deliberate systematised racism in America post-Lincoln (summarised in this excellent video by Phil Vischer of Veggie Tales fame). 

And white Christianity has been, and is, deeply implicated in this toxic history. Yes, that’s a sweeping statement but one, I think, that is impossible to deny. White supremacism isn’t a delusion of the radical left, it’s a defining assumption of modern Western history. Underneath it is an ability of those claiming the name of Christ to detach political and economic activity from what they profess to believe. In other words, to read the words of Galatians 3:28 but leave their radical implications conveniently behind in favour of power and money.  

Edward Colston. Wikipedia

Take Edward Colston, so recently thrown into Bristol harbour (well his statue at any rate). A slave trader who made vast profit from human lives, but also a churchman and philanthropist, well known for his generosity to good causes (hence his statue). 

So is this PS just an exercise in ‘white guilt’? After all, you may be thinking, ‘What has all this got to do with me? I’m not responsible for the past. Nor do I live in the racially segregated USA.’ 

Well, let me suggest that recent events are challenging that sort of detachment, wherever you live. If you are a white follower of Jesus and haven’t thought about what that means as a Christian, then this is a good time to start. Indeed, the very problem with ‘whiteness’ is that it is taken to be the ‘norm’ – and we don’t think about what seems to be normal (which is why I’d never thought seriously about being white until now). 

One Christian scholar challenging these sorts of assumptions is Professor David Horrell who has studied how Galatians 3:28 has been applied by white Western Bible interpreters. He concludes that 

“… though it may be uncomfortable to acknowledge it, is not our racialised identity one significant part of that complex intersection of facets of identity to which we should – indeed must – pay attention? …  Assuming that our interpretation is uncontextualised – unmarked, unlocated, unraced – is, I would suggest, no longer a feasible option.” 

In other words, if you are a Christian, you are a Christian first and a white person second. It is as Christians we are called to reflect theologically and critically on the intersections of whiteness, power and injustice. This means beginning to appreciate that our reading of history, theology, the Bible and Christian identity is deeply shaped by our whiteness. And then to put those assumptions under the searchlight of texts like Galatians 3:28.

In doing so we will be better placed to begin to seek out, befriend and listen to non-white voices and perspectives. This is especially needed in such an ethnically monochrome society like Northern Ireland. Maybe, just maybe, as we do so we will begin to understand, and to feel, what it means in day-to-day experience to be non-white within a ‘default’ white culture. And once we begin to see things through non-white eyes, perhaps, just perhaps, we will find ourselves called to act against systemic inequality in the church and wider society.

The pandemic is exposing the myths of Western individualism

This post is sparked by reading Douglas Campbell’s marvellous Pauline Dogmatics.

If asked to diagram social relations, very likely most of us would typically use a number of circles to represent individuals.

Each person is imagined as a self-contained ‘unit’, a discrete individual, separated off from other individuals by a social space.

This is a picture of the person as a self-sufficient person, with clear boundaries delineating them from other individuals. Others exist in their own spheres, perhaps bouncing off each other now and then, but essentially each of us are our own island.

Margaret Thatcher famously took this to its logical conclusion in stating that there is ‘no such thing as society’. Or, in Campbell’s words;

Personhood exists in isolation and society is a game of marbles

p.50

But with even a little analysis we soon realise this is a myth. All of us are incomplete, indeed we are crippled, without a network of social relationships. Our very identity and sense of personhood depends on interaction with, and recognition of, others.

This simple diagram begins to hint at how who we are is bound up with with relationships. The self cannot exist in splendid isolation.

^{By Wykis – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1618169}

This is why the pandemic is so hard to bear – we are being forced to actually live like the isolated individuals of Western consumerism / capitalism. And it shrivels the soul and breaks the heart. There is something deeply alien to our humanity to be in enforced lockdown.

For those us locked away with family members that we actually like and get on with this is just about survivable! But we still miss 1001 things about everyday life – its vibrancy, life, and delicious complexity, not to mention hugs, food with friends, and endless fascination of meeting new people.

For those trapped in spaces characterised by toxic relationships, it is unimagineably difficult. For those living on their own it is a lonely wilderness experience, unsustainable in the long term.

Douglas Campbell wrote his book long before Covid-19 was known about. So his words have perhaps attained extra prophetic weight in the meantime. He speaks of the connection between our social identity and the nature of God – Father, Son and Spirit.

We must let this revelation concerning the true nature of personhood sink down into out theologial bones, since it will pervade all that follows. People are relational beings because the personal God that is the Trinity is a relational communion, and we are made in the image of God …

At the heart of all reality lies an interpersonal and hence fundamental familial God. We are involved with a divinity that is interpersonal in the most committed and relational fashion.

p.52

Lockdown is necessary. But it comes at great cost – and I am NOT talking money here. It’s an issue of love. I say this because Christians believe, as Campbell says that

At the heart of the universe is a play of love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

p. 55

We are embodied beings, made by a relational God of love to be in relationships of love with him and with each other. Of course we can still love others we can only see on a computer screen, but it is a pale imitation of a fully functioning relationship.

And so, from a theological perspective, we long for the ending of lockdown, NOT so we can save the economy (although we need it to work in order to live) but so that we can love – for that is what we have been created to do.

And, even more remarkably, as God’s children love they ‘witness’ to the truth of who God is. God takes the ‘risk’ of choosing people like you and me to reveal or demonstrate his love to the world.

So in this pandemic, let us be asking ourselves, how can we as individuals and as church communities mediate something of the love of the triune God to a coronavirus world.

Comments welcome

A Dialogue with Ben Witherington on The Message of Love (26) Marriage and submission

This is a dialogue with Professor Ben Witherington about my book The Message of Love

336 pages $12.49 paperback on Amazon or £12.99 paperback IVP UK  or £9.99 ebook 

BEN:  I like the way in your discussion of Ephes. 5.21ff. you point out how Paul is busily renovating the traditional patriarchal orientation of the extended family in his day, not merely baptizing that structure and calling it good.  The exposition of ‘submit to one another out of reverence for Christ’ is helpful, and it shows the direction Paul is pointing the family in.  I have a doctoral student who has done a detailed study of Paul’s use of isotes in all its occurrences in Greek literature in that period, and it always means equality, not fairness.

In other words Paul in Colossians is even saying, masters treat your slaves as your equals, and serve them as they serve you. Now this is just as revolutionary as Ephes. 5.21.  Unless you see Paul the pastor as starting with the existing household codes and then modifying them in light of the Gospel in a more equitable direction, you’ve missed the thrust of passages like Col. 3-4 and Ephes. 5-6.  Would you agree?  Paul is not trying to change society directly, but indirectly by changing what happens in the Christian home and house church meetings— right?

PATRICK: Right. I used the title ‘Subversive Love’ to describe what’s going on. It isn’t as if Paul is confronting Greco-Roman culture head-on, I don’t think that’s his primary motive. He’s working out the good news of the gospel within fledging Christian communities in relation to different sets of relationships that commonly appear in the household codes. But he must have been well aware that the implications were revolutionary. The way Christians are to relate to one another necessarily undermines the patriarchal and hierarchical structures of existing household codes. The new communities were to be characterised by mutual submission (5:21) – a profoundly Christian concept. Love, humility, service of others, dying to the self – these are all Christ-like characteristics that all believers are called to.

So when it comes to husbands and wives, it is not as though husbands are somehow exempt from Christian submission! There’s a long history of interpretation that tries hard to separate 5:21 (all submit to one another) and 5:22 (wives submit to husbands). Some Bibles even insert a heading after verse 21 that breaks up the text – which, as you know, is one long sentence in Greek from verses 18-23. Yes, wives are told to submit to husbands (and children / slaves to obey parents / masters), not the other way around. But this is best read not as some Pauline mandate for a timeless ‘gender role’. The apostle is recognising cultural realities of the household codes but subverting them as he calls believers to follow the way of Jesus in whatever social role they happen to find themselves in.

The irony of so much discussion of this text is that it is not really focused on changing the behaviour wives at all – but it IS focused on challenging the behaviour and attitudes of husbands. They are told four times in nine verses to love their wives.

That husbands were to love wives self-sacrificially turns Greco-Roman ideas of status and patronage on their head. He is to treat his wife as he has been treated by his own head (Christ). The husbands ‘headship’ takes the form of loving and caring for his wife as his own body. It’s a subversion of cultural expectations – he nurtures her. He is to treat her as he, the man with all the power and privilege, has been treated.

Unless we get this sense of radical subversion I don’t think we’ve heard this text. And this is where many complementarian readings miss Paul’s gospel edge. They end up reinforcing the very Greco-Roman cultural norms that Paul is busy subverting.

 

A Dialogue with Ben Witherington on The Message of Love (25)

This is a dialogue with Professor Ben Witherington about my book The Message of Love

336 pages $12.49 paperback on Amazon or £12.99 paperback IVP UK  or £9.99 ebook 

BEN:   Gal. 5.6 is a remarkable claim— the only thing that counts is faith working through love. Why should we not see this as typical hyperbole by Paul in a letter full of hyperbole (like ‘you would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me!!!’)????

PATRICK: Yes, it’s remarkable and I liked it so much that I made it the strapline of the book. The danger of making it hyperbole is that it becomes too easy to downplay how what Paul says here is fully consistent with his pervasive theology of love – I’m thinking 1 Corinthians 13, or 1 Cor 16:14 ‘Do everything in love’, or how love fulfils the law in Galatians 5 and Romans 13:8-10, or walking in love in Ephesians, or Colossians 3:12, ‘And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity’.

 ‘Faith working through love’ has a sense of dynamic power, Paul knows nothing of faith that is not transformative and love in this sense is the goal and purpose of faith. In other words, I don’t think it is too strong to say that Paul sees love as God’s ultimate agenda for his people. This tends to get missed in hot debates about justification by faith. Paul’s passion in Galatians is not only to correct a false gospel but also to heal a community riven by division who were ‘biting and devouring one another’. It’s fruit of the Spirit, whose first characteristic is love, that is the only remedy to Galatian divisiveness. In this sense love is a ‘weapon’ in God’s war against the powers opposes to his good purposes. And if that’s the case, then yes absolutely – love is the only thing that counts.

BEN:  Paul speaks of Christ setting us free from something and for something. The problem, at least in my context is that Americans here this and think freedom means ‘free to do as I please’ whereas I assume Paul means something very different— freedom from sin and freedom to do as God pleases.  As you say ‘we are not set free to live for ourselves, but to love one another as Christ loved us.’ (p. 229).  How do we best get this idea across to an increasingly narcissistic  and selfy-oriented western culture???

PATRICK: Christian freedom is a paradox. Galatians 5 begins “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1) but Paul goes on to make clear that it is liberation is found, not in doing whatever we desire, but in serving one another humbly in love (Gal 5:13). Or as the NRSV translates it “but through love become slaves to one another.” The irony is that Paul has been pleading with then not to go back to a life of slavery, now he is commending it!

I guess a start would be to feel the offense of this paradox today in our teaching and preaching within a culture which prizes individual liberty and pursuit of the authentic self. Perhaps this is a particular challenge for the church in America, the home of ‘freedom’ and capitalism, where freedom is virtually worshipped as an end in itself. Self-made individuals neither need anything from others nor expect to be obligated to others. Capitalism fosters the belief that all we have belongs to us – including our possessions, our time, our bodies – and no-one has a right to tell us how to live. That’s a long way from “become slaves to each other in love”. If our preaching and teaching leaves Christians untroubled in a cocoon of wealth and self-sufficiency then it’s not doing its job!

A Dialogue with Ben Witherington on The Message of Love (24)

This is a dialogue with Professor Ben Witherington about my book The Message of Love

336 pages $12.49 paperback on Amazon or £12.99 paperback IVP UK  or £9.99 ebook 

BEN:  It seems to me that 1 Cor. 13 is perhaps the most abused text in the Bible when it comes to love. The passage is not about marriage or marital love, but rather about the manner in which all Christians should use their grace gifts.  It does not say that love is a gift, rather elsewhere in Gal. 5 it is called part of the fruit of the internal working of the Spirit. It’s clearly not a discussion of eros, not least because Paul is addressing all Christians in Corinth in all kinds of circumstances and relationships. And of course the operative term here is agape, which is to say its about God given love, the sort of God has and gives to us to share.

I quite agree with what you say about this sort of love being the mark of the Christian, or at least it should be.  All gifts should be exercised in love, including, perhaps especially when we wield the sword of truth.  Without love, spiritual gifts become just an ego display of Christian immaturity.  How many times have we seen very gifted Christians who are so immature, they don’t know how to exercise their gifts in ways that comport with self-sacrificial love? I’ve found this, sadly, often shows up with Christian musicians, of which I am one.

What in your view is the relationship between love and forgiveness? I like the quote about unforgiveness being like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die. Over time, I’ve discovered that forgiveness is as important for the giver as for the receiver. If one doesn’t forgive, a root of bitterness grows in one’s soul.  Forgiveness is not optional. But sadly, forgiveness offered is one thing, forgiveness received is another.  In a sense that situation is like unrequited love.  And there is nothing normal or natural about such forgiveness. It’s a God given ability.

I wonder if you think it’s true that the opposite of active love in some situations is not hate, but rather indifference and inaction as a result.  On p. 218 you say love is the believer’s defense against evil. How so? Unpack that idea for us. You rightly note that the Greek actual says ‘love never falls’, often translated ‘love never fails’ but are these one and the same?  Sometimes even the best godly love does not accomplish its aim, surely. Right?

PATRICK: There’s a lot in that question Ben. Maybe if I say a bit about the text first, then something on love and forgiveness.

In the book, rather than a warm comforting poem to love, I call 1 Corinthians 13 a ‘searing searchlight’ whose light exposes the Corinthians’ (and our) failures to love. Yes, love is described in inspiring and beautiful terms, but the ‘way of love’ is set against the ‘way of unlove’ with the aim of calling the Corinthians to self-examination and repentance. If we don’t read the text that way then we’ve missed hearing its call for followers of Jesus to embrace the difficult discipline of love.

And this is no optional extra – those extraordinarily stark illustrations at the beginning of the chapter reiterate the point that without love anything a Christian says or does is of zero value. Without love, however gifted an individual, however ‘successful’ a ministry, or however ‘impactful’ a church – it’s all utterly worthless. In our pragmatic culture that values results, those are radical words that we need to hear again and again.

The quote about unforgiveness being like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die is so true isn’t it? I see love as a choice and forgiveness is a good illustration. We can choose the way of resentment, bitterness, hatred but that leads to ‘self-imprisonment’. Or we can choose the way of not letting wrongs of others define us, of letting the past go, of moving towards forgiveness and possible reconciliation (which depends on the other responding). This leads to freedom.

Of course it’s easier to say this than do it. It’s a process that can take years and will be different for each person. I don’t think forgiveness can be forced on someone. And it certainly is not to dismiss deep hurt caused by others, that needs to heard and acknowledged. And if #metoo and experiences like Bill Hybels in Willow Creek have taught us anything, it is that forgiveness does not mean hiding sin. 

 

Dialogue with Ben Witherington on The Message of Love (11)

This is a repost of a dialogue on Professor Ben Witherington’s blog about my book The Message of Love

336 pages $12.49 paperback on Amazon or £12.99 paperback IVP UK  or £9.99 ebook 

BEN: On pp. 86-87 you rightly note that agape rarely occurs in the LXX of the OT and where it does occur, it does not refer to God’s love. And yet agape and its cognates are all over the NT– quite the contrast. You suggest this is to be explained by the fact that a deeper understanding of love, presumably due to the Christ event, led to the preference for a term for love that didn’t carry previous baggage or issues with it. Can you say a bit more about this?

PATRICK: This is an argument from silence, but I think it makes best sense of the facts that you have summarized. I rely on Leon Morris’ classic 1981 study Testaments of Love here. The facts are striking. In the NT agapē appears 116 times and philia (friendship) just once. Of related words, agapaō occurs 143 times and phileō 25 times; adjectives agapētos (beloved) 61 times and philos (friend) 29 times. In total, agapaō words appear 320 times and phileō words 55 times. Other Greek words for love like storgē (affection) and eros (passion) do not appear in the New Testament at all.

So why did the NT writers start using what was effectively a new word for love? I find Morris persuasive – he suggests that it is not so much that agapē creates a new meaning for love, but that the revolutionary gospel (good news) of Jesus Christ so transforms previous understandings of love that a new word is needed to express it. (I think this sort of thing goes on quite a bit in the NT in light of the Christ-event. Jesus’ use of ‘Son of Man’ fills that concept with new meaning in line with his unique understanding of his messianic mission; Paul and other NT writers ransack the OT and Greco-Roman culture for metaphors and images to explain the cross; John fills logos, a word known to Jews and Greeks, with revolutionary new Christological significance).

BEN: I love your chart on p. 105, and with your permission would like to nick it and use it for my students. The interesting thing is that John and 1 John are the texts with the most references to agape love, and after that Ephesians and then Romans. Pondering this for a moment, you hold up the notion that Paul should be seen as an apostle of love, as much as say the Beloved Disciple (whoever he was— but that’s a discussion for another day. Bauckham and I agree it’s not John Zebedee). What strikes me is that Paul and the BD are also the very ones who talk the most about conflict with others, being hated by others, judging the sins of various persons other than one’s self, and justice issues to some extent. It seems we’ve have swallowed our culture’s message about real love being tolerant, non-judgmental, not demanding when it comes to various ethical mores etc. What is your diagnosis as to why this has so infected or affected the church itself, rather than us being a change agent for real agape on the cultural notions ? How can we go about reversing these trends?

PATRICK: You are welcome to nick the chart of appearances of agapē in the NT Ben! It comes from Robert Yarbrough’s BECNT commentary on 1-3 John. Before trying to answer your question can I point to the surprising fact that Acts is the only book in the NT where agapē does not occur – not once. Connect this to all those gospel sermons in Acts and a good case can be made that ‘God loves you’, while true, is not how the first Christians understood the gospel. The gospel is preached in Acts without mention of God’s love. Maybe that’s a discussion for another day …

To reply to your actual question (!) I think Paul and John talk so much of love because they understand from pastoral experience, and from theological revelation, that love is the essential requirement for their new communities to survive and thrive. They are anything but naïve. In the letters of 1-3 John there seems to have been communal tension and external pressure and this is pretty well everywhere in Paul. We struggle to appreciate just how unprecedented were the first Christian communities in the ancient world. It had never seen anything like Jews, Gentiles, slaves, slave-owners, men, women, Scythians, barbarians, Roman citizens, rich and poor belonging together in relationships of mutuality and equal status before their God. Such diversity is difficult and requires costly love; it means the ‘strong’ making space for the ‘weak’ (Romans), it means putting others first, it means leaving your ‘worldly’ status behind (1 Corinthians, James). It means being accountable to one another – including disciplining each other if necessary.

There is a spectrum in the contemporary church here. At one end are churches made up of a loose coalition of Western individualists with all their assumptions around autonomy, rights, liberty and self-sufficiency. This will be a church where the depth of mutual accountability pictured in the NT seems pretty alien. It’s doubtful such a church is going to go anywhere costly and difficult. At the other end of the spectrum are some missional churches who have confronted this head-on in creating ‘total church’ communities that demand very high levels of buy-in. While effective in countering Western individualism and rightly focused on mission, they can have a downside. Recent reports in Christianity Today recount the fall of one well-known leader over a bullying style and serious relational damage done in the churches and organization he led. Strong leadership without love is also a dead-end.

Love and mission, love and truth, love and accountability need to be held together – that’s a challenge of leadership and vision.

How Important is Love? (5) Jesus and Love

If love is hugely important in Paul, how important is love in Jesus?

The best book that I’ve come across over the last couple of years of reading a lot on love is Simon May’s, Love: A History.

It is excellent: his writing is a pleasure to read, his overall argument is exceptionally well made, and he paints fascinating portraits of philosophers and theologians who have written about love through the centuries.

But when it comes to Jesus and love, May argues that love just wasn’t that important for the Messiah as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels. Certainly not in the way it was for the two major theologians of love in the NT – Paul and John, nor compared to how love came to be elevated in later Christian theology, especially from Augustine on.

Jesus, his argument goes, does not make love the ultimate virtue. He does not say ‘God is love’. He basically reaffirms OT love commands: love of God and love of neighbour is fulfilment of the law.

Even the radical innovation of enemy love is a sub-set of neighbour love – the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that your enemy is your neighbour.

Does this sound surprising?  Isn’t Jesus the anti-establishment prophet who shows love to all and makes love the defining characteristic of Christianity (as opposed to the legalism of the Pharisees and the OT law generally)?

Certainly in some strands of Christian theology, Jesus is held up as the one whose way of love liberates us from OT ‘law’ (Anders Nygren). But such ‘love versus the law’ theology is unsustainable. It is almost Marcionite in its negative view of the OT. It doesn’t fit Jesus, nor Paul. Both see love as a fulfilment of the law.

So I want to agree and disagree with May.

Yes, Jesus’ teaching on love fits fairly and squarely within the OT.

But I don’t see a chasm between Jesus and Paul & John when it comes to love. Love is critically important to Jesus. The entire goal of the law and prophets is fulfilled in love for God and neighbour. Those who love are greatly commended.

What May, I think, downplays, is how there is a development of theology of love in the NT.

It is not that Paul and John can be compared to Jesus as if all three were independent ancient philosophers of love, and that Paul and John, in very distinct ways, are responsible for ‘inventing’ Christian love and taking it to places that are foreign to the teaching of Jesus.

Rather, as I see it, the theologies of love in Paul and John undergo radical development in light of Jesus – and most especially in the shadow of the cross and in the Pentecostal gift of the Spirit.

The cross is reinterpreted not as a shameful defeat, but as a glorious demonstration of divine love.

The Spirit is the empowering presence of God who enables spiritual transformation – the most significant aspect of which is love.

It is these two developments that give shape to a NT theology of love. It is not that Paul and John are going off on a totally new tangent of their own. Nothing they say is incompatible with Jesus’ teaching on love.

What both of them see, in different ways, is how love is both the motive for God’s saving work in Christ (the cross) and the desired outcome of that saving work (a life of love lived in the Spirit).

It is to the unique importance of love in John that we turn next – tune in!

Comments, as ever, welcome.

 

 

How Important is Love? (4) lovelessness as heresy

This is a fourth of a series on the importance of love in Christian theology and contemporary culture.

In the third post we looked at one verse, Galatians 5:6 where ‘faith working love’ is the only thing that counts.

Staying with Paul, below is just a snapshot of other texts that, together, show how love is absolutely core to his theology and experience, and that the whole fabric of the Christian life is made up of love.

A couple of comments before those texts. In the New Testament, perhaps even more than today in the West, new communities of believers in Jesus were socially revolutionary. No-where else in the ancient world would you have Jews and Gentiles, slave owners and slaves, rich and poor, men and women, not only mixing together but worshiping together on a ‘level playing field’ where all were one in Christ (Gal. 3:28).

Love is the only thing that could hold such communities together then, and it is the only thing that can hold diverse communities together today.

A question: are Christians known, first and foremost as people of radical, other-focused love? Are churches known for being communities of love? Is love the first thing that people associate with followers of Jesus? With you and with me?

If not, why not? And what can be done about it?

Given the importance of love (see below), ‘lovelessness’ is not just an ‘unfortunate reality’ of church life, it is actually heresy in action. It is a denial of the very purpose of salvation and the work of the Spirit. It is a sign of counterfeit faith that is worth nothing at all.

Love in Paul

Love is the goal or purpose of the new covenant ministry of the Spirit

• The purpose of Christian freedom from the flesh is to ‘serve one another in love’ (Gal.5:13).

• The ‘entire law is summed up in a single command, “Love your neighbour as yourself”’ (Gal.5:14, cf Rom.13:8-10).

• The Spirit ‘produces’ love in believers’ lives as they keep in step with him (Gal 5:22-26)

• It is through the Spirit that believers experience God’s love (Rom.5:5).

The love of God has been most supremely demonstrated in Christ’s death on the cross (Rom.5:8).

God’s people are loved by God (1 Thes.1:4; 2 Thes.2:13, 16; Rom.1:7; 2 Cor.13:11, 14; Eph.1:4-5, 2:4, 3:17-9, 5:1-2; Col.3:12).

Nothing in all creation will be able to separate them from his love expressed in Jesus (Rom.8:37-9).

Believers are to act in love for each other (1 Thes.4:9; Rom.14:15; 1 Cor.8:1; Eph.4:2, 15-16; Phil.2:1-2; Col.2:2).

In 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 Paul teaches that all Christian life and ministry is of no value at all if it is not done in love.

At the close of 1 Corinthians he simply commands ‘Do everything in love’ (1 Cor.16:14).

In Ephesians 5:2 Christians are commanded to ‘walk in the way of love’

In Colossians 3:14 they are to ‘put on love’ on top of a list of other virtues.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:8 Paul includes himself in the exhortation to ‘put on faith and love’.

Paul often expresses his deep love for his communities (e.g., 1 Thes.2:8; 1 Cor.16:24; 2 Cor.2:4, 11:11; Phil.4:1).

Husbands are to love their wives (Eph.5:25; Col.3:19).

Paul prays that believers’ love would grow (1 Thes.3:12; Phil.1:9)

He is glad to hear of a church’s love (e.g., 1 Thes.3:6; 2 Thes.1:3).

He is thankful when Christ is preached ‘out of love’ (Phil.1:16).

He rejoices when he hears of believers’ love for God’s people (Col.1:4, Philem.1:5, 7)

He prays that the Lord would direct their ‘hearts into God’s love’ (2 Thes.3:5).

Rather than use apostolic authority, he prefers to appeal to Philemon about Onesimus ‘on the basis of love’ (Philem.1.9).

All this is why I like to call Paul ‘the apostle of love’.

 

 

Ephesians: a love letter

Working through Ephesians at the moment when time allows. It is an immensely rich letter and it is a privilege and pleasure to spend time in it. I know it’s a question of ‘Well you would say that wouldn’t you?’ but the Bible is really rather amazing. Here’s this ancient text, getting on for 2000 years old, written to an obscure minority within a great Empire and it is just bursting with power, creativity, freshness and compelling good news.

It is also beautifully written, with layer after layer of careful thought and structured chiastic patterns, all arranged to draw the reader into the compelling argument of the letter.

There are lots of excellent commentaries on Ephesians. Some of the ones that I have found most helpful are:

John Stott. The Message of Ephesians. 1991. A classic Stottian masterpiece.

Clinton Arnold. Ephesians. 2010. ZECNT. Very good.

Frank Thielman. Ephesians. 2010. BECNT. Excellent.

Klyne Snodgrass, Ephesians. NIV Application Commentary. 1996. Extremely readable and well researched. Gotta admire the name.

Harold W. Hoehner. Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary. 2002. Baker Academic.. Heavyweight and more technical.

But for sheer originality and freshness, nothing has surpassed John Paul Heil, Ephesians: Empowerment to Walk in Love for the Unity of All in Christ. (SBL. 2007).

The title says it all. What Heil does so persuasively is to argue that the essential theme of Ephesians is love. But on either ‘side’ of that core theme are ‘power’ and ‘unity’.

POWER

Heil argues that the Epistle not only talks about power a lot, but as it was read orally, the reading in itself would be powerfully transformative.

God demonstrated his great power in raising Christ from the dead, a power now available to believers (1:19-20).

Heil puts it this way,

The very experience of listening to the Letter’s elaborate and ornate language of power and grace communicated by the way of the oral patterns of its chiastically arranged units not only persuades but empowers the audience to the conduct envisioned for it by Paul. (p.2)

Here’s an idea – why not try reading the letter out loud to yourself or a group and see how that goes …

TO WALK IN LOVE

‘Walk’ appears at critical junctures in the letter (2:2, 10; 4:1, 17; 5:2, 8, 15). Like modern English, it carries a sense of a ‘way of life’. We talk of ‘walking the walk’. A key command, which shapes all that comes after it is 5:2.

Walk in love, as also Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

‘In love’ (en agapē) is a recurrent phrase – see 1:4; 3:17; 4:2, 15, 16; 5:2. It carries the sense of a dynamic domain of love, a sort of fusion of God’s love poured out for us in Christ which empowers believers’ love for God and for one another. The verb ‘love’ (agapaō) occurs even more often. Love is beginning, middle and end in Ephesians.

Just consider the closing verses of the letter to see the overwhelming emphasis on love.

Peace to the brothers and sisters, and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love. 6:23-24

UNITY

The empowering by God (and the Spirit is a major theme here), associated with ‘walking in love’, leads to a profound and deep unity in Christ.

There is the cosmic unity of all things being united in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth (1:9-10). This finds its fulfillment in the marvellous verses of 4:15-16 where believers are united together in Christ and with each other.

… speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. 4:15-16.

Power, Love, Unity – Ephesians in a nutshell.

Comments, as ever, welcome.

PS Update. I meant to say that the NIV, in my humble opinion, does a poor job in communicating the importance of  walk (peripateō) in the letter. For example, 5:2 is translated ‘and live a life of love’. This is a real loss. It loses the contrast between the Christian walk of 5:2 and the command in 4:17 not to walk as the Gentiles do (the NIV translates this ‘that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do’). Commands to ‘walk’ are significant in the letter but you would not know it reading the NIV. The ESV is actually much better here.