What is Love?

If you were to ask ten people of my generation what the highest good is, my guess nine of them would say love. My generation, raised on a steady diet of Disney, has grown up with the belief that love is the highest good. But do we really comprehend what love is? I am of the opinion that we don't. Most people around my age confuse love with tolerance. But tolerance is largely a passive disposition – especially since my generation tends to confuse tolerance with apathy – whereas love is active. By and large my generation thinks that love means that we should “live and let live.” We don’t care who you sleep with, what your religion is, or what kind of background you come from because we are apathetic about these things. We simply don’t have any capital invested in them. It is hypocritical when, in the name of love, we self-righteously demand those who do have capital invested in these things to change. Our notion of "love" doesn't require anything on our part, other than labeling anyone who disagrees with us as “intolerant” (an ironically moralistic phenomenon).

The problem is that our love tends to be therapeutic. We don't want to give up anything out of love, but we like to feel like we are people who practice love towards others. Kindly apathy or half-baked  slacktivism are cheap ways to make us all come away feeling good about ourselves and morally righteous. Our notion of love is not self-giving and for that reason it is not love at all. It doesn't give up anything, except for the pittance of our parents' money we spent on the "Free Tibet" or the "Save Darfur" t-shirts we bought. In reality, we have no right to demand that homophobes bigots, or religious dogmatists learn to self-sacrificially love when we don't do the same. If we did, we would learn what love really is. It isn't apathy, thinly disguised as tolerance. It is something far richer. Real love is unconditional and self-sacrificial. It means counting others more significant than ourselves.

My understanding of love is unapologetically religious. Though non-religious people, and people who do not share my specific religion (Christianity) should be able to appreciate and practice this conception of love, I believe that it is ultimately only justified by the Christian religion. This is because God is at the center of the Christian religion and God is love (1 John 4:8). And God can be love because of the uniquely Trinitarian character of the Christian God. The being of God eternally unfolds into threefold personality of three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God, therefore, is essentially tri-personal. His being overflows with life and personality. The Father is the fountain of the Godhead. He eternally generates the Son, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from both of them. However, each of these persons are consubstantial with each other, meaning that the three persons are one divine being. As a result, there is something like a community within God because each of the persons have eternally related to each other and eternally inhered within each other in what is called perichoresis - or the divine dance. The three persons within God have eternally loved another in self-giving love.  Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, expressed this when he said, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:10).Therefore it is possible to say that God from all eternity is love. The Trinity is inherently mysterious, but it is also inherently wonderful since only a Triune God can eternally be love. Any other god could not be loving until he created someone to love.

God did not simply exist as self-enclosed love for all eternity, but decided to create other beings whom he could love and who in return could also love (him as well as each other). This is partially what Christians mean when they say that God created man after his image; we are meant to love and be loved in return just as, internally, God loves and is loved. Specifically, God has created a covenant - a mutually and permanently binding relationship - with man, where if man loves God with all his heart as his chief end, God will not withhold himself from man. And this highlights the defining characteristic of love; it is giving yourself up to another. God has given himself to man by condescending to us. God did not have to make us; he was perfectly happy with the eternal love of his Trinitarian nature. Yet he decided to create us and bind himself in a covenantal relationship with us. In return we are to give ourselves up to God by desiring him with all our heart, soul, and strength. Hence, all love is covenantal in nature; it involves a mutual self-surrender to another. Of course, God's covenant with man differs from Trinitarian love in several ways. Primarily, it is unequal. This unequal love is very difficult for us to understand because we are so egalitarian. Yet if one thing it is certain, God is a entirely different species from us; he is divine, we are not. God does not need us, but we need him. Our relationship with God is always one of a king with his subject; God stoops down to us, whereas we lift our arms up to him. Yet there are analogies of inequality in human relationships. For example, the love of a parent and a child is quite unequal. The parent, though truly giving herself up in the love of a child, is in a position of authority over the child. Thus in covenantal relationships unconditional self-giving does not conflict with inequality. And, contrary to what our culture thinks, it is the former rather than the latter which is the true hallmark of love.

Perhaps a covenantal relationship - which is simply saying true love - can be better understood when it is contrasted with another kind of relationship: a consumer relationship.1 A consumer relationship is not binding or unconditional. It exists so long as both sides are getting what they want out of it. The two parties do not irrevocably give themselves up to each other. Yet, this is precisely what happens in a covenantal relationship. We no do not remain in our friendships and familial relationships only until they inconvenience us. Rather, we are permanently bound to our friends and brothers and sisters. When we enter into a consumer relationship with someone the end is not that person but whatever we get from them. We use them rather than love them. But in a covenantal relationship, the person is the end in itself.

The nature of love is further displayed through God's grace towards us. God entered into a covenant with us, which we broke by loving ourselves rather than him. Our relationships are now tend to be directed solely toward our own gratification and glorification.  Yet God is faithful to the covenant he made with those whom he called to himself from all eternity. Taking on the form of a servant he humbled himself by becoming a man. In the Incarnation God shows his love for us by making the ultimate self-sacrifice in an act of unconditional love. He suffered death so that our debt to God might be paid and our sins cancelled. God, in the Person of the Son, made himself the sacrifice that restored us to a relationship with him.  As Paul put it, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:2).  And Jesus himself said that "greater love has no one that this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (Jn. 15:13). He said this with regard to himself who had just said, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you." Thus we see that God loves us with the same love that abides within the Trinity. It is a love that "does not insist on its own way" and which "bears all things" (1 Corinth. 13: 5, 7). It is a love that does not insist on its rights but gives them up for the benefit of another, for the Son of God did not retain his rightful place at the glorious right hand of the Father but came down to our broken world and partook in our sufferings for our sake. Love fundamentally must involve grace.

Therefore, Christ is to be the model of love that we look to. God is Love and Christ, as Incarnate God, is Love made flesh. If we are to truly know what it means to love, we are to be imitators of Christ. We are to account one another more significant than ourselves, just as Christ accounted his own life nothing and gave it up for our own sake. If we are to truly love, we must give up our rights and bind ourselves in a covenant with our beloved. We must give up a part of ourselves to another. Any love worthy of the name must be unconditional. Hence, we see that real love is the furthest thing from apathy. Love is not content to live and let live, but strives to enter into the complicated and often messy tangled web of human relationships. We pay people an intolerable compliment when we love them, since love squashes all pretense to autonomy when it binds two souls together. Love argues, chides, and even disapproves because love is not satisfied with politeness but pushes on to speak the truth even when it is hard. Real love is not "romantic" either. Love does not always involve feeling loving or loving someone who is lovable. In fact, it may rarely involve these things. Love is an action undertaken by the heart in spite of how we feel about other people. When we love, disagreements and differences are not dissolved, but rather love proceeds despite of these things. "Love endures all things" (1 Corinth. 13:7). When we love, we do not forget our zeal for our religious creeds, our realization that others are imperfect sinners, or our partisan politics. Instead, we imitate Christ's love by retaining our zeal all the while having compassion and loving our very enemies. When we do so we pass beyond the shallow realm of tolerance and arrive at nothing less than pure agape.

1. What follows is an adaption of a part of a sermon I heard Tim Keller preach on May 6, 2012 entitled "Love and Lust."