BEN: In some ways the theme of love, gets lost in Biblical Theologies (and OT and NT Theologies too) and is sublimated to other concerns like, faith, or covenants, or justification, or eschatological, or the doctrine of God etc. Yet you have shown in page after page how love runs like a red thread right through the Bible, and describes God and his actions and what we are supposed to be like and do as well. This is passing strange. How would you explain the neglect?
PATRICK: I can hazard a few guesses. Culturally, in the Bible and in contemporary Western society, love is so ubiquitous a word that its meaning is assumed; what can be said that is not already obvious? Philosophically, as J K A Smith has spent a lot of time arguing, we have drunk deeply at the well of modernism and, as a consequence, naively imagine that if we get our minds right (‘know’ correct doctrines etc) then right behaviour (acting in love, Christian character) will follow. Theologically, the real ‘action’ is to be had in momentous debates about, for example, justification by faith and how someone is put right with God. Compared to the significance of soteriological questions like these, love is like the cream on top of the cake – nice but essentially an add-on to the real substance below. This, of course, ties in to the whole relationship between ‘faith and works’ or justification and sanctification. It would take far more room than we have here to unpack that, save to say much evangelical Protestantism has struggled to hold the two together in the way that the Bible does
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