The one theological virtue that is still in favor today is love. We keep hearing its praises: “Love wins.” “Love is love.” “It doesn’t matter who you love.” “Live, love, laugh.” But is this the same love as God’s love for us and the love we are to extend to our neighbors?
Peter Leithart doesn’t think so. In a piece for First Things, entitled, The Consuming Fire of Love he writes, “Liberal love is now the established religion, public philosophy, and ethic in the U.S. and elsewhere—love as enforced tolerance, love as non-judgmentalism, love as unqualified acceptance and endorsement.” The Bible gives us a far different and far more radical understanding of love:
As John tells us, God is love. Everything God does is an expression of love, the perfect love of the Triune Persons for one another and the Creator’s unwavering love for creation. All of God’s actions are actions of all of God. . . .
Even God’s most destructive acts are acts of love. When God rained fire on Sodom, he acted in love. When Yahweh led Israel through the wilderness, he acted as the God of love. When he burned against the peoples of Canaan, he acted in love. Out of love, Jesus went to the cross; out of love, Jesus avenged his martyred brothers. God is so intensely love that he tolerates nothing that keeps him from union with his beloved. God is determined to do good, to bring us to final bliss and glory, to full maturity, to deification as sons in the Son. As Holy Love, he destroys all that opposes his goodwill, obliterates everything that stands in the way of his purpose. He’s a consuming fire of love who purges away all that inhibits our union with him, so he can incorporate us into himself.
God isn’t terrifying because he’s unloving. He’s terrifying because Love is terrifying—undiluted love, love that refuses compromise with evil, love that will not negotiate away the good of the beloved by allowing the beloved to set the terms of her love, love that promises a good and a future beyond all the beloved can ask or imagine. There is in heaven or earth nothing so uncanny as love.
That’s the love, Paul says, God pours into our hearts. In the power of the Spirit, he calls us to love ourselves well enough to burn away our lust, pride, acedia, idolatry, and greed. We’re to love our neighbors well enough to strive to eradicate everything that keeps him from being the worshipper of God he’s created to be. He commands us to love our enemies well enough to pursue their good, even if it means killing everything in them that’s at enmity with God, so they can rise again as God’s friends. Jesus teaches us to love our enemy, even if it means dying at our enemy’s hand. [Keep reading. . .]
Good stuff. And yet, though God pours His love into our hearts, we need to remember that we are not, in fact, God. Trying to love like God does–this wrathful kind of love–can be disastrous. God is righteous. We are not. As Augustine says, our loves are disordered. Switching to Aristotle, we do not love what we should in the right way at the right time.
Leithart is describing the love that looms behind God’s law. We know that love most fully in the gospel, in the Cross of Jesus Christ. This is the love that we can emulate for our neighbors, not to mention our enemies.
We primarily receive God’s love, consuming fire and all. The love of neighbor that He commands is not so much a fire that consumes them. Rather, it partakes of the grace that He has extended to us. And Christ’s sacrificing Himself out of love for us becomes the model for the far lesser self-sacrifices that we are called to perform out of love for our neighbors.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)
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