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Divine love as a model for human relationships

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Abstract

A common Christian belief is that God loves universally, and that the Christian believer ought, likewise, to love universally. On standard analyses of love, loving universally appears unwise, morally suspect, or even impossible. This essay seeks to understand how the Christian command to love could be both possible and morally desirable. It considers two scriptural examples: Matthew’s trilogy of parables, and the Feast of the Tabernacles in the Gospel of John. I argue that God shows love to humanity through revealed disclosure of vulnerability. In particular, God is universally willing to engage in collaborative action with human agents. I suggest that the Christian command can be satisfied by adopting an analogous willingness to share intentional actions with others.

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Notes

  1. Talbott (2013).

  2. For a philosophical sophisticated skeptical view, see Jordan (2012). For additional discussion of divine love, see Evans (2006), Stump (2011) and Adams (2006).

  3. Amy-Jill Levine (2014) notes that a variety of earlier texts prohibit mistreating one’s enemies and a variety of later texts encourage treating enemies well, Jesus “may be the only person in antiquity to have given this instruction [to love one’s enemies]” (pp. 93–94).

  4. Swanton (2010).

  5. The accounts I will utilize are primarily (though not exclusively) prominent within the analytic philosophical tradition. Because they reference each other, they form a discussion that can be applied holistically to the religious issues of concern in this essay. But this should not be understood as suggesting that these are the only, or even most important, philosophical treatments of love. See also, for instance, Marion (2007).

  6. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork 4:399. For discussion, see Fahmy (2010).

  7. Cf. France (2002); Luke 10.

  8. Frankfurt (2004). Frankfurt’s account has figured prominently in subsequent literature on love, caring, and valuing. His view has also been influential within philosophy of religion. See, for example, Green (2017). Surprisingly, given the discussion that will follow here, Frankfurt’s account explicitly provides the basis for Jordan’s (ibid.) denial of the universality of God’s love.

  9. Frankfurt does not regard such love as a virtue. But he treats the possibility with equanimity. “Still, such things happen.” (p. 38).

  10. Frankfurt, p. 39. Emphases in original. For a helpful discussion of Frankfurt on caring, see Smith (2013).

  11. Frankfurt, Ibid., p. 42.

  12. Ibid., p. 42. Frankfurt’s central idea, that love involves disinterested seeking of the beloved’s good, is common in philosophy of religion. For example, Paul Moser (2013) writes, “agape is one’s noncoercively willing (at least when opportunity arises) what is good rather than bad for all concerned, including one’s enemies, without treating oneself as more deserving than others of good treatment” (p. 67).

  13. Ibid., p. 43, 79.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid., p. 43.

  16. Ebels-Duggan (2008, pp. 147–148).

  17. Ibid., p. 152.

  18. One could deny this by holding that sometimes reasons of love are defeated by other kinds of reasons. However, as Ebels-Duggan notes, it is seems uncomfortable both to say that the loving action is wrong, and also to say that such an action as disrespectful as surreptitious career sabotage could be an expression, rather than a perversion, of love (pp. 152–153). In any case, it is unlikely Frankfurt could take this option, as he intends his account of love to double as an explanation of the source of normativity more generally.

  19. As Ebels-Duggan notes (p. 146), “the parent/child model heavily influences Frankfurt’s position”.

  20. Ebels-Duggan’s account of love has been influential in subsequent discussions of friendship, love, and cooperative activity generally. See, for example, Koltonski (2016).

  21. Ebels-Duggan, pp. 156–57.

  22. Cf. Ibid., p. 160.

  23. Ebels-Duggan, p. 162.

  24. Ibid., p. 157, 161.

  25. Ibid., pp. 161–162.

  26. Ebels-Duggan introduces the issue by writing, “I don’t take this to be the whole story about what it is to love a person; that must also involve some of the attitudinal and emotional aspects that Kant labels pathological.” (p. 143).

  27. Ebels-Duggan describes the Kantian origins on the shared-ends view on pp. 155–56.

  28. Korsgaard (1996). See also Wallace (2009).

  29. For example, we should not ask God to prolong our life. For Kant’s discussion, see Kant (1963), pp. 100–102.

  30. Ibid., pp. 101–102.

  31. Jordan, ibid., takes this to be an important consideration against the claim that God loves universally.

  32. See, for example, the discussion of Jer. 3:19-20 in Soskice (2007), pp. 76–77.

  33. In his discussion of God’s love, Talbot (ibid.) appeals to the Good Samaritan (p. 309).

  34. My discussion is indebted throughout Konradt (2014), Olmstead (2003) and Onyenali (2013).

  35. According to Zech. 4, Zarubbabel will have in hand a hard stone to set as the headstone for the house of the Lord. The parallel between Zarubbabel and Christ is suggested by Jesus’s mentioning, after cursing the fig tree, that faith can also remove a mountain (Matt. 21:21)—a power also attributed to the former (Zech. 4:7). The connections between the fig tree, the levelled mountain, and the temple is even clearer in Mark, in which Jesus curses the tree on his way to the temple, and the disciples find it withered on the return trip (Mark 11:12–20). My discussion here is indebted to Wright (1996), ch. 12.

  36. Cf. Olmstead, p. 95.

  37. Konradt, p. 189.

  38. Olmstead, p. 60.

  39. Cf. Wright (1996) ch. 12. See also Deut. 32:11; Ruth 2:12; Ps. 17:8; Isa. 31:5.

  40. This idea is from Moloney (2013), ch. 2.

  41. Moloney, ibid., p. 64.

  42. See Coloe (2001). See also Moloney (2005), ch. 9.

  43. Moloney, ibid., p. 18.

  44. Moloney (2005), p. 197.

  45. Chennattu (2006), p. 76.

  46. Cf. Coloe, p. 130.

  47. Chennattu, ibid., p. 95.

  48. Chettanttu, ibid., p. 97. For an interesting discussion suggesting that Thomas in the Gospel of John is, in some ways, a positive model of active participation in such a relationship, see Sylva (2013), especially chs. 3–4.

  49. A point also underscored recently by Setiya (2014).

  50. Velleman (1999). Velleman’s proposal has elicited much subsequent discussion, including from Ebels-Duggan (ibid.) and Seitya (ibid.).

  51. Frankfurt, p. 62.

  52. Pace Frankfurt, Jesus does appear to run risks in loving. But opinions here may differ, depending on views about divine impassibility.

  53. Velleman, p. 360.

  54. Velleman writes, “I regard respect and love as the required minimum and optional maximum responses to the same value.” (p. 366).

  55. Ibid., p. 372.

  56. I’m grateful to Christopher Tucker and Matthew Jordan for pressing me on this point.

  57. We might want to call God’s attitude ‘vulnerability’ or ‘openness’—depending on whether one believes impassibility is a divine attribute. If one regards impassibility as an attribute of God, it may not make sense to speak of God as being “emotionally vulnerable” at all. I will try to frame my proposal in a way that allows for some flexibility, given the diversity of opinions about the issue. For some, even the idea of openness to shared action may make God seem inadequately impassible. However, on a variety of common theological views, the weaker version of my proposal need not be in tension with any divine attributes. For a helpful discussion of the logical space, see Keating and White (2009): Introduction. I’m grateful to a reviewer for pressing me to clarify this issue.

  58. See Bloom (2014).

  59. For a defense of friendship as self-disclosure, see Laurence Thomas (1987). For a skeptical view, see Cocking and Kennett (1998). For a sensitive discussion of friendship generally, see Nehamas (2016).

  60. Crossan (2012), p. 127. Emphasis in original.

  61. See Shiffrin (2008).

  62. Korsgaard’s own argument runs remarkably close to the Christian command to love. Her metaphor for moral relationships is marriage, and her metaphor for morally incorrect relationships is war. We either see ourselves as in a relationship structurally similar to marriage with other persons, or else we see ourselves as in a fundamentally adversarial or strategic relationship with them. For Korsgaard, there is no middle ground. She writes, “Isn’t there any form of personal interaction between a marriage and a war? Or to put the point more calmly, isn’t there any such thing as a fair negotiation, between two parties whose interests are legitimately at odds? Basically, I want to say there is not…” (see 2009 §9.4.11). For Jesus, a love that fails to include one’s enemies is not—in the end—any love at all. As Levine puts it, “Love cannot be restricted” (ibid., p. 93). For Korsgaard, a morality that fails to include those whom one might see oneself as at war with—literally, one’s enemies—is not any morality at all. On her Kantian view, this is something like a conceptual truth.

  63. Korsgaard, p. 195. For an elaboration, see Ebels-Duggan (2009).

  64. A less philosophical virtue of the present view is that it can help make sense of an apparent disharmony between Matthew 5, wherein Jesus enjoins love of enemies, and Matthew 23, in which Jesus denounces the hypocrisy of his own enemies. As Crossan observes, “the unfortunate result of his gospel as attack…is that he has created a Jesus ultimately open to Matthew’s own favorite accusation—hypocrisy” (ibid., p. 195). On the present view, Jesus’s anger is coherent with love, since both could be manifestations of a desire to work together with another agent.

  65. Nagel (1971).

  66. Frankfurt, p. 100.

  67. Velleman, p. 374.

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Acknowledgements

For comments and discussion, I am grateful to Terence Cuneo, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Terryl Givens, Rachael Givens Johnson, Matthew Jordan, Christian Miller, Mark Murphy, Joseph Spencer, and Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and also to other members of the 2015 Theistic Ethics Workshop at Wake Forest University and the 2015 Wheatley Institution Summer Seminar at Brigham Young University. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.

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    Ryan W. Davis

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Davis, R.W. Divine love as a model for human relationships. Int J Philos Relig 83, 271–290 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-017-9636-z

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