Love's argument

Love comes in many different forms: family love, romantic love, friendship, care for the needy and more.

To love and to be loved is such an enjoyable experience that it can capture our enthusiasm even to the point of making us look foolish. Poets have extolled love in the most exalted and vivid phrases.

'. . . Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never wrote, nor no man ever loved.'
Shakespeare

But love is not just beautiful. To love and care is also something that we feel deep within us as 'so right'.

Love is the closest you will get today to an agreed absolute. In their more sober moments, most people would still agree that love is what society needs. If there is a purpose in life, then love is what we are here for.

But thinking about love and the need for love argues a logical case which leads to Christian faith.

What?

Love is perhaps the greatest human virtue. But what is love? That is a question the answer to which contemporary society seems very unsure and confused. But the apostle John wants to point us to the answer: 'This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.' (1 John 3.16).

All the different forms of love have this in common; they involve freely giving of ourselves for the good of others, as Christ exemplifies. That is true love.

First of all, love is something that is freely given. In Shakespeare's great fantasy A Midsummer Night's Dream, the sleeping fairy queen Titania has a magic potion squeezed into her eyes which will cause her to fall in love with the first thing she sees. As she is woken up, blinking and rubbing her eyes, who does she see but the fool Bottom with a donkey's head on his shoulders! She cannot help but falling headlong for him.

But of course, we recognise that this is not true love. She is enslaved by the potion. Without free choice, love is not love at all. You cannot be loved by an automaton. If we want to humiliate someone, we need only persuade them that their beloved's passion for them is the inevitable result of genetic or psychological determinism - perhaps a faulty gene or a missing father figure? The loved one has no intrinsic value, they are just fodder for the other's habit.

Dark velvet night

Then, secondly, love involves self-giving. Imagine the classic romantic scene: the dark, velvet night is warm and sequinned with stars. Beneath the misty moon, the young couple - crazy with joy at being together - look deep into one another's eyes and confess in the most tender tones: 'I love you.'

What are they really saying to each other? How can we paraphrase 'I love you'? Here are some attempts at such a paraphrase which miss the mark of what our lovers are trying to express:

Upwardly mobile love: 'Darling, I feel that you have a good salary and that you would be eminently suitable to help me further my prospects in life.' That is not love, it is a calculation.

Market value love: 'You love me first and I'll love you. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.' But that is not love between a couple. That is a business contract.

Tabloid love: 'Darling, you would make a great personalised page 3 pin-up for me!' That is just using the other person for lustful gratification, it is not love!

None of these is the genuine article. They miss the mark of true romance. They fail to grasp what real love is about. In true love there is that element of self-sacrifice.

When he says: 'I love you' to his girl, he means: 'I cherish you so much that I want to live my life for you. Whatever the future may hold, I am prepared to do whatever it takes, to make any sacrifice for your happiness, I love you!' It may be despised as sentimental, but we all know that this is what true romance is about. This is genuine love. And something of this same self-giving is not only the essence of romantic love, but of all caring love, whether it is charity to the needy or affection to friends or family.

What John is telling us in the New Testament verse is that love in all its aspects is perfectly exemplified in the love of Jesus Christ for mankind. 'This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.'

God was born a baby in Bethlehem and went to the cross for us at Calvary. Because he loves mankind, he came to rescue us from condemnation and the eternal consequences of our sin. On the cross, Jesus paid the price for sin.

If we have forgotten what true love is, or become confused about it, we are directed to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Why?

But to many people today, such self-giving love does not make much sense. Although at heart they know that love is so right and so beautiful, nevertheless they get into a dreadful mess when they try to explain why we should love like this. Actually, it seems that if you do not believe in the Christian God, it is inevitable that love will appear somewhat senseless.

Secularism is the dominant force in the Western world. God is an irrelevance. But if we live in a godless world, what is life reduced to? The French novelist Victor Hugo has a telling phrase in Les Miserables. He says that without God, 'there is only vegetation'. Without God, our world, is only a grand mixture of chemistry, physics and biology.

It is said that an astonishing set of coincidences has brought about conscious life. We enjoy that conscious life for a short lifetime and then slip back into nothingness. There is nothing else.

With such an understanding of the world, many people have come to the conclusion that love has no real place. Love is replaced by lust. In the materialistic universe, 'survival of the fittest' and 'eat, drink and be merry' are the only things which make sense, but not self-sacrifice for the good of others.

Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford has the honesty to be up-front about this in his book on genetics The Selfish Gene. In the introduction to the book, he writes: 'A predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthlessness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour . . . Much as we would wish to think otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.' If the universe is ultimately only impersonal material in continual evolution, then the love we have described, the love that Shakespeare's sonnets explore so beautifully, is actually idiotic for the individual.

Mein Kampf

Sadly, the logic of a godless world of Darwinianism was only too well understood by Adolf Hitler. This is what he wrote in his book Mein Kampf: 'If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race (like the Germanic race) should intermingle with an inferior (like the Jewish race). Why? Because in such a case, her efforts, throughout hundreds and thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.' As someone has said: 'If Darwin is right, then Hitler was not all wrong,' and love has no true place.

But this conclusion does not just rest in the details of evolution, it is an inevitable conclusion of atheism generally. The father of existentialism was Jean Paul Sartre. In his magnum opus Being and nothingness, he investigates human relationships within an atheistic framework and comes to the conclusion that what we would see as true love is unavoidably unworkable. He writes: 'The result is that love as a fundamental mode of being-for-others holds in its being-for-others the seed of its own destruction . . . the more I am love, the more I lose my being.'

Some people, realising that love has no foundations in a godless world, tend to react by saying: 'So what? Does it matter that love doesn't make sense?' They try to take a purely pragmatic view. They will say: 'Isn't the fact that people need loving enough to make love the purpose of life?' Although there is some superficial weight to this pragmatic view, it is ultimately unconvincing.

The last parking space?

Firstly, no one would argue that love is not helpful to others. Of course it is. Therefore, it is good in itself. But true love, as we have seen, involves self-giving and sacrifice. The question is: 'What reason can pragmatism provide for me suffering so that another may be blessed?' It is where the rubber hits the road of real life that the pragmatic justification for love fails. If it is a 'me or them' situation, why should it not be me who gets the last shot of life-saving medicine rather than them? Or, more common in daily experience, why should it not be me who gets the last parking space rather than them? Without a motivation to validate self-giving, love falls to the ground. Why is another's good to take preference over my own? Pragmatically there is no answer.

Life's purpose

Secondly, for something to be life's purpose, there has to be an ultimate reason behind it. Reason is prior to purpose. Need alone is not enough. We all have a need for food, but that doesn't make eating the purpose of life! And if people are just complex vegetables, why not eat each other to satisfy the need!
If we believe love is truly life's purpose, it must make sense in some ultimate way. We know that love is vitally important to the world. Why? Why ought we to love like this? Our verse from the apostle John points us back to the cross. We ought to love because of who has loved us.

Why love? The answer is because behind everything, the ultimate reality is a Person. God who is love. He is the God who came in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, and sacrificed himself for us. That is why love makes sense. When we love, we are following in the ways of God. We are therefore in tune with the ultimate truth.

Indeed, it appears that the cross alone makes sense of love. If we really wish to take the position that love makes sense, then that does not just argue against atheism and towards some kind of religious faith, it actually argues for Christianity. Other world faiths contain much that is noble, but none of them make sense of love the way that Christianity does. The Muslim god, Allah, is awesome and mighty, but is distant. He sits aloof. He has never become man and suffered for us. If Allah does not love sacrificially, giving of himself, then why should we? We could go to the pantheon of Hindu gods. Every god there seems to have its opposite. There are gods of life and gods of death, gods of war and gods of peace, there are gods of love and gods of hate. But if the god of love is just one alongside many others, why should love have priority in our lives?

What is love and what is the point of love?

What?

Dark velvet night

Why?

Mein Kampf

The last parking space?

Life's purpose

Christianity owns all the love-songs.

JEB

Dr John Benton

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