What is biblical love?

Y ou may have heard that biblical love is something like doing what is best for someone, or a desire to promote the flourishing of another. This general definition is offered by men ranging from pastor-theologians like John Piper, to Christian philophers like Jerry Walls, to mildly-above-average churchgoers.

It is a compelling definition because there is obviously something true about love desiring the flourishing of another. Moreover, it makes for a strong corrective against secular, Disneyfied views of love that make it purely emotional, about generating certain feelings. While the world thinks that “falling out of love” is valid grounds for divorce, scripture requires us to love our spouses regardless of how we naturally feel. So love is both attitude and action, rather than merely affection. And while the world thinks that “love is love,” scripture tells us that love is ordered toward good ends, and so homosexuality is actually a form of anti-love, or hatred.

Nonetheless, while desiring the flourishing of another is certainly loving, it cannot be what love is. This becomes plain when we ask what it means with regard to Love himself. What does it mean for the persons of God to desire each other’s flourishing? The definition is simultaneously too strong and too weak:–

• It is too strong because flourishing involves growing or developing or prospering—activities which are obviously incoherent in respect to God, who cannot grow or develop, and who, if we can say he is prosperous, is infinitely so. To put it in more classical terms, to desire the flourishing of someone presupposes some potential within them that you wish to be realized; but since God is pure actuality, and has no unrealized potential, it is meaningless to speak of his flourishing.
• It is too weak because whatever love is, it seems obviously to be more than merely desiring the flourishing of the loved.

So what is biblical love? Before we can answer that, we must understand how to find the answer. Experience tells me that most Christians have not really thought this question through.

The nature of love can only be discovered in the nature of God

The “most real” kind of love is found in God himself. This is especially obvious in John’s writings. Not only does he describe God as love (1 Jn 4:8), but his corpus is saturated with the biblical “order of being:” we exist because God first existed (Jn 1:3); we have life and knowledge because God first was life and knowledge (Jn 8:12); we love because he first loved us (1 Jn 4:19). John is at pains to emphasize that the order of being is Divine → Human. Thus, the created realm is like a reflection of the divine; our love is like a shadow of God’s love.

Now, obviously there must be some point of comparison between them, or we couldn’t know what it means to say that God is love. In fact, while the order of being for love goes Divine → Human, the order of knowing goes Human → Divine. We rely on our prior understanding of love in the human realm to have something to “latch onto” when translating that love into the divine reality.

The problem is, many Christians never get past this initial order of knowing. They never get past describing the reality in terms of the shadow. They see God describing his love in terms of human relationships, and they think that whatever human love is, God’s love is just a really big version of that. They confuse God with his shadow.

But God is not his shadow.

Although he summarizes his nature using what amounts to a shortcut in the word love, he has also revealed himself far more comprehensively in every page of the Bible. Thus, although the nature of language requires our understanding of God’s love to start with a simple, human definition, we certainly shouldn’t end there. If human words are like buckets that we fill with meaning, we should not be content to simply take the puddle already in the bottom of “love” and say, “This is what God is.” No! We should be taking the totality of God’s revelation about himself and pouring that into the bucket until we have a word overflowing with theological meaning. And that meaning can then be read back into our own, derivative love for God and other people.

To state it another way, God chose the human words ahab, chesed, agape, philia because they most closely express the divine reality he wants to convey. But obviously divine reality is not defined by human reality—quite the opposite. So God’s nature is not defined by the words he chooses; it is merely analagous to them—neither as small nor as crude as they are. These words are simply the closest available “tokens” that match up with what he intends to convey: something that is ultimately more sublime than we can even experience as human beings, let alone imagine or describe. From God’s perspective, using human language to describe himself must look a bit like this:

We need to keep this very carefully in mind—that words like love are just the best terms available to conveniently refer to a reality which, in its fullest expression, is infinite and cannot even be captured with human language. Therefore, we should be spending time examining the key facts that God has revealed about himself to see how these inform and expand and mold our natural understanding of the analagous human-reality concept of love.

We have to start with God. Definitions of love that go along the lines of desiring flourishing are working in the opposite direction: they are trying to shoehorn the order of being into the order of knowing. That is less work, but it is not good theology, and it is not very rewarding either.

A good example of what I mean is the disagreement between Arminians and Calvinists over what moral goodness is in respect to God. Some of the most notable Arminian scholars today start with their preconceived idea of what goodness is in human reality, and then force it back into divine reality. Maintaining this backwards approach ends in them discarding entire portions of scripture, because a good God, humanly speaking, does not predestine people to hell or command the annihilation of entire people-groups. If only these scholars had worked out their knowledge of goodness from what God has revealed about himself, rather than deciding what God can have revealed about himself by starting with their parochial knowledge of goodness.

In the same way, in assessing what love is, we cannot start with a colloquial definition or word study, and then read it back into God’s nature. We cannot say, well love means X, therefore 1 John 4:8 means that God is X. On the absolute contrary, what we must say is, well, 1 John 4:8 says that God is love, therefore let’s look at the totality of what God has revealed about himself to discover what the ultimate nature of love is.

Characteristics of triune love

As many theologians have noted, love requires a subject (the lover) and an object (the loved). The Father loves the Son and the Spirit, who in turn love him and each other.

This strongly affects our understanding of what love is, because the love within the triune God has characteristics which self-oriented love does not. Some of these characteristics seem essential to the nature of God as love. They might not always be features of any love, since love can be expressed in different ways depending on the subject and the object—but they do seem to be essential to “ultimate” love. Other types of love will only be love inasmuch as they reflect what God himself is; so while they won’t all involve every one of these elements, the more they do, the more “true” they will be.

1. Triune love is affectionate

I mention this first because it is the feature most strikingly absent from typical definitions of biblical love. They tend to make love a purely intellectual operation, an action of the will. One reason for this may be in response to worldly definitions of love that make it nothing but feeling. Another—not necessarily unrelated—is the prior assumption that love cannot be “real” unless we can choose it or not. Since we very often have no choice in how we feel, love therefore cannot be primarily about feeling.

Now, I don’t think God is subject to emotion in the same way we are. I don’t think God finds himself spontaneously feeling anything he didn’t intend to feel. Nothing can cause a change in God, so he is what theologians call impassible—he does not have passions in the sense of being emotionally volatile, or having emotions imposed upon him by another. Passions, in the theological sense, are those feelings which are caused from without. God has no feelings caused from without—but that isn’t to say he has no feelings at all. On the contrary, although human emotions are no doubt only analagous to divine emotions, it seems very clear from the Bible that these divine emotions do exist.

Love must surely be chief among these: the Father has an infinite, ineffable affection for the Son and the Spirit; and they for him and each other. It is something greater and deeper and more inexpressible than the affection a human father has for his son, or a human child for his parents; but it is nonetheless like that affection. Our human affection is derived from, or modeled on, God’s affection within the Trinity. So triune love is affectionate.

2. Triune love is discriminating

God is love, but he does not love everything. Triune love is holy; it stems from each member of the Godhead being infinitely worthy of love. But holiness is an all-consuming goodness—where goodness is understood not in a fuzzy, muffins-and-puppies way, but in the “unapproachable light” way. It not only illuminates and empowers the good, but it consumes and destroys the bad.

To put it another way, God’s triune love is one and the same thing as God’s hatred for that which opposes his character.

I mention this because it has deep ramifications for human love. Love is not indiscriminate. Human love which is not holy is a perversion of what love should be. This is something the world would have us lose sight of—that we cannot love everything, and that God does not love everything. To love the world is to hate God. To love God is to hate the world. So for example, a gay Christian who believes God approves of his homosexuality because “God is love” is in fact utterly missing the point. He does not understand love at all. His own love for another man is a perversion of what love is supposed to be (just as a heterosexual man’s love for a married woman is); and God does not love perversions of his nature which exalt a corrupt caricature of who he is.

3. Triune love is necessary & volitional

This is particularly important to understand if you’re a Christian who believes, or is sympathetic to, the idea that libertarian free will is the price of genuine love. Many Christians strongly believe this, though you won’t find it anywhere in the Bible. It is one of the key pillars in the colonnade of freewill theism: that if God had not given us the ability to rebel against him, we would also not have had the ability to truly love him, because love by nature must be libertarianly freely chosen. Put simply, without the ability to choose not to love, we can’t have the ability to truly love.

But this is false—and not only false, but blasphemous in its implications. Love by nature cannot fail to be. God cannot fail to be; God is love; therefore, love cannot fail to be. And if the persons of the Godhead cannot fail to love each other, then they cannot choose not to love each other.

Do not draw a false implication from this. They certainly do choose to love each other. Love is obviously volitional; it requires an act of will, or we could not be commanded to love God and neighbor. But willing X need not entail the possibility of willing not X. The persons of the Godhead necessarily, eternally will to love each other; they are unable to will not to love each other. So in God’s case—the paradigm case—the act of will is necessitated. God cannot choose otherwise. The most real kind of love is the least libertarianly free.

4. Triune love is self-giving unity

The Father gives himself entirely to the Son and the Spirit, and they in turn to him and each other, so that,

I and the Father are one…the Father is in me, and I in the Father…that they all may be one, as Thou Father art in me, and I in Thee; that they also in us may be one. John 10:30, 38; 17:21

Similarly, the Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of Christ” and “the mind of Christ” (Rom 8:9; 1 Cor 2:16). This mutual indwelling through mutual self-emptying is called perichoresis. ❋ See for instance “Perichōrēsis,” Ligonier. https://learn.ligonier.org/devotionals/perichoresis.

Augustine suggested that the Spirit is the love itself existing between Father and Son. Whether this is true or not, the ultimate nature of love is completely reciprocal. More than reciprocal, it is such a closeness of being that the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father; and the Godhead is three and the Godhead is one.

I have left this for last because it strikes me as being the very ground of love. Fundamentally, love is a relationship that makes one “unit” out of distinct persons. The characteristics I’ve described above explain how love does that; but this concept of unity explains what love ultimately is; what it is aimed at; what it achieves.

I once saw someone describe biblical love as one-togetherness. I think this is apt, and I will explore it further below.

Onetogetherness between God and us

What implications are there for the nature of the love which God expresses towards us?

If love is fundamentally about unity or one­togetheness, then it follows that whatever God is doing when he loves us, it is aimed toward achieving something with us which is like the one­togetheness of the Godhead. Indeed, Jesus expressly says so in John 17:21.

This is not to say that God intends to make us one with him in the sense that we become him. We do not take on his essence; but we do become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). We are, as it were, of one mind with him through the Spirit, so that our communion with him is such that every desire conforms exactly to his, every thought follows his, every purpose is consonant with his.

There are a couple of significant ways that scripture develops this theme:

1. Familial telos

The entire sweep of the biblical narrative is a story of redemption which starts with, is grounded upon, saturated in, and aimed toward the idea of Yahweh creating a family for himself.

God’s people are consistently presented in familial terms; as an extension of the triune family. Adam was the son of God (Lk 3:38). Israel as a people is described with the same filial language (Hos 11:1), which in turn is paralleled with Jesus himself (Mt 2:15). Though we think of Israel as a nation, it was in fact a family descended from Abraham, and propagated through the covenant of marriage—which in turn was designed by God to model his covenant faithfulness and devotion (Heb. hesed; often translated “loving­kindness”).

The physical expression of marriage, which echoes the emotional, intellectual and spiritual relationship we call “love,” is also described in terms of the couple no longer being two, but becoming one together (Gen 2:24; Mk 10:8; cf. 1 Cor 6:16). Eve became one together with Adam by sharing in his physical nature, being made from his flesh, as a kind of physical analogy for the personal relationship between them. And working backward in the order of creation, we can infer that Adam became one together with God by sharing in his spiritual nature, being made into a living being by God’s own breath.

Which brings us full circle to the love of God again—in Ephesians 5:29ff, the love of Jesus for the church is described in terms of how we nourish and cherish our own bodies. We take the term “body of Christ” for granted as a kind of loose metaphor. But God doesn’t play loose with language. He chose that expression with care.

God’s love = God’s familial bond

Familial ties, and especially the ties of sonship and marriage, are close to the surface whenever God’s love is in view. When we come before the throne, Jesus bids us do so not as before a king, or a warrior—though he certainly is those things—but as our father (Lk 11:2; Mt 6:9).

I’m not sure how we could describe the essence of family, if not in terms of one­togetheness. Despite the fact that any given members of a family might be utterly different, and would want nothing to do with each other were they unrelated; in a good, properly-functioning family those people are subject to a mysterious bond that unites them. We call it “blood.”

Blood inclines us to loyalty. Faithfulness to the family. Properly functioning families try to be harmonious and united; they seek the common good of their members. Indeed, even wicked and poorly-functioning families do this—many crime syndicates are close-knit families.

God’s familial bond = the gospel

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that when we dig deeply enough into the doctrine of love, we end up hitting the gospel. But perhaps you haven’t seen it quite this way before.

God has made us his blood. Not only has he adopted us (Rom 8:23; Eph 1:5), but he has made us literally his blood. Jesus became a human being like us, and bought us with his blood. We are his blood-family. He sets his loyalty unerringly upon us. He works all things together to bring us into harmony with him. He seeks our good. We are his family.

2. Onetogetherness through perichoresis

John has a great deal to say about love. He himself was the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” He is the one who refers to God as love. He repeatedly emphasizes that loving God involves keeping his commandments. He had a keen insight into love.

But for our topic, the most notable part of his writing is the high priestly prayer he records in John 17, where Jesus prays that the Father keep us in his name, so that we may be one, just as he and the Father are one (v. 11); and we may be in the Father and Son, just as the Father and Son are in each other (v. 21). He goes on to add that he has given us the Father’s glory, so that we all would be one (v. 22),

I in them, and you in me, in order that they may be completed in one, so that the world may know that you sent me, and you have loved them just as you have loved me… 25Righteous Father, although the world does not know you, yet I have known you, and these men have come to know that you sent me. 26And I made known to them your name, and will make it known, in order that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I may be in them. John 17:23, 25–26

This all seems a little confusing unless you know that in the Old Testament, “the name” (ha-shem) is used to describe God’s essence; and to “know” is used to describe an intimate relationship. Thus, for Jesus to “have” the Father’s name is for Jesus to have the Father’s essence—i.e., to be God himself. And for the elect to “know” or be “in” the Father’s name is for the elect to have an intimate relationship with God’s essence.

With this in mind, verses 11 and 26 act as bookends which “decode” the prayer:

• The elect will be “one” by being “in” the Father’s name (v. 11)
• The elect will have love by “knowing” the Father’s name (v. 26)

So the elect are “one” in the sense of being all together in intimate relationship with God. We are one with each other because we are each one with God. God is what binds us together. Verses 20–25 of the prayer reiterate and nuance this overall thesis—in particular, they emphasize the priority between the Father and Jesus and the elect:

• Verse 21: the elect will be in the Father and Jesus, just as the Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in the Father;
• Verse 22: the elect have glory because it was given them by Jesus, who has glory because it was given him by the Father;
• Verse 23: Jesus is in the elect and the Father is in Jesus;
• Verse 23: the Father will love the elect just as he has loved Jesus.

If we were to simplify a little, we could write it something like this:

The relationships are always two-way, but they are initiated “from the left”—the Father gives to Jesus, who gives to us.

How Jesus is “in” us

John 17 explains that we are “in” God; that we “know” his essence—but it doesn’t explain how. Understanding this helps us to round out our grasp of God’s plan, of God’s love for us, of how the pieces fit together and mesh with the overall jigsaw of theology. John himself gives us some clues in his gospel—for example:

“In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” John 14:20-23; cf. 2 Corinthians 13:5

And he explains in another place:

Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us. 1 John 3:24; cf. 1 John 5:20

By the same token, Paul says that “he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17), which is how we can understand the Lord—because “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16). This in turn results in a progressive transformation in us:

We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3:18

And John again observes that “we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

God’s love = God’s plan to make us the exact imprint of himself

God’s intention for his elect is to make us so like him that we are “one mind.” Although we will not be God, we will be so like him as to be almost indistinguishable from him—something he will achieve by putting his divine Spirit in us; so that we are “in” him and he is “in” us in a way that is somehow like the essential bond of existence within his own three persons.

This is the love of God for us. He doesn’t merely desire our flourishing; he desires our one­togetheness.

Onetogetherness between us and God

What, then, does it mean for us to love God and each other? It is, after all, our most important duty—the Bible tells us that the first and greatest commandments, the commandments which constitute the meaning of all the others, are to love God and neighbor with everything we have (Mt 22:37-40; Rom 13:8-10 etc). To love is to fulfill the law; the Law and the Prophets are hung on the command to love.

It should be obvious by now that the “standard” definition of love actually renders the first and greatest commandment—to love God with our entire being—completely incomprehensible: if love is something like the desire to promote the flourishing of another, or a deeply-felt commitment to helping him be what he ought to be, ❋ I originally heard this definition from John Piper, but did not record the source; the internet suggests that it actually comes from All About Love by Bell Hooks. then how are we to love God? Do we imagine that God is not flourishing? That he is incomplete without our help? That he is not how he ought to be?

If our first and greatest duty is to love God, and the standard definition of love makes that command either meaningless or heretical, then how can we accurately, purposefully, thoughtfully perform our first and greatest duty as Christians?

Once we have a good idea of what it means for God to love within himself, and to love us, it becomes far clearer what it means for us to love him. Indeed, the Bible actually tells us explicitly that love is one­togetheness:

And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Colossians 3:14, ESV

The NASB and HCSB render this the “perfect bond of unity”, and the LEB, WEB and NET more dynamically render it the “bond of perfection.” Love is that which draws and holds people together in the synchronized pursuit of a common purpose: God’s glory—the one thing Jesus describes in parallel to love in John 17.

If glory is, roughly speaking, God’s revealed perfections, then we can mark out a basic position on what it means for human beings to love God in the biblical sense:

This is the transformation and renewal of our minds into the image of our creator; which means that sanctification just is learning to love God.

Onetogetherness between us and our neighbors

With this in view, you can see that loving our neighbor is almost indistinguishable from loving God. We love our neighbor precisely because we are conforming ourselves to God; because we are one together with him in will and character; because we are striving to reveal his perfection. That is true of both Christian and non-Christian neighbors:

• We love our Christian neighbors because we are joined to God by the same Spirit. If every Christian is united to God by being conformed in the Spirit to his will and character, then every Christian will be united to every other by the same token, for God is all in all (1 Cor 15:28). Thus, we are united as Christians in the purpose of revealing God’s perfection by being conformed to his image. To love God is to love other Christians. We are one together because we have the same Spirit in all of us. ❋ See also my discussion of the nature of Christ’s body in Dominic Bnonn Tennant, “Why I cannot worship at your lockdown-compliant church” (October 2021). https://www.bnonn.com/why-i-cannot-worship-at-your-lockdown-compliant-church.
• We love our non-Christian neighbors by living out God’s desire for onetogetheness. That primarily means sharing the gospel—trying to bring people into unity with God himself. But it also means living harmoniously with others; being of one mind with them. “As much as is in you, live at peace with all people” (Rom 12:18). Indeed, we value their lives as we value our own. Thus we clothe the homeless, feed the poor, visit widows and orphans in their affliction (Jas 1:27), and all those other charitable works traditionally associated with Christianity, and unfortunately now often subsumed under the incoherent title of “social justice.”

And in doing all of this, we are revealing God by becoming like God. Again, loving God is aimed at revealing his glory. Uniting ourselves to God naturally reveals his perfection. Glorifying God is fulfilled in loving him.

Onetogetheness between us and our enemies

Love of enemy is a particularly difficult duty we are called to. It is the challenging task of striving for one­togetheness with really bad neighbors. This is worth investigating separately, because many Christians think it entails radical pacifism, and opposition to any kind of violence.

For example, Greg Boyd—frankly, a wolf in a mangy and ill-fitting sheepskin—talks about how we are to love the soldiers of ISIS, ❋ Greg Boyd, “How Are We To Love the Soldiers of ISIS?” (September 2014). http://reknew.org/2014/09/how-are-we-to-love-the-soldiers-of-isis/. and makes out that praying for them and attempting to make peace with them is strictly contradictory to taking up arms against them; even when acting on behalf of a legitimate government, which he acknowledges bears the sword for God!

The first thing to notice is that people like Boyd are the exact ones who promote foolish definitions of love as simply “doing good” or “desiring flourishing.” Given that they don’t understand what love is, it should come as no surprise that they promote mistaken ideas about how to go about doing it. They are simply inept exegetes, theologians, and philosophers.

But what of more sophisticated Christians, like my friend Ben Askins, who observes:

The Son values, prays for, and remains non-violent toward his enemies—doing the will of the Father. If this is how God in Christ acts toward his enemies, how can I act differently and maintain “one­togetheness” with him?

And that’s a good question—how should we understand love of enemy, and particularly pacifism toward enemy, in light of love as one­togetheness?

Finding the principle to apply to the particulars

The first thing to recognize is that the question loses the forest for the trees. Rather than looking at how Jesus acted as a man on a particular mission, we need to step back and find points of analogy between God’s relationship to his enemies, and our relationship to ours, so we can see what the principle looks like which we should follow. To try to figure out the principle from specific circumstances, like Jesus’ actions in first century Palestine, is the exact approach which I argued earlier is exactly backwards. Indeed, using that approach will yield only confusion if we also examine how Jesus acted toward his enemies as the commander of Yahweh’s army in Exodus, or how he is going to act toward his enemies when he returns as the conquering king depicted in Revelation.

Points of analogy

The creator/creature distinction makes it more difficult to find points of analogy. God has absolute power over his enemies; they are impotent against him. He can separate them from himself forever and punish them eternally. Indeed, he will do this for some of them—which has to temper any conclusions we draw about loving our enemies.

The principle that does connect God’s redemptive plan, and our relationship to, say, ISIS, is the goal of one­togetheness. Because God desires one­togetheness with his enemies (or at least some of them), he acts to achieve this goal by taking their punishment, and then changing their minds so that they desire the same thing.

By the same token, he commands that we aim for one­togetheness with our enemies. (And I should be surprised if a thoughtful Christian would not prefer that to wiping them out.) The catch is, because God is sovereign while we are not, we may aim for one­togetheness with ISIS, but that doesn’t imply we have the ability to achieve it. Indeed, the chances look extremely remote when we consider our options. It’s not as if we could join them in jihad. When God said to love our enemies, he did not mean to join them in doing evil. Onetogetherness with evil is not the goal; love is discriminating.

The only way to achieve genuine one­togetheness, as I’ve argued, is in God. We can try to live peaceably even with those who are not Christians, but sometimes they force our hand. If they are determined to kill us, peace is not an option. Either they kill us, which makes one­togetheness impossible; or we kill them, which has the same effect. And there is a prima facie duty of self-defense which makes the latter preferable if those are our only options (Ex 22:2).

Of course, we should do everything in our power to avoid conflict and share the gospel with our enemies; because our goal is indeed one­togetheness and not mass slaughter—even in self-defense. But although we are to be innocent as doves, we are also to be wise as serpents. We know that although we should start with prayer and the word, we might need to fall back on good ol’ fashioned ordnance.

The problem with pacifism

There is also another critical issue that affects how we should act: ISIS and ourselves are not the only parties to consider in the moral calculus. Our obligation for one­togetheness with God carries obligations of one­togetheness with everyone; not just enemies. We have a duty to love our good neighbors as well. And one of the reasons that ISIS is a significant enemy is that they are killing millions of those good neighbors. If our efforts to achieve onetogetheness with ISIS are at the expense of those lives, then we have simply sacrificed love of neighbor on the altar of love of enemy. Even in the unlikely event that we achieved one­togetheness with ISIS, will God be pleased with the price we paid? But in fact, pandering to evil does not tend to result in evil changing its ways; it only results in existing goods being destroyed.

This is the kind of line I think we have to take when trying to understand our obligations to our enemies, in light of God’s actions toward his enemies. I don’t think you can get anything remotely like pacifism out of love construed as one­togetheness, because pacifism would end up destroying one­togetheness in significant and terrible ways.

Revisiting the standard definition

Why, after everything I have said, am I concluding by revisiting the standard definition? Have I not spent considerable time arguing for a completely contrary definition of love as one­togetheness?

But remember what I said at the beginning of this essay: while love is a concept we should carefully develop by studying all of scripture, our understanding of it starts with commonsense, human-level definitions. And God knows that, and he knows that many (perhaps most) Christians won’t develop their understanding of love even in the relatively rudimentary way I have done here. So I think it’s important, given how language works and how God uses it, to ask:

It does not. When scripture speaks of love, unity is not necessarily the main focus of the passage, or perhaps even an intended focus at all. In fact, if it were, the standard definition of love would probably not be standard.

For example, when Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?” (Jn 21:15–17), it is unlikely the rough-and-ready fisherman interpreted the question through a sophisticated lens of love developed out from the Trinity. He probably understood Jesus more as an unschooled church-goer would. Yet Jesus’ question was still meaningful.

I think unity is generally presupposed when the Bible speaks of love—particularly the love of God, or the great commandments. When Peter reflected back on this event, he would no doubt have developed a deeper and more theological understanding of Jesus’ question, and that understanding would have leaned in the direction of unity or one­togetheness.

Nonetheless, the point must be acknowledged: the Bible is not just written for philosophers; the commonsense, colloquial words it uses, like love, must be accepted for what they mean to the average person, as well as for what they presuppose to someone who has spent more time working through the issues. And I think this commonsense, colloquial view of love—that is, love as something like wanting what is best for people, desiring their flourishing, being affectionate toward them, helping them be what they ought to be, and so on—is worth considering one last time because of how it ties in so closely with a related concept in the Bible. A concept which rounds out our understanding of this topic very nicely…

Shalom

The Hebrew term shalom is generally translated peace. But it is actually an impossible word to properly translate because it means much more than that. There is no equivalent word in English, partly because English is a product of a very different culture. In Hebrew, shalom means wholeness, delight, flourishing, safety; it means for things to go well or be the way they ought to be.

One of the great messianic titles given to Jesus in Isaiah 9:6 is sar shalom—prince of peace. This is because, as Paul puts it, “he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph 2:14). Indeed, the gospel is itself is the “gospel of peace,” and every epistle of the NT is delivered with “grace and peace.” ❋ See my sermon on Phillipians 3:7–4:9, “Repentance, part 5: why peace surpasses understanding”. https://redwoodchurch.substack.com/p/repentance-part-5-why-peace-surpasses.

This tying together of Jesus being our peace, with Jesus having made us “one,” is where I want to end. Shalom is only possible with onetogetherness. Perfect shalom is only possible with perfect love. Shalom and love are two sides of the same coin.

Yahweh bless thee and guard thee;
Yahweh make his face lighten unto thee, and be gracious to thee;
Yahweh bear his face unto thee, and set unto thee shalom. Numbers 6:24–26

God does not promise love here; he promises shalom. Not merely peace, as we are forced to render it in English; but something more like the Amplified Bible’s take: “tranquility of heart and life continually.”

This is what we get when we strive for one­togetheness with God. Tranquility of heart and life in him. Shalom. Love God. Get peace.