The Love That Is God

An Invitation to Christian Faith

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467459259
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

"God is love is the radical claim of Christianity, " writes Frederick Bauerschmidt at the beginning of this little meditation on the essentials of Christian faith. In a rich yet accessible style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, Bauerschmidt breathes life back into that claim, drawing from Scripture, great Christian and non-Christian writers of the past, and his own lived experience to show just how countercultural and subversive Christianity is actually meant to be. Eschewing the abstract and dogmatic in favor of the relational and inviting, he offers something for everyone, from lifelong churchgoers and students of religion to the growing population of "nones" among younger generations who are increasingly seeking spiritual fulfillment outside of institutional Christianity.

With further reading suggestions (both scriptural and nonscriptural) at the end of each chapter, The Love That Is God is the perfect starting point of a spiritual journey into deeper relationship with God. Michael Ramsey Prize (2023)

God is love.

A witty and pugnacious atheist, the late English writer Christopher Hitchens once described the statement “God is love” as “white noise”: a sentimental bit of propaganda designed to trick the simpleminded into thinking that religion is a benign force. This phrase, found in the New Testament’s first letter of John (4:8), certainly has been trivialized, ensconced in bubble letters on posters with puppies to induce warm fuzzies. It is also abused by Christians who use it to distract onlookers from the fact that they have their foot planted firmly on someone else’s neck or to manipulate people into thinking that some violation of human dignity is being done out of love of God.

Trivialization and abuse can lead us to forget that the claim that God is love is the radical claim of Christianity. It is radical not simply in the sense of being a shocking or explosive claim, but in the sense of lying at the root (Latin radix) of the Christian faith. In some sense, the entirety of things that Christians believe flows from this claim. It is a belief that distinguished Christianity from much ancient imagining of the divine, whether in the mythological form of tales of the gods or the philosophical form of reflection on the source of universal order. It is anticipated by the ancient Israelite understanding of a God who enters into a covenant with Abraham and his descendants, a covenant grounded in God’s steadfast love, but even there, where loving-kindness for creation characterizes God, we find nothing quite as audacious as the claim that God is love.

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But is this claim credible? The notion that God is love suggests that something of what it means to believe in God can be gleaned from what it means to believe oneself to be loved. In discussing what faith is and is not, I often ask the students I teach whether they believe that their parents love them. This is, of course, a risky strategy since there is a not-insignificant number of people who are unsure whether they are loved by their parents (or by anyone, for that matter). But at least a few of them will admit that they believe that their parents love them. I then press the case: would they say that they believe this, or would they say that they know this? Do they believe it in the sense that they believe that LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of all time or that housing prices will go down, or do they believe it perhaps in the sense that they believe that George Washington was the first president of the United States or that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared? We use the word believe in a variety of ways: sometimes to state a preference or to make a guess about something unknowable (both of which we describe as “having an opinion”) and at other times to say that we hold fast to what we have learned from someone we judge to be in a position to know or that we grasp a truth with certainty for ourselves (both of which we typically describe as “knowing”). Which of these sorts of things is the statement “I believe my parents love me” more like?

It doesn’t seem like a mere opinion. To say that I believe my parents love me is not like saying, “I like the idea of my parents loving me” or “I think my parents love me, but I very well might be wrong; who can possibly know?” But it also doesn’t seem exactly like knowledge. I am not simply accepting someone’s authoritative statement, as if I were to say, “I accept that my parents love me because nine out of ten scientists agree that they do”; nor am I claiming to apprehend something that could not possibly be otherwise, like a mathematical truth. And yet to believe that one is loved by one’s parents is at least as fundamental to one’s actual being-in-the-world as any number of facts that we would ordinarily claim to know. It’s a truth that in a very real sense we stake our lives on.

I suggest to my students that believing they are loved by their parents is unlike an opinion in that it presumes some evidence, but it is also unlike knowledge in that it is not something we accept because we possess unshakable proof. In other words, this belief falls somewhere between opinion and knowledge. When I ask what sorts of evidence they can present for this belief, my students mention things like the financial sacrifices their parents have made for their education, the clear happiness with which they are greeted when they return home, or the care packages they receive during the exam period. Couldn’t these things, I ask in reply, all be part of an elaborate ruse, perhaps a plot to lull them into a sense of false security so their parents can murder them in their sleep and collect insurance money on them? But, they object, they have been doing these things for a long time with no sign of malicious intent. Perhaps, I suggest, they are patiently working the long con, stringing them along and gaining their trust so that they will let their guard down.

At this point, the students begin to scoff, and rightly so, because the alternative that I must construct to account for their sense of their parents’ love is so absurdly elaborate that it becomes incredible—not worthy of belief. They cannot absolutely demonstrate that my incredible alternative is false, but it is not capable of shaking the conviction born of a lifetime of converging probabilities. Though something like parental love is not subject to empirical verification, they are still willing to affirm its reality. Indeed, until I ruthlessly badger them in the classroom, it has never occurred to most of them that they might need reasons for that affirmation. It is so basic that, though they can come up with reasons on the fly when pressed, they ordinarily would feel no need to make an argument for it. And it is in this sense that we might call it a “bedrock” affirmation. It is a presumption that we use to make sense of the world. Such a bedrock affirmation is what the nineteenth-century theologian John Henry Newman called “certitude” (as opposed to certainty), which is “the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities” (Apologia pro Vita Sua, chap. 1).

Philosophy may or may not be able to prove or disprove God’s existence—philosophers differ among themselves on this—but for the vast majority of believers the existence of God is not a result of philosophical proof. Some people are inclined or impelled by their own particular intellectual makeup to seek a clearly demonstrative argument for God’s existence, perhaps based on the contingency of existence or the need for a ground for our moral claims or something else. Many, however, do not seek such a demonstration, simply intuiting that there must be a reason why there is something rather than nothing or that moral principles are rooted in some sort of transcendent values. But even people who do not seek demonstrations for God’s existence still have reasons or motives for their belief in God, though these reasons may be less like premises in a logical argument and more like a pattern of probabilities that we take in at a glance, sometimes without even knowing that we are doing it. In either case, the important thing to note is that faith in God is not the affirmation of a neutral fact about the world, like asserting that there is an as-yet-undiscovered planet orbiting beyond Pluto. Rather, our faith in God is, like our belief that we are loved by our parents, something upon which we stake our lives.

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If belief in God is something upon which we stake our lives, then it matters what god we believe in. It is not enough to argue that it is reasonable to affirm God’s existence in the same sense that we affirm our parents’ love. For Christians, it is not simply that we believe in God with a faith that is like our faith in human love. Rather, we want to claim that love is so characteristic of the divine that we are warranted in saying that the God in whom we believe is love. But, as I noted earlier, this claim is far from universal. How might we imagine a world in which the gods are real but are not the God of love?

“The Knight’s Tale,” the first of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is, among other things, the story of all-too-human lovers in a world of unloving gods. Written in the fourteenth century, it is an oddly anachronistic tale set in the world of pagan antiquity but reflecting many of the conventions of medieval courtly love literature. Two noble cousins from Thebes, Arcita and Palamon, fall in love with the same girl, Emily, whom they have observed only from afar. The love of each for her is so intense that it fractures their love for each other, making them bitter rivals, sacrificing the good of their friendship for an as-yet-unconsummated passion. Emily’s brother-in-law Theseus, the Duke of Athens, decides to resolve the conflict by setting a contest of arms between the cousins. The night before the contest, Arcita, Palamon, and Emily each goes to a temple to pray: Arcita goes to the temple of Mars, the god of war, to pray for victory in the contest so that he might win Emily; Palamon goes to the temple of Venus, goddess of love, to pray that he might have Emily; Emily goes to the temple of Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt, to pray that she might remain unmarried, but she also prays that, should that prove impossible, she should be married to the one who desires her more.

These prayers occasion a great conflict among the gods since each wants to be the one who shows that he or she can deliver the goods for their petitioner. Saturn, an ancient and somewhat terrifying deity, intervenes in the squabble and shows how each god can grant what has been asked. Arcita wins the contest, just as he asked, but Saturn startles his horse, which throws him to the ground so that he dies before he can marry Emily. Palamon eventually gets to marry Emily, as he asked, as part of a deal intended to improve relations between Thebes and Athens, though his heart is permanently wounded by the loss of his cousin Arcita. Emily does not get to remain a virgin—her plan A—but she (presumably) gets her plan B: the one who loved her more (though it is not really clear how much either actually loves her as opposed to being obsessed with the idea of her). So the gods get to show their capacity to grant what is requested of them, to fulfill their roles in the transaction between humans and the divine, though at the end of the day none of the human characters seems particularly happy. The final moral of the story, delivered by Duke Theseus, seems to be that while there might be an overarching providence guiding the universe, the gods, for the most part, do not care about human happiness, and so the best we can do is “to make a virtue of necessity” (“Knight’s Tale,” line 3042), to accept what fate sends us and make the best of things.

Though Chaucer was a Christian, in the tale told by his knight he attempts to inhabit a pre-Christian worldview, in which the world is ruled by gods who see each other as rivals and who don’t have much interest in human affairs except to the degree that they might be used to gain advantage over the other gods. The gods determine the fates of Arcita, Palamon, and Emily, but they do so in such a way that only the gods are winners. By sticking strictly to the specific way in which each of the petitioners phrases his or her prayer, the gods are able to fulfill the letter of those petitions without granting any of them what they most desire. Chaucer’s description of their temples, which are filled with images of violence and misery, shows the true nature of the gods. Mars’s temple, perhaps predictably, is filled with depictions of treachery and anger and fear:

Stark War, with open wounds, all bebloodied;

Discord, with dripping knife and direful face.

And full of screeching was that gruesome place. (lines 2002–4)

But even the temple of Venus, goddess of love, depicts

The broken sleeps and the cold sighs

The sacred tears and the lamenting

The fiery strokes of the desirings

That Love’s servants in this life endure. (lines 1920–23)

And the overarching providence that Theseus invokes at the end of the tale seems fairly indifferent to the fate of individuals as long as things as a whole turn out okay.

The depiction of human love in the tale is not much happier. The passion that Arcita and Palamon feel for Emily not only turns them against each other but has a narcissistic quality that seems totally unrelated to Emily as a flesh-and-blood reality. (Chaucer’s metaphors for her are all drawn from flowers; she doesn’t even get to be a warm-blooded animal.) Their love at first sight is an emotion that, for all its obsessive fervor, is free from any concern for the actual flourishing of the beloved; neither of them seems at all concerned that Emily would prefer to remain unmarried, if they even know this, since they have never bothered to have a conversation with her. And when love is finally victorious in the end, it takes the form of a marriage that is bought at the cost of Arcita’s life and is engineered in order to advance political aims. The gods may be supremely loveless, but the human characters give them a run for their money.

Perhaps in writing “The Knight’s Tale” Chaucer just wanted to tell a good story with action, romance, tragedy, and maybe a dash of philosophical reflection. But beneath the surface of this romance there lurks, as so often with Chaucer, a serious critique. His target is not really the religions of antiquity, which had complexities and nuances beyond the loveless gods depicted in the story told by the knight. Rather, his tale shows what the world looks like in any time and place, even—perhaps especially—among Christians, if one is unconvinced that God is love.

If God is not love, then the divine forces at work in the world are simply out for themselves, unconcerned with our well-being or only concerned with it to the degree that it advances their own self-aggrandizing agenda.

If God is not love, then whatever providential impulse there is that might be leading the universe as a whole to a favorable outcome does not particularly care about this or that individual; rather history appears to be, as Hegel put it, “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized” (Philosophy of History, 21).

If God is not love, then the best we human beings can manage is love as a passion at war with goodness, at war with friendship and with seeking the good of the beloved, so that all our loves are marked by a rivalry that gives birth to a violence that will be contained only by concerns for political expediency.

***

Even if we believe that God is love, we still must ask, “What then is love?” Is it the passion felt by Arcita and Palamon for Emily? Is it the care of parents shown to children of which my students are so certain? We use the word love like we use the word believe, in a number of different ways. Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2005 encyclical letter Deus caritas est (God Is Love), notes “the vast semantic range of the word ‘love’: we speak of love of country, love of one’s profession, love between friends, love of work, love between parents and children, love between family members, love of neighbor and love of God” (1.2). We clearly do not mean exactly the same thing by the word love in all these ...