Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part II: Love

Yesterday’s post unpacked the problematic character of modern positivist Christian conceptualization and prioritization of truth. Though truth undoubtably matters enormously, it was proposed that absolute truth about metaphysical matters is not attainable, that assertions of propositional truth claims are prone to exercising power and producing interpersonal alienation, and that in profound experiential (not necessarily epistemological) ways, love precedes truth chronologically. So, is love more attainable, less alienating, and therefore ultimately more vital to everyday Christian life?

Truth and love, it turns out, are equal and interwoven, even co-dependent and co-terminus. After all, Jesus was full of both grace (love) and truth (Jn 1:14), and unlike modernist Christians, early Christians did not separate them. Even belief did not refer to the intellectual content of faith, or those ideas about God that one holds to be true. In early English language, to “believe” (leubh) was to “belove” something or someone. Belief was a personal relationship forged in love, not the granting of intellectual assent to propositional truth claims. Moreover, given the greater biblical emphasis on love, truth that does not come from love and lead back to love is not truth to begin. As popular author Jeremy Myers put it, “Truth without love is harsh judgmentalism and dogmatism. Love without truth is blind sentimentality…. If you find yourself justifying what you are going to say or do ‘in the name of truth’ or ‘in the name of love,’ you are probably being neither truthful nor loving.”¹

This centrality of love to truth is less familiar than the centrality of love to the two greatest, summative commandments articulated by Jesus (Mk 12:30-1). Notably, he calls us to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength—mind here often unhelpfully conflated with reason today. But he calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves. The two little prepositions are crucial to the big difference. Because God is the holy wholly other, as Swiss theologian Karl Barth put it, and we are utterly unlike God, we cannot love God as ourselves, but only with our human attributes and capacities. However, we can and are commissioned to love other humans as ourselves, that is, empathetically. That means placing ourselves in their shoes, feeling their pain, and seeking their good as they would from their vantage point, just as we seek our own good from our own vantage point.

Take for example the neurodiverse student whose brain functions somewhere on the spectrum of neurocognitive differences, complicating their sensory processing, social anxiety, and focus of attention in the classroom despite their best efforts. Or consider the racialized student who has resigned themself to erroneous generalizations about aspects of distinct people groups and no longer expects equal engagement in the classroom with those of self-racialized others who justify and defend their privilege or deny its existence.

To truly love another human being, we must understand them (“stand under” them), not depersonalize them by simply making them the object of pre-determined actions we label loving according to our definitions of truth. We must love from the other-centered outside in, not from the self-centered inside out. When we do something to or with or for another person in what we intend as love, but are actually doing it primarily to assure ourselves that we are a good, caring person, or to avoid feeling guilty for being a bad, uncaring person, then we are actually doing it for ourselves, not for the other person. Social psychologists term that egoism, not altruism. And that is not love, regardless of its potentially positive effects on the other person.

For our engagement with the other to be true love, we must find ourselves in the other, and engage in what the Jewish German philosopher Martin Buber termed an “I-You” (Ich-Du) relationship, not merely an “I-It” (Ich-Es) relationship.²

I-You relationships recognize the mutuality of human “kind”ness in each other, and practice the authentic equality and genuine openness of true dialogue, where both selves are at stake, where neither self is totalizing nor capitulating, and where each self is holding the other accountable. In contrast, I-It relationships objectify the other person, manipulating or targeting the other as some “thing” in need of our truth. The two persons then merely carry on alternating monologues that talk at or past each other, never being vulnerable to the other. Hence, “I-It” relationships are thereby at root unloving.

It is therefore insufficient to love others merely volitionally from a safe distance as performance of our principled moral duty and role as Christians. Until we intentionally, vicariously, and continuously experience the internal cognitive and emotional state of the other as much as possible, we cannot fully love them. And in cases like the neurodiverse other, the racialized other, or the intersex other, we must imaginatively occupy their physical state as well; we must see and feel the world as they do. Unfortunately, there is a very real and troubling possibility that the practice of such cognitive and affective empathy as a means to love may be negatively correlated with the practice of rationality as a means to truth. In other words, the more we prioritize rationality as a means to truth, the less able we are to love empathetically. Notably, Jesus’ disciples were recognized and identified by the relationality and vulnerability of their love (Jn 13:35), not by the autonomy and supremacy of their truths. And when others drink of that love, they are drawn to those truths.

Christian living may well be more about the right affections of orthopathy—the passionate love for neighbors and hospitality for strangers—than it is about the right doctrine of orthodoxy, or the right practice of orthopraxy.³ And just as to love is to find ourselves in the other, to be Christian is to find ourselves in the holy wholly other. In the words of Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the face of the other is the portal to the holy.⁴ Love, it turns out, is the means to Christian truth because love finds the deepest truth not just in other humans, but finally in God. Perhaps the ultimate irony of truth is its dependence on love.

During the National Day of Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington after the recent presidential inauguration, the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington concluded her sermon by identifying three foundations of national unity—dignity, honesty (about truth), and humility (about truth)—and by appealing for mercy for sexual minorities and immigrants. “May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, and to walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people.”⁵

When the full grasp of truth on this side of heaven eludes us, as it always will, the faithful practice of empathetic love should guide us, as it always can. As the Apostle Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 13, even if we could master all truth, without love we would still be nothing. And though we know only in part, even that incomplete knowledge will come to an end. But love never ends. “In the essentials unity, in the non-essentials liberty, in all things charity” is an adage erroneously attributed to Augustine. The proverb is no help in adjudicating which truth claims are essential, but it leaves no doubt that love is the essence of everyday Christian life. At its core, love matters more.

An earlier version of the first two blogs in this three-part series first appeared as an article in the Journal of Sociology and Christianity.

1. Jeremy Myers, “What’s More Important: Truth or Love?” Redeeming God (2011). What’s More Important: Truth or Love? (redeeminggod.com)

2. Martin Buber, Ich und Du, Thirteenth edition, (Gerlingen, Germany: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1997).

3. Hannah R. K. Mather, The Interpreting Spirit: Spirit, Scripture, and Interpretation in the Renewal Tradition (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2020).
4. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
5. 1.21.25 Sermon by The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde