Love and Truth Are Not Competitors: So Any Brief Prioritization Depends on the Situation

As the editor of this blog for the past five years, I have never responded directly to other blog posts, but in the case of Dennis Hiebert’s recent three-part post, I realized I had such a deep disagreement with his core argument that I have decided to do so. I also hope this response may encourage others to offer their thoughts, whether in response to this conversation or any others we share on this blog.

First, I want to point out where we agree (I think). I agree with Hiebert’s critique that some modern Christians have often adopted an understanding of truth that fails to consider the core Christian understanding of the Trinity. Truth resides not simply in propositional statements but also in the triune God. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Second, I agree that Paul is clear that love should be prioritized among virtues. After all, he writes in I Corinthians 13 regarding the relationship between faith, hope, and love, “but the greatest of these is love.”

Third, I want to acknowledge another agreement we arrived at during the editorial process. The triune God does not prioritize love over truth. Indeed, if the Christian understanding of truth is personal, the same is true of love. Love is not simply a virtue, it is also a state of being. We know both that God is love (I John 4:8) and that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Both truth and love exist within the Trinity, and neither one is ontologically before the other.

Hiebert clarified to me that in his three-part blog post, he sought to speak more psychologically and anthropologically and not theologically. Thus, I take his central argument to be that not only that Christians have reduced truth to a particular modern form, but even after correcting that diminished form, we should prioritize love over truth for psychological and anthropological reasons. I have five specific areas of disagreement with this argument.

My Five Disagreements

First, I think we must recognize not just the danger of reducing truth to a matter of propositional statements, but we also do not want to reduce love to being merely a virtue. Love is also a state of ontological being (“God is love”). If we understand this point, we will recognize that an inordinate focus on the virtue of love at the expense of understanding it as a state of being can be dangerous, just as an undue focus on truth as only propositional versus also a personal state of being can be hazardous. For example, we must recognize that God’s command to the Israelites to love was made after God revealed the truth about his character and redemptive work (Ex. 20:1-2; Dt. 6:1-4). Only then could they understand what love meant. The same is true for Christians and Christ (Eph. 5:1-2; I John 3:16). True experience and relationally-obtained knowledge of God’s being preceded God’s command to practice the virtue of love because humans need that to know true love before they practice it.

Second, Hiebert highlights the disagreements Christians have had about propositional theological truth throughout church history, which certainly exist. Still, he fails to acknowledge that similar disagreements have existed regarding both the nature and practice of love throughout church history. Indeed, I recently wrote a blog post highlighting some of those contemporary disagreements regarding the definition of agape love. In fact, as any historian of the church or Christian ethics would tell you, when it comes to practices that are considered most loving, Christians and non-Christians also have disagreed throughout history (e.g., economics, marriage laws, war, socialism, social hierarchies, stewardship of property, body, food, and drink, wearing a mask during COVID, support for foreign aid, evangelism methods, etc.).

Instead, he states, without a close examination of the history, “the call to love is one of the few biblical imperatives that has both united Christians and benefited non-Christians.” This generalization gives short shrift to the way that Christians’ call to truth has benefited both Christians and non-Christians. After all, the 800-year-old model of the university we know throughout the world today is the product of the Christian West and a Christian concern for truth.

Moreover, our love only benefits Christians and non-Christians when it is tied to the truth (indeed, any understanding of what love is must also be truthful). There are many Christians who have engaged in great evil in the name of love (and not simply truth). I consider any Christian supporter of politically supported communism in that camp. In fact, Hiebert recently had politicians and elites in his country rush to support an unproven truth claim in the name of love. It resulted in over 100 burned churches in the country. Empirically speaking, I do not think Hiebert can provide enough evidence from church history to make his case that the call to love is less controversial than discerning truth or that we can do the former (discern what is loving first) without the latter (truth).

Third, the reality is, as the Trinity reminds us, to avoid misunderstanding either truth or love, we must always pursue both. To properly love, one must know the truth. For example, some mischaracterize love as avoiding the social implications of truth for the sake of peace, like Peter, Barnabus, and the other disciples in Galatians 1. That is why Paul had to admonish them, because “they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel” Gal. 1:14).

Having worked in public policy, I often found people promoting what they thought was loving (e.g., no-fault divorce is better for couples and children; public schools are best for all children; we must promote population control to save the planet) without actually doing some prior empirical work to discover the truth of whether that would be the case. Academics may rush to truth claims, Public policy-makers rush to love and justice claims (as in the Canadian rush to judgment about the recent indigenous schools grave site finding).

Students also rush to love. I find college students often think cohabitation is better for building a lasting, loving relationship, but they have examined neither how God views marriage covenants (Mark 10) nor social scientific evidence regarding the effects of cohabitation on marriage. Sometimes they need to be confronted, like Peter, with the truth first, even if we know they are coming for affirmation of what they think is loving (BTW, I usually find asking questions is the best form of confrontation). Sometimes, students need to be confronted with the fact that they are not taking the truth seriously, as they justify what they are doing using the language of eros.

Also, in settings where the pursuit of justice is the overarching purpose, prioritizing truth often proves necessary. When I served on the honor council, I found that violators often proclaimed about their cheating actions, “That was not really me.” They wanted to dissociate themselves from their action instead of confessing, “Yes, I did it.” On some occasions, I thought they needed to hear the truth about the problem with this form of moral dissociation. Thus, it does not surprise me when on YouTube, I watch the end of a cop chase of a violent criminal, one of the first things the perpetrator often says after being caught is, “What did I do wrong?” They first need confrontation with the truth. That’s why South Africa had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Confronting the truth must be a priority in these cases of injustice.

Fourth, I agree that there are times when we will need to prioritize love over sharing certain truths. When meeting someone immediately after a car accident, it is not the time to tell them truths such as, “You should have been wearing your seat belt,” “You should not have been driving so fast,” “You should not have been texting,” etc. At that time, it is best to show love, which I define in this case as asking about their welfare (although we should also want them to contemplate the truths mentioned later if applicable).

Yet, when figuring out if at times we need to engage in a pragmatic prioritizing of one or the other, it depends on important theological, moral, and situational analysis and should not be generalized to a larger rule. Hiebert’s examples in part 3 concern issues at an interpersonal level. At that level, Christians are likely to agree. Yes, the person who comes to you who claims he is the reincarnation of Elvis Presley is best first met with love that does not immediately tell him the truth, because he is likely to be resistant to the truth. If then, we determine together that this claim is ontologically false (which I have confidence it will be), then it is best to apply love with the end goal of convincing the person to adapt to this reality–even if living in that false reality makes them quite harmless whereas discovering reality may result in a stages of anger, angst, and/or threats of violence to themselves or others.

Of course, there are always challenges with these claims when placed within the Christian story. We often must figure out if the ontological identity claim reflects our fallen nature or how God designed us. Hiebert does not address that important question, which becomes central to truthful love. This problem then plagues his examples in his third post. Should we always try to heal a deaf person (following Jesus’ healing of the deaf and blind), or are such efforts actually a diminishment of deaf people as image bearers and deaf culture (I’ve read one Christian author call such efforts a genocide of deaf culture)? Our understanding of how God made us to function and flourish best, no matter how opaque our knowledge, still must guide our efforts to engage in truthful love.

Finally, difficulties emerge when making love a psychological prerequisite over truth if we step beyond interpersonal relationships and enter the realm of sociology and politics. In most countries throughout the world, except Muslim and communist ones, one is no longer pressured to acknowledge a certain religious or overarching ideological truth to be a full citizen. Yet, within liberal democracies today, pressure and even legal sanctions are used to mandate particular actions that are considered loving (and that also carry with them implicit truth claims). In liberal democracies today, a major danger we face comes from dictators of love.

Take, for instance, when a nation-state, professional society, or other powerful social entity mandates the use of political or social power to enforce that all people in the nation or professional society must respond with what the state or professional society interprets as loving or respecting of human dignity (e.g., using a person’s personally chosen pronouns–which has landed people in prison in the UK). Hiebert would appear to believe that it is clear that Christians should support these actions of the state or professional society because they are self-evidently loving, and we must always prioritize love (and Christians are largely in agreement about what love is). I think he is wrong on all these counts.

Overall, love and truth are not competitors. That being said, when contemplating whether to prioritize love or truth in a specific situation (while we pursue both equally as we pursue the triune God who is both love and truth), we must attend to power and politics as well when considering this issue, and not simply psychology and anthropology.

As a result, I believe more nuanced thinking that resists the temptation as much as possible to view truth and love as an either/or is what God asks of us.  As finite beings called to worship an infinite God of love and truth, such thinking may always fall short on this side of eternity. Regardless, such a calling is one we must embrace with whatever wisdom prayerful discernment yields.