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.
I agree with Professor Glanzer completely. The greatest virtue is love, not because it is in competition with truth or somehow below it in a value hierarchy, but because love endures forever. Faith and hope will be unneeded in the realization of the eschaton. Paul also writes that love rejoices in the truth (1 Corinthians 13:6). Love needs guardrails and propositional force. Sentiment without the guidance of knowledge is misguided or even dangerous.
Thanks for the incisive rebuttal to Prof. Hiebert.
I also agree with Glanzer. In universities, love under the guise of “social justice” often ends up disregarding truth in favor of certain, unquestioned narratives, or “sacred projects” as Christian Smith argues in the case of sociology. Heterodox Academy, which I am active in, was formed to combat this demotion of truth, which can lead to pseudoscience, as I have written about in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, when “ideology drives social science.” The same thing, of course, happens on the political right when truth is ignored in favor of “alternative facts.” Of course in specific cases, the truth is at times debated. But the historical, close tie between science and Christianity indicates we have nothing to fear from truth. There is a distinction between truth and love on the personal level, but that’s another topic.
Hiebert effectively highlights problems with rationalistic approaches to truth and emphasizes the importance of empathetic love. But he seems to have downplayed contexts where prioritizing love over truth might create problems. And how do we determine what is *truly* loving without first establishing certain truths? Appeals to love can also function as “power moves” in contemporary discourse, and the sentimental claim that love has united Christians more than truth overlooks significant historical disagreements about what constitutes loving action. Glanzer correctly points out that love without truth can be equally problematic and that situational discernment is necessary. Like grace and truth, both LOVE and TRUTH are essential, complementary aspects of Christian life. While there may be situations that call for different emphases, neither should be systematically prioritized over the other. The relationship is more properly understood as dialectical than hierarchical.
More recent research on the relationship between cohabitation and marriage is more equivocal. In one study, the increased divorce rate among cohabitators is reduced if couples make a decision to marry prior to cohabitation, https://www.du.edu/news/new-du-study-highlights-risks-living-together-engagement
This essay strikes me as an example of what I called “empirical rooting” among Christian scholars (see https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780761825821/Science-and-the-Soul-Christian-Faith-and-Psychological-Research). That is, we cheer on the studies that provide evidence in support of our theological claims (e.g., cohabitation and marriage) and we discount and/or find alternative explanations for those studies that don’t align with our theological beliefs–for example, the scientific evidence on biological determinants of human sexuality (such as smaller volume of the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus in gay men) does not answer the moral question of sexual orientation.
I think we all do this, not just this author. We cling to the studies that support our beliefs and look for alternative explanations or competing data for those that do not. We all too easily fall victim to the confirmation bias that we exhort our students not to fall victim to.
Scott, certainly what you mention does happen, although I clicked on the link and found that the study still supports the view I mentioned (“The study found that 34% of marriages ended among those who lived together before being engaged, while just 23% of marriages ended among couples who waited until after engagement or marriage to move in together.”). So, I’m not sure it makes your point about the relationship “more equivocal.” Plus, you confuse two types of studies when giving examples of empirical rooting. One is an if-then study about human actions and their results. Those are more helpful at obtaining Proverb-like forms of wisdom from watching or studying human actions. The other is not about actions but about biology and biological determinants of human sexuality. Those are two different things.
Now, when talking about biology, you’re right that biological findings do not answer moral questions. I pointed out in my essay that certain biological realities do not answer the ought question. For example, I pointed out that someone may be born deaf, but that does not answer the question of whether we ought to seek to correct that deficiency. That comes both from our particular teleological understanding of the purpose of the ear and the moral belief that we should seek to help everyone have that function (understanding such disfunction as an aspect of fallen or imperfect nature that should be corrected).
In “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart,” Martin Luther King, Jr. describes the tension between love and truth as a dialectic (as an earlier commenter did). Jesus sent his disciples out to be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves! It’s helpful for me to see the issues in King’s day – he wrote to Black Americans, concerned that the “soft-hearted” (love) wanted to acquiesce to segregation and just make do. But the “tough-minded” (truth) wanted to bring about justice through violence. The dialectic – the active tension between these two values – moves us along. We can recognize, proclaim, and worship the God in whom these values unite, even as we humbly watch ourselves unable to find that unity amongst ourselves, or even within a self. My two cents (not in King’s sermon) is that basic Christian practices — prayer, fellowship, service, worship – help us immensely. We sometimes pursue “more advanced” things like scholarship, research, politics, and activism, to the neglect of very basic, seemingly simple things, like praying and singing and gathering together as believers, across and in the midst of our serious differences.