In the fundamentalist churches of my childhood, propositional truths were weapons of spiritual warfare, wielded to help your friends and harm your enemies. Propositional truths held the community together, and they held the world at bay. Disagreements about propositional truths split all three of the churches my family attended before I went off to college. The splits were commonly understood by both sides as a fight between people who wanted to keep prioritizing certain propositions as “fundamentals,” and people who thought that continuing to prioritize those propositions was getting in the way of loving our neighbor.
The third and last church split after the pastor said from the pulpit that the KJV was not the only legitimate translation and conducted the wedding of a woman who had been divorced. For the pastor and his supporters, insisting on one view over the other in either of these cases was unloving; for the faction that threw him out, the truth came first. I’m proud that our family sided with the pastor, a good man who remains a personal hero of my faith. When I think of what “Christian love” looks like, I still think of him, even as I have traveled very far from the fundamentalism he embraced.
“Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,” wrote Robert Browning. “The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.” The loving fundamentalist. I thought of this “dangerous edge” as I read Dennis Hiebert’s three-part series on love and truth. Hiebert argues that love comes first, experientially if not epistemologically. When we put truth first, we damage the relationship that must be built before we can do any truth-seeking. While many Christians believe that speaking the truth in love “requires that we first be certain about what is true before we can ascertain what is loving in any situation,” Hiebert argues that “we accept as true only what we have already come to love.” We do not need to know what is true about a person before we can love them; rather, we must love them before we can know the truth about them.
I found myself in almost complete agreement with Hiebert. In my philosophical work I’ve made similar claims, arguing for the practical priority of “recognition” over “cognition,” technical terms that generally describe the attitudes in which we show love and seek truth, respectively. One of my loadstars is Wendell Berry, who emphasizes that “it all turns on affection” and draws an analogous relation between the “sympathetic mind” and the “rational mind.” Berry thinks both are necessary, but says that the sympathetic mind is the larger; it includes the rational one, while the rational mind excludes the sympathetic one. In the same way, Hiebert thinks love and truth are “equal and interwoven,” but that love nevertheless has a kind of priority. When you start with love, you can include truth; but when you start with truth, you end up excluding or diminishing love.
Despite this proximity to my own views, I came away troubled. I think it’s because Hiebert’s argument wobbles on that dangerous edge of things, the edge where love and truth are “equal and interwoven, even co-dependent and co-terminus” (as he puts it), and that it falls off the edge onto the other side of the relation. Rather than providing, as he intends, an argument for the priority of love over a certain set of truth-claims, Hiebert ends up with an argument for the priority of another set of truth-claims over love. Maybe it’s harder than we think to move away from our instinctive fundamentalism.
The danger here is that once we agree that “the faithful practice of empathetic love should guide us,” and that “we accept as true only what we have already come to love,” it becomes very easy to believe that whatever we accept as true must come from love. To be sure, we can continue to sincerely acknowledge that, however much love should guide us, we still fall short, and that our opinions might therefore be the result of our failure to love. But as a guard against error, this is no more foolproof than the measures taken by those who would rather start with truth. Both camps are vulnerable to the temptation to rationalize their beliefs (although in Hiebert’s case we might want to find a less confusing word for this common mistake). ‘Truth-first” Christians aim for a rational truth that leads to practical love, so they will be tempted to explain whatever they identify as “truth” as the conclusion of a rational procedure, even if it is not. Hiebert’s “love-first” Christians aim for a love that leads to truth, so they will be tempted to explain whatever they identify as “truth” as an insight that comes from love – even if it is not.
I am not suggesting that Hiebert’s proffered truths about neurodiverse, racialized, and intersex people are virtue-signalling, but I am saying that something like “virtue-signalling” is the special danger faced by those who find their balance on the love side of that dangerous edge between truth and love, just as “rationality-signalling” is the danger faced by those who perch on the truth side (“facts don’t care about your feelings!).” My objection is not to the idea that we must start with love, but to the idea that if we do this we will necessarily end with love, and that we can therefore assume that the truth claims of those who “start with love” are, therefore, more reliable as truth claims.
After all, Hiebert does make his own truth claims – propositions, even – about neurodiverse, racialized, and intersex people. And he argues that it is important to accept these claims if we are going to love those people. “What is true about individuals physically, psychologically, and socially has been increasingly unpacked by the modern natural and social sciences over the past few centuries . . . . Significantly, individuals have varying degrees of awareness about what is true about themselves and others . . . many lack important knowledge of themselves and others. Such lack of knowledge then not only limits the individual’s self-concept, but by routinely being projected onto others, compromises the individual’s ability to love others deeply.” Hiebert goes on to mention recently discovered or recognized truths in each of the three cases and commends (for example) universities that have acknowledged “the truth of neurodivergence and practice respect for the neurodivergent person by providing focused interventions and accommodations.”
To be clear, I am not accusing Hiebert of contradicting himself here. His argument is not that you can love people without knowing anything about them; clearly he thinks you do need to know something about them. His argument is that this knowledge can only be gained through love. We need a certain kind of knowledge to love well; but we must love in order to gain that kind of knowledge. By contrast, if we gain our knowledge by detaching from our relationships in order to figure out how to relate, then we get the kind of “knowledge” that makes us less capable of loving and damages our relationships. Love allows us to see more truth; truth allows us to love more deeply. I fully agree with this.
Rather, I am questioning what is implied, which is that this particular set of claims (about neurodiverse, racialized, and intersex persons) counts as “more truth” about the people in question. I am not sure why that is so. Why exactly would starting with love lead us to believe that conditions like autism are “not necessarily deficits?” Why would love not be just as likely to lead us to believe that they are deficits? I am not making the argument that they are deficits; I am emphasizing that the difference between the claim that they are deficits (the medical model) and the claim that they aren’t (the social model) is not the difference between starting with truth and starting with love. Two people, both putting love first, could come to opposite conclusions on this matter – just as two people, both putting truth first, could come to opposite conclusions.
Hiebert seems to equate love with empathy, and he defines empathy as “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 vantage point.” Is the love he has in mind the same thing as empathy as he defines it here? There are situations in which I want and need love but do not want or need empathy from someone – I do not want or need them to “feel my pain.” For example, I do not want my surgeon to feel my pain. I want her to be interested in the cause of my pain. I want a surgeon who enjoys the work of surgery, not a surgeon who enjoys “doing the work” of empathy. Love cannot be reduced to empathy; rather, it includes empathy, along with many other kinds of mental or emotional posture, such as that of the surgeon who is geeking out on cutting me open.
But when empathy is seen as the “one thing needful,” it excludes love, which is larger than empathy. This is Berry’s point about the sympathetic and the rational mind; it’s not that the rational mind is harmful, it’s that it’s harmful when cut off from the whole of which it is a part. Empathy, on its own, can be a very dark thing. I don’t think we can love others without maintaining the kind of distance from their feelings that respects them as the kind of creature who is capable of taking that same distance within themselves – capable not only of feeling pain and pleasure, but of making judgments – truth claims – about whether the pain or pleasure is good or bad for them.
Just as Hiebert rightly calls us to embrace a more capacious view of truth, in which there are more aspects of truth than propositions, I am calling Hiebert to embrace a more capacious view of love, in which there are more aspects of love than empathy. And I would argue that a more capacious view of love offers surer footing as we walk that dangerous edge of things, seeking to put love first in our pursuit of truth, without using our love to certify our truths. As Hiebert emphasizes, drawing on Barth, we love our neighbors as ourselves – as the same kinds of creatures as ourselves. But what kinds of creatures are we? We are biological and psychological and social and spiritual, as Hiebert points out. We are also, crucially, intellectual creatures. We are fitted for the pursuit of truth, and we love our neighbors by loving them as equals in that pursuit.
While Hiebert is right that “claims of objective truth often function problematically as acts of power in themselves,” such claims do not automatically function that way. Hiebert worries that “the more we prioritize rationality as a means to truth, the less able we are to love empathetically.” I can’t accept this zero-sum picture of our situation. The tension is certainly real, and it’s very hard to walk that dangerous edge without falling off, but I don’t see how we can love our neighbors as fellow truth-seekers without making claims about truth. Arguing with each other about truth is part of loving each other as creatures who are made to love truth.
That is precisely what the fundamentalists I grew up with refused to accept. Disputing the fundamentals was an offense against truth. For a kid like me, that was a deal-breaker. I despised, with a lot of intellectual arrogance, their own lack of intellectual humility. But “fundamentalism” is just a name for a frame of mind in which any of us can fall, whatever our beliefs may be, and the love-first approach can become just as fundamentalist as the truth-first approach.
I see as much fundamentalism in the very “love-first” denomination to which I now belong (the Episcopal Church) as I did in the “truth-first” Baptist churches of my youth. But we must love our neighbors no matter what. Many of those Baptists did, despite the priority they put on rationality, and many Episcopelians do, despite the priority they put on empathy. In the real world of human experience, it’s much more complicated than any epistemology, mine or Hiebert’s, can communicate. That’s a saving grace for us intellectuals, who like to think that thinking is the same as living. But thinking is part of living, part of loving, and if we are going to love one another, we will want to think together.
