Int J Philos Relig DOI 10.1007/s11153-017-9636-z ARTICLE

Divine love as a model for human relationships Ryan W. Davis1

Received: 21 January 2017 / Accepted: 17 June 2017  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Abstract A common Christian belief is that God loves universally, and that the Christian believer ought, likewise, to love universally. On standard analyses of love, loving universally appears unwise, morally suspect, or even impossible. This essay seeks to understand how the Christian command to love could be both possible and morally desirable. It considers two scriptural examples: Matthew’s trilogy of parables, and the Feast of the Tabernacles in the Gospel of John. I argue that God shows love to humanity through revealed disclosure of vulnerability. In particular, God is universally willing to engage in collaborative action with human agents. I suggest that the Christian command can be satisfied by adopting an analogous willingness to share intentional actions with others. Keywords Love
Ethics
Harry Frankfurt
Kyla Ebels-Duggan
Religion Thus says the Lord: If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will reject all the offspring of Israel because of all they have done. (Jer. 31:37) Christianity is widely thought to teach an ideal of universal love. Many Christian philosophers accept that ‘‘God’s love is maximally extended and equally intense.’’1 A second, plausibly Christian thesis is that followers of Jesus ought, likewise, to love universally. Or, slightly more weakly, followers of Jesus ought to love some persons who don’t satisfy any condition of worthiness for love. We should even love our enemies (cf. Matt. 5:44). Call this loving unconditionally. I will refer to love 1

Talbott (2013).

& Ryan W. Davis [email protected] 1

Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

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that is universal or unconditional as Christian love. The appropriateness of Christian love has long been—and continues to be—a matter of philosophical controversy.2 However, it is hardly peripheral to the Christian tradition. The command to love one’s enemies may be the single most unique principle in all of Jesus’s teaching.3 And the command to love has considerable independent moral appeal.4 But Christian love is also undoubtedly challenging, and perhaps paradoxical. How can we honor the command to love while maintaining the meaning and significance of that attitude? This question can be sharpened into two parts: How could Christian love be possible, and how could it be morally desirable? The aim of this essay is to explore one way of responding to these questions. To begin, I will briefly elaborate two prominent philosophical accounts of the reasons that love provides.5 According to the first, love gives us reasons to promote the wellbeing of the beloved. According to the second, love gives us reasons to share our beloved’s ends. Neither proposal, I will suggest, can fully explain the possibility or desirability of Christian love. To look for additional resources, I turn next to two scriptural vignettes: the Gospel of John’s rendering of the Feast of the Tabernacles (John 7–8), and Matthew’s trilogy of parables (Matt. 21–22). My hope is that God’s love for Israel in these narratives shows how Christian love can be both possible and desirable—the sort of love that would be well worth emulating. I will suggest that the love of God is manifest, in part, through the revelation of certain morally significant divine attributes. Such love can continue in the face of willful rejection. That is, it can continue even in cases that would challenge standard philosophical theories of love’s reasons. It is possible for ordinary persons to love in a similar way, through disclosure of one’s self—particularly in the form of a willingness to act with others. Seeing love through the lens of the Gospels suggests that the variety of genuinely loving relationships is greater than philosophers have sometimes supposed. In this way, divine love can teach us something about how to better love each other.

§1 The Benefactor View Complying with the Christian command to love has long had an air of paradox. Kant supposed that because love was an inclination and inclinations could not be commanded, what we ought to do—very roughly—is act as if we loved.6 At best, 2

For a philosophical sophisticated skeptical view, see Jordan (2012). For additional discussion of divine love, see Evans (2006), Stump (2011) and Adams (2006).

3

Amy-Jill Levine (2014) notes that a variety of earlier texts prohibit mistreating one’s enemies and a variety of later texts encourage treating enemies well, Jesus ‘‘may be the only person in antiquity to have given this instruction [to love one’s enemies]’’ (pp. 93–94).

4

Swanton (2010).

5

The accounts I will utilize are primarily (though not exclusively) prominent within the analytic philosophical tradition. Because they reference each other, they form a discussion that can be applied holistically to the religious issues of concern in this essay. But this should not be understood as suggesting that these are the only, or even most important, philosophical treatments of love. See also, for instance, Marion (2007).

6

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork 4:399. For discussion, see Fahmy (2010).

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this approach would appear to provide a verisimilitude of real love. Still, the command to love can be traced to some of the Christian tradition’s earliest writings (Mark 12; 1 Cor. 13; 1 Thess.; Gal.). Within a few decades, Christian writers had come to interpret the command in a ‘‘radically inclusivist’’ direction.7 So I will set aside efforts that appear to revise or qualify the meaning of love. One contemporary theory that makes room for (at least) unconditional love is Harry Frankfurt’s.8 Frankfurt acknowledges, ‘‘It is even possible for a person to come to love something despite recognizing that its inherent nature is actually and utterly bad.’’9 On this account, there is a straightforward explanation of love for an object that fails to satisfy any worthiness condition. For Frankfurt, love is not justified by any reasons at all. The ‘‘reasons of love’’ are not reasons that justify love, but reasons love justifies. Facts about our attitudes precede, and give rise to, facts about values and reasons. ‘‘What we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it.’’10 In short, this direction of fit can be explained by the fundamentality of our loves, among other cares (of which love is a species). There are ultimately no reasons to guide what we ought to care about, so although reason can tell us that we ought to love something, it cannot tell us what. To assume otherwise, we are told, is a ‘‘rationalist fantasy’’—a mistake made tempting by our desire for choices about what we love or care about to be non-arbitrary. With the rational arbitrariness of our love acknowledged, there is no barrier to a love for something ‘‘actually and utterly bad.’’ For Frankfurt, then, unconditional love need not be in any way affected, and in this respect his view seems to enjoy an advantage over Kant’s proposal—however close the Kantian facsimile might approach to the real thing. Frankfurt argues that caring provides us with reasons to act by determining what is important to us. In love, we regard something as not merely important to ourselves, but important in itself.11 On Frankfurt’s account, appreciating a value for its own sake involves ‘‘most centrally, a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it.’’12 To love someone is to take yourself to have a special class of reasons to promote ‘‘what is good’’ for them, or their ‘‘well-being’’ or ‘‘flourishing.’’13 7

Cf. France (2002); Luke 10.

8

Frankfurt (2004). Frankfurt’s account has figured prominently in subsequent literature on love, caring, and valuing. His view has also been influential within philosophy of religion. See, for example, Green (2017). Surprisingly, given the discussion that will follow here, Frankfurt’s account explicitly provides the basis for Jordan’s (ibid.) denial of the universality of God’s love.

9

Frankfurt does not regard such love as a virtue. But he treats the possibility with equanimity. ‘‘Still, such things happen.’’ (p. 38).

10 Frankfurt, p. 39. Emphases in original. For a helpful discussion of Frankfurt on caring, see Smith (2013). 11

Frankfurt, Ibid., p. 42.

12

Ibid., p. 42. Frankfurt’s central idea, that love involves disinterested seeking of the beloved’s good, is common in philosophy of religion. For example, Paul Moser (2013) writes, ‘‘agape is one’s noncoercively willing (at least when opportunity arises) what is good rather than bad for all concerned, including one’s enemies, without treating oneself as more deserving than others of good treatment’’ (p. 67). 13

Ibid., p. 43, 79.

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In many cases, Frankfurt’s account appears to give the correct answers about how we should treat our beloved. The account emphasizes that love should often be disinterested, or unmotivated by one’s concerns, non-substitutable, and oriented toward the beloved’s ‘‘true interests.’’14 In particular, Frankfurt’s account models love on the attitude of parents toward children, which he suggests paradigmatically exhibit all of these features. He writes, ‘‘Among relationships between humans, the love of parents for their infants or small children is the species of caring that comes closest to offering recognizably pure instances of love.’’15 Although Frankfurt’s account gets the right extension in some cases, Kyla EbelsDuggan has argued that it is significantly mistaken in others. Ebels-Duggan criticizes Frankfurt’s ‘‘benefactor view’’ of love as insufficiently respectful when one’s beloved is also a competent moral agent.16 To see the point, it helps to consider a case in which ‘‘your beloved chooses against her own well-being.’’ Suppose your beloved is the following: She’s a doctor and decides to discontinue her practice in a snug, safe suburb in order to work at an inner city clinic. She fully recognizes doing so will involve significant loss of income, a drop in social status, and increased risk to her physical safety. She acknowledges that her choice may thus leave her less well-off than she is now. Nevertheless, having considered the matter carefully, she’s determined that this is what she should do.17 Now, suppose also that you are in a position to sabotage your beloved’s plan by ‘‘intercepting an application’’ she intends to send to the clinic. It seems that if such sabotage would promote her well-being, then Frankfurt’s benefactor view is committed to saying that you ought to do it.18 However, such sabotage of another’s plans would be wrong. More, it seems especially offensive to act against the will of one’s beloved. So the benefactor account of love must not be correct. Here it seems that Frankfurt has relied too much on the parent/child model of love, when in fact children represent a fairly special class of agents.19 But once we see that the benefactor account goes astray, additional problems emerge. Because it supposes that a person ought to act toward one’s beloved in a loving way, and then holds that love involves promoting well-being, any case where one ought not promote a beloved’s well-being will generate a counterexample. Consider again that Frankfurt allows for love to take objects that are ‘‘actually and utterly’’ bad. This is an important step to defending Christian love. However, if one’s beloved is bad enough, we may think that the beloved is morally undeserving of a high level of 14

Ibid.

15

Ibid., p. 43.

16

Ebels-Duggan (2008, pp. 147–148).

17

Ibid., p. 152.

18

One could deny this by holding that sometimes reasons of love are defeated by other kinds of reasons. However, as Ebels-Duggan notes, it is seems uncomfortable both to say that the loving action is wrong, and also to say that such an action as disrespectful as surreptitious career sabotage could be an expression, rather than a perversion, of love (pp. 152–153). In any case, it is unlikely Frankfurt could take this option, as he intends his account of love to double as an explanation of the source of normativity more generally. 19

As Ebels-Duggan notes (p. 146), ‘‘the parent/child model heavily influences Frankfurt’s position’’.

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well-being. Though we might desire that the beloved flourish, we might have serious qualms about simply promoting her or his well-being without attending to considerations of desert or worthiness. Against this, Frankfurt could rightfully protest that he never intended love to yield mere indulgence of a beloved’s wishes. Instead, he holds that loving actions aim at the beloved’s ‘‘true interests.’’ A defender of the benefactor account might elaborate ‘‘true interests’’ as a kind of moral constraint. If an agent is actually and utterly bad, her true interests might not be what she cares about now—in her bad state—but what a morally idealized version of herself would care about. Thus, to promote one’s true interests could not, says the defender, involve promoting the well-being of a morally bad person, or promoting morally perverse interests, themselves. The problem with this response is that by the time Frankfurt presents the idea of ‘‘true interests,’’ his theory has already jettisoned the resources it would need to constrain their content. Recall that for Frankfurt, love is the source, rather than the consequence, of normative reasons. As a species of caring, love cannot be guided by any antecedent reasons, for there are no such reasons to be had. A person’s true interests are decided by what is important to her—which is given by the final ends that she imbues with value through love or caring. So if a person happens to care about or love perversely, there is no rational fulcrum from which to prise their true interests apart from those perverse loves or cares. To think that there were such sources of reasons, independent of an agent’s loves, is to commit the ‘‘panrationalist fantasy.’’ In short, the same feature of Frankfurt’s theory that make it open to unconditional love—its acceptance of love’s rational arbitrariness—also renders it unable to insist that a person’s true interests cannot be morally perverse. If love can be rationally arbitrary, and true interests are decided by love, then true interests can be arbitrary as well. So it seems, then, that Frankfurt’s benefactor account cannot provide guidance about how to love unconditionally, and so cannot vindicate Christian love.

§2 The Shared-Ends View The benefactor view went wrong in allowing love to become unmoored from morality—especially the morality of respect for other persons. Against this account, Ebels-Duggan proposes the ‘‘shared-ends view’’ of love.20 According to the sharedends view, love involves recognizing your beloved as having a kind of authority to shape your reasons for action, in two respects. First, your beloved’s choices of projects provide you with reasons to pursue those projects rather than others—which might be just as good (‘‘selection authority’’). Second, your beloved’s adoption of ends gives presumptive evidence in favor of their worth (‘‘authority in judgement’’). Thinking about love in terms of selection authority helps correct the first kind of counter-example to the benefactor view. If love provides reasons not to bring about 20 Ebels-Duggan’s account of love has been influential in subsequent discussions of friendship, love, and cooperative activity generally. See, for example, Koltonski (2016).

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your beloved’s well-being, but to treat their projects as authoritative for you, then the reasons you have will be sensitive to their own judgements about what they ought to do. Sharing your beloved’s ends will tell you to help them in their move from a cushy job in the suburbs to the front lines of moral urgency at the clinic, even if you don’t think this will be good for them. If you share your beloved’s ends, you have reason to bring about that those ends are satisfied (which may or may not involve your participating in the ends, themselves).21 Granting your beloved authority in judgment helps to maintain your relationship with your beloved—and also, perhaps, with yourself—while living by the selection authority component of the principle. If you grant another selection authority while holding that their ends are worthless, you risk taking a patronizing attitude toward your beloved. If you consistently act on reasons whose normative significance you deny, you risk alienation from your own actions.22 The shared-ends view corrects the benefactor view by showing how love can provide reasons that cohere with reasons of respect. In so doing, it provides a deep moral insight. Respect is not an external constraint on love, as if the two attitudes were potentially in tension. Instead, respect is internal to love, itself. We can only love those whom we also respect. As such, the shared-ends view may offer helpful guidance in avoiding a series of moral problems surrounding partiality, friendship, and moral risk. For present purposes, however, the question is whether the sharedends view can explain the possibility of Christian love. To investigate, it will help to focus on a few specific cases. Consider: Tragic Love. You love a person who, through tragic events, becomes a bad person. They routinely adopt morally impermissible projects. Your evidence that they will adopt bad projects defeats the presumption in favor of the worthwhileness of the projects. Crazy Love. You love a person who happens to be terrible at adopting worthwhile pursuits. Instead, they are constantly choosing pointless or absurd projects. You have sufficient evidence that their choices are not worthwhile to defeat the presumption that their choices are good ones. These cases pose challenges to satisfying the requirements of the shared-ends view. Importantly, the shared ends view allows that commitment to a beloved’s ends is provisional (that is, requiring deliberation with the beloved) and presumptive (that is, defeasible). In the crazy and tragic cases, the evidence that the beloved’s ends lack worth becomes strong enough to defeat the presumption in the favor. We might further suppose that the other party is recalcitrant in holding to them. What then? For illustration, I will focus on tragic love. In this case it seems you can either: 1. 2. 3.

Abandon love for the person. Love the person, but not treat their ends as reason-giving. Love the person, and treat their ends as reason-giving.

21

Ebels-Duggan, pp. 156–57.

22

Cf. Ibid., p. 160.

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Ebels-Duggan considers, but rejects, (3). Instead, she writes: I am more inclined to say that here we run up against a limit on the beloved’s authority: the provisional adoption of an impermissible end can’t generate reasons for you. You may still owe it to your beloved to consider her view that it would not be impermissible to undertake the project in question, if indeed that is her view. But in the end, you will have to reply on your own considered judgment about this.23 Given that a beloved’s selection authority is provisional until the end is jointly adopted, it’s reasonable to think that love can only ask that you deliberate about the potentially impermissible action—particularly if they differ on whether it is really impermissible. However, as the penultimate sentence suggests, it is at least possible that one’s beloved could knowingly adopt an impermissible end. This would certainly be unfortunate, but—to borrow Frankfurt’s turn of phrase—such things happen. What makes this feel intuitively unlikely is that the shared-ends view emphasizes marriage as the paradigm case of a loving relationship. The beloved is imagined to be ‘‘your spouse’’ or ‘‘your partner.’’24 In ordinary cases, we do not usually think that our spouses or partners will knowingly adopt impermissible ends. I suggest that the shared-ends view’s reliance on the paradigm of marriage makes it more theoretically specific than it might first appear to be. According to the account, one should treat one’s beloved as ‘‘an active participant in the relationship,’’ presupposing both a relationship and mutual willingness for active participation therein. Ebels-Duggan goes on to suggest that in cases in which a beloved adopts an impermissible project, ‘‘your refusal to share in your partner’s ends will have a tendency to disrupt—and perhaps undermine—the relationship. That’s because in practice, relationships largely consist in carrying out our shared ends together.’’25 Our relationship may be disrupted, but the question that remains is what becomes of our love. If the shared-ends view is the final word on love, and, consequently, the only way to love another is to share their ends, then it seems that such disruption must signal the end of our love. In that case, Christian love would be impossible. However, the shared-ends view never claimed to provide the final word on love.26 The account provides a morally sensitive guide to a loving relationship with someone who is reciprocally engaged in the same project. But one might sometimes love people who are not suitable spouses, partners, or even friends. As Frankfurt points out, one’s beloved might be actually and utterly bad. Or as Matthew and Luke point out, one might love an enemy. How should we treat them? The shared-ends view helps to develop an insight with a rich Kantian pedigree.27 Very roughly, this insight is that part of what it is to treat someone as an end is to 23

Ebels-Duggan, p. 162.

24

Ibid., p. 157, 161.

25

Ibid., pp. 161–162.

26

Ebels-Duggan introduces the issue by writing, ‘‘I don’t take this to be the whole story about what it is to love a person; that must also involve some of the attitudinal and emotional aspects that Kant labels pathological.’’ (p. 143). 27

Ebels-Duggan describes the Kantian origins on the shared-ends view on pp. 155–56.

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regard their reasons as having normative force for oneself. In its strongest formulation, the Kantian view holds that what it is to be a reason, in part, is to be shared among multiple moral agents.28 Given this heritage, it is worth noting that Kant himself recognized at least one important case of a loving relationship that does not necessarily involve the sharing of ends. In his Lectures on Ethics, Kant held that we should not request that God support our projects—including important and permissible projects.29 In general, we ought not petition God for support of our ‘‘temporal objects,’’ although Kant allows that we can ask for ‘‘spiritual objects.’’30 The difference is that we can only believe that God is, in principle, willing to grant requests of the latter sort. Kant says little about why this is so, though it does seem that he has a point. Given the great heterogeneity of human pursuits, even if limited to those that are morally permissible, one might reasonably wonder why God would favor our ends above the conflicting, incompossible ends of other, similarly loved persons.31

§3 Love in Matthew and John This section aims to explore the possibility that the model of divine love is instructive for love among humans. In particular, it will proceed on the hypothesis that if God loves all of humanity, then divine love may be helpful in understanding how Christian love might also be possible for humans. If the philosophical views of love considered so far are any indication, divine love resembles its human counterpart more than a little. The two most prominent scriptural metaphors for God’s relation to humanity are those we have already encountered: parenthood, and marriage. These metaphors can even be mixed in the same passage.32 Although God is portrayed as a loving parent and a faithful spouse to Israel, it does not follow that God’s people are always reciprocally willing to receive divine love. It is a commonplace to acknowledge much holy writing as a long story about Israel’s unfaithfulness. In this section I look to two New Testament vignettes to explore whether, and how, love remains possible even then. First I consider Matthew’s trilogy of parables (Matt. 21–22), and then John’s account of the Feast of the Tabernacles (John 7–8). I ask philosophically minded readers to indulge a somewhat lengthy exposition of these cases. The details will help in subsequent sections. Philosophers of religion regularly invoke scriptural examples for illustration, and in this instance I will suggest that the elaborateness of the examples is, itself, philosophically informative.33 28

Korsgaard (1996). See also Wallace (2009).

29

For example, we should not ask God to prolong our life. For Kant’s discussion, see Kant (1963), pp. 100–102. 30

Ibid., pp. 101–102.

31

Jordan, ibid., takes this to be an important consideration against the claim that God loves universally.

32

See, for example, the discussion of Jer. 3:19-20 in Soskice (2007), pp. 76–77.

33

In his discussion of God’s love, Talbot (ibid.) appeals to the Good Samaritan (p. 309).

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§3.1 Matthew’s Trilogy After his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and subsequent temple action, Jesus is greeted by the people as Son of David. Upon his return to the temple the next day, the chief priests demand to know by what authority he acts. His answer, which unfolds over the remainder of Matt. 21–22, takes the form of three parables: the two sons, the wicked husbandmen, and the king’s son.34 In the first, a man asks two sons to work in his vineyard. One agrees to work, but then does not. The other refuses, but then repents and does work. Jesus’s interlocutors agree that the penitent son is the one who does his father’s will, affirming John the Baptist’s call for repentance (Matt. 3). But their acceptance of the principle only indicts them, as they had rejected John and his call, supposing that their connection to Abraham would ensure their privileged status (21:31–32). Jesus’s invocation of the Baptist alludes also to the latter’s warning of divine rejection for the unrepentant (3:10). In the parable of the wicked husbandmen, Jesus follows Isaiah 5 in describing Israel as a vineyard whose tenants refuse to return the fruit of the vineyard to its lord. Instead, they kill two sets of servants before finally killing his son (21:38). The problem is not that the vineyard fails to return fruit, but that those charged with its care take the fruit for themselves. Again, asked how the lord of the vineyard will respond, Jesus’s audience correctly declares that he will destroy the wicked husbandmen. With this background, the setting of Matthew’s trilogy is again significant. The priests’ demand that Jesus divulge his authority was motivated by his temple action, which he had explained through a double reference (Matt 21:13) to the temple as ‘‘house of prayer’’ (Jer. 7:11) transformed into a ‘‘den of thieves’’ (Isa. 56:7). Just as Isaiah had blamed the demise of the temple on the negligence of the watchmen tasked with its protection (Isa. 56:10), Jesus’s parables indict Israel’s present leadership. Jesus’s temple action reveals him to be the fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy of one who would come to rebuild the foundation of the temple.35 But the temple’s rulers, blind to the scriptures, fail to recognize Jesus’s authority as better grounded than their own. If judgment is a veiled threat in the first parable, the second makes it explicit.36 ‘‘The kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom’’ (Matt 21:43). In the parable of the marriage of the King’s son, the King’s servants are killed by the people when they announce the marriage feast for the son. With the feast ready, the king sends servants out once more to extend the invitation, this time to any passersby on the highway. The arc of the parables follows, and then prefigures, the evangelization of the Gospel. They have already rejected John the Baptist, and they will reject God’s son, and finally the disciples who proclaim the Son. 34

My discussion is indebted throughout Konradt (2014), Olmstead (2003) and Onyenali (2013).

35

According to Zech. 4, Zarubbabel will have in hand a hard stone to set as the headstone for the house of the Lord. The parallel between Zarubbabel and Christ is suggested by Jesus’s mentioning, after cursing the fig tree, that faith can also remove a mountain (Matt. 21:21)—a power also attributed to the former (Zech. 4:7). The connections between the fig tree, the levelled mountain, and the temple is even clearer in Mark, in which Jesus curses the tree on his way to the temple, and the disciples find it withered on the return trip (Mark 11:12–20). My discussion here is indebted to Wright (1996), ch. 12. 36

Cf. Olmstead, p. 95.

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Together, the parables call attention to the failure of the leadership of Israel (Matt. 21:45). They keep the fruits of Israel for themselves. Rather than read the scriptures, they ignore God as a way of trying to instate their own rule (21:16, 42). God has established the authorities in Israel through the correct teaching of the Torah and to enable the people to enter the kingdom. But the authorities—as (supposed) representatives of God’s sovereignty over Israel—do not understand the will of God as it is expressed in Scripture; rather, they have attempted to establish their own dominion and therefore disregarded God’s messengers. With the murder of the Son, they thought they could bring Israel into their possession forever. But their foolish plan fails.37 In the very moment in which the leaders of Israel claim authority for their own, their authority is taken from them and given to others. Like the Pharisees mocked by John the Baptist, they have supposed that their connection to Abraham was enough to secure their chosenness. But chosenness is decided by a willingness to listen to God (Gen. 18). The Lord said, ‘‘Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him…’’ (Gen. 18:17-19) The leadership’s conception of their own authority was misconceived from the beginning. Thinking that they ruled by right through their genealogical connection to Abraham, they fail to see the sources of Abraham’s special status. While they have rejected the scriptures, Abraham was willing to listen to God, and his chosenness consisted in God’s corresponding willingness to reveal to God’s plans to him. After God’s disclosure of his plans, Abraham famously deliberates with God about how those plans should be carried out (Gen 18:16–33). Abraham will share God’s ends, but the apostate tenants of Israel will not. As such, God’s promises to Abraham will have to be fulfilled by other tenants, which motivates the expansion of the Gospel mission to any who will receive it in the last parable. None of Jesus’s interlocutors have a change of heart, but they do discern the (increasingly obvious) fact that the parables were about them (Matt. 21:45). However it is a mistake to infer that Israel—or, anyone—has slipped beyond the possibility of God’s forgiveness.38 After a bitter reflection on the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees, the next chapter ends with Jesus overlooking the city: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not. (Matt. 23:37) No amount of wickedness causes Jesus to forsake the children of Jersualem. Like the mother hen, he stands ready to offer protection, should they only accept it. N.T. Wright finds in the metaphor the idea of a willingness to suffer for others, so that 37

Konradt, p. 189.

38

Olmstead, p. 60.

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they do not need to suffer, themselves. The barnyard hen stretches her wings around her chicks in the event of a fire, to keep them from being burned.39 To tragic consequences past and future, Jerusalem’s children have rejected both the prospect of listening to God, and the promise of God’s parental security. Yet Jesus’s mourning over the city is not without love. Just the opposite: his lament reveals that God loves Jerusalem still. God will still fulfill his promises to Abraham, as John the Baptist had said. §3.2 The Feast of the Tabernacles The central task of the Gospel of John is to make known a God who loves (John 3:16–17).40 Although God is an active agent in John, it is only through the actions of Jesus that others experience a God who is not seen (3:13–14).41 The present discussion will focus on Jesus’s words at the Feast of the Tabernacles (John 7–8). The feast recalls Moses’s deliverance of the Israel with water and light (as well as anticipating a future Moses-like figure). During the first seven mornings of the feast, a priest would lead pilgrims to the Pool of Siloam, from which water was taken back to the temple. The priests turn their backs to the rising sun and declare that unlike the Israelites of old, they will keep their eyes on the Lord (cf. Ez. 8:16).42 Facing the temple, they recall the apostasies of the past with a commitment to maintain faith in the one God.43 At night, four giant candelabra light the Temple area, perhaps a reminder of the pillar of fire guiding Israel in the wilderness (Ex. 13:21).44 The feast’s dramatic moment arrives on its final day. Jesus stands and declares, ‘‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of water’’’ (John 7:37–38). The exact referent is unclear, but the idea seems to be that the messiah will be like water coming to a parched land (Isa. 44:3). In Ezekiel’s vision, water flows out from an unseen source beneath the temple (Ezk. 47:1). In his declaration, Jesus—the messiah of unknown origin—promises to be source of continual living water (cf. Isa. 58:11). Jesus’s words divide the audience between believers and skeptics, and the Pharisees denounce those who are open to the message for their lack of commitment to the law. But even the rulers are not unified; Nicodemus challenges whether the law should condemn Jesus without a hearing (7:50–51; cf. Deut. 1:16). Undeterred, the Pharisees confidently insist that the scriptures show no prophet can come from Galilee (7:52). The story resumes in chapter 8 with Jesus’s declaration that he is also the light of the world (8:12). With this, the two central images of the feast are joined in fulfillment by the person of Jesus. After another exchange with the Pharisees, 39

Cf. Wright (1996) ch. 12. See also Deut. 32:11; Ruth 2:12; Ps. 17:8; Isa. 31:5.

40

This idea is from Moloney (2013), ch. 2.

41

Moloney, ibid., p. 64.

42

See Coloe (2001). See also Moloney (2005), ch. 9.

43

Moloney, ibid., p. 18.

44

Moloney (2005), p. 197.

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Jesus tells those in the audience who believe that if they ‘‘abide’’ in his word, they will be his disciples, and will be free (31–32). Unconvinced, the Pharisees counter that they are the children of Abraham. As in the debate surrounding the Matthean parables, Jesus’s interlocutors claim their heritage as a better source of freedom than the person of Christ. And as before, their asserted security as Abraham’s heirs is misplaced. If they were Abraham’s children, they would act as he acted, extending hospitality to God’s messengers (Gen. 18:2–8). Instead, like the inhabitants of Sodom, they seek to kill God’s messenger. The central announcement of the feast is that Jesus is the continual source of God’s living word. By making God present to the people, Jesus is extending the possibility of eternal life to those who will ‘‘see’’ God—through him—with the vision of faith (cf. 8:49–51). Jesus is making God continually known, and hearers must also ‘‘continue’’ in his word (8:31–32). Rekha M. Chennattu interprets, ‘‘Abiding in Jesus’ word would imply that the whole life of the disciples is permeated by the presence of Jesus and guided by Jesus’ life-giving words or commandments.’’45 Even though the Johnannine community has been evicted from the synagogue and seen the temple destroyed, God continues to be present to them through Jesus.46 The living water made available to the community anticipates the new covenant initiated by the command to love (John 13). Washing with water carried the symbolism of God’s forgiveness and the restoration of a covenantal relationship with him (Ezek. 36:25–28). Chennettu explains that when God promises ‘‘You should be my people and I shall be your God,’’ the relationship invoked is ‘‘to have a share with’’ or ‘‘be partner with.’’47 And partnership is then promised to the disciples. He will tell them everything that the Father has told him (John 15:15), and the Father will treat their requests as authoritative (15:16). What is new about the covenant that Jesus offers is that it promises love as a kind of reciprocity.48 Both parties give and receive information and reasons from each other. This last thought gets somewhat ahead of the narrative from the Feast of the Tabernacles. There, Jesus’s interlocutors rejected the prospect of this covenant. For present purposes, the important point is just that it remained open to them. True, their dogmatic reading of the scriptures blinded them to the possibility of revelation from God that they did not already possess. But the narrative illustrates how they were denied communion in God’s love only by their own recalcitrance, not by the cessation of that love.

45

Chennattu (2006), p. 76.

46

Cf. Coloe, p. 130.

47

Chennattu, ibid., p. 95.

48

Chettanttu, ibid., p. 97. For an interesting discussion suggesting that Thomas in the Gospel of John is, in some ways, a positive model of active participation in such a relationship, see Sylva (2013), especially chs. 3–4.

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§4 Love and Vulnerability The benefactor account and the shared-ends account of love each help us to understand an aspect of divine love. God’s love is sometimes represented as that of a parent, and sometimes that of a spouse or partner. But neither account of love can be easily extended to all possible cases. People can refuse God’s parental protection, and they can reject the covenants promising God’s partnership. Like the leaders of Israel in Matthew’s trilogy of parables (and like the actual leaders they represent), we can reject partnership with God because we don’t want to cede any putative authority. Like the Pharisees who refuse the living water and light, we can spurn the benefits God offers, however significantly they might enhance our lives. The most central lesson of these accounts, I suggest, is that this is a recurring part of the story of God’s love of humanity, not the end of the story. The devoted spouse and forgiving parent depicted by Jeremiah will never forget the covenant with Israel (Jer. 31:31–37). How, then, does God love those who refuse to be participants in a loving relationship? I am less certain there is a single decisive answer contained in these accounts, and perhaps that itself is informative. Perhaps love is diverse in its sources and its manifestations.49 However, I will hesitantly proceed on the hypothesis that it may be possible to something at least slightly more determinate. One part of the answer may be a kind of maintenance of emotional vulnerability or openness to the beloved. Jesus’s sorrowing over Jerusalem only makes sense in the presence of love. The feeling of love can remain, even when there is nothing more that can be done. It is significant, though, that the feeling is enough to show that love remains. This thought follows a line from David Velleman, who suggests that love is that which ‘‘arrests our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other.’’50 Certainly one can be vulnerable to another even when the latter refuses participation in a loving relationship. Whether it is advisable is another question. A love like this may not be for the faint of heart. Keeping emotional defenses down against a committed partner or spouse can be difficult enough, let alone to someone who refuses one’s relational overtures. Lowering emotional defenses against an enemy seems downright foolish. Frankfurt warned that ‘‘love is risky,’’ and speculated that the only reason God could love universally was because an infinite being, God ‘‘runs no risks’’ in loving indiscriminately.51 In my estimation, the accounts of God’s love for Israel tell against this rationalization of universal love.52

49

A point also underscored recently by Setiya (2014).

50

Velleman (1999). Velleman’s proposal has elicited much subsequent discussion, including from EbelsDuggan (ibid.) and Seitya (ibid.). 51

Frankfurt, p. 62.

52

Pace Frankfurt, Jesus does appear to run risks in loving. But opinions here may differ, depending on views about divine impassibility.

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But a version of Frankfurt’s point remains: how is it that mere mortals could sustain emotional vulnerability unconditionally, or even universally? Velleman’s own account of love offers a twofold response to this concern. First, although love arrests our emotional guard, it may not expose emotions that make us subject to the possible manipulation of others. Velleman describes the feeling of love as a kind of ‘‘attentive suspension, similar to wonder or amazement or awe.’’53 One could experience a kind of awe toward another person, suspending our other emotions or attitudes directed at them, without depending on that person for any particular action or relationship. Second, Velleman’s account holds that love is universally rationally permitted, in the sense that love is an appropriate response to the rational nature of any other person.54 It does not, however, hold that love is required universally. Nor does it hold that universal love is even rationally permissible or psychologically possible. Lowering our emotional defenses is taxing, and sheer exhaustion can prevent us from loving everyone. Further, although we can know that every person has the incomparable value that makes love permissible, we don’t experience every person in that way. And it is our experience of another particular person, Velleman thinks, in a way that enables us to ‘‘see into’’ their ‘‘personhood’’ through its imperfect expression in their behavior, which makes us love them.55 The idea that love is somehow constrained by our experience of other persons is suggestive, if perhaps not yet altogether clear. I will return to it in a moment, but I want to call attention to a second aspect of God’s love in the accounts from the last section. Beyond some emotional response to the beloved, there is also a practical component. Jesus continues to disclose the nature of God, even when that message is not accepted, believed, or seen by others. God remains willing to reveal his plans and actions to Israel, even in the face of betrayal or apostasy. The Gospel message is thought of as an invitation persistently extended to all, or a light that all can enjoy, or water that anyone can drink. If the accounts above underscore any single fact, it may be the commitment of God to a kind of self-disclosure. Might we be able to satisfy the command to love through analogous acts of selfdisclosure? Our position relative to other persons is very different from God’s, but there is still a kind of intimacy associated with disclosing one’s self—or at least one’s important or morally relevant attitudes. We can offer comfort, reassurance, or solidarity with others by expressing our own sadness, fears, or indignation. Of course, much more would need to be said about how this might work. It is not generally the case that just any disclosure of oneself will count as loving. Still, it is characteristic of typically loving relationships—like friendship—that one will reveal things about oneself that one will not reveal to others (Cf. John 15:15). And it is possible to disclose oneself to persons who refuse one’s relationship in other ways—including those suggested by the benefactor and shared-ends views of love. The scriptural examples may suggest how this is sometimes sufficient for love. 53

Velleman, p. 360.

54

Velleman writes, ‘‘I regard respect and love as the required minimum and optional maximum responses to the same value.’’ (p. 366). 55

Ibid., p. 372.

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§5 Openness to Shared Action So far, I have argued (§1, 2) that either love is sometimes impossible, or else love cannot always be expressed through beneficent or ends-sharing actions. Accounts of Jesus’s dealings with apostate leaders (§3) show that love remains possible, even in the most difficult cases. So, universal love is possible—at least for God. Last, I argued that this love can provide a model for human love. Even though we cannot see the particular qualities of everyone else that enable us to respond with love, we can symbolize their true value in other ways. Christianity itself furnishes a way of regarding other persons that helps us ‘‘see’’ their value, and so to make possible love for them. When we thus see another’s true self, we can respond with love partly through disclosure of our own selves. The positive part of this paper is admittedly speculative. Much remains to be worked out, but for now, I will end by considering two central lines of objection. First, one might worry that the kind of self-disclosure suggested in the last section makes sense as an account of divine love, but does not make sense in the case of merely human love. God’s self-disclosure is apt to be a powerful, moving experience for the recipient. However, it would seem hubristic to suppose that disclosing oneself to another was similarly profound. In fact, it is easy to disclose too much about oneself—particularly to those whom one does not know intimately. Doing so seems more like a failure of propriety than a success of love. Call this the problem of oversharing.56 One might be tempted to respond to this problem by emphasizing love as suspending or lowering of emotional barriers to another person, and thereby becoming vulnerable to the other. Self-disclosing emotional vulnerability to another might avoid some of the discomfort associated with oversharing. However, this emotional aspect of love raises another problem. While God might be able to continuously maintain a kind of openness to God’s creation, it may well be impossible for humans to remain in a constant state of emotional vulnerability to each other.57 Doing so would be exhausting to beings of ordinary psychological limitations.58 We may only be capable of intermittent moments of this orientation toward others—even with those to whom we are closest. Yet we would not want to think that our love for our spouses, children, or family members flickers in and out. Call this the problem of inconstancy. I will consider these objections in turn. The problem of oversharing may be understood as a challenge to specify the way in which self-disclosure is carried out. 56

I’m grateful to Christopher Tucker and Matthew Jordan for pressing me on this point.

57

We might want to call God’s attitude ‘vulnerability’ or ‘openness’—depending on whether one believes impassibility is a divine attribute. If one regards impassibility as an attribute of God, it may not make sense to speak of God as being ‘‘emotionally vulnerable’’ at all. I will try to frame my proposal in a way that allows for some flexibility, given the diversity of opinions about the issue. For some, even the idea of openness to shared action may make God seem inadequately impassible. However, on a variety of common theological views, the weaker version of my proposal need not be in tension with any divine attributes. For a helpful discussion of the logical space, see Keating and White (2009): Introduction. I’m grateful to a reviewer for pressing me to clarify this issue. 58

See Bloom (2014).

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We intuitively accept some acts of self-disclosure as displaying love, but we recoil at the suggestion that others are loving. Telling a close friend or family member about a deep seated fear, for example, manifests the kind of trust that is characteristic of loving relationships. Telling a perfect stranger the same thing, on the contrary, might arouse puzzlement or even suspicion.59 Such asymmetries are unsurprising. After all, the vulnerability that results from an arresting of emotional defenses can take many forms. Velleman notes as much in his own account. Among his examples, he considers how the love one might appropriately feel for a student should motivate a very different kind of response than the love for one’s own children. Love for the former should motivate respectful distance, while love for the latter motivates efforts to close emotional distances that inevitably arise among parents and children. The question to focus on is about what kind of vulnerability to the other is characteristic of Christian love, in particular. And here, I suggest, the divine model described and enacted by Jesus can again be informative. In each of Matthew’s three parables discussed above, Israel’s leaders persistently refuse to cooperate with God in working for the salvation of God’s people. They may deny that they have to work with God at all, supposing that their favored status (as Abraham’s would-be heirs) will suffice to save them. Or else they do agree to work with God, but rather than sharing the gains of such work cooperatively, they try to keep all of the gains for themselves—either through deception or else through open force. Both techniques reveal hostility to an erstwhile partner. Like the leaders in the parables, the actual leaders to whom Jesus speaks refuse to listen to the scriptures, and so also to God’s word. They too rebuff God’s scriptural invitation to divine collaboration for the kingdom’s sake. Throughout the parables, the righteous are distinguished from the wicked by their willingness to work with God. Abraham, unlike Israel’s wicked leaders, is willing to engage in a covenantal project for the sake of his own posterity, but also for the sake of God’s ends. Because he is willing to take God’s direction seriously, he can enter into a relationship of shared deliberation and planning with God. What is striking is that the righteous differ from the wicked in their willingness to work with God, rather than in God’s willingness to work with them. If the parables insist on anything, it is God’s unqualified willingness to collaborate with Israel. It might seem unwise to send one’s son to those who had recently murdered earlier representatives, or to expand an invitation in the wake of a servant’s being killed. God is not deterred by considerations of prudence. If Jeremiah’s prophecy of the temple’s openness to all is to be realized (Jeremiah 7), a divine openness to human collaboration must remain intact. The idea of divine-human collaboration is not unique to these parables. On some views, it is perhaps the distinctively novel aspect of Jesus’s kingdom message. Earlier apocalyptic prophets had warned of God’s impending action in realizing an imminent kingdom. Jesus declared that the kingdom was already present, and called upon people to enter it. John Dominic Crossan describes Jesus’s announcement: 59 For a defense of friendship as self-disclosure, see Laurence Thomas (1987). For a skeptical view, see Cocking and Kennett (1998). For a sensitive discussion of friendship generally, see Nehamas (2016).

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‘‘You want God’s intervention, he said, while God wants your collaboration. God’s kingdom is here, but only insofar as you accept it, enter it, and thereby establish it.’’60 As long as the kingdom was in waiting, people could also wait for God’s independent action to deliver it. By pressing the kingdom’s temporal location back to the present, Jesus could emphasize human as well as divine action among the conditions for entry. As the parables illustrate, God’s robust willingness to act collaboratively shows a kind of vulnerability. Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem expresses its costs in vivid terms. The vulnerability in question is that of one who is persistently willing to engage in shared action with another, regardless of how the second party acts. Vulnerability in shared action is familiar as a human phenomenon. When one person is more committed to a shared project than another, the more dedicated party runs a risk of being abandoned mid-stream. Tepid collaboration justifies the fear that one’s own efforts will fail to be redeemed, as well as the further—and distinctively bad—fear that one’s success or failure is outside one’s personal control. Within ordinary human relationships, we use promises to ensure that both parties will see shared projects through to their completion.61 As discussed in §3.2, God uses covenants in a similar way. But as the Feast of the Tabernacles illustrates, neither covenant nor promise can eliminate the risks of shared action, so vulnerability remains. Can vulnerability as openness to shared action offer an ideal of love that helps dissolve the oversharing problem? On the view I have described here, among the attributes that God lovingly self-discloses is a persistent readiness to engage in divine-human collaboration. A human version of this ideal could adapt a point from the shared-ends view of love. To love universally, on this view, would be to adopt a disposition of willingness to engage in shared action with any person (provided certain other normative conditions, like moral permissibility, are satisfied as well). It would be to see any person as a worthwhile candidate for collaboration. Some philosophers have already recognized this kind of maximally general endsharing as a normative ideal. Christine Korsgaard, for example, holds that persons are morally required to see the ends of any other person as reason-giving. In effect, all moral relationships between persons are structurally similar to the relationship of marriage—as developed by Kantian proponents of the shared-ends view of love.62 We must see others in a fundamentally cooperative way, rather than seeing them as 60

Crossan (2012), p. 127. Emphasis in original.

61

See Shiffrin (2008).

62

Korsgaard’s own argument runs remarkably close to the Christian command to love. Her metaphor for moral relationships is marriage, and her metaphor for morally incorrect relationships is war. We either see ourselves as in a relationship structurally similar to marriage with other persons, or else we see ourselves as in a fundamentally adversarial or strategic relationship with them. For Korsgaard, there is no middle ground. She writes, ‘‘Isn’t there any form of personal interaction between a marriage and a war? Or to put the point more calmly, isn’t there any such thing as a fair negotiation, between two parties whose interests are legitimately at odds? Basically, I want to say there is not…’’ (see 2009 §9.4.11). For Jesus, a love that fails to include one’s enemies is not—in the end—any love at all. As Levine puts it, ‘‘Love cannot be restricted’’ (ibid., p. 93). For Korsgaard, a morality that fails to include those whom one might see oneself as at war with—literally, one’s enemies—is not any morality at all. On her Kantian view, this is something like a conceptual truth.

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fundamentally at odds. Korsgaard recognizes this ideal as plausibly sounding ‘extreme’ for a general moral requirement.63 And in fact, the reception of her view has proven philosophically controversial in ways that extend well beyond this essay. Even if a readiness to share ends with anyone is too high a demand for morality, it can still be a fitting demand for love—an attitude that is optional from a moral point of view, if not from a Christian point of view. All that matters for present purposes is that this specification of Christian love can avoid the oversharing problem. While there may be things it is inappropriate to disclose to strangers or enemies, it is not inappropriate to disclose a willingness to engage in shared action. I take this to be one lesson from the scriptural examples described in §3. I also believe that this conception of love can avoid the problem of inconstancy. Perhaps it is not possible (or desirable) to sustain emotional vulnerability to any other person. The example of openness to collaboration is relevantly different. Because this openness is a disposition rather than an emotion, it can be maintained without the fleetingness or particularity that characterize human emotions. However, because it is a genuine form of vulnerability, it does require lowering a kind of defense against other person. That is, it demands that we are willing to make plans with others, including our enemies. To be sure, they would first have to be willing to cooperate with us. But we would then have to reciprocate this willingness, undertaking the associated risks for disappointment, failure, and betrayal. And, even before they have shown evidence for making any joint plans, we would need to see them not only as enemies, but also as potential cooperators. The account offered here is admittedly only an opening sketch of how to address these issues. In short, the proposal of this paper is that God discloses a willingness to collaborate universally, that this willingness involves vulnerability to the other, and that this vulnerability is at least partly constitutive of divine love. Further, humans can emulate this love by likewise disclosing a disposition of willingness to engage in shared action with any other person. Hopefully the outline suggested here goes some way toward articulating an ideal that sounds plausibly like a conception of love, while at the same time within the moral and psychological capacities of normal humans. If it has succeeded in this regard, then this is at least some evidence for the hypothesis that the model of divine love as expressed by Jesus can provide meaningful guidance to Christians seeking to share in God’s love.64

63

Korsgaard, p. 195. For an elaboration, see Ebels-Duggan (2009).

64

A less philosophical virtue of the present view is that it can help make sense of an apparent disharmony between Matthew 5, wherein Jesus enjoins love of enemies, and Matthew 23, in which Jesus denounces the hypocrisy of his own enemies. As Crossan observes, ‘‘the unfortunate result of his gospel as attack…is that he has created a Jesus ultimately open to Matthew’s own favorite accusation— hypocrisy’’ (ibid., p. 195). On the present view, Jesus’s anger is coherent with love, since both could be manifestations of a desire to work together with another agent.

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Conclusion This essay opened with the observation that Christian love might appear paradoxical. One way of responding to this prospect is to admit that love, in general, has a paradoxical feel. Both Frankfurt and Velleman end their essays with the reflection that love is absurd. To say that something is absurd is to admit a contrast between its reality and its perception.65 For Frankfurt, love is deeply important, and so it seems like we should have reasons for what we love. But there are no such reasons, and so there is no final way of guiding our loves. Perception and reality do not match. Love is absurd because its pretense of rational seriousness is belied by its arbitrariness. All we can do, when we recognize the non-rational whims of our deepest loves, is to keep our sense of humor.66 For Velleman, love is made rational by reasons, but these reasons (always concealed) are not the ones that inspire our love. What inspires our love are symbols of another person whose origin is in the mysterious working of our own hearts. Our intuitive perception is that the same reasons should both justify and motivate our love. And yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Our love is rationally justified, but not by any of the reasons for which we actually love. Thus, love is ‘‘virtually an education in absurdity. But for that very reason,’’ Velleman writes in his dramatic final line, ‘‘love is also a moral education.’’67 Christian love purports to be universal in scope—including even our enemies. But how could we love those whom we also hate? What reality could possibly live up to such an ambition? Even if such a pairing of attitudes were conceptually coherent, it would certainly appear to be psychologically impossible. Christian love looks like the most absurd love of all. This paper has tried to sketch another possibility. It has said little about how the view of God might reveal the true value of persons. But suppose the Christian aspiration is right, and it can. In that case, love could both be justified by reasons, and be warranted universally. If that is right, it would live up to its purported ambition. Love would still be a moral education, but its lesson would be that our love and our reason are not really so different. Acknowledgements For comments and discussion, I am grateful to Terence Cuneo, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Terryl Givens, Rachael Givens Johnson, Matthew Jordan, Christian Miller, Mark Murphy, Joseph Spencer, and Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and also to other members of the 2015 Theistic Ethics Workshop at Wake Forest University and the 2015 Wheatley Institution Summer Seminar at Brigham Young University. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.

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