What is Love?

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

Some words are remarkably hard to define. This is true even of words that we use daily without much difficulty. When pressed to come up with a definition for these common terms, we can find ourselves at a loss. Try this experiment: without looking at a dictionary, try to write a 1-2 sentence definition of the word “which.” It’s not easy to do. Even after looking at the dictionary definitions, it is much easier to use the word than to wrap our minds around its meaning.

Plenty of words that Christians use regularly in thinking and talking about their faith fall into this category. We instinctively feel like we know what we mean when we say these words, but definitions can be frustratingly hard to come by. “Worship” is one notorious example. We understand particular acts of worship and the different kinds of worship, but it’s not easy to develop a definition that doesn’t leave out something important. And we can see pretty quickly that the stakes are higher with a word like “worship” than with a word like “which.” When questions arise over how we as Christians should worship, then it is important to understand what worship is.

In what follows, I want to explore the meaning of one such word: love. There is little doubt that love is central to the Christian faith. This is affirmed by Christians across the theological and political spectrum. For those of us in the Wesleyan tradition, love is at the heart of both how we talk about God and how we talk about sanctification. But what do we actually mean when we use this word? I have long been intrigued by one particular line in Joseph T. Lienhard’s book The Bible, The Church, and Authority: “To say that the Bible is authoritative is to begin a discussion, not to end it.” We could say the same about love: to say that Christians are called to love is to begin a discussion, not to end it.

So where should that discussion begin? I think it would make sense to propose a definition and then aim to show why the various pieces of that definition are helpful. But there is one challenge we will face right off the bat: like many words, “love” gets used in different ways in different contexts. To love a song or to love the Seattle Mariners is not quite the same as to love a person or to love God. Yet there is still some commonality among these various uses of the word. So we will need to set some boundaries to our reflections. John Wesley repeatedly lifted up the importance of loving God and our neighbors, drawing from Matthew 22. In that light, we might focus on what love means specifically in relation to God and to other people. This entails exploring both our love for God and others and God’s love for His creatures. 

I want to argue that love means delighting in and moving toward the good in someone. As we will see, the phrase “moving toward” means something slightly different when used in relation to God from what it means when used in relation to another person. But this compact definition enables us to recognize both what is in common and what is distinct in the love of God and the love of our neighbors. Even more, it enables us to clarify just what we mean when we say that we are called to love.

If we turn to the writings of John Wesley, we find a little help (but not, frankly, much help). He certainly wrote about love a great deal. But when it came to defining love, Wesley’s tendency was to describe how we express love rather than what love actually is. A natural place to look, for example, is his sermon “On Love.” The second section of that sermon begins on a promising note: “Let us inquire what this love is,--what is the true meaning of the word?” His answer focuses primarily on how love for God is shown: “Now, what is it to love God, but to delight in him, to rejoice in his will, to desire continually to please him, to seek and find our happiness in him, and to thirst day and night for a fuller enjoyment of him?”

When Wesley turns to describe love for God’s creatures, he introduces an important insight: “For he hath commanded us, not only to love our neighbor, that is, all men, as ourselves;--to desire and pursue their happiness as sincerely and steadily as our own,--but also to love many of his creatures in the strictest sense; to delight in them; to enjoy them: Only in such a manner and measure as we know and feel, not to indispose but to prepare us for the enjoyment of Him.” The last line indicates a key difference between loving God and loving God’s creatures. When we delight in another in such a way that it distracts us from delight in God, it is not a properly ordered love. But when we delight in another to prepare us for delight in God—that is, when our love for another turns us toward God in thanks and wonder—then it is a properly ordered love. (An interesting note emerges if we compare “On Love” to another Wesley sermon, “The Almost Christian.” In the second section of the latter sermon, the theme of delight is again central to Wesley’s description of the love of God, but it is entirely absent from his description of the love of neighbor. One wonders if he was concerned with the potential for idolatry—the love for another that might “indispose” us to delight in God—that he explicitly warns about in “On Love.”)

For Wesley, then, loving God involves delighting in Him, seeking Him, and desiring to please Him. The love of another involves both acting toward the good of the other and delighting in the other to the extent that it increases rather than decreases our love for God. Through these reflections on how we love, we are moving toward some clarity on what love is. We might continue that quest by going a bit deeper in the Christian tradition, to the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Thomas is able to shed light on our question by focusing on love as it applies both to God’s love for creatures and to our love for others.

One important piece of a definition of love is offered with remarkable clarity by Thomas: “to love a person is to wish that person good” (Summa Theologiae, I.20.1). He draws this definition from Aristotle, as Thomas makes clear when he repeats that definition later in the same work (Summa Theologiae, I-II.26.4). So to love someone is to will the good of that person; to work toward what will bring that person in the direction of the good. As any parent knows, we love our children by trying to do what is best for them. If our kids want to eat nothing but dessert for every meal, we show love by denying that request and making sure they eat some vegetables. Why? Because what they desire in the moment is not good for them, and love is to will and work toward what is good—in this case, a diet that will help their health and their growth.

The notion of love as willing the good of the other is a mark both of our love for other creatures and of God’s love for us. And in the case of God’s love for us, that love is perfect precisely because God’s knowledge of what is good for us is perfect. But what about our love for God? Surely we are called to love God, but God is the complete and perfect good. So it does not make sense to say that we will or work toward the good of God, since God lacks nothing of goodness. There must be something more, then, to our understanding of what love is.

Here we might recall what we found in Wesley’s sermon above, that love involves delighting in the one loved. As it turns out, Thomas had already anticipated this element of a definition of love. “For nobody desires anything nor rejoices in anything, except as a good that is loved” (Summa Theologiae, I.20.1). In that light, love is not only willing the good of the other; it is also rejoicing in the good in the other. Both of these are captured by Thomas just a few lines later: “An act of love always tends towards two things; to the good that one wills, and to the person for whom one wills it.” The love we have for a child, or a friend, or a spouse means both that we desire the best for that person and that we rejoice in that which is good in them—good which is itself a gift of God, whether we recognize that or not.

We can see both elements of this understanding of love in the commitment of someone to a person that society finds very hard to love—say, a person in a repeated pattern of destructive behavior. A parent or a friend remains committed to such a person because they love him. That love is not only a desire for that person to move toward healthier patterns, though it certainly is that. It is also a delight in that person as a creature of God, and often that delight enables the one who loves that person to see good in them that others can’t see. In the early fifth century, bishop and theologian Augustine of Hippo wrote a work called the Enchiridion that outlined the basics of the Christian faith. In that work, Augustine pointed out that all creatures must have some good in them, no matter how much sin may have diminished the good with which God originally created them (XIII-XV). It would be impossible for any being to be completely evil, since evil is the absence of good as darkness is the absence of light. Evil diminishes a creature’s share in being, as a parasite on the good, but like any parasite it needs a host. So anything that still exists, to the extent that it has being, has some good in it. Augustine was no Pollyanna when it came to human nature; he recognized the destruction that sin causes. But there is tremendous hope in his insight that every creature has some degree of good. God’s patient love of all of us, and at our best our patient love for each other, is aimed at drawing out this good that is still worthy of delight.

What then of our love for God? We can certainly delight in the perfect good that God is, but as we’ve already seen, there is no further good that we might will for God to acquire. Now we are in a position to see the reason for the phrasing above, that love is delighting in and moving toward the good in someone. When that someone is another creature, “moving toward” their good means precisely what Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas meant: to will and work toward what is good for them. When the one loved is God, however, “moving toward” the good means our movement toward the perfect good that God is. We delight in God and we draw closer to God’s goodness. In that respect, the way in which we show love to ourselves is to love God. We will our own good by moving toward God, since God alone is the source of all that is truly good. Yet this movement toward God is not motivated by a utilitarian desire to maximize our own joy. Rather, it is motivated by the sheer delight of seeing who God truly is and being drawn toward that beauty and goodness.

Hopefully, these final reflections make it clear why clarifying the nature of love is not just an academic exercise. It matters deeply for how we fulfill the twofold command to love God and our neighbors. The main point is this: true love always has an essential connection to the good. It is not just a delight in something, and it is not just a movement toward something. This is why we can speak of false or disordered loves, such as the inordinate love of money or fame or power. It is also why people often suppose they love another person merely because they delight in that person—but if that delight is really in treating that person as an object rather than in seeking that person’s good, then it is not truly love. All of this sheds new light on 1 John 4:7-8: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” To love is to delight in and move toward the good in another, and that delight, movement, and goodness are from God and lead us toward God.

Doug Koskela is Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA and an ordained elder in the Free Methodist Church