Love is a feeling
June 18, 2008
“Love is a verb”. It’s a common enough line; and it seems to make all the commands in the Bible about love—perhaps especially, “husbands love your wives”—a bit more do-able. Love is not a feeling that we can’t control; it’s about action, decision, doing stuff…
Oliver O’Donovan writes:
Love… carries no direct implication of action. Christians heedful of St John remember, of course, that love is attested by action: “let us not love in word or speech but in deed and truth.” Inactive or idle love is illusory. But love is not the same thing as act, as will is. Love, rather, is an attitudinal disposition which gives rise to various actions without being wholly accounted for by any of them. The object of love is not an act of our own, but simply—to use an Augustinian phrase again—the “enjoyment” of its object; and “enjoyment” is not the same thing as something we do, but of a relation in which we stand. In enjoyment, the object is simply “there for us”, which is what makes the difference between enjoyment and “use”, where the object is put to the service of some project. Love, whatever actions it gives rise to, is contemplative in itself, rejoicing in the fact that its object is there, not wanting to do anything “with” it. And so love can be described in passive terms, as in Augustine’s famous metaphor: “My weight is my love, by which I am drawn in whatever direction I go…” (Common Objects of Love, 16)
I wonder what you make of this. It seems to me that this is a truer description of love. Love for God does not simply mean doing things for him; it encompasses words like “adoration” and “delight”. Perhaps this makes a command like “Love the Lord your God” or “Love your wife” a little less easy to feel like we’ve got on top of. Perhaps this is a good thing.
Andrew. Thanks for a great post … and reminder.
[...] offers a nice reflection on the nature of love, and Craig Carter reviews Douglas Farrow’s, Nation of Bastards: Essays [...]
The thing is, there are those of us who will beat ourselves up if we don’t have ‘perfect feelings’ all the time for those who we are supposed to love. Not ‘a little bit more difficult to keep on top of’ but ‘I never really was a Christian in the first place / I never really loved my husband in the first place.’
If you think I’m exaggerating, I have spent endless hours trying to reassure someone who is clinically depressed that God has not abandoned them because they don’t have perfect feelings of adoration for God all the time. I have tried to explain that clinical depression will make affective feelings for God impossible but that God has promised to be faithful.
I’m assuming that you don’t really mean for this comment to be applied to the overly-scrupulous or the clinically depressed, but I’m trying to show why ‘Love is a verb’ has got something to offer.
Yes, it is better to adore God than simply to obey him. It is also better to obey him than to throw the whole ‘God thing’ out the window because one can’t muster the feelings on any given day.
Here’s a good point on praising God later
Dunno if that url worked.
But the point was from Psalm 43:5, that
“When I’m beyond discouraged, my worship of God can be to simply acknowledge that later—because of him—I will worship better.”
I wonder if “attitudinal disposition”, includes, but is bigger than feeling?
Thanks for these comments folks. Drew, yes, “feeling” was more for rhetorical effect. I think it’s the wrong word; but it’s a good corrective.
Pam, I hear what you’re saying, and I’m with you on the need to be careful with people on these issues. But I can’t help but feel quite strongly that the thing someone who is feeling like God has abandoned them because they don’t have perfect feelings is: God does not love us because of our merits, our worship, our good works, or our feelings of adoration. We can never earn his love. We can never be “good enough” for his grace. He made us, how could we? No, he just loves us, despite and in our weaknesses and failures. His love is not deterred or undermined by our flagging spirits, but is endless, perfect, and unstoppable. It is grace. This, I believe, is the only comfort for one who finds themselves inadequate; and it is the only motivation for true devotion to God.
Do we choose to have feelings of adoration towards God? Eg. Can I say “I do not have affectionate feelings towards God, I had better start doing so”, and then they come?
I would struggle to know when it is a thing of intellect or a thing of feelings, and how to spot the difference, or whether or not there is actually a difference?
Andrew, I have been thinking a lot about what you wrote. I recon I have been doing things… thinking that it is an action of love for God yet in the midst of doing those actions, I lost the adoration and delight that should have driven me to do those actions. On the other hand though, I wonder if love as feeling and action is talking about the same thing from different sides?
THis probably has a lot of implications for preaching as well. I think by emphasizing the action side we tend to preach legalism by pushing people to do things to assure themselves that they love GOd rather than preaching the object of love and creating in people’s hearts a love that motivates them to stand in a delightful relationship that irresistably moves them to act for the object of their love.
My umbrella smell like coffee rain..
Could it be that love is our purpose? Not something to attain or a tool to fill our needs and desires, but the reason that we press on, the reason that we choose to believe in the character of a person (or in God) even when the evidence stacked against it seems indisputable? I think that Christlike love can only be experienced through sacrifice and grace. As Christians, we are occasionally allowed the privilege of being a vessel of grace which is agonizing but we must trust in the same power that raised Jesus from the dead to make all things right. A love that seeks happiness at the expense of holiness is a counterfeit, and love that justifies any action for its own survival does not come from God. The word gets thrown around a lot, which is unfortunate.