Not so long ago, I entered into a debate with someone on Facebook. (I know, big shock, right?) The debate centered around a complex of issues that went something like this: He'd claimed that Jesus' command to "love your neighbors" was an exclusive claim. Specifically, that the likes of Westboro Baptist represented far better what Jesus actually meant than my type of "namby-pamby, liberal love fest". I attempted to illustrate then -- though largely in a dissatisfactory way, since he dismissed my argument in appeal to Paul -- that that was furthest from what the New Testament actually had in mind.
True, we Christians bang on about love. God is love, some say. Practice loving-kindness, others commend. And my interlocutor found it hard to know what sense to make of these sentiments. I'll openly admit they do so easily lose weight and meaning in a thousand repetitions. Or there's the claim that love reveals and is the fundamental truth of reality. What can be made of that in a scientific age?
Read up on some developmental psychology, though, and you'll discover the New Testament really isn't as antiquated as one would think.
Psychologists and psychotherapists as diverse as Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud, John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott seem to say that we learn about love in roughly three stages. Our first love is narcissistic, they claim -- not an entirely pleasant thought, though behaving as if we were the only creature of importance in the world is necessary for our early survival. Freud talked of His Majesty the Baby.
Neonates are lovable and tyrannical, as every parent knows. Winnicott showed that the good-enough parent is not perfect but is capable of being devoted to their child, especially in the early weeks. The aim is to instill a feeling that life can be trusted because, on the whole, it delivers what the child needs, physically and emotionally. A sense of well-being grows in the young body. It provides the basis for the kind of self-love that enables you to get over yourself and feel comfortable in your own skin. The myth of Narcissus conveys a similar insight. The problem the beautiful youth had was not that he loved himself too much, but that he couldn't love himself. (That's the problem with narcissism. It isn't self-love; it's self-hatred.)
Commonly understood, though, narcissism is the love of one. So for love to be real, it must grow. It moves from the one to the two and then to the many. It's frightening to awaken to the realization that you're dependent upon another -- a parent, in the child's case; a partner, in the adult equivalent: romantic love. But the upside is that life expands. To be one of two promises deeper delights and wider horizons than narcissism can embrace.
Our culture has this assumption -- wrongly held, I argue -- that this dyadic love is the height of what love is. We call it "falling in love". Thing is, it's only the mid-story in developmental psychology, so we can't stop there.
The next step comes with a secure enough attachment, as Bowlby put it. Equipped with such trust, the child is able to explore the world -- to take tentative steps away from the cosy twosome.
It can enter what has usefully been called a triangular space. There's me, there's Mum or Dad, and now there's something else -- a third dimension known in the reality of siblings, friends, interests, goals, a current of life that runs independently of me, though I'm somehow part of it. Again, taking that step is alarming, possibly traumatic. However, if negotiated OK, life becomes richer again, and more risky, and the individual's perception of reality grows.
So what does all this have to do with God? Well, for starters there's Plato. Plato argued quite convincingly that there's an epistemological element to loving. In short, what we know, we know through love. We start off on the lower rungs of a ladder, and keep looking up, only to discover that the next level of loving is, itself, a stepping point for deeper love. The more we climb, the better footing we have, the more we begin to see that all life and reality are infused with love. It's nothing short of a beatific vision.
The point Plato makes is that love enables and resources the ascent into seeing reality. Plato called it "the good, the true and the beautiful". Christians call this reality "God". It's a dynamic view of love that is very at home in contemporary developmental psychology.
A second way of thinking about this dynamic is more simply put. At each transition -- from one to two, from two to the triangular space -- the individual realizes is that love was already there waiting for him or her. Narcissistic self-absorption relaxes with the realization that I am held in the love of another. Lovers move from falling in love to standing in love, to recall Erich Fromm's phrase.
Christians believe there's a fifth dimension -- a divine love that's expressed in every moment of every day. It holds all because it's the source of the love that flows through every relationship. Sure, there's fear and uncertainty to our loving, but in the end "perfect love casts out fear". Because faith is a love that says it can be trusted. Love is, in truth, for Christians, the ground of reality. "The greatest of these is love."
Thing is, my opponent wanted to argue that such love is foreign to Jesus himself. His love is exclusive -- the picture I've been painting is inclusive. It's a radical claim, I know, to argue that God's love knows no boundaries. But I argue this is the claim made in the New Testament itself -- the whole New Testament. Of course, many disagree with me. And that's fine. But I do think this is the claim we Christians make: God is a God of love, not hate.
True, we Christians bang on about love. God is love, some say. Practice loving-kindness, others commend. And my interlocutor found it hard to know what sense to make of these sentiments. I'll openly admit they do so easily lose weight and meaning in a thousand repetitions. Or there's the claim that love reveals and is the fundamental truth of reality. What can be made of that in a scientific age?
Read up on some developmental psychology, though, and you'll discover the New Testament really isn't as antiquated as one would think.
Psychologists and psychotherapists as diverse as Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud, John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott seem to say that we learn about love in roughly three stages. Our first love is narcissistic, they claim -- not an entirely pleasant thought, though behaving as if we were the only creature of importance in the world is necessary for our early survival. Freud talked of His Majesty the Baby.
Neonates are lovable and tyrannical, as every parent knows. Winnicott showed that the good-enough parent is not perfect but is capable of being devoted to their child, especially in the early weeks. The aim is to instill a feeling that life can be trusted because, on the whole, it delivers what the child needs, physically and emotionally. A sense of well-being grows in the young body. It provides the basis for the kind of self-love that enables you to get over yourself and feel comfortable in your own skin. The myth of Narcissus conveys a similar insight. The problem the beautiful youth had was not that he loved himself too much, but that he couldn't love himself. (That's the problem with narcissism. It isn't self-love; it's self-hatred.)
Commonly understood, though, narcissism is the love of one. So for love to be real, it must grow. It moves from the one to the two and then to the many. It's frightening to awaken to the realization that you're dependent upon another -- a parent, in the child's case; a partner, in the adult equivalent: romantic love. But the upside is that life expands. To be one of two promises deeper delights and wider horizons than narcissism can embrace.
Our culture has this assumption -- wrongly held, I argue -- that this dyadic love is the height of what love is. We call it "falling in love". Thing is, it's only the mid-story in developmental psychology, so we can't stop there.
The next step comes with a secure enough attachment, as Bowlby put it. Equipped with such trust, the child is able to explore the world -- to take tentative steps away from the cosy twosome.
It can enter what has usefully been called a triangular space. There's me, there's Mum or Dad, and now there's something else -- a third dimension known in the reality of siblings, friends, interests, goals, a current of life that runs independently of me, though I'm somehow part of it. Again, taking that step is alarming, possibly traumatic. However, if negotiated OK, life becomes richer again, and more risky, and the individual's perception of reality grows.
So what does all this have to do with God? Well, for starters there's Plato. Plato argued quite convincingly that there's an epistemological element to loving. In short, what we know, we know through love. We start off on the lower rungs of a ladder, and keep looking up, only to discover that the next level of loving is, itself, a stepping point for deeper love. The more we climb, the better footing we have, the more we begin to see that all life and reality are infused with love. It's nothing short of a beatific vision.
The point Plato makes is that love enables and resources the ascent into seeing reality. Plato called it "the good, the true and the beautiful". Christians call this reality "God". It's a dynamic view of love that is very at home in contemporary developmental psychology.
A second way of thinking about this dynamic is more simply put. At each transition -- from one to two, from two to the triangular space -- the individual realizes is that love was already there waiting for him or her. Narcissistic self-absorption relaxes with the realization that I am held in the love of another. Lovers move from falling in love to standing in love, to recall Erich Fromm's phrase.
Christians believe there's a fifth dimension -- a divine love that's expressed in every moment of every day. It holds all because it's the source of the love that flows through every relationship. Sure, there's fear and uncertainty to our loving, but in the end "perfect love casts out fear". Because faith is a love that says it can be trusted. Love is, in truth, for Christians, the ground of reality. "The greatest of these is love."