Love Means Love?

February 14, 2020 authise authise

In this post for Valentines Day our Digital Marketing Editor Tom ponders a slogan dogmatically repeated in our culture today, interrogating some of ideas that float around in our culture. What on earth is being said by Love Means Love?

Frank Sinatra once sang a song ‘Love Means Love’, where the opening verse goes thusly:

Nag means horse, nag means bother,
Lid means top, and lid means hat,
Pop means noise, and pop means father,
But love means love and you can’t change that.

A cursory Google search for ‘love means love' offers up almost 2 billion ‘answers’.

You'd expect me to say this, working for a book publisher, but what if the meaning of love was already written down?

In his book The Message of Love, Patrick Mitchel writes;

“All human love exists within a time and context. Ours is contemporary Western culture that has rapidly evolving understandings of what constitutes love. When it comes to love, the past truly is another country. It is important to appreciate that what seems ‘normal’ to us regarding what is love today is historically novel. ‘Love’ has come to mean all sorts of things and is used in all sorts of ways. The result is that it is a word which is at once ubiquitous and yet also so plastic as to be bent into virtually any shape we want.”

Commenting on that time and context – with today being Valentine's Day, A. D. 2020, he writes on;

"‘In the wasteland of Western idols’, says the philosopher Simon May, ‘only love survives intact.’ We in the West live in an age that has (largely) lost faith in all the things that we once hoped could bring us meaning, value and even redemption itself. Faith in God is now very much a minority pursuit in a ‘secular age’. May argues that all other substitute objects of worship – reason, progress, the nation, the state, communism and ‘the bevy of other idols and “isms” that were, and in one or two cases – like nationalism and art – still sporadically are, elevated to religions of salvation’ have ‘all failed to deliver the ultimate contentment or limitless promise expected of them’. All, that is, except love. A contemporary ‘theology’ of modern human love consists of such beliefs as love is unconditional, it is not based on any quality of the other, nor does it seek anything for the giver; love fully affirms the loved one, the ‘bad’ as well as the ‘good’ (it is non-judgmental); ‘love is benevolent and harmonious – a haven of peace’; it is eternal – it, or its blessings, will never die; love is selfless, concerned for the flourishing of the other for their own sake; it alone can transport us to a state of purity and perfection ‘beyond’ the harsh and messy realities of this world; love can even redeem and deliver us from life’s losses and sufferings. Beliefs of this sort saturate popular culture and profoundly shape our expectations of romantic love and of parents’ love for their children. Today, it is love alone that is widely assumed to be what life is all about: our source of meaning and that which gives our lives purpose, joy and hope even in the face of stresses such as financial, political and job insecurity, terrorism, family breakdown as well as being faced with our own mortality through illness and bereavement. Even diehard atheists cling to love as the supreme universal virtue above all others. Determinedly godless humanist funerals still seek comfort in the love that ‘survives’ the deceased person – in her acts of love and in her being loved – giving her a measure of immortality that also lives on in the memories of her surviving loved ones. It is therefore hard to disagree with May when he concludes that love is the new god of our age: it is now the West’s only generally accepted religion. The Bible’s claim that ‘God is love’ has been subverted to become ‘Love is God’.”

And in this false theological vacuum, the meaning of love is further subverted.

“Love is individual freedom. Love is equality. Love is tolerance. Add these values together and you have a cultural context where it becomes unloving to make any sort of critical judgment on how people choose to live. When it comes to God, the idea of a loving deity can be welcomed and affirmed (after all, who is against love?), but only in so far as this God is not perceived as threatening the advances of secular liberal democracy. The result is a God who will be tolerated only if his love is affirming, inclusive and magnanimous – in other words a kindly God who can be left comfortably in the background, leaving us to get on with our lives.”

Readers who have got this far will have noted that apart from mentioning that it is Valentine's Day, I haven’t mentioned a topic that comes close to ‘love’ in many discussions.

I’m not going to.

Not because it isn’t important, but because there is more to love than what you might be thinking of.

In Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet, the titular male character tells a friend, Mercutio, that he is finding love difficult, challenging even:

“Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like a thorn”

Compared to the ubiquitous love that Patrick Mitchel describes in the quotes above, this kind of love is rather strange.

Stranger still, then, is Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, wherein Olivia, talking to Viola (disguised as a man and inadvertently attracted Olivia’s love!) speaks a profound challenge to our culture when she says;

“Love sought is good, but given unsought is better”

Here is a glimpse at a kind of love rather different from human kind.

Here is a glimpse at a meaning of love that reaches further back from human relationships, and yet inspires and infuses them.

Here is a love, unsought, that is given.

In reading this, I was reminded of 1 John 4:7-12. Here, the author addresses his intended audience:

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

With the myriad definitions of love in our culture, we can be forgiven for being confused by the clarity of the statement ‘God is love’.

That is slightly more obvious a sentence than ‘love is love’, or ‘love means love’, but it still isn’t particularly clear what this love looks like. Is it rough? Is it tender? Is it rude, boisterous, does it prick like a thorn? Is it given, is it good, is it searched for? The questions we might have about this simple phrase ‘God is love’ go far beyond a simple pastiche of Shakespeare quotes.

Yet, as is ever the case with the beautiful and wonderful Word of God, we read on:

“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

Here is love.

Love that is shown.

Love that is sent.

Love that brings life.

Love that we do not deserve.

Love that we did not initiate, or ask for.

Love that comes from God’s heart, extravagantly.

The trinitarian nature of our God is often confusing, yet here it helps us to unpick the complexity of the language around God. Sam Allberry writes that “The reality of the Trinity shows us not just that ‘God can love’, or even that ‘God has loved’ but that ‘God is love’. It is not a temporal characteristic but an eternal one. It is not just a phase he is going through and might come out of. It is not just something he does; it is who he is. God has always been love, for he has always been Trinity”.

God loves us.

God the Father loves us so much that he sent his one and only Son.

No one has ever seen God the Father, but if we love one another – in imitation of Christ – then God the Holy Spirit lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

Ponder that beautiful thought.

Marvel at that amazing love.

And next time some asks, what does love mean, know that God, who is love, has told us.

If you’ve made it to the bottom of this rather long blog post – thankyou! You may like to sign up for our free Lent reflections – daily emails designed to focus our hearts and minds on God’s love as we approach Easter. Alternatively, you may like to take your thinking about love further and deeper, and so we’d love to recommend the titles below to you. If you are curious about Patrick Mitchel's book 'The Message of Love', you might enjoy this interview on Ian Paul's blog.