What's Love Got to do with It?

United Methodists are in love with the word love, although in UM political discourse it is deployed to create a patina of sympathy or rebuke rather than to impart information. And of course in some cases its the equivalent of a Texas “bless your heart” that in fact covers up what can’t be politely expressed. 

This happens most in the debates about LGBTQ persons. Those arguing for “inclusion” assert that Christians must love LGBTQ persons by fully including them in the life of the church, particularly through participation in the  ritual of marriage and allowing them to be ordained.  And this group frequently asserts that a failure to include is a failure to love.

You know the rejoinder from the opponents of LGBTQ full inclusion. They say that they indeed love LBGTQ persons, but that it isn’t loving to encourage and allow what God forbids. The arguments on both sides don’t need to be reviewed here. 

Now beneath an argument about what constitute loving acts there must also be, although this seems entirely forgotten or distorted,  a relationship between action and  intention. A moral act is moral only if it has a moral intention. Specifically an act is loving only if it has a loving intention. The converse isn’t exactly true because of the complex nature of love: a loving intention only makes the act loving in the context of the relationship of lover and beloved. 

Now there is a long history of ethical reflection on these matters, but I’ll appeal to what we all know, the scripture. In the New Testament God is love, and God’s actions are always loving. Why? Because God always intends love for God’s creatures and creation. So even if God allows God’s children to suffer terribly, to face fearful persecution, and ultimately to die we know (see Romans 8) that God loves us. God intends good for us in the end, and all the rest are the necessary steps in fulfilling that intention. Of course, this can be said precisely because God has a covenantal relation with all God’s creatures and consistently reveals his lovingkindness to them, not least in Jesus Christ.

So our ethical understanding of the relation of intention to love is rooted in the nature of God's love. Moreover we know from experience that an apparently loving act, on its own, can’t be sustained. There will be setbacks, pushback, rollbacks, mistakes, and forgetfulness. It is intention that sustains loving acts.

God’s intentions are firmest, most long lasting, and thus persistent. They are the model of love. Yet precisely because God’s intentions are played out over vast periods of time the actual experiences of those God loves are most ambiguous. And hence (as scripture teaches clearly) there is the need for faith that is cultivated through a relationship with God through Christ. 

A bottle of hydrocodone offers daily relief to pain and requires no faith. The physical therapist only comes once a week, and it requires faith to see wholeness at the end of a painful process.  So also with human love. It is only intention that creates persistence, and long term intentions may not be experienced as loving in the short term. Faith is necessary, and it must be cultivated in a relationship.

Now I’ll admit up front that some Christians don’t buy this. They adopt any one of a variety of heretical stances that remove God’s moral agency from most human experience so that God only acts in ways that his children can recognize as loving. They preserve the righteousness of God by making God powerless and faith unnecessary. I’ll just say that such a god isn’t worthy of human worship and isn’t the God to which scripture witnesses. But this is primarily a matter of culture, not metaphysics. The culture of the post-enlightenment West, deeply empowered by its technological and organizational prowess, can happily embrace a God whose power is limited to eternal group hugs while humans sort out their own problems. Other cultures and even life situations may demand more of God and thus must wrestle with theodicy. 

But back to Christianity. The model scripture provides is that an act of loving must have a loving intention, and that a loving intention makes an act loving even if in the short run the consequences of the act are emotionally and physically painful. It is love if there is intention in the context of a covenantal relationship. Those who love the Lord know that all these things work together for good. Those that love and are loved by their brothers and sisters in Christ know that love may not feel good. 

Unfortunately what we see in the UM debate is repeated claims that actions that one group or another find painful therefore cannot be loving, and thus the accusation from both sides that they have failed to love as we are called to love by Christ. In other word there is the claim that we can read another’s inward intentions and relationships by that person or group's outward actions. 

And that, dear reader, is bull hockey. Only God, says the Bible, knows the intentions of the human heart. Only God knows the real state of the most apparently broken relationships. And that is why only God gets judge the human heart. 

And it isn’t just the whole LGBTQ issue. The disease of claiming that there is a failure to love whenever someone acts in a way that appears to cause pain and suffering has become the stock in trade of UM political discourse. Did you fail to show up at the rally? You must hate the poor. Did you fail to tithe? You must not love the church. Did you vote Republican? Yeah, we know where your heart is. Did you vote Democrat? You must not love America. And on and on. 

My personal experience is that the many people outside the church I meet and talk to daily have a far more sophisticated understanding of moral theology than active United Methodists, not least UM pastors. They almost always know that intentions are invisible and that interventions and accusations should be carefully considered. The loving thing is often to carefully consider what action will be in conformity with God’s desires for good. And they know you cannot see from the outside what is happening on the inside of a relationship with either God or neighbors. And they know that while not knowing isn’t an excuse for inaction, it is an excellent reason not to judge. 

And that is why, if you really want to know, our church has declining appeal. In our public discourse we prove time and again that we don’t know the first thing about the first thing we should all know about God - that God’s nature is love, and love is both an act and an intention in a relationship of faith.