HQ

"Love: We crave it so badly. Makes you wanna laugh out loud when you receive it. And gobble it like candy" ("Love" by Paul Simon from his 2000 album, You're the One ).

There is a difference between being materialistic and being a materialist . If you are materialistic, you value material things above non-material things. By materialism I don't mean the valuing of material things. What I mean is the view that there is nothing that exists that is immaterial. A material thing is some entity which is possible to experience. Some material things are so small you can't see them, but it would be possible to experience them if one's senses were adequate or if the thing in question was bigger. Of course, if you are a materialist, then you will very likely be materialistic. That's all there is, after all. What I mean by stink is some undesirable state of affairs. Getting a large bill from the mechanic is an undesirable outcome (for me, not the mecahanic). War is an undesirable state of affairs. Getting sick is undesirable. These things stink. My claim is that the non-stinkyness of certain states of affairs gives us reasons to think th...

The most common objection to Divine Determinism is that if God determines everything, then human beings are not morally responsible for their actions. In other words, for a human agent to be morally responsible for their actions, they can't have been determined to carry those actions out. The defender of libertarian free will will often say: "No LFW, no moral responsibility." This is perhaps the strongest argument against determinism (although there are good responses ). However, some argue that there is an additional feature of human life that would not be possible if there is no LFW – love. Love, it is suggested, is only possible if a human being has LFW. It is often suggested that if human beings had no LFW, then love would be coerced. Loving God, then, would be something one is forced to do. [1] It would be like trying to get a girlfriend by dating her at gunpoint. I will argue that love does not lend anything to the LFW proponent’s case. Either what is meant...

Compatbilists about free will hold that, although everything is determined by God, human beings are free because they are able to operate, uncoerced, according to their desires. Greg Boyd argues that such a view inhibits the possibility of loving relationships particularly when it comes to human relationships with God. He describes the following scenario in order to make his point: Suppose I were able to invent a computer chip that could interact with a human brain in a deterministic fashion, causing the person who carries the chip to do exactly what the chip dictates without the person knowing this. Suppose further that I programmed this chip to produce the perfect wife and inserted it in my wife's brain while she was sleeping. The next morning she would wake up as my idea of the perfect wife. She would feel, behave and speak in a perfectly loving fashion. Owing to the sophistication of this chip, she would believe that she was voluntarily choosing to love me in this fashio...

Oliver O'Donovan suggests that another way to think about the priority or the inclusiveness of love is to think about the object of love (for the first way, see here ). Who or what is it that one should love, given the immigration situation, for example? Should we supremely love those who cannot defend themselves and, having no power, find themselves at the mercy of an impersonal immigration system? Or should our loves be focused on either ideals of law or those for whom our decisions will most affect? What we love or, more precisely, what we are  supposed  to love entails a presupposed order of loves. Self, nation, future generation, ideals, oppressed people all compete for our love. And how do we decide which one  ought  to be loved the most? And when we do choose, for whatever reason, we make the object of love the ultimate object, universalizing a particular and, at the same time, raising it up as the object of supreme love. To see this consider the unin...

In The Resurrection and Moral Order  Oliver O'Donovan asks us to consider what we mean by love as a rule for life. Do we mean, on the one hand, that love is a summary and includes the rest of moral law? Or, on the other hand, do we mean that love is a priority over all other laws? The latter involves responding to a moral dilemma by doing what is considered the most loving act even while an alternative action might be more justified on other grounds. The former may involve suggesting that a particular course of action is justified by a moral law and, though we might not like the result, is the most loving thing to do. The priority  approach leads to the problem of arbitrariness - it is not clear how we discern which option is the most loving and whether or not this or that option are loving at all. The inclusiveness  approach suffers the problem of indefiniteness - if justice or prudence are merely forms of love we are left with the suspicion that those other mor...

God is love, but love is not God. So wrote C.S Lewis in The Four Loves. When we make love a god, Lewis thought, then whatever we love is legitimate: Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritorious. (C.S Lewis, The Four Loves p. 216) When love is god we twist the term, detaching it from the one who is love, and attaching it to parasites. There are certain features found among those who truly love each other. Pride, for example, is not one of them.  Pride is a parasite, a destroyer. Wherever there is pride there can be no love, only human selfish desire under another name. I know this in part because God says it (1 Cor 13), but also because I have pl...

Our culture has bestowed on us an axiom - focus on one another and love oneself. This is revealed in the rise of the selfie, the self-aggrandizing of our own vanity, the self-love Paul speaks of as a mark of the last days (2 Tim 3). It is also what is behind the focus we have on one another, our tendency to gossip about, judge and categorize one another, to check out each others' clothes, style, taste and achievements.

What worldview, apart from Christianity, can coherently account for, explain and oblige hatred for sin and love for a sinner? Answer: not one. This cliche has been the standard response of the church to issues such as gay marriage. It attempts to articulate that while the church opposes sinful actions that does not mean we oppose people in the same way. Its significance is not that it sounds reasonable, but that it is possible at all. How could it be that the sin of a person can been opposed, hated even, yet the person can be deeply loved at the same time by the same person? It is possible because Christianity is true. Let me try to show you how. Christians believe that all human beings are created by God and endowed with the image of God. They are valuable in an objective sense since they are valued by God. Human beings were not always sinful. Adam and Eve were sinless before their rebellion. All human beings are now subject to fallen conditions, rendering them sinful, capable of...

Another Hollywood marriage came to an end this week. Even though most Hollywood marriages struggle to make it to five years it is always a bit of a shock when another couple announce the reality of their unhappiness together. It all looked so perfect. And perhaps therein lies the problem - perfection and the lack of it. It is possible that, before tying the knot, Tom sat down with Katie and said something like, "Katie, I'm not perfect; I'm going to make mistakes, but I will always love you." This sounds reasonable. Most people don't think their partners are perfect; they know that they will not love perfectly. Yet people get married expecting to have enough love (to give and recieve) to sustain the marriage. Whatever else has alienated them, Tom and Katie have decided that what love they had was not enough. They knew it was not going to be perfect, yet that is exactly what they wanted it to be. What is going on here? What I want to suggest is that there...