We Are Relational Beings Who Must Love and Be Loved
March 27, 2006
John H. Armstrong
It should go without saying, you would think, but we must remind ourselves of this inherent and essential truth every day-we are relational beings and as such we need love. Made in the image of God, each of us was made for God, and for one another. This truth is profoundly rooted in the very nature of God as a triune relational being.
Our lives are filled with experiences, from our earliest remembrance, that separate each of us from others, especially from all other life forms. These experiences include the familial, the social, the psychological, the political and even religious, all of which we have from childhood. But there are other experiences that we all have that draw us toward further common ground, ground established by creation, a ground that bonds us to other persons. Philosopher/theologian Jean Maalouf put it this way:
The way we relate to others, to the world, and to God defines who and what we really are. Not to relate to anyone or to anything is not an option. We are born helpless, utterly dependent upon others (The Healing Power of Love, [Mystic, Connecticut: Twenty-Third Publications, 2004], 6).
Maalouf correctly observes that we relate to others whether we want to or not. The question is never: “Do we relate to others?” Rather the question is always: “How do we relate to others?” To ask a person the question “How are you?” reveals much more than you may realize. It is really to ask a deeper and more human question: “How are you doing with others in your life?” Think about this. Knowingly or not when we ask “How are you,” we are actually asking: “How are you relating to your family, to your friends, to your work and those you work with, and to various situations in your life that involve many other people?” Concludes Jean Maalouf, “To even think that one has nothing to do with others is an illusion” (The Healing Power of Love, 6). But many Christians I know persist in living this illusion.
You and I respond to others, either in love or in ways of non-love, every day. We also receive love or rejection, in some form, every day. What makes you feel good, deep inside, is to know that you have been loved. You want to be loved, because you were made for love and you want to love others for the same reason. Sin, however, corrupts the whole process. But, and Christians of all people should know this, grace restores it.
When Adam and Eve fell you will recall that they “felt naked and ashamed.” Most theologians agree that this was a picture of their alienation, of the loss of openness to God and each other. Simply put, the most direct loss that came about through the fall was a relational loss. These two unique persons, made for relationship with God and one another, could no longer enjoy this unique relationship as God designed it. The rest is human history, with all its misery and lovelessness.
You’ve heard it said before that “no man is an island.” This is simply another way of saying that you cannot survive, or truly live, alone. Even though we experienced deep alienation in the fall we still crave being human and real with others, thus being loved. We exist as whole persons, body and soul. Our most basic needs-physical and spiritual-are met not just in ourselves but in relationship with others. John Powell has noted that “we are, each of us, the product of those who have loved us . . . or refused to love us.” How powerfully true.
So important is this understanding to a happy and healthy human life that the Second Vatican Council, in the well-known Guardium et Spes, puts it this way: “We are all witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility toward his brothers and toward history.” We are relational. We are made to love deeply and freely and we must be loved or life becomes unbearable, impossible, divorced from God entirely.
This is why Jean Maalouf correctly concludes:
The fundamental problem of life is the problem of love. Without real love nothing else seems to make sense or to matter. We have a fundamental need to be loved, lovable, and loving. No fulfillment is possible without love. Love has the power to heal us, to renew us, to make us safe, to bring us deep joy, and to bring us closer to God and to each other. To think that we can exist apart from others and from the universe is an illusion. Love redefines our very existence in relationship to others, and brings heaven on earth (The Healing Power of Love, 2).
The most basic and tragic mistake that Christians make, it seems to me, is to forget that love alone has the real power to change people and build churches and ministries. So long as we seek rational explanations for mysteries we will fail to love. Ask yourself: Why is God called love (1 John 4:8, 16)? What makes God’s essence love? And how do we rightly conceive of a God who is truly God if he is a God who is love? Is there any correlation between God’s being love and your love, your happiness and your holiness? I think so.
If relationships are what life is really all about, then life is finally about God’s love. Every story is about love. Either your life is a great story about how love is restoring you day-by-day in the image of God, and thus in God’s love, or it is about how the lack of love has torn away more and more of God’s image from your life and broken you down.
When Christians speak of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ this is what we mean. This is the really great and important relationship. This relationship begins the restoration process. But this relationship is never meant to put you all alone with God. It is meant to bring you into many other developing and loving relationships with those also made in God’s image. God’s story is about his divine longing for you and me and of his deep desire to bring home captives who lost their way and ended up in relational bondage. God’s love breaks these bonds and frees the prisoner to love and be loved. This is why there is nothing greater than love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
So what is love? Can you provide a comprehensive and precise definition? The Bible never really defines it. I’ve read 1 Corinthians 13 scores and scores of times, probably hundreds of times, and I see no definition. The most important truth revealed in Scripture is not defined, at least as we think of a precise definition. What I do see are expressions of love, statements about of the qualities that demonstrate what love looks like. Maalouf rightly asks, “How do you define music? You will have a better idea about music if, instead of reading a twenty-five page article about it, you just listen to a beautiful symphony” (The Healing Power of Love, 30).
Paul says that true love is patient and kind, not envious or boastful, arrogant or rude. He also says it does not insist on its own way and is not irritable or resentful. True love will not rejoice in wrongdoing but rather in the truth and such love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7).
Thomas a Kempis, in his classic book The Imitation of Christ, writes:
Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller nor better in heaven and earth; because love is born of God, and cannot rest but in God, above all created things.
The words that follow this paragraph underscore aspects of love that I do not think I have ever previously connected to the biblical understanding of love in the right way. Thomas adds:
Love is swift, sincere, kindly-affectioned, pleasant and delightsome; brave, patient, faithful, prudent, long-suffering, manly, and never seeking itself. For where a person seeketh himself, there he falleth from love.
Love is circumspect, humble, and upright; not yielding to softness, or to lightness, nor attending to vain things; it is sober, chaste, firm, quiet, and guarded in all the senses (Imitation, III, 5).
I hear lots of men telling other men today that they need to be “manly” and not to yield to “softness” of feminization in our culture. I don’t think I have heard a single teacher tell men that the right way to be manly and strong is to love. Somehow we have associated love with feelings that are anything but manly and strong. We have virtually feminized love into a Hallmark emotional greeting, and the confusion is so great that much of what we hear from theological voices is a critique of what is wrong with this emphasis on love.
The story of God’s work in the world is the story of love. His infinite love is the great story. Our love for one another is rooted and grounded in God’s love for us, this great story. This is why martyrs died for their faith. This is why Christians pour out their lives, and sacrifice their own pleasures, for others. The great theologian Augustine said, “By loving me, you made me lovable.” God has made me lovable. And God has empowered me to love others because of his love for me.
This then is my highest calling-to love. Only by growing in divine love, which does not live in the mists of projected images but rather in the lowlands of fallen human life, do we become more and more like our heavenly Father. This is real maturity. This alone is the measure of our lives. If Jesus is God’s most perfect human form and the epiphany of his divine being then our acting like him in love is what our lives are all about.
Thomas Aquinas understood this well and said, “Love of neighbor is included in the love of God.” To love is not to love nothing but God alone, but rather, it is to love God and people. The Spirit lives in us to help us live this fullness of divine life, which is the life of God’s eternal love. As Maalouf concludes:
To any challenge we meet there is an answer: love. And since “God is love” (1 John 4:8), God is the answer, God is in me, God is in you. Like the Trinity, we exist with one another interdependently. And it is the Trinity that defines our true relationships to one another. We share God’s nature when we love (The Healing Power of Love, 40).
The way that you understand God will make the largest difference in the world in how you actually live. If you believe God is love then you will love and others will be your greatest joy. But if you fear God, much as a child fears a large frightening monster in their imagination, then you will likewise treat others accordingly. You will be big, others small and God will be there to serve your agenda.
Several years ago my friend Andrew Sandlin told me that our love as very dear friends was much more important to him than our agreement on points of intellectual content and theology. I agreed with Andrew at the time, but I was quite sure I hadn’t thought very deeply about this like I should. I resolved to meditate on this truth more deeply. The realization that I now have of the way love connects me with others as a relational being makes Andrew’s comment appear even more obvious and precious to me than it was several years ago.
