The contours of Love: a response to Colin Creighton

The cheesy ABBA-shaped musical Mamma Mia has, as you’ll know if you’ve seen it, a rather peculiar ending.

At the climax of the film, as the bride and groom stand side by side, they suddenly decide not to get married after all. Instead, they realise that the truly romantic thing would be to travel the world (together) rather than settle down to marriage – which, it is implied, would be far too dull for them to start right now. The structure of marriage would, perhaps, stifle their love; what real love needs is shapeless, limitless freedom. Solid boundaries and hard edges, duties and necessities, are the opposite of what love is about.

This is an idea everywhere in our culture, but one which Scripture rejoices to save us from. For shapelessness is not a blessing to love, but is something far closer to its opposite. Not for nothing are monsters in stories often shape-shifters; for it is of the nature of evil to present itself as one thing and then swiftly morph into something else entirely. People who change unpredictably are hard to love and even harder to feel loved by.

Thus when God loves in Scripture He does not speak in vague generalities, but He makes promises: hard-edged commitments to His people, founded in His unchanging nature. And that is necessary for what love is: true love, as Paul expounds in 1 Corinthians 13, bears all things, precisely because it does not change. God’s love is full of fixed content: promises made, in line with the contours He reveals of His unchanging character. It is because God’s steadfast love endures forever that the Psalmist sings of the specific riches of His good actions (Ps.136).

And so when God calls us to love Him and love our neighbour – our Lord’s two great commandments – these are not amorphous sentiments. They are given clear shape. And that shape is the law of God. ‘The one who loves has fulfilled the law… the commandments… are summed up in this word: you shall love your neigbour as yourself… love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Rom.13:8-10). Now we might think at first sight that this means that, provided you love, you can forget about fulfilling the actual law. But that is the opposite of what is meant, as Jesus’ words about the law make clear (Matt.5:17-20). Of course, the laws which were fulfilled in Christ are no longer binding on us – most obviously the food and sacrificial laws – but those at the heart of the Old Testament and New Testament law alike, which are grounded in God’s nature, very much remain. The Ten Commandments are the God-given content and contours of love, love for God and love for our neighbour. Christ came to redeem us from the curse of the law so that, free from God’s righteous condemnation for our lack of love shown in our breaking of the law, we might now truly love by being enabled to keep it.

This is why it will not do to draw a contrast, as Colin Creighton did in the last en issue (‘Gender, Sexuality and the Shape of Love’ ) between simple acceptance of the commands and instructions of God and a love-driven attitude towards moral issues. ‘We need to stop saying this is an open and shut matter, throwing out proof-texts to make our point’, he says – as if these were the same thing. It is quite possible for something to be perfectly clear in Scripture without it arising from careless proof-texting. Nor will it do to suggest that true love means simply to ‘keep talking’ rather than come to firm conclusions. In contrast to what Creighton implies, on the issues of ‘gender’ and ‘gay marriage’ there are clear moral commands of Scripture which do not arise from loveless proof-texting.

Rather, those commands are given to us so that we would know what true love actually looks like. True love is, for Christians, of course founded on the loving example of Christ in His laying down of His life for His sheep. But He has not left us ignorant of how we imitate Him. That is what God’s revealed moral law does. In matters of sex and surgery, God has revealed perfectly clearly the structure of marriage and the goodness of the human body and the sinfulness of deliberately harming it. Creighton is right to say that love must be shaped according to God’s created design; but entirely wrong to imply that God has not shown us how to do that in Scripture. Indeed, that is one of the chief functions of the law.

And this is part of the glory of the gospel. The shifting sands of shapeless love are one of the chief horrors of sin. Amnon loved Tamar; but in a moment his love morphed into hatred. Laban’s love for Jacob proved as variable as the colour of his flocks. But God sent His Son to redeem us from all lawlessness (Titus 2:14) so that we might, in accordance with His command, truly love one another, and truly love God. It is in teaching that God’s word not only tells us to love, but teaches us how to love, and that God in Christ not only redeemed us from not loving, but by the Spirit enables us to love as He loved us, that we will both defend our young people from the world and proclaim the gospel to it.

This article was written in response to Colin Creighton's piece in the last issue, here.

Matthew Roberts is the Minister of Trinity Church York. He is one of the authors of the Greater Love Declaration on Marriage, Sex and Identity. His book Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self is out now, published by Christian Focus. He is on Twitter at @ MPWRoberts.