There is no doubt the Bible talks a great deal about love. The two great commandments, according to Jesus, are based on love (love for God and love for neighbor). Paul writes that love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10). John states that love for the brethren is one of the marks of true Christianity (1 John 3:10ff). Again, the commandment of Jesus is that we love one another (John 15:12, 17). And perhaps the best remembered Bible verse is focused on God’s love toward a world undeserving of that love (John 3:16).
Sadly though, the biblical concept of love is much misunderstood and misdefined in our day. In Jonathan Leeman’s book The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love (one of the freebies at Together for the Gospel 2010), the first chapter is aptly entitled “The Idolatry of Love.” The author writes, “We have made love into an idol that serves us and so have redefined love into something that never imposes judgments, conditions, or binding attachments.” Leeman identifies the culprits for this idolatry as individualism (“a hatred of authority [resulting from] a diminished God”), consumerism, commitment phobia, and skepticism (particularly toward forms of religious dogma). After exploring each of these in great detail, Leeman concludes:
…[I]n our individualistic, skeptical, anti-authoritarity, God-despising age, we are instinctively repulsed by the idea of being bound by anything. So we have defined God and the expectations of his love in such a way that we are not required to do so. We have erected an idol and called it ‘love.’ And this idol called love has two great commands: “Know that God loves you by not permanently binding you to anything (especially if you really don’t want to be)’ and, following from it, ‘Know that your neighbor loves you best by letting you express yourself entirely and without judgment.’
As examples of this change in definitions of “love,” Leeman mentions the shift in religious songs, away from expressions of God’s love for sinners (e.g., “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”) to a subjective love of the individual for God (“I Could Sing of Your Love Forever”) — in other words, a transition from the way God demonstrates His love to a priority in the way we feel about love. In addition, this idea of love can be seen in a rejection of Christian orthodoxy in favor of an ill-defined, murky “tolerant” love that so often finds itself outside the boundaries of God’s expressions of love without even realizing it. Many in our day will decry any reference to the supremacy of God’s word as “bibliolatry,” but it appears in our day as if the bigger problem is “phileolatry.” If we have made love into an idol in our hearts, we need to tear down that idol and smash it to pieces (a la Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18), for we cannot love “love” and still claim to love God. A servant cannot have two masters — ironically, he will love one and hate the other.
