Theological Fragments

[From Part II, Chapter X: “ The Work of Love in Praising Love ”] “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love…. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” 1 John 4:8, 10 (ESV) Even as Works of Love draws to a close, there is still infinitely more that can be said about love. This one book is not enough to guide us completely in understanding the nature of Christian love. How, then, do we proceed when the book is over, the study is finished? How do we continue to pursue and understand love? Kierkegaard engages this question in a chapter on the importance of praising love—which we might (roughly) equate to “appreciating love.” Kierkegaard has two points to make about how we should appreciate love. We will cover the first one here, and the second on in the next post. Kierkegaard’s first claim is that “the work of praising love must be done inwardly in self-renunciation [or self-denial]...

[From Part I Chapter IV, " Our Duty to Love the People We See "] If anyone says, “I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. (1 John 4:20 ESV) In this chapter Kierkegaard sets up a familiar scenario: “Usually one thinks that when a man has changed essentially for the worse, he is changed in such a way that one is exempted from loving him.” [1] We have all experienced these situations, in which a person we once loved has become unlovable. Maybe their personality changed, maybe they made a poor choice, maybe they did something hurtful. For whatever reason a person went from being lovable to unlovable, and in those cases we find ourselves not really wanting to love them. The world gives us full permission to stop loving—because world doesn’t have the command of God, “you shall love”—and in fact often blames anyone who continues to love a person who has been judge...