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Works of Love X: Love Builds Up

[From Part II Chapter I, "Love Builds Up"]

"…[L]ove builds up." ~1 Corinthians 8:1b ESV

In this, the first chapter of Part 2, Kierkegaard talks about the ability of Works of Love to build up other people. That is, when we show love to others those actions can inspire them, spiritually edify them, help them to grow. This is the trait of love we are talking about: love builds up. In the course of the discussion, Kierkegaard begins a bit of a philosophical digression when he asks, “what does love build up, and what does it build on?” He concludes,
 “In very fact it is love; love is the origin of everything, and spiritually understood love is the deepest ground of the life of the spirit. Spiritually understood, the foundation is laid in every person in whom there is love. And the edifice which, spiritually understood, is to be constructed, is again love; and it is love which edifies. Love builds up, and it is this which love builds up.”[1]
Love is everything in the heart. When love builds up—when a person is encouraged or inspired by our works of love—it is their own capacity for love that is being built up. They are becoming a more loving person.

Then Kierkegaard asks a question inspired by Socrates in Phaedo:
“Therefore when the discourse is about the works of love in building up, it must mean either that the lover implants love in the heart of another person or that the lover presupposes that love is in the other person’s heart and precisely with this presupposition builds up love in him—from the ground up, insofar as in love he presupposes it present as love. One of the two must exist for building up.”[2]
Pause. Here’s essentially what he’s asking: how does a person start to learn what love is? If they’ve never known what love is, then they can’t recognize it in other people’s actions. If they could see love in our actions, then they would already know what love is and they wouldn’t need to be taught. So how do we know about love? Is it because another person showed us, or do we learn from another source? Unpause.
“But I wonder whether or not one person can implant love in the heart of another person. No, this is a more-than-human relationship, a relationship unthinkable between man and man; in this sense human love cannot build up. It is God, the creator, who must implant love in each person, he who himself is love….Therefore we must consider the other relationship.”[3]
Kierkegaard concludes that a human being cannot introduce another human being to the concept of love; they must already know what love is, to some degree, because God planted it in their heart. Therefore we should assume that everyone we meet already has the basic foundation of love, and we must build on it.

But what’s the point of all this philosophizing? What’s the relevance? Well, let me ask you have you ever met a person who seemed to have no idea what it meant to show love to another person? Have you ever met someone who was just full of hate, or anger, or arrogance, or whatever trait it was that caused them to treat you, or others, with contempt? Now think of how hard you found it to love that person—because they didn’t seem to have a single ounce of love in them. Think of how quickly you wanted to give up on loving them. If you’re like most people—if you’re like me—you did give up, because there is no love in that person, and so you have nothing to work with. You might as well be teaching physics to a cocker spaniel.

This is the situation Kierkegaard is talking about. So when he says that we must assume that God has placed love in each person, he’s saying that we should believe that every person has some love in their heart, placed there by God. Like Darth Vader, each horrible person has a spark of good in them that can be fanned into a fire. There is a foundation in every person on which we can build, with the help of God.

But this means we do not have permission to give up on people who seem to have no love in them, because God works in all hearts. Love must always assume that other people have the capacity to respond to it. This assumption—or preconception, as Kierkegaard calls it—defines the nature of New Testament love. Kierkegaard demonstrates this by applying it to the famous passage on love in 1 Corinthians 13. I have chosen a few examples here (I recommend reading the entire passage):
  • ·         “‘Love is patient’; by this it builds up, for patience specifically means perseverance in presupposing that love is fundamentally present. One who judges even though he does this leisurely, one who judges that the other person lacks love takes the ground-work away—and he cannot build up; for love builds up with patience.
  • ·         Therefore ‘It is not irritable or resentful,’ for irritability and resentment deny love in the other person and thereby annihilate, if it were possible, the ground-work. Love, however, which builds up, bears the other person’s misunderstanding, his thanklessness, his anger….”
  • ·         “’Love does not insist on its own way’; therefore it builds up. For he who seeks his own way must push everything else aside; he must demolish in order to make room for his own which he wants to build up. But love presupposes that love is fundamentally present. Therefore it builds up.
  • ·         ‘Love believes all things,’ for to believe all things means precisely, even though love is not apparent, even though the opposite is seen,  to presuppose that love is nevertheless present fundamentally, even in the misguided, even in the corrupt, even in the hateful.
  • ·         ‘Love hopes all things,’ but to hope all things means, even though love is not apparent, even though the opposite is seen, to presuppose that love is nevertheless present and that it will show itself in the deluded, in the misguided, and even in the lost.”[4]

The purpose of works of love is to build up love in other people. When God said, “you shall love,” he was laying on us an obligation to build up love in the hearts of all our neighbors. This can be a hard, discouraging and painful task. It can hurt profoundly to love unloving people, to make ourselves vulnerable to people without compassion. And yet all love comes from God, which means that the only reason any of us have love is because God planted it there. We must not lose faith that God can build up love in the hardest of hearts. After all, love “believes all things.” But that’s next week.

Dear Father,
You call us to love those who show no love to us, who seem to have no love in them at all. But you ask nothing of us that you have not performed. You sent your son when I had not showed you any love, when I had no love in me. And through the work of your Son you planted your love in me, and it is ony because of him that I have any love in me at all. Give me the faith to believe that you can build love in the most unloving people. Give me the tenacity not to give up on anyone. Give me the heart to seek after the unloving and the unloved persistently, without exception. Build up your love in me so that you can use me to build up your love in other.
In the name of Jesus Christ, the ultimate builder of love,
Amen.




[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love. Harper Perennial, 2009, p.204-5.
[2] Ibid, 205-6.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, p. 208-9.
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