“And now faith, hope, and love abide,
these three; and the greatest of these is love.” From the First Letter of Paul
to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13.
In the name, etc..
It seems to me that there is no better, no
more concise, a description of the fundamental Christian attitude, than this 13th
chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians. When I was a student, I had
attached a poster-sized copy of this chapter, in Greek, to my dorm room wall,
to my closet door, actually. I got to know it very well. Alas, I can’t recite
it in Greek today, but I like to think that some of it anyway, sank in and
stayed with me.
The three-fold theological virtues, as
they’re called, faith, hope, and love, express and summarize the Godward
orientation, the defining characteristics of Christians. They express not only
the fundamental character of individual Christians, but also of the Christian
community, the Church. Everything we do as Christians, one way or another, expresses
this three-fold character.
These virtues are called theological
because they are directed basically toward God; they express our attitude, if
that is the right word for it, to God as the source and goal of our lives.
Faith is belief in God and in the truth of his revelation. Hope is the
expectation that all good things are attainable with God’s help, and is also an
oddly negative refraining from despair, and a refusal ever to give up. And love
is the greatest of the three, as the Apostle says.
As
we know, ‘love’ translates the Greek ‘agape’, which is more than friendship, or
affection, or attraction. It is the gift of God, and makes the other loves
possible. And faith and hope, without agape, are disastrous. Faith without
agape leads to fanaticism, as we see in religious warfare today, and hope
without agape leads to mere material desire and acquisitiveness, as we see in
our consumerist society, in the hope for gain in money and property and goods.
And earthly love without agape can wind up as mere physical desire and ordinary
gratification, a hunger for intimacy without depth or commitment or real care
for others.
The Apostle warns us in this chapter not
to let ourselves be carried away by purportedly religious experiences that are
not grounded in love, in agape; in other words, we are not to let religiosity
take the place of agape, and imagine that we are somehow spiritually more
advanced than others. That is to say, religion is not God; many people confuse
the two, and the Apostle wants us to know the difference.
Paul lists examples of experiences
that can mislead us, if we are not anchored in love, in agape. To start with,
speaking in the tongues of mortals and angels: this can mean the ecstatic
speaking called glossolalia, or it may have some occult meaning. There may be
angelic languages which humans may claim to understand. In any case, no matter
how wonderful the experience, without love, without agape, it is nothing more
than noise, and annoying noise at that --- gongs and cymbals, good for getting
attention, and nothing more. Prophetic powers likewise, and great knowledge,
are nothing without love, without agape.
Love is the point, the center around which
all virtues revolve, and on which they depend. The First Letter of John tells
us that God is love. Love here is the most important thing we know about God’s
nature. It is not merely a command, an exhortation he is giving us to be more
loving in a worldly sense; it is the means by which we participate in his life,
which he makes available to us. It is, dare I say it, what God makes available
to us from his own nature, what he makes possible for us to have in common with
him, insofar as we can as creatures.
Faith, hope and love abide, these three;
and the greatest of these is love.
In the name, etc..
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