Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
We are a nation in deep debt, both corporately and personally. But despite how much we owe, the debt of ‘love’ doesn’t figure on our balance sheets.
Romans 13 says that it should, and that ‘love’ is in fact the fulfilment of the Old Testament law.
How can this be? And what is ‘love’ anyway? That is the topic of this podcast.
For more on Romans 13:8-14 listen to Phillip’s sermon The Christian Debt.
The next episode is Quarrelling Over Opinions. The previous episode is What is Government For?
A CULTURE OF DEBT AND LOVE
Romans 13 and the obligation of real love.
Phillip Jensen: In Romans 12, one of the big things of thinking differently about yourself is not to think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather to think with love. Let love be genuine. The way of the Christian mind–the renewed mind–is to always be thinking in terms of love. And today, we come to the second half of Romans 13, starting with verse 8:
Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
Now, although love is a common experience of life, we don’t usually connect love with the concept of owing, of obligation. Love is just a feeling in our society.
And not only that, the instruction to not owe anyone anything is quite strange for us because owing has now become a normality. Even our nation Australia is in hundreds of billions of dollars of debt. Student debts, which were only invented in the 1990s, now mean our graduates owe $81 billion to the government. Then there is about $41 billion outstanding on credit cards at the moment. A lot of that will be paid within the interest-free zone of the first month, but $18 billion is owed beyond 30 days, and because once you get beyond a year on a credit card debt, the interest rate rises to quite obscene levels.
Tony Payne: Yes, when you don’t pay it off in your interest fee period, you’re liable for the interest rate, and often it is iniquitously high–20% or something like that.
PJ: Yes. Interest rates are one of the most important governing mechanisms of controlling the economy, because people are all in debt.
TP: Now the Bible was against usury. What does ‘usury’ mean?
PJ: Usury involved lending money at interest to a fellow Israelite. And so for many years in medieval Christianity, you were not allowed to charge interest. The idea of charging interest is part of modern Western civilization post-Reformation; so even Luther wrote against lending money at interest.
TP: What was wrong with it? Why was that part of the law?
PJ: It was driving at the lack of love between neighbours. Your neighbour is in need, and so you lend him money, which is a generous, kind, neighbourly thing to do. But if you’re charging him interest, it’s not genuine, it’s not loving, it’s not generous; it’s self-interested, you’re exploiting his need for your benefit. And that’s not how you treat a neighbour. Of course, that’s not talking about joining with a neighbour in a business venture where you both put in a certain amount and borrow and receive interest for a payment. If you look up usury in modern dictionaries, it nearly always says ‘taking excessive interest’. But what makes ‘excessive’ excessive? Is any interest excessive? It’s a dreadful thing, but our society has shifted to debt being the normality. We have made interest rates so part of our life that we are now exploiting our neighbours again.
TP: So even though it’s possible that interest loans and funding investments through business ventures are not exploitative arrangements and not contravening the Bible’s morality, at the same time, it is interesting how the charging of interest so easily does become exploitative and traps people in awful circumstances.
PJ: Yes, even fairly impersonal and genuine things such as house buying can trap you into that. You’ve got to have two incomes to be able to pay it. You can’t choose to run the family the way you want to run the family because of your indebtedness. It’s wound up with many Australians feeling time-poor and family-poor because of the necessity that has been laid upon us to be in debt in order to own anything. It’s the shift from saving up for things for the future to getting the future now and paying for it later. It’s a lack of delayed gratification that we have in our society.
TP: We used to have these things called lay-bys, where you would want to purchase something in the future and you got the shop to put it aside for you by putting a little down payment on it. Then you would save and make payments on it until finally you’d paid for the whole thing, and then you could get it.
PJ: My very first job outside our family business was being in charge of the lay-bys around Christmas time, and I would be the person to hand the lay-bys to people when they finally paid it all off. Now that was before the bank cards came into the picture. When bank cards came in, I was just sent one without applying for it, and was told I had X number of dollars as credit. So I suddenly became able to use money on a card when I didn’t have the money for it. And it was not hard to find psychological studies that show that people spend more money when they use cards than when they use cash. And Australians are using cash less and less. So the retailers like people having cards.
TP: From lay-by to Afterpay. Rather than paying off in installments before collecting the goods, you collect the goods first then pay it off in installments.
PJ: Yes. and that’s a wonderful thing… if you need the goods now and can’t afford it. For example if your refrigerator broke down and you haven’t got the money to get a new one. But of course, that’s not what happens, is it? People see a trinket that they want now and do so. Which brings us back to Romans 13:8.
Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
This is still a text that I think we should take to heart. And it’s more than just being about interpersonal loans, even though the same principle still applies that when we lend to others, we should be doing it generously. If I get it back, praise God. If I don’t, well, that’s life. We shouldn’t be charging each other interest. The usury law between brothers in Christ still applies. But what he’s really trying to say in Romans 13 is that we do owe each other something, and that is love. That is a bit strange for many modern people, because we think of love as something you just have, such as ‘I love this person’. Whereas this verse is saying I’m obligated to love the other person, isn’t it?
TP: Yes, it’s speaking of love not just as a spontaneous reaction we have to things that we like or to something that’s generated entirely from within. Somehow love can be an obligation we should fulfill for somebody else, that there’s something objective here about love that is more than just a feeling generated from within ourselves, which is not how we normally think about love.
PJ: Indeed. But love is still a feeling, isn’t it, even if I have an objective obligation?
TP: Well, yes, and that kind of takes us into a more complicated discussion about what love is.
PJ: So Tony, tell me, what is love?
TP: Well, in a sense we have gotten a definition of love already in Romans 12:9:
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.
Love is our response to the good–to hold fast to something that is good, and to abhor things that are evil. Love is directly related to good, rather than simply being a feeling of warmth or sentiment or affection.
At one level, you could say we respond to something good that we see and desire; for example, I love ice cream. There is something really great about ice cream that attracts me that I want to enjoy. I want to seek out and reach for that good thing and grasp it and have it and enjoy what’s good about it.
PJ: So that sounds self-centred. But usually we say that love is not self-centred.
TP: That’s been the great debate about love down through the centuries, whether love is only ever self-centred, or whether love seeks the good for somebody else, seeks the benefit of the other, regardless of whether that person deserves it or not.
PJ: So if I love ice cream for myself, that’s not good. But if I love to give you an ice cream that’s good?
TP: Well, it illustrates the point. I love my wife because my wife is good–because there’s something beautiful and wonderful about my wife that makes me want to embrace her, to care for her, to be with her, to enjoy being with her. There is something really good there that I love, but also because there’s a good for my wife that she doesn’t yet have. There are things that she doesn’t yet have that are good for her, and I want her to experience more and more of the good. That is also love.
Essentially, I think what Romans is telling us is that love does have a connection to something real and good. Genuine love is a response to hold fast to the good, and is not simply just generated entirely from within, even though there are emotions and affections that go along with it.
PJ: And if what is being generated from within is not good–for example if I desire murder–then that is not love.
TP: Yes, that’s evil. You should hate what is evil. You should love what is good. So it can’t be love. And because love is responding and desiring something that is objectively good for someone else, love then becomes a moral experience and a moral act.
PJ: So if love is moral, it helps us understand why the verse says:
Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
Romans has been talking a lot about how the law is spiritual. The law is holy and good. But the law condemns us because we are sinful. So we see that Romans is against legalism, against salvation by law keeping, but it’s not against law keeping, because law keeping is loving.
TP: Indeed. And he fleshes this out in the following verses 9-10:
For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
PJ: That creates another problem for us in our society today, because we have been commended to unconditional love. As it’s used in our normal parlance, unconditional love means accepting people irrespective of what they’re doing, irrespective of their morality. If I unconditionally love a gambler, I accept his gambling. I don’t reject him or his activity. But that’s not doing good for my neighbour, because that’s enslaving him to his materialism, and it’s not good that he is enslaved to materialism. So I can’t actually love him without paying attention to the fact that it’s wrong.
TP: That’s exactly right. If I care about the good thing you are as a person, and I want to see you become a person who is enjoying the good things of life and becoming more the person you could be in your future, I want you to stop gambling. To love you is to abhor evil and hold fast to the good.
PJ: Therefore adultery can never be love.
TP: No, it can’t be, because it’s wronging the person whose wife you’re sleeping with and doing harm to them in fracturing their marriage and in leading them into sinful behaviour. So it’s not holding fast to and seeking what is good. It’s the opposite. It’s seeking evil.
PJ: So do we not believe in unconditional love?
TP: Well, then how come God loves people like us who don’t deserve any love? If love is about seeking out the good and loving the good, well, we’re not good. We don’t deserve anything.
PJ: Or is there something good in us, a little spark of good because we’re made in the image of God, that makes God loves us?
TP: That has been suggested as one of the possible solutions to this question.
Augustine, among many others, has proposed that what God is reaching out to and loving is us in Christ. He’s loving who we can become, even though we’re not good now. Even though we deserve nothing but his judgment, yet he wills to do us good and wills to love us because he sees what we will become in his son. He sees the goodness that he will give us–the justification, the blamelessness, the vindication, the holiness that we will become in his son. And even more than that, he sees what his son will become in having a people gathered around him. In loving us, he also seeks the good of his son.
PJ: Because he’ll be the firstborn amongst many brothers, as it says in Romans 8. And the love of God is unconditional in the sense of election, that before we’ve done right or wrong, he chooses. He doesn’t choose because we’re good or moral or anything like that. He chooses because he chooses.
TP: Yes, just like when he sends his rain on the just and unjust, he’s acting in love, doing good even to those who don’t deserve his good, who don’t deserve his love.
PJ: But that’s providential love, which is different from elective love where he chooses to justify some.
TP: Yes, it is. I think it is still within the conceptual boundaries of what love is, but you’re right that elective love is a special and intense and focused love on his elect people, to intentionally redeem us in his son. Whereas his providential love is a general form of the same thing, to do good to others, to seek the good of his creation.
PJ: Back to unconditional love, I have found that more and more ‘unconditional love’ is used to refer to Rogerian counseling, where you create an environment in which there is no criticism, you affirm the person in everything they want, whatever it is they want. It’s a good counseling technique because it enables the person to genuinely open up and explore what their feelings are–good, bad, indifferent, horrible, lovely, whatever it might be–because they are in a totally safe space. But this concept now goes beyond the counseling room into how we treat everybody. We create a safe space for everybody all the time because there is no morality in love, because we have ‘unconditional love’. This is the kind of unconditional love that people think of when they hear us say God is unconditional in his relationship with you. But this is not true.
TP: It’s not true that he has an unconditional, positive regard for you, no matter who you are or what you’ve done.
PJ: That’s right, because the truth is, he is angry with sin. And he’s not only angry with sin, he’s angry with sinners. It is not true that he hates the sin but loves the sinner because throughout the Psalms, he hates the sinner. It’s not just the sin that will be sent to hell, it’s the sinner that will be sent to hell.
TP: Very much so. The shape of modern love as you’ve described it is a contentless, subjective experience. And like so much of of our modern, post-enlightenment thought, we’ve rejected the idea that there might be an objective moral reality that we live in, that there might be things that are genuinely good that we should hold fast to and evils that we should abhor. Value and goodness is something that’s entirely generated from within. I decide what’s good. And so whatever I love is good by definition, because I’ve decided it’s good. That’s where you get a phrase like ‘love is love’. It just means, if I’ve chosen to love it, it must be good. And it’s good because I chose to love it. And so who are you to tell me it’s not good? You must just accept that.
PJ: Yes, that’s the tautology of modern ethics. But there are two things in the Bible that speak against that. One, the law is what defines what is good for us. Two, Romans 5:8 is a wonderful verse about God’s unconditional love for us, that he loves us even while we were still sinners. It’s unconditional because it is undeserved. It’s not that while we were still sinners, God accepted us as we were. Because God loves us even while we’re sinners, he does that which is good for us by paying the penalty himself for our sin. So his love carries within it this morality, this importance of right and wrong, this objective good for us that goes beyond just respect or acceptance unconditionally; it goes into the love that fulfills the law.
TP: And in that sense, as the passage says, what all the different facets of the law were really pointing to was the call for Israel to do good to its neighbour. All the different laws were providing moral content to what the ‘good’ was, that they should seek for their neighbour. And Paul is saying here that the basic Christian command, the new commandment of Christ, is actually an old commandment as well–to love one another as I have loved you; to seek one another’s good, just as I sought your good, even to my own harm, even to my own death; to lay down our lives for the sake of others. While it looks like a new form of love that Jesus was teaching his disciples, it’s actually what love always was all along, and what the law was always driving at.
PJ: Then why am I not allowed to love the world, as John says, “Do not love the world or the things of this world’?
TP: Well, that is what Romans 12:9 is saying, hold fast to what is good and abhor what is evil. I think in that context, John is referring to humanity’s rebellion against God.
PJ: But doesn’t God love that? As it says in John 3:16, for God so loved the world…
TP: Yes, he did love the world, by sending his only son. So again, God does not love the world to say, ‘Your rebellion is great and I’m going to affirm it’. Rather God wanted something better for the world, he wanted the world to be saved and redeemed. He wanted the world to not perish.
PJ: So I am to love the world by going into the world to proclaim the gospel and lay down my life for the world. But I am not to love the world by desiring to live in exactly the same way as the world.
TP: Because to do the latter is to not recognize the great good when he created the world and created us for him. He created us for Christ. And that’s the good that we must finally seek for the world. So when we talk about ‘good’, there is a hierarchy of ‘good’, isn’t there? There is the good that is ice cream, and there is the higher good that is our purpose in Jesus Christ. There is a good that overarches all the others and within which all the other goods make sense. And that higher good is God’s purposes in Jesus Christ which give the content to what love is–to love people towards God and who they can be in Christ.
PJ: Yes, and that’s where Romans 13:11-14 continues:
Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
So the good which God is working in all things is talked about as the light, and day of the Lord that is coming, in contrast to the darkness in which we are living in this fallen, sinful world now. It is futuristic.
TP: And so to love is to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, as it says here, to avoid all these other things, to see them for what they are. They’re the evil that we should abhor and lean away from and cast off. And instead we are to lay down our lives to go into the world to bring the message of forgiveness of sins and repentance towards God. The love we owe to one another is the fulfilling of the law through loving in Christ and in the gospel. True unconditional love is not defined by modern acceptance and respect, but rather by the sense that it is undeserved and unmerited. That is the nature of love that the gospel calls us to.
