A theological bugbear: ‘love’ cannot be used as a criterion for judging whether something is a properly Christian action or not.

I have at least two reasons for this.

a) If love were to function as a criterion in this way, it would have to be self-evident what ‘love’ is. Otherwise we would need a criterion for deciding what is living and what isn’t.

Of course, it *isn’t* self-evident what love is—at least, not in the sense where people always understand it the same way. So we do need a criterion for telling whether something is love or not—in such a way that ‘love’ cannot function as a fundamental criterion itself.

b) Even if love was self-evident and everyone agreed what the loving thing to do is, it is still the case that love leads human creatures to do evil things.

One of the biggest misunderstandings at work in progressive politics is that death-dealing politics are driven by hate. This may be so—but if so, this hate is more likely than not first grounded in love; whether for family, country, or friends.

The obvious response to this, ofc, is ‘well, that’s not truly love.’ But there are two things wrong with that. First, it leads us back to the question of criteria for love: if we need external criteria for true love, then ‘love’ cannot be a criterion for truth.

Second, it assumes that humans can have such a thing as a ‘true’ love—a love which *cannot* lead to harmful and destructive consequences. There seem to me overwhelming empirical and theological arguments against this.

Anyway; this is not to say we shouldn’t strive for love. It strikes me that most of the time ‘love’ is appealed to in this way, it just serves as a cipher for whatever is already believed—and so if we’re to seek love, we can’t assume we already know what it is.

(The same arguments apply to ‘good consequences,’ fwiw. The problem there being that it’s precisely what counts as ‘good consequence’ that people disagree on. /ramble over.)