I was surprised to see this old debate between John Piper and me
linked here (or, for that matter, linked anywhere), and I was doubly
surprised to hear from Jason Pratt that several theological sites had
pointed him to Piper’s first reply while ignoring my rejoinders
and other matters. A wonderful thing about the web, I suppose, is the
access it provides to old material and how easily one can use it to
circumvent those who would try to slant material one way or
another.
In any case, I thought some here might have an interest in my present
attitude (many years later) towards this old debate. Quite frankly, I
don’t like the polemical tone of my initial article. I
originally wrote the article (several years before it was published)
for a forum at Westmont College, where a friend of mine had asked me
to make it as controversial and hard hitting as possible. He wanted me
to “stir up the troops,” so to speak. So, not
surprisingly, the article reflects a young man’s immaturity and
polemical spirit.
I now find such polemics quite distasteful, however, because they are
so obviously self-defeating. They not only deflect the reader’s
attention away from the substance of an argument; they even foster the
very “us verses them” attitude so characteristic of the
most rigid fundamentalists in all religions.
The published reactions to my initial article illustrate the point
nicely. For the principle objection was that my argument was not
biblically informed at all; it was instead philosophically inspired
and grounded in logic, a sort of non-biblical invention of my own.
Almost none of my respondents seemed even to notice, in other words,
that my principal argument was lifted (almost as if it were
plagiarized) from the New Testament itself, albeit without the typical
chapter and verse citations that some seem to relish. Accordingly,
John Piper offered “as an articulate antidote to Talbott's
nonbiblical argumentation the biblically saturated essay by Geerhardus
Vos, 'The Spiritual Doctrine of the Love of God'….” By
“biblically saturated” he evidently meant saturated with
lots of specific references to specific texts in the Bible.
But why, I continue to wonder to this day, did he (and others) regard
the argument I set forth as non-biblical? Consider the following
offhand remark that Paul made concerning his friend and fellow worker
Epaphroditus: “He was indeed so ill that he nearly died. But God
had mercy upon him, and not only on him but on me also, so that I
would not have one sorrow after another” (Phil. 2:27). Here Paul
acknowledged an important point--and the very point I made in my
article--concerning the way in which love ties people’s
interests together even as it renders a person more vulnerable to
misery and sorrow. Given Paul’s love for his friend, any good
that befell his friend would also be a good that befell Paul and any
evil that befell his friend would likewise be an evil that befell
Paul.
Or consider a more general remark that Jesus made: “as you did
it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me …
[and] as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not
to me” (Mt. 25:40 & 45). So here again we encounter the same
powerful point about the inclusive nature of love: how the interests
of Jesus are so tightly interwoven with those of his loved ones that,
if we do something to them, it is as if we have done it to him. More
generally, wherever two persons are bound together in love, their
purposes and interests, even the conditions of their happiness, are so
logically intertwined as to be inseparable. And that is why the letter
of I John can declare, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’
and hate their brothers and sisters are liars” (4:20). For it is
simply not possible to love God and, at the same time, to hate those
whom God loves. And neither, given Rebecca’s love for Esau,
would it have been possible for God to love Rebecca (not to mention
Jacob) and, at the same time, literally to hate Esau, Rebecca’s
beloved son.
Or consider, finally, Paul’s “unceasing anguish”
over the spiritual health of his beloved kin: “I have great
sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish [or pray]
that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my
people” (Rom. 9:2-3). Nor is there anything irrational about
such a wish. From the perspective of Paul’s love, his own
damnation would be no worse an evil, and no greater threat to his own
happiness, than the damnation of his loved ones would be.
So my point is that the polemical nature of my initial article was
self-defeating for just this reason: It tended to deflect the
reader’s attention away from the fact that my central argument,
which I set forth in philosophical terms, was merely the elaboration
of an important biblical principle concerning the inclusive nature of
love.
-Tom
Tom Talbott's Site
Thu 29 January 2009