Volf Lecture 4: Same Love?

In this fourth (read 1, 2, and 3) of four Kistemaker lectures, Dr. Volf examines the question of whether Muslims and Christians share the same love of neighbor as expressed in the A Common Word (ACW) and the Yale Center Response (YCR) documents. (See my introduction and Volf’s lecture 1 for the historical background of these documents.)

What follows are my lecture notes with my own interpretive comments [in brackets]. I’m saving critical interaction for future posts (and perhaps a paper or two at RTS this semester); therefore, as with my previous three posts, in this fourth post I’m merely trying to communicate the content of Dr. Volf’s lecture.

I. What do we mean by same love?

As noted in lecture 3, the same love question is highly interrelated with the same God question.

When we ask whether the loves are the same, what do we mean by same? [What senses of "sameness" are we talking about?]

(a) Do we mean “same” as in shared activities?

Love is a personal action [love must be performed by persons]. Thus, we could say that to love together means to harmonize the loving actions of multiple persons, just as an orchestra director harmonizes the sounds of various musical instruments.

But, when we speak of shared love we usually mean more than just shared activities. [Or, to just leave matters at the level of shared activities is to beg the question of love's norms--upon what normative basis do we love?]

(b) [Same source?] Do we mean “same” as in mutual participation in the “glowing furnace” of divine love?

[God is the source of all love. Therefore,] no one loves by himself.

[In other words, love demands a subject and an object. Thus, even for God, love is impossible without community. I think Volf referenced the Trinity's self-love an an example of this point in the sense that the object of God's love must be Himself in order for his love to avoid utter transcendence (unknowable irrationalism) or mere imminence (rationalism/pantheism), to put things in Van Til's terms. In a word, Volf sees the doctrine of the trinity as an absolute necessity for Christianity in general and for love in particular.]

Accordingly, Christians’ love flows from God; We love because we are in Christ. Like Luther said, God’s love is a blazing hot furnace, and we are like the irons put in God’s fire. Just as the iron’s heat derives from the fire, so the Christian’s love derives from God. [I searched for this reference in Luther and came up with a quote in Luther's Seventh Sermon on March 15, 1522, a sermon on the sacraments. Because Volf leans heavily on Luther's furnace image, I thought it important to quote the paragraph:]

We shall now speak of the fruit of this sacrament, which is love; that is, that we should treat our neighbor as God has treated us. Now we have received from God nothing but love and favor, for Christ has pledged and given us his righteousness and everything he has; he has poured out upon us all his treasures, which no man can measure and no angel can understand or fathom, for God is a glowing furnace of love, reaching even from the earth to the heavens (Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull, p. 297; emphasis mine).

Furthermore, [on Christian terms] God is not only the source of love for Christians, but also He is the source of love for all people [whether Christian or not]. Christian theology speaks of God’s love as the source of non-Christians’ love in terms of “common grace.”

[However, merely recognizing God as the ultimate source of all love for all people does not yet answer our question.... We are forced to still ask, "Is Christian love unique/distinct from Muslim love?" In other words, even if Christians understand that God's love is the source of all love for all people, we are still left with the question: Are the means by which Islamic love flow to man the same as Christian means?]

(c) [Same means?] Do we mean “same” as in the connection between the divine source of love and the human actions of love?

To return to the orchestra image, when Muslims love are they following the same conductor? [Forgive me for suggesting a better metaphor, but I think Volf's returning to the conductor metaphor here is confusing. He seemed earlier to focus on the divine source of love, and now he moves into pointing out unique features of Christian love. Therefore, I think a better metaphor would have been to ask whether the players in the orchestra (i.e. the means) are performing properly.]

(c. 1) Trinitarian Love

For Christians, God is love. He commands Christians to love as the One who has first loved us.

(Excursus: Volf stopped at this point in the lecture to say that the doctrine of the trinity can be made plausible to Muslims precisely at this juncture–How can finite man approach the transcendent God of the universe?) [In Van Til's terms, how can do we approach the rational-irrational dialectic and the one-many problem? Only in trinitarian terms, through Christ's incarnation, etc.]

(c. 2) Love of Enemy

Referencing Luther’s “glowing furnace” again, Volf proclaims that the Christian God loves his enemies. [Though he didn't dwell on this point long in the lecture, God's love of enemies was one of his main points throughout the question and answer times, etc.]

(c. 3) The Crux: God’s Love as Portrayed in ACW Contrasts with Christian Love

In ACW, God loves to be known, so He created creatures to know Him. This formulation contrasts with Luther’s: God is love, and God loves to love His creatures.

Furthermore, in ACW, God loves those who love him! But, in Christianity God loves even the ungodly!

Therefore, because of this crux we don’t know if Christianity and Islam share the same love [same in activities, source, and means].

[For all of my RTS friends, perhaps there is an important tri-perspectival relationship of love's aspects in Volf's thinking:

1. source/norm,
2. activity/situation,
3. means/existential.

Volf seems to be arguing that though any one of these by itself may evidence apparent overlap between Muslim and Christian formulations; however, all three aspects interrelated consistently in one system must be compared successfully with the other system in order to warrant an equation between Muslim and Christian love. Volf thinks such a warrant does not exist especially because of existential (trinitarian empowerment for love/regeneration) and situational (love of enemy) discontinuities between the two religions' formulations of love.]

II. What does it mean to love God?

(a) Christian View

God is categorically different than any other objects in creation. [Compare lecture 3 on God's aseity.]

For Luther, to love = to trust, or to place faith in this categorically different God [c.f. Van Til's Creator-creature distinction.], who is the Creator/sustainer of all things (Rom. 11:36).

Such faith in [this all-powerful] God precludes beneficence. Rather than giving anything to God, faith receives all blessings from Him. [I think I remember Volf referencing the Luther quote noted above: "...he has poured out upon us all his treasures, which no man can measure and no angel can understand or fathom...." At any rate, Volf's point is that for Christians God's love comes to man sola gratia, sola fide!]

(b) The ACW View

To love = total devotion.

(c) Possible Disagreements

(c. 1) Motive

In ACW people love God in order to be loved by God ["beneficence"/nomism/Covenant of Works], whereas in Christianity people love God because God loves them first and unconditionally [sola gratia].

(c. 2) [Objects of Love]/Who is my neighbor?

In ACW there is no room for loving the enemy. In Christianity, however, the love of enemy is the most characteristic feature of Christian love (i.e. the parable of the Good Samaritan).

To summarize, in Volf’s opinion there exist many similarities between Christian and Muslim love, but they are not exactly the same. A crucial question is on whether Muslims have room in their theology for loving enemies [unconditionally].

III. What can Christians learn from Muslims?

Dr. Volf’s closing remarks change topics from the same love question to asking what Christians can learn from Muslims. He shared how profoundly he had been impacted by his personal interaction with God-fearing Muslims. What impacted Volf most was that these Muslims were living a profoundly God-centered way of life. He shared how the Muslims with whom he has interacted love to constantly talk of God and man’s relation to God.

In contrast, Dr. Volf lamented the lame shallowness and lack of a comprehensive God-centered way of life that characterizes much of his interactions within evangelicalism. Volf said that one main cause of such lackluster spirituality among Christians is that we have functionalized God to meet our own ends. [In other words, we treat God as just one more commodity who exists to serve us.]

Question and Answer Time

After the lecture Dr. Volf allowed questions from the audience. I have to be careful here because some of these questions are really important, and I don’t know how much weight ought to be placed on “shooting from the hip” answers to difficult questions. So, with that qualification, I share the following notes from the q/a time:

Must Christians include Christ in their definition of God’s love, especially God’s love to enemies?

• I am assuming that whoever asked the question was thinking in Reformed covenantal terms of the pactum salutis and the implications of this doctrine upon the definition of God’s love for His enemies. However, I don’t think Volf understood the question this way.
• Dr. Volf seemed to draw a fine distinction between the Father’s sending of the Son as essential to God loving the enemy vs. God’s sending of the Son as illustrative of God’s love to the enemy. He appeared to favor the latter position in how he responded at first. However, he then quickly affirmed the former position with words something like, “I like that [too].” Therefore, I got the impression from Volf’s ambivalence that he may have not understood the question correctly.

In answering one of the questions Dr. Volf evidenced a typical Arminian understanding of how people receive God’s gift of salvation–he located the efficaciousness of the Gospel’s all in man’s act of responding, like receiving a birthday present which one can either open or reject.

Dr. Volf made a point to say that in this lecture he had not talked about whether Muslims are saved, whether they worship God rightly.

Finally, Volf admitted that a perplexity that nags him in thinking through these issues is that in his experience it seems non-Christians are often better at loving their enemies than are Christians.