The Christian life is not a way of escaping from the reality of life in the world, as some throughout history have presented it. Neither is it a way of following the ancient and presently-popular formula carpe diem, seize the day. This dictum advises to live the present as if there were no tomorrow: forget the past and its burdens and have no illusions about tomorrow and its accidents. That is, live today for what it may offer you in immediate satisfactions.
For Paul, life must be lived fully in the present, and the only way to do that is to be rooted in a solid past event and have a clear vision of what life is for. Only when the present is a living testimony of where life is rooted and what it is about does the present have any claim to transcendence. For Paul, Christians must testify to the love of God; but love is not an emotion, or a feeling, or a virtue. It is not something that exists as such and can be defined by itself. Love is the working out of faith and hope (Gal. 5:6). It is the Christian “manner of life” in the world (Phil. 1:27). Paul’s theology is the theology of living the full life, that is the theology of faith, hope and love, and his ethic is the ethic of the love that embraces the world.
Naming the fruit of the Spirit, Paul lists love first (Gal. 5:22). When he gives concrete ethical advice to the Romans, he begins by saying: “Let love be genuine” (Rom. 12:9). A more literal translation of the original Greek would be: “Our love [must] not [be] hypocritical.” The original assumes the verb “to be” and supplies the definite article to the noun. It is not just any kind of love that Paul has in mind. He is writing about “the love,” that is, Christian love. What would make Christian love hypocritical? A love that is not the manifestation of God’s activity in the world. What does Paul consider to be genuine Christian love? A love that expresses faith in Christ’s cross and hopes for full participation in Christ’s glorification by extending to others the benefits of being “beloved by God” (1 Th. 1:4).
The intellectualization of faith had overtaken some members of the Christian community in Corinth. They trusted in their knowledge of God in order to defend a particular way of life both in church and in society. They lived under the slogan “We have knowledge” (1 Cor. 8:1), and the corollary to that slogan was “all things are lawful” (1 Cor. 2:12; 10:23). Paul insists that faith is not a way of gaining access to esoteric knowledge. Those claiming to posses it may be “puffed up.” To such he says, “but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). With two conditional sentences he takes away all claims to perfect knowledge and affirms, instead, the efficacy of love. “If any one imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves God, one is known by him” (1 Cor. 8:2 – 3). Christians do not trust what they know. They trust the God who knows them.
For Paul, faith and hope in God is not what ultimately count. A Christian’s participation in the life of the Spirit, which is life in God, is only made evident by the life of love that reveals God’s knowledge of that individual. The theological affirmations and the religious claims of Christians are not ultimately tested by their logic or by appeals to a biblical quotation. They are tested by the way in which the Christians who make them live out their faith and hope through acts of love, by whether their manner of life is worthy of the gospel. Even while Paul gives an important role to thinking and speaking he does not understands Christianity as a way of thinking, a way of knowing, or even a way of believing. He encouraged his readers to think critically and be fully persuaded intellectually as to what is God’s will (Rom. 14:5). But he does not think that Christianity is primarily a matter of knowledge. For Paul, Christianity is a way of being. That is why the famous Pauline poem to love ends with the admonition, “Pursue love” (1 Cor. 14:1). He further advises the Corinthians, “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor. 16:14).
At the core of Paul’s exposition of the superiority of love are found the words “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). At first glance these phrases would seem to espouse passive submission to the vicissitudes of life. The phrases, however, form a classic chiasmic parallelism, well known to Hebrew poets. The first two terms deal with the present — love bears and believes. The second two look to the future — love hopes and endures. The first and the last — bears and endures — share content, and the second and third — believes and hopes — are love’s two companions. Together the four terms are interlocked to bring out the stability and purposefulness of love. Love is not shaky, love is not insecure, love is not passive, love does not settle down for the status quo., love is not a receptacle for things as they are. Paul cannot be charged with an ethic of passivity. His is not the Stoic ethic of emotional detachment. For him, love is positive, love is inventive, love is full of surprises, love is full of miracles. Love does not bear, believe, hope and endure because it is stupid, gullible, unrealistic or submissive to the point of irresponsibility. Love bears, believes, hopes and endures because it is powerfully grounded on God and embraces life.
In all its manifestations Christian love is one and the same because it is grounded on the unity of life in the Spirit that pours God’s love into human hearts (Rom. 5:6). The workings of love reveal that the vitality to live comes from a source which is not one’s own. Christian lovers are driven by the desire of creatures to be reunited with the source of life. For this reason love can only be the living expression of faith and hope.
Paul repeatedly links faith and love as twins that operate together in the lives of Christians. He also refers to the trinity of faith, hope and love, not only in the hymn to love in To the Corinthians I, but also in 1 Thess. 1:3 and 5:9. That faith, hope and love work together in the Christian life is explicitly said in ringing declarative sentences which describe the reality in which Christians live. Describing the present, not the past nor the future, he shows how faith, hope and love work together. He writes, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ . . . and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that we rejoice in our sufferings . . . because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5:1 – 5). Here faith, hope and love are interlocked with peace, Christ, joy and the Holy Spirit.
There is no more concise statement of Paul’s Gospel in his letters. Several nuances of this statement are worthy of notice. It is implicit that justification is accomplished by God on account of our faith in Him. Our hope is dependent on our faith in God. Most telling is that God does not only justify. He also pours love into human hearts. He does not give it counting the drops. He does not sprinkle it. He does not stingily let it flow. He prodigally pours love. The trinity of faith, hope and love corresponds to the trinity of God who justifies, Christ who gives peace, and the Holy Spirit who is the agent of love. As the text goes on to point out, all this could happen because “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Thus, it is the love of God that provides the object for the faith that brings about God’s justification. In turn, faith also brings about hope, and together these two make the love of those who believe and hope effective in the world. Faith and hope may be thought of as faculties that give transcendence to a person, and in some ways that is the case. Still, when they energize the love manifested by a person’s actions, they actualize themselves in a most immanent way.
It is somewhat surprising to realize that Paul does not urge his converts to love God. He urges them to believe in, to obey, to fear, to know, to wait for, to trust in, to pray to God, but not to love God. There is just one possible exception, which is not a demand but a description, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom. 8:28). This may be because he realized that love cannot be mandated. Christian love is not the result of a human’s initiative. It is the response to God’s initiative.
Paul’s ethic of love is geared to the principle that it is impossible