does not give His love to us in ways that take away our freedom of
response. He leaves us free to say Yes or No to Him, to love, to our
families, and to all the responsibilities of life. This means, as we saw
earlier, that we are to speak the word of love and leave the other
person free to make his response. We cannot expect a guaranteed response
from him. We cannot prevent him from making a wrong response any more
than we can make him give the right response. Our children are free, and
we must respect that freedom. This is why the achievement of a love
relationship is so exceedingly difficult. In the achievement of any
relationship we are involved in a life-and-death struggle. Our children,
for instance, want our love, care, and protection. At the same time,
they want to be their own selves and to assume responsibility for their
own lives. They can and do resent, with devastating hostility, action on
our part that looks to them like interference with their lives. On the
other hand, we love them and feel that we cannot do enough for them. The
effect of our zeal often is to overwhelm them with our care and deprive
them of the freedom in which to achieve their power of being.
Inevitably, then, the living dialogue between the parent and the child
is both a happy and a troubled one in which the powers of love and
resentment are exerted on both sides. The struggle between freedom and
tyranny in human relations is understood in the struggle of the cross,
which takes place in every individual and in every relationship. The
actualization of ourselves in relation to one another is both difficult
and painful. It is hard to understand how anybody could ever think it
was easy. The struggle calls for a love that is prepared to lay down its
life for its friends. The entrance of love into life brings, sometimes,
not peace but a sword. Tension and conflict may accompany the work of
love. The conflict between the love of God and the self-centeredness of
man produces an ugly, rugged, and bloody struggle, which the crucifixion
summarized.
_The Power of Love_
The good news of the gospel is not that a way has been given us by which
to avoid conflict, but that the power of love has been given us for the
conflict. With it we can enter into the shambles of life with assurance,
courage, and a belief that, even though we cannot always understand what
is going on, the purpose of love is to reunite man and man, and that in
Christ God's love won the initial victory in this process. We may,
therefore, participate in the life of the world with all of its
conflicts, including our own personal conflicts, with faith in the power
of reuniting love. We should not be surprised when we find ourselves
embroiled in conflict and involved in complex situations. Our faith is
not in our ability to do right, but in the power of God to help us
re-enter the difficult and unpleasant situations we have created with
new hope and with healing love. We may be thankful that God revealed
Himself through a cross and, therefore, made clear how realistic He is
in relation to the characteristics and conditions of human existence.
The power of love is liberating. It frees us so that we can use what
happens between us as a part of the curriculum of Christian living and
learning. Instead of wasting our time worrying about why things happen,
we can use our energies and our understandings to deal with them
constructively. The purpose of Christianity is not alone the prevention
of crime, but the redemption of criminals; not alone the prevention of
sin, but the saving of sinners. The great Christian word is redemption,
which means transforming a destructive relationship into one in which
the conditions and purposes of love are realized. Let us remember that
fine linen paper is made out of old dirty rags. Similarly, a wonderful
Christian relationship can be formed out of one that seems tragic. As we
have seen, the test of a man is not in what happens to him, but in what
he does about what happens to him. The transformation of what happens
in human relations is the work of the Holy Spirit, continuing the work
that was begun in Christ. The Spirit gives the gift of reconciling love
with which we may participate in the continuing work of Christ, which is
the redemption and transformation of life. So in the context of this
love we can relax while we also exercise our care.
_Love and Sin_
The power of love over sin is widely recognized. In the first place,
there is no judgment like the judgment implicit in love. The face of
love is compassionate, but it gives a light that reveals the darkness of
our hearts. We know that we are judged, but we know also that we are not
condemned. The judgment and the forgiveness come to us as a part of the
communication of love. Have we not felt this as we stood in the presence
of someone whose love was true? We wished to be rid of everything in us
that was unworthy of that love. In that same instant there may have
welled up within us a repentance and a determination to live in response
to that purifying, reuniting love. Such is our experience when the
Spirit of Christ brings us face to face with Him and His love. To be
loved is to be illumined, purified, and transformed, because love has
the power of re-creation.
Parents and others who are conscious of their failures and sins in
relation to their loved ones should remember that human beings are
fundamentally resilient and resourceful. Children's springs of life and
vitality are powerful. Their need to affirm themselves as persons is
undeniable, and any experience of love that they have is reinforcing.
Experiences of unlove are to them unbelievable and point, fundamentally
and finally, to the necessity and believability of love. While our
children are dependent upon us for their personal environment in which
to grow up, they bring powers and resources to their growing up which
are independent of us. They bring something to the dialogue in which
self-actualization occurs. Their part of the dialogue is just as
important and indispensable as ours. We cannot live their lives for
them. They have to live their own lives, and our part is to live in
relation to them and contribute our assistance to their powers of
becoming.
Parents and teachers are not the only ones who influence their children.
We live in a society in which different people have different roles to
play in relation to everyone else. We should not measure the progress of
a child only by how we see him or by what we think he is receiving from
us. Our impression of the child's progress may be mistaken. We may not
be able to know him as he is, nor know what others are contributing.
And, least of all, can we know the total effect of all his relationships
on what he is becoming as a person. Our anxieties about a particular
incident may exist because we fail to see it in its total context. Much
happens in the development of a person's life that we do not see, and
much of the transformation occurs secretly at levels so deep that we
cannot observe it. Although we may not see what is happening, we may be
sure that something is. In the sphere of the personal we need to trust
both God and man, and if we trust God we can trust man. We then may take
a long view of our task, and teach and work and live by faith.
This is what it should mean to be a Christian and a member of the church
of Christ. What a wonderful thing it is to belong to a fellowship that
is made up of people who may be united by the Spirit of God and through
whom we believe that God works! What a comfort it is to know that we do
not have to do and believe everything ourselves! Not only do we not have
to live and believe and love for ourselves, but others live and believe
and love for us at times when we cannot. But let us also remember that
we have to live and believe and love for them when weakness or doubt or
hostility seems to overwhelm them. This is the meaning of Christian
fellowship; namely, that we are not an aggregation of individuals, but
instead are members of one body, with every member having his own
function, and the function of every member standing in a complementary
relation to that of the others, of which body Christ is the head. Here
is the source of the love about which we have been speaking and the
process through which love is lived in the life of the world that God
loves.
[11] Luke 10:27.
[12] From _Love, Power and Justice_, by Paul Tillich, Oxford
University Press, Copyright, 1954. Used by permission.
[13] 1 John 4:10. The title of this book was suggested by the familiar
opening words of this verse in the King James Version, "Herein is
love...."
[14] Matt. 10:8.
[15] See Luke 19:2 ff.
[16] See Luke 7:37 ff.
IV
SOME OBJECTIVES OF LOVE
"Little children, let us not love in word or speech
but in deed and in truth."--_1 John 3:18_
The objective of love, as we have seen, is to "move everything to
everything else that is," especially to reunite person to person. This
is an identifying characteristic of the love of God, and it is to some
degree the characteristic of all love. We believe that this love was
incarnate in Jesus Christ. We believe that His Spirit, active in the
world in which we live, seeks to incarnate this love in us here and now.
Furthermore, we have identified some more general characteristics of
love. Now we turn to look at some of the ways in which love accomplishes
its purpose, a purpose which is the responsibility of the church in its
dispersion in the life of the world.
_Love's Sphere Is Personal_
The sphere of love's action is in the realm of the personal; it acts in
and through relationships. The process by which the person emerges is
both wonderful and fearful, and one for which we should have reverence,
the zeal to understand, and the willingness to be responsible for.
Certain specific things need to be accomplished which are the work of
love, which we have already identified as the calling forth of persons.
In this work of love we participate in the reconciling work of God in
Christ today. Let us remember also that children first experience the
love of God through their experience of their parents' love, and that
parents in loving their children are loving God, since we love God by
loving one another. How else can we love God than by loving one another?
With this understanding of the context in which we live and work and
serve one another, let us turn our attention to how love's task is
accomplished.
First, however, a word about what that task is not. The objective of
love is not to create or nurture a so-called normal human being. In the
first place, there is no universal concept of the normal, and the
criterion of normality varies from age to age and from culture to
culture. All men have problems and always will have them. The pursuit of
perfection is a perilous project that may cause all kinds of
imperfections and will inevitably produce disillusionment.
Adjustment cannot be the goal of Christian living and the objective of
love. The clam is adjusted about as well as any of God's creatures, but
has very little to offer beyond a passive role in a bowl of soup.
Instead of striving to mold a person completely adjusted to his
surroundings, love seeks to nurture a person who is capable of
maintaining a creative tension between his need and his responsibility,
between the vitality of spirit and the form of being. And, according to
tests, such creative people often are classified as not normal and not
well adjusted.
Nor is the pursuit of happiness the objective of love. Happiness for
human beings is a forlorn hope. Because of conflicts within himself and
between himself and others, man is doomed to be unhappy most of the
time. He is always having to deal with the inevitable conflicts and
accidents of life that give him a sense of vulnerability, both as an
individual and as a member of his tribe, nation, or race. Instead, the
objective of love is to provide the human being with resources, by means
of which he may face his human existence with courage and with a sense
of peace that passes understanding. It now remains for us to spell this
out in human terms.
_Dialogue Between Individual and Environment_
When the human being is born, he leaves the biological exchange of the
womb for the social exchange system of his society, where his gradually
increasing capacities meet the opportunities and limitations of his
culture. The appearance of the person, therefore, results from the
dialogue between himself and his environment, between his growing,
autonomous self and the directing community upon which he is dependent.
This dialogue between the individual and his environment often has, as
we have seen, the characteristics of a conflict. The individual
challenges and makes demands of his family, and the family challenges
and makes demands of the child. Each wrestles with the problems of trust
in relation to the other, each wrestles for autonomy that is equal to
the domination of the other, each strives for the initiative and
industriously competes with the other, and each seeks an identity that
may either exclude or include the other. The quality of the life of the
individual and of the social order depends upon the results of the
dialogue between them.
I am thinking of two families. In one, the parents helped their children
work through their difficulties with each other, thus assuming
dialogical responsibility for what happened between them. In late
teenhood, each child in turn became a person in his own right who had
achieved a relatively mature, congenial, and loving relation with every
other member of the family. In the second family, the parents could not
face the conflicts inevitable to human nature in a growing family, and
pretended a quality of relationship that did not exist between them.
When their children became late teen-agers and older, a smoldering
antagonism existed between them which occasionally broke out in venomous
quarrels. The parents of this second family had not assumed dialogical
responsibility for the content of their family life, with the result
that the interaction between the growing person and his environment was
not creative.
The process of unfolding patterns, of decisions made in response to
crises, of frustrations and achievements in living, are also the human
content for religious development, and provide opportunities for both
conversion and nurture. The development of a person is religiously
significant, and the events in his life have ultimate meaning. We may
think of them in only psychological and sociological dimensions, but
their meaning also is theological and religious. As we weave our
intricate way through the years of our lives, approaching and
withdrawing, attacking and retreating, victorious and beaten, decisive
and uncertain, being loved and being resented, loving and hating, and
sometimes gladly and sometimes reluctantly participating in the dialogue
between ourselves and our environment of influential persons, we may ask
ourselves this question: What contributes to our emergence as
responsible, resourceful persons? As participants in the dialogue
between our children and ourselves, for example, we should like to know
the kind of address and response we should make that would call them
forth as persons who will be responsible and helpful in relation to
their dependents, peers, and superiors; and enable us, through them, to
love and serve God. How can we so participate with them in living that
there will be called forth in them a courage that will dare the risks of
creativity and acquire the freedom to love?
The dialogue between the individual and life is initiated by the basic
question that is implicit in our being, and becomes explicit as our
capacities as persons increase. The basic question is: Who am I?, and
associated with it is its partner question: Who are you? These two
questions have to be asked together almost as if they were one question,
because there is no answer to the question: Who am I?, except as there
is an answer to the question: Who are you? And this twofold question is
not only asked implicitly by the newborn baby, but explicitly by his
parents, whose own dialogue with the baby involves asking and receiving
answers to Who are you? and Who am I? because the relationship is one in
which the child also may call forth the parent as a person.
This basic twofold question is one which we all continue to ask all
through our lives in many different ways. We must not associate
question-asking exclusively with verbalization. Obviously, the baby
cannot ask his mother in words who she is. He does it by his actions, by
his random movements, by his crying, by his protests, by his exploring
hands and eyes, by his mouth. And the mother does not give reply to his
question by word only, but by her actions; by her feeding and care of
him, by her neglect, by her joy in him and her irritation because of
him, by her coming to him and by her unexplained departures from him.
All her actions are a language by which she tells her child who she is
in response to the questions implicit in his actions. And her answer to
him as to who she is gives him the beginning of an answer to his
question as to who he is.
Thus, the dialogue between mother and child, which is largely nonverbal,
tells him that his mother is one who in some ways loves him and in
others does not, and tells him also that he is one who in some ways is
loved and in other ways is not. Out of this interchange emerges his
manner of response which may become his style of living and loving. But
we need to remember that his characteristics as a person are not wholly
determined by the action of his environment, because they also are
determined by who he is within himself as a unique being. His
inheritance provides him a given quality and capacity. Therefore, the
dialogue is to be understood also as a dialogue between heredity and
environment in which his experience of love releases his power of being.
_Sense of Trust_
The first objective of love to be accomplished out of the dialogue
between the individual and the world is the awakening in him of a sense
of basic trust. Trust toward oneself and toward others is acquired to
some degree during the first year. I have discussed this at some length
in an earlier book, _Man's Need and God's Action_,[17] and here, as well
as there, I acknowledge my indebtedness to the work of Erik Erikson.[18]
In this chapter I shall discuss the other senses that he identifies as
necessary acquisitions of the growing personality.
Perhaps the greatest contribution to the achievement of basic trust is
through the experience of being fed. The experience of being fed
regularly and responsibly causes the child to respond with trust, and he
learns to have faith long before he knows the word for it. Later, at the
appropriate time he acquires the word "faith" to point to the meaning of
his trust experiences. If, still later, he allows the words to take the
place of the substance of his faith, they will become empty words.
Responsible parents and teachers seek to combine the right word with
their action so that the meaning of the child's experiences is
correlated with the words for them. A mature correlation between word
and experience is one in which the child has the experience of finding
people both trustworthy and untrustworthy, and has been helped to deal
with the untrustworthiness in the context of trust. His first
experience, therefore, is a realistic one in which he is strengthened by
his experiences of trust, and is not made too anxious by his experiences
of the inevitable failures of his loved ones to take care of him
perfectly.
The child's experience of trust and mistrust contains the first meanings
for his Christian education. The care of the Divine Father is expressed
in and through the care of his earthly parents. His response to the care
of his earthly parents is his response to his Divine Father. This needs
to be interpreted to the child as he grows up, so that he will accept
and believe in the participating presence of God in human life. An
obstacle in the way of this achievement occurs when people separate God
from life and make Him a kind of absentee operator of the machine called
the world. It then is necessary for the child to make a huge leap from
his trust of his parents to faith in God. While we cannot equate
parental action with divine action, nevertheless we can affirm that
divine action takes place through human action. When such an affirmation
is made and accepted as a part of the parents' faith and is interpreted
to the child as he is able to receive it, he is helped to grow up with a
religious understanding of life itself, rather than conceiving of
religion as being merely a part of life. He will grow up with the idea
that being trustworthy and trusting others has not only psychological
and sociological meaning, but also theological meaning.
A sense of trust is basic, because without it the further development of
the individual would not be possible. Its foundations are laid in the
very first year of an individual's life. The act of taking from his
mother not just food, but her ministrations, her companionship and
friendliness, is the beginning of his emergence as an individual apart
from his parents. As he becomes an individual person, he immediately
begins to be a giver as well as a taker. Giving, as well as receiving,
must become a part of the dialogical relation between two individuals,
whether between a child and the parent, or between two adults. As soon
as a child begins to become a giver, the parent must consent to be a
receiver of that which the child has to give, and thus, again, is a
relationship of basic trust established.
Without parental reception the child would not be affirmed as a giver,
and would, out of his mistrust, become a compulsive taker, a result that
is tragic not only psychologically and sociologically, but religiously
as well. He will not be able to trust God; but because he needs to trust
God, he will begin to create images of God in the context of which he
will try to handle his existential problems. Thus, the foundations of a
false religion may be laid in early childhood, and this false religion,
as it matures, closes the person off from the truth of the gospel and
keeps him from becoming an instrument of the gospel in relation to the
whole world. The church is filled with people who do not really trust
God, even though they publicly profess their faith in Him. These people,
like Mr. Clarke, Mrs. Strait, and the others, live timidly.
We must not conclude that the establishment of basic trust concerns only
infants. The balance between trust and mistrust is something that
concerns us all our days, and the question is raised acutely again every
time we face a danger in the circumstances of our lives. I have observed
that when people come together in a new group relationship, their basic
questions, Who am I? and Who are you?, are reactivated. Significant
communication between them does not take place until some relationship
of trust is established on the basis of satisfactory answers. Our
initial asking of these questions in infancy is, to some degree,
repeated at subsequent times in our lives. They are repeated in times of
marriage, bereavement, retirement, death, or in my personal crisis; and
also when we face the threat of war or the possibility of interplanetary
existence, or in any economic, social, or political crisis. Needed at
these times of threat are relationships with sufficient power to enable
us to participate in the dialogue out of which will come the answers to
our questions. The objective of love is to provide the relationship of
love for a world that, again and again, and in an infinite variety of
ways, asks the basic questions: Who am I? and Who are you?
How wonderful it is to participate in the answer to the basic questions!
Mothers, for instance, who tend to lose the sense of purpose in the
minutiae of their responsibilities, could be helped to realize how
profoundly important is the care they give their children. The way in
which they feed and care for their families may be, if they opened
themselves to the presence and action of God in human life, the means of
their child's union with man and God.