Insights
The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
Insights
The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
Fall 2024
Volume 140 Number 1
Editor: William Greenway
Editorial Board: Ángel J. Gallardo, Crystal Silva-McCormick, Jeff Sanchez
The Faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Sarah Allen
Margaret Aymer
Patricia Bonilla
Rodney A. Caruthers II
Gregory L. Cuéllar
Ted Foote Jr.
Ángel J. Gallardo
William Greenway
Carolyn Browning Helsel
Philip Browning Helsel
José R. Irizarry
David H. Jensen
Donghyun Jeong
Jennifer L. Lord
Song-Mi Suzie Park
Cynthia L. Rigby
Crystal Silva-McCormick
Eric Wall
Andrew Zirschky
Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary is published two times each year by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. e-mail: wgreenway@austinseminary.edu
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COVER: “Electric Love” by Linda Woods; ©2005-2018 Linda Woods; used with permission from the artist. View more of Linda’s artwork here: https://linda-woods.pixels.com/ or follow her on Instagram: LindaWoodsArt.
Herlin, Daryl L.
Introduction
INTRODUCTION
In this issue of Insights, we are invited to engage diverse reflections upon “love,” a concept blindingly familiar and boundlessly complex. This year Dr. Song-Mi Suzie Park, a professor of Old Testament at Austin Seminary, published Love in the Hebrew Bible (Westminster John Knox, 2024), so she decided to focus this issue of Insights upon love in biblical and Christian thought. In her book, Park surveyed Hebrew texts about love, focusing upon a key Hebrew word for love, “ahav.” Park discovered profound ambiguity, as ahav is used to describe people loving each other in an array of “messy, terrible, and glorious ways.” Ahav is seldom used in relation to God in the Hebrew Bible, so in the book Park did not delve deeply into the question of divine love. For that reason, she uses this essay to focus upon what she finds to be the provocatively vexing question of divine love in the Hebrew Bible.
Three distinguished scholars expand the conversation in diverse ways. Dr. Anna Bowden, a professor of New Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, in conversation with a pivotal scene from Fiddler on the Roof, focuses our attention upon Jesus’ use of two words for love, agapaō and phileō, revealing how love involves not only feeling but action. Dr. James Howard Hill, a professor of religion at Boston University, concentrates upon the interpretive lenses through which we conceive love, delineating elements of a “materialist hermeneutics of love” and unfolding distinctive, vital insights into love which flow from “Black ways of knowing” and “Black ways of becoming.” Finally, Dr. Lydia Hernández-Marcial, a professor of Old Testament and Biblical Hebrew at the Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico, explains how “love” as it is used in the Hebrew Bible can work either to facilitate or to inhibit resilience and resistance
among women who are struggling to survive within violent, patriarchal contexts.
In our Pastors’ Panel, a distinguished group of pastors—all Austin Seminary alumni—answer questions about concrete ways they see love functioning in church and society: Reverend Isabel Rivera-Velez, Stated Supply Pastor at Faith Presbyterian Church, Baytown, Texas, Pastor James Martin, Borderlands YAV site program coordinator in Arizona, Pastor Mark Sturgess, Lead Pastor at San Luis Obispo United Methodist Church, in California; Associate Pastor Ann Herlin of the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria, Virginia; and the Reverend Dr. Daryl L. Horton, of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Austin, Texas.
In Faculty Books, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, a professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, traces and celebrates key insights from Professor Park’s aforementioned Love in the Hebrew Bible, and Dr. Michael Oehrtman, Noble Professor for Technology Enhanced Learning in Mathematics at Oklahoma State University talks about ways in which my book, In the Light of Agape: Moral Realism and its Consequences (Cascade, 2024), a collection of philosophical reflections upon “love,” can ease qualms over the rationality of faith.
Finally, in our Christianity and Culture column, Dr. Andrew Zirschky, research professor in youth ministry and director of the Master of Arts in Youth Ministry program at Austin Seminary, with an eye to the daunting socio-cultural complexity of today’s congregations, provides a practical introduction to “design prototyping” for congregational leaders as they adapt their ministries to the evolving needs of increasingly diverse congregations.
We are thankful for these insightful contributions and trust they will spark constructive reflection.
William Greenway
Professor of Philosophical Theology
Editor: Insights, The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
Love in the Scriptures
Song-Mi Suzie Park
When many of us think of love and the Bible, certain passages immediately spring to mind: the simple yet powerful equation, “God is love” (1 John 4:16), or perhaps we might recall the verse widely cited during the holidays: “For God so loved the world, He gave his only son...” (John 3:16); or the lovely definition of love in 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud...” (13:4). Suffice it to say, when many of us think about love in conjunction with the Bible, we think primarily of the New Testament, bypassing, for the most part, references from the first part of the Scriptures known as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. Likely reflective of some uninterrogated bias, for some of us, therefore, “loving” is not the term that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the Old Testament or the Old Testament God.1
Yet is the Hebrew Bible and the God featured in it lacking in love? Is love only found in the New Testament? What does love look like in the Hebrew text? What do the Hebrew biblical writers mean to say about love? These questions led me to write Love in the Hebrew Bible. 2 As usual, however, I did not have space to discuss everything; and one of the questions that I did not get to delve into very deeply and
Song-Mi Suzie Park is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Focusing on literary readings and interpretations of the Bible, with a particular interest in issues of identity and gender, she is the author of Hezekiah and the Dialogue of Memory and 2 Kings in the Wisdom Commentary Series and coauthor with Carolyn B. Helsel of The Flawed Family of God: Stories about the Imperfect Families in Genesis, as well as several articles and essays.
which I will try to do here in a succinct manner is divine love: Does God love in the Hebrew Bible? If so, what does God’s love look like?
Let’s start with some quick background work on “love” in the Hebrew Bible. Two words in Hebrew usually mean love: ahav, which means “to love,” and an unrenderable word, hesed, which has a range of translations, including “loving kindness or loyalty” or “steadfast love.” Because hesed is wider and more ambiguous in meaning, we are going to focus today on ahav, “to love.”
When it comes to ahav (the verb “to love”) or ahava (the noun “love”), it is unsurprising readers have been disappointed with the paucity of description of God’s love in the Hebrew text. The Hebrew Scripture is rather quiet about this attribute. Though God is called by a variety of titles and names in the Hebrew biblical text—for example, the Holy one (Psalms. 71:22; 78:41; 89:18), the rider of clouds (Isaiah 19:1), or rider of heaven (Deuteronomy 33:36; Ps 68:4), the Most High, Lord of Hosts, El Shaddai—and though God is described in the Hebrew Bible as one’s protector, refuge, fortress, rock, strength, tower, and shield, he is never described with reference to the verb “to love.”3 Moreover, the Hebrew text does not mention any theophoric names—personal names of people that reflect or describe an attribute of God, such as Ariel (lion of God) or Immanuel (God is with us)— which utilize the verb to love, ahav, in conjunction with God. Hence, judging by theophoric names or the titles of God, the writers of the Hebrew text do not appear to associate God with love very often.
Why? Do the biblical writers not envision their God as loving? This seems unlikely. The first books of the Hebrew Bible describe God as forming and maintaining a very personal and emotional relationship with a particular family. Indeed, God is envisioned as the head of this family founded by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their hardworking wives and servants, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah. It is difficult to imagine God, who was viewed as part of this family, envisioned as lacking in love. A more likely explanation, therefore, is that ahav means something different in the Hebrew text.
So what does ahav mean in the Hebrew Bible? To address this question, we must briefly go over the history of scholarship on this topic. In an influential article, William Moran, noting the frequent command for Israelites to love God in Deuteronomy and parallel commands for vassals to love their suzerains in other Near Eastern treaties, argued that it would be strange if love were imagined as an emotion: How can God demand that the Israelites feel a certain way? Hence, Moran posited love in the Hebrew text does not have an emotional meaning. Rather, love must be a political or legal term connoting political or legal loyalty, service, and obedience. According to Moran, then, ahav entailed action (i.e. loyalty, service, and obedience), not emotion.4
Recently, however, some scholars have argued Moran’s conceptualization of love is too neat and may reflect religious bias.5 Unintentionally perhaps, Moran seems to imply the ancestors of the Jewish people were overly legalistic,6 that
“love” in the Hebrew Bible really meant “law.” Indeed, a subtle comparison can be detected: The works and law of the Old Testament versus the emotions, beliefs, and faith of the New Testament.7
In short, Moran seems to have falsely assumed a clean separation between emotions and actions. Something was either an action, which could be commanded, or an emotion, which could not, but not both. However, when one examines Judaism, this distinction is largely absent. Emotions and actions are not distinct and separate but closely interconnected.8 Modern biblical scholars, such as Walter Brueggemann, Bill Arnold, and Jacqueline Lapsley, have also argued that actions and emotions are intimately linked.9
When we look at biblical narratives throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, which describe relationships between human beings, love does seem to connote a kind of affection. Genesis 24:67 states that Isaac loved his wife, Rebekah. Genesis 29:18 states Jacob loved Rachel more so than his first wife, Rachel’s sister, Leah. Similarly, 1 Samuel 1:5 states that Samuel’s father, Elkanah, loved his mother, Hannah, and loved his barren wife more than his other wife; and that the Persian king loved Esther more than other women in Esther 2:17. Genesis 25:28 states that Isaac loved Esau, while Rebekah loved Jacob; that Israel or Jacob loved Joseph more than his other children in Genesis 37:3. Most famously, Genesis 22:2 states that Abraham loved Isaac. Disturbingly, Genesis 34:3 states that Shechem, the lord of a Canaanite town, loved Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, whom he raped earlier, and 2 Samuel 13:1 states that Amnon, David’s son, loves Tamar, his half-sister whom he later brutally rapes. And there is no end to statements about love and sexual desire in the Song of Songs (e.g. 1:7; 3:1-4).
Hence, love or ahav seems to run a gamut of meanings: It can mean intense desire or sexual attraction, such as in the case of the Song of Songs, and perhaps more disturbingly in the narratives about Shechem and Dinah and about Amnon and Tamar. It has resonances of romantic feelings and longing, as is the case with Jacob and Rachel. It can mean something like preference, as we see with the Persian king’s feelings toward Esther (2:17), Rehoboam towards Maach (2 Chronicles 1:21), or Jacob toward Rachel (Genesis 29:30-32). In my book, I argue that ahav is also frequently associated with more negative things, such as pain, suffering, and even death. In all cases, emotion seems to be present in the understanding of ahav
However, all the narratives in which the word love is used involve love between human beings. When we turn to descriptions about God’s love in the Hebrew Bible, the evidence gets a bit murkier. One of the most frequent mentions of divine love in the Hebrew text concerns God’s love of either justice (Psalms 11:7, 33:5, 99:4; Isa 61:8) or of those who are just, righteous, or obedient to God’s commandments (Deuteronomy 5:10; 7:9, 13; Nehemiah 1:5; Psalm 37:28, 146:8; Proverbs 15:9). This makes sense when we consider Moran’s argument that ahav in the Hebrew text largely has a legal or political connotation, such as loyalty and obedience to God and his commandments to act justly and righteously.
The most frequent mention of God’s love throughout the Hebrew Scriptures entails God’s love of Israel, God’s main covenant partner. In these references, Israel/ Jacob/Zion is sometimes mentioned directly (Deuteronomy 7:8; 23:5; 1 Kings 10:9; Psalms 47:4, 78:68, 87:2; Isaiah 43:4, 63:9; Jeremiah 2:2; 31:2, 3; Hosea 3:1, 11:1, 4, 14:4; Zephaniah 3:17; Malachi 1:2; 2 Chronicles 2:11, 9:8); or indirectly referred to as Israelite ancestors (Deuteronomy 4:37; 10:15) or Abraham (2 Chronicles 20:7; Isaiah 41:8). That Israel is the most frequent target of God’s love makes sense as Israel has a covenant with God. Hence, ahav, as Moran rightly noted, does seem to have political connotations in the Hebrew text.
However, the feeling and affection evinced by some of these verses shows that God’s love of Israel also has emotional resonances. The prophetic texts, where we find the most frequent mention of God’s love, most clearly reveal the personal and affective aspects of divine love. In these prophetic materials, ahav is used to describe God’s relationship with Israel, which is frequently analogized. For example, in Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, God’s relationship to Israel is likened to that between a husband and wife (usually adulterous) or between a father and a daughter. The use of these analogies to describe Israel and God’s relationship clearly indicates that the feelings between them were more than just political. Indeed, God’s love towards Israel appears to be complex, with political, emotional, familial, and theological undertones.
Adding to the complexity, while the most frequent occurrence of God’s love concerns Israel, overall, only thirty-eight passages in the Hebrew Scriptures talk about God’s love.10 Indeed, according to Alexander To Ha Luc, even in the prophetic books, where God’s love is analogized to emotional human relationships, ahav is used infrequently.11 Moreover, the main Hebrew text about love, the Song of Songs, never uses ahav to describe or talk about God. Rather, the most frequent appearance of the word “to love” in the prophetic materials is to describe relationships between Israel and her illicit lovers, that is, the other gods or political allies aside from Yhwh.
How do we make sense of this general paucity of ahav with reference to God in the Hebrew Bible? To answer this question, I have to get a bit speculative. And I think the reason God is rarely said to love might be because love, ahav, is viewed as something very human. It is because love was viewed largely as a human thing that the love relationship between Israel and God is only analogized, only likened to love between human beings. Indeed, I maintain that the biblical writers deliberately shied away from utilizing the word “to love” even when they analogized God and Israel’s relationship to that between human beings precisely because love, in this sense, was so intimately connected to humanity.
A beautiful passage from the Song of Songs (8:6) lends some support to this conclusion. The poet commands his beloved “to set me as a seal upon your arms” before ending with a moving description of the strength of love (my own translation): “For love is as strong as death; passion, as cruel as Sheol. Its flashes are flashes of fire, like the very flaming blade of the Lord” (8:6). What is most striking
and relevant here is the comparison between the strength of love and the strength of death: “Love is as strong as death.” Now, the word “to be strong” or “strength” (‘azzah) can mean different things in Hebrew, such as fierceness, harshness, cruelty, might, or, as I would translate it here, “force.” Hence, what is juxtaposed and likened in this verse is the force of love to the force of death.
This seems to imply, first, that the emotional pull of love and that of death are similar, connected, or intertwined somehow. Second, considering this connection or likeness between love and death, it also seems to imply that love and death are linked to and elucidate or influence one another in some way. To put it simply, Songs 8:6 seems to suggest some intimate association between death and love. And if so, this verse raises an interesting question: If love is connected to death, can someone or something that does not die understand love? More bluntly, Can God, who does not die, who is not physical, experience and understand love in the same way we humans can? Or is this verse implying that love, in this emotional, forceful sense, is something particular to humans, to those who are impermanent and, therefore, can understand and experience the power of death?
Ancient Near Eastern texts wrestled with this idea about what makes humans different from the gods. Genesis also seems to address this query when it describes how the first humans, as soon as they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, were driven out of the Garden of Eden to prevent their procuration of a fruit from the tree of the life (Gen 2:4-3:24). If humans were to eat from both trees, they would become not like the gods, but gods: Both knowing good and evil, and immortal. Hence, if death is essentially a human thing, and if death is intimately connected to love, doesn’t this mean that love, or at least its force, is something that is human? If death is human, then is not its partner, love?
Perhaps a better way to think about this question is not to ask whether God loves but to ask: Did the biblical writers imagine God loves like humans, or did they imagine some difference between divine and human love? I posit that they imagined a difference between the loves. For example, take the descriptions in the Hebrew Bible, which detail the precautions a high priest must take to ensure he is not struck dead by God when he enters the Temple. This sense of awe seems to suggest that the Israelite writers imagined their God as very different from human beings. And if that is the case, they must have believed that God experienced emotions, such as love, in qualitatively different ways from how humans—these physical, limited, and profane beings—experienced them. They might have felt that divine love was also filled with affection. But love from God, from an immortal being without a physical body—divine love—was probably envisioned as dissimilar in some key ways from the love of human beings.
This would explain why ahav, “to love,” is not utilized very often in the Hebrew text. Love, as a human emotion or act, and thus connected to humanly things or aspects, such as death, sex, and society, was probably viewed by the biblical writers as inaccurate when describing God. Hence, God’s feelings towards Israel are only
analogized, only likened to human relationships, and the word “to love” is not used to describe God’s feelings, feelings which are like but, in essence, different from human love.
To conclude, I want to ask a final question. If love is imagined as a humantainted concept, and if the biblical text fails to mention God in relation to the verb “to love,” does this mean the Hebrew Scriptures does not reflect or convey divine love? Are there any glimpses of divine love in the Hebrew text? I think there are, but again, only analogously. The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories about human relationships. Indeed, the truthful and vivid descriptions of these relationships are what make the Hebrew Bible so difficult but also so interesting to read. I think that it is through these stories about human relationships, the very relationships which the prophetic writers utilize as analogies to describe the relationship between God and his people, it is through and in these stories that God’s love for his people is reflected and conveyed. We know that God loves in the Hebrew Bible, not because we have a lot of direct descriptions or statements, but because we have stories about human beings loving each other in all their messy, terrible, and glorious ways. And these stories of love, somehow, in some way, reflect and are said to be like the way that God loves God’s people.
NOTES
1 On the difficulty of ascertaining a Christian theology of the Hebrew Bible see: Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, The Old Testament and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2012), esp. 62-81.
2 Song-Mi Suzie Park, Love in the Hebrew Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2023).
3 Larry L. Walker, “‘Love’ in the Old Testament: Some Lexical Observations,” in Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation, ed. Gerald F. Hawthrone (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 277.
4 William Moran, “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 (1963): 77-87.
5 Jacqueline Lapsley, “Feeling Our Way: Love for God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 65 (2003): 350-369.
6 Lapsley makes a similar charge (“Feeling Our Way,” 365).
7 According to Gary Anderson, such a bias is not uncommon: “Christian scholarship tends to characterize the Jewish scriptures . . . as a set of overly punctilious behavioral norms that operate independent of any higher spiritual correlates” (A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991], 12, 54).
8 Commands to change or control one’s emotions are found in Jewish writings, such as the Tosefta. See Jacob Neusner, “The Virtues of the Inner Life in Formative Judaism,” Tikkun 1, no. 1 (1986): 72-83, esp.73.
9 Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 420; see also 416-17; Bill T. Arnold, “The Love-Fear Antinomy in Deuteronomy 5-11,” VT 61 (2011): 561; Lapsley, “Feeling Our Way,” 354.
10 Deut 4:37; 5:10; 7:8-9, 13; 10:15, 18; 23:5; 2 Sam 12:24; 1 Kgs 10:9; 2 Ch 2:11; 9:8; 20:7; Neh 1:5; 13:26; Psa 11:7; 33:5; 37:28; 47:4; 78:68; 87:2; 99:4; 146:8; Prov 3:12; 15:9; Isa 41:8; 43:4; 61:8; 63:9; Jer 2:2; 31:2, 3; Hos 3:1, 11:1, 4, 14:4; Zeph 3:17; Mal 1:2.
11 Alexander To Ha Luc, The Meaning of ‘hb in the Hebrew Bible (PhD diss. University of Wisconson-Madison, 1982).
Insights: The Podcast
Listen to Editor William Greenway’s interview with Dr. Song-Mi Suzie Park at the link below or scan the QR code to the left.
AustinSeminary.edu/insightspodcast
Song-Mi Suzie Park
Interview with Insights editor William Greenway
What made you decide to write a book on love in the Hebrew Bible?
Love is a topic that most of us are interested in. It’s a big concept, and there was very little written about it. Originally, I thought about writing about love in the Hebrew Bible as my dissertation. So, the idea began to percolate many years ago. There’s a nice book written by Jon Levenson on God’s love in the Hebrew Bible, and he does this interesting turn where he starts talking about love and Judaism. Hence, his book is really about divine love in Judaism and Jewish thought. But there was still not really a book on the topic in only the Hebrew Bible itself, and love is an important concept for all of us, so I returned to the idea and wrote the book.
You speak of an influential article by William Moran….
Yes, Moran wrote this very influential article, which notes that one of the books that had the most occurrences of the word ahav (love) is Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a very important book in the Hebrew Scriptures. It concerns and likely entails a covenant between God and Israel, so it is a political document. Moran noticed that Deuteronomy had a lot of occurrences of God commanding the people to love him, and when he started looking at ancient Near Eastern treaties in neighboring states, he found the same repetition of the command to love by suzerains to their vassals. Well, you can’t command someone to feel a certain way, but you can command them to act a certain way. Hence, Moran concludes that love, which we think of as an emotion, does not have the same meaning in ancient treaties or in the Hebrew Bible, especially Deuteronomy. Rather, Moran concluded that love entails covenant fidelity and obedience. According to Moran, when God says you should love me, what God is really saying is that you should obey me and follow my covenant. Moran was correct, but people started to overapply Moran’s conclusion. They started to think love in the Hebrew Scriptures always and only meant action. In short, that love in the Hebrew text was said to be devoid of emotion. So, every time you saw the word love in the Hebrew scriptures some Hebrew scholars would say, “Aha! This is only about politics and power.” And the problem was that this can lapse into this stereotype of the “old” covenant of the Jews, where one only cares about the law, versus Christianity’s “new” covenant, which is centered on grace, emotions, and feelings. So other scholars started pushing back against Moran’s idea, and they noted that just because love entails action, this doesn’t mean it does not include
any emotional aspect. If you look at Judaism, for example, there’s not this clear separation between action and emotion. Indeed, your emotions affect your actions, and vice versa. So, the new thinking is that love in the Hebrew Scriptures has both effective and action elements.
You list many places where ahav (love) is used to describe relationships among humans, some romantic and healthy, others obsessive or even abusive…
Love is a hard concept. The ancient writers probably meant all sorts of things by it. That being said, in Scripture, the meaning is both complicated and somewhat limited. Though the Hebrew Bible seems long, it is relatively succinct in a sense, and as it is passed down, it is reworked and edited, so the use of words seems very deliberate. There is mention of God’s love, but it’s almost always in the context of Israel’s election, of the covenant, of this special relationship between God and Israel. Regarding love among humans, because of the text’s deliberate nature, it is odd when you find the word love in more harrowing stories like, for example, stories of rape, and you sit there and think, some editor could have changed the word here, so why didn’t they? Why are they using this word in this particular context when there are other words they could have used?
Apart from the command for the people to love their God, do passages talk about God’s love for the people?
Yes. However, because love is usually something a higher power will command from a lower power, there are a lot more instances of the Israelites being commanded to love God than the other way around. However, in Deuteronomy, you do have some verses that tell of God loving Israel. Almost all these instances, however, if not all of them, concern God’s choice and selection of Israel to have a special covenant relationship with. So, when you look at God’s love in the Hebrew Bible, it seems to be heavily intertwined with Israel’s election. On one occasion the text talks about God’s love of the foreigner residing among you. But there’s only this one instance of this sort in Deuteronomy, and I don’t know what to make of it.
Is this special love for Israel favoritism?
It’s complicated, because if it were favoritism, what you would expect is that things would just go well for the Israelites. Right? But that’s not what happens. So, it’s not quite favoritism. It means a kind of special relationship where love between God and Israel is intertwined with a notion of being special, chosen for the covenantal relationship. It’s easy to fall into this kind of stereotype where you say, oh, the covenant is this legalistic, obedience thing. But a better way to imagine the covenant is as a marriage covenant or as a kind of adoption. And a marriage covenant or adoption has legal dimensions but also emotional dimensions. It’s interesting that in the biblical text, everything is put into the language of family.
Interview
So, on the one hand, they are reaching a formal agreement, and it’s a treaty. On the other hand, they use the language of kinship—this is a brother, or this is a son. Everything is filtered through the lens of the family, and how can you remove emotions from family?
You make some striking suggestions about the relation of love and mortality…
As we’ve been discussing, it is common to compare the relationship between God and Israel to a marriage, and marriage has an emotional, love dimension. In addition, the prophets talk about Israel as this lover who is constantly cheating on God, whereas God is portrayed as a scorned lover. Moreover, you have this other biblical book that does use the word “love” a lot—the Song of Songs; and what’s striking is that God is not really mentioned in the Song of Songs. So, the speculative part of me wonders, why are there not more clear instances that talk about God and love, especially in the Song of Songs, which is the book of love? Yes, it’s a book that describes erotic love, but as we see in the prophetic books, the biblical writers had no difficulty imagining God in an erotic relationship. So, something else is stopping the writers/editors from making the connection.
I looked at a very specific portion of the Song of Songs, where love and death are juxtaposed, and I wondered if you don’t have as much direct mention of God and love because love is intimately connected to mortality, and God is imagined as immortal. So, maybe there is something about love which death gives meaning to that only mortals can experience. I use the work of a philosopher named Dan Werner, who argues that in some ways, it’s the fact that we die, that our friends and our family and our loved ones die, that there is something about that separation that gives true resonance to love. But I don’t know, it’s all very speculative.
In your final paragraph you point us back to stories of human beings loving each other in all their messy, terrible, and glorious ways. Do you think the ancient Hebrew authors understood God’s love to have all these dimensions, similar, for instance, to the way the ancient Greeks understood their gods to possess loves and desires which were messy, terrible, and glorious?
The reason the essay ends the way it does is because it’s hard to know what to do with the rather infrequent mention of God’s love in the Hebrew text. You do have God’s love mentioned in relation to election, in relation to the special relationship between God and Israel. And you have God’s love mentioned by the prophets in terms of a love affair or marriage gone awry due to Israel’s infidelity. But aside from these analogies, we don’t have descriptions of God’s love, so it’s easier to conclude that the Hebrew authors mean for us to understand human love as well as divine love via analogies to these complicated human relationship stories that fill up most of the text. Does this mean that sometimes God is thought to love in the messy or even terrible ways that we find in some of these stories? Well, for some texts,
the answer to that question would be “yes.” But the Hebrew canon is a compilation of texts, so it’s hard to say anything definitive about it in general. The problem with the Hebrew text is that there’s no center. If I’m being a good Bible scholar, there’s always a “Yes, but…” because there are disagreements within the text, plus there is the paucity of material about divine love, and so it’s very hard to make an argument from nothing. The combination of ambiguity among diverse texts and the lack of evidence is deeply problematic. Without being able to point more directly to Scripture, what you have is really just speculation. So, you can’t really come to a firm conclusion.
Still, if you were to press and ask me, “Do the ancient Israelites have a vision of a loving God?” I would say, “Yes,” but specify that what they meant by “love” should be understood in terms of a special relationship, a familial sort of covenant relationship, like a marriage covenant, which has both emotional and legal dimensions. Now, this is limited to that portion of the Hebrew canon, which Jews refer to as Written Torah. Judaism, however, also has Oral Torah and other commentaries on the biblical text, which inform its meaning for Judaism. That is, the wider material that Levenson utilizes when he traces an ancient Jewish understanding of a loving God is far more developed than one can deduce from only using the Hebrew canon.
Are there questions that you were not able to fit into the essay?
I did not get to answer in full what divine love looks like in the Hebrew Bible. I focus upon ahav, but there are other Hebrew terms which are pertinent, such as the untranslatable Hebrew word hesed. And one might also need to study texts addressing the opposite of love, like “hate.” In addition, love in the Hebrew Bible seems to be intimately connected with the election of Israel, and there are different ideas of what it is to be “chosen” or “elect,” and I was not able to fully explore that topic. Nor was I able to talk fully about the way in which love is related to power, suffering, or death or how love gets formulated in the traditions that emerge out of this text, such as Judaism. So here are book ideas for scholars who want to research this further!
Are there one or two central insights you hope readers will take from your essay?
I would like people to walk away understanding that the biblical writers were very realistic about the glory and the suffering that is entailed by love. Love is not seen as just a positive thing because the text is full of very complicated stories where things don’t turn out well for a lot of the participants. So, the text has a very realistic vision of love. And that realism is very modern—though, again, it’s me doing the interpreting. We think of the Hebrew text as canonical, and we usually think the text will have some kind of very clear statement about how God loves you so much. But the Hebrew Bible doesn’t play by the same rules, especially with love. What you get instead are these very complicated and ambiguous stories that
mention love but with unexpected results, and sometimes, it doesn’t work out for the characters, including God. The story of the relationship of God and God’s people in the Hebrew Scriptures is a very fraught, complicated tale. And that, I think, more accurately reflects not only life as we live it now but also our relationships with God in some ways, which are also fraught. So, you know, it’s not as pretty as we want it to be; there’s a lot of not knowing and questioning. But this makes the biblical text much more relevant and the interpretation of it much more interesting!
“Do You Love Me?”
Anna M. V. Bowden
While expressions of love are nice and necessary, there are few scenarios, if any, where posing the question “Do you love me?” is comfortable. When someone asks that question, something is usually amiss. Something is not tracking. Sometimes one asks the question in an attempt to sync definitions, when it appears perceptions of the meaning of “love” do not align. Other times the question is the beginning of an attempt to figure out what love could even mean.
Consider the dialogue between Tevye and his wife, Golde, in “Do You Love Me?” from Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye wrestles with the meaning of love. His daughters wish to buck tradition and marry for love rather than have conventional arranged marriages. But Tevye does not quite grasp the meaning of love. Forced to confront a changing world, Tevye asks Golde, “Do you love me?” She replies, “Do I what?” and thus begins the witty duet, “Do You Love Me?” One wonders if this—wrestling with the meaning of love— is what is at play in the final chapter of the Gospel of John, where Jesus calls Simon Peter’s love into question (John 21:15–19).
“Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” Jesus asks him. Peter replies, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus follows Peter’s response with a command to feed his lambs. But the scene does not end there; Jesus asks Peter again if he loves him, and the scene repeats—question, reply, command. Three times, Jesus asks Peter the same question. Three times Peter replies with the same answer. Three times, Jesus responds with almost identical commands. The scene
Anna M. V. Bowden is Associate Professor of New Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and author of Revelation and the Marble Economy of Roman Ephesus: A People’s History Approach (Lexington, 2021).
quickly evolves from an innocent question to a cross-examination. It should not come as a surprise, then, that Peter’s feelings are hurt following Jesus’s seemingly unfair inquisition. Why does Jesus keep asking? Is something wrong with Peter’s reply? Something is going on.
There are two Greek words for the verb “love” in the Gospel of John—phileō and agapaō. John employs both in this exchange between Peter and Jesus. English translations often miss this subtle distinction in the Greek. Jesus asks Peter if he loves (agapaō) him. Peter replies he does (phileō). Peter and Jesus are using different words. Some readers define these as different types of loves and delineate their differences. Others attempt to simplify them. For example, some suggest phileō is a form of friendly love, whereas agapaō is unconditional love. But these definitions and simplifications are misleading. The terms are used inconsistently in John’s Gospel, and there is no clear distinction between them in John’s larger milieu.
A scan of these two verbs in the Gospel of John illustrates their flexibility. A few examples suffice. First, both describe God’s love for the son. God loves (agapaō) the son in 3:35 and loves (phileō) the son in 5:20. Second, both verbs describe the beloved disciple, the disciple whom Jesus loved. Compare, for example, John’s use of phileō in 20:2 with his use of agapaō in 21:7. Third, both verbs describe Jesus’s relationships with individual people. In the story of the raising of Lazarus, Jesus both loves (phileō) Lazarus (11:3; 11:36) and loves (agapaō) Mary, Martha, and Lazarus (11:5). In summary, when speaking of relationships between people, there is no clear-cut distinction between the two verbs in John’s gospel. They evoke similar bonds and are often interchangeable. A reference to different kinds of love can hardly explain John’s use of two verbs for love in John 21.
Yet, a lack of separation between the meaning of the two terms does not mean that they cannot be used to different rhetorical effect. What if John employs these two terms for his own persuasive purposes? Does John’s Jesus want Peter to use the term agapaō in his declaration of love for Jesus? This is a common interpretation, but it relies on a distinction between the two terms in meaning. It assumes that one type of love is better than the other and we have already seen that this distinction does not exist when referencing relationships. What else might be at play in John’s use of these two terms?
Further attention to the use of the two verbs in John highlights another possibility. While there does not appear to be a clear distinction between the terms when speaking of relationships between two people, there is one way they stand apart. Agapaō is the only verb used when speaking of the command to love (13:3435; 14:21; 14:31; 15:9-10, 12, 17). Phileō is never used with reference to the love commandment. Moreover, Jesus emphasizes that being a disciple requires agapaō “If you love (agapaō) me,” he tells the disciples, “you will keep my commandments” (14:15). Discipleship is known by agapaō. Is this what Jesus is asking Peter? Is he questioning Peter’s discipleship by asking him if he loves him? Is he asking how he is doing agapaō—or keeping the commandments— out in the world? Maybe this is
why Jesus replies to Peter’s profession of love with commands.
Throughout the narrative, John’s Jesus appears to engage in a bit of witty banter with Peter. While he asks Peter if he loves (agapaō) him the first two times, he changes the verb the third time around. He matches Peter’s reply, mimicking his response. In place of agapaō, he uses phileō: “Simon, son of John, do you love (phileō) me?” Why does Jesus change his question? Is he asking a different question? And why match Peter’s reply? He already knows Peter’s answer to this question; Peter has already said he loves (phileō) him. It is possible that John’s Jesus wants Peter to notice the wordplay. With a shift in vocabulary, Jesus subtly suggests to Peter that he is asking him a different question and looking for a different answer.
Jesus changes other words in his replies to Peter. The first time, he commands Peter, “Feed my lambs.” The second time, he commands him to “tend my sheep.” For the third command, he combines the verb from the first command (feed) with the direct object from the second (sheep). The words flip back and forth. His three commands, it seems, also engage in a game of wordplay. Jesus hints: the answer to my question is in the commands. Is Peter paying attention?
Jesus is not the only one who engages in clever wordplay, though. Simon Peter also has a way with words. While the Greek word for “love” remains the same in Peter’s replies to Jesus, the Greek word for “know” does not. Peter’s first two replies to Jesus’s question are consistent. “Yes, Lord; you know (oidas) that I love you.” But his reply to Jesus’s final question is different. This time, he replies, “Lord, you know (oidas) everything; you know (ginoskeis) that I love you.” The verb for “you know” has changed. Again, translations miss this subtle shift in terms. Why does Peter change his response? The narrative, it seems, does not want us to cast Peter as utterly inept. “I can play games too,” his response tells Jesus. Jesus changes the question; Peter changes the answer. Peter meets Jesus’s word game tit for tat.
Although Peter demonstrates that two can play the game, he continues to miss the point of Jesus’s interrogation. Jesus is not asking Peter if he loves him—like how Jesus loved Lazarus (11:3, 5). He is asking Peter if he loves him—as in if he keeps his commandments (14:15).
Prior to the dialogue between Jesus and Peter, Jesus appears to the disciples on the shore of the lake (21:4–14). The disciples, who are out fishing in a boat, do not initially recognize Jesus, even after he speaks to them. Jesus asks them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” It is a leading question and has a pejorative quality. Jesus anticipates a negative response, and the disciples deliver on Jesus’s expectation. Their nets are empty; their outing was unsuccessful. Jesus tells the disciples to recast their nets on the right side of the boat and they do as he suggests, but it is not until their nets are overflowing that the disciples finally recognize Jesus. They did not recognize his voice, but they were familiar with his ability to multiply fish.
It is in this moment that we get another rather curious story about our disciple Simon Peter. When he realizes that it is Jesus on the lakeshore, the story tells
us that he gets dressed and immediately jumps out of the boat to swim ashore. Setting aside questions about the practice and propriety of fishing in the nude, another detail begs our attention and might give fodder to our interpretation of the dialogue between Jesus and Peter in 21:15-19. Why does Peter jump out of the boat? What is the purpose of swimming ashore? Why does he leave the fish and the other disciples behind, abandoning his morning’s work?
When the boat and the other disciples make it to the shoreline, Jesus tells the disciples to bring him some of the fish from their nets. Peter obliges and heads back to the boat to haul the nets ashore. After Jesus invites the disciples to have breakfast with him, the narrator tells us that the disciples would not dare ask who Jesus was because they already knew. The story suggests that Jesus is known by his actions, in this case, his ability to feed people. He provides provisions, and he prepares the meal. By feeding the disciples, Jesus models discipleship. He lives love. He acts out agapaō.
Maybe this scene helps explain Jesus’s critique of Peter in their dialogue about love. Three times, Jesus commands Peter to provide for his flock. The commands to feed and tend conjure images of feeding narratives, like the breakfast story in 21:4–14. When Peter recognizes Jesus from the boat, he abandons the task of gathering provisions to jump in the lake and swim ashore to Jesus, but Jesus sends him back to the boat to collect the fish. Jesus is subtly rebuking Peter, redirecting Peter and the attention away from himself towards the work of feeding people. Jesus did not want the attention, the praise, the recognition. He wanted Peter to continue his work. Likewise, in the subsequent scene, Jesus was not looking for a proclamation of love. He wanted Peter to get back to work.
In response to Tevye’s question in Fiddler on the Roof, “Do you love me?” Golde replies, “For twenty-five years, I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow; after twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?” Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus reminds the disciples that while love may be many things, the love (agapaō) God commands is a series of actions, a way of living life, a display of discipleship. Golde knew this. Peter, it seems, did not. Peter needed reminding that loving Jesus is more than a display of affection or a simple declaration. It requires feeding his lambs, tending his sheep, feeding his sheep. It requires keeping his commandments (14:15).
This is what I love about Scripture. In this story, words fail to capture love. Loving Jesus requires action. It is not a confession but a way of life. It is a calling, and it requires work. Jesus spent his life showing us what it looks like to love him, and as John reminds us, “If every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (21:24).
Abyssal Love
James Howard Hill, Jr.
I. Prolegomena
I am a theorist of religion because I am led to study, contemplate, and pursue the evidence of things unseen within the abyss we call life. While I agree with the late, great Prince Rogers Nelson that life is, indeed, electric, I believe that Prince’s equally electric discography also guides us through a world that is all at once chaotic, mystical, abyssal, and apocalyptic. Electric word, life. As a Black Baptist raised in the backside of North Texas, I earned my first graduate degree from a School of Theology rather than a Research 1 Religious Studies department. Through my theological formation, I have become well-acquainted with the myriad ways that theological education, at its best, makes an earnest attempt to engage with the haunting, revelatory, and abyssal state of our lives. Haunting word, abyss.
Concerning the conceptual framework informing the following essay, instead of
James Howard Hill, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University. He holds a B.A. from Criswell College, an M.T.S. from Southern Methodist University, and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He teaches courses and conducts research on black studies, religion and the politics of popular culture in the United States, political theory, black political thought, modernity, ecology, coloniality, and conceptual methodologies informing the study of religion. Hill, Jr. is the author of two forthcoming books under contract: The Haunting King: Religion, Michael Jackson, and the Politics of Black Popular Culture (under contract with The University of Chicago Press Class 200: New Studies in Religion series) and Haunting Joy: Essays on Religion, Black Popular Culture, and Overcoming Childhood Adversity (under contract with Fortress Press). He is a 2024 inductee into the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. His scholarship has received recognition and support from The Crossroads Project, The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (Heidelberg, Germany), The Henry Luce Foundation, the Forum for Theological Exploration, The Louisville Institute, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Mellon Cluster Research Fellowship in Comparative Race and Diaspora studies.
taking the invitation to reflect upon the theme of love in Scripture as a given, I follow the approach of political theorists and theorists of culture and religion who do not ignore the reality that no term, including love, exists outside the matrix of power. Whatever our concept of love might be, we must not suppress or ignore the reality that certain material conceptions of love are prioritized, normalized, and universalized over others. To that end, the following reflection does not take the theme of love in Scripture as a given but rather focuses on the conceptual frameworks, disciplinary investments in certain productions of knowledge, and canons of legitimacy that determine the boundaries and terms of order through and by which we are allowed to meditate on love and Scripture.
Love is not an abstract, universal concept but one deeply shaped by the material realities of race, class, gender, and other political structures. Any scholarly account of love in Scripture must grapple with how dominant, normative, Euro-centric conceptions of love have been forged within the crucible of white, patriarchal, and capitalist power structures. The invitation to reflect on love in Scripture cannot be divorced from the lived experiences of ghettoized communities, whose alternative expressions and visceral resolve to tarry with the abyssal concept of love have been systematically occluded or delegitimized.
Moreover, the very disciplinary boundaries and methods of biblical, theological, and religious interpretation have been shaped by these same power structures, privileging certain hermeneutical approaches and canons of legitimacy over others. A materialist hermeneutics of love in Scripture, therefore, must interrogate how the academy, as an institution, has historically foreclosed and marginalized the perspectives of Black, feminist, queer, and transgressive thinkers who have offered radical re-imaginings of love, spirituality, and the sacred. Only by centering these ghettoized, suppressed ways of knowing and their material conditions can we begin to expand the boundaries of what counts as a legitimate way of engaging with love and Scripture. This is not merely an academic exercise but a vital political and ethical imperative—to challenge the structural and epistemic violence that has long accompanied the imposition of dominant, Eurocentric constructs upon the lived experiences of marginalized communities.
Furthermore, a materialist account of love in Scripture requires a critical engagement with the abyss of contingency that undergirds New Testament exegesis. Far from the fixed, essential, and normative Christian approach to interpreting love that is often proffered, the study of love in the New Testament is deeply shaped by the contingent, sedimented practices that have been normalized through the exercise of power over time. Post-foundational thought allows us to excavate the ways in which the dominant interpretations of love in Scripture have been produced and legitimized within the academy, which itself is inextricably linked to the aims and ambitions of the modern nation-state. The study of New Testament interpretations and applications of love in the United States cannot be divorced from the ways in which the state has utilized the academy as an intellectual arm to serve its own political and social agendas. At the heart of this critique is the recognition that
the mobilization of the concept of “Christian love” (agape) in the United States cannot be engaged primarily as the fruit of an ahistorical, universal truth but rather a deeply contingent construction that has been shaped by the political and social forces of colonial modernity. The abyssal dimensions of “the political”-- the fundamental instability and undecidability at the core of the social order -- are inextricably imbricated with the ways in which agape love has been interpreted and applied within the U.S. Christian tradition.
The political, in this sense, refers to the inherent antagonism and contingency that underlies all social and institutional formations, including the seemingly neutral and apolitical realms of biblical hermeneutics and theology. By excavating the political within the scholarly accounts of love in Scripture, we can begin to unsettle the taken-for-granted assumptions and normative frameworks that have long governed the field of New Testament exegesis. This critical engagement with the abyss of contingency in New Testament exegesis opens new possibilities for reimagining the relationship between love, Scripture, and the political. It demands that we confront the ways in which dominant interpretations and political applications of love have been shaped by the larger project of the modern nationstate, which has sought to harness the power of Christian love to legitimize its own authority and social order.
Abyss, as a theoretical concept, is deeply anchored in post-foundational political thought. At the level of Being (or ontology), political theorists like Barnor Hesse, Claude Lefort, Chantal Mouffe, Richard Iton, and Ernesto Laclau emphasize the inherent undecidability and lack of a fixed foundation in the social and political realm. The abyss, thus, represents this ontological void at the heart of political existence, where no ultimate ground or essence can be found. Haunting and daunting as it may be, through this short essay, I aim to invite theological educators and practitioners of faith to critically engage the Christian concept of agape through an abyssal conceptual framework. Such critical engagement requires a willingness on the part of the reader to grapple with how the Western world was produced through the violent negation and foreclosure of Black ways of knowing, Black styles of living, and the compression of Black creativity (oppression), the very “abyssal cut” that continues to disrupt the normative categories and structures of the world.
II. Black Ways of Becoming within the Abyssal Cut
The notion of the “abyssal cut” in the context of the Black study of religion refers to the way in which Black ways of knowing exist within and disrupt the profound knowledge structures, the metaphysical concept of Being, and the existential chasm or “abyss” at the heart of the Western world. As historian of religion Charles H. Long argues, much of the complex and evasive nature of African American religion is due not only to the particular circumstances of Black people within the United States but also to their formative role in the very creation of the modern world itself. For Long, Black religions do not simply exist on the margins of modernity but rather cut across and rupture the very foundations of Western thought and
power. The abyssal quality of this cut speaks to the way in which Black ways of knowing (especially spiritual ways of knowing) inhabit the uncharted territories, the fissures and gaps, that expose the inherent instability and contradictions of the world. Thus, Black living, Black movement, Black knowledge, and Black becoming are inextricable from the blackened depths of the abyss—the profound ontological (Being based) and epistemological (Knowledge base) void that undergirds Western claims to progress, rationality, and universality.
By theorizing the Black study and practice of religion as an abyssal cut, we also recognize how it operates as a site of radical imagination, refusal, and the creation of counter-modes of becoming. The abyssal cut represents a deliberate disruption and interruption of the normalized categories, structures, and rhythms of both Western theology and the broader project of Western modernity. From this abyss, Black modes of becoming do not simply mimic or conform to dominant theological, metaphysical, and hermeneutical frameworks, but rather stridently forge counter pathways and imaginaries. These counter-modes are fundamentally oppositional, positioning themselves in direct antagonism to the ontological, epistemological, and existential foundations of the modern world. Such counter-significations and methods of engagement are fueled by a visceral refusal to be contained or subsumed within the terms of order which sanctify Western thought and power. Instead, our cutting movement through time, space, and disciplinary borders disarm the powers and authorities governing the world while simultaneously making a visceral spectacle of them, triumphing over them by our fierce resolve to live, love, and create despite the principalities and powers ruling over what our ancestors signified through song as a mean old world.
At the heart of agape love is the idea of foundational, essential, self-sacrificial, and unconditional love for the Other. This love is not contingent on merit or exchange but springs from a place of compassion, solidarity, and a recognition of shared humanity. Some may argue that agape love stands in stark contrast to the abyss, which denies any fixed, essential foundation or ultimate ground for political, theological, and social identities. Where the abyss highlights the inherent undecidability of the political, hermeneutical, and theological realm, agape love offers the possibility of political, hermeneutical, and theological positionality grounded in a commitment to the dignity and flourishing of all people. Rather than the constant battle for authority and political power, agape envisions a politics of mutual care, empathy, and collective flourishing.
While these critical distinctions must be acknowledged and engaged, at the same time, I argue that agape love, in its very openness and refusal of authoritarian essentialism, shares an under-theorized affinity with the post-foundational political critique of fixed foundations. The self-emptying nature of agape love mirrors the abyss, in that both refuse to ground political life in any ultimate essence or ground. Rather than viewing them as strictly incommensurable, we should consider how their agonistic interplay might open up new pathways for religio-political thought and praxis. The abyss, with its critique of essentialist foundations, can prevent
agape love from falling into a sentimental, a-racial, and apolitical universalism, reminding us of the ever-present possibility of exclusion, structural antagonism, and, as theorist Joy James brilliantly unpacks in her own theorization of agape, the urgent need for political struggle.
Conversely, the ethos of agape love can temper the potential nihilism or cynicism that may arise from an unmitigated embrace of the abyss. Such a counter-engagement with the concept and practice of agape offers the promise of a politics animated by a radical openness and a commitment to the dignity of all, even in the face of ontological negation, foreclosure, and instability. In this way, the agonistic dialogue between the abyss and agape love could give rise to a new, more braided political and theological imagination. Such an imagination acknowledges the fragility and contingency of the social order while simultaneously holding fast to a posture of care, empathy, and critical accompaniment that exposes and transgresses the shifting sand of our present troubles.
Abyssal word, love.
Women and The Message of Love and Loyalty in the Old Testament
Lydia Hernández Marcial
As a small kid growing up in Puerto Rico, I loved watching children’s TV shows on our local stations. One of the show’s theme songs was “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” popularized by Jackie DeShannon. I never understood how this song fit in the context of a cartoon show.
Back then, Disney Princesses were not a thing. However, Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty taught us, girls and boys alike, that love conquers everything, and a kiss of true love breaks women free from the powers of mistreatment, bullying, and even death.
What I learned in church complemented the message from cartoons and Disney movies. Sunday School taught me songs and Bible verses affirming that God is love, sometimes making us afraid of that love (remember O Be Careful Little Eyes?).
How did those cartoons and animated films shape the idea of love for girls and boys in my time? How did the ambiguous biblical message of a loving and frightening God add to the “Disney” notion of love? The message of love coming from a prince who rescues the suffering damsel from the claws of abuse and death does not correspond with the experience of many women. In 2023, six out of ten female deaths in Puerto Rico were feminicides. Where would a woman with the idea of a loving and frightening God go when she is a victim of abuse?
Rev. Dr. Lydia Hernández-Marcial is Assistant Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Hebrew at the Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico.
Hernández-Marcial is an ordained minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Puerto Rico. She is the author of several entries in the Connections series. Her last publications are “Qohelet and Jaiba Politics: Ecclesiastes and Activist Resistance from a Puerto Rican Perspective,” in Activist Hermeneutics of Liberation in the Bible: A Global Intersectional Perspective, edited by Jin Young Choi and Gregory L. Cuéllar, 109-122. (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023), and “Tecnología y sociedad. Retos y oportunidades en la nueva Torre de Babel,” Vida y Pensamiento 42, no. 1 (2022).
As a pastor and Old Testament professor, I want to explore some examples of the ambiguous message of love in the Hebrew Bible and the dangers of metaphorical language in the Pentateuch and the Prophets. The effects in today’s readers of the marital metaphor, one of the favorite representations of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel in the Pentateuch and the Prophets, need to be examined. The article concludes considering how the empowering love in Song of Songs message could be received in a context with a high rate of feminicides.
Covenantal Love: Loyalty and Obedience
The exhortation to love God in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is a stipulation within the covenantal relationship between God and God’s people (Exod 20; Deut 27–28). Obedience to the stipulations of the covenant determines the fulfillment of its promises. This obedience guarantees God’s love (Exodus 34:6–7; Num. 14:18).
Thus, the covenantal relationship between God and God’s people relies upon obedience. Passages such as Deuteronomy 6:4–5, known as the shema, describe this commitment using the concept of love: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” In a time when kings required the loyalty of their subjects, Deuteronomy expected the total loyalty and allegiance of the Israelites to be to God, not to the kings or to other deities. The covenant is a contract of exclusivity.
The stipulation of exclusivity takes a different language in the Prophets. The relationship between God and Israel resembles a marriage contract: God is the husband, and Israel/Judah is the bride (see, for example, Isa 54:5; Jer 3:14; 31:32; Hos 2). This marriage contract guarantees God’s tender love and the promise of blessings if the people of God obey, or after they steer away from their marital partner, if they repent.
A Jealous God
What happens when God’s people do not obey the stipulations of the treaty? The Pentateuch depicts God as a jealous deity, while the Prophets present God as a jealous husband ready to punish the unfaithful bride, Israel. The frequency of these depictions of God shocks the reader today, as it did in the past.
Hosea portrays God’s love for Israel as tenderness and jealousy. For many people, this language is adequate, for it describes the well-deserved punishment of the wayward bride. However, the language is problematic, especially for women. The metaphors identify God as a male figure, whereas a female figure represents the disobedient people of God. For women victims of domestic violence, a text such as Hosea 2 reflects the cyclical pattern of this behavior: deprivation, isolation, abuse, recrimination, and an attempt at reconciliation with tender words.
Ezekiel, a prophet who suffered the trauma of deportation, identifies Israel’s
and Judah’s unfaithfulness as the reason for the exile. The prophet attempts to grab people’s attention by employing graphic, violent language in chapters 16 and 23. Ezekiel 16 describes Israel as an abandoned baby girl, adopted and raised by God, who later becomes his wife: “I pledged myself to you and entered a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine” (16:8).
The metaphor of God as husband continues in Ezekiel 23. In this chapter, Samaria and Jerusalem are two promiscuous sisters, Oholah and Oholibah. Ezekiel crudely represents the punishment for their behavior using violent images, such as mutilation, sexual shaming, and exposure to sexual abuse.
A message originally addressed to male audiences, which treats the men as abused and shamed women, had the purpose of shocking the audience to reflect on their abhorrent behavior (their political alliances and idolatry) and provoke repentance.
It is striking how the Ezekiel, who is okay with portraying God as an abusive, jealous husband, speaks against the jealous God who is willing to punish three or four generations for their ancestors’ sins (Exodus 20:5–6):
What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”? As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins who shall die (Ezek 18:2–4).
The metaphorical language of love and jealousy relies on traditional roles to move the people toward repentance and renewal of their relationship with their husband, God. At the same time, the prophet does not justify the suffering of the new generations because of the misdeeds of their ancestors.
This language, however, is dangerous if it is taken as approval to engage in violence against women who are thought to “disobey” men, or when it is read in churches which are oblivious to how this language can trigger traumatic responses in some female members. Fortunately, other voices in the Hebrew Bible offer a more positive view of the relationship between a man and a woman, providing an alternative reading where women can see themselves as valuable persons.
A Garden of Pleasures: Love in the Song of Songs
In today’s world, which is so outspoken about sex and pleasure, people still consider love’s physical expression sinful and shameful. I started ministry as a pastor of a small, rural congregation of older people. They were from a generation that socialized women to be submissive; sex was a duty not always enjoyed by women. Pleasure and satisfaction were not expected from them. I deemed it necessary to start a study series on Song of Songs. One night, one woman told me: “I wish I would have known this in my youth!”
Jews and Christians have traditionally read the Song of Songs allegorically, as a relationship between God and Israel, or Jesus and the Church. However, the literal sense of the book gives a green light for the physical, erotic expression of love. An unparalleled book in the Hebrew Bible, it speaks of mutual enjoyment, of longing, seeking, and finding. Song of Songs opens the door to female sexual agency, a critical capacity for parishes like mine. The Shulammite (6:13) considers herself beautiful (1:5) and feels desired (7:10). She enjoys the body of her beloved (2:3). Song of Songs offers a contrasting voice in the Old Testament, counterbalancing the ubiquitous idea of male dominance and of violent punishment from a jealous God.
However, jealousy is not foreign to the Song of Songs. The last chapter, sometimes used in weddings, describes love and jealousy: Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, For love is strong as death, jealousy fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.
(Songs 8:6–7)
A seal is a symbol of ownership, of commitment as in a covenant. Jealousy, then, rests upon the promise of exclusivity behind this commitment. Song of Songs’ language in this final chapter resembles the language of relationship between God and Israel/Judah.
Not everything is perfect in the Song of Songs. Even when the book highlights the freedom of this couple to enjoy each other’s bodies, they cannot display their love publicly (8:1–2). Traditional roles for men and women do not disappear from the book. Even though Song of Songs teaches women to enjoy the physical expressions of love because expressing sexual agency is not sinful, this teaching does not change social definitions of gender behavior. Once a woman breaks with social expectations, she risks being a victim of violence. For instance, because women should not walk around the city at night, the city guards beat the woman (5:7).
Pastors and church leaders need to focus on the empowering voice of Song of Songs without ignoring the ways in which the book is a product of a violent and sexist time.
Conclusion
The biblical marital metaphor shapes congregants' views of women and men in the same way that Disney movies and cartoons shaped my understanding of love when I was a child. In many passages of Hebrew scripture, the metaphor can easily be understood to endorse violence and abuse towards independent or “disobedient” women, so pastors need to take special care to be alert to and to seek to mitigate the traumatizing and harmful aspects of these passages. The message of the Song
of Songs provides an alternative voice that can empower women who have been raised with a distorted interpretation of the portrayal of a jealous God. I agree with DeShannon’s song; what the world needs now is love, but given the awful violence women endure from fathers, brothers, and husbands who should love them, it is vital that we make resoundingly clear that this love abhors violence against women, that this love values and respects women, delighting in their delights, their freedom, their independence, their work, and in their service and worship.
Pastors’ Panel
The Reverend Isabel Rivera-Velez (MDiv’10) and her five siblings were raised on Galveston Island. After 25 years of service at Union Carbide Corp., Isabel retired and immediately began her initial four years of service as Lay Pastor at Emmanuel Presbyterian Church of Galveston. After sensing God’s call to study, she enrolled in Austin Seminary and earned her Master of Divinity in 2010. Pastor Isabel was ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament in January of 2011 and installed at her first pastorate, Juan Marcos Presbyterian Church, where she served for three years. Then, she served at Iglesia Latina Presbyterian Church for six years. Currently, Isabel is serving at Faith Presbyterian in Baytown, Texas.
The Reverend James Martin (MDiv’22) lives and works in the U.S./Mexico borderlands in the communities of Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. He is the site coordinator at Borderlands YAV program, where he accompanies and learns with young adults about God's call for us to cross borders and live in community together. He enjoys the Chihuahuan/Sonoran Desert, exploring the Sky Island Mountains on bike or foot with friends, and meeting strangers on the road.
The Reverend Mark Sturgess (MDiv’01) is the pastor of San Luis Obispo United Methodist Church in San Luis Obispo, California. Mark focused on church music in his undergraduate studies before earning an MDiv at Austin Seminary. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister who has served United Methodist Churches in Southern California since 2003, where he is an openly LGBTQ full elder in the California-Pacific Annual Conference of the UMC.
The Reverend Ann Herlin (MDiv’01) is an Associate Pastor at the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria, Virginia, where she has served since graduating from Austin Seminary in 2001. Prior to attending seminary, she taught first grade in south Texas as part of Teach for America, then spent a year teaching English to elementary students in Costa Rica. She received her B.A. from Yale University. Rev. Herlin and her husband are the parents of two pre-teen children.
The Reverend Dr. Daryl Horton (MDiv’15) is a native of Austin, Texas and serves as the Pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in historic East Austin. He earned his MDiv from Austin Seminary and DMin from Brite Divinity School. Pastor Horton is an active member of several boards, commissions and non-profit organizations in the Austin community.
When it comes to loving our neighbor, how can the church improve?
Isabel Rivera-Velez
Beginning with the Old Testament, we find the original Law to which Jesus referred. My version of the Ten Commandments is stated in the first person with God as the speaker: “I love you, and I want you to love me back, and this is how.”
This message of The Ten Commandments can be easily heard in the New Testament in Matthew 22:37–39 and Matthew 25:31–46. In the parable of the nations, those with “ears to hear” can explicitly hear Jesus say, “And this is how.” Jesus makes a quick twist to say that when we commit acts of mercy to a needy person whom we meet along life’s way, then WE, the church, become the neighbor.
Historically, the church has performed missional outreach activities within that understanding, but has not gotten the message across in a fuller way. Because the church believes that the “needy ones” are the neighbors and not the
other way around, WE, the church, cannot fully know our true calling as disciples in a world of “needy ones.” Jesus teaches us that “this is how” we show love—by taking on the role of neighbor, intentionally seeking ways to share the good news of the love of God. When the church imposes on herself the basic requirements of taking on the role of being a neighbor to the world, she will greatly improve her presence in it.
James Martin
As people of faith and leaders in the church, we are reminded by scripture to make “loving your neighbor” the most important part of our lives and the mission of the church. While often society and the church talk a lot about love, I think the power in Matthew 22: 37–39 is when we use it to reflect on what we are prioritizing as individuals, church, and society. If loving our neighbor is truly what is most important to Christ, then it should be the first value with “loving God” we consider as Christians when we engage or make decisions in politics, community, and church. But the reality is that we have a lot of reasons (good and bad) we prioritize other things over “loving our neighbor,” because capitalism and the founding of the United States were never based on the value or priority of “loving your neighbor.” But the church was founded on the value and a community of “loving our neighbor,” thus we first must reflect on actions of the church that do not prioritize “loving our neighbor” and work accordingly to reshape the priorities and mission of the church. And just as the church is also called to share this good news with the world, we are also called to evangelize our communities, countries, and governments that make decisions on the value of “loving neighbor.”
If the love of God is an action, how have you seen it expressed in your ministry context?
Mark Sturgess
Christians are right to speak of God’s love distinctly as agape, a love given without need for return, without consideration of the beloved’s worthiness. God’s first love for the world shines upon all, and each is sacred. When we are granted a vision of this love—as we all are when we behold another creature—we are claimed and called to action.
Amid the challenge of being human, however, I find that Christians who have put this love into action do so because God’s agape has become their heart’s desire and greatest joy. We must claim our passions, celebrate beauty and our joy in living and loving, and with these, commit our lives to a Christlike shape. When our theological awareness neglects to make room for rightly placed human desire, it reappears unchecked as self-aggrandized power — I have served one congregation where abuse was a tragedy of its history.
I see this active, desiring love shaped in Christlikeness present in my church, where something as simple as meeting minutes is greeted with spontaneous gratitude from committee members. On another scale, at the end of American participation in Afghanistan, two of our congregation members were moved by the plight of those left behind. By the end of the year, they had galvanized a city-wide coalition around this mission. Their nonprofit organization began settling refugees from Afghanistan and, shortly after, Ukraine. This isn’t an exclusively Christian organization, but I see it as a vision of God’s first love motivated by human passion and joy.
Ann Herlin
I serve a congregation located in the shadow of Washington, DC. The events of the world loom large in our lives, and anxiety floods us with a sense of both helplessness and responsibility. Loving God, loving neighbor feels like it will never be enough… but we best seem to grasp God’s grace when we focus on the love right here.
Our weekly Open Table breakfast began to provide food for the hungry. It soon became more. Birthdays are celebrated, talents shared, prayers offered, friendships formed. At the end of the morning, everyone still has challenges ahead, but volunteers and guests alike leave feeling bathed in God’s love.
Our congregation witnesses youth supporting one another through awkward and challenging years. We witness a young widow tentatively searching out God’s purpose for this new season. We witness a young man with severe autism navigating ways to serve and to belong and a poverty-stricken woman setting up her meager bank account to autopay her church pledge. We witness church members providing a bridge of support for a mother and infant who appeared at coffee hour with nowhere to go.
We don’t fully live up to our calling. It is never enough; things are rarely “resolved”; beauty and messiness come hand in hand.
And yet we come, and we sing, and we pray, and we give, and we help, and we care. When the maelstrom of the world seems to overwhelm, we try to remember: there is always someone right in front of us whom we can love.
3) How is taking care of ourselves a witness of God’s love?
Daryl Horton
As pastors, seminarians, and disciples, we are convinced Jesus is our ultimate example. This question reminded me of one more way I can be a witness of God’s love. John’s gospel proclaims that because of the love God has for humankind, the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. During His time on Earth, Jesus demonstrated both a faithful ministry and commitment to self-care. Often, after
teaching and healing others, Jesus spent time in a remote place to rest and pray. Jesus also made time for meaningful moments eating and resting with family and beloved friends, as He did with Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. These intentional times of self-care by Jesus are a call to follow His example and make time to take care of ourselves. God demonstrated the love God has for our physical bodies when God formed humankind from the dust of the earth and breathed the Spirit of life into us. With this eternal investment into our temporal bodies God shared with us a lifelong responsibility to be a witness to God’s love by caring for our bodies. The Apostle Paul reminds us of this responsibility in his letter to the Corinthians when he writes, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So, glorify God in your body.” (6:19-20 ESV) May our witness glorify God and inspire others.
Coming in the Spring 2025 issue:
Honoring retired Professor Timothy Lincoln “The
Futures of Theological Education”
Faculty Books
Song-Mi Suzie Park.
Love in the Hebrew Bible.
Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2023, 157 pages, $28 (paper).
Reviewed by Jonathan Kaplan.
Love can be sweet, beautiful, and joyous. It can also be daunting, jealous, and violent. The descriptions of love in the literature of ancient Israel are no different. In Love in the Hebrew Bible, Song-Mi Suzie Park takes readers on a compelling and sensitive journey through passages in the Pentateuch, the Former Prophets, and the Song of Songs in which love plays a central role. Park’s analysis focuses closely on a collection of stories in these works “that use or center on the Hebrew term and concept ’ahav/’ahev or ’ahavah, translated as the verb ‘to love’ or the noun ‘love’” (1). In her analysis, Park does not shy from the fraught complexities of these descriptions of love or ahav—by parents, siblings, friends, lovers, and God. Rather, she shows how these stories and poems portray unique ancient cultural understandings of what it means to love and be loved and how perspectives on love were intertwined with ancient Israelite conceptions of kinship, gender, and politics.
In a brief introduction, Park outlines the main claims of the book and describes her own personal journey in writing this work. She then turns, in chapter 1, to examine the relationship between love and covenant in the book of Deuteronomy, where Israel is famously enjoined in the second verse
of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–8) to “love Yhwh your God.” She shows how ancient Israel’s understanding of loving God is enmeshed in ancient Near Eastern conceptions of “political loyalty, service, and obedience” (18). Park builds upon the foundational scholarship of William Moran. Whereas Moran saw Deuteronomy’s conception of love to be transactional and emotionless, Park, like other more recent scholarship on the topic (e.g., Walter Brueggemann, Jacqueline Lapsley, Jon D. Levenson), sees in Deuteronomy “the possibility that Israel’s obedience stems from willingness and feelings, indeed positive ones, such as a sense of reverence, awe, and love of God and tradition” (22).
Park turns in chapter 2, “The Divinity of Love: Jacob and Esau,” to examine love as it is expressed in the cycle of stories related to the patriarchal figures Jacob and Esau and their parents Isaac and Rebekah. She shows how this cycle “conveys the multivalent meanings and associations of covenantal love” while adding a new dimension to the understanding of love in the Hebrew Bible: “the divinity of love” (29). This narrative conveys its conceptions of love, in Park’s analysis, by juxtaposing two distinct understandings of love expressed through the conflict between these two brothers and their parents’ distinct favoritism for them. The first understanding, seen in Rebekah’s love for Jacob, is “lofty” and “celestial” and connected to God. The second, demonstrated by Isaac’s affection for Esau, is “baser, animal-like” and “centered on appetites and bodily desires” (29).
In the next two chapters, Park examines the expressions of love in the stories associated with Israel’s most celebrated king, David. In chapter 3, she focuses on the fraught relationship of David with his father-in-law Saul. She argues provocatively that God, rejected by “his beloved Israel, as its sole king” in 1 Samuel, becomes overwhelmed by grief and heartbreak, contributing to God’s rejection of Saul. As Park describes it, “Love and heartbreak are things shared by God and by human characters alike” (69). In chapter 4, Park shifts to discuss the role of love in the relationship of David with Saul’s son Jonathan, his beloved friend and companion. She shows how God’s rejection of Saul leads to the fracturing of his family as David betrays both Saul and Jonathan, who both loved him and whom he both loved.
In the final chapter of this volume, chapter 5, “The Gender of Love: Women and Love,” Park turns to texts in the Hebrew Bible that mention love in connection with women. She first examines stories of female characters who are described as expressing love: Rebekah, Michal, and Ruth. Next, she analyzes the rape narratives of Dinah and Tamar before finally looking at the “apotheosis of love” in the Bible, the Song of Songs, a celebration of erotic and sexual love (97). Park’s reading of the Song in juxtaposition with all the other narrative portrayals of love helps to knit this poetic work, which is often read as an outlier in the Hebrew Bible, back into the fabric of ancient Israelite understandings of love. Like these other works, she argues, the Song of Songs is the most fully wrought description of
ahav in the Hebrew Bible.
Taken together, these biblical stories about love—from Genesis to the Song of Songs—display, in Park’s analysis, an intricate portrait of love as “fraught and complicated” (130). Indeed, Park’s Love in the Hebrew Bible is a must read for anyone interested in coming to a deeper appreciation of the Hebrew Bible’s rich and nuanced portrayal of love.
Jonathan Kaplan is an associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
William Greenway. In the Light of Agape: Moral Realism and Its Consequences.
Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2024, 204 pages, $27 (paper).
Reviewed by Michael Oehrtman.
Twenty-first century understanding in the areas of faith and ethics is like that of medieval science before epistemological and methodological developments sparked the scientific revolution. Scientific Enlightenment, however, has been accompanied by conceptual collapse in the areas of faith and ethics.
-William Greenway, In the Light of Agape: Moral Realism and Its Consequences
Greenway responds to his critical assessment by developing a moral foundation for philosophy and spirituality. His approach, based on agape, a force as real as gravity concretely
experienced in our delight for others as well as in our horror at their violation, is thoroughly developed and applied in seventeen essays throughout the book. Reading them was a revelation for me, for his foundational critique reflects a personal spiritual challenge with which I have wrestled throughout my religious life. Greenway’s analysis provided needed exercise for my own spiritual understanding, helping me to nourish a more fulfilling approach to faith.
I have always struggled with my understanding and experience of faith. Although I find John Calvin’s definition intellectually satisfying and elegant, “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit,” my rational appreciation often leaves me feeling spiritually unfulfilled and disconnected from my faith community. I have rarely felt the “firm and certain knowledge” I thought Calvin described.
The way Greenway addresses such ambivalence is representative of his approach across an incredible array of spiritual and contemporary issues. He reassures us that doubt is not a result of insufficient ability, experience, knowledge, or effort. Doubt is a recognition that faith constitutes a different kind of assurance with its own “logic” and “vocabulary.” Greenway elaborates the foundational crisis in faith and ethics as a lack of objective grounding and an inability to provide a compelling answer to the question, “Why act morally?” without resorting to superstition. He
demonstrates that these limitations arise from the incommensurability of our rational vocabularies of naturalism and secularism with the sphere of spirituality.
Inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Greenway develops a philosophy of agape to provide a new language of moral reality. Having spent most of World War II in a Nazi labor camp, Levinas found himself taken “hostage” by the faces of others in their suffering and “commanded” to respond morally. Levinas concluded naturalist and secular framings were inadequate to the reality of evil in those concentration camps and the force driving his response. Greenway develops this vocabulary in terms of “being seized by agape for every face, including one’s own” and elaborates its consequences in response both to delight for the thriving of others and to horror over their violation. Importantly, he observes, we do not choose to be seized, and we can harden our hearts, but being “seized” by such love is prior to any response, interpretation, or analysis. Greenway extends his analysis to “being seized by” nonhuman faces, which serves as a realist foundation for exploring topics from faith and philosophy to social and environmental challenges.
In Greenway’s treatment of faith through the lens of agape, I recognized that my predominantly rational attempts to interpret Calvin’s definition prevented me from appreciating its true potential. In particular, the revelation of faith in our hearts and minds by the holy spirit is a manifestation of “having been seized by agape for every face.” From this perspective, my experience of
faith is not contingent on propositional statements but rather in that firm and certain knowledge which I have indeed experienced when seized and compelled by agape.
In the Light of Agape presents a compelling way forward. I read each application of the vocabulary to new topics of faith or contemporary issues, eager to learn and practice the approach. Since this is a significantly new way of thinking for me, I found the repeated setup and application of the agapeic framing essential to gaining fluency.
Frequently, in the essays, Greenway looks at a common interpretation of scripture, then explores how the meaning expands when read in openness to being seized by agape for all faces. I particularly appreciated his reorientation toward creation, the authority of scripture, parables, grace, and community. A letter from his time as a missionary in the Philippines presented one of the most powerful illustrations of giving, receiving, and grace I have heard. Greenway also repeatedly shows how agape ethics can restore the “spiritual heart” to modern philosophy and theology, ranging from Peter Singer’s animal liberation and Heidegger’s ontological being to Karl Barth’s universal salvation.
Greenway’s conclusion to the paragraph I quoted above perfectly captures my emerging hope for my own spiritual growth and for society:
Ideally, my neo-Levinasian theorization of the reality signified by “ agape” and my distinctions among faith, belief, ethics, and aesthetics can contribute to epistemological and methodological developments
that could spark another conceptual revolution, yielding a moral and spiritual Enlightenment that would free us from both religious and metaphysical dogmatism and enable unprecedented progress in our understanding of ethics and faith in fidelity to agape. (p. 173)
Greenway observes that the world trains us to look away from our complicity in violence against others, to harden our hearts to avoid its overwhelming condemnation and hopelessness. An orientation to agape—in prayer, grace, study, and community—provides an opening for cross-cultural understanding, healing, and cooperation. Greenway’s hopeful perspective throughout the essays positively complements his compelling case that a universal vocabulary of agape is critical for Christianity and all faith traditions.
Michael Oehrtman is the Noble Professor for Technology Enhanced Learning in Mathematics at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of the non-commercial instructional resources CLEAR Calculus and a leader in the Mathematical Inquiry Project which promotes student success in entry-level college mathematics courses.
Christianity and Culture
Prototyping Ministry in the Borderlands: A Transformative Approach to Complex Challenges
Andrew Zirschky
Some years ago, a pastor I know invested significant time in a youth ministry basketball league that spectacularly failed to launch. The simple reason for the failure: games were scheduled at times when most teens couldn’t attend due to lack of transportation. This was not recognized in advance because young people had not been included in the creation of the league.
This illustrates common pitfalls in ministry planning: the tendency to invest heavily in ideas without first testing their viability in the specific context of the congregation and community and failing to include the voices, perspectives, and ideas of those to whom the ministry should belong. This reduces people to mere objects of ministry, wastes resources, dampens enthusiasm for future initiatives, and erodes trust within a congregation. A powerful tool can prevent such missteps— design prototyping. With this approach, church leaders can save time, resources, and social capital while creating more effective and responsive ministry programs.
Andrew Zirschky, is director of the Master of Arts in Youth Ministry (MAYM) program and research professor in youth ministry at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He oversees the Progressive Youth Ministry Conference, which found a new home at Austin Seminary in 2023. With a focus on youth ministry and Christian education and formation, Zirschky earned his MDiv and PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he received the Arthur Paul Rech Prize in Theology and Pastoral Ministry. He is the author of Teaching Outside the Box: Five Approaches for Opening Scripture with Teenagers (Abingdon Press, 2017) and Beyond the Screen: Youth Ministry for the Connected But Alone Generation (Abingdon, 2015). He has broad experience in the creation and administration of innovative endeavors, particularly in youth ministry, including two programs at CYMT (Theology Together and the Innovation Laboratory), for which he received Lilly Endowment grants of more than $1 million each.
The Need for Design Prototyping in Ministry
Ministers and congregations today are confronted with a host of complex, interconnected challenges that resist simple solutions and often involve multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives. These challenges range from declining attendance and changing demographics to questions of social justice, environmental stewardship, and interfaith dialogue. Congregations face the profound challenges of fostering meaningful community engagement and living out a mission that is both spiritually grounded and socially transformative. Traditional approaches to ministry and leadership, which often rely on top-down decision-making and linear problem-solving methods, are often inadequate in addressing these multifaceted issues. Whether visioning new ministry falls to individual leaders or to a committee, it is vital to harness the collective wisdom and diverse perspectives of the community while engaging congregants in a collaborative, iterative process that is essential for navigating the complexities and nuances of modern ministry with the innovation and inclusivity needed to address the challenges and lived experiences of the congregation.
The Church’s Context of “Border Work”
As churches navigate the complexities of our contemporary world, they increasingly find themselves engaged in “border work.”1 This term, drawn from scholars of borderlands theory, refers to the challenging but essential task of operating at the intersections of different cultures, identities, and epistemologies. Today, no matter where your church is located, ministry doesn’t unfold in a homogeneous community. The idea of border work highlights the reality that churches now operate at the edges of traditional cultural, social, theological, and political boundaries. Today’s ministries are situated within a dynamic and often contentious space where diverse worldviews, values, and experiences converge. In her groundbreaking work Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa discusses these physical, cultural, and psychological spaces where different identities, cultures, and languages meet and intersect, often resulting in tension and conflict. Anzaldúa, however, wants to highlight the opportunity that such spaces afford because they can birth creativity, transformation, and a new consciousness. In these complex and dynamic contexts, ministry cannot be effectively guided by a rigid hierarchy. As Daniela Peukert argues, the only way organizations, including churches, can truly address borderland challenges is by honoring and drawing from the collective wisdom and diverse perspectives of members.2 Churches must embrace a model of ministry that is collaborative, iterative, and open to the creative and transformative possibilities that emerge when diverse perspectives are brought together. Ministers and leaders must transition from being sole decision-makers to facilitators of community discernment, fostering an environment where diverse voices are heard and integrated. Participatory approaches to problem solving that value the insights and experiences of every member, especially the historically marginalized, are crucial.
Ministry in the borderlands also resists the wholesale importing of ideas, programs, or curricula that have worked in other contexts. While these resources offer some value, the complexities and unique challenges of contextual ministry mean the days of plug-and-play solutions are over. Effective ministry in these spaces requires an approach that is sensitive to the specific needs, cultures, and dynamics of the community. This involves adapting, reimagining, and creating new practices that are rooted in the lived experiences of the people being served so that churches can develop relevant and impactful ministries that resonate deeply with their unique contexts.
By living into new ways of operating, churches can more authentically engage their communities and develop inclusive and contextually relevant ministries equipped to navigate the multifaceted challenges of a rapidly changing world.
The question is how? It’s one thing to aspire to such change, but how might we operationalize it? I believe one way is by embracing design prototyping.
The Epistemology of Prototyping
Design prototyping provides a unique and powerful approach to navigating the complexities of ministry in a rapidly changing world.3 While engineering prototyping focuses on refining one specific idea until it works—emphasizing the idea itself— design prototyping is about testing an idea (or multiple ideas) to explore and understand the diverse needs and perspectives of a community. Consequently, design prototyping doesn’t just generate new solutions, it creates a unique epistemological space, allowing us to know things we cannot know in other ways.
By shifting the conversation from abstract theorizing to tangible action, prototyping enables congregations to break free from established patterns and explore new possibilities. For example, prototyping a new form of worship that incorporates elements from different cultural traditions allows congregations to see how these resonate with various members of the community before full implementation. In addition to fostering new insights, design prototyping facilitates collaborative knowledge creation by bringing together diverse perspectives within a congregation. Traditional decision-making in churches often privileges authority, stifling innovation and excluding important voices. Prototyping, by contrast, is inherently participatory, inviting all community members to engage creatively in shaping the design process.
Arturo Escobar’s concept of the “pluriverse” can enrich this process by emphasizing the importance of embracing multiple realities and cultural perspectives within communities.4 Prototyping becomes most powerful when it prioritizes the experiences and knowledge of those who have been historically excluded from leadership and decision-making processes. By centering marginalized voices, prototyping brings a wealth of hidden knowledge and new perspectives to the surface, making it more likely the church can address complex situations with creativity and inclusivity.
The playful nature of design prototyping further enhances its epistemological power. By encouraging experimentation in a low-stakes environment, prototyping reduces anxiety and stimulates creativity, allowing congregations to explore new ideas without the pressure of full implementation. This approach aligns with the Christian rhythm of death and resurrection, teaching congregations that good ministry does not have to last forever. Instead, it fosters a dynamic and adaptive approach that is responsive to the community’s changing needs.
By providing a way to explore complex issues through iterative and collaborative processes, prototyping offers a nuanced and holistic understanding of challenges and potential solutions, which is indispensable for the “border work” reality that confronts most churches today. Prototyping empowers congregations to honor the wisdom in marginalized perspectives, creating more inclusive and representative ministry practices that reflect the diverse needs and aspirations of the entire community.
Implementing Prototyping in Congregational Ministry
While the theoretical benefits of design prototyping are clear, implementation requires careful planning. Here are some recommendations for incorporating design prototyping into ministry:
• Create sandbox spaces: Instead of altering your usual ministry endeavors, prototype new ideas in a safe “sandbox” outside of regular ministry times and gatherings. This sandbox serves as a dedicated space for the congregation to experiment with new ideas in a low-pressure environment. By establishing this separate space for experimentation, the community can freely explore creative approaches, openly discuss what works and what doesn’t, and view missteps as valuable opportunities for growth.
• Start small: Begin with low-stakes prototyping projects to build confidence and familiarity with the process. This could involve prototyping new elements for worship services, outreach programs, or community events.
• Embrace iteration: Encourage multiple rounds of prototyping and refinement, emphasizing that the goal is not perfection but continuous learning and improvement. Little that is worth doing works perfectly the first time.
• Facilitate inclusive participation: Actively seek out and include diverse voices in the prototyping process, especially those who may be marginalized or underrepresented in traditional decision-making processes. Remember, you’re not just including diverse voices to give feedback, but you’re including them as active agents in crafting the prototype and the final ministry endeavor.
• Assign expiration dates: Recognize the temporary nature of prototypes and assign expiration dates to every prototype, no matter how successful (or unsuccessful) it feels. This allows for debriefing and congregational discernment before fully implementing even the best ideas.
• Connect prototyping to theological reflection: Integrate prototyping into existing processes of theological reflection and discernment, using it to explore and embody theological concepts in concrete ways.
• Celebrate prototyping as ministry: Prototypes and the prototyping process itself are meaningful forms of ministry. Recognize that the act of experimenting, learning, and iterating is a powerful way to embody faith in action. By valuing each step of this creative journey, the church affirms that ministry is not just about polished outcomes but about the transformative potential found in the process of exploration.
• Practice reflexivity: Engage in critical self-reflection about one’s own biases, positionality, and the power dynamics at play in your ministries. Unless these are named and known, the prototyping process will likely fall prey to the same old structures.
By implementing these strategies, congregations can harness the power of design prototyping to address complex challenges, incorporate diverse perspectives, and create more responsive and contextually relevant forms of ministry.
Conclusion
In a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, design prototyping offers a powerful and transformative approach to ministry. By engaging with a prototyping process, ministers and congregations can transform their approach to address the complex challenges they face. Rather than launching ministry based upon the mere hunches of committees or individual leaders, congregations can embrace the creative potential of borderlands, fostering innovative and inclusive forms of ministry that reflect the diversity of their communities while responding effectively to the multifaceted challenges they face.
NOTES
1 Theorists who talk about the nature of “border work” include: Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Celia Haig-Brown, “Continuing collaborative knowledge production: knowing when where why and how,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2001): 19–32; Celia Haig-Brown and Jo-Ann Archibald, “Transforming First Nations research with respect and power.” Qualitative Studies in Education 9, no. 3 (1996): 245–267; Margaret Somerville and Tony Perkins, “Border work in the contact zone: thinking indigenous/non-indigenous collaboration spatially,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 24, no. 3 (2003): 253-266.
2 Daniela Peukert, Design Methods for Collaborative Knowledge Production in Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research. (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2022).
3 For a rich but highly academic exploration of design prototyping see, Peukert.
4 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. (Duke University Press, 2018).
José R. Irizarry, President
Board of Trustees
Denice Nance Pierce (MATS’11)
Lee Ardell
Thomas Christian Currie
James A. DeMent (MDiv’17)
Jill Duffield (DMin’13)
Britta Martin Dukes (MDiv’05)
Peg Fall-Corbitt (CIM’20)
Jackson Farrow Jr.
G. Archer Frierson II
Jasiel Hernandez (MDiv’18)
Cyril Hollingsworth (CIM’16)
Ora Houston
David Jensen
Shawn Kang
John A. Kenney (CIM’20)
Keatan A. King
Steve LeBlanc
Steve Miller (MDiv’15)
Lisa Juica Perkins (MDiv’11)
Mark B. Ramsey
Stephen J. Rhoades
Sharon Risher (MDiv’07)
Pamela Rivera
Kenneth Snodgrass (MATS'16)
John L. Van Osdall
Michael Waschevski (DMin’03)
Sallie Sampsell Watson (MDiv’87)
Elizabeth C. Williams
John Williams (MDiv'87)
Rachel Wright
Shirley Zsohar
Trustees Emeriti
Cassandra C. Carr, Lyndon L. Olson, B.W. Payne, Max Sherman
