No one’s arguing that love isn’t the most central virtue of the Christian faith. You have to be a real contrarian to even try. Between the Greatest Commandment from the lips of Jesus, John’s assertion that God is love, and Paul’s ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13, that love is the highest calling is virtually unquestioned.
Yet “love” is ambiguous. We can all agree on its importance, but we can’t always agree on its implementation.
Greek famously complicates the issue with is multiple words for our one English term: philos (brotherly love, occurring several times in Scripture), storgé (familial love, only appearing once and in connection with philos), eros (romantic love, never occurring in the Bible), and agapé (by far the most common word for love). And that last one, unfortunately for us, is the trickiest of these words to nail down.
Once Christianity took off, agapé came to mean something radically different than it did before, so it’s difficult to grasp what Jesus and Paul meant by the term in its original use. Probably a good starting point is to read it as “prefer,” implying the choice involved and the selectivity of it. If you were transported to ancient Palestine, you might hear people express their agapé for pita and hummus or their agapé for a skilled carpenter.
Now, Jesus and Paul do give us a few indicators for how the word should be interpreted. Jesus, most notably, tells us that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Paul is a little more verbose when he iterates over all the manifestations of love: patience, kindness, resisting envy and pride and rudeness, submission, not giving into anger and resentment, integrity, and endurance (1 Cor 13). This is an eclectic list, fairly broad in scope, but it begins to steer us toward an understanding of the greatest Christian virtue.
Though it isn’t conclusive, this understanding seems to rule out “hard” love, a love that’s manifested through wrath or justice. That’s not to say that sort of love isn’t in some way legitimate, simply that it is not the picture we see in those definitions.
On the other hand, what is suggested through a love that chooses or a love that lays down one’s life is a love that takes on the traits of mercy and grace. This sort of love accepts and gives generously, sacrificially. And in exalting mercy and grace, this sort of love necessarily subordinates justice and holiness.
This is not to say that justice (understood as fairness) and holiness are vices, merely less central to the ultimate aim of the faith. Admittedly in Scripture, justice is often propped up as a goal for God’s people, but almost always it is in response to injustice. In this way, justice is a solution to wrongs, a fix for something broken; it restores humanity to the baseline of goodness expected by God. But true virtue, virtue that exceeds this baseline and lavishly demonstrates the character of God, is acting out of grace.
Love, seen in this way, is surpassing and transcendent. It is not content to simply do what is fair but seeks to do what is more than fair—to give out of oneself. Through this love, we manifest the love of God.