Unconditional Love is Both Real and Necessary
Love, properly understood, must be unconditional—because otherwise, it would cease to be love and become, if nothing else, an expression of mere convenience.
Dennis Prager, with his characteristic to-the-point style, recently made, in fewer than 1,000 words (!), “The Moral and Religious Case Against Unconditional Love.” He insists that the concept is “neither biblical nor moral nor rational.”
He couldn’t be more wrong.
At the outset, it’s worth noting that I’m sympathetic to what I suspect is the true, albeit implicitly stated, aim of Prager’s article: to militate against moral spinelessness and the very real human suffering it engenders (e.g., soft-on-crime utopianism creates more crime victims than would otherwise exist). Like Prager, I certainly don’t want to see moral chaos and confusion expand (in fact, I’ve argued against that specifically in the context of pro-abortion politicians’ receiving the Eucharist). But attacking unconditional love is not the way to do that. And besides, even on its own terms—on biblical, moral, and religious grounds—his view that unconditional love is impossible or, if possible, then unwise and unethical, is simply incorrect.
Properly understood, love is “willing the good of the other” (or, perhaps even more fundamentally, “the conformity of the heart to some good”). Therefore, “unconditional love” is simply willing, maximally or without limit, another’s good, or, alternatively, totally conforming one’s heart to another’s goodness, not because of his merits as a moral actor but because he is a fellow creature made in the imago Dei, infinitely precious in the eyes of God.
Prager thinks this is nonsensical. For him, love is inherently limited in its scope, and how much we can expect from our fellows fluctuates based on how we behave. He writes:
If we gave everyone the same amount of love no matter how they behaved, what would motivate anyone to behave better? And would it be fair? If kind, self-sacrificing, responsible people were to receive no more love than narcissists, murderers, and thieves, the world would be a far more unjust place than it already is.
It is very telling that Prager begins his case against unconditional love with an analogy to paying someone a salary, one of the most conditional acts there is. In the labor market, you are given a wage in exchange for the work you do for your employer, and if your work fails to meet certain minimum benchmarks over time, you will be let go. So, too, in Prager’s mind, with the “love market”: You are given love by people in exchange for your good behavior toward them, and if your actions fail to meet their expectations over time, you will be abandoned, unloved, and rightfully so.
It’s a shockingly transactional view, and it also suggests that Prager, no dis-respecter of Scripture to be sure, somehow has failed to recognize the import of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, in which the landowner paid all the laborers the same day’s wage, regardless of how many hours they had worked. Prager probably scoffs, certain the landowner will be destitute in a week (if that) because of that sort of foolish behavior. He’s right, of course, as an economic matter. But love is not subject to the laws of economics (thank God). Prager totally misses the point, which is that what God gives us has nothing to do, fundamentally, with what we deserve (after all, God “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust”). Rather, God gives us what we need to be saved, namely, His complete, uninterrupted love, which we need for that reason even more than plants need sunshine to grow.
Love is a free, unmerited gift. Nobody “deserves” to be loved by anyone, least of all by God. And yet, God Himself, Who is love, nonetheless loves us first, so that by His example and with the aid of His grace, we in turn can love one another—even our enemies. (That sure sounds like unconditional love to me!)
Prager is not wrong to stress that obeying God is paramount. In fact, it is how we as creatures properly love God: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” But the converse doesn’t follow; that is, if we fail to keep God’s commandments, He doesn’t stop loving us. Scriptural examples of God’s reckless, self-emptying, context-less, and limitless love for us are many, which is why it’s hard for me to believe that Prager—who is 80 percent finished writing a five-volume biblical commentary—can be serious when he says that he “could not find a single direct statement about unconditional love . . . in the New Testament.” Here are a few from right off the top of my head:
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rm. 8:38-39);
“But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. How much more then, since we are now justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath. Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life” (Rm. 5:8-10);
the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the Samaritan (best understood as representing Jesus), helps a complete stranger who was left for dead on the side of a dangerous road and pays lavishly for his care at an inn;
the parable of the prodigal son, in which a father, who is scorned and abandoned by his younger son, runs out to meet him after that son comes back to him, ashamed, having spent his half of the inheritance.
Need I go on?
More than all of that: The central symbol and metaphysical reality of Christianity is unconditional love, namely, the Paschal Mystery—Jesus’ birth, life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension into Heaven. Nearly two millennia before the unfortunate secularization of America in the 1970s, Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, became incarnate of the blessed Virgin Mary and, for our sake, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. . . [and] he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
If that’s not unconditional love, then what is?1
Part of Prager’s error is that he wrongly conflates the attainment of salvation with the practice of unconditional love:
Some Christians respond that God continues to love the nonbeliever even as he descends to hell—because it is the nonbeliever, not God, who has sent himself to hell by rejecting God’s love through His offer of salvation. However, that hardly argues against God’s conditional love—that love (and the salvation prompted by it) is conditioned on the human being’s acceptance of God’s terms.
I’m not a theologian, but I do know that salvation basically comes down to our cooperating with God’s grace and abandoning ourselves to His Providence by obeying His will in the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, accepting all that happens as a gift directly from His hands. The fact that salvation has “conditions,” so to speak (which is an odd way to think about it, since the very possibility of salvation is in the first place a totally unmerited gift from God) is not an argument against the unconditional love of God—“who wills everyone to be saved . . .”—because they’re two different, but related, realities.
At bottom, it would seem that Prager “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” He fails to see how love is a radical subversion of the established, worldly order, not a way to participate in that same order, just with the benefit of a rhetorically pleasant, religious veneer. And he does not grasp that love, properly understood, must be unconditional—because otherwise, it would cease to be love and become, if nothing else, an expression of mere convenience. Love is at its most pure, most real, when someone, spurred to action by its power, becomes “the saint of Auschwitz,” taking the place of a fellow prisoner condemned to die by starvation, not when you’re pleasant to someone who’s also being pleasant to you—“[f]or if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same?”
Perhaps Prager is worried about being taken for a chump. It’s an understandable, but ultimately misplaced, fear. Loving a problem child does not mean being a doormat, nor does loving an ax murderer who has just broken into your house require offering him your neck. Why?
Because unconditional love is not incompatible with prudence. And just because such persons are hard to love doesn’t mean that unconditional love is nonsense. But what it does mean is that we need more grace to do it, to see that love is not, for the most part, like hugging a soft teddy bear. As pilgrims trying to navigate this tragically fallen and complex world, loving unconditionally is hard; that doesn’t mean it’s a fool’s errand.
Prager rejects, agape, and its true beauty is that it is both freely given to all and does not lose its distinctive power to transform each person touched by it—that is, it isn’t diluted as its shared; in fact, it grows. We know this because God has proved that He loves each of us in exactly this way by His Crucifixion, and yet, none of us would dare to say that His love is somehow less precious for that reason.
That God loves my neighbor as intensely as me is no bad thing, and if I think it is, I am committing the sin of envy—desiring not just to have more than my neighbor (which is mere jealousy and bad enough) but, rather, desiring to have more by the fact of my neighbor’s having less.
Prager’s most fundamental error comes near the end. He writes that “babies should receive unconditional love. The rest of us should want to grow up.” Prager thinks that it is desirable for us to be “adults” before God. But I submit that before God, we are all children, that it must be so, and that it is only by and through His complete and unwavering love for us that we can “grow up” as we should—paradoxically, ever more child-like and trusting of His care for us.
As a final thought and challenge: I wonder if Prager seriously thinks that we should love God conditionally? If God is perfect—perfectly good and so, presumably, perfectly loveable—what reason could there possibly be for me not to love Him without limit?
But that is exactly what Prager’s view entails: Even God Himself is on the balance sheet, subject to a bloodless, unfeeling benefit-cost analysis, and terminated if He does not meet our (human) benchmarks, just like a problematic employee would be.
How sad.
Prager is Jewish, but in his article, he took it upon himself to discuss the New Testament, claiming that it supports his position.
WOW! You said everything I was thinking and more. Prager is working his way to heaven but sadly will never get there that way.