Liberal Love: A Theological Perspective

This essay begins with the methodological question concerning how theology can speak in an interdisciplinary context today about love. Theology's challenge is to correct for a narrow understanding of its task as the prescription of normative doctrinal claims by re-defining the discipline as the conceptual analysis of religious concepts. On this view, theology shares with other academic perspectives an understanding of love as the tension between opposing elements, particularly the tension between love as directed to a particular and love as an exhibition of a universal essence or principle. The concept in classic Christian theology informed by the tension between the particularity and the universality of love is atonement. I diagnose the classic theory of atonement as inadequately balancing this tension by representing God according to both wrath and love. I turn to the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), whose 1830 sermon Why There is No Wrath in God proposes a resolution to the tension between particularity and universality. Schleiermacher shows how love is twinned with wisdom in the concept of God. Schleiermacher understands redemption as a balance between the universal orientation of divine wisdom and redemption's actualization in the particularities of history as guided by divine love. A liberal theological understanding of love articulates a glimpse of God's liberal, and in this sense generous, love.