A Book of Love for Everyone: Part 5, Love Demands an Ontology of Life

In Part 2 of this series I described how, for conservative readers of the Bible, reading Scripture as a book of love was mainly a hermeneutical journey. Progressive readers, by contrast, tend to endorse many of the hermeneutical moves and approaches I describe in The Book of Love. They embrace liberationist hermeneutics (see the chapter "Tell Old Pharaoh, Let My People Go"), progressive revelation (see the chapter "Mercy, Not Sacrifice"), take Jesus' moral teachings with absolute seriousness (see the chapter "This Is the Way"), and lean more heavily into human experience when interpreting Scripture (see the chapter "The Stories Won"). These are just a few examples of where conservatives hesitate, hermeneutically speaking, and where progressives go all in.

If all this is so, if progressives already have in place many of the hermeneutical assumptions necessary to read the Bible as a book of love, what else do they need? That is to say, what is The Book of Love offering that progressives cannot get from other books about how to read the Bible?

The answer is: ontology.

Progressives view themselves as already reading the Bible as a book of love, but by and large they struggle with belief in the ontological realities that justify and sustain that vision. Regular readers know that I've been writing about this for years: the relationship between ontology and the Christian commitment to radical and sacrificial love. Simply put, the Christian vision of love isn't possible without a metaphysics of hope. Love requires what John Haught has called an ontology of life. So, right at the start of The Book of Love, in the chapter "In the Beginning," I jump on this ontological issue using the life and witness of Maximilian Kolbe to make the point plain:

[W]hat makes love worth the cost? Especially, as we see in the story of Maximilian Kolbe, when the costs of love accumulate and the price tag becomes substantial. What makes sacrificial love sustainable?

This is where ontology matters, how you imagine the world you are living in. Love demands an ontology of life. Knowing that life is there to catch us empowers us to give ourselves away in love. For example, the pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas has long noted that nonviolent resistance demands a belief in the resurrection. His point is obvious. If there is no hope of life after death, throwing your one precious life away, like Maximilian Kolbe, in an act of nonviolent resistance is a waste. Given an ontology of death, a world where life is accidental and rare, preserving your life at all costs has to be your primary moral imperative. Self-interest and self-preservation must rule, as any sacrifice we make won’t ultimately matter or make a difference. The cosmos will end in death no matter what we do or don’t do. Ultimately, a billion years from now, no act of either love or hate will change the course of history. The atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the ontology of death this way: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” In such a world, self-preservation is privileged over sacrificial love.

The Book of Love imagines a different, better world. To repeat, what is at stake in Genesis isn’t science. What is at stake is whether your view of the universe creates a greater or lesser capacity for love. An ontology of life creates capacities for love through the hope that our small, daily sacrifices ultimately matter and make an eternal difference. No life given away in love is lost. No act of love, large or small, is ever wasted. We can love fearlessly and sacrificially because death is not our destiny.

Other chapters in the book continue to underline the vital necessity of ontology. In "The Great Pear Theft" I describe how soteriology (our beliefs about salvation) concerns our dire need for help. That is to say, salvation isn't reducible to moral performance but involves real rescue from real powers that hold us captive. In the last chapter of the book, "The War of the Lamb," I describe the role of eschatological hope in sustaining our moral efforts when objective signs of victory and success are absent, perhaps for the whole of our lives.

In short, for many progressive readers of the Bible, reading Scripture as a book of love is less a hermeneutical issue than an ontological one. And so in The Book of Love I give those ontological issues the attention they need.