Human love has
little regard for truth. It makes the
truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the
beloved person. Human love desires the
other person, his company, his answering love, but it does not serve him. On
the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving. There are two marks, both of which are one
and the same thing, that manifest the difference between spiritual and human
love: Human love cannot tolerate the
dissolution of a fellowship that has become false for the sake of genuine
fellowship, and human love cannot love an enemy, that is, one who seriously and
stubbornly resists it. Both spring from
the same source: human love is by its
very nature desire - desire for human community. So long as it can satisfy this desire in some
way, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of
genuine love for others. But where it
can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, there it stops short - namely,
in the face of an enemy. There it turns
to hatred, contempt and calumny.
Right here is the
point where spiritual love begins. This
is why human love becomes personal hatred when it encounters genuine spiritual
love, which does not desire but serves.
Human love makes itself an end in itself. It creates of itself an end, an idol which it
worships, to which it must subject everything.
It nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself, and nothing else in
the world. Spiritual love, however,
comes from Jesus Christ, it serves Him alone, it knows that it has no immediate
access to other persons.
Jesus Christ stands
between the lover and others he loves. I
do not know in advance what love of others means in the basis of the general
idea of love that grows out of my human desires- all this may be hatred and an
insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. What love is, only Christ tells us in His
Word. Contrary to all my own opinions
and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really
is. Therefore, spiritual love is bound solely to the Word of Jesus Christ. Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship
for the sake of love, I will maintain it.
Where his truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for love's sake,
there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love…… Human
love can never understand spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above; it
is something completely strange, new, and incomprehensible to all earthly love.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
from his book: Life Together
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