The Biblical Account of the Justice of Agape-Love: A Theological Treatise on the Problem of Evil and God being Agape-Love (Part 1)

A "Kierkegaardian" Biblical Solution to the Problem of Evil based on God being Agape and His Desire to Create Finite Neighbors of Agape

The Power and Goodness of God Redefined through Lens of God being Agape, The Fall into Self-Love of those Creatures created in the image of the Self-Emptying One, and The 'Tragic' Self-Chosen Suffering of the Self-Emptying One who Knew no Suffering to Potentially Eternally Deliver those who Suffer in this Fallen World

Introduction: The Problem of Evil and Approach to be Taken to Resolving It
In this blog series I will seek to start with Kierkegaard’s portrait of what it means for human beings to be loving ones engaged in works of agape-love to ultimately address the problem of evil (suffering)[i]. The working presupposition for this is the following: God created human persons to be loving ones, because He who is agape-love created us in His very own image (Gen. 1:26; 1 John 4:16).  Given that genuine works of truly loving human persons by necessity bear witness to the very nature of God, a study of genuine works of agape-love within the human sphere will shed light upon what it means for God to be agape-love, once the universal characteristics of agape-love have been determined. From this point of departure of the necessary implications of God being love, the concept of God’s omnipotence and His goodness will be defined in harmony with His nature as an Infinite Being who is agape-love. These concepts will then be applied to the creation, fall, redemption, and final judgment of human persons, in order to address the problem of evil (suffering) from a Kierkegaardian perspective, which he believed could “resolve [this problem] quite simply” (Works of Love, 405).

Ultimately I aim to elucidate this solution to the problem of suffering by turning its focus from the scene of creation and onto the Creator, Himself, as the Self-Emptying One. I aim to elucidate how He freely choose to create a world inhabited by finite loving individuals created in His own image required that the actuality of the potential for departure from His vision of no suffering for finitude, an absolute potentiality ingrained in His very nature, was necessary by virtue of His nature. God knew that if our first parents failed this preliminary examination, they would encounter existential cross-roads accompanied with the potentiality according to His desire for us to be co-workers in agape-love. The possibility of this cross-roads required them to possesses the freedom to choose in self-denial to be this agape shaped self, or to not to be this agape shaped self (by willing to be a self-loving self). Even though God’s desire is that they ultimately will to be an agape shaped self reflecting the glory of His personhood as One who is agape, since He gives them the necessary freedom required to achieve this destiny, this came with the potentiality that this desire of His heart would bring temporal suffering on all His most beloved creation. However, such suffering is against His best intentions for them. Nonetheless, this best of intentions was conjoined with the highest gift He gave them which was the freedom that allowed for this existential crossroads to exist in the first place, to choose agape-love or self-love, which leads to all-consuming hate (anti-agape). As the story goes, by the free decision of His most beloved creation experienced the unknown consequences of following the deceptions that holding on to self-love is in their best interest (Temptation of Adam and Eve that led to a world of suffering). Nonetheless in His loving effort to redeem His creation (to permanently put a stop to anti-agape and the suffering it inflicts), He knew that even when He made a way for reconciliation back to this originally intended purpose by those who via grace freely choose self-denial, the potential remained for this suffering to remain indefinitely for those, who against the desires of His heart of agape, do not repent of self-love.

Divine-Human Works of Agape-love manifested through the life of Jesus Christ
In Kierkegaard’s book Works of Love, he ventures to bring Christian’s idealistic concept of the duty to love as Christ loves to bear on the concrete realm of actuality of human intra-personal and inter-personal relationships. In view of this, the focal point for finite manifestations of what is agape-love will be the oughtness placed on human beings intended to be like God and the exemplar for the fulfillment of this standard of human oughtness: Christ Jesus. Therefore, the life of Christ recorded in the Gospels gives us the clearest means for what it means for the All-Powerful and All-Good One to be Agape-love.

In Christ, agape-love was manifest as a continuous ontological realization. “In Him love was sheer action” (99). Every individual He came in contact with experienced what it meant to be loved because “His love was totally present in the least things as in the greatest” (99).[ii] This love is pointed out to not bring with it the demand for reciprocal love, given that even Judas and Peter were loved by Christ even when they both in self-love betrayed Him. Moreover, Jesus did not only teach His disciples to love their enemies, but He himself did love His enemies, or else He would be a hypocrite when He called His disciples to imitate His love (100; Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:32-36; John 15:12). This reveals that agape that underlies the Creator’s very nature bears an unconditional characteristic: it does not depend on reciprocal love. Accordingly, the one who does works of agape does them regardless if the recipient loves them in return; for even when Peter denied Christ, Christ remained the loving one who sought to save him (169-170). Kierkegaard describes this aspect of agape as giving it a “boundless” quality that did not require the beloved to change in order to be loved by him, although He in love sought to change him for his own good: “Peter is Peter, and I love him. My love, if anything, will help him to become another person” (172). Hence, agape-love does not refrain from loving the object of love if this object undergoes and becomes seemingly un-loveable, for this love by nature is not conditional. It remains equally strong as it was all along, for it is rooted in a non-discriminating outlet of agape-love that gives it in a non-merit-bound graciousness that does not hinge upon conditions required to be loveable, to love one even “when he has (like Peter who said he would lay his life down for Jesus, then is deny him without a direct threat to his life) changed completely” (173-174; John 13:37-38). Quite simply this agape-love “loves the person it sees,” for each person is a person and every person as a person is loveable to agape that does not differentiate based on character (173-174). The Loving-One knows that since no person is agape, they must be loved regardless of the active presence of agape, yet even so, any person can come to know and be transformed by agape, hence agape seeks all others out (173-174).

The perfection of Christ love was not that He was too perfect to find another as perfect as Him worthy of His love. Rather by His mercy and grace is the “perfect person who boundlessly loves the person he sees,” even the rich young man who would not become His disciple in spite of this man clear imperfections and weaknesses (174; Mark 10:21). Christ even wished that this young man would have become His disciple, given how it was for his best interest, and this wish held strong given how Christ knew that this man would refuse to accept His love that does not change. “His divine-human love was equal for all people, since it wanted to save them all, and equal love for all who would allow themselves to be saved” (100).[iii] Christ never became embittered even with those who struck Him and crucified Him, but even went as far as to say “forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). He “lovingly hid the multitude of sin,” given how “love strives in every way to hide a multitude of sins; and forgiveness is the most notable way” (287-289, 294). Therefore, His devoted concern for others also did not hinge with their continual faithfulness to him.[iv]

The chief revelation of agape-love in the person of Christ is that of its inherently freely self-sacrificial nature. Jesus Christ, the physical revelation of God, freely took upon Himself the suffering of the world because He “loved the whole human race”, in order by “the sacrifice of atonement” to tear the veil that kept fallen man from being His intimate neighbors in agape-love via the reconciliation of the God-relationship (101, 110-112, 436-437; 1 John 3:16; John 10:11; Eph. 5:2; Heb. 9:26). Just like the Scriptures, Kierkegaard points out that Christ came “to draw human beings to Himself, so that they might be like Him and truly become His own… He sought His own by giving himself,” and hence, God’s “love is a (sacrificial) giving of oneself” (264-265). Do we not read this plainly spoken where we read how Christ “emptied himself” even “to the point of death” for the sake of restoring humanity as His neighbors in agape (Phil. 2:6-8)?[v]

Such acts represented Christ’s intent that all would become not merely his ontological neighbors but neighbors in agape-love, co-workers and friends in bringing agape love to completion[vi]. Christ Himself was driven by a “need to love,” because He himself was agape, and agape in being true to itself has an intrinsic need to empty itself. In being human He needed to be with co-workers in agape-love to bring agape to completion with “to the point that he asked three times if He was loved… [even] more than these” (155-157). Christ sympathized with the human need to be loved, because He created them to be loved. Only in being love and becoming loving as He is loving could they come to bear the image of God. This was the reason they were created, and so He sympathized for all individuals who were estranged from love, especially because they were blinded by darkness that estranges them from His agape-love (155; John 12:35; 2 Cor. 4:4).

Kierkegaard shows how Christ, in contrast to self-love, made clear that the highest love exists to promote the God-relationship. Only in and through the God-relationship do persons become neighbors of agape, co-workers with God’s Spirit. And by this they can truly come into their identities, be free of despair, and truly be free (110-111)[vii]. Love that goes unloved becomes truly unhappy. When in failing to return love, the beloved becomes led astray into destruction, the most suffering that a truly Loving One can suffer is the terrible collision of the beloved weighing agape-love according to self-love, thereby rejecting agape-love against the efforts of the loving one to rescue the beloved from destructive self-love (110-111). Lastly, the agape-love of Christ teaches us the continual longing of the truly Loving One to abide intimately with the beloved, such that “the lover continually wants what he actually possesses – a longing, but note well, continually for what the lover actually has” (175). Did not Christ, who presently dwelled with His disciples pray to the Father saying, “Father, I want (desire) those you have given me to be with me where I am,” and He longs for this for their own good that they might partake more fully in His self-disclosure (175; John 17:24).

P.S. I adapted these blog posts from my undergraduate senior thesis at Houston Baptist University.

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[i] I should point out that he himself briefly addressed in a journal entry corresponding to the ideas found in this text (405-406).

[ii]Even the Pharisees who although experienced His indignation this was always tempered His heart that grieved over their hard-heartedness that kept them from believing in Him ( Mark 3:5). See also Matt. 13:14-15 that says if it were not for these hard hearts that they do not turn to Him to be healed, and hear it puts the responsibility for this with them

[iii] See Luke 9:24, 19:10; John 12:32, 47. In being the merciful and gracious Loving One, in relation to the very city that crucified him was the city whose inhabitants, He bemoaned saying, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it!” (Matt. 23:37).

[iv] When his disciples fell asleep after He pleaded with them to stay awake during a moment of emotional predicament, He still loved them and prayed for them (100; Luke 22:31-32, 41-46).

[v] Does not such self-emptyingness not merely refer to the act of the cross but the entire narrative of Christ that will continue eternally, as He self-emptyingly dedicates Himself to promoting the highest good of those who accept Him both now and into eternity, as our High Priest and Shepherd King who taught as that true leadership is sacrificial servant leadership (Phil. 2:6-8; John 13:4-16).

[vi]John 15:15; Hebrews 2:11-18

[vii] He does this by being the intercessory High Priest for the human race