30 May 2025 Author Philip Parnham
I have been reading with great interest recent obituaries of Alasdair MacIntyre (12 January 1929 – 21 May 2025). MacIntyre, a Scottish-American philosopher, was famously critical of the Enlightenment project which, he argued, had divorced modern Westerners from both tradition and the good life.
As I understand it, MacIntyre effectively argued that whilst we still use moral terms like “virtue”, “justice”, “duty”, “rights” and “freedom”, these words have become detached from their moorings, the coherent traditions of moral reasoning and practice that once gave them clear and shared meaning.
In MacIntyre’s own words:
“What we possess […] are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived […] We possess indeed simulacra of morality; we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality”.1
Talking at Cross Purposes
To put it another way, if we do not have a shared moral framework, a big word like “love” can mean whatever you want it to mean. When we speak of “love”, we are often using the same language to communicate very different “truths”. So, as Christians we might all agree that Jesus extolled the primacy of love, yet use that phrase to justify widely divergent practices and beliefs as loving and therefore normative.
That is why I have learned to be a bit more cautious when I am around Christians who agree that “Jesus was all about love”. Chances are we are talking at cross purposes.
Distorted Views of Love
To illustrate my point, I have listed below what I consider to be nine common distortions. In everyday conversations any number of these notions may co-mingle with construals of love that I, for one, would recognise as harmonising with Scripture and our God-given humanity.
Remember that I am claiming the items listed below represent distortions of love. A distortion is a change or misrepresentation that twists something away from its original, true, or intended meaning or form. Deceptively, a distortion usually preserves a fragment of truth, but reframes it in a way that misleads or misrepresents the whole. Distortions are particularly hard to identify when they overstate or absolutise important and valid insights.
1. Secularised
Firstly, in popular opinion, love can do no wrong. Stronger still, love must break every chain. In liberal Western democracies as long as you avoid harming others and respect individual autonomy within the boundaries of the law, tolerance and pluralism are the order of the day. This is love as compassionate non-judgmentalism, set over and against harsh justice, bigotry and evil religion.
2. Sacralised
Secondly, love is the last idol standing in modern society. “All you need is love” – whatever that might be. When talking to people or watching films you often get the impression that love and kindness are almost sacred. It is as if Love is God (in contrast to 1 John 4:8, 16).
3. Substantivised
At the individual level love can actually seem quite “thingy”. It can solidify into an abstract ideal or fixed formula such as a “love ethic”. At other times love might be presented as a noble principle tied to land, tribe and soil, or most profoundly, an inner voice so deeply personal and compelling that it is elevated to the status of a supreme moral authority.
4. Subjectivised
Then there are those who would gladly belt out the anthem Love Me Warts and All (if it existed). Here love has become thoroughly internalised as a life force I feel and need. Frankly, it manifests itself as nothing more than self-love, reflective of baser instincts and often rebranded and justified with a plaintive: “I just can’t help it, I’m overpowered by love”.
5. Spiritualised
Today, love means nothing and everything. It has acquired a mystical, spiritual and esoteric quality. “Love” eludes definition. It just needs to be experienced and belongs in the realm of poetry, music and painting, denoting a state of ineffable rapture. We are, it seems, perpetually in love with love.
6. Sentimentalised
Tragically, we “fall in and out of love”. The term has become widely sentimentalised, reduced to the currency of feelings so that enduring loyalty to others and steadfast obedience to God appear all too quaint. If I’m not feelin’ it, it ain’t happenin’.
7. Sexualised
Celibates, virgins and nuns are ridiculed as repressed freaks because mainstream moderns are zealously pledging allegiance to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Thus, love has been romanticised, eroticised, and cheapened into a fleeting thrill. Grab what you can, numb the pain, eat, drink, and be merry. And have sex. Lots of it.
8. Sold
Love is now a consumer product or at least a vital additive which is sold for filthy lucre. It is a universal truth commonly acknowledged that Valentine’s Day is good for business—and we’re lovin’ it.
9. Superficialised
Shamefully, in the same breath we can declare: “I love scrunchies and that sports team…oh yes, and my parents”. In this way, love becomes trivialised, used so casually it loses all substance.
What To Do?
And herein lies my problem. How should I know that my fellow Christian and I are using the word “love” in the same way? You might forgive me for wondering sometimes whether we are even speaking the same language – so different are our assumptions and moral frameworks.
Real Love
Of course, none of the above is to deny that in the face of distortions such as these there are also authentic, human manifestations of love, that there is often plenty of common ground (we all recognise real love when we experience it), and that the Bible teaches us the real meaning of love. For, after all: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:16). But when we refuse to define “love” as we please, when we are honest about the need to filter out the distortions, it seems to me the real challenge is to recover the biblical meaning of love, rooted in the tradition and person of Jesus Christ, the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth. Only then, to respond to MacIntyre’s concern, can our moral language recover its truest power, and our lives, their deepest purpose.
Notes
1 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition (1981, 1984, 2007) in Chapter 1: A Disquieting Suggestion.
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