Love and Law: Friends or Enemies?

Love and the Commandments

Does love nullify God’s moral law? Many think so. The argument goes like this: “Jesus shows us that love is what matters, not the commandments. Therefore, just love people and forget the rules.”

But is that true? Does the New Testament ever assert such a thing? In some churches, this Sunday’s reading from Romans 13:8-10 might be used to answer “yes” to those questions. The passage reads thusly:

“Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Something to Ask Oneself

It’s easy to use St. Paul’s words to justify the nullification of God’s moral law, but such an interpretation is patently wrong. To make this clear, one should ask oneself, “Can I dishonor my parents (Commandment 4), murder someone (Commandment 5), commit adultery (Commandment 6), steal from someone (Commandment 7), bear false witness against someone (Commandment 8), and covet someone’s wife and possessions (Commandments 9-10), and then still say, ‘I am walking in love toward people.’”?

In the words of Romans, by no means! One cannot break the commandments and act as if he is still walking in love. In fact, the commandments are the very content of love. They show the one who wants to love his neighbor what not to do to him. (This includes acts of sexual immorality, regardless of how “loving” one thinks such acts may be.) Ultimately, as the above question shows, violations of God’s moral law cannot be called love.

The Nature of Summaries

Another way to arrive at a correct interpretation of Romans is to consider the nature of summaries. It’s written in Romans 13:9 that the commandments are “summed up in this word: ‘Love you neighbor as yourself.’” The Greek word translated “summed up” is anakephalaiosis, which literally means “recapitulate.” So what does a recapitulation or a summary do? Put simply, it distills the message or the plot of a larger body of literature. Notably, a true summary does not contradict that which it summarizes.

It would be awfully strange if the so-called summary of a story contradicted the story itself. Say the story was about a child who ran away from home but was sought after and found by his father (hooray!), but the summary says the child had neither home nor father but instead just roamed the world aimlessly (lame). The summary would be contradicting the story, and thus would be no true summary at all.

Those who would say that love can contradict God’s commandments are like those who would write a summary that contradicts a story. Try as they may, their summary will never be faithful to the story itself. They may get the characters’ names right, and they may even use the word “love” till blue in the face, but the plot will have been altered drastically, and the biblical meaning of “love” will have been misconstrued to the point of unrecognizability. The child who had run away from home will still be lost, the father who saves him never even mentioned.

Final Word

If one wants to know what love looks like, he ought to dwell on the commandments. As Martin Luther wrote in his Large Catechism, “These are the fount from which all good works must flow.” Even better than dwelling on the commandments, one ought to dwell on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), in which Jesus shows the much deeper meaning of the commandments. Or even better still, one ought to dwell on Jesus himself, who is the embodiment of love and the incarnation of God's Torah. He came not to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill. (Matthew 5:18) And so his words deserve the final word:

“Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:19-20)