The Table Video

Theologian Thomas Oord and Professor Alan Tjeltveit reflect on the desire to understand love, and offer their own definitions.

Transcript:

We seek love at a personal level and at an emotional level but we also try to grasp it at a rational level. And that’s some of the things that I wanna discuss this morning. So Thom, in an effort to define love and effort to understand it. Say a little bit about this deep human desire to understand the phenomenon of love.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think we all reach out for an intuitively know there’s something about love that we want, it compels us toward it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to define love but I’ve come to believe that even my best efforts can’t full encapsulate and capture everything that I intuit about love and yet I think it’s important because as a Christian, my tradition says that love of God, love of neighbor as myself is at the very core of who I ought to be, and so if I don’t have some intuition, some grasp, some understanding about love is, I’m not sure I can feel even half way confident that I’m doing what I’m called to do.

So I’ve thrown out sort of quick and easy definition of love. I’ll put it on the table. I don’t know if Alan likes it or not, but. I define love as acting intentionally in response to God and others to promote overall being. It’s that well-being aspect that I think is key to thinking about love. It’s the doing of good, it’s the promotion of good, not only between persons but I think throughout all dimensions of life.

So that benevolence, the focus of your definition of love is thinking about thinking about the other and caring for their well-being and helping them to flourish.

Yes and it’s in response to them. There’s a relational aspect that’s inherent in it because in order for me to act for the well-being of the other, I have to somehow empathize, I have to listen, I have to take account of what it might be that can help the other person.

I think love is psychological, it’s theological, it’s philosophical. And if you chop any of these dimensions out, you don’t fully understand that. Psychologists wanna chop out the theological and the philosophical and so, a few psychologists actually look at the term love. It’s something they’re studying. Well, sometimes, talk about altruism and altruism is kind of helping someone else from a pure motive. But, in fact, in rare instances only do we act from pure motives.

There is a line of research though that focuses on the relationship between empathy and altruism and shows that if you have a lot of empathy for someone, if you can really kind of feel what they’re feeling, in that situation then you’re more likely to you can act out of pure motive genuinely to help someone else. So that’s one of the strands of research that is kind of related to what we would say as love.