Leaving Dirt Place: Love as an Apologetic for Christianity

By Jonah F. Haddad and Doug Groothuis

Accosted by hatred and living out a dismal existence in Dirt Place, we humans have tried and failed to find the source of love. Many philosophies of love have proved powerless in satisfying our need for this pure and true thing. One after another, the world's religions fail to illuminate its reality and beauty. All the while, the overwhelming presence of evil has forced love into the shadows of elusiveness. But through the barrage of attempts to explain love's source, it is the Christian God alone who has brought meaning, value, and eternal significance to this oft-misunderstood virtue. It is the Christian God alone whose divine and perfect love was revealed in all its splendor in the cross of Jesus Christ. In Leaving Dirt Place, Jonah Haddad explores a multitude of philosophies and religions whose flawed accounts of love must ultimately yield to the truth of Christianity. This thoughtful and challenging apologetic presents a clear case for the true God of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781621890706

Jonah F. Haddad

Jonah Haddad received his MA in Philosophy of Religion from Denver Seminary. He lives and works in Lyon, France.

Book preview

Foreword

by Douglas Groothuis

With the Bible as their guide, Christians make the audacious claim that God is love, and that God demonstrated his love toward us by becoming Incarnate in order to reconcile us to God through the perfect life, sin-cancelling and demon-defeating death, and glorious historical resurrection of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. Therefore, the concept and reality of love vibrates at the living center of all Christian thought. This titanic claim should not be taken for granted. Neither should the concept of Christian love languish amidst clichés and intellectually superficial invocations.

While many apologetics books and articles have defended the love and power of the Christian God in relation to the miseries of this fallen world (addressing the problem of evil), few writers have made love itself a profound apologetic for the Christian worldview. This largely neglected task is the burden of this unique and much-needed work by Jonah Haddad. In a poetic yet philosophical approach, Haddad explains the vexed question of the very meaning of love. He then investigates which worldview best explains the objective existence of love by carefully and fairly assessing each live hypothesis (William James) available to answer this query.

While humans speak of love, yearn for love, give love, receive love, and have their hearts broken (and break other hearts) by the manifold betrayals of love, the very fact of love is often unexplained or (worse yet) explained away by philosophies that cannot bear its bittersweet weight. Haddad, however, does not shrink from this daunting task, but rather marshals the theological and philosophical resources required to set forth a compelling case that only the Christian vision of existence can give love its proper meaning, value, and significance—even (or especially) amidst all the tears, blood, and fears of a world east of Eden.

Love is an inescapable mystery that has stymied many of the best of philosophers, poets, and prophets. Yet love finds its answer—philosophically, theologically, and existentially—in the person of a crucified Jew, who, two thousand years ago, manifested the greatest love of all and who gathers all other loves under his suffering arms. As George Herbert wrote in the concluding lines to The Agonie (1633):

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

Introduction

If Love is There

Something rotten has found its way into the human heart and mind—some anger, hatred, or selfish acrimony that is set on destruction. Aggravating and irritating, it tears at the inmost places of the soul, and it gnaws on all that is good and lovely. This is the reality of the human condition: to love and to hate. This condition demands we be tattered and torn from within, to act in true and noble love toward our fellow human, and to act in vile disregard.

Hatred is all too prevalent. At times it brings the strongest of us to tears, and these tears flow harder and heavier with every augmentation of hatred’s power. It is sobering. It is numbing. Hatred devastates and ruins and comes to fruition when love is forgotten. It begins with abandonment and neglect. It is bred in the wake of indifference, disregard, carelessness, selfishness, and ill-will. Ironically, it takes its form under the nurturing direction of apathy.

A loveless life is like that of an orphan abandoned by his parents and left to hardship: a little one discarded like an old worn out garment, and for what reason? The reasons may never be completely understood, but it is certain that there is a good deal of selfishness that prompts such carelessness. The one without love will lay like the orphaned child, unattended in a cold unfriendly orphanage bed, and never hear a father’s gentle whisper, or feel a mother’s touch.

Such reality is all too real. I have seen those who walk away from kindness, from goodness, and ultimately from love. They drop whatever is left of love and leave. They depart to pursue selfish ambitions and never look back as the beauty of love decays into a corpse. The one who walks away has lived as if he himself is all that matters. And this is where hatred begins—concern for one’s self and contempt for all others. This is where indifference leads to selfishness, selfishness to hatred, and hatred to the detestation of all that is love.

The events of war often bring out such hatred. I remember reading, not too long ago, of a young Muslim woman whose life was devastated during the conflict in Bosnia at the close of the twentieth century. Soldiers entered her home and raped her, while her father and husband could do nothing to stop her torment. After these men had had their way with her and grew tired of their sport, she begged them to allow her to nurse her infant child who had been left crying on the floor. One of the soldiers struck the child, decapitating it, and threw this little one’s head in the lap of its mother.

¹

Something that tears just as deep is the cruelty shown to Jewish children during the Nazi invasion of Europe. Experiments were done on these children that I cannot even mention. Words should not be expressed for these atrocities, only tears. John Weidner, a Dutch-born Frenchman who saved many Jews during the Nazi invasion of France, relates the event that prompted him to action. He remembered being at a railroad station, were a group of Jewish women and children were being deported to Eastern Europe. One woman held an infant in her arms. When the baby began to cry, an officer demanded that she make it stop. Of course, the baby was distraught and no soothing word would arrest its cries. And so the officer intervened. He forced the child from his mother’s arms and smashed it against the ground, and when it did not die from the impact the officer callously crushed its head. Other soldiers only watched and laughed.² Weidner relates that he forever remembered the wails of that mother.

I have heard and seen far too many things that have made me question if love is there, anywhere. If we humans are to be honest with ourselves then I think we will find room to lament the lack of love in this world. If we are honest then we will question love. I have found myself asking of love, where are you? If love is there, then it shows itself far too infrequently. The human condition has made love compete with hatred, with indifference, and with selfishness. This has been the paradox of man. This is where we find antithesis.

With this in mind I wish to pose some questions of love. How are we to define it? Does love actually exist? If love exists, does a non-theistic worldview explain such love? If atheism fails to account for love, can love be properly accounted for in pantheism, polytheism, or theism? What is the valid theistic response to love? Why is love so scarce? Can this often absent love explain the human condition? Can it shed light on humans and their relationship to the divine?

Having decided to entitle this project Leaving Dirt Place, I have consequently welcomed laughter, shrugs, and mild bewilderment. This title may seem a bit strange for a book on love, but greater explanation will come in the following chapters. For now, Dirt Place is a land where love is elusive and its origin unclear. When I began this work I had little faith in love. I was trapped in Dirt Place where love could not be known. Love was nothing more than a frail affection or a broken emotion. My desire was to move beyond the dry and wretched landscape where love springs up only to wither again. My desire was to move beyond such arid places so as to find a true and pure and perfect love.

1

. This event was related by Eleonore Stump in her, Mirror of Evil, 239.

2. Meyers and Rittner, Courage to Care, 59.

1

Love: Obfuscated and Elucidated

Love Defined

Every few years I am subjected to the curse of the flu like a pestilence from the abyss. Some are worse than others in their intensity and longevity, but all are uncomfortable. It was but a few years ago that I fell particularly ill. Such was the illness that my body ached with every movement, and my head was afflicted with dizziness which made it nearly impossible for me to draw myself to my feet. Between the fever and the sweating I slept uncomfortably and dreamt the most hideous dreams. Each time I closed my eyes I would find myself lost in what seemed like Dante’s dark wood. There was always some peril to face: goblins, hobgoblins, and phantoms of every wicked kind. Though the illness lasted for nearly two weeks, the worst of it was at its onset. And on one of those first nights, my uneasy dreams took me to a land called Dirt Place. From where this ridiculous name came I do not know but Dirt Place was a most unusual landscape. The sun shone there but it was cold as ice. There was only dirt and sky, like in a desert but different still. Deserts are often like seas of sand stretching out to the horizon. Dirt Place was not like that. There were spires of sand and rock reaching like fingers to the sky, and in my dream I lay on the ground and wept for some unknown reason. The dream lasted only a short time but it was not easily forgotten. Even after my condition improved I still had a vivid image of Dirt Place in my mind that I have carried with me for many years.

There was something significant about Dirt Place. It was a land where love did not show its splendor. It was a dry and desolate place of filth; a land of discontent where everything was made frail. It was a withered place where grasslands had been burned away leaving only a pit of wretched sand and ash. Dirt Place was a land of weeping, where I hid with fear among the rocks. It was a spoiled land, and I think I wept so bitterly because I could not escape. In my dream I sought something. What I sought I do not know. I sensed that this land was once a place of beauty and that I was made for it but I could only lay there among the rocks, parched and angry. The dirt consumed me as I sat and watched the choking hills and flats lie lonely without hope. In the cold I watched the spires like crumbling stone tossed hard against the sky. That azure field brought comfort but even the stone like a lily unfolding kept me from escape. It was a prison, and the dry dead dirt became dear to me, for it hid me even as it seemed to lurk and watch me. Everything about Dirt Place was wrong. It was as if I had ungraciously lost my affiliation with a palace home. All that remained was despondency. All that remained was despair.

It was all a dream, and yet, like all the worst dreams it seemed so real. It reminded me of something, and now years later I know of what it resembled. Even now I look around the room or out the window and I see it: Dirt Place. I live in Dirt Place even now. I think every human being does. The good and the evil are real. Dirt Place had its sunshine and blue sky but it was a cage of stone and sand that seemed so corrupt and fallen. It was a hopeless, loveless place. In my dream I sensed that love was real, and yet, I could not grasp it. I could not reach out and feel it against me. Maybe that is why I wept. Even here, in the waking world love seems so elusive. Even here as in Dirt Place, the lack of love makes life burdensome. The love I sought in Dirt Place was something divine, and holy, and good. But this is not of what we humans often speak when we talk about love. I am not certain that the love I sought there can be real but still I must ask.

What is love? Much has been alleged of love thus far by scholars, romantics, artists and the like, and I often wonder how much more will be said as long as the earth continues its course and men stop to contemplate all things? It was Nietzsche who said, there is something so ambiguous and suggestive about the word love, something that speaks to memory and to hope, that even the lowest intelligence and coldest heart still feel something of the glimmer of this word.¹ Humans look for love in all the usual places. They identify it through relationships, through sex, through affection for various people, and through attachment to certain objects. It might be argued that every human being seeks love to some degree but what exactly is it they seek? Like the woman who sweeps her house clean in search of something lost, only to forget what it is that she is looking for, so it is with those who search for love without the slightest idea of what love is.

Those who do not believe in the existence of a God claim, even still, that love can be known. They have said that it is real and knowable. If there is anything divine in it, then its divinity is in its connection to man, the only god of the world. Yet, are those confined to earth all that is heavenly in love? Others have spoken of love’s celestial origin. When Christians consider the meaning of love they will often think of it in terms of its relationship to God. The simple statement, God is love, is spoken often as a word of encouragement and as a reminder of one of God’s timeless attributes. Love of this type is thought to be an essential predication of God. In other words, to say that God is love is to say that love must flow from God as a part of his nature, or that love pours from him as a part of his essence. In fact, love is of God as of his very character. To say that God is love is to say that God is within his nature loving.

If love flows from God as a divine attribute then it is certain that any demonstration of love within humanity is dependent on God as its divine source. But must love flow from God? Are humans truly some god’s creation, made in his image, and given moral capacities that reflect their divine origin? If God is good then one would expect to find goodness in humans. If God is just, then one would expect human beings to have a sense of justice. If God is love, then naturally humans will have a sense of love and know how to recognize this love.

²

To those who view the Bible as true, the existence of both God and love are taken as true beliefs about ultimate reality. Yet, can the existence of love itself become a proof of a divine love giver? Is love a mere illusion to which religious people allude? Can love exist apart from the divine? As Nietzsche said, there is something ambiguous about this word. In fact, it is so encumbered by ambiguity that the truer meaning must be extracted from its many lesser connotations.

Toward a Definition of Love

There is a French proverb that says, un amour défini est un amour fini.³ Yet, a proper definition of love must form the heart of any further understanding of love’s existence and its relationship to both God and humans. Certainly, and most basically, love is not some corporeal object. It is not something that one might hold in the hand or toss in the air. It is not something to be hung on the wall and admired, like the work of Rembrandt or Monet. It is not a mere thing but has been seen often as some kind of intellectual or emotional attachment toward something or someone.

In his book, The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis identifies love within two categories. First there are the natural loves. These loves consist of what Lewis describes as liking, affection, friendship and eros. Operating within this first category, humans often build attachments to everything from fellow humans to animals, and from objects to ideas. These need-loves not only demand sentiment but appeal at a most indispensable level to the human nature.⁴ We all claim such love when we speak of those things that are dear to us.

I can think of many examples of things I might claim to love. It is easy to say that I love other persons with whom I have developed close relationships. But I often claim to love certain objects of sense-perception as well. I claim to love the sound of a horse consuming a carrot or an apple. I have only heard this sound several times, and perhaps if I heard it more often I would not be so delighted by it. But strangely I find it to be an agreeable sound—a muffled wholesome sound more pleasing than a symposium of strings or a whisper in my ear. I could go on to say that I love the perfume of bread baking in an oven on any winter day when no other sensation could be lovelier. When this scent captures me it is as if something more than bread was seeping from the confines of the oven and moving about the room like an apparition. Like a siren of scent it would call me and for only the oddest of reasons I would feel as if I could only be satisfied if I were baked into the loaf itself. I could go on from here and say that I love a fire’s warmth