Q. I came across the following quotes: “If you love everyone, your love isn’t worth anything,” and, “When you’re taught to love everyone, to love your enemies, then what value does that place on love?” How should we respond?
The logic behind the first quote seems to be this: If you love everyone, that means you can only love any given person in a way in which it would be sustainable for you to love every person. Since humans are finite, it is not sustainable for a person to love everyone heroically; therefore, if you love everyone, you cannot love anyone heroically.
One problem with this logic is that it does not recognize that our love for most people is potential. It is potentially heroic, as in the case of people who sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of strangers in situations of disaster. But ordinarily, we are responsible to make a small group of people the recipients of our actual love: our family and friends. It is sustainable for us to love them deeply and sacrificially—heroically. And this will only make us readier to love even strangers heroically should a situation call for that.
Another problem with this logic is that it conceives of love as finite. Human love is certainly finite. But divine love, even as it flows through human beings, is infinite. We do not have to worry that we are diluting divine love to the point where it “isn’t worth anything” if we spread it around among as many people as we encounter as “neighbor” (to use the term that Jesus used). Thomas à Kempis wrote about divine love flowing through humans: “Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, pleads no excuse of impossibility, attempts what is beyond its strength. While one who does not love grows weary and gives up, one who loves continues on and brings all things to completion.”
The logic behind second quote seems to be that if we treat our family and friends no better than we treat our enemies, then we are not doing anything special to show our family and friends how much they mean to us. The inference is that we should distinguish through our behavior between our enemies and our family and friends, in order to show our family and friends that we truly love them.
Once again there is a problem with this logic. A person who is merciful, gentle, and generous even to enemies will certainly be merciful, gentle, and generous to family and friends. Those qualities, expressed towards enemies, show what is inside that person, and family and friends will be very grateful to be in a close relationship with such a person. But if those qualities are expressed selectively, only towards friends and family, then they are instead indicators of restraints or constraints on behavior. Such selective expression suggests that the person might actually act in an unloving way towards family and friends if not for the social conventions governing behavior towards them.
Indeed, the principle that one should distinguish through behavior between friends and enemies suggests that as soon as a friend or family member falls out of our good graces, we can and should treat them in a less loving way, correlating with their new relational standing. If we become pleased with them again, then we will treat them well again. That is not love. That is manipulation.
So I would respond to these quotes by saying that as Christians, we have the amazing privilege of being channels of infinite, inexhaustible divine love to everyone we meet. Ordinarily we will make our family and friends the focused recipients of the active expression of our love, but honoring Jesus’ example of how to “love our neighbor as ourselves,” we will unleash our potential sacrificial love to all we encounter. We will cultivate the character qualities of a genuinely loving person so that we can naturally and spontaneously be gracious, generous, and merciful to everyone, no matter what relational standing they have with us. In this way, we can turn enemies into friends, and then not even have to ask whether we should treat them any differently.
Good Question 