Defining Love: Exposing the "Love is Love" Lie Through a Biblical Lens

Hey everyone, welcome to That's Good Question, a podcast of Peace Church and a part of Resound Media. You can find more great content for the Christian life and church leaders at resoundmedia.cc. That's Good Questions is a place where we answer questions about the Christian faith in plain language.

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That kind of stuff. I invite you to tune in at resoundmedia.cc. Great resource, especially as we head into the year 2024 and all that it holds for us. I'm here today with Pastor Mitchell. Hey, I'm really excited about this topic today.

We're still in a series called Calling Out Cultural Lies, and we're going to look at this topic of love is love, this lie that culture has wholesale adopted. And here's our first question. Some critics suggest that the saying love is love or love is love ideology is rooted in Marxist or Freudian thought. Can you explain these philosophical ideas that might have influenced the modern understanding

of love and identity? Yeah, I think that's a great question, because we want to, when we hear a phrase, a catchy mantra like love is love, we want to go to, one of the great places to start is to go to what's underneath it.

What are the ideas that are foundational for it and that are lurking underneath? So one of the books that's been big and influential for you and I is this book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by a guy named Carl Truman.

So if you're watching via video or on NRBTV, you can see that in my hand right there. If you're listening on audio, you'll have to imagine it. But check it out later, Karl Truman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Great book, goes through a lot of this stuff.

And we use that just as a helpful reference as we think through the ideas underlying this mantra. So like you said, one of those is Marxism. So to try to get a handle on Marxism, so a guy named Karl Marx, one of the major themes of his writings is about class struggle, the upper class and lower class, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat. And today I think we would say the oppressor and the oppressed. So we're in kind of a post-CRT world. That's the common language that we use today. So if you don't know what proletariat is, it's fine. But oppressed and oppressor is kind of what we use today.

Right. That's what you'll hear. And that's where that idea comes from. That's rooted in Marxist thought. It divides the world into these two categories and sees these two classes, these two groups as in a struggle.

So there's that and then you mentioned the other idea and Truman mentions this idea of Freudianism. Okay, so the psychologist Sigmund Freud who to sum up, I mean, made everything about sex, right? I mean, that's a, you know, as a layman, as a non-psychologist, that's sort of how I would summarize. He sort of made everything about sex.

Yeah, he has some pretty bad ideas about sex, too. I mean, just, I mean, even from a psychological perspective, psychology's really wholesale rejected a lot of what he's had to say. And it just went from psychology to philosophy, or like a worldview, which is kind of weird that we reject the science,

but we accepted that this is a good thing for us to how we should view society. That is kind of a wild thing in that area of study is that, yeah, psychologists have debunked him scientifically. And yet people still refer back to him. I'm sure anybody listening to this, you've heard of Sigmund Freud and people refer back to him as an authority, but I mean, professionally, he's been sort of debunked as these ideas were not really any good for understanding human beings.

And yet we're still going to tap on them and use them when they fit kind of the direction we want to go. I think that's what you've got going on here. So you've got kind of this blending of class struggle, the oppressed and the oppressor, and then bringing in Freud, making it about sexuality, using kind of sexual categories to talk about people wanting to have what they would call sexual freedom. And then they are oppressed by people saying that there are moral norms that you have to stay within. And you might be imagining already people would label Christians as that category.

So they say, for example, that the Christians are the oppressor who is telling the LGBTQ person would be the oppressed, who is just trying to do what makes them feel good and what they're happy about, what brings them happiness and we're trying to say that there are moral norms that actually put limits on that. So that makes us the oppressor and then the oppressed. Yeah, like you were saying, Marxism goes after the oppressed and oppressor and Sigmund Freud, his ideas was all about sexual freedom, that the best thing or the highest form of freedom is to have no sexual rules.

And so anytime that anyone's putting rules in place, it is it is the greatest harm to people by by marginalizing them by using these rules to to rule over them and that's not what the Bible is saying. The Bible is actually saying the opposite that these rules are for your freedom for for yourself flourishing and we'll get to that in a little bit, but these philosophies are deeply tied to this idea of love is love, but also the LGBTQ movement.

Yeah.

Yeah. So another important part of it is something we've talked about the last couple of weeks in this series, Calling Out Cultural Lies, is the underlying worldview of relativism, that there isn't absolute truth. So, right, this is, you know, so the oppressor is the person who's using quote unquote truth to oppress another person.

So the premise there is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. There is no such thing as absolute moral norms. So the only reason somebody, like a Christian, would try to impose a moral norm on somebody else is to just try to have power over them, whereas obviously the biblical world view would say, no, God created the whole world. God designed it good.

God's laws that he lays out for us in his word are good for human beings. They're not arbitrary. They're not mean. They're good for us. And so as Christians, we want to follow those ourselves, and we think the rest of the world ought to follow them because it's actually what's best for human beings. And so we're not trying to oppress people. We're trying to work for people's good. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't necessarily view it that way.

How would you see that idea of Freud's philosophy of sexual expression in human happiness? How has that shaped the way that our society views love, particularly in the context of the LGBTQ plus movement? Yeah. So when you look at love and we look at it in the Bible, there's a lot we could talk about. We could talk about the four different Greek words used to describe love. There's a lot we could talk about what the scripture says about what love is, but in our world, in the culture today, I think love has been largely boiled down to sex. They would say that's at least, maybe at the heart of what it is, or the greatest expression of it, and that the circular definition of love, love is love.

That's a circular definition. It's just trying to say that love is whatever you want it to be, and whatever makes you happy, whatever feels good, whatever gives you happiness and freedom, that's what love is. And so the Freudian thought of sex being at the center of everything has, I think, infiltrated the concept of what love is versus what Bible would define love is.

Yeah, I even think about going back to that that circular reasoning when that phrase love is love first kind of splashed onto the scene in culture. There were a lot of critics early on of that mantra being too wide, like what's the danger of using that idea of love is love, like where could that lead to? And I mean, what was that originally intended to mean?

And what could that mean? Or how is it being used even today? Yeah, when that phrase became really popular 10, 15 years ago, something like that, it was being used to normalize same-sex relationships, homosexual behavior.

And it wasn't really being used to advocate for further out forms of sexuality. But today they are. Today it's being used to advocate for normalcy for transgenderism. I'd say it even goes as far as normalizing pedophilia amongst the minors. Maybe I you know that's the problem of a circular definition. Yeah is The problem with a circular definition is not that it has no meaning The problem is that it can mean anything. Yeah, it can mean anything you want it to mean love is love.

Gives so much room for you to take it in any direction you want to take it So yeah, it could be about adults and minors. It could be about Humans and animals, you know, it could be about polyamory multiple about humans and animals. You know, it could be about polyamory, multiple lovers.

You know, it can go in so many directions. I think that's part of the problem of a circular definition is that it has an infinite amount of meaning. Yeah, and when it has an infinite amount of meaning, logically, it also should not mean anything. Right.

And that's the danger of circular arguments. I remember when it first came onto the scene, I was in class with some people and they were talking about this idea of love is love and I just kind of said like I think what you really mean is love is love as long as it's between two consenting adults that are human. You have to still put boundaries on it. At some point there is a place to put a boundary. As a society I think we we've seen that that's that is a good thing to put some sort of laws around sexuality. I think, you know, I don't think anyone here would say everyone should be able to act out sexually in any way that they want.

I mean-

Right, I hope not. Yeah, I mean, there's some really disgusting things that have happened to people that should be in jail for the things that they've done. Right, right. And so I think, so what you tried to do there was try to put a limit on it, which is helpful. Even in that conversation still, unfortunately, you've got love on both sides of the equals sign. You've got it on the word we're trying to define and how we're using the definition. Let's just bring in some scripture. This is 1 John chapter 4, famous passage about love.

I want to just share this and how the Apostle John defined love, and we'll see where we go from there. It says, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. So there's a key equation. God is love.

Verse 9, in this love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. All right, so the Bible says that actually the best definition of love is God himself. God is the embodiment of love. So if we want to know what love is, we've got to look at God. We've got to see who he is in his character. We've got to see things that he's done and how that displays his character. In the very next verse, there in verse 9, it said we've got to look at Jesus, the embodiment of God, God himself coming down in the form of a man living on the earth. So if we want to know what love is, we got to look at that. There is, yeah, there is a an absolute reality definition to what love is. The Bible says it comes from God. Yeah, and it's so much better than anything that we can ascribe to love because God is infinite, right? So he is an infinite amount of love and therefore he can be the perfect definition of it. He is love because that's part of who he is.

Where when we try to put anything that's created and we try to define that by something that's created, it's automatically limited and flawed, right? When we say, this is what this word means,

and its root is back in God, it can be the purest form of that definition, which is beautiful.

Yeah.

One of the things I've heard Christian teachers say before, I've used this definition, others have used it, is that to love somebody is to want God's best for them. Yeah. So it's just playing off that idea that love flows from from God. And so how do you love somebody you want you want what's best

for them, but specifically you want God's best for them. So it's not just you know, if I love you, it's not just I want what I think is best for you. It's I want what the Creator knows is best for you.

Yeah.

So going off of that, if someone's listening to this, and they're not offended enough to stop listening to this, but they're disagreeing with what we have to say. What would you say to them going off of that idea that what we're trying to say here is not, is really trying to provide what God's saying to them? Yeah. Well, I think I could imagine that if somebody is resisting to this, probably what you're resisting to is this idea that somebody else knows what's best for you, that there are limits on what you want to do that somebody else could impose on you. And I get that. I think, even as Americans, right, we have people who talk about liberty and freedom a ton. That feels wrong to us. The idea that somebody else could tell us what to do,could tell us what's best for us. We tend not to like that idea. But it goes back to, he's the creator. It's not me saying what's best for you. It's not a man saying what's best for you. It's not a person, it's God. So I think of when my wife picks up some Ikea furniture and brings it home and asks me to put it together,

I'm tempted to take the instructions and throw them out the window and just make it up all on my own. But you know what works best is when I follow the instructions. The person who designed it knows how it works best.

And I think the same thing is true for human beings. God designed us, he knows what's best for us. And so, yeah, I know we in our rebellious spirit wanna say, no, I know what's best for me. Well, really, we don't. And we know that, you know, if you're honest with yourself, you look in the mirror, you know that. You can look at decisions that you've made probably even in the last week and say, yeah, I did that, I thought it was gonna be great. It actually wasn't what's best for me. I think we all know by looking at our own lives, from an honest perspective, we know that we're not the best all on our own at making decisions for ourselves. Yeah, I think there are people in our lives too that we just naturally understand that they know some things that are for our benefit. People like doctors, when they say that you've got a broken arm, I usually trust them with that and say they're trying to do something that's good for me and it's OK for me to say you might know more than I do. That's an all right thing. Maybe that makes me a sheep, but you know, whatever. I like not having broken arms.

Another question. One of the criticisms of love is love movement is that it undermines the traditional morality of moral values of marriage and the family. How do you believe that this phrase

impacts those two institutions?

Yeah, of marriage and family.

So, I mean, God, right at the very beginning, Genesis 1 and 2 there, establishes that marital love, romantic love, is meant to be had between a man and a woman, and that that love is to be consummated in marriage and that sex belongs within marriage. So, you know, God lays out the institutions of marriage and family and that love, romantic love, at least, is supposed to be happening within those bounds, whereas the love is love mantra takes it out

of those bounds.

Yeah. And says it's supposed to happen wherever you want it to happen, whatever makes you as an individual feel good. We could go, we could even talk about how, you know, love within the context of marriage and family is designed for the good of other people, whereas love is love is really more selfish. It's really about how can I get the most, how can I get the most fulfillment, the most pleasure, whatever it might be. It's really about me getting what I want rather than fulfilling God's design for human beings or even what's best for other human beings. Yeah, it's kind of the disregard for any impulse control and saying that any impulse that I have is good and right and something that I should be able to act on. And we would say, you look at society, there are a lot of impulses that people have that we just think are flat out wrong. I mean, people who don't use their turn signal, I think that's a terrible impulse, you know, drives me up the wall. But yeah, I mean, I think you look at this even with the Marxist Freudian kind of lens that is thrown on this. You know, we were going to use those words a few times, but they're important because this the LGBTQ movement, some of these groups, their foundational documents go back to these guys, go back to people who propagate these messages. This is not just something that we're saying that's right-wing and trying to call people names by saying Marxist.

These are literally things that come from philosophies of Karl Marx. That's a good point. When we say that, we don't mean that in a derogatory sense. We just mean simply the ideas are coming from that place. Yes, R.C. Sproul wrote a great book back in the day, Ideas Have Consequences, or the Consequences of Ideas, I think is how he framed it, and that's exactly, every big idea has consequences, and we wanna just trace it back to where it came from. Yeah, I mean, and some of these, some of the people who are proponents of these ideologies will say things like, families are the worst unit, or used, worst institution because what they do is they impose the governments or the cultural norms of sexuality onto children. And these people again, they think that children should be able and youth, you know, teenagers should be able to act out any sexual desire that they want, that families are imposing these standards on them and that families need to be held accountable by the government, in fact.

So one of the interesting things about that is I think, I think that's really not a rejection of standards, it's a changing of standards. You know, what they're saying is, we don't like the family standards that are gonna be put on people this way, so we're gonna impose our own standards. To me, that's always one of the self-defeating ironies of their argument is trying to – they're trying to take away standards, but they're really not. They're imposing just a different set of standards, even in kind of what you articulated there of saying, well, we've got to get the government involved so that the family doesn't corrupt our young people. Well, you're just trading one authority and set of standards for a different authority and set of standards. these organizations that find their ideology in these Marxist ideas, organizations like the Black Lives Matter movement, when they were kind of first burst onto the scene, they had a clause on their website that said that they were anti-family for a while, and they later took that down.

But that, at its core, goes back to this Marxist ideology, this Freudian ideology that says families are inherently bad for society, which is I Mean flies completely in the opposite direction of what the Bible says. I mean you see in Deuteronomy 6 verse 7 this part of the Shema But it says that you must teach this to your children, right? There's a command from God to parents and And what that's saying is God's what that implies is that God believes that the family unit is such a good thing not only for kids but for society and that it's a great thing for parents to be the primary disciples or primary guardians and people the people who give boundaries to children that's that's a good thing for society and for for people so there's a growing emphasis on expressive individualism where personal fulfillment is prioritized over communal responsibility. How does this idea of love is love contribute to this trend and what are the the potential consequences for society of believing this?

Yeah, so like we were saying a minute ago, love is love focuses very much on self-fulfillment rather than others, rather than others' fulfillment. And God didn't design us that way. So a passage that comes to mind is in 1 Corinthians 6. Let me just read a couple of portions here, starting in verse 9. It says, Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers nor men who practice homosexuality nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor revilers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God." So God lays out what his kingdom looks like. It goes on, by the way, to say that we were those people before we received Jesus and received salvation. Yeah. But then further down says, do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God? You are not your own for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body."

So that's kind of, to me, the ultimate anti-selfishness attitude that the Bible gives us, is that we don't actually belong to ourselves. My life is not about self-fulfillment. My life is not about self-realization. My life is about doing what God has called me to do, what God made me to do, doing what glorifies him. He saved my life. He made me, then he saved me. And so my whole life is about him. And he tells me that my life is about loving him and loving others. That's just a summary of the law, right? Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. So that's what I exist for. I exist to love God and then to love others.

So it's not all about me. So love is not love. Love is whatever God says it is. And then as a result of that, or related to that, it's what's good for other people. And again, come back to what we said earlier.

It's what's good for other people, not according to me, but according to God. Yeah, it's so interesting that that passage talking about that we're not our own, but that we're bought with a price is in the context of sexual deviancy or trying to chase our own sexuality or our own sexual preferences. It's almost like God knew that this was going to be a conversation or that this is part of the human heart and that this is something that's gonna always be a passage we need to come back to to ground ourselves.

Yeah.

So can I ask you a follow-up question on that? How would you define what love is love is actually trying to say? What does that actually mean for us right now? When they say love is love, if you're going to put our biblical worldview on that and just cut out the circular arguments, what does that actually mean? Love is whatever I want it to be.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the – and I think that's our sinful nature coming out, right? We want to define it and we want what we want. Love is whatever I want. And so don't get in my way, don't try to stop me, don't judge me. Let me do my thing. Yeah.

It's such a dangerous place to be too, because when you say that, any affront or any criticism of that is an attack on what our culture views as the most important thing, which is your self-identity, your self-image. And that's… Right, and that's where we get the response language of hateful, bigoted, you know, whatever. Yeah, I mean, you try to tell somebody that there's a sexual norm,

you're going to get called some things. Yeah. They're going to come back at you, which I think, to me, again, just highlights their belief in absolute moral norms. They're just different norms than what we have. Their absolute moral norm is that you can't tell me what to do.

You've got to let me express myself, pursue my own happiness. So one of the things that we saw in the first text that we read in 1 John 4 was that Jesus is our perfect example of love. I think of what scripture says in John 1, so not John's letter, but in the gospel of John chapter one, about Jesus being full of grace and truth. So if we're talking about what love really is, one of the things that's critical to it is truth.

We've got to share with people the truth, God's truth specifically. We've also got to do so in a way that's full of grace, full of mercy. And I think those two things are, if we're Christians trying to figure out, well, how do we do love by contrast to the rest of the world? Those are two important words for us to remember. We're supposed to do love according to the truth. You know, if you don't have truth, then you're not loving somebody. But you also got to communicate it in a way that is full of grace, that's full of kindness, that really cares for the other person.

What would you say to someone who is confused why some churches would seem to propagate this lie of love is love. That there are some churches who are open and affirming of members of the LGBTQ, not just to come and worship with them, but to be their pastors or to sanction their so-called marriages as a good and holy thing.

Yeah.

I think, unfortunately, they themselves have become confused about what love is. So they're adopting some of the lies themselves. So they're seeing what Jesus says about loving others, about love your neighbor. And they're equating that with what the world says that that means, which is to accept anything and everything.

So instead of using a biblical, it actually comes back to definitions, is why definitions are so important. Underlying ideas of other ideas are so important. The foundations matter. So they're taking something that Jesus says and putting a worldly definition on it and saying, well, Jesus tells me to love people. And the world tells me that to love somebody means to accept them, whatever they do, whatever they believe. I mean, I remember honestly sitting in a meeting of a whole bunch of pastors in a denomination that I was a part of previously and watching pastors with master's degrees in the Bible say, make arguments about homosexuality, saying, well, Jesus just told us to love people. So this should be okay.

We should embrace this. We should support this. So I got to, I got a front row seat to watching people abandon what scripture says about sexual norms and about love and how to do love and actually just adopt this whole lie.

Yeah, it seems like the most natural thing would be to confront them with what you just read in 1 Corinthians 6. How do they address passages like that? Yeah, unfortunately, I think there's a lot of ways that people have tried to take words like in the text there where it said homosexual behavior or sexual immorality. They've tried to take some of those words and twist them and try to say that the word homosexuality wasn't in an English Bible until 1946. Yeah, one of the things that these churches who affirm these things will say is that the Bible is really not saying homosexuality, it's saying homosexual rape. And on the surface, that looks like maybe that could be the truth. The Greek word there is the word for soft. It was a kind of a not so great name for people who were part of this homosexual relationship, the one who acted like the woman in that relationship.

And the danger in taking that understanding of it is that if you're saying it's homosexual rape, really what we're saying is it's the one who was raped is the one who doesn't enter the kingdom of heaven, which is a really awful thing to say. Paul actually uses in other places in the Bible a word he has to make up for male better or someone who takes another man to bed because there wasn't a word for it.

It was so normal in culture. It was so widely accepted that, you know, homosexuality is something that Paul is saying all of this is wrong. All of this is sinful and evil. And unfortunately, there are whole denominations, there are whole groups of people in churches who really don't look at that. They really don't do the critical work of trying to explain that or trying to understand that. Just another reason the definitions are important, right?

It's becoming a theme. I mean, yeah, so if you want some books to look into a really deep study of it, Robert Gagnon, what's his book called? The Homosexuality in the Bible, something like that? Or a much shorter one, Kevin DeYoung,

What Does the Bible Really Teach About Homosexuality? Some great books just that they go right into the root Greek words and talk about the meaning of those words. And if you want an even shorter one, I'll toot my own horn. There is an article on Resound that gets into this very idea. Perfect.

That's why I could pull that off the top of my head.

But that's it.

Yeah.

Resoundmedia.cc, great resources there. Yeah, so Mitch has written an article on that topic. Yep. I've actually got a picture of a Bible before 1946 or whatever, and it shows the word there for – it uses the word effeminate instead of homosexual, which I think carries the same connotation,

but you know, depends on who you ask, I guess.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it comes back to the same temptation in the garden. Did God really say?

Yeah.

And so we've got to be able to study and figure out, is that what God said or is it not?

Yeah.

So, awesome. Well, hey, thanks for the conversation, Pastor Mitch. Yeah. Awesome, thanks everybody for talking about Love is Love. You can find more great content at resoundmedia.cc. We'll see you next time.