
David Cowles
Feb 1, 2025
“When we truly love, the Kingdom is already ‘come’ and God’s will is already ‘done.'"
(Paul was not only a great theologian; he was a student of the human condition. This is an updated version of an essay with the same theme, originally published October 15, 2022.)
“Love is patient, love is kind…It does not seek its own interests… It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are prophesies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing…So, faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (I Cor. 13: 4 – 13)
When we think of Faith, we think of belief in the existence of a benevolent God; but if we reduce faith to belief in God, we are putting the cart way in front of the horse. First and foremost, faith is the belief that there are objective values, transcendent but nonetheless operative, in the world: e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice, values that roll up into our concept of Good.
Faith is the belief that these values are universally normative. They would apply in any possible situation in any possible universe, no matter how alien from our own. Faith is our guarantee that Being per se is Good. Faith is the conviction that Being is rooted in Value. These values are valid for our spatiotemporal world, but they transcend that world; they are universal and eternal. Value is Being’s ‘non-negotiable demand’. Bumper stickers read: “No Value, No Being.”
Imagine the alternative; imagine that Value is not objective, imagine that the World is other than Good. Then per the inexorable judgment of Being (God?), that World would not exist. It would fail to meet the minimum condition for being. Remember your Genesis: God ‘saw that it was good’ and so the World is. The structure of Genesis 1 makes it clear that Being and Value are inseparable. To be is to be Good.
Second, faith is the belief that every actual entity that comprises our world exhibits these values, albeit in widely varying ways and to vastly different degrees. To be is to appropriate and reflect universal values.
Third, faith is much more than mere belief. To have faith is not just to give passive intellectual assent to a series of propositions, but rather, it is to live our lives as though these propositions were true. Faith, then, provides the measure by which we may, nay, must judge ourselves.
(Sidebar: This paragraph underscores the enormous chasm that exists between faith and belief. In our culture, I think it is quite common for someone’s faith and beliefs to be polar opposites.)
Faith is not contrary to doubt; it assumes it. We will always question our beliefs. Faith stares into the abyss of radical skepticism. After all, we are human. It is the nature of the human condition that we can never know with absolute certainty our existential fate, but from “the crucible of doubt” (Dostoevsky), we constantly recover and reaffirm our core beliefs (our values, our faith).
Faith does put us at odds with a host of modern thinkers – existentialists like Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre and analytics like Ayer and Wittgenstein. These thinkers directly challenge the core proposition itself. They deny the possibility of objective, transcendent value. What you see is what you get; it is what it is!
No matter how much they sugarcoat it, these thinkers place us firmly on the lips of the abyss. A 20/21st century version of human sacrifice? So enter Hope! It is hope that confronts the abyss of nothingness. We are born; we live our lives; we have experiences; we acquire knowledge; we make decisions; and then we die.
“Nothing beside remains.” (Shelley) Everything is wiped away, as if by a giant cosmic eraser. It will be as if we never were, and so we are not. We are like characters in Shakespeare’s Tempest:
“These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Whatever meaning we thought our lives might have had is gone. Your life is like a pattern drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch. One good shake and it’s gone…forever. That’s life without hope.
Marxists, positivists (logical or otherwise) and pragmatists find hope in the idea that our lives contribute to the up building of social structures, to the welfare of future generations, to ‘progress’ generally. Well and good, but science has shown that all social structures, every human generation, and even the cosmos itself will one day pass away. So, this sort of collective hope is ultimately just ‘bad faith,’ a futile attempt to find solace in what is merely a stay of execution.
Still others are content to say that we create our own meaning. Sounds cool, but as with other New Age memes, what does it mean? ‘To mean,’ by definition, is to refer to something outside, something beyond. On the other hand, if there is nothing outside, nothing beyond this “mortal coil,” then our so-called ‘meaning’ can be nothing but make-believe. We can’t create meaning if meaning is not intrinsic to the human condition. (Viktor Frankl)
If we had Faith the size of a mustard seed, we could move mountains. But we don’t. So where Faith fails, Hope takes over. Real hope accepts the truth of personal and cosmic mortality but does not despair. Hope rests on the possibility that there may be something about this world that does not pass away, an atemporal (eternal), negentropic dimension to Being.
Finally, we come to the ‘greatest’ of virtues, Love. Love finds us staring into the most terrible abyss of all, the abyss of isolation. What if there is just me…and none beside me? What if I am utterly alone in a meaningless and hopeless universe?
Jackie DeShannon was right, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.”
And as if my magic…or divine intention…it is right here when we need it. When faith has shattered and hope evaporated, love comes to the rescue. This is not eros, or philopatria, or even agape. This is the love that exists between fellow travelers encountering each other on this absurd path known as the World:
“Two Buddhas met on the road; they laughed and laughed.”
When faith and even hope quit, we can still find meaning in the love of another. Arguably at least, that love could be for a life partner, perhaps a pet, a higher power (AA), or God.
Love stares into the abyss of isolation…and finds ‘the other.’ The virtue of love affirms that there is ‘being’ other than me that is independent of me and enjoys at least the same ontological status I do. Love solves philosophy’s “other minds problem.” Who in love doubts the subjectivity, or the reality, of her lover? That is why the ultimate ‘proof’ of God’s existence is the mystical encounter.
In love, my recognition of ‘the Other’ as ‘real’ is at least as strong as my recognition of myself. Cogito ergo sum becomes Amamus ergo sumus. Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy, called it ‘reck’. (To be is to grant another reck and be granted reck by that other.)
But love comes with a terrible price tag. If I love, I cannot discriminate, I must love my neighbor as myself. Not like myself, as myself! I can have no ontological priority over the other. I may even be prepared to lay down my life for the other if called to do so.
Suppose I’m not prepared to grant ontological equality to another. I am simply too entitled. No problem! I just consign myself to live alone…for eternity. (That’s Hell, BTW.)
Love is the greatest of these virtues because it is the final frontier. The last chance saloon. It is what launches faith and hope into action. It is Love that I have faith in, Love that I hope for. That is why we say, “God is Love.”
Love lifts Faith and Hope out of the realm of the merely conceptual and gives them physical reality. There is no true faith or hope without love. In fact, love is the test of whether my faith (or hope) is real.
You cannot love God and ignore your neighbor; you cannot have hope if hope means leaving others behind. Love enjoins us to act out of the values that Faith affirms and that inspire Hope. If we love another, we must behave toward that other in accordance with the values we discover and adopt through faith. Likewise, the eternity that we discover in Hope enjoins us to care for others with a full realization that what we do here now, we do everywhere and forever (Kant).
Faith allows us to know the Kingdom, hope allows us to anticipate its realization, but love empowers us to instantiate the Kingdom on our patch right now. Love is the breaking of God’s Kingdom into our World.
In Greek Mythology, Cerebos, a three-headed dog, guards the gates of hell (Hades). For me, those ‘heads’ symbolize an unholy trinity: skepticism (vs. faith), nihilism (vs. hope) and solipsism (vs. love).
And what of God in all this? God is the eternal present and the source of all meaning. To the extent that we experience the present and feel our lives have meaning, we experience ‘the other’, and God is the archetypical Other. All meaning points to God. God is the only possible meaning.
When we encounter the other in fellow human beings, we encounter the image and likeness of God; and when we love the other in fellow human beings, we love God for God is Love. So, the spatiotemporal world is passing away, but when we truly love, the Kingdom is already ‘come’ and God’s will is already ‘done.'"

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.
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