"This is the decisive word which marks the distinction between man in disunion and man in the origin. The word is love. There is a recognition of Christ, a powerful faith in Christ, and indeed a conviction and a devotion of love even unto death-all without love. That is the point. Without this "love" everything falls apart and everything is inacceptable, but in this love everything is united and everything is pleasing to God. What is this love? Everything that we have so far seen to be true excludes all those definitions which endeavour to represent the essence of love as a human attitude, as conviction, devotion, sacrifice, the will to fellowship, feeling, brotherhood, service or action. All these, without exception, can, as we have just heard, arise without "love." Everything that we are accustomed to call love, that which lives in the depths of the soul and in the visible deed, and even the brotherly service of one's neighbour which proceeds from a pious heart, all this can be without "love," not because there is always a "residue" of selfishness in all human conduct, entirely overshadowing love, but because love as a whole is something entirely different from what the word designates here. Nor is love the direct relationship between persons, the acceptance of the personal and the individual in contrast to the law of the objective and impersonal institution. Quite apart from this thoroughly unbiblical and abstract wrenching apart of the "personal" and the "objective" or "real," love here becomes an attitude of man, and only a partial one at that. "Love" now becomes the superior ethos of the personal, which perfects and completes the inferior ethos of the purely real and institutional. It is, for example, in accordance with this view that one regards love and truth as mutually conflicting and gives priority to love as the personal principle over truth as the impersonal principle, thereby coming into direct contradiction with St. Paul's saying that love "rejoiceth in the truth" (I Cor. 13.6). For indeed love knows nothing of the very conflict in terms of which one seeks to define it. On the contrary, it is of the essence of love that it should lie beyond all disunion. A love which violates or even merely neutralizes truth is called by Luther, with his clear biblical vision, an "accursed love," even though it may present itself in the most pious dress. A love which embraces only the sphere of personal human relations and which capitulates before the objective and real can never be the love of the New Testament."


Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Ethics (pp. 52-53). Kindle Edition.

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