“There is and should be an ethical denial of theological convictions—our ethics is the testing ground for the substance and truth of our religious and theological affirmations.”¹
Stanley Hauerwas

A question for the reader: Is theology a useful guide for romance? It’s known to mental health professionals that religious thinking can intensify delusions. Since those in love are particularly vulnerable to delusions, it might be true that it is not. An episode in my life suggests to me that, for people in love, straightforward, pragmatic considerations are more helpful than theological ones. But where does that leave us with regard to the truth of theological claims, especially as applied to eros? I think it means ideas close to the heart of faith are not as easily put into practice as we might wishfully think.

1. Theology in the Afterburn of Eros: Story

“He loved her for years, and never gave up.  Even when she rejected him.”

“Yeah?” We were sitting on the floor, packing the farm’s eggs into cartons. Outside the window, dead grey-brown vines hung on bare tree limbs and covered the ground. Snow fell slowly, gradually covering everything. We were both international volunteers at an alternative Christian community in South Korea.

“He wrote her a letter about how he loved her,” my friend continued. “It can work. They got together afterwards.” This was Giovanni’s best counsel for my heartbreak. Giovanni² was a youth pastor from Indonesia. His usual modus operandi in conversation was to concentrate on the dinky soccer game on his cellphone until he thought of some jokes to share. At night, he slept with the lights on. He had to sleep lightly, because he was regularly called upon to talk young Indonesians out of suicide.

I thought of myself as too theologically sophisticated to straightforwardly think that God had chosen the girl I loved for me. But I was too naïve and in love to not have experienced the preceding months’ flirtations and intimacy as exactly that. As if by design, it had begun my first night in Korea. I heard her laugh, saw the flash of her eyes, and loved the way she hit my shoulder and raised the pitch of her voice as we joked around. 

I summoned my own theological machinations to add to Giovanni’s advice. How could I bring the type of love Jesus commanded we have for our neighbour to my situation? Kierkegaard’s Works of Love helped me think through this question. When love is frustrated, we experience it as a need for a particular person, Kierkegaard explained. However, since everyone is our neighbour, we are forbidden from exclusively focusing love on this one person. Therefore, our true “need,” by which fulfilling we follow Jesus’ command, is to love those who populate our daily lives. Yet Kierkegaard had also praised unrequited lovers who persevered in their love.  Christ’s love too was unrequited – “while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled…”³  – and yet persevered even to the point of the cross.  

To my love-sick self, my would-be-lover had appeared to leave open a crack in the: “I just want to focus on other things. Maybe, we should forget about it for now.”

For now: in this crack, I was able to jam the ideal of persevering love. If I couldn’t win the love I desired so much, so be it. In any case I would still love her, and my anguish would be analogous to Christ’s on the cross. So as long as I also loved those around me in some way, there was no reason to not follow my friend’s advice and write a letter. 

I stayed up three sleepless nights writing the letter, as if my hopes rested on the perfect wording.  My letter did not receive a response. It turned out to be one more excruciating, apparently inevitable step away from the person I loved.

Was there anything wrong with the theological line of thought about love I was pursuing? I don’t think so. Yet, as psychologist Todd Grande pragmatically notes, there are no good outcomes associated with unrequited love.⁴ The right advice would have been absolute and uncompromising: move on. 

2. How does Experience Falsify Theology, Logically Speaking?

Why go beyond the pragmatism of Dr. Grande?  My experience poses a challenge to my theological thinking: the results of following apparently sound theological ideals were terrible. I descended into deep psychosis and in that state sent delusional texts which alienated me absolutely from the woman and others. How could these ideas be true? If they are about ethics – how to live well as a human being – then my personal experience would suggest that they are not.

Let’s assume what happened is evidence against my use of the theology. We could do a little exercise like they do in the sciences.  According to some models of scientific reasoning, a hypothesis (H) should entail observable consequences (O), and if those consequences are not observed, then that falsifies the hypothesis.

Premise 1: If H then O

Premise 2: Not O

Conclusion: Not H 

Take the example of the discovery of Neptune. John Adams and Urbaine Le Verrier, two mathematicians working independently, used Newtonian physics and irregularities in the orbit of Uranus to predict the existence and position of an as-yet unknown planet, Neptune.  For philosopher of science Karl Popper, if astronomers had not seen Neptune (O), Newtonian physics (H) would have been falsified. 

Fellow philosopher of science Imre Lakatos disagreed. Lakatos reasoned that scientists wouldn’t have abandoned such a foundational and reputable theory just because of one wrong prediction.  Why? Lakatos pointed out that one of Adam’s and Le Verrier’s assumptions about telescopes, the earth’s atmosphere, the asteroid belt, and mathematical relations (amongst many other things) might have been what was falsified instead.  

The problem with Popper’s logic of falsification is that H is never a stand-alone hypothesis.  It is always embedded in larger paradigms, theories and assumptions about the world needed to predict the observation:

Premise 1: If (H, P, T, A) then O

Premise 2: Not O

Conclusion: Not (H, P, T, A)

So, if a predicted observation does not occur, it’s the conjunction of all these things that is disproven, not H alone. Moreover, for a conjunction to be untrue, only one of the conjuncts need be untrue. That’s why Lakatos thought that Newtonian physics could survive a mistaken prediction. One of Adam’s and Le Verrier’s other assumptions might have taken the hit, as it were.

By analogy, our foundational theory is that cruciform persevering love is a virtue. Our prediction is that if we act according to cruciform persevering love, even in the case of romance, the Kingdom will be advanced in some way. For example, I had hoped that, even if my eros was unrequited, the person I loved would, in the context of a friendship, see my persevering love as a sign of Christ’s love for her. However, sadly, Not O.  Fortunately, also by way of analogy, “Not O” might falsify some adjacent assumptions, rather than the main hypothesis about love.

3. Guesses

Most of these adjacent assumptions have to do with difficulties encountered in the attempt to embody cruciform love. We won’t know by experience exactly which assumption is disproven.  For that, we would have to pursue each individual assumption at length. The best we can do here is make some good guesses. 

Assumption 1: I had the personal characteristics needed to adequately embody cruciform love in this context.

I have already said, although not perfect and combined with eros, my desire to be Christ-like was earnest. Yet, it might still be true that a personal failure to live up to the ideal of cruciform love is to blame for how things turned out.  Young and naïve as I was, the ideas led to a bad outcome.⁵ A different personality might not have had as much trouble in this specific context.  A more developed character might have had the strength and vision to better follow the path of love through the fog of eros.

It may be that cruciform love is not truly possible apart from other virtues.  I may have lacked the requisite prudence, not knowing the pragmatic truth that unrequited erotic love is never good for anybody.  I may have lacked the faith needed to let my eros love go, believing that I was watching the best God had for me slip through my fingers.

Assumption 2: I had the practices and institutions needed to apply cruciform love in this   situation.

Further, it may be wrong to assume that I had all the standard ones; a lively prayer life, family, mentors, church life, a supporting community. But maybe marriage exists because combining romance and cruciform, persevering love for one person is dangerous business. Marriage adds the discipline of a mutual public declaration and lifelong commitment that is absent in the context of mere unrequited love.

Assumption 3: We can expect to see the Kingdom advanced not long after we love someone.

Today, we tend to think about ethics by thinking about individual decisions and their immediate consequences. However, many philosophers – from Catholic neo-Aristotelian Alistair MacIntyre to secular feminist Margaret Urban Walker – reject this approach. They prefer something closer to Aristotle’s view that what matters rather is the whole of one’s life. 

From any perspective that only considers the events surrounding my love, the evidence against it is damning. It was painful, humiliating and alienating. That said, I can’t deny I’ve been exposed to a lot more of life because of my actions, and that I’m wiser for it. I’m not in a position to say whether this event will contribute to a well-lived life overall. Perhaps that is true for the others involved as well. There might be a sense in which we “needed” something like this to happen.

4. Conclusion: Point

The logic of falsification in this essay implies that at least one assumption about my attempt to live up to Christ’s example of love was mistaken. On the strength of this logic, we don’t know which. It could be all of them. 

The point then is a dual caution. We should exercise caution when trying to follow the example of Christ’s love, not least in contexts involving romance.⁶ And we should exercise caution when drawing conclusions about theology from bad outcomes. Both are more difficult than they might at first appear.