Love in Hard Places (D.A. Carson)

 A companion volume (of sorts) to his The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, Love in Hard Places is D.A. Carson's discussion on "the love Christians are called to display." He makes no attempt to be comprehensive, but focuses on "understanding how the love mandated of the followers of Jesus operates in several different passages and in conjunction with other New Testament themes."  He breaks his work down into the following chapters:

1. Love and the Commandment of God
• Starts with Mark 12:28-34, the "double commandment to love" [God with all your heart, neighbor as yourself]. "[Jesus] is saying that loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength is bound up with reading, cherishing, meditating on, and obeying God's words," and "these two great commands expose our lostness, our moral inability and culpability, and thus multiply our explicit transgressions."
2. Love and Enemies, Big and Small
• Starts with an exegesis of Matthew 5:43-48, he finds "that the command to love our enemies is widely spread in the New Testament and surfaces in diverse and colorful ways. All of these diverse forms of expression are deeply challenging, but none is naive. There is even frank recognition that some of the Christian's enemies will be closest to home" [in the Church!].
3. Love and Forgiveness: Thinking about Basics
• Discusses various verses that look at forgiveness, a topic the Bible talks about in different ways (and needn't result in reconciliation, though that is the hope).
4. Love and Forgiveness: Two Hard Cases
• Based on previous chapters that lay the foundation, studies two hard and prevalent cases where love is needed and gives thoughts on how to approach them: racism and terrorism.
5. Love and the Denial of the Gospel
• Looks at the apostolic rebuke in Galatians 2:11-14 as he unpacks the reality that love results in a need for various types of correction within the church.
6. Love and the Intoxication of the Diligent Routine
• Looks at Revelation 2:1-7 as he looks at the reality that Christians can do and say all the right things and still have lost their love of God. How? "Love is more than self-sacrifice and altruism . . .[these things are] barren without love." [see 1 Corinthians 13:1-3] There is an affective component, and a great deal else. And "all the initiative is his [God's]; if we display Christian love, it is in response to his redemptive love." [see 1 John 4:19]

Why this volume? Because "to love wisely and well, to love appropriately, to love faithfully, to love in line with the biblical expectations of what it means to love, is commonly a very difficult thing to do." Indeed, the hardes place is "our own hearts and lives."

Ultimately, "the biblical passages that call on God's people to love- to love God, to love fellow believers, to love neighbors, to love enemies- simultaneously accomplish three things. (1) They penetrage our defenses and show us how selfish and loveless we can be. (2) They prompt us to reflect on the fact that the one Bible not only talks about Christian love in a variety of ways but also talks about God's love in a variety of ways, inevitably inviting us to reflect on the relationships between the two. (3) They disclose the subtlety and wisdom of the biblical texts. In so doing, they warn us against an easy proof-texting that makes one passage or theme, without adequare reflection on the context or on complementary or even competing biblical mandates, control the entire structure of Christian ethics."

I really enjoy D.A. Carson's books. His insights are profound, humbling, convicting, and ultimately hopeful, as he points to Christ. I especially appreciated his insights on 'small enemies'- those within the church- and his exegesis of the main passages mentioned above.

Rating: A