How Do Non-Christians Love? Exploring the Idea of Love apart from God

In The City of God, Augustine discusses the problem of misdirected love. While we might assume that the object of our loves determines whether our love is aimed at evil, Augustine does not place blame on the object of desire but on desire itself. As such, he notes, “For avarice [greed] is not a fault inherent in gold, but in the man who inordinately loves gold, to the detriment of justice, which out to be held in incomparably higher regard than gold.”  

Augustine is not trying to categorize every aspect of God’s creation as lovable or unlovable—good or evil. Instead, he advocates for rightly ordered or directed loves concluding: “he who inordinately loves the good which any nature possesses, even though he obtain it, himself becomes evil in the good, and wretched because deprived of a greater good.” Misdirected love—like rightly directed love—works back on us. The course we set through love directs us toward some end while conditioning the way we love others and creation more generally as we pursue that end.

Understanding love’s dynamics, then, becomes crucial because love shapes the way we interact with God, ourselves, others, and the world. When misdirected, love can create obstacles and enemies. When rightly directed, it offers peace and contentment even in the midst of suffering. Rightly ordered love, however, is only available to those who know the Triune God (1 Jn 3:16; 4:7-8, 19). So, where does that leave those who do not know the Triune God? Can non-Christians love?

Rightly Directed Love

Before addressing the question of whether non-Christians can love, we need a working understanding of rightly directed loves. Rightly directed love is a love aimed at enhancing and extending the Triune God. Does this preclude us from loving anything else? Not at all. Rightly directed love is not exclusionary—it doesn’t limit what we can love. Instead, it informs how we love. We love everything in a way conditioned and shaped by our love for God. To put it differently, we love our neighbor and all aspects of God’s creation in a way that enhances and extends the glory of God.

What does enhancing and extending the glory of God mean? In part, it means that whatever else we are doing, we are always seeking to make disciples who live under Christ’s authority. For instance, rightly directed love doesn’t view earthly goods like justice, adequate provision, health, etc., as ends in themselves. While rightly directed love never opposes the distribution of such earthly goods to others, such goods are always viewed as a means of pointing others to the Triune God.

Rightly directed love doesn’t settle for helping the lost be more comfortable or for prompting them to be “less lost” by promoting moral living apart from God. Saying that rightly directed love doesn’t “settle” for these things, doesn’t mean Christians should oppose them. Instead, it means that we don’t view earthly good or moral living as ultimate ends. Rightly directed love can’t stop with justice or morality—it must situate them within a life of discipleship under the authority of Christ.

Rightly directed love, then, has God as its end. It points to and glorifies the Triune God prompting obedience (1 Jn 5:2-3; 2 Jn 1:6) and love for others (Rom 13:8-10; 14:15; 1 Jn 4:11, 21). It points us toward the holy God we serve and issues forth in a life trued to God as our reference point (Lev 19:1-37). Rightly directed love guides our interactions with others by faithfully positioning us in relation to the Lord.

Love and Non-Christians

Does this mean that non-Christians are incapable of loving others? Rather than offering a simple “yes” or “no,” we may say that non-Christian love will always be disordered and incomplete. It is disordered because non-Christians love for reasons unrelated to any ultimate purpose (i.e., understanding God and enjoying Him forever). It is incomplete because it can only love toward the limit of the good recognizable apart from God’s revelation. Non-Christians can love, but that love doesn’t true itself to God, nor does it love with the aim of drawing others under the authority of Christ for God’s glory.

Non-Christians, then, can love but not with the love of the Father (1 Jn 2:15). Because this love is misdirected, it is not a love that has been trued to God as the ultimate reference point. At this point, it may be helpful to think about different degrees of misdirection. Consider the relationship between the following sets of lines. The first set are parallel—they could go on forever and never touch. The right line is trued to the line labelled rightly directed love. The second set of lines is not parallel though the divergence between the two lines is less severe than in the third set of lines. The second and third sets of lines illustrate the challenge of misdirected love—they do not end at the Triune God but at some pseudo-ultimate end.

The pseudo-ultimate end is some object of desire other than God that becomes the reference point of love. The pursuit of this pseudo-ultimate end orients one’s life conditioning the way one allocates resources, sets goals, makes decisions, and treats others. Pseudo-ultimate ends do not have to be “evil” in the sense that we often think about evil—they can be “goods” like humanitarian efforts or justice. The problem is not that the object is unlovable but that the love of it displaces God as the primary object of our desires.

Non-Christians can love. However, their love is misdirected because it does not begin with an unqualified love for God (Deut 6:5; Matt 22:37; Lk 10:27). Non-Christians don’t recognize that love is situated within the authority of Christ. Non-Christians are not incapable of love but—as Christians once were—of recognizing that love demands obedience (2 Jn 1:6). As such, their love serves the world’s interests and ambitions rather than those of the Lord. Because their love does not have God as a reference point, it does not lead to Him, but to some other pseudo-ultimate end.

Conclusion

Love has a concrete, historical referent. Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf (Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 3:16) demonstrates the basic, self-sacrificial nature of love. Christ’s life demonstrates the connection between obedience and love (Jn 14:31). Love is not a matter of giving ourselves away to anything but of giving ourselves away to God—living under his authority as a sign of our love for him. Misdirected love can only gesture toward the sort of love we see in the life of Christ. To the extent that it gestures toward that love, it can be a powerful way of encouraging those who do not know Christ to move ever-closer to him.