Reflections on Loving God with Our Minds: Part 2

In Part 1 we asked how seriously we take the requirement to love God with our minds. In Part 2, we now want to ask whether loving with the mind is even possible. On one hand we typically associate ‘love’ with feelings. We know we love someone when we have good, warm, tingly, affectionate feelings toward that person. On the other hand we associate the mind with thinking, reasoning, gaining facts and knowledge. ‘Love’ and ‘mind’ appear to be about very different things. Some people even contend that love is not something that can be commanded because feelings happen to us; we do not choose them (try to get angry or sad or happy on cue and you’ll see the point!).

However, a proper understanding of the biblical view of love will help us see that ‘love’ and ‘mind’ do go hand in hand and it makes perfect sense for God to command love. The biblical view of (non-erotic) love is not feeling-based. The proper way to understand the kind of love that Jesus call’s his followers to is to look out for the best interest of another. Loving another person, then, means that I seek what is best for that other person. And this is to be the case whether I feel anything for that other person or not. Ideally, though, compassionate or affectionate feelings will accompany a mature love, but the feelings are not the primary feature of biblical love.

Now, if love is the looking out for the best interest of another, then it makes perfect sense that the mind is deployed in this activity. A person who seriously looks out for another’s best interest will have to be very good with the use of the mind to figure out what will produce that which is in the best interest of the other. And, of course, looking out for another’s best interest can be commanded as well because that activity is not a feeling.

God is right in issuing a command to love with the mind. Not only is it possible to obey this command, but how else could one actually look after the interest of another apart from using one’s intellect? Would you want someone looking after your best interest who could not use his or her mind well? I wouldn’t. God apparently doesn’t either.