What Is Biblical Love? — MacDonald on Love That Heals
⏱ 15 min read
The English word love has been doing too much work for too long. By the time the modern Christian woman picks it up on a Sunday morning — God is love, love your neighbour, love one another — the word is carrying romantic films, parenting books, friendship advice, self-help slogans, and centuries of theology, all at once. No single word can carry that load and stay precise. So the woman who has been asking, quietly, what is biblical love and how would I know I was operating from it has not been overthinking the question. She has been noticing, accurately, that the word has gone slightly thin from being asked to mean too many different things.
This is the slow version of the answer. George MacDonald, the nineteenth-century Scottish minister and writer whose Unspoken Sermons shaped C. S. Lewis and a long line of contemplative writers after him, was one of the most careful pastoral theologians of love the English-speaking church has produced. MacDonald spent decades trying to disentangle the word love from the sentimental uses it had already acquired in Victorian piety, and to anchor it back in the heart of the Father — where, in scripture, the definition actually lives. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow doctrinal reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
The question what is biblical love is, in MacDonald’s hand, not first a question about feeling. It is a question about where the love comes from — and where it is going. Biblical love, in MacDonald’s reading, is the outflow of the Father’s heart toward His creature, taking up residence in the creature, and then flowing through the creature back toward God and outward toward other creatures. The love is His before it is yours. The love passes through you on its way somewhere else. The love heals what it passes through, including you. (For the heaven-companion to this love essay, what is heaven like? — Edwards on the world of love walks Edwards’s parallel account of love as the eternal atmosphere. For the joy-companion, what is biblical joy? — Edwards on the joy that holds walks the affection that grows in the same soil. And if the love question has surfaced specifically around marriage and waiting, what does the Bible say about a future spouse? — de Sales on devout love is the de Sales companion essay.)
The thing biblical love is not, before we begin: it is not first a feeling. It contains feeling. It produces feeling. The feeling is not the substance. MacDonald spent a lifetime saying this, gently and repeatedly, to a Victorian piety that was as prone as the modern bookshop is to confusing the warm emotion with the deeper thing. Read his work for any length of time and you will find him patiently pointing past the feeling to the Father’s will toward you — which is the real material biblical love is made of.
The first passage: holiness is just another name for happiness
“This is, even here in the wilderness, ‘the Highway of Holiness: the ransomed of the Lord shall come with singing; the redeemed shall walk there; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness.’ Do all God’s children understand this? — that holiness is just another name, the true name, that God gives for happiness; that it is indeed unutterable blessedness to know that God does make us holy, that our holiness is in Christ, that Christ’s Holy Spirit is within us.”
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons Vol. II
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly. Notice the unfamiliar pairing.
Holiness is just another name, the true name, that God gives for happiness. This is not a sentence the modern bookshop puts on a mug. The bookshop knows love and happiness belong together; it does not know that holiness belongs in the same sentence. MacDonald is doing patient theological work here. He is naming the structure of the love the Father has toward His creature, and inside that love, the Father’s will is not to keep us at a polite moral distance — it is to make us whole. Holy and whole are the same word in their roots. The Father’s love wants the soul to become whole, and the wholeness is what the Bible calls holiness, and the wholeness is what the soul, in its deepest unspoken centre, has been wanting the whole time.
This is the first move in MacDonald’s definition of biblical love. The Father’s love toward the creature is not the love of an indulgent parent who only wants the child’s surface comfort. It is the love of a Father who wants the child to be healed — to be made whole in every place the soul has been quietly broken — and who is willing to walk the long slow process of the healing with the child for as many decades as the healing requires. The love is the long patience of the One who will not stop until the wholeness has come.
For the modern Christian woman, this changes the way the difficult seasons read. The Father’s love has been operating in the long slow stretches when nothing seemed to be happening. The love was not absent during the hard years; the love was healing something the woman could not see being healed. The love that heals does not always look like a comfortable love at the time. It looks, often, like a love that lets the wound be touched again so the wound can finally finish closing. MacDonald is not romantic about this. He has been a pastor long enough to know that the love that heals is sometimes the love that exposes — and that the exposing, undertaken by the Father, is one of the most tender expressions of the love itself.
Holiness is just another name for happiness. The slow practical version of this sentence is the discovery, over years, that the things the Father has been removing from your life were not the sources of your happiness; they were the obstacles to it. The love that healed you of them was love. The pain of the removal was the love’s working method, not its absence. You did not feel loved at the time. You were being loved more deeply than the comfortable version of love could have managed. This is the first definition. Biblical love is the Father’s will of healing toward His creature — long, patient, occasionally costly, always aimed at the soul’s wholeness.
The second passage: the will of love makes every loss into a help
The second passage is the one where MacDonald names what biblical love actually does with the hard things the soul carries. It is one of the most quietly devastating sentences in the Unspoken Sermons:
“How shall I bless Thee for the lesson of this day, that there is not a loss or sorrow, not a pain or care, not a temptation or trial, but Thy love also means it, and makes it, to be a help in working out the holiness of Thy people. Through each Thou drawest to Thyself, that they may taste how, in accepting Thy Will of Love, there is blessing and deliverance.”
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons Vol. II
Read it twice. Slowly. Notice the careful phrasing — Thy love also means it, and makes it, to be a help.
MacDonald is making a hard claim here, and he is making it carefully. He is not saying the Father caused the loss in some crude direct sense. He is not saying every bad thing that happens is from God. He is saying something more subtle and more pastorally accurate: there is not a loss or sorrow that the love of the Father does not also mean — does not also take up and make into a help in the working out of the soul’s wholeness. The love does not stop at the edge of the hard things. The love runs underneath them, takes them up, and re-purposes them for the healing the love has been after the whole time.
This is the second move in MacDonald’s working definition. Biblical love is the love that takes up everything — including the losses, the sorrows, the pains, the cares, the temptations, the trials — and turns each of them into a piece of material the soul’s slow healing is built out of. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is outside the love’s reach. The Father is not standing at a distance hoping the hard things will not be too damaging; the Father is in the midst of the hard things, meaning them and making them into the means by which the wholeness arrives. This is what love does, in MacDonald’s reading. The love that heals is the love that uses everything to heal with.
In accepting Thy Will of Love, there is blessing and deliverance. The phrase Will of Love is doing the heavy theological work. The Father’s will and the Father’s love are not two different things. The will is the love acting. The love is the will felt. To accept the Father’s will is to accept the love. To accept the love is to receive the will. The two are one thing seen from two angles, and the soul that accepts the Will of Love in the difficult middle of a hard season is the soul that finds, in the acceptance, the blessing and deliverance the love has been quietly carrying toward her the whole time.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that re-frames the hard year you may currently be in. The year is not the absence of love. The year is, very possibly, the form love is taking — the long patient healing of something in you that the comfortable years could not have reached. Thy love also means it, and makes it, to be a help. The losses of this year, the sorrows, the pains, the trials — the love is meaning them. The love is making them. The love is working them into the slow wholeness of the soul that, on the far side of the year, will look different from the one that walked into it. This is what biblical love does. It does not promise the year will be comfortable. It promises the year will not be wasted.
The somatic — feeling for the place the love is currently touching
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is honest about what the love is touching in a way the mind is not.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor. Let one hand rest, lightly, on the chest — somewhere over the breastbone, where the breath rises and falls. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale.
Now ask the body — not the mind — a single question. Where is the place inside me the love would most like to reach right now? Do not answer in words. Wait for the inward sense to surface. It might be a grief the calendar has been hiding. It might be a small chronic shame that the soul has not let anyone, including the Father, touch for years. It might be a fear about how the year ends. It might be a relationship the soul has held away from His reach because the reach felt unsafe. The love is patient. The love can wait for the place to be willing. The love will not force entry. The body’s answer is information about where the love is currently knocking, gently, and where the soul has not yet opened the door.
The opening is small. It is not a dramatic act. It is one slow exhale. It is the silent inward sentence — come in here, too. Take one more slow exhale. Take the hand away. Continue reading.
A daily home for the practice — between the second and third passages
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built for the slow opening of doors the love would like to reach. A short passage each evening. Room for the honest sentence. No demand to perform. The doors do not open all at once. They open over months of small daily returns, in the soil of a daily practice that has the space for the slow inward opening. The love does the healing. The chair is yours.
The third passage: be thou my home
The third passage is from MacDonald’s prayer-poem cycle Diary of an Old Soul, where the doctrine he walks in the Unspoken Sermons becomes the daily prayer of the soul that has finally learned what biblical love asks of the creature receiving it:
“Be thou the well by which I lie and rest; Be thou my tree of life, my garden ground; Be thou my home, my fire, my chamber blest, My book of wisdom, loved of all the best; Oh, be my friend, each day still newer found, As the eternal days and nights go round!”
— George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly. Notice the smallness of the images.
Be thou the well by which I lie and rest. Be thou my home. Be thou my fire. Be thou my chamber blest. MacDonald is naming what the love that heals is for. The love is not for the production of religious activity. It is not for the impressive transformation of the visible life. The love is for home — for the deep settled inward sense that the creature has, at last, found the One she was made to live with. Be thou my friend, each day still newer found. The love that heals is the love that, after the healing, becomes the home the soul lives in. The wholeness was the means. The dwelling-with is the end.
This is the third move in MacDonald’s working definition of biblical love. The love that heals heals toward a particular outcome — not just a soul that is now whole, but a soul that is now home with the One whose love did the healing. The whole soul living with the Father, in the simplest possible mutual presence, is the final form of biblical love. This is also why the love feels, in the long run, less like a feeling and more like a dwelling. The feelings come and go. The dwelling stays. The dwelling is what the love builds, over years, in the soul that has let the love do its slow work.
As the eternal days and nights go round. MacDonald is gesturing at the long arc the dwelling lasts across. This is not the love of a season. This is the love that occupies the soul for the rest of its existence — across the years it has left in this life and across the eternity that follows it. The love that heals is the love that takes up residence. The residence does not end. Biblical love, in its fullest form, is the eternal dwelling-with the Father, established now in the small daily room of the chair where you sit with Him, and continued, on the far side of death, in the World of Love which is the home the soul has been being built for the whole time.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that quiets the chronic anxiety about am I loving enough, am I loved enough, is this enough. The love is not measured by feeling. The love is measured by the dwelling-with. The dwelling is small now. The dwelling will grow. The growing is His to do. Your part is the small daily showing-up to the chair — the well, the home, the fire, the chamber. The love will heal what needs healing. The dwelling will deepen as the healing finishes. The healing finishes, in the slow MacDonald-ian way, across the rest of your life, and the dwelling is the destination the healing has been making room for the whole time.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series sit at what is the kingdom of God? — Augustine on the two cities and what is biblical hope? — Owen on hope that anchors the soul. The three together walk the doctrines the daily companion practice of the workbook is built to feed.)
What this means for what biblical love asks of you now
Most modern Christian conversations about love ask the wrong first question. They ask am I loving the right people, and am I loving them well enough? MacDonald would not start there. He would start with a quieter question: have you let the love reach the places in you that have been quietly closed off to it? The love that flows out of you toward others is the love that has, first, flowed into you from the Father. If the inflow has been thin, the outflow will be thin. If the inflow has reached the wounded places, the outflow will reach the wounded people you live with. The order matters. The reaching is His before it is yours.
The work is not, then, to try harder at loving. The work is to let the love that heals reach the next place inside you it has been quietly knocking on. Slowly. In the chair. With the door opening one inch at a time. The outflow grows naturally from the inflow. The healed places in you become, over years, the places through which the Father’s love reaches other people. You will not have to manufacture the loving of them. The love will pass through you on its way to them, and the passing-through will be visible to them in a way you will not always be able to see.
What biblical love will actually feel like over a year of slow healing
The love that heals will not feel, at first, like the bright certain love the bookshop promises. It will feel quieter. Sturdier. Slower. The doors inside you will open one at a time — not all at once. Some seasons will be the love reaching a place you did not know was closed. Some seasons will be the love simply dwelling, quietly, in a place that has already been healed. The dwelling is the destination. The healing is the means. After a year of slow practice, you will find that the chest, in the small spare moments of the day, has become slightly more open — that the inward register of the name Father has become slightly more warm — that the small daily showing-up to the chair has become less effortful and more home-like. These are the slow visible signs of biblical love at work. Not euphoria. Dwelling. The Father has been moving in, quietly, while you were busy with the rest of your life, and the inward house has become more His than yours, in the way MacDonald spent a lifetime trying to describe.
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