As Nijay Gupta observes in this accessible yet ambitious book, the language of love is ubiquitous in the letters of Paul, but largely absent from recent discussion of his theology. With The Affections of Christ Jesus, Gupta aims to redress this imbalance by demonstrating the centrality of divine and human love to Paul’s theological and moral vision.
As Gupta is aware, love is a difficult topic to circumscribe. In lieu of attempting a formal definition, Gupta elects in the book’s first chapter to offer an eclectic survey of modern perspectives on love, including treatments by the philosopher Simon May, the theologian C. S. Lewis, the feminist educator and social theorist bell hooks and the psychologist John Gottman. This chapter also introduces modern appraisal theories of emotion, which, Gupta suggests, are particularly relevant to biblical love commands wherein ‘feeling love works in conjunction with our minds and will’ (p. 31). It is here that Gupta’s own understanding of his subject matter is most clearly articulated: ‘To call for love is to invite someone to direct or redirect their whole being toward someone or something and intertwine their whole being with another’ (p. 31; cf. p. 207). Although Gupta does not acknowledge the point outright, readers will notice that such a description aligns more closely with Lewis’s idealised divine agapē than with May’s or hooks’ more modest conceptions of interpersonal love.
The following three chapters contextualise Paul’s love language: Chapter 2 reviews the recent discussion regarding the meaning of love in Deuteronomy; chapter 3 surveys terms for love in Koine Greek, especially forms of philia and agapē (which Gupta judges near synonyms); and chapter 4 treats Jesus’ teaching on love for God and neighbour. Although Gupta notes the peculiarity of Jewish and Christian usage of the term agapē, his focus here and throughout the book is less on the history of this specific term than on the biblical authors’ broader concept of love, which Gupta aims to access by considering ‘the whole range of terms in the semantic cluster’ (p. 73).
Gupta’s treatment of Paul’s letters themselves unfolds in six chapters. Chapter 5 surveys Paul’s usage of key terms and insightfully establishes the affectionate household as the ‘master image’ through which Paul articulates the love of God as divine father and love of fellow believers as beloved sisters and brothers. In chapter 6, Gupta highlights the fundamental role of divine love in Paul’s account of the gospel in Romans 5 and 8, which centres on Christ’s extravagant act of self-giving love. Less convincingly, Gupta argues in chapter 7 that, despite the lack in Paul’s letters of an explicit mandate to love God and his manifest preference for faith language, love nonetheless lay at the heart of Paul’s understanding of devotion to God. Chapter 8 offers a rich treatment of Paul’s summons to love among believers, love that responds to and is modelled after the self-giving love of God in Christ. To the question whether Paul would have extended this love ethic to include treatment of those outside the group of believers, chapter 9 gives an appropriately tentative positive response. Finally, chapter 10 offers a love-centred reading of Ephesians, which is, as Gupta notes, ‘by far the most love-saturated Pauline letter’ (p. 184).
A brief concluding chapter summarises the book’s key insights in a series of six carefully worded theses on Paul’s conception of love. It also describes with disarming straightforwardness the academic milieu from which Gupta’s project arose: ‘The environment in which I was trained for academic study often treated Paul’s gospel first and foremost as a theological system or framework … What I am struck by now, though, is the deeply emotional nature of Paul’s gospel, which focuses on the love of God in Jesus Christ’ (p. 210).
Many readers in both academic and ecclesial contexts will resonate with Gupta’s experience of a doctrine-forward induction into the interpretation of Paul’s letters. In this respect, The Affections of Christ Jesus is a welcome intervention. Gupta convincingly portrays Paul’s gospel not simply as a theological system but as an affectively charged account of divine and human relations.
Yet Gupta’s description of these relations and the feelings that accompany them is less than fully satisfying. Love is, as Gupta repeatedly notes, a difficult thing to pin down. Adopting a generalising ‘you know it when you see it’ (pp. 13, 207) approach to his subject matter permits him to cast his exegetical net broadly. But it does not allow him to draw very fine distinctions among the disparate things he catches. Readers seeking a more finely grained analysis will value the conceptual precision of Oda Wischmeyer’s Love as Agape (Baylor University Press, 2021), a study that also poses more frankly the moral questions raised by placing the New Testament’s discourse of love alongside modern critical discussion.
Moreover, by assimilating the ancient concept of love to the modern critic’s common sense, Gupta’s approach tends to elide the cultural and historical distance that lies between him and his sources. Gupta repeatedly and correctly notes that early Christian emphasis on the love of God was an oddity in the context of Greek and Roman piety, which more often cultivated a cautious and reverent respect for the gods’ power. He devotes less attention to differentiating the affective tenor of early Christian piety from its modern counterparts, which are, of course, rooted in very different social and thus affective landscapes.
Still, as an exegetical overview of an important but neglected aspect of Paul’s gospel, Gupta’s clear and readable text has much to commend it.
