Equipped to Love

Book Review (Norm Wakefield)

Sometimes I read books that I think weren't the best, which is always a risk you take when you open up any book. I had higher hopes for this book, and perhaps that's the problem - my expectations were too high to begin with.

So, this book is Equipped to Love: Building Idolatry-Free Relationships, and I saw it on someone's "2022 books" list and thought, "Yes, I could do with a book like that". Why? Well, the aim of the book is simple - how to equip people to love other people, especially those in our families and relational networks, with a love that is like God's love, and not an idolatrous love. I need that - I need to love other people better.

I think the core of this book is right, or its core insight so to speak. Let me try to lay that out simply.

God's love is characterised by giving, serving, valuing the other. "Worldly" love is characterised by getting. So, when we love other people with a worldly love, we are involved in some form of idolatry. For Wakefield, this idea of idolatry is either (a) looking to anything other than God to supply what only God can supply, or (b) looking to anything other than God as the ultimate thing to worship and adore.

So, practically, if I idolize my spouse, this is what I might be doing - looking to her as a source for what only God can supply - meaning, affirmation, value, etc etc are the most likely contenders here. And of course she will fail to do that, all our idols fail us. So, I'm going to respond by (i) blaming her, (ii) trying to manipulate her in various ways to fulfil my self-centred desires. Or, I might idolize my wife by making her the ultimate grounds of meaning and adoration in my life, which is also doomed to failure.

Wakefield also, and again I think this is right, talks about the way that our relationship to the true God can be idolatrous. How? When we treat God as the source of getting - when we come to God and try to manipulate him either through acting 'good', or acting 'bad', in order to get him to do what we want. He uses the metaphor of 'carving' (from carving idols) to describe "words or actions designed to get someone to do what we want them to do when we want them to do it." (ch 4)

So, then we come to what I think are two flaws in the book. Firstly, it's clear that Wakefield has had a fairly negative history with "Decisionism" - i.e. that form of faith and evangelism that basically says, "does steps x, y, z, pray the sinner's prayer, and then you are saved for life and God will make everything great for you". Wakefield rightfully takes time to take this theology to task as deficient, but I can't help wonder how that experience seems to weight the rest of this book in an certain direction. Which leads into my second criticism - I don't know that Wakefield thinks that we ought to expect anything from other people. I.e., if God supplies all my needs, then I shouldn't expect anything from anybody. This seems to veer into a kind of pietistic fatalism at points. Everything that happens, and every difficult situation, is interpreted as for my good, in God's providence, and I shouldn't expect human beings to provide any form of meaning or affirmation in my life.

This seems, on balance, to be an overemphasis on one point to the extreme. What ought I expect of my wife, my children, my brothers and sisters in Christ? Does God not supply some of our needs through relationships that involve mutual obligation not purely mutual giving?

I think the solution to this could have been found if Wakefield's book engaged historical theology a little more. Here, I think, Aquinas and Augustine are helpful! How should we treat fellow humans? What is it to love them?

I think if you cornered Aquinas, he'd say something (paraphrasing the ST a little), that love is the fundamental orientation to seek the ultimate good of the Other, and that ultimate good is itself oriented towards God, and the pursuit of God, ending in the beatific vision. So, I love others when I help them move towards God. That shouldn't be interpreted in a very narrow, 20th century protestant evangelical framework - evangelism and discipleship alone. But rather in an expansive sense - anything and everything that is done for the other, is part and parcel of the promotion of a God-oriented existence.

I think Augustine is useful in terms of distinguishing people as ends, means, and some third thing. He wouldn't quite put it like this. But we idolise people when we treat them as Ends in themselves. Why? Because if our orientation towards the Other ultimately stops in them, then they are our End. However, when we treat people as Means, as instruments or tools, we dehumanise them and subjugate them to our selves as End. That too is a form of idolatry, because we are using, or more properly abusing people for our own gain. Rather, we need to cultivate a perspective that sees people as Ends but not Ultimate Ends - the Other is a Person whose value is far more than instrumental, not just by degree but by category, and yet precisely because God is the Ultimate End, we must love them in and through God, and God in and through them.

To return to Wakefield though, there is an earnestness, and a biblical richness, to the book that pushes you to think through the relationships of your life and ask, "Am I treating this person as a source of things I ultimately ought to seek from God? Am I loving them with a love like God's love? Am I seeking to manipulate them, through positive or negative means, for my own ends?" and I did find that a challenging set of questions to apply to my own life.