Yes, Jesus Loves Me
An Essay By Ashwin Afrikanus Thyssen
About the author: Ashwin Afrikanus Thyssen is a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology at Stellenbosch University, specializing in church history, church polity, and religion and law. His current research investigates the intersection of race, sexuality, and religion.
A rather familiar anecdote is often attributed to Karl Barth. The veracity of this anecdote, of course, is to be questioned. Still, this tale aids us in grounding the focus of this contribution. After delivering a lecture, the tale goes that someone once asked Barth for a summary of the gospel. His response, we have been told, was this: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
“Yes, Jesus loves me” is, in a sense, a word that affirms Christ’s love for young Christians as they make their way through childhood. Singing these words, they—and indeed, we who continue to sing it—affirmed and are affirmed in the knowledge of the Heidelberg Catechism’s first question: “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The Catechism, of course, offers this assurance, stating in part: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”1
With this anecdote and affirmation, I would like to set the focus of this contribution on love for and in our time. Reflecting on love in this historical moment—with crises in Palestine, Sudan, and other regions, and amid ongoing ecological devastation—demands a reckoning with the manifold ways our societies have become obsessed with individualism (at the expense of community) and fixated on rendering love as only an abstract idea. Doing this, the hope is to follow Barth in the notion that our “work, at any rate, [is] to know about this love, to join in the praise of God.”2 How may we, interpreters of Barth (who are also attempting to be faithful Christians), repent of the ways we have stood in the way of Christ’s love through obsessions with individualism and abstractions of love? How may we affirm Christ’s love for us and all of creation?
In 2022, the World Council of Churches (WCC) gathered for its assembly in Karlsruhe, Germany. This was done under the theme “Christ’s Love Moves the World to Reconciliation and Unity.” Meeting after the global COVID-19 pandemic, this gathering set out to continue its pilgrimage of justice and peace—celebrating the joy of walking together. Identifying this theme for the assembly, the WCC reflected on Christ’s love, noting:
It is rooted in God’s design for the unity and reconciliation of all, a design made visible in the incarnation of the love of God in Jesus Christ… Out of love for us and for the whole of creation, God became flesh, assumed all the suffering and passion of humankind and of the whole created order to heal us, restore us, save us, and reconcile us with God.3
This reflection, of course, is grounded in Scripture, namely Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15. For the Council, Christ’s love enables the Christian faithful to address the challenges of war, poverty, and ecological devastation, allowing us to recognize how they shape the conditions for misery, suffering, and death. Affirming the insights of the Faith and Order text, The Church, that God’s attitude toward the world is love, the Council contends:
This ‘foremost attitude of God’ is made flesh in Jesus Christ: in the compassion he lived in his earthly ministry; in the mystery of his incarnation; in his suffering, dying, and being raised again to new life; and in the promise of the future renewal of all creation. And this love, the love with which he loved and the love he makes possible in us, is the gift of God to the church and to the world.4
It is here that we should turn to Barth. In a previous contribution, I shared a few thoughts on Barth’s conception of theological work as love.5 In this piece, I would like to gesture toward a different direction. Like other Christian theologians, God’s love for humanity is central to Barth’s thoughts. McKenny helpfully informs us:
What distinguishes Barth’s account of love are its identification of God’s love with God’s gracious self‐giving and its emphasis on our love for God and one another as participation in God’s love in the form of a creaturely analogy that corresponds to God’s gracious self‐giving love in a distinctively human way.6
Rather clearly, Barth locates love (here understood as Agape, as opposed to Eros) in Christ—a gift thus received by humanity. As such, Barth argues:
Once a man knows where to seek and from where to expect the perfect love, he will never be frustrated in his attempts to turn himself to it and to receive from it an orientation which enlightens his small portion of knowledge. This love abides in the one in whom the covenant between God and man is fulfilled.7
Locating love in Christ, Barth resists the temptation of reducing love to an abstract idea. Such love has a twofold response: firstly, love for God, and secondly, love for neighbor. In the first instance, to love God is to honor God as God; this love is the giving of ourselves to God, putting ourselves at God’s disposal.8 In the second instance, flowing from the first, “Barth consistently holds that love for the neighbor is dependent on but not reducible to love for God.”9 In loving our neighbors, our love for God is made manifest. Barth, thus, cautions us again, rendering love in abstract terms. Love—both love for God and our neighbor—demands concretization in context and community. Therefore, love for our neighbor may demand that we stand with them in their call for more just working conditions; love for our neighbor may require us to critically consider the destructive role transnational corporations play in the parts of the world we do not reside in. Barth would argue that our love for God manifests concretely in doing this.
As the WCC has diagnosed, the world we are part of is in need of reconciliation and unity—recent national elections in various regions confirm this. Returning to love, an idea central to Christianity (but also featured in other traditions), we may enable ourselves to discern the move required of us and journey beyond restrictive binaries, boundaries, and borders.
In Dogmatics in Outline, Barth reminds us that faith in the Triune God is a gift of grace of unconditional love for humanity, indeed all people.10 In our time, our reception of this free gift of grace, namely love, requires setting aside unhealthy individualism and the pervasive abstraction of love that causes more harm than it contributes to healing and sustaining life. Indeed, saying “yes” to Christ’s love—truly receiving it—quickens in us an openness to the other, allowing us to cultivate community with and alongside them, always aided by Christ. Receiving God’s unconditional love, we are readied—in ways language cannot adequately capture—to turn, repent, and become anew—thereby stewarding who we are in service of God’s kingdom, as Barth observed in 1963. May we, in this moment, sing with Barth and the saints:
Jesus liebt mich, ganz gewiss. / Ja, Jesus liebt mich.
Jesus loves me, this I know. / Yes, Jesus loves me!
The Presbyterian Church (USA), The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA): Part I, Book of Confessions (Office of the General Assembly, 2014), 31.
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 206.
World Council of Churches, Christ’s Love Moves the World to Reconciliation and Unity (2022), 2, https://www.oikoumene.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/ENG_WCC2022Assembly_Booklet_TEXT.pdf
World Council of Churches, Christ’s Love Moves the World, 6.
Ashwin Thyssen, “Theological Work as Love: Eros and Agape in Barth's Evangelical Theology” (2023, November 8), https://barthcenter.substack.com/p/theological-work-as-love?utm_source=publication-search.
Gerald McKenny, “Barth on Love,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, Volume I, ed. George Hunsinger and Keith Johnson (2020), 381.
Barth, Evangelical Theology, 205.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2 (T&T Clark, 2009), 798.
McKenny, “Barth on Love,” 383.
Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (Harper & Row, 1959), 16.
Ashwin- thank you for this beautiful meditation. It “fits” beautifully with the second Sunday in Advent passages, especially Malachi 3: the Lord “smeltering” the people of God to be God’s vessel in the world.