Heresy: Hermeneutic of “Love”

This will be, as always, a highly abbreviated summation of a much larger topic for the sake of awareness and information. It’s impossible to do more than give a general sense in an article of this kind.

For the Christian, “hermeneutics” is the science by which we arrive at the meaning and application of the Bible as intended by God Himself. In a nutshell.

This requires actual study and intellectual engagement. (2^nd Timothy 2:15)

There are three basic steps in this process. Three Basie questions we ask.

1. What does the text say? What do the words, sentences, and phrases say?

2. What does the text mean? Once we’re sure of what the text says, lexically, grammatically and syntactically, we must determine what was being said to the original hearers to which it was originally written.

3. How does it apply to us? What are the universal principles being conveyed to all believers of all ages? There is the cultural form, in which a given book and or passage originally came to be, and the trans-cultural principle which is binding upon all cultures throughout all time.

The hermeneutic of “love” pretty much dispenses with all of this. Instead, it begins with a subjective and very postmodern, unbiblical definition of what “love” is and then proceeds to subject every single syllable of scripture to that definition.

The results will range from grotesquely mangling foundational biblical truths that have been universally held throughout the whole of church history, to simply dismissing others altogether. This of course precludes, by definition, any vaguely orthodox view of the inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of scripture.

This, in their minds, allows them to embrace historically unheard-of theological and moral heresies all in the name of “love.” Because after all, God IS love right? Their definition of “love,” drawn, not from scripture, but directly from their own emotionally driven moral preferences, necessitates that they re-create God in their own image.

There is a historical evolution here dating back to the enlightenment and 19th-century theological liberalism after that, up through the 20^th century through the rise and fall of modernism, and now postmodernism that is beyond the scope of this piece.


Key tenets include:

• The a priori denial of the inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of scripture.
• A rank perversion of biblical love along with an equally rank perversion of what God being that love means.
• This leads to a list of damnable heresies from the denial of substitutionary atonement to the overt celebration of all manner of sexual immorality.
• Anyone daring to preach the biblical truths of the Christian faith as historically held by the Christian church is ipso facto unloving and a danger to human well-being.
• This entire mindset is centered squarely on the preeminence and autonomy of man rather than the honor and glory of the almighty God.
• You will find that an incessant barrage of emotional stories and humanistic illustrations rather than sound biblical reverence and scholarship characterizes their “preaching.”

Modern-Day Proponents:

• It would be simpler and easier to name those who have not been infected to some degree by this postmodern perversion.
• Homosexual and transgender affirmation, feminism, antinomianism, the practical elimination of sin from the gospel and the subsequent need for substitutionary atonement, and even the smuggling of CRT into the church, are the result of the hermeneutic of “love.”
• Postmodern uncertainty and the hermeneutic of “love” are the right and left brain of most of the compromise seen today even among those who have not fallen so far as denying the saving Gospel altogether.