What the Strong Man Loves

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.—1 Corinthians 16:13–14

Interstellar is set in a near future where Earth is slowly becoming uninhabitable. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot turned farmer, is called into a desperate mission to find another home for humanity. He is an intensely masculine figure: a pilot, pioneer, builder, protector and father, drawn toward danger and the unknown. But accepting the mission means leaving behind the people he loves most, especially his young daughter, Murph. As he travels farther into space, relativity separates them not only by billions of miles but by years and decades. And beneath all the danger, exploration, engineering and endurance, the film keeps returning to one surprising idea: love. Without spoiling the climax of the film, Interstellar suggests that love as a force somehow transcends time and space, binding people together across seemingly impossible distances.

Christianity goes further. Love does transcend the physical universe because the God who made and rules it is love. Dante famously ends the Divine Comedy with Dante himself standing in the beatific vision contemplating “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

It may seem strange to begin a discussion of muscular Christianity by talking about love. But it is arguably the only place to begin. Because before we ask what Christian strength looks like, we have to ask what Christian strength is for.

The “what” of robust, strong Christian witness matters. What some have historically called “muscular Christianity,” rightly understood, results in self-mastery, well-ruled households, courage in the face of cultural opposition—and that is all good. But also crucial is the why of muscular faith. And the Christian answer is this: such strength is for shouldering the burden of rightly ordered love. The muscular Christian man is a man strong enough to love all whom God has given him to love, in the order God has commanded him to love.

We should not find this strange. Love is no mere emotion; it is acting willingly for the good of another even at cost to oneself. And in the text above, Paul can put “act like men,” “be strong” and “let all that you do be done in love” in the same breath. They are part of the same thought.

But there is a problem. The problem is not that we as a people, or as men in particular, do not love; the problem is that men love badly. Love is an inescapable concept. We are made as lovers—chiefly of God. As Augustine prayed, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” All this is well and good and not terribly controversial in our day; indeed, our society loves to talk about love. “Love is love!” we shout.

But an important modifier appears above: rightly ordered love. That same Augustine gave us what we today call the order of love, ordo amoris. He writes: “The just and holy man neither loves what he ought not love, nor fails to love what he ought, nor loves more what ought to be loved less.”

Sin, cultural chaos, and the evil around us are not fundamentally caused by too much love or too little love in general per se but by disordered love. We love ease, pleasure, food and sex inordinately. We express untethered empathy towards those purported to experience hurt or exclusion. We spread abstract warm feelings across the mass of humanity like butter over too much toast. Meanwhile, we love our families, our church, our heritage arguably too little. And of course, we fail—as all sinners do—to love God as he deserves. Robust Christianity depends upon recovering the order of love. So what is that order?

Loving God Supremely

The first duty of love is not towards a man’s town, his church, his children, or even his wife, but toward God (Deuteronomy 6:5; Matthew 22:37). Every lesser love—the family, the nation, the nations—is received from God, governed by God, and returned to God to be found in him as its proper end.

A man may care deeply about restoring the order of love in church life, civic life, and so on. He may be invested greatly in the type of Christianity that confronts pagan agendas boldly. But does he love his Lord supremely? Is he giving himself to the means of grace? Communing with him? Warring against sin and temptation in his own life?

And what is the second greatest commandment? To love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:39). Of course, this creates a question—the same question the lawyer asked in Luke 10: “And who is my neighbor?” To which Jesus replied with the parable of the Good Samaritan, answering, in effect, “The person right in front of you, even if they’re different.” And question 39 of the Baptist Catechism for Boys and Girls answers, “All my fellow men are my neighbors.”

In our fraught cultural moment, the more conservative of us may instinctively want to limit this obligation. We recall the famed heat maps from the 2019 Nature Communications study. We’ve seen what cosmopolitan love spread abroad across the vast seas of humanity, abstracted and deracinated, can do to society. We’ve seen how deformed the theological virtues—faith, hope, and love, supremely—can become when unmoored from the cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

But in reaction against this kind of disorder, many of us want to conclude, contrary to the catechism, that all fellow men are really not neighbors. But that is not the shape of the doctrine according to Scripture or the church fathers. The ordo amoris is not an excuse not to love but a blueprint for how to love one’s neighbor well.

What is true is that we are limited. A man can perhaps feel benevolent towards all mankind, but he cannot actually act in beneficence toward them all, no matter how strong and muscular he is. So what is he to do? Augustine picks up this theme in On Christian Doctrine, book 1:

All men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you. . . . since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.

In other words, God has not left us without a roadmap for whom to love with our limited strength; he has given us our assignment. We’re to start with those around us, assigned to us by providence, and proceed outward from there. So the procession begins. First, God; then, our nearest relations.

Loving the Household

If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.—1 Timothy 5:8

Concerning elders in particular, Paul earlier states:

He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?—1 Timothy 3:4–5

This is where muscular Christianity is wonderfully ordinary. Christian love has an address—not just a website. It has a dinner table, not just a podcast.

This is also where the case for the ordo amoris applying beyond the basic distinction between God and neighbor—and also organizing the social loves—is strongest, because in the natural family we learn the duty of preference. If a man said to his wife, “Honey, I love you… and your sister,” it would communicate lots of things. Love would not be one of them. Likewise, if a father demonstrated love for his own children in the exact same manner in which he demonstrates love for all the children in his church, he would perhaps be considered an effective youth pastor, but a terrible father.

Muscular Christianity does not sacrifice the household on the altar of ministry using a few cherry-picked verses about sacrifice from the hard sayings of Jesus. Rather, it—like Aeneas fleeing Troy with Anchises on his back and his wife Creusa and son Ascanius in tow—bears the weight of the people who have a particular claim upon its love.

But importantly, muscular Christian love doesn’t stop there. Aeneas was not a mere “family man” who was home on the weekends and attended all the soccer games. He was a man with a mission. And so, the order of love extends.

Loving Church, Neighbor, People, and Place

Let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.—Galatians 6:10

Everyone. Especially. Paul can juxtapose universal benevolence with particular obligation without falling into the extreme of flattened universalism on the one side or the trap of inbred tribalism on the other. Biblical love can say “especially” without saying “only.”

In sum, biblical, muscular Christianity loves the people of God well. It loves our flesh-and-blood neighbors, determined by proximity, well. It loves its community, state, and nation. But a good question here is “how?” For many of us, spread thin as we are between obligations of family, church, and work, extending our love further may simply seem impractical. To answer this vital question, it is worth briefly considering our father in the faith.

The Biblical Example: Abraham

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”—Genesis 12:1–3

God calls a particular man, then miraculously raises up from him a particular family, and from that family a particular people emerges and grows in a particular place. And yet, from the beginning, the promise reaches further: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Reading this text, the modern believer tends to jump ahead to its fulfillment in Christ. But Abraham’s work as a household manager was not without its role, as Genesis 18:18–19 makes clear:

. . . Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

Abraham must command his children and household after him—and connected with this, and in part through it, “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.” This is particularly true of Abraham not merely because he was the progenitor of the Jewish race but because he was the progenitor of the Lord Jesus Christ, who blesses and rules all the nations. Yet the uniqueness of Abraham’s calling should not obscure the fact that here God establishes the particular for the sake of blessing beyond the particular, and he does so for our example. Ordered, local love is teleological; it points toward a greater mission.

Biblical particularity, in other words, is fruitful; it overflows and spills out. It is like a marriage: if a man truly loves his wife well, the ordinary result is a multiplying of image-bearers to love and mouths to feed.

The Reformed world has not always held these emphases together. In broad strokes, Presbyterians have tended to be known as the family people and Baptists as the missions people—the former for large covenant households, the latter for evangelistic zeal. But the great gulf fixed between the “radical” school of mission and the “ordinary” priorities of God, family, and country finds its resolution in the order of loves. If grace restores nature, then missionary zeal need not overthrow the work of building and cultivating Christian family and nation; rather, the former should come as the overflow of the latter.

It is not, then, the hearth or the world; in God’s economy, the hearth becomes one of the means by which the nations are blessed. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, and so God does not obliterate Abraham’s household in order to bless the world—he sanctifies, orders, and uses it. This pattern develops throughout Scripture.

Loving the Nations

There is a version of Christianity that talks endlessly about humanity while neglecting the human beings at its dinner table, and we should reject it. But there is another temptation: recovering household, place, people, and nation, and then acting as though the order of loves terminates there. It does not; love must be ordered, not truncated. The order of loves tells a man whom he must love first; it does not tell him whom he is permitted never to love.

Thus we see in the Great Commission in Matthew 28: the Christ who orders us to faithfully love wife, children, church, and neighbor also possesses all authority in heaven and on earth and commands his church to disciple the nations. To return to the heat maps, the inner rings are not like the Dead Sea, with love flowing in but never out; they overflow to the outer rings. And those outer rings are not imaginary—they too are under Christ’s dominion.

The Proof of True Strength

History offers a picture of what this looks like. The Muscular Christianity movement of Victorian England in the 1880s prized physical vigor, discipline, duty, courage, athletics, and adventure—the formation of young men who were expected to do difficult things. Seven young men in particular embodied that movement. Among them:

• Stanley Smith: star athlete and prominent Cambridge rower.
• Arthur Polhill: distinguished in athletics at Cambridge and played football with one of the leading clubs in England at the time.
• Montagu Beauchamp: son of a baronet (a hereditary title ranking above a knight), born into the British aristocracy.
• Dixon Hoste: from a military family, an officer in the British Army.
• And then Charles Thomas Studd: one of the great cricket players of his generation, playing for Cambridge and later for England.

These were young men with strength, discipline, education, connections, and prospects—the kind of men Victorian Britain needed, and muscular Christianity at its finest. So what did they do with all that strength? They spent it for their King.

In 1885, all seven joined Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission and sailed for China. Known as the Cambridge Seven, they caused a sensation with their decision to go, even drawing coverage in the press. Before they left, they traveled through Britain speaking at universities and public meetings; thousands came to hear them, and more than 3,000 people gathered for their farewell meeting in London.

Here were some of Britain’s most promising young men walking away from lives of worldly opportunity because they believed Christ was worthy of their lives. In China, they learned a hard language, traveled inland, and preached the gospel. Some would spend decades there; Arthur Polhill spent most of the next 43 years in China. One of them eventually succeeded Hudson Taylor as the leader of the China Inland Mission, and C.T. Studd would go on to serve in India and then Africa.

Their strength did not terminate on itself; it made them more capable of sacrifice. Christ ordered their loves, and their loves directed their strength. Muscular Christianity should produce strong husbands, fathers, families, pastors, churches, institutions, and nations. We need builders and protectors—men who preserve good things and hand them down to their children.

But if this recovery of Christian manliness is genuinely Christian, surely it must also occasionally produce men strong enough to leave—not men who take a brief trip abroad, document it for social media, and congratulate themselves on their cosmopolitanism, but men strong enough, like Saints Patrick, Columba, or Boniface, to go and proclaim the reigning Christ with reckless abandon in the face of pagans, dragons, and gods.

Such men love their families, yes—but like Odysseus, fighting for them abroad and returning home in victory, not like Hobbits who never venture out at all. They love their own people well and therefore understand what it means to love another people; they have cultivated the nearer loves so faithfully that they have strength to spend on the farther ones.

Not every man should go to China or become a missionary, but healthy Christian strength ought to produce some men who can. Strength must always go somewhere; the question is where a man’s loves send it. For the one whom we serve and proclaim—the Lord Jesus Christ—is the perfectly ordered, perfectly loving strong man. He loves the Father supremely and honors father and mother. He loves his own sheep and gives his life for them; he gives himself for his resplendent bride. He loves neighbor and kin, and he even loves enemies, assimilating some of them into his family as he gathers a people from every tribe, language, people, and nation.

And in that dying moment of dereliction, as Christ is paying the price of divine wrath to procure his global kingdom, what does he do but turn to his best friend and say, “Behold your mother,” and to his mother, “Behold your son.” He is not weak love, nor is he heartless strength; he is perfect strength in the service of perfect love.

The “Why”

Behind the “what” of muscular Christianity stands the “why.” Why recover a robust vision of Christianity marked by duty, virtue, and strength? Not merely so that we can impress other men, bless our generations, or preserve the beauty of our heritage.

We become strong so that we can bear greater burdens of love: strong enough to love God when obedience is costly; to love one woman for a lifetime; to raise children toward maturity rather than merely keep them comfortable; to shoulder responsibility in the church; to love neighbor and place; to care about people we will never meet; and, if Christ requires it, to leave the familiar and spend ourselves among the nations.

What, then, is our strength for? What do we love—and are those loves rightly ordered?