What happens when something genuinely worth loving becomes so closely joined to Christianity that losing it feels like losing Christ? The question is difficult precisely because the competing love may not be evil at all. This is where Divine Eros and Competing Loves comes in.

A church can be good. A theological tradition can teach the truth. A Christian institution can provide education, friendship, opportunity, and spiritual formation. Parents, pastors, professors, mentors, and close communities can help us understand Christ and learn to love Him.

The problem, then, is not simply that we love something besides Christ. The deeper problem is what happens when a good thing through which we encountered Christ becomes so closely identified with Christ that we can no longer distinguish the gift from the Giver.

Saint Porphyrios gives us a useful way to think about this problem in Wounded by Love. His teaching on divine eros and competing loves helps explain both why created things deserve our love and why none of them can finally bear the weight that belongs to Christ.

Christ as the Summit of Desire

In the section “On Divine Eros,” Porphyrios describes Christ as the supreme object of the soul’s desire. Christ is not simply one valuable object among many valuable objects. He is the proper end toward which human desire ultimately reaches.

Porphyrios describes Christ as the “summit of desire.” Other loves reach a point of satisfaction, while divine eros works differently because love for Christ does not exhaust itself as it is fulfilled. Instead, love produces an even greater desire to love Him.

For readers who want to hear Porphyrios’s language rather than merely read an analysis of it, the Orthodox Wisdom video Divine Eros: Insatiable Love for Christ presents an extended reading from Wounded by Love. A longer audio treatment of the book is also available in Wounded by Love: The Life and Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios.

This distinction matters because Christ and created things cannot occupy exactly the same place in our lives, even when both are genuinely loved. A Christian may love a church, a family, a tradition, a mentor, or a community deeply without making any of them equal to Christ.

Such love may include gratitude, loyalty, sacrifice, and grief. None of those things prove that the love has become idolatrous, because the more important question is what role that lesser love has begun to play.

Has it continued to lead us toward Christ? Or has it begun to function as though Christ Himself depends upon it?

The “Little Loves” That Lead Us to Christ

Porphyrios does not respond to the supremacy of Christ by teaching contempt for creation. In “On Creation,” he describes the beautiful things of the created world as “little loves” that can lead us toward the great Love, who is Christ.

That point is crucial because created things are not competitors with God simply because we enjoy them. Beauty can awaken love for God, friendship can reveal something about divine love, and a faithful Christian community can show us what forgiveness, worship, generosity, and holiness look like when they become visible in ordinary life.

The same principle can be extended carefully to institutions and traditions. Porphyrios himself is speaking directly about creation, not about modern denominations, Christian colleges, ministries, or theological systems, so the extension is a theological application rather than a quotation of his position.

Nevertheless, his distinction provides a useful framework. A church can be a little love that leads us toward Christ, and so can a theological tradition, a Christian school, a mentor, a form of worship, or a religious community.

The problem does not begin because these things matter too much in some abstract sense. It begins when something that should lead us toward Christ becomes so identified with Christ that the distinction between them starts to disappear.

This same problem appears from another angle in Fresh Ground Theology’s discussion of the danger of becoming attached to spiritual experiences and religious means rather than to God Himself. The particular objects differ, but the underlying question is similar: can something that genuinely helps us seek God eventually become something we seek in place of God?

When Mediation Becomes Fusion

All Christians encounter Christ through particular means. No one learns Christianity in the abstract.

We learn Scripture through translations, teachers, churches, parents, books, and traditions. We learn what Christian community looks like by participating in actual communities, while theological frameworks give us categories through which we understand doctrines we did not invent for ourselves.

That is mediation, and mediation is not inherently a problem. The difficulty comes when mediation becomes fusion.

A person may begin with a perfectly reasonable statement: “I encountered Christ here.” Perhaps a particular church first taught him Scripture seriously, or perhaps a school introduced him to Christian theology and a pastor helped him understand grace.

Over time, however, another conclusion can develop almost unnoticed: “Because I encountered Christ here, this place has become inseparable from Christ in my mind.” Once that connection becomes strong enough, criticism of the mediator may begin to feel like criticism of Christianity itself.

Then one more step becomes possible. If the church fails, if the institution betrays its principles, if the mentor falls into serious sin, or if the theological system proves inadequate, the person may begin to think, “If this collapses, perhaps Christ collapses with it.”

That movement deserves careful attention because the conclusion does not necessarily arise from conscious theology. It may instead reveal an association that has developed slowly through years of spiritual formation.

A Good Thing Can Become Dangerous Because It Was Good

One of the hardest parts of this problem is that spiritual fruitfulness can actually make fusion more likely. Something may gain enormous authority over our imagination precisely because God genuinely used it in our lives.

Suppose a Christian institution gave someone close friendships, theological education, ministry opportunities, and a coherent understanding of the faith. The person has good reasons to be grateful because the institution really did give him something valuable.

However, several ideas can slowly begin to merge. “This institution taught me the truth” becomes “This institution reliably represents the truth,” and eventually the thought may become something stronger: “If this institution is seriously wrong, perhaps everything I learned here is wrong too.”

The same process can happen with people. A pastor may faithfully teach someone the gospel for years, yet the pastor is still not the gospel. A mentor may reveal something genuine about Christ, yet the mentor is not the guarantor of Christ.

This is particularly significant because spiritual mentorship is not supposed to be trivial. Fresh Ground Theology’s discussion of spiritual fathers, mentors, and Christian leadership argues that deep Christian formation is relational, which means a faithful mentor may rightly exercise tremendous influence.

Yet deep influence increases the need for theological distinction rather than eliminating it. The more genuinely someone has mediated Christ to us, the easier it may become to confuse faithfulness to that person with faithfulness to Christ.

The Difference Between Mediation and Idolatry

Because of this, we should distinguish mediation from idolatry rather than treating them as the same thing. Strong affection, loyalty, or grief does not automatically prove that someone has made an idol.

A church can mediate Christ without being Christ. A theological tradition can teach truth about Christ without exhausting the truth of Christ.

Likewise, a community can embody Christian love without being the source of Christian love. A mentor can reveal Christ without becoming the final reason Christ should be trusted.

The term idolatry becomes justified when the lesser good begins to perform a function that belongs properly to God. The evidence is functional rather than merely emotional.

For example, suppose preserving an institution’s reputation becomes more important than telling the truth. Suppose loyalty to a community requires excusing injustice that would otherwise be condemned, or defending a theological system becomes more important than allowing Scripture to correct that system.

At that point, the lesser love is no longer merely mediating Christ. It has begun to compete with Him.

This is close to the broader biblical problem explored in BibleProject’s popular video Where Is There Idolatry in Modern Culture?. Tim Keller’s widely viewed sermon Counterfeit Gods approaches the same question from another direction: good things can become spiritually destructive when they are required to function as ultimate things.

Four Ways Lesser Loves Can Relate to Christ

It may help to distinguish several possible relationships between Christ and the things we love. These categories will overlap in real life, but they can clarify what is happening.

First, a love can be ordered toward Christ. The created good directs us beyond itself toward Him, and its spiritual value is measured partly by whether it makes us more truthful, charitable, holy, and faithful.

Second, a love can be integrated with our love for Christ. We love the created good because it participates in something genuinely Christian while still recognizing its limits.

Third, a love can become fused with Christ. At this point, fidelity to Christ and fidelity to the particular institution, tradition, or community begin to feel like the same thing.

Finally, a love can begin competing with Christ. The preservation of the lesser good now takes precedence over truth, justice, obedience, charity, or fidelity to Christ Himself.

These distinctions prevent an easy binary between “Christ good” and “everything else bad.” The real theological problem is not the existence of lesser loves but their ordering.

Why Loss Can Become a Crisis of Faith

As long as the lesser love remains secure, we may have little reason to distinguish it carefully from Christ. The two may have always appeared together in our experience.

Perhaps Christian truth, Christian community, trusted authority, family loyalty, and personal identity all came through the same religious world. If so, their differences may remain mostly invisible because nothing has ever forced us to separate them.

Loss changes that.

An institution fails. A respected leader behaves terribly. A community fractures. A theological framework no longer explains the evidence, or a Christian culture that once seemed stable suddenly becomes difficult to defend.

The immediate problem may be limited, but the resulting crisis can become theological. The person does not merely think, “This institution was wrong.” Instead, he begins to wonder, “Perhaps Christianity is wrong.”

That second conclusion does not logically follow from the first. Nevertheless, its emotional force makes sense if the institution had become part of the structure through which Christianity itself was understood.

Church history gives concrete examples of this dynamic. Fresh Ground Theology’s study of the collapse and legacy of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church examines what happened when B. H. Irwin’s moral collapse confronted a movement whose theology had invested extraordinary significance in his spiritual experience.

The movement did not simply face the problem of a sinful leader. His failure raised questions about the theological system that had helped make his leadership credible in the first place.

Does a Faith Crisis Mean the Person Never Loved Christ?

Not necessarily. Several explanations are possible, and we should not assume one before examining the evidence.

In some cases, the crisis may reveal that ultimate trust had actually been placed in a lesser good. The person’s faith depended upon the institution, leader, or tradition remaining secure.

In other cases, the crisis may expose genuine theological problems. Religious disillusionment should not always be dismissed as an emotional problem because institutions and traditions can actually be wrong.

However, there is another possibility. A person may genuinely have loved Christ while never learning to distinguish Christ adequately from the particular forms through which that love developed.

In that case, two genuine loves became tangled together. The person loved Christ, but he also loved the community, theological tradition, or institution through which Christ had become concrete and intelligible.

The crisis comes when those two loves are suddenly pulled apart.

What Does the Intensity of Grief Reveal?

Grief alone cannot answer the question. Losing something genuinely good should hurt.

If a church provided decades of friendship and spiritual formation, losing that church may produce tremendous grief. If an institution shaped someone’s vocation and gave him opportunities that changed his life, disappointment with that institution may cut deeply.

None of that proves idolatry. Emotional detachment is not necessarily a sign of greater spiritual maturity.

The better question is what conclusions the loss seems to require. “This thing I loved is gone” is one statement, while “therefore Christ is gone” is another.

The distance between those statements tells us something important about the ordering of our loves. It may reveal that a created good had begun to perform more theological work than we realized.

Loss Can Reveal What Security Concealed

This is one reason loss can become spiritually revealing. While a lesser love remains stable, we may never discover how much theological weight we have placed upon it.

A rupture forces distinctions that we previously did not need to make. Christ must now be distinguished from the Christian community in which we encountered Him, and Christian truth must be distinguished from the theological system that first articulated it for us.

Likewise, faithfulness to Christ must be distinguished from loyalty to an institution. Divine authority must be distinguished from the authority of trusted leaders.

That separation can feel like unbelief because the familiar structure of belief has been damaged. Yet the feeling that Christ is disappearing does not necessarily mean Christ Himself has been lost.

Sometimes it means that Christ is being painfully separated from something that had become intertwined with Him in our imagination. A related distinction appears in Fresh Ground Theology’s discussion of why the felt absence of God does not necessarily mean the absence of God.

The two subjects are not identical, and institutional disillusionment should not simply be labeled a “dark night.” Nevertheless, both cases require us to distinguish our experience of God from God Himself.

Divine Eros Does Not Mean Loving Everything Else Less

Porphyrios offers an important corrective here. His answer is not simply, “Care less about everything except Jesus.”

That would misunderstand his idea of the little loves. Created goods remain goods, and Christians are allowed to love them.

The issue is their order.

A person may continue loving the church that formed him. He may remain grateful for the theological tradition that taught him or the institution that gave him opportunities.

He may also love people who were genuinely good to him even after recognizing their serious limitations. In fact, distinguishing them from Christ may make it possible to love them more truthfully.

Once a lesser love no longer has to function as Christ, it can be judged according to what it actually is. Its good can remain good, while its failures remain failures.

Gratitude no longer requires infallibility. Criticism no longer automatically means betrayal.

Reordering Competing Loves

The reordering of competing loves does not require destroying them. It requires restoring the distinction between the lesser love and the greater Love.

Some lesser loves should be retained. Others should be reformed, and still others may need to be relinquished.

Sometimes we may need to hold gratitude and criticism together. We may say that an institution gave us something genuinely valuable while also saying that it acted wrongly.

We may say that a theological tradition taught us important truths without claiming that it possesses the whole truth. We may honor a mentor’s real influence without allowing that mentor’s character to become the foundation of our faith.

Divine eros creates the freedom to make those judgments because Christ does not depend upon any one of these things. They may mediate Him, but they do not contain Him.

The Gift Is Not the Giver

So what happens when something genuinely worth loving becomes so closely joined to Christianity that losing it feels like losing Christ? The crisis may reveal that two real loves have become insufficiently distinguished.

The lesser love was not necessarily false, and the person’s love for Christ was not necessarily false either. A gift through which Christ was known may simply have begun to bear some of the weight that belongs to Christ Himself.

When that gift collapses, the first experience may therefore feel like the collapse of Christianity. Porphyrios’s theology of divine eros gives us another way to interpret what is happening.

The lesser love can remain a real love because its goodness does not depend upon becoming ultimate. We may grieve it, criticize it, retain it, reform it, or even relinquish it according to what is true.

But none of these lesser loves can finally bear the weight of being Christ. Their proper place is to remain what Porphyrios calls the little loves: created goods that point beyond themselves toward the great Love who is the summit of desire.