Relocating To Elfland

“As man is given by the Spirit to share in Christ’s authority, he cannot do so without love, both for the created order in general and for the particular beings, human and other, which stand within it in various problematic relationships. Love does not bear the dominating and manipulative traits that have been given to it in some attempts to characterize the Christian ethic. It achieves its creativity by being perceptive. It attempts to act for any being only on the basis of an appreciation of that being. Thus classical Christian descriptions of love are often found invoking two other terms which expound its sense: the first is ‘wisdom’, which is the intellectual apprehension of the order of things which discloses how each being stands in relation to each other; the second is ‘delight’, which is affective attention to something simply for what it is and for the fact that it is. Such love is the fruit of God’s presence within us, uniting us to the humanity of God in Christ, who cherishes and defends all that God the Father has made and thought.” (Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 26)