The Greatest Thing in the World

Drummond opens with the oldest question there is, the one the ancient philosophers called the summum bonum: what is the supreme good? He puts it plainly. "You have life before you. Once only you can live it." So what is the one thing worth wanting above everything else?

For centuries the popular answer inside religion was faith. Believe rightly, and the rest follows. Drummond, a devout man speaking to devout people, answers flatly: "Well, we are wrong."

He is not being clever. He is pointing at a verdict already written in the thirteenth chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, where faith, hope and love stand side by side and one of them is chosen: "The greatest of these is love."

You might suspect Paul simply forgot about faith for a moment. Drummond shuts that door. Earlier in the same chapter Paul had written, "If I have all faith, so that I can remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing." He had faith in full view, weighed it, and decided.

Nor is this a man praising his own strong suit. People tend to recommend whatever they are already good at, and love was not Paul's gift. The hand that wrote that line, Drummond reminds us, "when we meet it first, is stained with blood": Paul began as a persecutor.

And he is not alone. Peter writes "Above all things have fervent love among yourselves," and John goes further: "God is love." Not an oversight, and not prejudice. It is the verdict of the tradition's first great writers.

Why does Drummond point out that love was not Paul's strong point?

• To suggest Paul privately valued faith more highly than love
• To argue that love can only be learned late in a person's life
• To show Paul was not just recommending his own natural gift✓Correct answer
• To warn readers that Paul's letters should be read with suspicion

People praise what they already excel at, so a verdict for love from a former persecutor carries more weight, not less. Drummond does mention Paul's tenderness ripening with age, but his point here is that the ranking cannot be put down to personal bias.

Paul makes a second remark Drummond wants taken seriously: "Love is the fulfilling of the law."

Picture the religious world Paul lived in. People were working their passage to heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments and, Drummond says, "the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them." Every new situation needed a new rule, and every rule needed a clarification.

Christ, in Drummond's paraphrase, offers a shorter road: do one thing, and you will do the hundred and ten without ever thinking about them. "If you love, you will unconsciously fulfill the whole law." Love is not one more item on the list. It is the rule for fulfilling all rules.

Drummond tests the claim by walking through the commandments one by one, and the effect is almost comic.

Tell a man who loves his neighbour not to steal from him, and you insult him: how could he steal from someone he loves? Warning him not to lie about that neighbour is superfluous. Urging him not to covet the neighbour's things is pointless, because he would rather the neighbour had them than himself.

The same holds towards God. Nobody who loves needs to be ordered to keep one day in seven for the one they love; they would be glad of it. Notice what this does and does not mean. Love does not cancel the commandments or lower the standard. It makes the prohibitions unnecessary, because the person who loves already wants what they protect.

Drummond teaches that because love fulfils the law, a loving person is free to set the commandments aside.

False✓Correct answer

Fulfilling is the opposite of discarding: the person who loves keeps every commandment, only without needing to be told. What falls away is the list of reminders, not the standard itself.