Law of Love

The "law of love" is a theological-ethical formulation in Rollins's work that designates love not as one moral rule among others but as the singular, irreducible foundation from which all genuine ethical reading of scripture proceeds. Rather than treating the biblical text as a closed repository of prescriptions — an "ethical textbook" — Rollins argues that the only foundation Jesus actually laid down is this law, which functions as a surplus that exceeds and fulfils ordinary rule-based ethics. Love, in this sense, is not a content to be applied but a form of being-in-relation, a Christlike orientation that opens the text each time to a fresh encounter rather than closing it around a fixed code.

This concept operates as a theological analogue to what Lacanian theory would call a "beyond" of the symbolic law: love does not abolish the ethical order but radicalises it from within, taking the place of an impossible foundation — not a rule that grounds other rules, but the very excess that prevents any rulebook from becoming totalised. In this respect the "law of love" functions structurally like a sublation: ordinary ethics (as codified rule-following) is negated and preserved at a higher register, one animated by an inexhaustible demand that no finite set of commandments can fully capture.

In the source (peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006), the "law of love" appears as the pivot of Rollins's critique of foundationalist or rulebook ethics in theology. It is positioned against a hermeneutic that treats scripture as a closed ethical system, proposing instead an open, ever-renewed encounter with the text as a "way of being in the world." This aligns the concept most closely with the cross-referenced Ethics of Psychoanalysis: both share the structure of a radical reorientation away from the service of goods (rule-compliance, utility, adaptation) toward something that exceeds any normative calculus. Just as Lacanian ethics insists that the only genuine guilt is betraying one's desire rather than breaking a rule, Rollins's "law of love" insists that genuine fidelity to scripture cannot be reduced to rule-following.

The concept also resonates with Beyond and Surplus-jouissance: love here is a structural surplus — something that cannot be domesticated within the economy of commandments, just as jouissance exceeds the pleasure principle. The cross-reference to Das Ding is also suggestive: love as foundation occupies the structural position of an "excluded interior," a void around which ethical reading orbits without ever fully arriving. And the link to Sublation is explicit in the move whereby ordinary ethics is not simply discarded but negated and preserved at the higher level of love. Lack and Universality enter because love, precisely by exceeding every particular rule, gestures toward a universality that is not totalising — an open universality constituted through its own irreducible gap.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

for the only clear foundation laid down by Jesus was the law of love. This love demands that we use the scriptures not as an ethical textbook but rather as a text that extrapolates the Christlike way of being in the world.

The phrase "only clear foundation" performs the theoretical move precisely: by designating love as the sole foundation, Rollins simultaneously empties the place of all particular rules (introducing a structural lack at the level of the law) and fills it with an excess — a "way of being" — that cannot be codified. The contrast between "ethical textbook" and "extrapolates the Christlike way" marks the difference between a closed symbolic system and an open, generative encounter, mapping directly onto the tension between rule-bound morality and the beyond that the Ethics of Psychoanalysis identifies as the real dimension of desire.