Prejudice of Love

The "prejudice of love" names a hermeneutical stance in which the reader of scripture is called to abandon the fiction of neutral, objective interpretation and instead approach the text from an avowed, directional orientation — love as the governing pre-understanding. In Peter Rollins's theological framing (drawn from the post-foundationalist tradition that inherits both Gadamerian hermeneutics and a Lacanian-inflected suspicion of ideological neutrality), every reading is already an act of eisegesis as much as exegesis: the subject never simply extracts a meaning that was passively waiting in the text. The prejudice of love names this unavoidable subjective investment but redeems it theologically, arguing that rather than striving for an impossible objectivity, faithful interpretation should consciously situate itself within love as its animating commitment. The "prejudice" is not a distortion to be overcome but the condition of possibility for any genuine encounter with the text's truth.

This move is structurally anti-foundationalist: it displaces modernistic, rule-governed ethics — which would seek a universal, neutral ground from which to read — and replaces it with an ethic that is irreducibly situated and relational. The tension between what the text says (exegesis) and what the reader brings (eisegesis) is not a problem to be resolved but the living space of authentic theological reading. Insofar as the prejudice of love is offered as the properly theological hermeneutic, it implies that the truth the text bears cannot be accessed from outside the relationship of love — it can only be "half-said" through an engaged, committed, and thus partial reading.

This concept appears in peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006 and sits at the intersection of theological hermeneutics and the critique of ideological neutrality. It cross-references four canonical concepts — Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Hermeneutical Tension, Ideology, and Truth — and can be read as a theological specification of all four simultaneously. Like the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it refuses any appeal to a Sovereign Good or neutral Law as the ground of the ethical act: just as Lacanian ethics demands fidelity to one's desire over the "service of goods," the prejudice of love demands fidelity to love over the service of objectivist method. The structural parallel is close: to abandon love for the pretense of neutrality would be, in Lacanian terms, to give ground relative to one's (hermeneutical) desire.

In relation to Truth and Ideology, the concept performs a double gesture. It acknowledges the core ideological insight — that no reading is innocent of the reader's subject-position, and that "neutrality" is itself an ideological formation that conceals its investments — while proposing love as a consciously adopted, non-mystified counter-prejudice. This aligns with the Lacanian account of truth as belonging to the level of enunciation rather than statement: the truth of a scriptural reading is not extractable from a proposition in the text but erupts through the subjective relationship the reader maintains with it. Rather than disavowing that relationship (the modernist move), the prejudice of love names and owns it. It thus functions as an extension of the Lacanian truth-framework into a theological-hermeneutical register, while also offering what Rollins treats as the genuinely ethical alternative to ideological bad faith in biblical interpretation.

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

the religious idea of truth demands that we should have a prejudice when reading the text: a prejudice of love.

The phrase "the religious idea of truth demands" is theoretically loaded because it frames the prejudice not as a concession or a compromise but as a positive requirement — something truth itself calls for, echoing the Lacanian notion that truth is not neutral propositional correspondence but an active, enunciative force. The juxtaposition of "prejudice" (classically a defect in interpretation) with "love" (the theological ground of ethics) performs the entire anti-foundationalist argument in miniature: the very thing modernist hermeneutics treats as an obstacle to truth is here recast as its condition.