Compelled or Moved? Socio‐Cultural Interpretations of Love in the Ecumenical Dialogue

ABSTRACT The debate over the theme of the Eleventh World Council of Churches General Assembly in Karlsruhe (2022) opens a revealing window into how the understanding of love is shaped by socio‐cultural contexts rather than by biblical exegesis alone. The seed of the conversation was planted in the 2018 report of General Secretary Olav Fykse Tveit, who proposed that the WCC be understood as a “unique instrument for the ecumenical movement of love.” The contested translation of 2 Corinthians 5:14 generated significant debate between “the love of Christ compels us” and the finally adopted “the love of Christ moves us.” Reading the 2022 Ecumenical Review issues dedicated to the assembly theme, two streams emerge: a love‐as‐freedom stream that emphasizes love's spontaneity and vulnerability, and a love‐as‐imperative stream that emphasizes love's commanding, border‐crossing, embodied character. This article traces the philosophical genealogy of the two understandings through Irving Singer, Gordon Marino, Zygmunt Bauman, Simon May, and D. C. Schindler on the Western side, and through Confucian ren , Buddhist karuna , and Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love on the Eastern and theological side. I argue that the WCC's negotiated translation is a responsible exercise of contextual theology, but that the imperative character of Christ's love must not be permanently lost in translation.