Love Fulfills, Not Replaces

This claim is often heard from kind people: “Love is the higher law. Love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10), and whoever loves another has fulfilled the law (Romans 13:8). So the law has ended.”

It is easy to see why this appeals. Picture a man who has long carried an enormous key ring, with one key for “do not steal,” one for “do not lie,” one for “do not covet,” and hundreds more jangling at his belt. Every door means hunting for the right key. Then one day he is handed a single golden key called love and told, “This opens every door. You can throw the old ring away.”

That is the picture behind the claim, and the claim does quote Paul, who really did write that love fulfills the law. The question, then, is not whether Paul said it but what he meant by it. We find out the way we have all through this book: read the whole passage, not one line of it.

All Three Verses

Romans 13:8-10 Owe nothing to anyone except to agapao ἀγαπάω ag-ap-ah'-o(love) one another, for the one who agapao(loves) the other has fulfilled the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law). For the commandments — "You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet" — and if there is any other commandment, are summed up in this logos λόγος log'-os(word): "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Agape(Love) works no evil to a neighbor; therefore agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay(love) is the pleroma πλήρωμα play'-ro-mah(fulfillment) of the nomos(law).

Verse 8 holds the line the claim quotes: “the one who agapao(loves) the other has fulfilled the nomos(law).” Verse 10 holds the other: “agape(love) is the pleroma(fulfillment) of the nomos(law).”

Between them stands verse 9, and it is the verse that matters most.

It begins with the word “For,” which tells us that Paul is about to explain how love fulfills the law. The first thing he does is quote commandments: “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet.” These four are neither paraphrases nor new rules. They are the seventh, sixth, eighth, and tenth of the Ten Commandments, quoted as they stand. Then Paul adds, “and if there is any other commandment.” He does not drop the rest; he leaves room for every one of them.

In the very sentence where Paul explains what love does, the commandments stand word for word. If love had ended them, this would be a strange place to recite them.

Gathered Under One Head

Then comes the key phrase. All these commandments, Paul says, “are summed up in this logos(word): ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The Greek word behind “summed up” is anakephalaioo ἀνακεφαλαιόω an-ak-ef-al-ah'-ee-om-ahee. Inside it lies kephale κεφαλή kef-al-ay', the word for head. To anakephalaioo something is to bring it together under one head, to gather many things into one.

Think of a newspaper. At the top of a long article stands a headline that gathers the whole story into a few words. Yet no reader has ever torn the headline from the page and said, “I have the headline now, so the story is gone.” The headline does not replace the story. It tells you what the story is about, and the article is still there beneath it, every paragraph of it.

That is what Paul says love does to the commandments: they are gathered under it, not abolished by it. Paul does not list all ten commandments here; he quotes four and then covers the rest with “if there is any other commandment.” That only makes the point stronger. Love is the head under which every commandment is gathered, both the ones he named and the ones he did not.

How Love Fulfills

Verse 10 now makes sense: “Agape(Love) works no evil to a neighbor; therefore agape(love) is the pleroma(fulfillment) of the nomos(law).”

Pleroma (πλήρωμα) is fullness, that which fills a thing completely. Paul has just told us how love fills up the law: love “works no evil to a neighbor.” The person who loves his neighbor does not take his neighbor’s wife, his neighbor’s life, or his neighbor’s goods, and he does not even long for them. The one who loves has fulfilled the law because he does not commit adultery, does not murder, and does not steal.

The direction of Paul’s thought is plain. Love is not a different law that replaces the commandments. Love is the power that makes us do them. The commandments say what love does, and love is why we do it.

The Words the Bible Uses

One more thing deserves notice. The phrase “higher law” is not in the Bible. Nowhere does Scripture rank love above the commandments, as if they were two laws competing for first place. The Bible uses two other pictures instead.

One is Paul’s, which we have just read: the commandments are “summed up,” gathered under one head, in love. The other is Yeshua’s, from Chapter 42: “On these two commandments depend the whole nomos(law) and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:40). The commandments hang on love the way coats hang on a row of pegs, and the pegs are there to hold the coats, not to replace them.

Those two commandments, moreover, came from the Torah. Yeshua was quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” the very sentence under which Paul gathers everything in Romans 13:9, is a line of the Torah. If love had ended the law, it would have ended itself.

James and Paul Agree

James calls the same commandment by a royal title:

James 2:8 If you truly fulfill the royal nomos(law) according to the graphe γραφή graf-ay'(written-scripture), "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well.

Two things stand out in “the royal nomos(law) according to the graphe(written-scripture).” James calls love of neighbor a nomos, a law, and he says that it is “according to the graphe,” according to what is written. Love is not a feeling detached from Scripture but a commandment written in it, and of the one who fulfills it James says, “you are doing well.”

Paul says the same in Galatians, in a verse we read in Chapter 6: “the whole nomos(law) is fulfilled in one logos(word)” (Galatians 5:14). The law is fulfilled there, not finished. In another letter he puts it as bluntly as anyone could:

1 Corinthians 7:19 Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing, but keeping the commandments of God is everything.

Paul wrote that to a church made up largely of Gentile believers. The same apostle who said that love is the fulfillment of the law said that keeping God’s commandments is everything. For Paul those two statements do not conflict; they say the same thing in two ways.

The Key Ring, Again

We return, then, to the man with the golden key. The picture was beautiful, but it was the wrong picture. Love is not a master key that lets you throw away the ring. In Paul’s words, love is the head under which every commandment is gathered, and in Yeshua’s words, it is the peg on which they all hang. The person who truly loves his neighbor will be found, day after day, keeping the very commandments the claim says have ended.

Some people, though, do not reach their conclusion by reading verses at all. They reach it by a dream.