The Delight of Difference

Last winter, walking through our snow-laden neighborhood, I passed an elderly man shoveling his driveway. I faintly recognized him from the local congregation. I offered my help, which he cheerfully accepted. The snow was deep and we labored together a little while, scoop and throw, scoop and throw.

After a few minutes of shoveling in silence, I paused with my arm on my shovel. “I hear you once played professional football?”

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “A few seasons with the Chicago Bears.” He reminisced briefly but fondly over his successful career. He was large, still trim and powerful in his build, and clearly relished his memories.

“I know this will come as a surprise to you,” I said as I stood erect with all my 130 pounds, hands poised thoughtfully on the handle of the shovel still idle before me, “but I never played professional football.”

He didn’t so much as pause in the rhythm of pitching his snow. “That’s ok. We all have different gifts,” he said.

I’ve thought about that interaction many times since. Because even though he missed my irony, there was a genuine grace in his words. 

“The task is to recognize the creature’s otherness,” writes John Durham Peters, “not to make it over in one’s own likeness and image. The ideal of communication, as Adorno said, would be a condition in which the only thing that survives the . . . fact of our mutual difference is the delight that difference makes possible.”¹

This “delight that difference makes possible” may be the essential feature of that love into which Christ is trying to initiate us.  

Love can only operate in the presence of difference, though difference has many deceptive surrogates. Social media is not the only shaper of “affinity bubbles,” as Noreen Herzfeld calls them.² Ego and fear alike lead us to surround ourselves with mirrored walls we think are windows of communion. 

God’s fullness of joy exists in the face of infinite human variability. That stunning fact warrants pondering. Our particularity is the field in which God’s delight is operative. Helen Oppenheimer sees human value as “a particular sort of living claim” that God recognizes.³ 

As a religious imperative, therefore, “what the belief in a heavenly father requires is the exercise of imagination to see each other's irreplaceability.”⁴ We must be schooled to see difference, variability, particularity, as God does: not as obstacles to surmount but the precondition for fullness of celestial joy. Oppenheimer sees parental love as a pale but valid analog: “the alternative to making favorites among our children is not to love them ‘all alike’: it is to love them all differently.”⁵

In one of the most provocative of his theological insights, Stephen Webb suggested that, in one crucial regard, we may miss the point of our incarnation. Out of his nurturing love, “the Father creates bodies that can share the Son’s sorrows and joys and, in that process, become more like him.”⁶ In other words, Christ’s primal place within a relational mosaic, joyfully and sorrowfully responsive to the entire array of our fractiousness and frailties, is the condition for which mortality prepares us. His Incarnation expresses his solidarity with us; but our incarnation prepares us for solidarity with him. His Incarnation heals and redeems us, while our incarnation puts our potential in play. Our potential, that is, to love as he loves, with the same vulnerability and delight in difference.

Oppenheimer emphasizes what this love has to move beyond within a field of radically differing personhoods. "It is an impoverished human being whose highest hope is to be at the receiving end of a merely accepting love. Tolerance, after all, is not the top virtue.”⁷

Perhaps this point is what’s behind Peter’s admonition in his first epistle to “love one another with a pure heart fervently” (1:22 and again in 4:8). He needed the adverb, twice, to emphasize the active embrace of, rather than tolerant acquiescence to, the difference that constitutes one’s neighbor—or one’s child or spouse. 

Our best ethical philosophers have seen this “delight that difference makes possible” as reframing human interaction in powerful ways. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “Christ was not concerned about whether ‘the maxim of an action’ could become ‘a principle of universal law, but whether my action now helps my neighbor to be a human being before God. God did not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief or a law. God became human.”⁸ 

Herbert McCabe restates that idea more simply: 

“The morally good act is not the act prescribed antecedently by some moral law, it is whatever love demands in a particular situation.”⁹ 

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Art by Eileen Cooper.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

1. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 31.

2. Noreen Herzfeld, The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic Age (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 44.

3. Helen Oppenheimer, The Hope of Happiness: A Sketch for a Christian Humanism (London: SCM, 1983), 101.

4. Oppenheimer, Hope of Happiness, 94.

5. Oppenheimer, Hope of Happiness, 81.

6. Stephen Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 270.

7. Oppenheimer, Hope of Happiness, 119.

8. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Reader’s Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 44.

9. Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), 31.