Other-More: The Biblical Shape of Creaturely Love
Abstract
Popular theological and secular accounts of Christian ethics routinely characterize the biblical demand as selflessness: the erasure or suppression of the self in service to others. This paper argues that the biblical data support a different and more precise category. The grand narrative of Scripture calls the creature toward what I term other-more orientation: the preservation of the self as a genuine agent whose relational vector is directed outward toward God and neighbor. The distinction is grounded in Trinitarian theology (the perichoresis as mutual self-giving without personal diminution), in the two great commandments (which presuppose a self that loves), in the Pauline structure of Philippians 2:3–4 (which retains self-interest while subordinating it), and in the Christological pattern of the Incarnation (where divine self-giving amplifies rather than annihilates personhood). The paper traces the implications of this distinction for theological anthropology, hamartiology, soteriology, and apologetics.
1. Introduction: The Problem with Selflessness
A persistent assumption runs through both popular Christian piety and its secular critics: that the Bible demands self-erasure. The spiritual life, on this reading, consists in progressive diminution of the self until something like a moral vacuum remains, through which divine or neighborly interests can flow unimpeded. The language of “selflessness” pervades devotional literature, sermon illustrations, and ethical treatises. It has become the default shorthand for Christian virtue.
The assumption is understandable. Scripture is replete with language that, read superficially, supports it. Jesus tells his followers to deny themselves and take up their crosses (Matt. 16:24). Paul speaks of being crucified with Christ so that it is no longer he who lives (Gal. 2:20). The kenotic hymn of Philippians 2 describes Christ “emptying himself” (Phil. 2:7). These texts appear to describe the dissolution of personal agency in favor of an unspecified other.
The problem is that this reading generates contradictions elsewhere in the canon and incoherence in the theological system it purports to serve. If the telos (end or purpose) of the creature is genuine self-erasure, several questions become intractable. Why does God create distinct persons bearing His image rather than undifferentiated extensions of Himself? Why does the second great commandment presuppose a self that loves (”as yourself”)? Why does Paul retain first-person agency throughout his most radical statements of union with Christ? Why does the eschatological vision of Revelation depict individual names, distinct persons, and personal rewards rather than absorption into an undifferentiated unity?
These are not peripheral puzzles. They cut to the heart of theological anthropology and, by extension, to the character of the God who creates. This paper proposes that the biblical data support a different and more textually faithful category: other-more orientation. The creature is called to become more fully directed toward God and neighbor, while remaining a genuine self with legitimate capacities for love, knowledge, and delight. The self is not the problem. The self’s direction is the problem.
2. Trinitarian Ground: Communion Without Diminution
The doctrine of the Trinity provides the ontological control point for any account of creaturely love. If the God who is love (1 John 4:8) exists eternally as three distinct persons in one essence, then the divine life itself models the relational pattern into which creatures are called. The question is what that model actually discloses.
Orthodox Trinitarianism affirms that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each fully God, personally distinct, and inseparably operative in all divine acts toward creation (Matt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14; John 1:1–2; John 15:26). The classical tradition describes the inner-Trinitarian life through the concept of perichoresis (Latin: circumincessio), a term denoting the mutual indwelling and interpenetration of the divine persons without confusion of identity or diminution of personal distinctiveness. The Father is wholly in the Son and the Spirit; the Son is wholly in the Father and the Spirit; the Spirit is wholly in the Father and the Son. Yet the Father remains the Father, the Son remains the Son, and the Spirit remains the Spirit.
The critical feature for our purposes is that this mutual self-giving does not produce self-erasure. The Father does not become less the Father by eternally generating the Son. The Son does not become less the Son by being “from the Father.” The Spirit does not become less the Spirit by proceeding from the Father through the Son. The divine persons pour themselves into one another, and the result is not homogeneity but the fullest possible realization of personal distinctiveness within relational unity. John 17:20–24 makes explicit that believers are drawn into this very pattern: “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us.”
If the Trinitarian life is the archetype of love, then love at its most fundamental is other-directed self-giving that preserves and perfects the giver. This is categorically different from self-erasure. The divine persons do not diminish in giving; they flourish. And the unity they achieve is richer, not thinner, precisely because the persons who indwell one another remain genuinely distinct.
The implications for creaturely love follow by analogical extension. If human beings are created in the image of the Triune God (Gen. 1:26–27), and if Christ is the true and perfect image in whom derivative images find their orientation (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3), then the creaturely telos mirrors the divine pattern: self-giving that amplifies rather than annihilates personhood. The creature who loves most fully does not disappear. The creature who loves most fully becomes most distinctly and recognizably herself, precisely because she is no longer curved inward upon herself but oriented toward the Other who made her.
3. Exegetical Foundations
3.1 The Two Great Commandments (Matt. 22:37–40)
When asked to identify the greatest commandment, Jesus responds with a double command: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Deut. 6:5), followed by “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). On these two commandments, he says, hang all the Law and the Prophets.
The second commandment is decisive for the present argument. The phrase “as yourself” (ὡ̧ς σεαυτόν) does not command self-love as a third obligation alongside love of God and neighbor. It functions as a measure and a presupposition. The command assumes that human beings already relate to themselves as subjects of value, concern, and responsibility. It then takes this existing self-regard as the baseline for how one ought to treat the neighbor. Love your neighbor to the same degree and with the same attentiveness that you already exercise toward yourself.
This grammatical structure is incompatible with self-erasure. If the goal were the elimination of self-regard, the “as yourself” clause would be incoherent, since the standard of measurement would have been abolished. You cannot extend to your neighbor what you no longer possess. The command requires a functioning self whose natural self-orientation becomes the template for other-orientation. The vector changes; the agent remains.
3.2 The Philippians 2 Hymn: Counting Others More Significant
Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 2:3–4 provides perhaps the most precise formulation of other-more orientation in the New Testament:
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Phil. 2:3–4, ESV)
Two features of this text deserve close attention. First, the comparative structure: “count others more significant“ (ταπεινοφροσύνῃ ἀλλήλους ἡγούμενοι ὑπερέχοντας ἑαυτῶν). A comparative requires two terms. If the self has been erased, there is no second term against which the other can be counted as “more.” The very grammar of the exhortation preserves the self as a reference point while reordering the priority structure.
Second, the scope qualifier: “look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (μὴ τὰ ἑαυτῶν ἕκαστος σκοποῦντες, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ ἑτέρων). The “not only... but also” (μή... ἀλλὰ καί) construction does not negate the first term. It supplements it. Your own interests remain legitimately in view. They are simply no longer the exclusive or even primary object of attention. The relational field expands without collapsing the original agent.
What follows in Philippians 2:5–11 is the Christological ground of this exhortation. Christ, who existed in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. The kenosis(self-emptying) described here is routinely misread as self-annihilation. The text says otherwise. Christ empties himself by taking (λαβών), not by subtracting. The divine Son does not become less divine; he adds humanity to himself. The self-emptying is an act of addition through voluntary condescension, and the result is not diminished personhood but the fullest possible display of divine character in human form. The Father then “highly exalted him” (Phil. 2:9), confirming that the self-giving trajectory terminates in glory, not in dissolution.
3.3 Galatians 2:20: The Paradox of Crucified Agency
Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:20 appears, on first reading, to support self-erasure: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” If Paul no longer lives, has the self been abolished?
The very next clause answers: “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul simultaneously claims that “I” no longer lives and that “I” now lives. The paradox is intentional. The “I” that has been crucified is the autonomous self, the creature curved inward upon itself in what the theological tradition identifies as the fundamental shape of sin (Gen. 3:5; Isa. 14:13–14; Rom. 1:21–23). The “I” that continues to live is the reoriented self, now animated by faith and directed toward the Son who gave Himself. Paul’s agency has not been annihilated. It has been relocated: from self-referential autonomy to Christ-referential dependence. The person remains; the operating principle has changed.
3.4 The Eschatological Confirmation
If the telos of redemption were genuine self-erasure, the eschatological vision of Scripture would depict an undifferentiated unity: souls absorbed into the divine essence without remainder. Instead, the biblical picture is emphatically personal and particular. Individual names are written in the Book of Life (Rev. 3:5; 21:27). Personal rewards are distributed according to faithful service (Matt. 25:21; 1 Cor. 3:12–15). Distinct persons inhabit the New Jerusalem, entering by its gates, walking in its light (Rev. 21:24–26). The consummated communion described in Revelation 21–22 is not the dissolution of creaturely identity into God. It is the fullest possible realization of creaturely identity in the presence of God, where “God himself will be with them as their God” and “they will be his people” (Rev. 21:3). The plural persists. Communion is the context; distinct persons are the participants.
4. Hamartiological Implications: The Fall as Misdirected Orientation
If the biblical ideal is other-more rather than selflessness, the nature of the Fall comes into sharper focus. Sin, on the self-erasure model, is the presence of self-regard, and the remedy is its elimination. This generates an anthropology in which the creature’s very structure is the pathology: to be a self is already to be in danger.
The other-more framework locates the pathology differently. The self is not the disease. The self’s curvature is the disease. Augustine’s incurvatus in se (the soul curved in upon itself) captures the spatial metaphor precisely: the creature turns inward upon itself and treats its own resources as sufficient for flourishing. This is what the biblical framework identifies as “culpable self-rule”: the creature’s assertion of interpretive and moral independence from the Creator (Gen. 3:5; Isa. 14:13–14; Rom. 1:21–23). The Fall does not introduce selfhood; God created that. The Fall introduces autonomousselfhood: the creature treating itself as its own center of gravity.
The Genesis 3 narrative supports this reading. The serpent’s temptation is not “you will cease to exist” or “you will become someone else.” The temptation is “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). The promise is an expansion of the self’s prerogatives, a claim to autonomous interpretive authority that belongs to God alone. Adam and Eve do not lose their personhood in the Fall. They redirect it. The relational vector that was oriented outward toward God and toward each other (Gen. 2:18–25) collapses inward. The immediate consequences are telling: shame before each other, hiding from God, blame-shifting that treats the other as a threat rather than a partner (Gen. 3:7–13). The selves remain; the orientation has inverted.
This analysis clarifies the contrast between Adam and Christ that stands at the center of Pauline soteriology (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:21–22, 45–49). Adam grasps for autonomy: “you will be like God.” Christ refuses to grasp: “he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Phil. 2:6). Adam’s act is self-referential assertion; Christ’s act is other-directed submission. The two patterns display the fundamental moral axis of Scripture. Sin is the creature turned inward. Righteousness is the creature turned outward. Both require a genuine self doing the turning.
5. Soteriological Implications: Redemption as Reorientation
If sin is misdirected orientation rather than the existence of selfhood, redemption is reorientation rather than elimination. The Spirit’s work in the believer is not the progressive destruction of personal agency but its progressive redirection from autonomous self-communion toward communal participation in the Trinitarian life.
The biblical language of sanctification supports this. Paul does not say believers are becoming less themselves. He says they are being “transformed into the same image [of Christ] from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). Transformation into Christlikeness is not the loss of the creature’s image but its restoration. Christ is the true image (Col. 1:15); believers are derivative images being conformed to the prototype (Rom. 8:29). The result is that each believer becomes more distinctly herself, because she is being shaped by the pattern for which she was designed.
The fruit of the Spirit catalogued in Galatians 5:22–23 confirms this. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are not the attributes of an absent person. They are the attributes of a presentperson whose orientation has been healed. “Self-control” (enkrateia) is particularly instructive: it names the self’s governance of itself under the Spirit’s direction. A self must exist to exercise self-control. The Spirit does not annihilate the agent; the Spirit equips the agent to govern herself rightly.
The present experience of believers within the redemption continuum reflects this pattern. Present communion with the Triune God is real: “Believers presently participate in Trinitarian communion. This is real, not merely positional or forensic” (Created Continuums Model, Section E Summary). Yet this communion is partial, marked by suffering, groaning, and hope oriented toward future glory (Rom. 8:18–23). The Spirit is the “firstfruits” and “guarantee” of what is to come (Eph. 1:13–14; 2 Cor. 1:22). The believer’s present experience is thus one of a self being progressively reoriented toward communion while still contending with the pull of inward curvature. Sanctification is the ongoing war between the two vectors, not the progressive deletion of agency itself.
6. Apologetic Significance
The distinction between selflessness and other-more carries significant apologetic weight, particularly in conversations with secular audiences and with those experiencing deconstruction from Christian faith.
6.1 Answering the Self-Annihilation Caricature
One of the most effective rhetorical weapons against Christianity in popular discourse is the charge that faith demands the surrender of personal authenticity. “Christianity wants you to stop being yourself.” “Religion suppresses individuality.” “Faith requires you to become a doormat.” These objections gain traction precisely because the selflessness framework appears to validate them. If the Christian ideal really is the elimination of self-regard, the critic has a point.
The other-more framework dissolves this objection at its root. Christianity does not ask the creature to become less. It asks the creature to become more, by becoming for more than herself alone. The call is to expanded relational capacity, not contracted personal existence. C. S. Lewis captured the intuition precisely: the most fully human people, the saints, are not the most uniform or self-effacing but the most vividly individual, because they have been freed from the homogenizing pressure of autonomous self-reference. Other-more provides the theological grammar for that observation.
6.2 The Contrast with Non-Christian Alternatives
The other-more framework also clarifies Christianity’s distinctiveness against rival accounts of the good life. Buddhist anatta (the doctrine of no-self) genuinely aims at the dissolution of personal identity as the path to liberation from suffering. Stoic apatheia (freedom from passion) aims at the suppression of desire and attachment. Secular altruism, in its strongest forms, treats self-sacrifice as intrinsically valuable without grounding the worth of the self that is being sacrificed. Christianity’s other-more orientation differs from all of these. It preserves the self, preserves desire, and redirects the entire complex toward communion with a personal God and with fellow image-bearers. The creature keeps her identity, keeps her longings, and finds both fulfilled in a relational field wider than herself.
6.3 Addressing Deconstruction
For those in the process of deconstructing Christian faith, the selflessness framework can function as a primary catalyst. “I was taught to suppress everything about myself for God, and I couldn’t sustain it.” This testimony is remarkably common in deconstruction narratives. If Christianity genuinely required self-annihilation, the psychological unsustainability of the demand would count as evidence against it.
The other-more framework reframes the question. The demand was never sustainable because it was never the real demand. What Scripture requires is not the destruction of desire but its reorientation. “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Ps. 37:4) does not say “abandon desire.” It says “reorient desire.” The self that collapsed under the weight of mandatory selflessness may find that the actual biblical call is to something far more livable, and far more human, than what was presented.
7. Systematic Integration
7.1 Within the Created Continuums Model
The other-more distinction integrates cleanly with the theological architecture developed across the broader research program. Within the Created Continuums Model, the three continuums (redemption, communion, separation) are distinguished by relational orientation to God. The redemption continuum is probationary: relational orientation can change. The communion continuum is characterized by “reconciled relational access to the Triune God.” The separation continuum is characterized by “irreversible exclusion from communion with God” (CCM, Layer 3). In each case, the creature remains. What changes is the direction and quality of the creature’s relational engagement. Other-more names the ideal orientation toward which the redemption continuum moves and which the communion continuum consummates.
7.2 Within the Moral Realism Framework
The Christological grounding of normativity depends on Christ displaying a concrete moral character that can be identified and imitated. If Christ’s moral example consisted in self-annihilation, “Christlikeness” would mean the progressive disappearance of moral agents. This is incoherent. The “Imaginary Foundations” paper argues that moral obligation consists in conforming to the character of Christ, because that character is identical with the character of the ultimate reality that made and sustains us. Other-more specifies the shape of that conformity: agents who retain their personhood while directing it toward God and neighbor in the pattern Christ displayed.
7.3 Within the Convergence Methodology
Within the convergence methodology of the Field Guide, other-more adds a further independent domain of explanatory advantage. Christianity predicts that human beings will flourish when they are outwardly oriented but will fail when they attempt either self-erasure (ascetic collapse) or self-enclosure (autonomous isolation). The psychological and sociological evidence confirms this: human well-being correlates most strongly with rich relational engagement that preserves individual agency, precisely the pattern other-more describes.
A careful naturalist will object here, and the objection deserves a fair hearing. Evolutionary psychology provides plausible models for cooperative, outwardly oriented dispositions in social species. Kin selection explains sacrificial behavior toward genetic relatives. Reciprocal altruism explains cooperative behavior among non-kin when repeated interaction creates mutual benefit. Multilevel selection models explain how group-beneficial norms can be maintained even at cost to individual fitness. On these accounts, “other-more” behavior is exactly what we should expect from highly social primates whose reproductive success depends on coalition-building, reputation management, and cooperative child-rearing. The pattern is predicted by natural selection. The correlation with subjective well-being is predicted by the match between evolved dispositions and the social environment in which they were selected. The descriptive adequacy of these models should be conceded.
The pressure point lies elsewhere. The question is not whether naturalism can model the pattern of other-more behavior. It can. The question is whether naturalism can preserve the normative authority of the pattern it models. And here the framework encounters a structural difficulty that no amount of descriptive sophistication can resolve.
Consider the logic. If moral intuitions, including the deep conviction that love is genuinely good and cruelty is genuinely evil, are products of natural selection shaped for reproductive fitness rather than for tracking stance-independent moral truths, then the felt authority of those intuitions is undermined by the very theory that explains their existence. Michael Ruse states the concession explicitly: “Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory” (Ruse, 1986). On this account, “love is good” reduces to “love has been reproductively advantageous for creatures like us.” The moral claim has been replaced by a biological description. The word “good” has been emptied of normative content and refilled with adaptive content. The creature who acts in an other-more fashion is doing something fitness-enhancing, perhaps, but not something genuinely and objectively good in any sense that transcends the contingencies of evolutionary history.
This generates a trilemma for the naturalist who wants to retain both evolutionary psychology and the moral seriousness of other-more orientation.
Option A: Endorse the debunking consistently. Accept that moral intuitions are adaptive illusions. Other-more behavior is useful, and the felt conviction that love is objectively good is a trick of selection. This is logically coherent but practically unlivable: no one who holds this position actually lives as though love and cruelty are morally equivalent strategies distinguished only by fitness payoff. The position purchases consistency at the cost of moral seriousness.
Option B: Exempt moral beliefs from the debunking. Claim that evolution shaped our moral intuitions and those intuitions happen to track moral truth. But this is selective skepticism. If the evolutionary origin of a belief class is grounds for doubting its truth-tracking reliability (as the debunking argument claims for religious and metaphysical beliefs), the same principle applies to moral beliefs produced by the same process. The naturalist who debunks religious intuitions while exempting moral intuitions is applying the skeptical principle inconsistently.
Option C: Ground normativity in natural properties. Identify “good” with some natural predicate such as “promotes human flourishing” or “maximizes well-being.” But this faces Moore’s open question: for any proposed natural property X, one can coherently ask “I know this has property X, but is it good?” The question remains open because “good” is not analytically reducible to any natural description. More fundamentally, even if the identification were granted, it would not explain prescriptive force. Why ought we promote flourishing? The naturalist can only treat normativity as a brute, primitive feature of certain natural configurations, which abandons explanation at precisely the point where it is needed.
Christian theism navigates the trilemma by providing what naturalism structurally cannot: a ground of normativity that is both explanatorily adequate and genuinely authoritative. On the Christian account, other-more orientation correlates with human flourishing because it participates in the structure of ultimate reality. Love is genuinely, objectively good because the Triune God, the necessary ground of all being, is constituted by other-directed love (1 John 4:8; John 17:20–24). The creature’s other-more disposition is not merely adaptive; it is truth-tracking. The moral intuition that self-giving love is objectively good turns out to correspond to the deepest features of reality, because reality itself is personal, relational, and characterized by mutual self-giving at the most fundamental ontological level.
The apologetic claim, then, is not that naturalism cannot model other-more behavior. It can. The claim is that naturalism cannot preserve the objective goodness of the behavior it models. Christianity underwrites both the pattern and its normative force. Naturalism can describe the pattern but, on its own terms, must treat its felt normativity as either illusory (Option A), inexplicably reliable (Option B), or brutely primitive (Option C). Each option leaves the naturalist with less than what ordinary moral experience delivers and less than what the Christian framework explains.
8. Conclusion
The grand story of the Bible is not a call to selflessness. It is a call to other-more: the reorientation of a genuine self toward the God who made it and the neighbors who bear His image. The Trinitarian life models this pattern at the deepest ontological level, where three persons give themselves fully to one another without any loss of personal distinctiveness. The two great commandments presuppose it. Philippians 2 grammatically encodes it. The Christological kenosisdemonstrates it. The eschatological vision consummates it.
The Fall is the inversion of this pattern: the creature turned inward, treating itself as sufficient. Redemption is the restoration: the Spirit reorienting creaturely desire from self-enclosure toward communion. Sanctification is the progressive realization of the other-more trajectory within the probationary life. Consummation is its perfection in unmediated presence with the Triune God, where distinct persons enjoy reconciled relational access forever.
Naturalism can model the other-more pattern and account for its adaptive value. What it cannot do, on its own terms, is preserve the conviction that the pattern is genuinely good rather than merely useful. Christian theism underwrites what naturalism explains away: the objective normativity of self-giving love, grounded in the character of ultimate reality itself.
The distinction matters because theology that gets the shape of love wrong will get the shape of everything else wrong: the nature of sin, the goal of redemption, the content of obedience, the character of the God we proclaim. Other-more preserves what selflessness destroys: the creature as a genuine agent, loved by God, bearing His image, and called into a communion that amplifies rather than annihilates what He has made.
References
Longmire, J. (2025). Imaginary Foundations: Christ as the Material Ground of Moral Reality. Zenodo/oddXian.com.
Longmire, J. (2025). Naturalism’s Faith Commitment: A Cumulative Case for the Structural Insufficiency of Metaphysical Naturalism. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18695574
Longmire, J. (2025). The Created Continuums Model. Working paper. oddXian.com.
Ruse, M. (1986). Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Scripture Index
Genesis: 1:1–2; 1:26–27; 2:18–25; 3:5; 3:7–13 · Leviticus: 19:18 · Deuteronomy: 6:5 · Psalms: 37:4 · Isaiah: 14:13–14 · Matthew: 16:24; 22:37–40; 25:21; 28:19 · John: 1:1–2; 15:26; 17:20–24 · Romans: 1:21–23; 5:8; 5:12–21; 8:18–23; 8:29 · 1 Corinthians: 3:12–15; 15:21–22; 15:45–49 · 2 Corinthians: 1:22; 3:18; 13:14 · Galatians: 2:20; 5:22–23 · Ephesians: 1:13–14 · Philippians: 2:3–11 · Colossians: 1:15 · Hebrews: 1:3 · 1 John: 4:8 · Revelation: 3:5; 21:3; 21:24–27; 22