Continuing from the earlier post today:
I have made the observation that some of the people who most vehemently profess abstract, universal love are those who do not exhibit or appear to experience any actual, personal love of specific persons - except their memories of family love during childhood.
Childhood family love (or even, in some people who lack families, a recognition of the lack of family love and a yearning for it) is a sufficient basis for a Christian life. After all not everybody has a loving marriage, or children and a loving relationship with them.
On the other hand, some adults reject the ideal of individual and personal love - and instead profess that abstract and universal "love" is a higher value and morality than individual/ personal love.
I have often heard this argument. The idea that individual love is a childish thing, the sign of an immature, narrow and selfish personality.
...That the higher love is impersonal, embraces everybody equally (or perhaps loving unknown strangers more that family - to compensate for natural 'xenophobia'); maybe embracing all animals; maybe indeed every living thing; or, maybe The Earth itself (and this love of Earth considered not as loving an actual, conscious, purposive individual such as an angelic being - but as abstractly loving a deific abstraction).
What did Jesus say on this matter?
As so often the Fourth Gospel can be a touchstone for Christians. Here, in what some call "the Gospel of love", Jesus is always described as loving specific persons, and never as expressing abstract, universal love.
My understanding is that Jesus wanted Christians to be a family, that is not 'organized' by abstractions, but as individual persons bound in presumably extended-family-sized (and overlapping, especially by marriage) groups cohering by personal love.
Be that as it may; I think Christians can be confident that Jesus did not regard abstract, universal love as a higher ideal than personal love - quite the opposite.
