God is love, but what is love?
Posted on October 3, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Emerging Questions
Had big discussions on Monday evening in our small group when we were planning on discussing Bec’s “Pick and Mix” post. The conversation was hijacked and diverted to the point that we were talking about one of the big ugly questions: dealing with God killing people in the Old Testament. Lots of people. Entire tribes. Which is a big deal.
I suggested that my baseline for any theology revolves around the very simple statement that “God is love”. Just about anything else I believe about God has to go through this filter. Thus, my problem with God wiping out tribes, etc. But the “God is love” thing is more central to me than having to have a great explanation for everything that I don’t understand in the Old Testament. So my very learned and wise friend Brian (Bri-Bri for those who know him well) who also believes that God is love, suggested that perhaps the issue is with my human limitations of what love means.
He suggested that my understanding as a 21st century western pseudo-post-modern white man of what “love” is must surely look differently to that of a first century Jew or Roman. Which must be accurate. So where I see violence and killings as bad things, it’s possible, under a different understanding of what is loving and good, to see those actions as being loving and true. But it leaves me in a nasty spot.
Because without that reference point: huge chunks of my assumptions about what it means to be following the heart of God are gone, or at least clouded. The assumption that it’s not God’s will for people to die from preventable diseases could just be wrong - it could well just be my faulty understanding of what death is all about, and my modernist assumption of a right to life. But my gut tells me that’s not quite right either.
Does the fact that my understanding of what “God is love” means would be vastly different to a first century believer change how I should act? I realise I’m getting over-theoretical about something that’s ultimately worked out best in “just doing it”, but I guess I’m hoping that there’s value in wrestling with this stuff. Do we need to be more holistic or broad in our understanding of what is love and loving?
About Geoff Matheson
Geoff is a 23 year old database administrator who has birthed amateurtheology.org from some crazy thoughts he had early one Monday morning. Geoff does his best to sound lots smarter than he actually is. He also runs some youth stuff at Yarra Valley Vineyard, and he is married to the very lovely Rebecca.
Geoff's site: http://www.geoffreport.com/wp/
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I think there’s at least some things we can know about love:
“4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.8Love never fails.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
Not sure if that helps your thinking at all geoff but I think it does show us to some extent what it means for God to be love.
The following quote actually belongs in a response to the very first post (I think) Not in love with Jesus. But the two things are seriously linked so I’ll put it here.
“The two become one,” yet do not cease to be two. In love, the one is immersed in the other, without identities, however, being merged or lost. The Song of Songs helpfully rounds out a biblical view of wisdom as love:
‘Something extremely simple yet incredibly mysterious is said in Song of Songs 2:16 and again at 7:10: “My beloved is mine and I am his.” Love exchanges selves. When I love you, I no longer possess my self; you do. I have given it away. But I possess your self. How can this be? How can the gift of the giver be the very giver? How can the hand that gives hold itself in itself as its own gift? The ordinary relationship between giver and gift, subject and object, cause and effect, is overcome here. The simple sounding truism that in love you give your very self to your beloved is a high and holy mystery.’ (Kreeft, P. Three Philosophies of Life, San Francisco: Ignatius 1989. quoted p.89 Blomberg, D., Wisdom and Curriculum, Souix Center: Dordt College Press 2007)
First link back to the other post. If loving is about giving my self to Jesus then I can sing that I am in love with him…
Now if the problem with the OT is that God doesn’t look like a loving God, that might be because all we try to do as post-modern modernist with a dualistic view of life is to chop bits of OT out and try to apply an extracted proposition from there to our lives. The OT is about God’s loving connection with his people with a purposeful direction toward the redemptive intervention of his son Jesus. Thus the giving of himself to us (I mean collective eklesia as the “bride of Christ”) as his people has a very very long scope through ancient history.
The other thing I would throw in here is that our reading of the Wisdom literature in the Word (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) should alert us to the fact that more often than not, things just can’t be tidied away into nice neat boxes of coherent propositions as the modernist view of life likes to see. At least we can be genuine post-moderns (not pseudo ones) in agreeing that this facet of the modernist view of life can be jettisoned. So I am happy to live with apparent unresolved tensions between the violent history of our faith and the God who is LOVE. In fact even a full orbed understanding love from a biblical perspective may not, dare I say won’t, resolve the tension. Nevertheless I go on with faith in that God - who is and was and is to come, and that means I shall go on responding to him in the self giving away love - because he loves and has given himself to me.
Indeed, nor is an understanding of the purpose of the Old Testament. Broadly speaking, the OT does several important things. It acts as a metaphor for this age (the time between Christ’s ascention and return), and it looks forward to and underlines Jesus Christ. There’s probably more but this is all that comes to mind immediately.
In the first capacity, God’s judgement on the nations of Canaan makes a lot of sense - there are too many dimentions to list but among the most obvious is that the Promised Land (New Creation) is given to the faithful people Israel (in the New Covenant, the Kindom of Heaven, that is the Church).
However as I see it God did not judge them merely so they could serve as an example to us (though that is a big part of it no doubt). They were also a very sinful and wicked people. God said to Abraham that his descendents would not enter the land for some four generations because the “iniquity of the Amorites [was] not yet complete.”
Remember that we all are worthy of God’s judgement. So when he judges, we should not be surprised that His patience has come to an end, rather that it lasted as long! God gave the Amorites four hundred years but they would not med their ways. And being a just God as well as a merciful one, His character demanded that He put an end to the evil.
There are some good reflections here.
I think the starting place of “God is love” often leads us astray from the beginning - we let our notions of love get read back in to the definition of God.
I like this as a theory: but as a “filter” or reference point - it’s a lot less clear. If I’m trying to work out whether an idea aligns with who God is, the triune God idea doesn’t give a lot of direction. God is love at least helps me to rule out things that are just really bad ideas.
wow, quite a juicy topic it seems!
I love Gerry’s discussion of the ideas in tension…
Reminds me something one of my lecturers said when we were workshoping communication skills: she called communication “the loving struggle”.
Even in the New Testiment there’s the story of Annanias and Sephira… and I can’t help wondering whether God didn’t intend for it to be documented as a reminder of his power, and an intruiging indicator of his choice not to intervene in that way since (at least not to my knowledge!)
I feel as though most of modern western christianity has had its cajounas cut off. I think we need to be incredibly cautious and considered in the way that we respond to, and use power… both God’s and our own influence, but avoiding influence, and implying impotence, seems strangely dangerous.
God is like a nuclear power plant running smoothly at peak output. Safe, Clean, and predictable. Don’t #$*% with it.
why do I always seem to have the last word? I don’t even like my last word. (which was “it.” if you can’t be bothered scrolling up)
Was it something I said?
[...] I’ve had with people both online and off in response to the “God is love. But what is love?” post have caused a few different people to ask the very pertinent question: “Is love [...]
I’ll save you Tim.
Doesn’t belief in a God beyond our understanding imply that our understanding of what he says about himself may indeed be limited - yes, that’s basically what you’ve all said - but then does it actually *matter* that we don’t understand what God is Love actually means if we already believe IN him?
If we believe in him, and we already know he’s unknowable, then does us gaining new perspective on him actually change anything? Are we just describing another extra-black shade of black - a gradation in the absolute?
What do we believe in? Him, or what we know about Him?
Does God being unknowable mean::> you can’t comprehend my limits, or you’ll never be able to characterise me?
The former I’m happy to take on faith, and the latter I think I’ve got a handle on, but it DOES mean I need to take elements of it on faith, because He IS bigger than my understanding, and therein lies majesty, and power, and creativity, and scale, and diety, and love that can forgive a little bugger like me.
It’s a bit circular.
I think it depends somewhat on our willingness to tolerate our own uncertainty, and how often we realise we’ve constructed schemas for God’s behaviour which will of course never accurately represent Him.
Given that it is really quite circular… what happens if we embrace the circular notion? Is it possible to accept that a relationship with God is a constant cycle of disillusionment and reillusionment?
It might be somewhat discourging to admit that we’re rarely ‘progressing’ onwards… in fact the progress myth is one of those critiques of western society. Perhaps we just cycle: we get a chunk of what God is, and we go and live off it, and then we rechunk, and relive, again and again.
I came up with two reactions to that pretty quickly:
1. That seems to be an accurate description of many people
2. That’s a bit depressing.
I think in accurately describing the status quo we risk repeating it: which is not what idealism (surely the original motivator behind this site) would have us do.
hmm. I definitely move forward more often when I DO know myself; but often simply identifying who/what I am or what I do doesn’t lead to forwards movement (and I’ll buy into the notion that forward movement is something I’m wanting to do as well as achieving).
Embrace the cycle: hmm. On the whole I think it leads to the “I’m a little worm” mentality for me; which helps with my humility but doesn’t help with my confidence, authority and pride in telling Satan where to get off. So some days it’s a good thing, some days perhaps not.
Like coffee. Or chocolate before lunch.
Quick thought - I hope, and have grounds to think, that the process is not necessarily circular.
I believe that it can (and has been for me) a spiral by which I come around to the same area of ‘constructed schema’ as Tim refers to it, but I have learnt or read or experienced something that alters my understanding to be a little bit more closely aligned with the truth.
For example as a teenager one can say “God is love”, confident that they are quoting Scripture and then run with their understanding of God.
After studying the Bible for 3 years they can come back and still say “God is love”, but they will have a richer view of what that love looks like - creation, blessing, serving, sacrifice, exile, judgement, covenant, etc.
The spiral isn’t always neat, but it is the best model I have come across
yep, I like that. Kind of like sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset