The Love of God

Christopher W. Morgan, Christopher W. Morgan

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781433539077
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Our understanding of the love of God has been tragically distorted. The comfortable, sentimentalized version we commonly encounter today is far from the biblical depiction of God's love. Featuring contributions from well-known evangelical scholars, this multi-disciplinary study presents the biblical view of the love of God from the perspectives of systematic theology, biblical theology, apologetics, pastoral theology, and ethics. The contributors—including D. A. Carson, Andreas J. Köstenberger, Raymond C. Ortlund Jr., Robert L. Plummer, and many others—address a variety of issues related to how God's love is expressed in the Old and New Testaments, the Trinity, apologetics, Christian living, social justice, and more. This addition to the Theology in Community series will promote clear, sound thinking about what Scripture means when it declares that "God is love."

Part of the Theology in Community series.

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Distorting the Love of God?

D. A. Carson

God is love. Everything we know about him teaches us that, and every encounter we have with him expresses it. God’s love for us is deep and all-embracing, but it is not the warmhearted sentimentality that often goes by the name of love today. —Gerald Bray

Gerald Bray, in the quote above, is correct on two counts.1 First, God is love, and this grand subject is a major theme of the Scriptures and of this book, which seeks to capture something of the Bible’s content and ethos on the subject. Second, Scripture’s presentation of God’s love is far from the “warmhearted sentimentality” so commonly confused with love today. This book focuses on a positive presentation of God’s love in Scripture, theology, and Christian living. Nevertheless, a correction of distortions of God’s love is foundational and is the subject of this chapter. I will set the distortions over against the rich and nuanced biblical picture of the love of God.

Why the Doctrine of the Love of God Must Be Judged Difficult

There are at least five reasons that the doctrine of the love of God must be judged difficult.

1) If people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this God—however he, she, or it may be understood—is a loving being. But that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting, for this widely disseminated belief in the love of God is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. Worse, neither side may perceive that that is the case.

Consider some recent products of the film industry, that celluloid preserve that both reflects and shapes Western culture. For our purposes, science-fiction films may be divided into two kinds. Perhaps the more popular ones are the slam-bang, shoot-’em-up kind, such as Independence Day or the four-part Alien series, complete with loathsome evil. Obviously the aliens have to be nasty, or there would be no threat and therefore no targets and no fun. Rarely do these films set out to convey a cosmological message, still less a spiritual one.

The other sort of film in this class, trying to convey a message even as it seeks to entertain, almost always portrays the ultimate power as benevolent. On the border between the two kinds of films is the Star Wars series, with its treatment of the morally ambiguous Force, but even this series tilts toward the assumption of a final victory for the “light” side of the Force. ET, as Roy Anker has put it, is “a glowing-heart incarnation tale that climaxes in resurrection and ascension.” 2 And in Jodie Foster’s Contact, the unexplained intelligence is suffused with love, wisely provident, gently awesome.

Anker himself thinks this “indirection,” as he calls it, is a great help to the Christian cause. Like the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, these films help people indirectly to appreciate the sheer goodness and love of God. I am not nearly so sanguine. Tolkien and Lewis still lived in a world shaped by the Judeo-Christian heritage. Their “indirection” was read by others in the culture who had also been shaped by that heritage, even though many of their readers were not Christians in any biblical sense.

But the worldview of Contact is monistic, naturalistic, and pluralistic (after all, the film was dedicated to Carl Sagan). It has far more connections with New Age, Pollyannaish optimism than anything substantive. Suddenly the Christian doctrine of the love of God becomes very difficult, for the entire framework in which it is set in Scripture has been replaced.

2) To put this another way, we live in a culture in which many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.

The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized. This process has been going on for some time. My generation was taught to sing, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” in which we robustly instruct the Almighty that we do not need another mountain (we have enough of them), but we could do with some more love. The hubris is staggering.

It has not always been so. In generations when almost everyone believed in the justice of God, people sometimes found it difficult to believe in the love of God. The preaching of the love of God came as wonderful good news. Nowadays, if you tell people that God loves them, they are unlikely to be surprised. Of course God loves me; he’s like that, isn’t he? Besides, why shouldn’t he love me? I’m kind of cute, or at least as nice as the next person. I’m okay, you’re okay, and God loves you and me.

Even in the mid-1980s, according to Andrew Greeley, three-quarters of his respondents in an important poll reported that they preferred to think of God as “friend” rather than as “king.” 3 I wonder what the percentage would have been if the option had been “friend” or “judge.” Today most people seem to have little difficulty believing in the love of God; they have far more difficulty believing in the justice of God, the wrath of God, and the noncontradictory truthfulness of an omniscient God. But is the biblical teaching on the love of God maintaining its shape when the meaning of “God” dissolves in mist?

We must not think that Christians are immune from these influences. In an important book, Marsha Witten surveys what is being preached in the Protestant pulpit.4 Let us admit the limitations of her study. Her pool of sermons was drawn, on the one hand, from the Presbyterian Church (USA), scarcely a bastion of confessional evangelicalism; and, on the other, from churches belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention. Strikingly, on many of the crucial issues, there was only marginal statistical difference between these two ecclesiastical heritages. A more significant limitation was that the sermons she studied all focused on the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15). That is bound to slant sermons in a certain direction.

Nevertheless, her book abounds in lengthy quotations from these sermons, and they are immensely troubling. There is a powerful tendency to “present God through characterizations of his inner states, with an emphasis on his emotions, which closely resemble those of human beings. . . . God is more likely to ‘feel’ than to ‘act,’ to ‘think’ than to ‘say.’” 5 Or again:

The relatively weak notion of God’s fearsome capabilities regarding judgment is underscored by an almost complete lack of discursive construction of anxiety around one’s future state. As we have already seen, the sermons dramatize feelings of anxiety for listeners over many other (this-worldly) aspects of their removal from God, whether they are discussing in the vocabulary of sin or in other formulations. But even when directly referring to the unconverted, only two sermons press on fear of God’s judgment by depicting anxiety over salvation, and each text does this only obliquely, as it makes the point indirectly on its way to other issues while buffering the audience from negative feelings. . . . The transcendent, majestic, awesome God of Luther and Calvin—whose image informed early Protestant visions of the relationship between human beings and the divine—has undergone a softening of demeanor through the American experience of Protestantism, with only minor exceptions. . . . Many of the sermons depict a God whose behavior is regular, patterned, and predictable; he is portrayed in terms of the consistency of his behavior, of the conformity of his actions to the single rule of “love.” 6

With such sentimentalizing of God multiplying in Protestant churches, it does not take much to see how difficult maintaining a bi...