The Nature of Love

A Theology

Thomas Jay Oord

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780827208292
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

God is love. Consequently, shouldn't love exist at the center of Christian theology? When love is at the center, theology is understood differently than it has typically been understood. Some theologians have placed faith at the center, others God's sovereignty, still others-the Church, but Dr. Oord places the emphasis on love. God's love for us, revealed in Christ, in the Church, and in creation, and our love for God and others as ourselves—must be afforded its rightful place. Beginning with the foundation of "love" is what differentiates the Christian faith from others…a loving God. Dr. Oord defines love as: "To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being." Is this not what has defined Christians throughout history?

1

The Primacy of Love

Love Matters

“The greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13b).

Paul’s final words in what Christians sometimes call the “love chapter” describe the supremacy of love. Love is greater than faith and hope. Love is the one thing that never ends. Without love, says Paul, we are nothing.

Too often theologians neglect these biblical words. Love is present in Christian devotional literature, worship lyrics, testimonials, and other forms of Christian experience. But too many theologians write their formal theologies with love as an afterthought. The logic of love — God’s love for us and the love creatures are called to express in response — is largely absent and rarely followed consistently.¹

Given that themes of love are central in the Bible, one would think love would be central in formal theology.² Most Christians know “God is love,” as 1 John says (4:8, 16). Many memorize Jesus’ words: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16). These verses suggest the primacy of love. They suggest love is a central feature of God’s nature.

Most Christians know Jesus placed love as the pinnacle of ethics. The greatest commandment, said Jesus, is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mk. 12:30). The second is like the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12:31). The law and the prophets rest on these two commandments.

“By this will all know that you are my disciples,” Jesus tells his followers: “if you have love for one another.” (Jn. 13:35). The apostle Paul tells Christians to “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us…” (Eph. 5:1–2). An adequate biblical theology of love makes sense both of God’s call to love and God’s own love as a model creatures should emulate.

Even before Jesus Christ revealed God’s nature most clearly, biblical authors considered love a, if not the, primary attribute of God. The phrase “steadfast love” is the most common Old Testament description of God’s nature. Divine love is relentless. God’s love is everlastingly loyal. The psalmist speaks often of God’s steadfast love for creation, making statements such as “the earth is full of the steadfast love of the LORD” (Ps. 33:5). In Jeremiah 31:3, God declares, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” Even King Huram of Tyre testifies that God loves the chosen people (2 Chr. 2:11). Deuteronomy affirms that God loves “the strangers” or alien peoples (Deut. 10:18). Old Testament writers witness powerfully to the love of God.

From Genesis to Revelation and from the early church through today, the Christian story revolves around love. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop says it well: “[L]ove as the central truth makes better sense out of the gospel than do other aspects of theology. Love is the gospel message.”³

Because love sits at the center of the Bible, Christians throughout history have proclaimed God’s love for them and their obligation to love God and others as themselves.⁴ Some scholars even claim the centrality of love differentiates Christianity from other religions.⁵ In his influential work on love, philosopher Irving Singer says, “What distinguishes Christianity, what gives it a unique place in man’s intellectual life, is the fact it alone has made love the dominant principle in all areas of dogma. Whatever Christians may have done to others or themselves, theirs is the only faith in which God and love are the same.”⁶

If love is the center of the biblical witness and the core of Christian experience, it should be the primary criterion for theology. Love should be the orienting concern and continual focus for speaking systematically about theology. We should discard ideas or theories that undermine love.

Christian experience speaks in multiple ways to the primacy of love. Believers in the past and present draw from a rich Christian tradition. Christian hymns, devotional readings, liturgies, prayers, sermons, Web sites and videos, Rock-n-Roll, and more testify to love’s primacy. The relationship between Christian experience and the Bible is mutually enriching. Christians attempt to respond lovingly to the God whom the Bible describes as acting in love to make love possible. God responds in love to creation.

Christian saints speak eloquently of the centrality of love. Their testimonies are worth hearing and incorporating in theology:

Bernard of Clairvaux:

“When God loves, he wants nothing but to be loved; he loves for no other purpose that to be loved, knowing that those who love him are blessed by their very love.”⁷

Julian of Norwich:

“To the property of motherhood belong nature, love, wisdom, and knowledge, and this is God.”⁸

Thomas Aquinas:

“God is as lovable as He is good, and His goodness is infinite, wherefore He is infinitely lovable.”⁹

John Wesley:

“Love is the end of all the commandments of God. Love is the end, the sole end, of every dispensation of God, from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things.”¹⁰

Søren Kierkegaard:

“When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbor whom you shall love.”¹¹

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Love must be at the forefront of our movement if it is to be a successful movement. And when we speak of love, we speak of understanding, good will toward all men.”¹²

Mother Teresa:

“We have been created to love and be loved, and [God] has become man to make it possible for us to love as he loved us… [God] is hungry for our love, and this is the hunger of our poor people. This is the hunger that you and I must find.”¹³

Billy Graham:

“God does not change. He is still the God of love and mercy; and in the midst of our sorrow and pain, we can turn to Him in faith and trust.”¹⁴

Pope Benedict XVI:

“‘God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him’ (1 Jn. 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny.”¹⁵

Christians have said many things about love. Their witness has not always been consistent or clear. Sometimes the Christian witness has confused those inside and outside the Christian community. Sometimes Christian understandings of love have differed. Despite these differences and despite occasional confusion, love has been and continues to be central to the Christian witness.

Love matters are central, because love truly matters.

Love Has Not Been the Center of Theology

Discrepancy exists between formal Christian theologies and the centrality of love in the Bible and Christian experience. Those who write Christian theologies have often not placed love and its implications at the center of their work.¹⁶

Inconsistency reigns when love remains absent or incognito. Kevin Vanhoozer observes how “exceedingly odd that Christian theologians have themselves been somewhat indifferent — inattentive, neutral — with regard to the concept of love of God, if we are to judge from their often oblique, indistinct, or awkward treatments of the subject.”¹⁷ Love has not been the orienting concern, organizing principle, or primary lens through which theologians have written theology.¹⁸ Charles Hartshorne is mostly right when he laments, “Theologians have never taken really seriously the proposition that God is love.”¹⁹

One might conclude that love actually lies “behind the curtain” of Christian theologies. Love is unseen and rarely mentioned, but love remains present nonetheless. Perhaps this is true in some cases. But I believe love should take theology’s center stage.

Only when placed at the center can the logic of love explicitly extend to all aspects of Christian theology. Love — God’s love for us, revealed in Christ, in the church, and in creation; and our love for God and others as ourselves — must be afforded its rightful place.

Theologians typically consider other topics central. Sometimes the center of Christian theology is the sovereignty of God. This kind of theology explicitly or implicitly allows no room for the kind of creaturely freedom that loving relationships require. Sometimes the center of formal theology is faith. This approach often neglects the motive God might have for relationship and the motive we might have to respond lovingly. Sometimes the central motif is eschatology, the future, or the kingdom of God. Sometimes the church itself dominates. Sometimes faith and hope are central, despite Paul’s claim to their secondary status.²⁰

Sovereignty, faith, the church, and other matters are important. Unless defined in strange ways, none essentially opposes love. When considered the center of formal or systematic theology, however, these matters have drawn Christians away from a coherent understanding of God’s love and the love God calls creatures to express. Too often, placing other concerns as theology’s orienting concern results in Christian dogma inconsistent with love.

The work of three twentieth-century theologians exemplify the discrepancy between theology, on one hand, and the Bible and Christian experience, on the other. Despite insights each theologian provides, love plays a secondary role in his or her theologies. These three illustrate George Newland’s observation, “Love as a major theme is absent, at least explicitly, from most of the best of recent… theology.”²¹

Millard Erickson

In his magnum opus, Christian Theology, Reformed theologian Millard Erickson purposely chooses the magnificence of God instead of love as his theology’s overarching theme.²² Erickson understands “the greatness of God in terms of his power, knowledge and other traditional natural attributes, as well as the excellence and splendor of his moral nature.”²³ Like most theologians, he lists love as merely one divine attribute among others. Love does not function as the orienting concern.

When he describes God, Erickson divides the divine attributes into those pertaining to greatness and those pertaining to goodness. Erickson does not list love among that which makes God great, the first and primary set of attributes in his explanation of who God is. By greatness, Erickson refers to God’s sovereignty, eternity, omnipresence, and perfection. Rather than lead with love, love appears as the last item mentioned among those attributes pertaining to God’s goodness. He even sets love and justice in tension.

Throughout his formal theology, Erickson endorses ideas inconsistent with love. For instance, he adopts the view that a sovereign God alone pre-decides a creature’s eternal destiny (predestination).²⁴ The kind of power God exerts, according to Erickson’s theology, makes creaturely freedom for salvation meaningless. We will explore in later chapters the importance for love of both divine and creaturely freedom and the problems with predestination and similar ideas. Coherent notions of creaturely and divine freedom are crucial for overcoming the detrimental belief that God controls everything.

Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich, one of the most important twentieth-century liberal theologians, also fails to make love central. His three-volume systematic theology mentions love sparingly in reference to God. Speaking consistently with the existentialist philosophy he embraces, Tillich famously calls God “the ground of being”²⁵ and “being itself.”²⁶ The static God that Tillich envisions cannot be personal, responsive, or dynamic.

When Tillich finally addresses God’s love in his systematic theology, his description sounds nothing like what we typically call love. “Since God is being-itself, one must say being-itself is love,” he writes. “This, however, is understandable only because the actuality of being is life.”²⁷ Shortly after these confusing words, Tillich tells us “man’s love of God is the love with which God loves himself.”²⁸ This suggests that humans have no love to express toward God.

Tillich’s failure to embrace the primacy of love derives largely from the philosophical ideas informing his theology — especially his view of existence itself. These ideas do not support a theology of love in which God’s love i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Primacy of Love
• 2 Agape Theology and the Bible
• 3 Augustinian Love Theology
• 4 Open Theology as a Theology of Love
• 5 Essential Kenosis
• Notes
• Index of Topics and People
• Index of Scriptures