The Love of God

A Canonical Model

John C. Peckham

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830898800
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Christliche Theologie

Readers' Choice Award Winner"For God so loved the world..."We believe these words, but what do they really mean? Does God choose to love, or does God love necessarily? Is God's love emotional? Does the love of God include desire or enjoyment? Is God's love conditional? Can God receive love from human beings?Attempts to answer these questions have produced sharply divided pictures of God's relationship to the world. One widely held position is that of classical theism, which understands God as necessary, self-sufficient, perfect, simple, timeless, immutable and impassible. In this view, God is entirely unaffected by the world and his love is thus unconditional, unilateral and arbitrary.In the twentieth century, process theologians replaced classical theism with an understanding of God as bound up essentially with the world and dependent on it. In this view God necessarily feels all feelings and loves all others, because they are included within himself.In The Love of God, John Peckham offers a comprehensive canonical interpretation of divine love in dialogue with, and at times in contrast to, both classical and process theism. God's love, he argues, is freely willed, evaluative, emotional and reciprocal, given before but not without conditions. According to Peckham's reading of Scripture, the God who loves the world is both perfect and passible, both self-sufficient and desirous of reciprocal relationships with each person, so that "whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life."

1

Conflicting Models of Divine Love

Divine love is a central component of God’s character, with abundant implications regarding all areas of theology. However, theologians are sharply divided regarding the nature of divine love for the world and the corresponding issues of divine ontology. Considerable semantic and conceptual ambiguity in some treatments of divine love exacerbates the issue.1 How does one adequately address such an integral, complex and pivotal theological concept? The vastness of the topic precludes an exhaustive overview of the various conceptions of love generally or of divine love in particular. Whereas conceptions of divine love vary widely, the primary features of the contemporary debate over divine love may be illuminated by examination of the differences between two prominent and recent, but irreconcilable, models of divine love, the transcendent-voluntarist and immanent-experientialist models, the former being a descendant of classic theism and the latter representing process panentheism.2 These models depict mutually exclusive conceptions of both love and divine ontology, amounting to a fundamental impasse. Furthermore, the current theological landscape manifests significant dissatisfaction with these prominent conceptions of divine love.3

The sharp conflict and corresponding dissatisfaction regarding competing conceptions of love hinges on answers to five integral questions, which revolve around whether the God-world love relationship is unilateral or bilateral. First, does God choose to fully love only some, or all, or is he essentially related to all such that he necessarily loves all? Second, does God only bestow and/or create value, or might he also appraise, appreciate and receive value? In other words, is divine love only arbitrarily willed, pure beneficence (thematic agape), or may it include desire and/or enjoyment (thematic eros)?4 Third, does God’s love include affection and/or emotionality such that God is concerned for the world, sympathetically or otherwise? Fourth, is divine love unconditional or conditional? Fifth, can God and humans be involved in a reciprocal (albeit asymmetrical) love relationship?5

In order to address these questions, I undertook a biblical investigation by way of a final-form canonical approach to systematic theology, without presupposing the truth or error of existing models.6 From this research, I have derived a foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love that addresses the five crucial questions above, explained in the coming chapters. First, however, the theological conflict over the nature of divine love must be understood.

Classic Conceptions of Divine Love and the Process Polemic

The dominant conceptions of divine love throughout the ages of Christian theology are grounded in classic theism. Although classic theism is not monolithic, it generally refers to the classical conception of God as necessary and self-sufficient, perfect, simple, timeless, immutable, impassible, omniscient and omnipotent.7 In the twentieth century, this view of God was directly challenged by a rising school of natural theology called process theism, a panentheistic system that represents a form of the increasingly popular, though varied and complex, relational theologies.8 The most prominent form of process theism originated in the writings of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and was further developed and systematized by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000).9 Hartshorne’s process theism rejected or redefined each of the previously mentioned divine characteristics of classic theism, positing a conception of divine love directly at odds with the classic tradition. In Hartshorne’s view, classical divine ontology fails to maintain meaningful relationship between God and the world such that God is “not an exalted being, but an empty absurdity, a love which is simply not love.”10 In order to evaluate Hartshorne’s criticism of classic theism and his alternative model (the ­immanent-experientialist model), one must first have a basic understanding of the most influential conceptions of God’s love in historical theology.11

Augustine (354–430). Augustine systematized perhaps the most influential Christian conception of divine love outside Scripture, influenced indirectly by Plato’s ontology through Neoplatonism.12 However, the Platonic ontology of the ultimate being as perfect and immutably self-­sufficient, coupled with the Platonic conception of love in terms of desire (eros), rendered it impossible for God to love humans, since any desire would require that God be somehow deficient.13 Whereas Augustine affirmed divine perfection, immutability and self-sufficiency, he broke with Plato by upholding the indispensable tenet of Christianity that God loves humans.14 Indeed, for Augustine, “love is God.”15 Regarding this apparent paradox he wrote:

In what way then does He [God] love us? As objects of use or as objects of enjoyment? If He enjoys us, He must be in need of good from us, and no sane man will say that; for all the good we enjoy is either Himself, or what comes from Himself. . . . He does not enjoy us then, but makes use of us. For if He neither enjoys nor uses us, I am at a loss to discover in what way He can love us.16

Accordingly, God’s love for the world is not acquisitive, evaluative or passible. God can neither desire nor receive any value or enjoyment from the world, since he lacks nothing (aseity).17 As such, God does not love in the sense of Plato’s eros (desire) or Aristotle’s philia (friendship), but divine love is unilateral beneficence (thematic agape).

On the other hand, human love toward God is of a different kind than divine love. Whereas divine love is beneficence bestowed downward, proper human love (caritas) is directed upward toward God, its only proper object.18 Moreover, human love is produced by divine action such that God himself determines who will love him.19 In this way, Augustine’s view excludes a freely reciprocal love relationship between God and humans.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Aquinas continued along the lines of the Augustinian view of the God-world relationship while adapting it to Aristotelian metaphysics.20 For Aquinas, God is the perfect, self-sufficient and utterly immutable first mover who remains unmoved and passionless and is thus impervious to desire; pure act with no potentiality.21 However, in a decisive break from Aristotle’s conception wherein God cannot love the world, Aquinas posited friendship love (amicitia) between God and humans, in which God is the unilateral benefactor but never the beneficiary.22 As in Augustine’s system, since God lacks nothing, he cannot desire or receive anything for his own benefit.23 God loves, but “in God there are no passions” (impassibility), such that God’s love is a purposive, rational “act of the will,” not an act of the “sensitive appetite.”24 Though God loves universally, he does not love all equally. He wills “all some good; but He does not wish every good to them all,” and so far as “He does not wish this particular good—namely, eternal life—He is said to hate or reprobate them.”25

Whereas human love is moved or affected by its object, divine love “infuses and creates goodness.”26 Human friendships involve give and take, but God has no reciprocal relations with humankind.27 Accordingly, human love is derivative from divine love, though Aquinas also maintains that humans who love God love him voluntarily and meritoriously in the sense of enjoying him for his own sake.28 God thus loves (caritas) humans in the sense of beneficence.29 Aquinas, then, continues the Augustinian emphasis on caritas as both the divine essence and that which proceeds from God.30

Martin Luther (1483–1546). In Martin Luther’s view, divine love is similarly unilateral, nonevaluative, unmotivated and wholly gratuitous beneficence, akin to grace. God’s unilaterally determining, irresistible and wholly efficacious will is primary (voluntarism) such that God is entirely self-­sufficient, immutable and impassible; the giver who never receives.31 God’s love is thus nonevaluative bestowal: “Rather than seeking its own good, God’s love flows forth and bestows good. Therefore, sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”32 Simply put, “God is nothing else than love,” and his “nature is nothing else but pure beneficence,” as manifest supremely at the cross.33

For Luther, only divine love (thematic agape) is authentic.34 He vehemently rejected the conception of human love (caritas) from Augustine throughout medieval theology, viewing it as a false synthesis inclusive of egocentric love toward God (thematic eros). On the contrary, since God is the cause of all authentic love, humans cannot truly love except as passive agents of divine love flowing through them, excluding the possibility of freely reciprocal divine-human love.35 Thus, whereas Luther breaks significantly from Augustine and Aquinas regarding the value of human love, Luther’s view of God’s love is generally congruous with both.

Anders Nygren (1890–1978). Anders Nygren’s influence as a Christian theologian does not approach the magnitude of Augustine, Aquinas or Luther. Yet Nygren has immensely influenced Christian thinking about divine love via his seminal work, Agape and Eros, which fleshes out Luther’s view of gratuitous love, agape, against eros.36 Nygren posits an absolute dichotomy between eros and agape such...