The Framework of Love
John Lennon’s lyrics “All you need is love. Love is all you need,” are either the truest words ever penned or the most perverse. They are either criminally trivial or deeply profound. The significance of the lyrics is not found in the letters of the word love but by what is intended by love. And Lennon understood this to the degree that he rejected patriotism as love of a nation, tyranny as the love of detrimental power and embraced the love of non-violence and art. Even entertainers at least suspect that we are saved and we are damned by love.
Our salvation or reprobation and love are clearly linked in Scripture; “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). He is not merely love and yet he is love. Further, man is created in the image of God and so in some sense man is love, though again not merely love. The great summary of the duty of man is to love God with all our being, and to love our neighbor as ourself. We cannot move away from God without a love, and we cannot turn to God without love. Thus both theology proper (the study of God) and anthropology (the study of man) are dependent on what love is or is not. A definitional misstep on the issue of love damages both our worship and our ethics; the greater the error the less true our worship and the more confused and detrimental our relationships. False love when “fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15).
God is love, and because God is the greatest possible being (Heb. 6:13, 16-18), God must love perfectly: further God is “blessed forever” (Rom. 9:5, 2 Cor. 2:11), and so God has always loved and been fulfilled or blessed in that love “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). To love requires an object of love. The infinitely perfect object of God’s love is himself in the mutual admiration of the Trinity. The Father loves and so begets the Son, the Son in turn loves the Father and both the Father and Son are conscious of this mutual love, leading to the spiration of the Holy Spirit.
Shedd summarizes the issue for us: “God cannot be self-contemplating, self-cognitive, and self-communing unless he is trinal in his constitution. The subject must know itself as an object and also perceive that it does. This implies, not three distinct substances, but three distinct modes of one substance. Consequently divine unity must be a kind of unity that is compatible with a kind of plurality. The unity of the infinite being or Trinity. God is a plural unit” (Dogmatic Theology, 220).1
The “blessed forever” God cannot have a love based on need. We may say, “I would love a glass of water, or I would love to be healthy,” but God’s love is self-sufficient. God’s love does not know need, because God is holy and perfect. There is an infinite perfection to God’s love that humans can only admire and taste because we are wholly dependent and He is exhaustively independent.
Yet, God’s love is an ordered love. There is a logic to God’s affection. Christ tells us, “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30) and “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel” (John 5:19-20). And the Father and Son together send the Holy Spirit (cf. John 14:26 and 15:26).
God’s love for himself is then not egalitarian; instead God’s love has an economy or order based on the Father begetting the Son and the spiration and procession of the Spirit. The Father instigates, the Son submits to the Father, and the Spirit is sent. All three persons within the Trinity are equal in subsistence or ontologically, but each member has different roles and responsibilities within the Godhead.
Thus far we have been considering God’s internal love or God’s infinite love of himself as the most meritorious, beautiful, holy, and true. For God to be, he must be Trinitarian. But when God created the universe, there became something less than himself. The universe is less than God because it is dependent on God for its continued existence. Or as the author of Hebrews states it, “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). We are because he is and chose to create and keep us.
God created the universe so that it both exists and moves forward in time. The movement of the universe around God’s unfolding design means that an individual component of the universe could be good (Gen. 1:4), a complex whole could be good (v. 10), yet that which was only good as it developed could become “very good” (v. 31). The universe which exists in time unfolded from a partial good to a complex good to a complete very good.
God’s love as directed outside of himself is then also not egalitarian. God’s love of self is not egalitarian because of the order of the Trinity, but God’s love for creation is non-egalitarian for a host of reasons. The first is that the creation is not God. If the creation were God, it would be perfect, but the Bible and natural observation presents a world of becoming. The creation as first formed was good, but the creation completed and prepared for the first family became “very good.” God’s love directed outside of himself is an evaluating, probing, judging, rational love, dependent on the internal standard of God’s plans or decrees. God distinguishes between the “good” in conformity to God’s unfolding of his declared will and “very good” at the revealed completion of God’s creation.
And so enters man. Adam and Eve stood enframed by God’s creation and his commands. They are lovely and very good. The procession of creation from maturing good to very good, from loveable to lovely, taught them that something greater awaited them and their offspring (Gen. 1:27-31); and the single negative command with the threat of death (Gen. 2:17) taught them that there were two kinds of becoming—pleasing to God and not pleasing to God, to love God or to hate him, to obey or disobey.
When Adam named the animals, he proved that he too was an evaluating and judging being. He then shared in God’s ability to judge the good and the very good. Adam’s recognition of the incompleteness of nature (2:20) and the incompatibility of the animals requires that his loves be ordered around God’s commands and God’s nature. The framework of Adam’s love was not merely the commands of God, but also reasoning from the structure of the universe and the character of God.
When Eve was confronted by the Serpent over the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she “saw it was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.” There is a horrifying subtlety within the temptation. The fruit was not evil, for God had declared it not only good but very good. The fruit was beautiful. God agreed with Eve that the fruit was beautiful and good, but when she used the fruit for a purpose other than God had commanded, she hated God. She hated God, because she judged God as less than perfect. What but an imperfect and cruel God would forbid man from becoming wise (cf. 1 Cor. 3:19-20)?
In eating the fruit Eve accepted Satan’s enframing of the universe—a worldview with horizons sketched out on the premise that God was not good as he ought to be. She ate and Adam joined her within this faith that God was unlovely and that man and Satan were wiser than God. They attempted to murder God within their hearts, but were only able to destroy the principle of love within their hearts. Adam and Eve loved that which was less then God as if it were God and died. Their bodies continued to function, but the Spirit of love left them (cf. Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit).
The death of God within the heart of man was an imagined death and not the reality, because he is the living God. He exists independently of man and man’s conceptions of him. At this point in history God had the right to destroy Adam and Eve and with them their posterity, but God held back. And here we have a new expression of love; it is not merely the creational condescension of the infinite to the finite or of the Being to the becoming, but God loving through grace. Grace is not merely unmerited favor, in the sense of favor that is unearned, but it is unmerited favor poured out on his enemies. Grace is loving the unlovable.
God’s love is so much love that God the Father gave his son (John 3:16) for the world, and the Son gave his life for the world (1 John 2:2), and the Spirit now testifies to all the great love of God and returns to the heart of man. The staggering, infinite weight of grace is measured by the cross. The goodness of the Lord is vindicated and displayed at the cross. God is love.
Lord willing, next month we will consider the definition of love, and then in the following months: loving God, the love of self, love of neighbor, common objects of love, and uncommon objects of love.
It is important to note the modes here mentioned are persons or modes of subsisting and this should not be confused with the heresy of modalism which allows only for a single mode of subsisting.