Perhaps the most magically charged word in all human language is the word ‘love.’ Most people like to hear that they are loved, or at least to imagine they are loved, even if they can never be absolutely certain that they are, whereas no-one surely would actually relish being disliked, or hated, or despised.
Even the fact that cynical remarks are often made about ‘love’ is an indirect compliment to its power. Cynicism is never applied to things that are of no consequence.
It may be claimed, of course, that the most powerful word in our language is not ‘love’ at all, but rather ‘God.’ That may well be the case.
Yet it’s also undeniable that there are many in today’s world whom the word ‘God’ leaves cold and indifferent, but who would nevertheless still be moved by the word ‘love’. In a culture like ours, with Christian roots, this is perhaps ironic, since Christianity has actually gone so far as to define God as ‘love.’
But some would then argue that Christianity has maybe gone too far in this definition, and in so doing has given hostages to fortune, which fortune shows no sign of wanting to release.
For it’s all very well to say, ‘God is love’, but then the obvious objection has to be faced: If God is love, why did he create a world which – according to Christian faith – he didn’t need to create and in which immense suffering occurs, not all of it due to purely human nastiness?
How credible is love?
If no answer to this question is forthcoming, and if people then conclude from the deafening silence that there is no God, at least no God who is love, could that mean that Christianity itself is responsible for atheism – for its own demise, in other words – because it has presented the world with a God who has turned out to be just too sublime to be credible?
How paradoxical it would be if Christianity were to be finally rejected not chiefly because of the moral shortcomings of Christians, but more worryingly because Christianity itself has fostered a notion of God so idealistic that people have deemed it just too good to be true.
Yet the idea that it is not just important that something be true, if we are to accept it, but that it is much more important that it be true than that it make us feel good — that is arguably something we have inherited from Christianity, with its exaltation of ‘truth’, and as long as we still believe in the primacy of truth, we can hardly be said to have entirely abandoned Christianity.
So: to return to the question for Christian faith that the seemingly reckless definition of God as love raises, at least for some, we can surely only approach this question from within Christianity itself, not from outside it.
How paradoxical it would be if Christianity were to be finally rejected not chiefly because of the moral shortcomings of Christians, but because Christianity itself has fostered a notion of God so idealistic that people have deemed it just too good to be true
Put in slightly different terms, to ask what St John means when he says, ‘God is love’, we have to remain within the universe of St John’s writings, especially his Gospel, because it’s in his Gospel that he spells out what for him is the truth of those two short words: ‘God’ and ‘love’.
And he does this, as we know, through the story and the teaching of Jesus, who, Christianity claims, is God incarnate, and who incarnates in the human medium of becoming and transience, with all its attendant pain, what ‘love’ is.
God is love
In other words, love is expressed by St John not as an idea or an emotion, but as a particular human history whose unique drama redeemed the world. It’s not that ideas or emotions are unimportant, far from it. But St John can only communicate what he has to communicate by telling us what happened when, in his terms, God became flesh.
And the implication of this would seem to be that we will only truly begin to understand the meaning of St John’s writings, and hence understand what it could possibly mean to accept that ‘God is love’, to the extent that we are willing to follow the way of Jesus in our own allotted span of time on earth.
If we are tempted to do so, we might hope to come eventually not just to a recognition of, but also to a participation in, the life of God, thus following in reverse order, so to speak, the path the eternal Word of God took when he entered our world of flesh and sin and suffering.
This path cannot be legislated for. No-one can be compelled to take it. Taking it is, on the human side, a kind of ‘creation out of nothing’, echoing in some small measure God’s own original and inscrutable act of creating the world itself ‘out of nothing’.
